Indian wars in the colonial Southeast

Largely due to Hollywood films, when Americans think of “Indian wars”, they think of what we now call the West, particularly the Great Plains, or the “new” Southwest.  Really, though, the wars of the Europeans against the Native Americans/American Indians east of the Mississippi lasted longer, involved greater numbers in combat, and saw far more brutality.

The first wars of Europeans and American Indians occurred during the century of Spanish occupation which preceded that of the rest of that Continent.

Battle of Mabila, 1540

Though De Soto’s conquistadors fought many battles in their three-year trek (1539-1542), the one fought at Mabila in central Alabama against by the coalition under the paramount mico Tuskaloosa was by far the worst of them all.

Napochi War, 1560

In 1560, Spaniards under Tristan de Luna left their recently-founded home at Nanipanca, or Santa Cruz, on the Alabama River in search of trade with the town of Coosa, at Coosawattee, Georgia, the dominant chiefdom inland.  Once there, they were “invited” on a war expedition against the “Napochi”, living in what is now the Chattanooga area. 

After burning the town of Opelika at Audobon Acres, the combined army moved on the village of Tasqui near the mouth of Citico Creek and crossed the river, where they met a force from the large town of Tasquiqui at the Hampton Place site on Moccasin Point.  After a parlay, the locals, ancestors of the Tuskegee, agreed to resume tribute to Coosa.

Carolina Revolt of 1569

The tribes of the Spanish province of Carolina (named for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor), which stretched from the seacoast of South Carolina into East Tennessee, in La Florida rose up and destroyed all the inland forts of the Spanish and massacred the garrisons, save for one lone survivor. The then capital of La Florida on Parris Island, Santa Elena, was the only settlement and fort untouched.

Escamacu War, 1576-1579

The Orista (Edisto) and the Escamacu (Ahoya) in Carolina and the Guale on the seacoast  between the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers rose up to expel the Spanish, especially their hated missions.  It ended with Santa Elena burned to the ground.

Guale Revolt of 1582-1583

The Guale again rising up against the Spanish, until the peace treaty the next year.

Guale Revolt of 1584-1585

The treaty of 1583 didn’t last very long.  By now you’re getting the idea that the Guale did not like the Spanish very much.  There’s more.

Juanillo’s Revolt, 1597-1601

Another uprising by the Guale, after they became an organized province of La Florida.  It began over denunciation of polygamy by a Spanish friar.

Guale Revolt of 1608

Five micos of the Guale rose up against the Spanish colonial and Church mission systems.  The short-lived revolt led to the reintroduction of slavery.

First Powhatan War, 1610-1614

Essentially a war of conquest by the colony of Virginia against the Powhatan Confederation, it ended with much of the confederacy’s territory in English hands.

Calusa War, 1614

After the Calusa, who dominated all of South Florida, killed five hundred of the Mocoso on Tampa Bay in retaliation for Spanish incursions, the Spanish responded with a punitive expedition against them.

Second Powhatan War, 1622-1632

Begun when the Powhatan massacred a third of the colony in a surprise attack.  The war lasted for ten years, with two tribes of the Confederation, the Accomac and the Patawomeck, fighting on the English side.

Beaver Wars, 1628-1701

Largely a war over which nation would control European trade in the North, the nations also fought over resources and to replenish their depleted ranks.  Begun by the attack of the Mohawk of the League of the Iroquois upon the Mahican, the Beaver Wars disrupted life of the nations and tribes in all of eastern North America and some west of the Mississippi.

The fighting covered all of the north, plus West Virginia, western Virginia and Maryland, and Kentucky in the Old Southwest.  The Beaver Wars ended with the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, signed there because New France had been a party to the conflict as allies of several of the nations and tribes involved, thirty-eight counting the French and the Iroquois.

First Susquehannock War, 1642-1652

The colony of Maryland declared war on the Susquehannock of the Susquehanna Valley over trade issues.  With help from the colonies of New Netherlands and of New Sweden, the Susquehannock emerged victorious.

Third Powhatan War, 1644-1646

This war essentially ended the confederation and made the Pamunkey the leading tribe among the remaining groups.

Guale Revolt of 1645

More of a labor strike than an armed revolt, the Guale Indian workers on Spanish missions and plantations walked off their jobs to their towns in the backcountry in defiance of the friars and their own chiefs when the colonial government ran out of money to pay them.

Apalachee Civil War, 1647

The Apalachee occupied South Georgia between the Altamaha River on the east and the Flint River on the west.  In 1647, traditionalist chiefs rose up against Christianized chiefs and the intrusion of Spanish spiritual beliefs and mores into their daily lives.  As allies, the rebels had a band of the Chisca, the name by which the Spanish knew the Yuchi as far back as De Soto.

First Choctaw Civil War, 1647-1650

Long running disputes over trade with European colonials between the Okla Tannap (Eastern Division) and the Okla Hannalli (Six Towns or Southern Division), who traded with the French of Louisiane, via-a-vis the Okla Falaya (Western Division) who had recently begun to trade with the English of Virginia, broke into war after the charismatic Western Division leader, Red Bones, was assassinated.  The Western Division had the support of the English, the Chickasaw, and the Chakchiuma; the Eastern Division had the support of the French; the Six Towns remained neutral.  The Eastern Division was much larger, however, and in the end won.  Over a thousand Choctaw died, either hundred of them warriors, and dozens of towns were destroyed.

Erie-Iroquois War, 1651-1664

Though accounts of the war between the Erie and the Iroquois give the beinning and ending dates as 1653 and 1656, in truth the war began in the winter of 1651-1652 when the western Iroquois attacked, unsuccessfully, the Atrakwaeronon, one of the Erie subtribes.  The next summer, with contingents from all Five Nations, the destruction of the Atrakwaronon as a cohesive unit succeeded.  In 1653, the Erie counterattacked, destroying one of the two Seneca towns.  Though the Iroquois countered the next year, 1654, by destroying the capital town of Arrigha, or Rigue, causing the diaspora of the Riqueronon subtribe, by 1655 the Five Nations were begging the French for military assistance.  Many historians count the capture of the town of Genaienton in 1656, but the Jesuit Relations, the informants of which were the Iroquois themselves, make clear the war lasted until at least 1664.  Even then, the final group of the Erie remaining in the north did not surrender until 1682.

Descendants of the former Erie assimilated or enslaved by the Iroquois became the core of the mixed group of Iroquoians known as the Mingo or Blue Mingo in the eighteenth century.   Other Erie, particularly the Riqueronon subtribe (whose name was often synonymous with the whole confederacy), went south to the “country of the Muscogui”, as John Norton put it, with a stopover in Virginia.

First Battle of Bloody Run, 1656

Shortly after the destruction of Arrigha by the Iroquois, a large body of northern Indians that colonial records refer to as the “Richahecrians” invaded Virginia and took up residence on the upper James River.  Two years later, Virginia sent a force of colonial rangers accompanied by a hundred Pamunkey to dislodge them.  The resulting battle was a disaster for the Virginian forces.  Later in 1670, the Richahecrians were found in the Blue Ridge mountains in the west of Carolina by a Virginia emissary who referred to them as the Rickohockans.

Timucua Rebellion, 1656

The Timucua were a native people that at the time of Spanish first contact made up between ten and twelve nations that occupied all of North Florida.  Like the Guale before them, they revolted against the forced labor system in 1656.

Second Susquehannock War, 1655-1657

Fought between the province of Maryland and the Susquehannock, now at the head of Chesapeake Bay and without their Dutch and Swedish allies.

Iroquois-Shawnee War, 1662-1672

Having eradicated or chased off many of their previous targets, the Iroquois turned their attention on the Shawnee of the Ohio Valley.  Finally tired of the attacks, the Shawnee divided into several bands, and dispersed.   The Chillicothe and Kispoko migrated to the Cumberland River; the Hathawekela moved to the Savannah River upstream from the Westo; the Mekoche sought asylum near the Mascouten; the Piqua gained refuge among the Lenape, who were already subjects of the Iroquois.

Coosaw War, 1671

This was fought against the new colonists led by the inland Coosaw tribe of Cusabo.

First Westo War, 1673-1674

The Westo began attacking Carolina in 1673.  The hard-pressed English imported the Esaw for support.  The war ends in December 1674 with an alliance between the two major parties and a trade monopoly with Carolina for the Westo.

Stono War, 1674

Another war fought with the Carolina colonists, this time led by the Stono tribe of Cusabo.

Chowanoke War, 1675

The Chowanoke launch attacks against Carolina, and the colonists only end the fighting after losing many people.

Third Susquehannock War, 1676-1677

Instigated by the Doeg (the Nanticoke under another name), this war involved the colony of Maryland, and helped spark Bacon’s Rebellion.  At the end, the surviving Susquehannock took refuge with their erstwhile rivals, the Iroquois.

Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676

Both a rebellion against the colonial government at Jamestown and a war of eradication and/or expulsion against local Indians, its leader was Nathaniel Bacon.  Afterwards, the Occaneechi joined the Saponi, the Nanticoke became part of the Nanzatico, and the Pamunkey gained the Rappahannock and the Chickahominy as tributaries in compensation for Bacon’s unprovoked attack upon them.

Guale War, 1675-1680

In 1675, the English colony of Carolina (named for Charles I of England) began a campaign to eradicate the Spanish missions on the Atlantic coast of what is now Georgia.  The Guale were north of the Altamaha, the Mocama south of it; both were targets.  Carolina primarily used proxies, the Westo on the Savannah River and some of the Lower Creek.  The remnants formed the core of the Yamasee.

Second Westo War, 1680-1682

English Carolina and the Hathawekela band of Shawnee (on the Savannah River since 1674) joined forces to eradicate the Westo.  After the destruction of their town, the Westo moved to the Chattahoochee and the Shawnee took their place as trading partners.

Winyah War, 1682

Carolina and the Shawnee attacked the Winyah, primarily for slaves.

Iroquois-Catawba War, 1680-1759

After defeating the Susquehannock and absorbing them into the League, the Iroquois turned their attentions south for warring, scalping, and slave-raiding.  Though for the most part marauding indiscriminately, their favorite targets were the Catawba.  The Catawba fought back, even raiding the north.  George Washington noted that large war parties going one way or another were a common sight.  The final peace came after the Treaty of Albany in 1759.

First Cherokee-Creek War, 1690-1710

As the ranks of the Cherokee swelled from assimilation of new refugees from the north and local remnant populations and they began to spread out, the Creek towns, not yet a confederacy but in league, felt the threat and attacked.  The war lasted until around 1710.

Catawba-Shawnee War, 1690-1707

Back by Carolina, the Catawba begin attacking the Hathawekela Shawnee on the Savannah, often in conjunction with the Yamasee.  After the climactic battle in 1707, the Hathawekela disperse to the Creeks, the Lenape, and most to their Chillicothe and Kispoko cousins on the Cumberland.

Cherokee-Lenape War, 1698-1708

With the upper Ohio County, including at that time the Allegheny Valley, deserted, some Cherokee, apparently a fairly substantial group, returned to the north.  The main town was known as Allegheny, and stood at the confluence of the Kiskiminetas and Allegheny Rivers, what is now Schenley, Pennsylvania.  The Lenape began attempting to drive them out in about 1698, probably encouraged to do so by an invitation of the Iroquois to settle in western Pennsylvania.  In 1708, Allegheny is destroyed (later rebuilt with other occupants), and the survivors returning south, and the Lenape settle the region.

Cherokee-Iroquois War, 1701-1768

After the Beaver Wars ended, the Iroquois turned their martial and slave-raiding attention south, and one of their chief targets were the former Erie reimagined as the Cherokee.  The wars ended with the Treaty of Johnson Hall in 1768, mediated by Superintendent of Northern Indians William Johnson.

First Apalachee War, 1702-1704

English Carolina turned its attention to the west of the coast and began attacking the Apalachee and their Spanish missions.  In addition to their own militia, they used Yamasee and Lower Creek warriors.

Timucua War, 1706

Using the same allies, English Carolina penetrated into northern Florida to eradicate the missions among the Timucua and decimate the dwindling tribe.  Within a short time, the survivors fled to the seat and fort at San Agustin.

Second Apalachee War, 1708

Another invasion of Apalachee territory by Carolina and the Yamasee.

Mobile War, 1708

In support of the Alabama, the Cherokee, Abihka, and Catawba invaded the Mobile Bay area with them, intending to drive the French at La Mobilia and Fort St. Louis there, then capital of La Louisiane, into the sea.  For some reason, their four thousand warrior strong force instead settled for torching the nearby town of the Mobile tribe.

Cumberland Valley War, 1710-1715

In 1710, the Chickasaw in the west and the Cherokee in the east launched a war of expulsion against the Chillicothe and the Kispoko bands of the Shawnee on the Cumberland River.  The impetus came when part of the Hathawekela band moved from the Savannah to the Cumberland to join their cousins beginning in 1707.

Tuscarora War, 1711-1715

The southern band of Tuscarora joined with several Algonquin tribes to attack the settlements of North Carolina over territorial encroachment and slave raids.  They and their allies faced the militias of North Carolina and South Carolina, the northern Tuscarora, the Apalachee, the Yamasee, the Catawba, the Cherokee, and many others.  After the war, the southern Tuscarora migrated north to become the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee, where some of their cousins from the northern band later followed.

First Yamasee War, 1715-1717

The Yamasee opened the war with a massacre on the frontier.  Several other Indian nations joined in, including Cherokee, Catawba (often in conjunction with the former), Lower Creek, Apalachee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Yuchi, Shawnee, and others.  Against them were the colonial militias of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.  The Tugaloo Massacre of a number of Creek leaders brought the Cherokee over to the side of the colonists.

There was no decisive victory by either side, but the Yamasee were greatly reduced as were the Apalachee, both moving south, and the Lower Creek returning from the Ocmulgee River and Ochese Creeks to the Chattahoochee River.

First Natchez War, 1716

Uprising by the Natchez in Mississippi, the last remain vestige of the Mississippian culture which once dominated all the Southeast and much west of the Mississippi, against the French colonists of Louisiana.

Cheraw War, 1716-1718

In the midst of the Yamasee War, the province of North Carolina declared war on the Cheraw living on its borders with Virginia, which refused to do likewise.  After the close of the war, they joined the Catawba to escape attacks by the Seneca.

Second Cherokee-Creek War, 1716-1755

Begun over the Tugaloo Massacre, hostilities between the two nations lasted until 1755, ending at the Battle of Taliwa in North Georgia.

Chickasaw-Choctaw War, 1721-1760

Provoked by the French colonial authorities at Fort Toulouse, sending their Choctaw allies against the British-allied Chickasaw.

Second Natchez War, 1722-1724

Low intensity warfare between the Natchez and the French colonists, particularly the settlers.

Second Yamasee War, 1727

Carolina attacked the Yamasee refuge near San Agustin, burned the town, slaughtered most, carried some away as slaves.  The survivors later joined the Seminole.

Third Natchez War, 1729-1731

The final uprising of the Natchez began with the capture of Fort Rosalie and massacre of its garrison.  With Choctaw and Tunica allies, the French destroyed the Natchez as a people, deporting captives to the Caribbean as slaves, most of whom had been pro-French, while the rest fled to the Chickasaw.  The Chickasaw also fought the French, raiding well into Upper Louisiane, joined by the Cherokee in 1730.

Chickasaw War of 1736

The French with their Choctaw, Illini, and Quapaw allies launched attacks on the Chickasaw at two different points.  They lost badly.  Their goal had been to destroy the Natchez who had taken refuge with the Chickasaw.

Chickasaw War of 1739-1740

The French ascended the Mississippi, established a fortified camp at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis), but never got around to attacking the towns just to the east, returning south without firing a shot.

King George’s War, 1744-1748

Though fought mostly in the north between the Great Britain, the northern British colonies, and New France, the war included participation of British allies the Chickasaw and the Cherokee, who focused their efforts on Detroit and the native allies of the French in Upper Louisiane.

Second Choctaw Civil War, 1746-1750

During these years, the Choctaw fought a bloody civil war among themselves between the pro-French Eastern and Six Towns divisions and the pro-British Western division.  It ended with the Choctaw remaining allied to the French.

Chickasaw War of 1752

Another would-be campaign by the French against the Chickasaw that came to naught.

French and Indian War, 1754-1763

Fought mostly in the north, the war in the Southeast primarily involved Shawnee attacks on the Virginia frontier until they switched sides in 1758 and the Anglo-Cherokee War and Anglo-Creek War.

Cherokee-North Carolina War, 1755-1756

Disagreements over trade and encroachment of settlers from the colony into Cherokee territory led to a period of hostilities that ended when the Crown called the Cherokee to join the effort against the French and their Indian allies.

Chickasaw-Shawnee War of 1756

The Chickasaw expelled the Piqua band of Shawnee who had been invited by the Cherokee to settle on the Cumberland a decade before.

South Florida War, 1757

The Lower Muskogee invaded South Florida out to the Keys, killing and enslaving most of the surviving natives.  Those few who escaped were relocated to the Caribbean by the Spanish, and those Lower Muskogee who stayed became the nucleus of the Seminole.

Chickasaw-Cherokee War, 1758-1769

Begun because of an attack by the Cherokee upon the Lower Chickasaw on the Savannah River (where they lived from 1730 to 1775), the tensions had built since the settlement of the Piqua band of Shawnee on the Cumberland.  The final battle at Chickasaw Old Fields in Alabama was a bad loss for the Cherokee.

Anglo-Cherokee War, 1759-1761

Though it started over dissatisfaction over their treatment by the British army while on the campaign to take Fort Dusquene (Fort Pitt), the Cherokee had a pro-French faction based in Great Tellico, supported by a forward post at Long-Island-on-the-Tennessee between the Coushatta at the head and the Kaskinampo at the foot.  Small raids on the Virginian frontier began in 1758, but the war did not fully break out until the next year. 

The Cherokee involved primarily came from the Lower Towns on the headwaters of the Savannah and Coosa and the Overhill Towns on the Little Tennessee River against the provinces of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.  It ended with the Treaty of Long-Island-on-the-Holston with Virginia and the Treaty of Keowee with the two Carolinas.

Anglo-Creek War, 1759-1763

Sparked by the smallpox deaths of a number of micos at Fort Prince George near Keowee, the pro-French faction within the Creek Confederacy declared war against the provinces South Carolina and Georgia.  The faction, led by Great Mortar, had already returned to the former home of the Coosa at Coosawattee, in support of the pro-French Cherokee.  They were opposed, though not with arms, within the Confederacy by a pro-British faction led by Emistisigua.  It ended with the Treaty of Augusta (1763) with Georgia and the cession of coastal land.

Creek-Choctaw War, 1765-1775

This war between the Creek and Choctaw escalated in 1768 when the Chickasaw joined the side of the Choctaw.  John Stuart, Indian Commisioner for the South, almost brought about peace in 1770, only to be undone by four Lower Creek murdering a number of Choctaw.  The British Indian Department managed to secure peace between belligerents in the face of the brewing American Revolution.

End of an era, beginning of a transition

In the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the end of the French and Indian War, Great Britain gained all of New France east of the Mississippi went to Britain (east Louisiana, Canada, and Bermuda), plus Florida in exchange for Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the return of Cuba and the Philippines to the Kingdom of Spain.  The disposition of its new territory, especially in the case of the former east Louisiana, contributed much of the rancor and dissatisfaction that led to the rebellion of thirteen of Britain’s sixteen North American colonies as well as to the same sentiments of the Indian tribes and nations there toward those same colonies.

Why not son of Joseph and son of God?

In the essay I just posted, I mentioned “the nativity myth of birth in Bethlehem”.  Recalling those myths reminds me of the two conflicting and contradicting genealogies at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke.  Both genealogies trace descent from Dawid (David) ben Yishay (Jesse), but in two entirely separate lines.

In Matthew, beginning with Avrahim (Abraham) and working down, the descent is traced from David down to the present of the gospel in twenty-eight generations.  In Luke, the descent is traced from the present back to David in forty-two generations, then back to Adam, son of God.  Oh, and Matthew gives the descent through Sholomo (Solomon), while Luke gives the descent through Natan (Nathan).

Big problem though: both these alleged genealogies have Yosef (Joseph) rather than Yeshu (Jesus) as their end or start point.  Not very relevant to a Church which officially teaches that Miriam’s (Mary’s) conception was completely virginal and Yosef wasn’t even a sperm donor for in vitro fertilization.  Especially in the Catholic Church, which teaches the perpetual virginity of Miriam, which would have violated the Torah and been a sin in the first century.

The fact that Yosef is the focal point of both and that the name is Yosef calls into question whether the story of Yeshu originally had him as the Moshiach ben Yosef.

For the ancient Irish, this wouldn’t have been a problem.  In their mythology, which had more gods being members of trinities than not, Cuchulainn, born Setanta mac Sualtim, was equally the son of Sualtim and of Lugh Lamfada mac Cian, god of the arts and sciences as well as a trickster similar to Loki.

If the Church can teach that there are Three Persons but only One God and that Yeshu M’sheekha (Jesus Christ) is, at the same time, 100% God and 100% human, why can’t Yeshu ben Yosef be both fully the son of Yosef and fully the son of God, like Cuchulainn? 

Perhaps if the Irish had been on board when the Church Fathers were putting this stuff together, it would make more sense.  I am quite sure that Patrick had a much better understanding of Trinity after he held up his shamrock for the Irish and they explained it to him.

Dragging Canoe was not a Cherokee

Under today’s standards, Dragging Canoe (Tsiyugusini) was not a Cherokee.

Yes, that is correct, I am not kidding.  Dragging Canoe, the greatest military and diplomatic leader the Cherokee have ever known, would under the laws of all three of today's recognized tribes of Cherokee be ineligible for membership of any of them. 

This is not just because he doesn't have ancestors on any of their rolls which the three tribes use to determine who gets in.  His father, Attakullakulla, was a Nippissing from the North taken captive during a raid and adopted, while his mother was Natchez, from the group who lived along Natchy Creek.  He did not have a single drop of Cherokee blood.

The three Cherokee tribes require the following blood quantums: United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, 1:4; Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 1:16 (originally 1:32); and Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, 1:2064.

In addition to Dragging Canoe, these blood quantums would also deny former Principal Chief of the Eastern Band William Holland Thomas and former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation West John Rogers membership in the tribes of which they held the highest office.  

They are also the means through which the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has disenfranchised the Cherokee Freedmen from the time of Ross Swimmer and Wilma Mankiller in the 1980's.

Similar blood quantums would likewise deny membership to Bluejacket, one of the most renowned Shawnee war chiefs ever, in any of the three modern tribes of Shawnee:  the Shawnee Tribe, the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. 

But this essay isn’t an argument against the use of century-old membership rolls and blood quantums by federally-recognized Indian nations for membership.  Rather it is to point out the flaws in imposing modern definitions on cultures of the past, even within those cultures direct descendants.

Let me cite another example.  In 1860, neither corporations nor slaves were counted as full persons under the law.  Corporations had no such standing at all, while slaves were only counted as three-fifths of a person each.  Kind of like an individual citizen in the U.S.A. today vis-à-vis any for-profit corporation.

In first century Palestine, to be a Jew meant to be of a certain descent AND to have been born and live in Judaea, or if in the Diaspora, to have that descent.  It could not mean worshipping the same deity, because the Samaritans did so and were scorned by first century Jews. 

It could not mean adhering to the same religious scriptures because the Sadducees who were most certainly Jews only accepted the Torah.  Religiously, except for recognizing the temple on Mt. Zion rather than the one on Mt. Gerizim, the Sadducees had far more in common with the Samaritans, whom they desipised, than they did with other Jews.

The Pharisees accepted the Torah and the Prophet and some of the Writings.  Hellenistic Jews, even in Judea, accepted even more writings but not the Mishna, and the Essenes, who accepted even more scriptures likewise rejected the Mishna.  The Bene Sedeq, forerunners of today’s Karayim, also reject the Mishna but accept the same scriptures as the Pharisees (in the past) and rabbinical Jews (in the present).

While many Galileans practiced much the same religion as Jews, they were still Galilean rather than Jewish, and descended from exiles considered heretics during the Hasmonean period and from Iturean Arabs forcibly converted like the Philistians and Idumeans and Nabatean Arabs.  Even had they had clear lines of descent, they were still living in the “wrong” place to be a Jew.

During the early stages of the Great Jewish War (66-73 CE), one of the main problems the insurgents had, especially in Jerusalem, was dissension between Jewish Zealots and Galilean Zealots, along with other factions such as the Idumeans, the Temple Guard and other supporters of the Boethusian priesthood, and the Sikari.

In the gospels, several passages point out the difference between Jews and Galileans.  The first that comes to mind is the woman who accosts Peter outside the chief priest’s house.  The entire Gospel of John refers to Jews almost as if they are a foreign people, but the sense in which the writer uses the term “Jew” becomes clearer if you realize he means “Judean”.

That distinction changed with the complete destruction of Jerusalem including the temple in 70 CE, followed by the Bar Kokbha War and expulsion of the remaining leadership from Judea to Galilee in 135 CE.  But in the first century, especially the early first century, if you were from Nazareth, you were a Galilean, not a Jew, even if the nativity myth of birth in Bethlehem was anything more than a myth.

The point is this: Yeshu bar Yosef of Nazareth was a Galilean, not a Jew.

Triumphal entry in the Passion narrative

The three great annual festivals of Hebraic religion are Pesach (Passover) and the accompanying “feast” of Unleavened Bread; Shavuot (Weeks), also called the feast of Harvest (or First Fruits); and Sukkot (Booths), or the feast of Ingathering (end of harvest).  The feasts of Unleavened Bread, Harvest, and Ingathering are clearly agricultural in origin while Passover is pastoral, welded onto the head of the agricultural festival.

The earliest text for the Shabbat mandate gives no religious reason for its prescription.  Rather, it was to give servants and animals a break from their labors.  Only later, after the captivities of the elites of the northern kingdom of Samerina/Beth Omri in Nineveh and of the elites of the southern kingdom of Yehud/Beth Dawid in Babylon that Shabbat took on a religious significance (commemoration of Yahweh’s rest on the seventh day of Creation Week) when those elites adopted the seven-day creation myths of their captors.

Likewise, the three pilgrimage festivals took on new and specifically religious myth meanings when the Hebrews adopted the foundation myths found in Genesis and Exodus.  The dual festival of Pesach came to symbolize the exodus from Egypt.  Shavuot came to symbolize the delivery of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.  Sukkot came to symbolize the forty years of wandering in the desert of Sinai. 

All of these commemorated events never actually happened, but they are important to the foundation myths.  To cite an example with which I am familiar, it would be like the Irish commemorating the flight of Scota, daughter of Pharaoh and her husband Goidel Glas from Egypt, the landing of the Milesians at Inver Sceine in west Munster, and the defeat of the Tuatha De Danaan at the Battle of Tailtiu and the subsequent exile of those foes underground as the Daoine Sidhe.

Back in West Asia, one of the midrashim about Shavuot is that when Yahweh gave the Torah to Moses, he did so in all seventy-two languages spoken on Earth, at least according to Hebrew tradition.  In Canaanite mythology, El, the supreme god, had seventy-two sons, each of them the god of their own people of Earth, each of which spoke its own language.  The story of Pentecost (the Greek name for Shavuot) in The Acts of the Apostles in which all present understand the words of the apostles regardless of their language reflects this midrash.

As a time of expectation (as well as inconvenience), Sukkot acquired religious significance additional to the Wandering.  It became a time of looking for the Messiah, specifically the Messiah ben David as opposed to the Messiah ben Joseph.  This is the aspect of Sukkot which ties into the Passion Story in all four gospels.

Jews, Galileans (in the 1^st and early 2^nd centuries there was a difference), and perhaps Samaritans converted to the new Way mythologizing the real events of the life of the one to whom they claimed allegiance would have done so in imagery drawn from their own culture.  Hence, the waving of palm branches and the Hosannas upon Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, because these two things are part of the anticipatory, messianic-looking festival of Sukkot.

To have Jews, Galileans, and other pilgrims waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna!” at Pesach would be like Christians erecting Christmas trees and singing carols in Holy Week.

I suspect that the myths surrounding Jesus of Nazareth and his death as a rebel at the hands of the Roman state prior to the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73 CE placed these events at Sukkot, given its connection to messianic expectation and palm branches and Hosannas, when Jesus was shrouded in purple to return as the conquering King of the Jews.  After the epic fail of the chauvinist militants in the Siege of Jerusalem, Christians sought to deemphasize those political aspects and moved the Passion Story to Pesach, a time of intentional sacrifice.

Many of the sayings of Jesus, if accurate, indicate that instead of the Messiah ben David, he saw himself more as the Messiah ben Joseph, who would precede the former and die in self-sacrifice.

Whoever put the Passion stories of the various gospels into their current form, they clearly were not Palestinian, even if they were Jews, Galileans, or Samaritans and not Gentiles.  One can understand, perhaps, why they couldn’t let go of the imagery of the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, but it is out of place.

Jesus was not a Jew

Jesus (Yeshu bar Yosef) of Nazareth was not a Jew.  He was a Galilean.  True, he followed the Torah and the Prophets and the Writings, went to synagogue, attended the temple in Jerusalem for major feast days when possible, and probably wore a tallit with tzizit and tefellin in his wrist and head daily but he was not a Jew. In first century Roman Palestine, what you believed religiously did not matter as much as where you were born (unless you were born in the Diaspora) and to whom you were born.

To be a Jew in Roman Palestine meant first of all to be from Judea, the core Judea, not the expanded version which took in Samaria, Philistia, Idumea, and Nabatea.  Jews, or Judeans, looked down their nose at Galileans almost as much as they did at Philistians, Idumeans, and Nabateans, though not as much as they looked down on Samaritans.  The name Galilee derives from Galil ha-Goyim, “District of the Gentiles”, and its population was a mix of forced colonists deported by the Hasmoneans, descendants of converts, and Gentiles.

Before its conquest by the Hasmoneans, Galilee had been the southern territory of the Arabic kingdom of Iturea in much of southern Syria, whose territory was conquered by Aristobolus I along with Galilee, with the requisite, for Hasmonean tyrants, forcible conversion of the populace.  There is not inconsiderable chance that Jesus could have been part Arab.

In addition, one had to be not just from Judea but of the correct ethnicity, because in the first century Judea took in the formerly independent territories of the Idumeans, Nabateans, and Philistians.  Those groups followed the Torah, most also the Prophets and the Writings, went to synagogue, and attended major feasts at the temple in Jerusalem, but were not considered entirely kosher because their immediate ancestors had been forcibly converted under the Hasmoneans, who were even more tyrannical and fratricidal than their Herodian successors.

Since we’re on the subject of 1^st century ethnic groups in Palestine…

The Samaritans in the middle, between Judea and Galilee, followed the Torah but not the Prophets or the Writings, went to their own synagogues, and attended major feasts in their own temple atop Mt. Gerizim, destroyed in 110 BCE by the Hasmoneans but rebuilt by Herod the Great in 10 BCE. 

The main reason for the spiteful, vindictive attitude of most if not all 1^st Jews towards the Samaritans had to do with the northern kingdom having been the senior and historically wealthier and more cosmopolitan of the two Hebrew/Israelite kingdoms.  Under the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian empires, Yehud, the southern realm, was governed as a sub-province appended to and subordinate of Samerina, the northern realm.  That situation changed briefly under Alexander, but resumed under the Ptolemies.

In inscriptions and surviving papyri, Samerina is also known as Bit Humria, or House of Omri, while Yehud is also known as Bit Dawid, or House of David, though this junior kingdom was at first simply known as Teman, Hebrew for “the south”.

The Jewish sect of the Pharisees, which also had adherents among the Galileans, used the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, and included the Mishna, or Oral Torah, in its teachings. It was divided into two factions itself, Beth Hillel and Beth Shammai, with Beth Hillel the dominant of the two, with its head holding the title of Nasi, head of the Great Sanhedrin.

The Jewish sect called Bene Sedeq accepted the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, but not the Mishna; their “descendants” became the Karayim.

The Jewish sect of the Essenes, which probably had adherents in Galilee since it certainly did in Damascus, used not only the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, but a number of other sacred scriptures as well.  Their main cult center seems to have been the large commune at Qumran, but enough of them visited Jerusalem to have their own gate.

Not all 1^st century Jews subscribed to the Prophets and the Writings.  The Jewish sect of the Sadducees, like its Samaritan neighbors, accepted only the Torah.  However, its adherents worshipped at the temple in Jerusalem and traced their ethnicity matrilinealy like the rest of the Jews as well as the Galileans where the Samaritans traced their ethnicity patrilinealy.  Its head was the high priest and necessarily tied to the temple cult.

Hellenistic Jews used the Septuagint, a Greek-language version of the Tanakh translated in Alexandria and used throughout the Diaspora which included several books and passages not found in the Hebrew Tanakh or Aramaic Targum of Palestine.  Diaspora Samaritans had their own translation into Greek of the Torah.

The bitter rivalry between Jews and Galileans, even within the same sects, lasted at least through to the end of the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE), or at least the end of its major phase, the fall of Jerusalem.  One of the main handicaps suffered by the rebels was the fratricidal infighting among their four or five major factions.  Two of these were rival factions of Zealots, one from Judea and the other from Galilee.

The sect of the Sadducees disappeared with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the Essenes soon after the destruction of their base at Qumran in 68 CE.  The Samaritans lost their own temple again in 67 CE, but they did not go away.  Of the two power centers of the Jews at the turn of the era, only the Great Sanhedrin in the hands of the Pharisees and Beth Hillel was left after the Jewish Revolt to shape mainstream Judaism for the future.

The distinctions between Jews and Galileans vanished after the Bar Kokbha War 130-135 CE, when nearly all the elite remaining in Judea were deported to Galilee along with the permanent move of the Great Sanhedrin and seat of the Patriarchate to there in 140 CE.

Contrary to popular belief, the Samaritans, who in ancient times were equally numerous with the Jews and Galileans combined, did not simply vanish.  Many became Christians or Gnostics, with the latter eventually conforming under the Roman Empire.  Following the Muslim conquest in the 7^th century, the great majority converted to Islam, especially after the Abbasids gained the Caliphate.  Around a thousand Samaritans remain, half in the State of Israel and half in Nablus in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine.

The real threat

The other day current POTUS Obama declared that the biggest threat to the United States of America and to the world is terrorism.

Really, Mr. POTUS?  When my chances of being killed by a rogue cop overreacting to an exponential degree with virtual impunity are greater by a factor of ten or a hundred than being killed by a terrorist, the chimera of “terrorism” is not the greatest threat to my health, safety, and well-being. 

And if that were true, Mr. POTUS, then why did you allow agents of your government to back down from doing their jobs in the face of white right-wing American terrorists in Nevada?  What would have happened if POTUS Eisenhower had backed down when Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to enforce segregation in that state’s schools? 

Fortunately, we didn’t have to learn the outcome of that because Eisenhower not only nationalized the Guard but sent in the 101^st Airborne.

In truth, the biggest danger to the U.S.A. and the world is not terrorism but the uninhibited power and de facto legal immunity of those who have produced and are still producing the Great Recession and whom people such as POTUS Obama have bent over backwards to protect from us, the outraged 99%. 

Well, theoretically “99%”.  Let me explain. 

True, the 1% at the top of the pyramid nationally and globally control a mega-glutton’s share of the wealth of the nation and the world.  They are the masters.  But the masters can’t do it by themselves.  As Turkish journalist Nuray Mert noted, “It is those who choose their well-being and careers over matters of principle who create an autocrat, not vice versa,” only in this case substitute “oligarchy” for “autocrat”. 

Because the 1% needs the next 10% to keep them in power.   So really what we have is an outraged 89% with 10% covering the backsides of the 1%, like the current POTUS and COTUS did with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  That, of course, was in addition to the $485 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed under the previous POTUS and the secret no interest $7.7 TRILLION (that’s twelve zeroes, folks) in loans to national and global financial houses in 2008 under the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility of the Federal Reserve.

When he was still Malcolm X, the prophet Malik el-Shabazz frequently told the parable of the house Negro and the field Negro.  Were he still around today, he would call the outraged 89% of us field slaves and that other 10% the house slaves.  What the 10% and the 89% have in common is that both groups are slaves, virtual and de facto maybe rather than literal and de jure, but slaves nonetheless.  Both are proletarii.

Since the current $COTU$ has grossly expanded the definitions of corporations as persons and money as speech, each of we average citizens (or is it subjects now?) only amount to about three-fifths of a person anymore, so the description fits.

Marx called that 1% at the top of the nation and of the world the “finance bourgeoisie”, as opposed to the “industrial bourgeoisie” and the “rentier bourgeoisie”.  One factor Marx got really wrong was that he never foresaw the supremacy of that sector of the bourgeoisie over the other two.  He may not have carried is historical dialectic back far enough, because the ultimate roots of the world’s banking system lie during the centuries of crusades, quests, and pilgrimages in the methods of moving money around internationally developed by the Knights Templar.

That is not a conspiracy theory reference.  The KT were not mystical Illuminati and they had to develop some manner of moving vast amounts of wealth safely across hundreds and thousands of miles of often extremely dangerous land in Europe and West Asia and the pirate-infested Mediterranean Sea.  That’s how and why the modern banking system came into being. 

So a millennium thence, their financial elite descendants, released in Clinton’s administration from the final bonds of the financial safety net enacted under the New Deal, went on an unprecedented avaricious binge of fraud and excessive consumption, and when everything fell apart because of their profligacy, they hand us the bill, all of us, here in America and across the world, urging “austerity” and promoting destruction of programs for the general welfare while declaring, “By God, you better not raise taxes!”.

Money as speech, corporations as people, politicians sponsored by business interests as literally as NASCAR drivers…the KT were at least honest in their financial dealings, also competent and shrewd; too good at it, at least for the King of France and the Vatican, and look at what happened to them.  Now, I’m not saying we should try the financial gods of Wall Street for heresy and burn them at the stake, but where’s an enraged Galilean prophet with a whip when you need one?

Mr. POTUS, if you really believe “terrorism” is the biggest threat to our country, you really need to read an essay I wrote a few years back called “Shadow of Fear in the Aftermath of 9/11”.  We have done far worse things to ourselves, to our country, to our freedom, and to our own souls than anything Osama bin Laden and his minions could ever do.

Tennessee legislature's latest homophobic absurdity

I had not realized until a couple of days ago that our most honorable governor of this our fair Tennessee had signed a most unnecessary piece of so-called ‘legislation’ entitled ‘Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act’.  But sign it he did, on this past 10 April.  Another vulture feather in the coonskin cap of the “Greatest State in the Land of the Free” to go along with the one awarded for the thankfully failed “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. 

It is the latter failed attempt at making homophobic bigotry not merely acceptable in the halls of Tennessee schools but real official policy and praiseworthy behavior that gives insight into the real motivations behind the former.  To protect not religious speech but hate speech.  Not a defense of anyone’s rights but of social dominance orientation and sociopathic entitlement.

Let me give y’all an example of how things could easily play out under this ill-conceived and completely unnecessary “law”.

Throughout my time at East Brainerd Elementary School, first through sixth grades, a teacher from outside came into our class once a week for Bible lessons.  Yes, this was at a public school, from fall 1969 to summer 1975.

I am NOT endorsing this; absolute separation of church and state is something I have always believed in and advocated even at my most religious.  Growing up I considered myself Republican because that’s what my parents were.  I even helped campaign for Reagan in 1980, mostly because a girl I had a crush on in Mr. Cousin’s American Government class was campaigning for Carter.  Then the Moral Majority and similar groups came to the fore soon after the election, and I left.

Part of the reason I didn’t see a conflict with having a Bible teacher in our public school at the time was that my teacher in first and second grade at the school was also my Sunday School teacher at St. Martin’s Episcopal.  Both, incidentally, were within easy walking distance of our house on Walnut Grove/North Joiner Road.

One of my most memorable arguments (there were several) with this Bible teacher at school came when I was in sixth grade.  This was either in the fall of 1974 or the spring of 1975.  Mrs. Genung was our regular class teacher, and Malcolm Defriese was still principal back then, still had his grocery at the Crossroads in Westview. 

The argument was over her assertion that black skin was the “Mark of Canaan” that all blacks wore as the stain of the sin of Canaan’s father Ham against Noah.  I objected rather strenuously, and when my mom arrived at school after being called there (something she was not unfamiliar with), she backed me up.

My point in telling this story is to point out that under our legislature and governor approved ‘Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act’, if a student made that assertion in a class speech or even before the whole school assembly, that assertion would be protected, and if part of an oral report could not be automatically failed.

Some might call the Tea Party Republicans who have taken over the GOP of our fair state as well as our entire government the American Taliban, Tennessee Chapter.  In truth, however, they are nothing more than old unredeemed Bourbon Democrats recycled through a Tennessee Walking Horse.

No doubt part of their illogic is based on claims that they have to defend Christianity from a nonexistent war against it.  However, first, that is not and never has been at any time a function of government in the United States of America.  Second, there is no “war on Christianity”.

Christianity is no more under attack in this country than George Zimmerman (murderer of Trayvon Martin) and Michael Dunn (murderer of Jordan Davis) were when they were still sitting in their cars.  No more than the ante-bellum property rights of slave owners.  No more than white supremacists to discriminate against Afro-Americans in the days of the Jim Crow South.

First the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of gay kids in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, but I didn't protest because none of my kids were gay.

Then the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of Muslim kids in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, but I didn't protest because we're not Muslim.

Then the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of Latino kids in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, but I didn't protest because we're not Latino.

Then the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of kids of trade unionists in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, but I didn’t protest because I’m not in a trade union.

Then the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of Jewish kids in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, but I didn’t protest because I’m not Jewish.

Then the Tennessee legislature passed a law which was signed by the governor allowing the bullying of mixed race kids in schools in the name of protecting religious speech, and I finally took notice, because my kids are Irish-Kapampangan-Scottish-Sangley-English-Tagalog-Cherokee-Spanish, but when I looked around, no one was standing behind me to back me up.

An injury to one is an injury to all.  Whoever harms the least of these little ones, it would be better for them to have a millstone to be tied around their neck and be drowned the sea.

Bullying is an act, not speech.

Wisdom of Jedi Master Vergere

Vergere was a character created for the New Jedi Order series, which was perhaps the best series of the whole Star Wars Expanded Universe.  One of the particularly intriguing features of the NJO series was that the various authors seemed willing to step outside the simplistic moral box of good/evil, light side/dark side, white hat/black hat.  This culminated with the penultimate NJO novel, The Unifying Force.  The characters were more ambiguous morally, more real, for a more mature audience.

Vergere, a Fosh female Jedi Knight who came up under the Old Republic and kidnapped by a species alien to the Galaxy, was the character who introduced this new view of the Force to the Masters, Knights, and Padawans of the New Jedi Order (the Order of the New Republic itself, as opposed to the series) and to Star Wars fans.  It was a welcome breath of fresh air.  For me, the overall message of the NJO series is best expressed in a quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his book, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Alas, GL shit-canned all that by insisting there was an actual Light Side and Dark Side to the Force and everything was all good and all evil, much to the disappointment and really pissed-offness of many fans of the EU, especially of the NJO. In the later Legacy of the Force series, he made sure its authors turned Vergere into a full-fledged Sith.

GL and his acolytes at Lucasarts had a similar reaction to the humanizing of Clonetroopers and Mandalorians in the Republic Commando series, which never got finished due to disagreements between its sole author, Karen Traviss, and Lucasarts.

However, none of that matters since Disney, which owns the franchise now, has decreed none of it ever happened, even in a fictional universe.  Kind of like the way the reboot of the Star Trek franchise wiped out two or three hundreds years of history (I am a fan of the new as well as the old, btw).

Now, without further ado, the quotes of Jedi Master Vergere, whom I and other NJO fans have promoted to that rank.

The first is from James Luceno’s The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial.

 “The Force is a sword with two edges.  Cut one way and vanquish.  But be careless on the backswing, or allow your mind to wander, and you risk undoing all you’ve accomplished.”

The rest of are from Matthew Stover’s The New Jedi Order: Traitor.

“Out of control is just code for ‘I don’t want to admit I’m the kind of person who would do such things.’ It’s a lie.”

“The most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic is that fanaticism is self-defeating.”

“Questions are more true than answers, because all the answers fall short of the truth: this is the beginning of wisdom.”

“A master of defense is one who is never in the place that is attacked.”

“A right that is given is as useless as a virtue that is given. Rights are used, or they have no value, just as virtues must be performed.”

“Freedom is always alarming.”

“Orders not backed by force are only suggestions.”

“You feel empty. You feel alone.  Lonely.  Almost frightened, but also strong, yes?  The name for what you are feeling is freedom.  How did you expect it to feel?  You are free, and that can be lonely, and empty, and frightening.  But it is also powerful.”

“This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side.  The Force is one.  The Force is everything and everything is the Force.  The Force does not take sides.  The Force does not even have sides.”

“Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand. What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion, but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness requires the surrender of control.  Passion that is guided, not walled away.  Leave your limits behind.  If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it.  It is because you do.  The only dark side you need fear is the one in your own heart.”

“The truth is greater than the words we use to describe it.”

“Why is a question that is always deeper than the answer.  Perhaps you should ask you should ask instead: what?”

“What distinguishes a flower from a weed is only this: the choice of the gardener.”

“Sith?  Jedi?  Are these the only choices?  Dark or light, good or evil?  Is there no more to the Force than this?  What is the screen on which light and dark cast their shapes and shadows?  Where is the ground on which stands good and evil?”

“Everything I tell you is a lie.  And the truth.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Another Old Republic Jedi expressed views of the Force almost identical to those Vergere in Medstar II: Jedi Healer, by Michael Reeves and Steve Perry, set in the Clone Wars.  This time it was Padawan Bariss Offee, who at the end of the novel gained her Knighthood and the title Jedi.

“Feelings don’t come with ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ labels. You feel how you feel. You are only responsible for how you act.”

 “Jedi refer to the ‘light side’ and the ‘dark side’, but really, these are only words, and the Force is beyond words.  It is not evil, just as it isn’t good—it simply is what it is.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The following is a dialogue between Vergere and Jacen Solo when he was a prisoner of the Yuuzhan Vong (in Traitor) in which her wisdom can’t really be separated.

Vergere: “What is pain for?  Do you ever think about that, Jacen Solo?  What is its function? Many of our more devout masters believe that pain is the lash of the True Gods: that suffering is how the True Gods teach us to disdain comfort, our bodies, even life itself.  For myself, I say that pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. The most basic instinct of life is to retreat from pain. To hide from it. If going here hurts, even a granite slug will go over there; to live is to be a slave to pain. To be ‘beyond pai’' is to be dead, yes?”

Jacen: “Not for me," Jacen answered dully, once his throat opened enough that he could speak. "No matter how dead you say I am, it still hurts.”

Vergere: “Oh, well, yes. That the dead are beyond pain is only an article of faith, isn't it?  We should say, we hope that the dead are beyond pain--but there's only one way to find out for sure.”

Jacen: “I don't think anything. I just want it to stop.”

Vergere: “I am such a fool.  All this time, I had thought I was speaking to an adult.  Ah, self-deception is the cruelest trick of all, isn’t it?  I let myself believe that you had once been a true Jedi, when in truth you are only a hatchling, shivering in the nest, squalling because your mother hasn’t fluttered up to feed you.”

Jacen: “You...you...How can you... after what you’ve done...”

Vergere: “What I have done?  Oh, no no no, this is about what you have done.”

Jacen: “I haven’t done anything!”

Vergere: “Exactly. Is that not the infant’s tactic? To wail, and wail, and wail, to wriggle its fingers and kick its heals...hoping an adult will notice and care for it?”

Jacen: “What can I do?”

Vergere: “Certainly, among your options is continuing to hang in this room and suffer.  And so long as you do that, do you know what will happen?”

Jacen: “"What?”

Vergere: “Nothing.  Oh, eventually, you’ll go mad, I suppose.  If you’re lucky. Someday you may even die.  Of old age.”

Jacen: “Is that why you keep coming here? To gloat? To humiliate a defeated enemy?”

Vergere: “Am I gloating? Are we enemies? Are you defeated?”

Jacen: “I don’t understand.”

Vergere: “That, at least, is very clear. I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?”

Jacen: “Help? When we talk about the kind of things you’ve done to me, help isn’t the word we use.”

Vergere: “No? Then perhaps you are correct: our difficulties may be linguistic. When I was very young, I came upon a shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, still within its cocoon.  I had already some touch with the Force; I could feel the shadowmoth’s pain, its panic, its claustrophobia, its hopelessly desperate struggle to free itself.  It was as though this particular shadowmoth knew I was beside it, and screamed out to me for help.  How could I refuse?  So I gave it what you mean by help: I used a small utility cutter to slice the cocoon, to help the shadowmoth get out.”

Jacen: “"Oh, you didn't, did you? Please say you didn't.”

Jacen: ‘You can’t help a shadowmoth by cutting its cocoon.  It needs the effort; the struggle to break the cocoon forces ichor into its wing veins.  If you cut the cocoon—

Vergere: ‘The shadowmoth will be crippled. "Yes. It was a tragic creature--never to fly, never to join its fellows in their nightdance under the moons. Even its wingflutes were stunted, and so it was as mute as it was planetbound. During that long summer, we sometimes heard moonsong through the window of my bedchamber, and from my shadowmoth I would feel always only sadness and bitter envy, that it could never soar beneath the stars, that its voice could never rise in song. I cared for it as best I could-- but the life of a shadowmoth is short, you know; they spend years and years as larvae, storing strength for one single summer of dance and song.  I robbed that shadowmoth; I stole its destiny... because I helped it.”

Jacen: ‘That wasn’t helping. That’s not what help means either.”

Vergere: “No? I saw a creature in agony, crying out in terror, and I undertook to ease its pain, and assuage its fear.  If that is not what you mean by help, then my command of Basic is worse than I believed.”

Jacen: “You didn't understand what was happening.”

Vergere: “Neither did the shadowmoth.  But tell me this, Jacen Solo: if I had understood what was happening--if I had known what the larva was, and what it must do, and what it must suffer, to become the glorious creature that it could become--what should I have done that you would call, in your Basic, help?”

But tell me this, Jacen Solo: what should I have done that you would call help?”

Jacen: “I suppose the best help you could offer would be to keep the cocoon safe.  Hawk-bats hunt shadowmoth larvae, and they especially like newly cocooned pupae: that's the stage where they have the most stored fat.  So I guess the best help you could offer would be to keep watch

over the larva, to protect it from predators--and leave it alone to fight its own battle.”

Vergere: “And, perhaps, also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk—who might wish, in their ignorance, to ‘help’ it with their own utility cutters.  And also perhaps, you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering, creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in service of its destiny.”

Jacen: “Yes...”

Vergere: “Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical.”

Ukraine and Iran

There is a history going back nearly two centuries, some might say a millennium, underlying current events between Russia and Ukraine, as well as an aspect that could effect what in some quarters is currently one of the most important issues in international relations.

First, the history.

EuroMaidan was not a plot by Western imperialists to get one up on the center of power of the former Soviet Union, as too many talking heads of the neoleft either wearing Moscow-colored glasses or simply unable to climb out of a paradigm that no longer exists protest.  Nor was it a plot engineered by rightists in Ukraine to create a fascist anti-Semitic Russophobic state as the Kremlin and its propaganda outlets and its sycophants proclaim. 

These two views of events are as patronizing and condescending as any of the worst of those more upfront and bald in their imperialist intent and sentiment.

No, EuroMaidan was a popular uprising initiated by the people of Ukraine for a variety of reasons, chief of which were the rampant political and financial corruption of those in power, the worsening economic situation in the country.  The final straw that broke the camel’s back was the prospect of being dragged into an inescapable orbit around the power from whose gravity well it had escaped in 1991 when its kleptocratic president threatened submission of the country to Czar Vladimir in the form of joining the Putin/Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union.  That’s why the rising in November.

The protestors are still camped out on the Maidan, because they do not trust or have much love for those who returned to power.  They want their country back from all the oligarchs, not just the ones recently kicked out but their successors as well.

A thousand years ago, Kiev was the center of power in Eastern Europe north of the Roman Empire governed from Constantinople (“Byzantine” is a misnomer, a neologism coined a century after it fell).  With the rise of various empires, wars, migrations, and invasions its star fell while that of Moscow rose.  Eventually, Ukraine came totally within the Russian Empire.  Peter the Great was the first to order its “Russification”, but he recommended that it be carried out slowly and subtly, like first having ethnic Russians migrate there. 

The strategy worked remarkably well and by the twentieth century, Ukrainian nationalism was buried deep.  Increasing repression banished the Ukrainian language from public life and printing in the Ukrainian language was outlawed.  Ukrainian schools were eventually banned in the mid-1800’s and the formerly autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church was subordinated to the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow.

Then came the February Revolution in 1917, followed by the October Revolution the same year, the latter actually more of a coup d’etat by the Bolshevik Party.  As part of its program to gain the loyalty of the disparate peoples of the former Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Central Committee launched a propaganda program promising non-Russian nationalities a certain amount of autonomy in a Bolshevik utopia.

When Stalin, the former Bolshevik Commissar of Nationalities, years later announced his policy of “socialism in one country”, he included in it an unwritten but no less intense policy of Russification.  Among other features, this meant that the Russian language was the sole official language throughout the USSR and “nationalist deviations” would be stamped out.  This process was most intense in Ukraine, and included the decimation of party members of the Ukraine SSR to half in two separate purges, 1929-1934 and 1936-1938.

The most horrific act toward accomplishing complete Russification in Ukraine was the 18-month famine engineered in 1932 and 1933, in which at least 3.5 million, and possibly as many as 7 million, perished.  The latter figure exceeds the death toll for Jews under the Nazi regime 1933-1945 and was carried out in much less time.  Ukrainians call this atrocity the Holodomor (“Extermination by Hunger”).

Don’t just take my word for it.  Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent  who had fought with the Polish Army against the Germans then escaped when that collapsed, referred to what happened in Ukraine as genocide.  He later became the founder of the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948.

Lemkin actually coined what was then the neologism “genocide” in his important 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.  In addition to the then ongoing slaughter of Jews, Roma, Poles, and others, he cited as examples the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Holodomor.  For Lemkin, genocide went beyond just the killing of mass numbers of people to include the intention destruction of their culture, suppression of their language, and dissolution of their national life.

Ukrainian nationalism remained submerged until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The new nation suffered the same corruption and insane mismanagement of former state resources as Yeltsin and his younger former KGB protégé Putin allowed in Russia which has led to two revolutions, first the Orange Revolution of 2003 and now EuroMaidan.  In 2003, once what they thought was a better government was installed, the protestors went home.  With that experience in the rear view mirror, this time they have stayed out.

The turbulent past is the main reason so many in Ukraine support Svoboda, the right-wing party pandering to extreme anti-Russian xenophobic chauvinism.  It is important to point that although members took part in EuroMaidan, they neither initiated it nor led it, and while many of its members are part of the current caretaker government, they do not dominated it and its members who are officials hold only less important posts, except for one.

Contrary to widespread belief, fomented both by Putin’s Wurlitzer and the lazy mainstream media broadcasting without fact-checking, the new Ukrainian government did not outlaw Russian.  What the MP’s voted on was to overturn a law granting Russian and three other languages status as official state languages.  However, Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, vetoed that.

Now, to other issues in international relations and how they might be affected.

Three years into its independence, the same year Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons for destruction.  As part of the agreement for it to do so, the United States, United Kingdom, and Russian Federation Statement guaranteed its borders, its sovereignty, and its economic independence in the Trilateral Statement, with France and China giving their assent and support.

The only other nation known to have voluntarily surrendered its nuclear arms is the Republic of South Africa.  It ended its nuclear program, which had been covertly supported by the State of Israel, and dismantled its six devices in 1989.

The Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin has violated this agreement on several occasions in as many ways possible, perhaps most egregiously in the invasion and conquest of Crimea and its absorption into its borders, but also in its repeated economic extortion of its neighbor.

Here’s something to think about…

But first, let me point out that I don’t give a damn, a shit, a flying fuck, or a rat’s ass whether or not the Islamic Republic of Iran has nukes or not.  I mean, I hate that anyone at all has them because any use of them in any circumstances whatsoever, especially just to show a rival that one has the will to deploy them, is a crime against humanity. 

Iran doesn’t have them now and its programme is many years away from achieving that.  But as much as I despise Iran’s mullahs and what they have done to the country and its people, Iran’s leaders are not nearly as dangerously psychopathic as the current leaders of Israel, which has hundreds of nukes, and even they haven’t used them. 

Now, suppose you are a leader of Iran in talks with five world powers who are trying to convince you to give up attempts to begin creating a nuclear arsenal.  The five powers promise that they will guarantee your country’s safety against all enemies in return for this, just like they promised the same to Ukraine in 1994.  Given the aggression of Russia, the apathy of China, and the impotence of the USA, the UK, and France, how likely do you think Iran’s leaders will trust such guarantees of protection for an agreement to come to pass?  Yea, me either.

For Nakba Day

This isn’t meant to be a coherent essay so much as a collection of my status updates and my descriptions of and comments on various posts made to Facebook.  I wanted it all in one place to post for Nakba Day.

“Occupied Palestine” is that portion of the Levant east of Jordan, west of the Mediterranean Sea, south of Lebanon, and north of the Sinai. Everything within those parameters is Occupied Palestine.

We need to come up with a word stronger than apartheid for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Apartheid is how they treat Palestinians (and Africans, and Maghrebic, Mizrahic, and Sephardic Jews) within the recognized borders of the State of Israel. How it treats Palestinians beyond that approaches how the Nazis treated Jews before the camps.

The "two-state solution" is not a solution but a mirror of the bantustans of apartheid South Africa, of which the State of Israel was the most staunch ally, to the extent of sharing nuclear weapons technology with it. The West Bank looks pretty much the same as the territory on the other side of the Apartheid Wall [carved up with Palestinians shoved into tiny corners], and Palestine's southwest is a de facto Gaza Ghetto equal in deprivation but twice the size of the one in Warsaw during occupation of Poland by the Nazis.

Saying, “There shouldn't be a ‘Jewish' State” is the same saying as “There shouldn’t be an ‘Aryan’ State” or There shouldn’t be an an ‘Anglo-American’ State” or There shouldn’t be a ‘Persian’ State’.  No nation-state has the right to exist for the purpose of elevating those of one ethnic group above all others inside its borders with the eventual goal of eliminating those other groups.

Imagine if 21^st century Germany declared itself the homeland to all Germanic people and gave ethnic Germans outside its borders more rights than non-ethnic citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.  Now, imagine that ethnic Germans had an automatic right-of-return to Germany with instant citizenship provided they were Lutheran or Catholic but required all those not of ethnic German descent and/or non-Lutheran, non-Catholic to go through an arduous approval process that lasts for years.  Furthermore, imagine the passports of the Federal Republic of Germany listing its citizens not simply as “German” but by nationality and/or ethnic-religious group, so that you get “German Lutheran”, “German Catholic”, “Jew”, “Turk”, “Irish”, “Druze”, “Ethiopian”, etc.  Outraged yet?  Welcome to the State of Israel, just switch the names “Jew” for “German” and “Orthodox” for “Lutheran” and “Catholic”.

Every time officials of the State of Israel whine about a two-sided story to the latest atrocity its government, military, or imperial colonists being condemned by governments and news organizations across the globe, I can't help thinking that I didn't realize there were two sides to ethnic-cleansing.  Were there two sides to the Holocaust?  Were there two sides to Jim Crow?

There are few things I despise more than pseudo-history. It's one of the reasons I have little respect for any religion's sacred scriptures as history.  None of them are history from that religion's POV as much as they are historical fantasy.

Using the Bible as a benchmark for studying the history of Palestine is like using the movie "Birth of a Nation" as a foundation for studying the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Xenophobic bigotry is not the same as true religion, though it too often passes for it, even in the eyes of religious adherents who despise it.  That's true whether you're talking about the Zionist Jewish State or the Muslim nation of Malaysia or Catholic Vatican City or Putin’s Orthodox Russian Federation or Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey under Erdogan and the AKP or Buddhist Sri Lanka or Buddhist Burma or Hindu India or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Salafi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the Catholic Republic of Ireland or the Catholic Republic of El Salvador or the Catholic Republic of Spain or the Protestant State of Texas.

Since most Palestinians in the West Bank descend primarily from Samaritan forebearers, is it fair to say that Zionists are anti-Semtic?

One of the chief reasons European Jews began seeking a homeland of their own in the latter decades of the 19th century was that traditionally Jews in Europe were forbidden by law from owning land.  Thus the Zionist movement, which first set its sites on Uganda before turning to Ottoman-occupied Palestine.  Wanna guess how much land a non-Jew is allowed to own in the State of Israel under current law?  If you said zero, you are correct.

Palestinians of 2014 envy Catholics in Northeast Ulster of 1968.  Calling for a two-state solution in the Southern Levant is like calling for a two-state solution in Northeast Ulster.

In Israel, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews have the same status roughly as Scottish Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other Dissenters (non-Catholic non-Anglicans) had in Ireland prior to repeal of the Penal Laws.  Meaning, they don’t suffer under as many legal disabilities as Muslims and Christians (except, in the latter case, of visiting members of the rabid Christian Right who rabidly support the most extreme Zionism), but their marriages by their own rabbis aren’t recognized so their children are illegitimate under the law.  is a little funny since Zionism sprang from the Haskala and therefore shares a common origin with Reform Judaism.

Buying products from Israel, especially coming from Occupied Palestine, is the same as buying blood diamonds.

At the height of the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish soldier who had evaded capture and made it to the USA in 1941 published a book in 1944 called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe describing what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, Roma, Poles, and other groups, which he defined as genocide.  In it he described genocide as:

“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals.”

Both these passages describe exactly what the State of Israel has been doing to the people of Palestine since 1948.

While Lemkin was the driving force on the Convention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948, it was much watered down from his wishes.

Lemkin’s criticisms of the genocide of Ukraine carried out by Stalin in the 1930’s, suddenly very topical at the moment, are less well known than his criticisms of the Nazi Reich, but they are a subject for another essay.

Saya'ty yawmana.