Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

Pre-publication of chapter XIX of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; chapters XXVII to XXXII form Part Eleven (How and why the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals failed) of the book, which is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters. Chapters XXVII and XXVIII have already been pre-published.

Until now, 21 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the present book; this chapter is therefore the 22nd (out of 33) to be uploaded. At the end of the text, the entire Table of Contents is made available. Pre-published chapters are marked in blue color, and the present chapter is highlighted in gray color. 

In addition, a list of all the already pre-published chapters (with the related links) is made available at the very end, after the Table of Contents.

The book is written for the general readership with the intention to briefly highlight numerous distortions made by the racist, colonial academics of Western Europe and North America only with the help of absurd conceptualization and preposterous contextualization.

References made to entries of the Wikipedia offer average readers a starting point for their research; they do not signify acceptance and approval of their contents.

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Certainly, the Safavid Empire was not the first Islamic state established by a mystical order; but earlier states launched by mystical orders were either set up in small and remote territories as form of local resistance against the Islamic Caliphate like the Babakiyah (Khurramites) or organized as a secret subversive movement coordinated from mysterious, faraway, unreachable and impregnable headquarters, like those of the Hashashin Isma’ilis (known as Assassins in Western literature). In this regard, at the level of governance, the main difference between the Safavids and the Isma’ilis was the fact that the latter did not try or even plan to proclaim an empire, whereas the former, even before solemnly announcing their empire, felt that they had the task to entirely reshape the Islamic world.

Selim I

Ismail I Safavi

Babur

The Safavid Order had the apocalyptic, eschatological and messianic feeling that their task would be the only way to save the Islamic world; they felt that they had the divinely bestowed obligation to institute a secular empire across the Islamic world, which would be based on spiritual values, moral virtues, cultural traditions, and epic revival. The name of the empire was no lees imperial than the following expression: “the Realm of the Outspread Universe of Iran” (ملک وسیع‌الفضای ایران /Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran); one understands automatically the importance of Ferdowsi’s epic narrative and the cosmological dimension that Safavid spirituality gave to the state that the venerable members of the Order launched. The term ‘Iran’ does not denote either the territory of a nation/ethnic group or the land controlled by a state; all these divisive, nonsensical, modern notions were nonexistent at the time. In the very beginning of the Safavid times, the term ‘Iran’ was not even used.

Prof. Ali Anooshahr, speaking at the symposium “The Idea of Iran: The Safavid Era” (https://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cis/events/idea-of-iran/27oct2018-the-idea-of-iran-the-safavid-era.html; Center for Iranian Studies, SOAS; 27 October 2018) about the topic “Historiographical perceptions of the transmission from Timurid to Safavid Iran”, explained how historians of the early 16th c. dealt with the transition from the Timurid to the Safavid period. His speech is available here (from 8:10 until 46:19): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkvUfU2ruKM

The most important historians of the early Safavid times were Ghiyath ad-Din Muhammad Khwandamir (Habib al-Siyar; Khulasatu-l Akhbar; Dasturu-l Wuzra), Abdallah Hatefi (Khamsa), Amini Haravi (Futuhat-e shahi), Fazli Khuzani Esfahani (Afzal al-tawarih), and Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani (Tarih-e alamara-ye amini).

It is interesting to herewith include selected excerpts from Prof. Anooshahr’s well-founded speech, notably (11:30 onwards/no editing involved):

“There was no idea of something called Iran in this transition period”.

“The word ‘Iran’ only shows in Amini’s book twice; once is paired with Turan; and then immediately afterward, when the Rumi (: Roman) envoy shows up on behalf of the Ottoman Emperors”.

“As far as the people of the time were concerned, the actual participants in these events, they had no idea of Iran, and this was not because they were alien or unpatriotic, in fact they were non-patriotic, because there is no patriotism; this was because they had a radically different idea of territory than we do today. So, in our modern conception, people are defined as a nation, they own the land that they live on, and this land has a particular characteristic that is shared between it and all the people”.

“When Amini writes about territory, he sublimates it by using the Quran and comparing it to heaven; he does not connect it to any kind of territorial identity at all”.

“The establishment of Twelver Shi’ism, based on this text, does not seem to be that important. And then the establishment of a kind of Ancient Persian Empire is actually not on their agenda”.

As a matter of fact, Safavid Iran was the entire universe for the members of the Safavid Order, and as such it had no ethnic/national dimension or character and no religious identity. Spirituality was all that mattered. Even more importantly, it was not proclaimed only to encompass the territories that the Safavid emperors finally controlled, as Western Iranologists perniciously suggest, perversely viewing the Safavid empire’s territory as simply a larger ‘version’ of the modern pseudo-state of Iran. For the members of the Safavid Order, “Molk-e vasi-ye fezaye Eran” had the divinely entrusted task to contain the entire circumference of the Islamic world.   

Four major monarchs between Rome and China

Between Rome and China, four persons, who played a determinant role in the final formation of major empires and in the final delineation of their borders, were born between 1450 and 1487.  In chronological order they are as per below:

i. Muhammad Shaybani (Muhammad Shaybani Khan or Abul-Fath Shaybani Khan; 1451-1510), grandson of Abu’l-Khayr Khan, and Genghisid founder of the Khanate of Bukhara (1500), one of the empires that were formed after the split of the Golden Horde and demise of the precarious Uzbek Khanate; he evidently did not make any distinction between a) Turanians and Iranians (which shows the extent of the completed ethnic Turanization of Iran) and b) those who are fallaciously called today ‘Shia’ and ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists, diplomats or statesmen and Islamic terrorists and extremists alike.

Muhammad Shaybani; 16th c. portrait painted by the famous Iranian artist Kemaleddin Behzad

The fight between Shah Ismail I and Muhammad Shaybani (1510); from the manuscript Tarikh-i alam-aray-i Shah Ismail (the world adorning History of Shah Ismail)

Bukhara; Chor-Bakr burial place constructed under Muhammad Shaybani (1505-1510)

The state of Muhammad Shaybani

ii. Selim I (سليم اول / Yavuz Sultan Selim; 1470-1520), grandson of Mehmed II and son of Bayezid II; he ruled the Eastern Roman Empire only for eight years (1512-1520), but he was by far the most important sultan of the 600-year long dynasty for having expanded the Ottoman territories more than any other. Then, there was no ‘Ottoman Empire’; not one man used that term at the time. The term ‘State of the Ottoman family’ (دولت عليه عثمانیه‎ / Devlet-i ‘Alīye-i Osmaniyeh) was introduced centuries later. Selim I was the Padishah (پادشاه‎), i.e. the ‘Great King’, thus bearing an Iranian title that goes back to the early Achaemenids who antedated him by two millennia. Selim I was also (βασιλεύς Ρωμαίων / Imperator Romanorum / قیصر روم‎ / Qaysar-i Rum, lit. “Caesar of the Romans”) like his father and grandfather after 1453, because Mehmed II claimed the title after conquering Constantinople, George of Trebizond endorsed the claim, considering Mehmed II as emperor of the world, and Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, fully recognized the title.

The state of Selim I was also viewed by others as the Roman Empire (in the sense of the Eastern Roman Empire, because the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist in 476 CE). From the aforementioned speech of Prof. Ali Anooshahr, I quote another excerpt here (exactly after 12:07 in the above mentioned video and link):

“I am referring to what we call ‘the Ottoman Empire’; but if the topic today is to look at how people perceived their own territoriality, then we shouldn’t call it ‘the Ottoman Empire’, because they didn’t call it that way; they called it ‘the Roman Empire’ (ruled by the Ottoman family)”.

Selim I was not styled “Commander of the Faithful” (أَمِير ٱلْمُؤْمِنِين‎ / ‘Amir al-Mu’minin) for most of his reign, and when he could claim the title, the majority of his subjects rejected it for him. The same concerns the later and minor title “Servant of The Two Holy Cities” (خَادِمُ الْحَرَمَيْن‎ / Hadimü’l-Haremeyn), which is somewhat a historical novelty introduced only as late as the 12th – 13th c. Last, it is only after 1517 that Selim I was accepted as ‘Caliph’ throughout his realm and dependencies.

Selim I (Yavuz Sultan Selim); portrait painted by the Ottoman artist Nakkaş Osman (16th c.)

The territorial expansion of the Ottoman Sultanate (focus on Anatolia and the Balkans)

Portrait (end of 18th-beginning of 19th c.) painted by the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman artist Konstantin Kapıdağlı (Κωνσταντῖνος Κυζικηνός; Konstantinos Kyzikinos)

Ottoman Empire around 1520

Miniature from the 16th c. manuscript Hüner-nāme; I, Library of the Topkapi Palace Museum

The Ottoman Empire in 1875

Sultan Selim I and the Grand Vizier Piri Mehmed Paşa

Selim I portrait painted by Aşık Çelebi

Painting showing Selim I during the Egypt campaign, Army Museum, Istanbul

Portrait of Selim I painted by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari); Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Staatsgalerie in der Residenz Würzburg

From the personal belongings of Shah Ismail that were captured by Selim during and after the Battle of Chaldiran. Topkapi Museum, Istanbul

iii. Babur (ظَهير اَلَدّين مُحَمَّد – Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad; 1483-1530) was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza, the Timurid governor of Ferghana who was the son of Abu Sa’id Mirza; consequently, Babur was the great grandson of Abu Sa’id Mirza’s father, Sultan Muhammad Mirza, governor of Samarqand for some time, whom due to an unknown reason Babur did not even mention in historical boon Babur-nameh. This implies that Babur was the great-great grandson of the father of Sultan Muhammad Mirza, Miran Shah, who was the third of Timur’s four sons. So, Babur was the great-great-great-grandson of Timur.

If he is basically known through his nickname (‘tiger’), this happens because he truly deserved it. Babur became the ruler of Ferghana at the age of 11 (in 1494), and he was an outstanding and exceptional adolescent in every sense. In his rather brief but most eventful life that had unprecedented ups and downs, Babur had to incessantly fight hard for long and in a most adventurous and often thunderous manner, undertaking campaigns, laying sieges, and winning battles, but also losing his capitals. He was defeated by Muhammad Shaybani, and he spent years in humiliation and poverty without a real shelter.

However, he managed to capture Kabul (1504) and to control parts of today’s Afghanistan; he then benefited from Ismail I’s victory over Muhammad Shaybani (1510), recaptured Samarqand, and prepared his army for the major campaign and the greatest success of his life, namely the invasion of the Indus River and the Ganges River valleys, the demolition of the Delhi Sultanate, and the foundation (1524-1526) of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858). So, triumph came at last to this intellectual soldier and philosopher-conqueror. By all means, Babur would have made -in a terrible historical irony- the perfect son to Timur himself!

iv. Ismail I Safavi (1487-1524) was none other than the son of Shaykh Haydar, the Grandmaster of the Safavid Order and the founder of the Qizilbash military order. It is noteworthy that his maternal grandmother was none other than Despina Hatun, i.e. Theodora Megale Komnene, of John IV of Trebizond, who became Muslim to get married (1458) with Uzun Hassan, the Aq Qoyunlu sultan, whose daughter Martha (mainly known as Alamshah Halime Begum) -in very young age- got married (1471) with Shaykh Haydar.

However, tribally and imperially, Ismail I’s lineage was not as important as the ancestry of Muhammad Shaybani, Selim I, and Babur, but his spiritual-mystical backing was incommensurately stronger; people of different origin, occupation and location could instantly rush to his support and give their lives personally for him. And his great military advantage was his unpredictability, which was due exactly to his spiritual-mystical backing. His opponents would never know from where his fighters would surface to protect him and defend his cause. 

Contrarily to Muhammad Shaybani who had the youth of a regular soldier, and to Selim I who spent years in palatial intrigues as he was his father’s third son, Ismail I was an exceptional youngster like Babur; but his father’s spiritual potency made an enormous difference. This is difficult to assess properly today, but in the circle of the Anatolian-Caucasus-Iranian-Central Asiatic members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash fighters, Shaykh Haydar was believed to be God Incarnate (elah) – in the spiritual (not theological) connotation of the word. This meant nothing less than an absolute faith as per which the infant Ismail, long before establishing the Empire of the Safavid Order, was believed to be ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God).

Western colonial historians and Orientalist forgers, in their incessant effort to distort the historical reality of the Safavid times, select deliberately anti-Safavid authors of those days, like Fazl-Allah Khonji Esfahani, take their premeditated narratives at face value, attach to them several fake, pseudo-Islamic theological concepts, such as the ‘ghulat’, and portray the Safavids as ‘Shia extremists’ or ‘antinomians’ (another fake term), which is absolutely absurd. As said in the previous chapter, there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters; this means that every attempt of theological interpretation of a spiritual term or expression is a failure already before it is stated. In fact, there are no ‘ghulat’ at all.

This term is a neologism, which is attributed by modern scholars to various mystics and spiritual masters (of different Islamic periods), who were misunderstood in their times by their theological critics. The perverse colonial interest in promoting the ‘ghulat’ bogus-literature and in using the fake term for people, who were not called ‘ghulat’ in their times, is due first, to the Western academics’ distortive effort to generate the nonexistent ‘Sunni vs. Shia’ divide, and second, to the Western intellectuals’ vicious attempt to portray several Muslim mystics and spiritual grandmasters as ‘heretics’, whereas the difference between Islam and Christianity hinges exactly on this point, namely that there cannot be ‘heresy’ within Islam.

Ismail I was undoubtedly an extraordinary youngster who lived in strict mystical seclusion for five years (from 7 to 12), before appearing as almost the Islamic Messiah (Mahdi). It is necessary to straightforwardly clarify at this point that this term has a totally different meaning in spirituality and in religion (or theology). Meanwhile, the bright and exceptional apprentice was communicating with several members of the Safavid Order and the Qizilbash army though a sophisticated network of agents that was too difficult for others to identify, let alone put under control.

For Ismail I Safavi’s early stage of life (during those five years), there were certainly several parallels between his concealed existence and that of Muhammad ibn al-Askari, the Twelfth Imam (who was born in 869 and finally disappeared in his Major Occultation in 941). However, only theological misinterpretation of spiritual activities and narratives could lead to the wrong assumption about an eventual identification of Ismail I with Muhammad ibn al-Askari. Not one member of the Safavid Order was confused in this regard.  

After having lived his childhood in the forests of Gilan, he appeared to his brethren and followers at 12 (in 1499), he achieved an unexpected, great victory over the Shirvanshah ruler Farrukh Yassar two years later (1501), and he was crowned king at 14. Thus, he was catapulted to power in the most exulting terms, whereas his merry, exuberant and legendary entry to Tabriz was followed by endless feasts, imperial banquets, endless consumption of wine, and fabulous erotic delights.

He who says that wine (or alcoholic drinks in general) is prohibited in Islam is either a conniving Westerner (diplomat, statesman, agent or academic) strongly motivated by his vicious hatred of the true, historical Islam or an idiotic puppet of the Western powers, i.e. an ignorant and idiotic, fanatic and extremist, Islamist sheikh, who – as per the Satanic orders of his Western masters – believes that “Islam is the Quran and the Hadith”. Quite contrarily to this fallacy, the extensively misinterpreted and calamitously misunderstood sacred texts of Islam do not represent even 0.001% of the existing voluminous literature (in classical Islamic languages, namely Arabic, Farsi, various Turkic languages, and Urdu), which has to be first studied, then correctly perceived and plainly comprehended before one attempts to read the Quran and the Hadith. No holy text exists without exact conceptualization and comprehensive contextualization. 

The sacred texts of Islam (similarly with those of every other religion) cannot be accurately and succinctly understood per se except in the light of literary, spiritual, historical, theoretical and scientific texts of the Golden Era of Islam. The same occurs in Christianity; without the Patristic Literature (Patristics or Patrology, i.e. the texts written by the Fathers of the Christian Church) no one can possibly understand correctly the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the true, historical Christianity. The fallacy, as per which anyone today can understand the Gospels and the other sacred texts of Christianity without the Patristic Literature, is a deviate, Protestant – Evangelical distortion.

The aforementioned four Muslim emperors were all authors, poets and highly educated and cultured monarchs. Muhammad Shaybani composed his Bahr ul Huda, a theological, moral treatise, being widely known as a consummate polymath and an erudite scholar who highly valued books, manuscripts, epics and arts. Selim I wrote poetry in Farsi and Turkish under the penname Mahlas Selimi. Babur excelled in prose; he elaborated his own biography in Chagatai Turkic; the legendary Babur nameh (Book of Babur) is a major historical source for the History of Asia during the 15th and 16th c.

Ismail I Safavi composed spiritual poetry in Turkish and Farsi under the penname Khatai, i.e. ‘the one who makes mistakes’; in and by itself, this fact constitutes the complete confirmation of the aforementioned statement, namely that there cannot be religious evaluation of spiritual matters. Confessing one’s own mistakes -by selecting a name that makes this reality so explicitly known- is full indication of humanity; a perfect human accepts that he/she makes mistakes. By using this penname, Ismail I fully demonstrated that the term ‘ebn Allah’ (Son of God) attributed to him was not meant in a rationalistic theological way but in terms of spiritual symbolism, which is absolutely unfathomable to juristic, rationalistic and materialistic theologians.

In the existing manuscripts (preserved in Tashkent and Paris) of Ismail I Safavi’s poetry, there are ca. 260 qasidas and ghazals, quatrains, morabbas, mosaddas, and three mathnawis (different types of Islamic poetry); two of his mathnawis are quite lengthy, namely the Dah nameh and the Nasihat nameh. Bektashis in Anatolia and the Balkans, as well as the Shabaks in Mesopotamia, extensively recite Ismail I Safavi’s poetry in their spiritual sessions down to our days.

The interaction of those four great emperors was not trouble-free, peaceful and bloodless; at times, it even took a dimension of extreme monstrosity. During the period 1497-1504, Babur and Muhammad Shaybani were repeatedly engaged in battles against one another, particularly for the control of Samarqand. Muhammad Shaybani proved to be Babur’s real nemesis, but both of them captured, lost and recaptured Samarqand several times. As Babur had a small basis of support in Central Asia, he undertook a most adventurous campaign in 1504, and with few men he captured Kabul, making of the area his new base. He made an alliance with a distant relative, namely the ruler of Herat Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqarah; but Muhammad Shaybani chased him from there too.     

As Muhammad Shaybani was an ally of the Ottoman family and of Bayezid II, the father of Selim I, he concentrated his efforts in the East and Southeast, against the Hazara Turanian nomads in Khorasan (currently located in central Afghanistan) and the Kazakhs. In fact, his campaign against the Hazaras was a disaster, because first his cavalry had many casualties and second the war against the Hazaras produced a major reaction among the Qizilbash, because many members of the military order were of Hazara origin. Then, Ismail I Safavi, who had spent many years, invading and dismantling the Akkoyunlu state and its last remaining forces in Iran, Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, turned against Muhammad Shaybani. Then, in the Battle of Merv, the Qizilbash army, after devising a trick (i.e. a feigned retreat), ambushed and slaughtered an almost double Uzbek force.

The excesses after the Qizilbash victory were exorbitant; Muhammad Shaybani’s corpse was cut to pieces and parts were sent to be in public display in many cities; his skull ended up as a gold-plated cup for Ismail I. The cup was later sent to Babur himself, and the same occurred to one of Muhammad Shaybani’s wives, namely Khanzada Begum, who was Babur’s elder sister. These gestures started an era of cooperation between Ismail I, who had just risen to prominence, and Babur whose army and the Qizilbash fought side by side against the Uzbeks at the Battle of Ghazdewan (1512); however they were defeated there, and this event marked the end of Babur’s dream of recovering his father’s kingdom at Ferghana. For some time, Babur accepted Ismail I as his own emperor, while he was struggling to impose his rule in the mountains between Central Asia and the Indus River valley.

Opposing Ottoman allies at the Battle of Ghazdewan, Babur (today portrayed as a ‘Sunni’ by colonial Orientalists) became an ally of Ismail I Safavi (currently labeled as a ‘Shia’ by European and American historical forgers) and therefore an enemy of Selim I (nowadays described as a ‘Sunni’ by Western academics). The reality is totally different: Ismail I was a spiritual mystic, who became the ruler of a secular empire controlled by the army (Qizilbash) of his mystical order (Safavid), whereas Selim I was a palatial intrigue man controlled by evil theological circles and people who caused divisions, civil wars, internal strives and terrible bloodshed in the Eastern Roman Empire (of the Ottoman family). Then, in striking opposition with both, Babur was an intrepid, intelligent and opportunist, yet formidable, soldier entirely motivated by the dream to create an empire greater than his father’s and Timur’s.

The spread of Qizilbash force, movement, worldview, mentality, and lifestyle among Anatolian pastoralists was overwhelming in the 1500s. It triggered its own dynamics, which was not controlled anymore by the Safavid Order and the newly established Safavid Empire. The mystical order of Şahkulu was the perfect continuation of many long centuries of Anatolian Islamic spirituality and mysticism; it was energized by the introduction of the Qizilbash concept (an army for a mystical order that would establish a secular universal empire).

Ismail I Safavi in an incident from his campaign against Shirvan; he is charging down a mountain in pursuit of the King of Shirvan; miniature from the manuscript Shahnama-i-Ismail (Tabriz style), ca. 1540 (MS Add. 7784, f.46v. British Museum, London); his distinctive turban has twelve folds representing the twelve Imams of whom Ali ibn Abi Taleb was the first.

The Aq Qoyunlu tribal khanate (1378-1503) around 1475, i.e. 25-30 years before it was defeated and incorporated with the Safavid Empire

Miniature from a 17th c. manuscript with mystical representation of Sheikh Safi ad-din Ardabili (1252-1334) blessing the young Shah Ismail I; gouache heightened with gold on paper. The historic mystic is depicted at the top of a minbar in the mosque holding a Qur’an and blessing Shah Isma’il (identified in small brown script) who stands on a lower step of the same minbar, surrounded by courtiers and elders.

Ismail I Safavi offers an audience to the Qizilbash, after they have defeated his opponent Shirvanshah Farrukh in 1500; miniature from Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. The painting was created by Muin Musawwir, a famous artist who also illustrated six editions of the Shahnameh.

Ismail I Safavi and his soldiers cross Kura River in the Caucasus region

Ismail I Safavi defeats Sultan Murad, the last ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, near Hamadan in 1503.

Miniature from a manuscript of Bijan’s Tarikh-i Jahangusha-yi Khaqan Sahibqiran (A History of Shah Ismail I), which was written in Isfahan in the late 1680s. It was painted by or in the style of Mu’in Musavvir; gouache heightened with gold on paper. Ismail and his courtiers are depicted on horseback while hunting.

The fight of Ismail I Safavi against the Dulkadiroğulları in Southeastern Anatolia

Ismail I Safavi watches his soldiers defeat the Musha’sha (المشعشعية) messianic leader Sultan Fayyad in Khuzestan; from the miniature of a manuscript of the late 1680s.

Representation of the Battle of Merv between Shah Ismail and Shaybani Khan; fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan

Ismail I Safavi’s envoy Ganbar Agha appears before the last Aq Qoyunlu ruler Sultan Murad; miniature from a manuscript of the 1670s

Representation of the Battle of Chaldiran (1514); fresco in the Chehel Sotun Palace in Isfahan

The helmet of Ismail I Safavi

The Şahkulu Spiritual Movement

However, the Anatolian mystical order was not stricto sensu created by the Safavid Qizilbash. Many Western Orientalists totally misinterpret the role, the scope, the targets and the motivations of the founder and grandmaster of the eponymous order; Şahkulu (also known as Shah Qoli Baba or Shah Kulu or Shah Quli or Karabıyıkoğlu, i.e. the son of the man with black moustache) was certainly not a Safavid puppet who attempted to subvert or infiltrate the Ottoman state; this misinterpretation is absurd. Şahkulu was an Anatolian original.

In this regard, colonial academics totally distort everything, even the real meaning of Şahkulu’s name! It is true that in Turkish, this word means ‘the servant of the Shah’; however, this is not meant in a theological and rationalist manner, but with a purely spiritual connotation. Şahkulu was indeed the ‘servant’ of the ‘Shah’, but according to the terminology of an Islamic mystical order, ‘Shah’ is God. In fact, even worse lies and incredible distortions are published by Western colonial historians as regards the bloodshed, the persecution and the oppression of the Anatolian Qizilbash by the usurper of the Ottoman throne Selim I. The reason for these lies is evident: on the misrepresentation of the historical events that took place in Anatolia during the dramatic period 1510-1512 hinge both, the entire falsification of the Ottoman History and the fallacious theory that “the Ottomans were Sunni and the Safavid Iranians were Shia”. In addition, Western historians tried systematically to obscure the fact that the Ottoman ruling class followed Maturidi theology, whereas the uncontrolled but intentionally tolerated majority of the madrasas and the imams were impacted by Ash’ari concepts.

As a matter of fact, the so-called Şahkulu İsyanı (rebellion), which was not an uprising but a messianic fervor, and the subsequent events, namely the battle of Chaldiran (1514) between Selim I and Ismail I, bear witness to the gradual rise of a pseudo-Islamic theological school at Istanbul (under the Hanafi madhhab coverage). Those indoctrinated and ignorant sheikhs progressively destroyed the Ottoman Empire with their absurd inhumanity and obdurate idiocy, which invariably took the form of nonsensical argumentation, strict anachronism, theological rigidity, verbal rationalism, worldly materialism, and nonsensical involvement in the governance of the expanding empire. Their worst and most catastrophic trait however was their explicit revilement and utmost hatred of Islamic spirituality (Batin/ باطن; Batiniyya/ باطنية; these terms literally means ‘inner’ and ‘esotericism’, but they have nothing to do with Western esotericism/mysticism).

These Istanbulite theological circles were not powerful at the time, but gradually, during the 16th c., they managed to prevail within the Ottoman court; their achievement was the destruction of Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf’s Islamic Observatory of Istanbul in 1580 – an event that marks the irrevocable death of the Islamic Civilization. In 1510-1512, the same theological circles plunged Anatolia in terrible bloodshed; this was due to their determination to oppose the prevalence of Şahkulu Qizilbash spirituality. That’s why these pseudo-Muslim theological circles always represented the ‘enfant gâté’ of Western academics: they constituted indeed the perfect guarantee for the destruction and the disappearance of Islam, because they could be (and they were) easily induced by Western colonial agents to trigger interminable divisions and fratricidal wars among the Muslims.

Selim I was not predestined to become a sultan, as he was the fourth among the eight sons of Bayezid II. Şehzade Abdullah was the first among Bayezid II’s eight sons, but he died young in 1483; Şehzade Şehinşah was the Ottoman sultan’s fifth son and he was very well educated and militarily strong, but he never gained the support of the Ottoman bureaucracy, administration and theological nomenklatura. Although governor of big cities and loved by the people of Karaman, he died in 1511 for unknown reasons, possibly poisoned by some vicious Ottoman theologians. Born in 1465, Ahmet (known as Şehzade Ahmet; 1465-1513) was the second son of Bayezid II; born in 1467, Korkut (known as Şehzade Korkut; 1467-1513) was the third son of Bayezid II. Şehzade Mahmud (1475-1507), the younger brother of Şehzade Ahmet, died in 1507 for undefined reasons. Seventh son of Bayezid II was Şehzade Alemşah (1477-1502) who also died in 1502 or 1503 for unspecified reasons.

Compared to Şehzade Ahmet and to Şehzade Korkut, Selim I (born in 1470) was a far cry and an unimportant prince, even more so since Bayezid II’s favorite candidate to his succession was Ahmet. However, the Ottoman court had always been a matter of Istanbulite palatial intrigues, intra-family fights, and endless fratricides, pretty much like those occurred during the Eastern Roman times in God-damned Constantinople. Bayezid II (1447-1512; his reign started in 1481) had to fight to secure his succession, because Cem Sultan (1459-1495), his younger brother, laid claim to the throne. Selim I was an insubordinate, rebellious, idiotic and absolutely unworthy son, who was manipulated by the evil Istanbulite theologians as to how to plot, cheat and connive against his own father. This is what the pseudo-Islamic madhhab (jurisprudential schools) and theological schools were reduced to at those days – and ever since down to our days.

Selim I rebelled against his father not for any other reason, but because the vicious theological circles of Istanbul, which are nowadays mistakenly called ‘Sunni’, wanted to use him against the spread and the rise of the Şahkulu Anatolian spirituality. The succession to the throne of Bayezid II was only the pretext. In fact, Ahmet (Şehzade Ahmet) did not only have the right of primogeniture, but also his father’s consent and favor; that’s why the disloyal son and puppet of Istanbul’s evil theologians Selim I had to ceaselessly plot against his father.

In addition, there was a confusing and disastrous tradition in the Ottoman family, as per which among the dying sultan’s sons, whoever reached the dead monarch’s bed first would (or could eventually) become his father’s successor. A clear sign of the chaotic situation that prevailed in the Istanbulite palace of the disorderly, lawless and faithless family was the disastrous fact that, in order to make sure that the eventually insubordinate crown princes and the other princes would not fuel a rebellion against the sultan, the Ottoman rulers used to send their sons to faraway provinces in order to serve there as local governors – which in turn reduced their chances to successfully plot. This meant that distance mattered greatly at those days!

Ahmet was the governor of Amasya in Northern Cappadocia (675 km from Istanbul), Korkut was the governor of Antalya (then called Teke, in Pamphylia) in the southern coast (640 km from the capital), and Selim was the governor of Trabzon (1060 km from his father’s palace). In that ridiculous situation, everyone was preparing for the forthcoming confrontation; it was therefore normal that Ahmet rejected his father’s appointment of Suleyman (son of Selim I, who became later known as Suleyman the Magnificent) as governor of Bolu, because of the small distance that separated the tiny and insignificant city from the Ottoman capital (only 260 km). Suleyman was then sent to the Ottoman Crimea (Kefe or Kaffa or Caffa; today’s Feodosia).

Incessantly plotting, Selim asked his father to appoint him as governor in a sanjak in Rumeli (: Balkans). Bayezid II rejected this bizarre demand because the Ottoman sanjaks in the European territory of the empire were smaller, more recently acquired, and unfit for princes. This fact shows that Anatolia was always the central and most important part of the Ottoman state, as it was of the Eastern Roman Empire in earlier periods.

Involving foreigners in acts against his father’s decisions and affairs, Selim asked the help of the Tatar Khan of Crimea and he was finally appointed as governor of the pashalik of Belgrade (then named in Turkish as ‘Semendire Sancağı’, i.e. Sanjak of Smederevo), which is located at a distance of 900 km from Istanbul. However, instead of staying at the headquarters of his administrative province, the disloyal, immoral and faithless Selim approached Istanbul, and then Bayezid II had to fight against him and defeat him in August 1511. Selim escaped to his Tatar friends in Crimea, but at the same time, the Şahkulu spiritual movement and the ensuing messianic fervor took disproportionate eschatological dimensions in Anatolia, and the sultan tasked Ahmed to impose order and discipline through the Ottoman Empire’s eastern provinces.

As a matter of fact, there was never a Şahkulu rebellion, contrarily to what most of the historians claim nowadays. There was instead a passionate messianic fervor and the Ottoman attempt to suppress the spiritual movement was met with resistance. This situation cannot be termed as ‘rebellion’, because there was no intention for rebellion among the members and the followers of the Şahkulu mystical order. They did not want to overthrow any authority or to impose themselves as the rulers. As every spiritual movement brings forth liberation and salvation, a large number of people across Anatolia viewed in the Şahkulu movement and in their Qizilbash army the promise and the perspective of a better life free from the Ottoman family’s incompetence and incessant butchery and bloodletting; but this was not tantamount to public disobedience or disorder.

As spirituality enables the faithful to understand the real purpose of this life and of the Hereafter, the Şahkulu members, followers and army knew quite well that the Ottoman princes had absolutely no legitimacy to possess the wealth they garnered and to hold the positions they had. In terms of spirituality, states do not exist or are not needed; these evil social structures have absolutely no value and no authority for any spiritual mystic and any spiritually-awakened person.

Şahkulu Qizilbash army raids on cities, on Ottoman treasures, on imperial caravans, and on regional administration centers started therefore becoming very frequent around 1510. It is essential for both, experienced historians and erudite readership, not to evaluate those developments with today’s average Western mentality and approach; there was nothing illegal in those acts. They were absolutely just, moral and lawful; even more importantly, they were viewed as such by the outright majority of the Anatolian populations. In any case, ‘lawful’ is only the ‘just’ and the ‘moral’, in striking contrast to the modern Western societies and their lawless laws, criminal nature, and evil states that are all doomed to perish.

The historical reality was as simple as that: the Qizilbash soldiers were not thieves; quite contrarily, the Ottoman princes, administrators and theologians were crooks. Şehzade Korkut’s caravan was attacked once, whereas the beylerbey of Anatolia (Anadolu) was defeated, when he tried to engage the Şahkulu forces in battle. Then, Bayezid II realized that his empire was about to crumble in Anatolia; he therefore sent Şehzade Ahmet (1511) and the Grand Vizier Hadım (: eunuch) Ali Pasha in order to protect his, his family’s, and his gang’s lawless interests. I severely criticize the Ottoman sultan because he was ruling his realm as a disgrace; when a ruler is not just, moral and lawful, it is the plain right and duty of every person to take justice in his hands.

The dispatch of Şehzade Ahmet happened at the same time, when Bayezid II was fighting against his lawless, faithless and rebel son Selim; this was a development Şehzade Ahmet had to keep a close eye on. During the battle against the Şahkulu forces (near Kütahya), Şehzade Ahmet tried therefore to close a personal deal and an alliance with Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu himself; in other words, he attempted to gain his support, as well as that of his movement and of the Qizilbash army for the succession to the Ottoman throne. This would be an excellent solution for all, namely the local populations, the Anatolian Qizilbash, the messianic mystic, and the heir of the Ottoman throne. 

Şehzade Ahmet’s attempt to ascend to power with the support of the Şahkulu movement, if it brought forth great results, would make of the Ottoman Sultanate {then still called ‘(Eastern) Roman Empire’} a perfect copy of the Safavid Empire: a Turanian Empire ruled by a spiritual order. This would trigger exceptionally positive and truly propitious changes across the Islamic world, entirely revivifying Islamic spirituality and terminating the catastrophic theological indoctrination, which finally prevailed and gradually destroyed the Islamic World totally.

Of course, Şehzade Ahmet was not a mystic and he acted only out of his personal interest. Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu tried then to gain him to his own cause; however, the affair was very risky, and unfortunately the news leaked. Then, Şehzade Ahmet had to persuade Hadım Ali Pasha that the scope of the negotiations was other, ask him to continue the battle against the Qizilbash army, and run to major Anatolian cities to gain wider regional support for his ascension to the Ottoman throne. The correct place for this was Konya, the leading center of Anatolian spirituality.

The forces of Hadım Ali Pasha pursued the Şahkulu Qizilbash army and after several minor engagements, in the battle of Çubukova (Eastern Cappadocia), both Şahkulu Karabıyıkoğlu and Hadım Ali Pasha were killed (July 1511). However, the Qizilbash force was not dispersed and remained actively powerful. Having prevailed over his rebellious son Selim in August 1511, the embattled Bayezid II had to deal with the chaotic situation of his empire in Anatolia. As Şehzade Ahmet controlled Konya and disobeyed his father’s order to return to his position, Bayezid II believed that the true reason for the spread of the Şahkulu movement was Ismail I; this was a very wrong conclusion, because the Anatolian Qizilbash force was totally independent from the Safavid state. Actually, in the ensuing exchange of royal correspondence, Ismail I totally rejected any involvement in the Şahkulu events in Anatolia; he even went on to explicitly condemn the Anatolian Qizilbash attitude and practices.

Meanwhile, Şehzade Ahmet attempted to advance to Istanbul and dethrone his father, while Selim was in Crimea; however, he failed to advance, as he was blocked by the imperial guard before Bursa. At the same time, Selim gathered a Tatar force and, relying on the Istanbulite theologians’ and bureaucrats’ timely messages and direct support, returned to Istanbul in April 1512 and dethroned his father; no less than a month later (26 May 1512) Bayezid II died dishonored in shameful exile (in Dimetoka, today’s Didymoteicho/Διδυμότειχο on the Turkish-Greek border).

The confrontation between Şehzade Ahmet, who had gathered Qizilbash support in the meantime, and Selim I took place in April 1513 near Bursa, and after an initially indecisive clash, Şehzade Ahmet was defeated and killed. Although Şehzade Korkut had accepted his younger brother’s reign in 1512, Selim I had him killed too, in 1513. An extraordinary purgatory took then place against all the remaining nephews of Selim I, so that the bloody reign of the Ottoman butcher may not be endangered in any way; this would also concern particularly Şehzade Murad, the son of Şehzade Ahmet, who was viewed by the outright majority of the Anatolian population as the rightful heir to the Ottoman throne. However, Şehzade Murad was clever enough to escape to Eastern Anatolia, which was totally out of Ottoman control, communicate with Ismail I, get his support, and coordinate with other Turkmen and Qizilbash forces in order to oppose and eventually overthrow Selim I.

The terrain of the Şahkulu movement

Full of hatred, rancor and hysteria, Selim I carried out an unprecedented ‘white terror campaign’, killing dozens of thousands of civilians under the fake pretext of supporting the Qizilbash army; numbers vary in several historical sources, but an estimate of 50000 people would not be far from truth. This extraordinary bloodshed took place in only one third of today’s Turkey’s territory, namely Western Anatolia. Subsequently, a great number of captives were sent to Rumeli (European provinces of the Ottoman state) and finally settled in Mora Eyalet (ایالت موره; Eyalet-i Mora, today’s Peloponnese in southern Greece).

After the previous description, it becomes clear why, in today’s absurd, disastrous, anti-Turkish and pseudo-Islamic regime of Turkey, one can find journalists who still remember the illustrious Şahkulu movement, having however shaped a disastrously mistaken opinion about it. The so-called ‘political islam’ was indeed fabricated by the French, English and American Orientalists in order to entirely replace the traditional knowledge of the Muslims about the true historical Islam; for this project, an entirely fake History of the Islamic World was scrupulously written, taught and propagated by thousands of Western Orientalist forgers over the last 200 years.

The Islamic forgery of the Western academics did indeed match the ideological forgery that is known as ‘political islam’: they proved to be the two sides of the same coin. The scope of Western Islamology (or ‘Islamic Studies’) was exactly to come up with narratives, which would offer venues to all the Islamists and to the stupid Muslim followers of ‘political islam’ to misperceive the Şahkulu movement (and generally, the entire History of the Islamic World) and to thus shape a totally distorted idea about this topic (and about thousands of other topics). This was done in order to engulf all the Muslims in a totally false perception of the History of the Islamic World, and in an absolutely compact ignorance of their past and heritage.

The fallacious contextualization of the history of the Şahkulu movement had therefore started long before the English secret services selected the ignorant street seller Erdogan for the position to which they raised him, duly fooling the Turkish military, academics, politicians, and businessmen. As he functioned as the prefab puppet of the worst enemies of the Muslims, a false reading of the History of Islam spread throughout Turkey (as it had already been the case in all the other Muslim countries which, contrarily to Turkey, were colonized). As a matter of fact, nowadays all the worthless theologians and disreputable sheikhs of Diyanet (Turkey’s so-called ‘Directorate of Religious Affairs’) are the equivalent of the uneducated, idiotic and evil theologians of the times of Selim I.

A typical example of historical distortion concerning the Şahkulu movement in today’s Turkey is offered by the shameless villain and crook Murat Çolak who published a ridiculous article in the local newspaper of Kahramanmaraş (formerly Germanikeia) ‘Maraş Gündem’ on the 16th July 2018 under the nonsensical title “FETÖ’nun Tarihsel Kökleri Şahkulu İsyanı ve 15 Temmuz” (The historical roots of FETO organization, the Şahkulu Rebellion, and July 15), which is an allusion to the failed coup of the 15th July 2016. Useless to add that there is no connection at all between the Şahkulu movement (not rebellion) and Fethullah Gülen, the notorious leader of the said organization; https://www.marasgundem.com.tr/makale/fetonun-tarihsel-kokleri-sahkulu-isyani-ve-15-temmuz-16277

The war between the Ottoman state and the Safavid Empire had become inevitable, because the unprecedented killings and the Istanbulite anti-Anatolian malignancy caused an even greater reaction among all the populations of Anatolia, Turanian or not. Selim I and Ismail I exchanged several insulting letters prior to the historic Battle of Chaldiran (August 1514) and some of them have been preserved down to our times. They only bear witness to their reciprocal rejection, without however using the colonially-imposed (starting with the 19th c.) false terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’. About: 

Rıza Yıldırım, Turkomans between two empires: the origins of the Qızılbash identity in Anatolia (1447-1514).

Click to access 52925088.pdf

Yasin Arslantaş, Depicting the other: Qizilbash image in the 16th century Ottoman historiography

Click to access 0006379.pdf

Yusuf Küçükdağ, Measures Taken by the Ottoman State against Shah İsmail’s Attempts to Convert Anatolia to Shia

University of Gaziantep Journal of Social Sciences 7(1):1-17 (2008)

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/223506

https://www fas nus edu sg/hist/eia/documents_archive/selim.php

Click to access 02selimismail.pdf

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ottoman-persian-relations-i-under-sultan-selim-i-and-shah-esmail-i

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/calderan-battle

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/esmail-i-safawi

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-khayrids-dynasty

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/babor-zahir-al-din

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Shaybani

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Таварих-и_гузида-йи_нусрат-наме

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaybanids

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbek_Khanate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanate_of_Bukhara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selim_I

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._Selim

https://www.academia.edu/79310004/Masters_of_the_Pen_The_Divans_of_Selimi_and_Muhibbi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babur

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babür

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/بابر

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/ظهير_الدين_بابر

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Shaikh_Mirza_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Sa%27id_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miran_Shah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal-Mongol_genealogy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanzada_Begum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ghazdewan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_I

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._İsmail

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/شاه_اسماعیل_یکم

Darius the Great’s Suez Inscriptions: Birth Certificate of the Silk Roads

https://silkroadtexts.wordpress.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ghazdewan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khanzada_Begum

Click to access anatm_1297-8094_1997_num_7_1_946.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eahkulu_rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eahkulu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_Islamic_theology#Sh%C4%AB%CA%BFa_schools_of_theology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batin_(Islam)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batiniyya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_interpretation_of_the_Quran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_cosmology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism

https://ottoman.ahya.net/node/100

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/II._Bayezid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayezid_II

https://www.konyapedia.com/makale/3308/sehzade-abdullah-abdullah-bin-bayezit-ii

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_%C5%9Eehin%C5%9Fah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Ahmet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Korkut

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Korkut

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Mahmud_(II._Bayezid%27in_o%C4%9Flu)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople_Observatory_of_Taqi_ad-Din

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chaldiran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eehzade_Murad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padishah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_(title)#Ottoman_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_the_Conqueror#Conquest_of_Constantinople

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoman_Empire#Names

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_al-Mu%27minin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custodian_of_the_Two_Holy_Mosques

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqi_ad-Din_Muhammad_ibn_Ma%27ruf

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/historiography-vi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Khwandamir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habib_al-Siyar

https://www.sid.ir/en/Journal/ViewPaper.aspx?ID=709213

Click to access jaas072001.pdf

https://journals.openedition.org/asiecentrale/2866

https://journals.openedition.org/asiecentrale/499?lang=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatefi

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/golat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghulat

Comparative evaluation

An objective assessment of the four Turanian rulers whose Iranian education and culture was evident may lead us to devastating conclusions. Finding themselves in different environments, they failed to go beyond the limits of their ‘worlds’. Still, this was imperative for the survival of their respective realms, taking into account what was happening in the Western confines of Asia, namely the pseudo-continent of Europe, which is Asia’s most worthless, most troublesome, and most barbarian peninsula. Consequently, we have to consider them as the initial reason for the collapse of their states, despite the fact that these empires lasted long and fell after 350-400 years. The sole exception is certainly Babur; but he also failed to effectively convey to his offspring and successors the mindset, the predisposition, the attitude, and the ensuing behavior which undeniably helped him transform his Central Asiatic failure into an Indian triumph.

The really embarrassing part of the conclusion is the ascertainment that all four rulers were very civilized, highly cultured, and impressively educated; it goes without saying that I use these terms with the connotation they had at the time, and not the meaning that they have in our fallen, corrupt and putrefied world. They all failed to assess the serious problems that existed in the Islamic World during their lifetime and they proved to be unable to detect the lethal threats that were mounted against their empires and more generally the entire Muslim World. Again, the only exception is Babur, because the time between his conquest of the Sultanate of Delhi and his death is truly brief.

With the exception of Ismail I Safavi (1501-1524), all the rest experienced a rather brief period of reign. Muhammad Shaybani ruled for 10 years (1500-1510); Selim I reigned for only 8 years (1512-1520). And Babur was the sovereign of an empire only for 4.5 years (April 1526-1530). One can truly be astounded with their narrow horizons, naïve approaches to governance, profane understanding of reign, and simplicity in worldview.

Muhammad Shaybani was the living intersection of all things Iranian and Turanian; from his paternal side, he belonged to the lineage of Shayban (also written as Shiban) who was the fifth son of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan; Jochi was the ancestor of all rulers of the Golden Horde. This means that Muhammad Shaybani was indeed associated and concerned, one way or another, with all the states that came out of the split of the Ulus Jochi (as the Great Empire of the Golden Horde was named at the time), namely the Kazan khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Qassim Khanate, the Astrakhan khanate and the Nogais.

Muhammad Shaybani was almost 30 years old at the time of the renowned Ugra standoff (1480), when the emperor of the ailing Great Horde failed to impose his dictates on the formerly tributary statelet of Muscovy; Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde and Ivan III of Muscovy, facing one another from the opposite banks of Ugra River, hesitated to cross the river and start fighting, This rather bizarre event is generally considered as the beginning of Muscovy’s independence from the Golden Horde.  

From his maternal side, Muhammad Shaybani was the cousin of Janibek’s son Kasym Khan (reign: 1511-1521), the great Kazakh ruler, who expanded his khanate at the detriment of the Bukhara Khanate. Furthermore, according to the historical treatise “Tavarikh-i guzida-yi nusrat-namah” (Chagatai: تواریخ گزیده نصرت‌نامه ; Таварих-и гузида-йи нусрат-наме), which was elaborated by Alla Murad Annaboyoglu in the early 16th c. (ed. V. P. Yudin/В. П. Юдин, Alma Ata 1969), Munk Timur, i.e. Muhammad Shaybani’s great-great-great-great grandfather, was married to the daughter of a Turanian descendant of Ismail Samani (849-907; reigned after 892), the founder and first ruler of the Samanid dynasty of Eastern Iran, one of the states that seceded from the Abbasid Caliphate while also recognizing the caliph as the head of all Muslims.   

In spite of the aforementioned, briefly presented, background, Muhammad Shaybani remained always a sectarian and tribal ruler. Despite the fact that he was unbiased in his approach to people, although he did not discriminate among Iranians and Turanians (therefore viewing them as one nation), and in spite of the fact that he was truly tolerant in his stance towards Muslim mystics, theologians, members of various tariqas, and followers of different madhhab, he clearly proved to be a treacherous subordinate (to Sultan Ahmed Mirza, a Timurid), a cruel oppressor of the Kazakhs, a disastrous ally to khanate of Moghulistan, a distant and useless friend to Bayezid II, and a consummate plunderer. His poor judgment relied on tribal lineage, family affairs, and petty calculations; this resulted in vindictive deeds, sheer opportunism, and day-to-day governance. He would not be a match for any strong strategist who intended to create an empire. Hating all the Timurids, he defeated Babur several times, but he did not prevent him from establishing one of the world’s greatest empires of all times.

Muhammad Shaybani’s silly head had a well-deserved end; the skull served as a lovely drinking goblet in the hands of Ismail I Safavi. One can even assume that, although it was graciously bejeweled, the goblet was thrown to the ground many times, during those fabulous feasts and banquets of Tabriz – just for fun!

Among these four monarchs, Ismail I Safavi was certainly the best prepared to reign; but he was still acting as a semi-nomad pleased with what was available in nature around him. During his early years in the throne of Tabriz, he used to spend time, camping in the mountains and hunting for several months; there was no urgency to conquer lands and territories. The expansion of his empire was slow and it took the form of a joyful endeavor instead of a serious state affair, scrupulous programming or a major expansion stratagem. There were certainly many wars, notably against the Shirvan kingdom (in part of today’s Azerbaijan), the Kartli and Kakheti kingdoms of Georgia that became vassal states, and the Aq-Qoyunlu nomadic sultanate that was entirely eclipsed, but there was no methodical undertaking in this regard. Not a care in the world!

Within few years, the empire of Ismail I Safavi replaced the Aq-Qoyunlu tribal confederacy, but there were no second thoughts, no back thoughts, and no serious observations, let alone monitoring, of developments, state affairs, and relations among neighboring states. To offer an example, not one Iranian magistrate in the court of Ismail I Safavi took note that two Kakheti Georgian embassies had been dispatched by Alexander I to Ivan III of Muscovy (in 1483 and 1491) as soon as the tiny statelet stopped paying tribute to the Golden Horde.

Ismail I Safavi and his spiritual brethren, namely the members of the most ancient and most venerable Safavid Order and the combatants of the Qizilbash contingent, acted out of free will and spiritual illumination. They did not need to even name their empire; at the beginning; the structures of state were rudimentary, and there was no bureaucracy at all. Ismail I Safavid was indeed closer to Cyrus the Great than Shapur I was. Living the epic moments superbly narrated by Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and others, performing the spiritual exercises of Saif ad-Din Ardabili, and staying in cities only during the cold winter months of the Iranian plateau, they gave the impression that wars consisted merely in short break times of a peaceful eternity that they enjoyed. Fearless to die in battle, knowledgeable about the Hereafter, and devoted in their vow, they were less envious, possessive and worldly than most of the soldiers of their time. There was no need for a rational plan for war, because this is genuinely evil; there was impulse for war instead – which is genuinely human.

This situation may perhaps appear as confusing and unpromising to many people, but it is not. Of course, it is normal for a mystical fighter to believe that due to the synergy between his soul and body, he is indomitable and invincible; this conviction is basically correct and true. However, it takes a very high degree of moral discipline and of self-restraint for the spiritual potency and the inherent impulse of the fighter to be exacted and exerted. Quite unfortunately, Ismail I Safavi’s spiritual master and mentor, Hossein Beg Laleh Shamlu, tolerated a great degree of self-gratification, self-complacency, and even exuberance; he was lenient with the rising emperor, his brethren, and his guards. This did not bode well for the ruler, his army, and his empire. Compromised moral is tantamount to weakened spirituality and emollient attitude conditions human integrity.

This explains perfectly well why, after his defeat in Chaldiran (1514), Ismail I Safavi collapsed and lived the rest of his life ashamed, in sadness, despair, lamentation and uncontrollable alcoholism; in reality, there was nothing to be sad for. During the battle, the Iranians were about to mark a thunderous victory, being provenly better trained to fight; the Ottomans won only because they started using gunpowder artillery that the Iranians did not have. Even worse, the Ottoman army was about to be cut to two pieces, because the Janissaries did not accept to fight against and kill their Muslim brethren. Actually, the Ottoman soldiers who used the cannons that they had transported with greatly difficulty also murdered Ottoman Janissaries. However, a mystical fighter with compromised moral and self-indulgent attitude certainly collapses after a defeat; quite contrarily, a mystic strongly experienced in ascetic self-denial never feels sorrow, frustration and depression – ever after an extreme adversity.   

Having to fight against monstrous criminals, rancorous establishments, bloodthirsty rulers, rancorous enemies, inhumanely cruel soldiers, professional serial killers, and greedy armies that sailed off to intentionally perpetrate genocide in Mexico and to circumvent Africa by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, the Safavid elite was rather living in a dream that turned out to become a nightmare for Iran and for the almost the entire world. Iran had always been a major empire with long maritime tradition; Achaemenid Iran is credited with the merge of several earlier regional trade routes that had existed for millennia; this was due to the unmatched, royal administrative genius of Darius I the Great (522-486 BCE).

Darius the Great’s contribution to the emergence of the east-west trade network was twofold: a) the establishment of the Royal Iranian Road and b) the circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula and the direct maritime connection of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with the Persian Gulf. Oman was always an Iranian satrapy; and during the Sassanid times, Iran invaded also Yemen, which was a focal land for the world trade between East and West. However, this background was entirely lost and the Safavid elite did not care at all about the maritime presence and strength of their empire despite the fact that in the beginning of the 16th c., Iranians still controlled an important part of the commerce between East and West, having always been an important constituent of the Islamic times’ navigation and trade. But for all the people around Ismail I Safavi, treasures were to be mainly collected from lands conquered and cities pillaged.

For the case of Ismail I Safavi, one is however tempted to think that the historical heritage itself rather than the various individuals and the ruling elite resurrected the Iranian Empire under the Safavid dynasty. The spiritual exercises of the Safavid Order, their ruminations, their cordial illuminations, and their angelic invocations seem to have electrified the Soul of Iran as incantated by Ferdowsi; but their impious self-indulgence confused the serenity of their souls and made it sure that their pledge was predestined to doom.  

Selim I shared the same ideas as Ismail I Safavi and Muhammad Shaybani about a state’s chances to acquire wealth; this was not due to cultural tradition (as in Iran) or to geomorphological impact (as in Central Asia). The state that Selim I -through plots, family disloyalty, treason, and shameful banditry- managed to put under control stretched from Central Anatolia to Belgrade; this had been the usual, typical domain of the Constantinopolitan βασιλείς (basileis; emperors) from the 7th to the 12th c. The official name of the state was invariably ‘Eastern Roman Empire’, and this was the will of all the successors of Mehmet II. But quite unfortunately, the ill-fated Ottoman Sultanate was controlled by a criminal, pseudo-Muslim family, which was manipulated by idiotic theologians, sectarian sheikhs, and a bogus-Islamic authority, the sheikh-ul-Islam (also written as Shaykh al-Islam). The sultans wanted, quite absurdly, to represent the Eastern Roman imperial tradition, while remaining the petty warriors (غازى; ghazi), who relied on worthless and unnecessary razzias (غزية), i.e. military expeditions of greedy barbarians; this meant that they were a 14th c. state in a 16th c. world; this situation could not possibly have a successful exit.

The immediate descendants of Mehmet II continued ruling their realm in a most ineffective manner that included very contradictory elements, practices, concepts and procedures, which produced endless tensions. On one side, the devshirme (دوشیرمه; devshirme; lit. ‘collecting’), i.e. child levy, and the janissary infantry elite (یڭیچری; yeniçeri) gave the Ottoman sultan (and, after 1453, emperor) the real tools to create a formidable empire similar to that of Justinian I. But on the other side, the obscure, nefarious and ominous presence of a body of execrable theologians and their increasing, onerous and catastrophic impact on the sultan gradually turned the Ottoman sultanate to a sort of Papo-Caesarist realm, whereas for the Eastern Roman Empire (of which the Ottomans wanted to make their state the living continuity) the Caesaropapist model of rule had to be the sole, paramount and permanent concept of imperial order.

The existing anachronistic elements, the tensions ensued from the contradictory dynamics, the ruinous hatred unleashed by the blind, dogmatic and cruel sheikhs and sheikh-ul-islams, and the vindictive stance of many sultans (as well as of other members of the Ottoman family) triggered unprecedented reactions. In their outright majority, the populations, either Christian or Muslim, reviled the cursed state of the Ottoman family (دولت عليه عثمانیه; Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye), whereas the wretched family in a vicious and most anti-Islamic manner disrespected the humans that God had entrusted to them. This situation led to real worsening of the living conditions, sheer deterioration of the state structures, and grave decrease of government effectiveness.

The Ottoman Sultanate never managed to acquire a well-structured administration; that’s why it was never a strong empire that could methodically elaborate a program of expansion or Reconquista. Islamic spirituality was besmirched, attacked and later prohibited; the worthless Ottoman bureaucracy was a burden; the wars declared against neighboring empires were due to sectarian or arbitrary motives; and the only sound element in the empire was the janissary elite.

A mere comparison of the Roman and the Ottoman possessions in Africa helps everyone realize how absurd, precarious and inconsequential the rule of the Ottoman sultans was. On the Black Continent, the Ottomans controlled an area more sizeable than the largest Roman dominions there. The Romans never managed to advance successfully south of Egypt and to conquer the Cushitic (i.e. Ancient Ethiopian) Kingdom of Meroe in today’s Sudan; but they controlled the African North up to the coasts of today’s Morocco.

The Ottomans invaded Egypt (1516-1517) to disband the Mamluk state, and then they progressively extended their rule over the entire coast of North Africa, thus including Algiers (1518), Benghazi (1521), Tripoli (1551) and Tunis (1574) in their domain; the Ottomans were invited and acclaimed by the indigenous populations that were mostly Muslim (only according to Western colonial propaganda, the Ottomans ‘colonized’ North Africa), and until the time these lands were incorporated into the Caliphate, the Ottoman Emperor was acknowledged as the caliph – which already made of these lands real dependencies of the Constantinopolitan Muslim ruler. Under Suleiman the Magnificent (1554) and Murat III (1576), two Ottoman military expeditions were undertaken in Morocco, ending with the capture of Fez.

In Eastern Africa, the Ottomans sent detachments and corsairs to defend the Somalis against the Portuguese (in the 1520s-1540s), having excellent relations with all the Somali sultanates, notably Adal and the Ajuuraan Empire. In fact, by recognizing the caliph at Constantinople and by mentioning his name first in the Friday prayer, all Muslim African sultanates and emirates recognized the Ottoman Caliphate, thus becoming effectively mere dependencies of the Caliphate. That’s why there was no real need for an Ottoman invasion of the Western Africa, Sahara (the Songhai, Mali, Hausa-Zaria, Kanem-Bornu, Wadai, Funj, Darfur, and other realms), and Eastern Africa. Located south of the Mısır eyaleti (as the province of Egypt was named in Ottoman Turkish), the Habeş eyaleti (i.e. the province of Abyssinia) comprised the coastal lands of today’s Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, and parts of today’s Somalia and Ethiopia). The Adal Somali sultanate shared therefore borders with the Ottoman Empire.

But exactly because of the highly de-centralized condition of the Muslim African world, it was totally impossible for them to establish a major, functional force ready to repel colonial attacks. Even worse, the Ottoman dominions in North Africa never became a serious matter of governmental concern and there was never a real effort to organize, systematize and standardize the integration of the African vilayets into the Ottoman state. Certainly, the Ottoman Empire controlled vast territories in Africa; but because of the aforementioned problems, these lands were a burden rather than an advantage and an asset. In this regard, Selim I’s attack against the Mamluk state and his subsequent invasion of Syria, Palestine, Arabia and Egypt, after the victory he marked over Ismail I Safavi in Chaldiran, proved to be a complete waste of the Ottoman military resources.

Bayezid II’s disloyal son was not prepared to become an emperor and that’s why he was a miserable opportunist without a clue of strategy; he could not understand what truly makes an empire strong, wealthy and sustainable. With respect to the expansion of a state, he did not know which lands are necessary and which are not; even worse, he did not observe -let alone study- patterns and models of expansion from the History of the Islamic Caliphates and Empires.

Selim I was a blind, indoctrinated idiot, who -after his victory in Chaldiran- lost the unique opportunity to promptly invade Iran, merge the two Turanian and Iranian empires, and then attack the Sultanate of Delhi. I have however to admit that he did not have the correct education, the shrewd mindset, and the accurate perception of the reality to possibly think strategically and act accordingly. The Iranian plateau and the valleys of Hindustan (India) and Bengal were far more important than the sands of Arabia and the waters of the Nile.

Had he attempted to establish one empire from Danube to Ganges, he would have followed the example of Timur (Tamerlane); at the same time, he would have created a uniquely wealthy empire able to possess the inexorable resources and the technical infrastructure needed to oppose and defeat the Western colonial kingdoms.

Babur makes Humayun his successor (1530); miniature from a manuscript of the Akbarnameh (created ca. 1602-3)

Babur treated by doctors during a serious illness, in 1498; while recuperating, Babur had a relapse and his condition became critical; for four days he could only take water dribbled into his mouth from a piece of cotton, and for several days he could barely speak.

In his Baburnama (Book of Babur), the founder of the Mughal Empire describes his struggle first to assert and defend his claim to the throne of Samarkand and the region of the Fergana Valley. After being driven out of Samarkand in 1501, he sought to create his headquarters in Kabul and then in northern India in Delhi. In this miniature from a manuscript of the Baburnama, Babur meets Sultan Ali Mirza near Samarqand.

Scene from Babur’s wars; from a miniature of the Farsi edition of Baburnama (translation by the Mughal courtier Abdul Rahīm in AH 998, i.e. 1589-90)

Babur from the miniature of manuscript of Baburnama currently in the Museum of Oriental Art (Государственный музей Востока), Moscow

Vasily III, ruler of Muscovy (1479-1533; reigned after 1505), son of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina, receives the ambassador from Babur; miniature from the 19th volume of the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible (Лицевой летописный свод Ивана Грозного)

The Mausoleum of Babur (Bagh-e Babur, i.e. Babur Gardens) in Kabul

Khusrau shah swearing loyalty to Babur; miniature from the Baburnama copy in Moscow

Babur receiving Baqi Beg Chaghaniyani, a Turkistani Qipchaq, in his encampment on the banks of the Amu Darya (Oxus); Baqi was a loyal supporter of Babur contrarily to his brother Khusraw shah, whom Baqi brought to pledge allegiance; however, at a later moment, Khusraw shah proved to be a traitor once more. Miniature from a manuscript now in the British Library (Or. 3714, f. 35v); it was painted by the Mughal artist Bhem Gujarati.

Miniature from a Baburnama manuscript now in the National Museum, New Delhi; squirrels, a peacock and peahen, demoiselle cranes and fishes

Babur was exempt of sectarian ideas, tribal mentality, and worthless theological prescriptions; of the Western colonial powers he had minimal knowledge, if any. Deep in his heart and mind he had apparently the wish and the dream to prove himself worthy of his glorious past; for this reason, he needed to establish himself somewhere, i.e. to set up the headquarters of his forthcoming empire. Samarqand was an ideal location; but there he failed repeatedly. Babur’s life was not that of a great emperor, because prior to the invasion of the Delhi Sultanate, his realm was always small and constantly under attack.

Continuously moving from place to place with his few but loyal and devout soldiers, Babur was however an indomitable adventurer, an indefatigable soldier, an excellent tactician, and a great strategist. The greatness of the Mughal Empire, which was far wealthier than the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Russia, Holland, England and even Louis XIV’s France, was basically due to its founder Babur. As it is known, he died rather young (at 47). If he had lived as long as his great ancestor Tamerlane (69), the History of Asia would have certainly been markedly different.

Great rulers are those who prepare well their successors; to do so, they have to endlessly convey to their heirs their way of thinking, their approach to facts, their reaction to developments, their world perception and worldview, and -last but not the least- their method of governance. This is often a long enduring process; it is not always sure that the elder son of a ruler is fit to it. For this reason, we often observe a ruler’s predilection for his second or third son. For Babur this dilemma did not exist; Humayun (همایون/lit. ‘auspicious’ in Farsi; born as Mirza Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad; 1508-1556) was his firstborn (being also son to Babur’s favorite wife Maham Begum), and he proved to be a loyal, shrewd and very knowledgeable heir.

Babur apparently imparted his first son with many of his crucial personal traits and great abilities, notably his mobility, agility, flexibility and adaptability. That’s why Humayun managed to survive, although he was inexperienced at the beginning of his reign, when he faced many challenges, particularly from his half-brother Kamran Mirza and from Sher Shah Suri, a villainous and heinous scoundrel who set up a divisive but temporary rule. All the same, Humayun recaptured his empire with the help of Ismail I Safavi’s son Shah Tahmasp I (طهماسب; 1514-1576), and later consolidated and even expanded his realm. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humayun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamran_Mirza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahmasp_I

However, Babur did not achieve to pass onto his son and successor a superb quality that was the top trait of Timur’s and Genghis Khan’s idiosyncrasy; this consists in a rare moral expertise and spiritual dexterity to invariably disdain and undervalue material achievements of one’s own and to thus infallibly maintain the original impulse toward a great vision permanently alive. Genghis Khan and Timur were indelibly motivated by their vision to unite the world; Babur was stimulated by his first target to re-establish the great empire of his ancestors, but he did not stay long on the throne of Agra (1526-1530).

With him died the vision of a universal empire. Humayun had to fight all his life long to eliminate threats and challenges and, when everything was put under control, he did not enjoy his throne more than few months before dying at 48, due to an accident. When Akbar I (أكبر; born Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad; 1542-1605; reigned after 1556) was crowned, very little was left from the original vision of his grandfather, Babur. Akbar I expanded greatly his realm and, after a certain moment, he shifted his interest to the North with the intention to extend his borders up to the ancestral lands in Central Asia; but by the end of the 16th c., it had become very clear to Akbar I that it was impossible to incorporate Samarqand and the Ferghana Valley to his empire.

To the early instability of the Mughal Empire and to Akbar I’s effort to expand in Central Asia testify the incessant changes of the Mughal capital: Agra 1526-1540, Agra 1555-1571, Fatehpur Sikri 1571-1585, Lahore 1586-1598 (reflecting Akbar I’s move to the North), Agra 1598-1648 and Delhi 1648-1857. In fact, Akbar’s death marks the end of every Central Asiatic venture of the Mughal rulers.  

The Mughal Empire expanded greatly across the Asiatic South, notably the Deccan; it impacted considerably the formation of Muslim sultanates in Southeastern Asia and the islands of today’s Indonesia. All the same, the Gurkanian (گورکانیان; lit. ‘the sons-in law’), as the Iranians called the Mughal emperors due to an old Turanian tradition, only corroborated the unchangeable verdict of History, namely that from Central Asia, Iran, Mesopotamia and Anatolia great military expeditions to faraway lands have often been and can actually be undertaken successfully; but no ruler has ever launched a campaign and a conquest of major parts of Asia, starting from the Valley of Indus and the Valley of Ganges. (The same is also valid for the Yellow River and the Yangtze River valleys.)

Having a truly complex mindset, a very wealthy, composite and perplex culture, and a spiritual impact on their reasoning, the Mughals, the Safavids and the Ottomans could never understand how simple, low, and profane the intentions, attitudes, and mindsets of the colonial bandits, soldiers, merchants, academics and agents were. Had they perceived accurately the level of the colonial purposes and objectives, they would have early reacted against the Western barbarism, cruelty and monstrosity; but they were not able to lower their intellect in order to deal with petty things. They mistook the Western inhumanity for foolishness; their mistake allowed the Western colonials to achieve their targets. How could it have been otherwise? Occam’s razor, if described to a Mughal, Safavid or Ottoman erudite scholar, would have been considered as totally nonsensical, puerile, absurd, and typical for savages. That’s why English, French, Dutch, and American savagery plunged all these civilized lands to poverty, wars, genocides, and interminable destructions down to our days. About:

The simplicity principle in perception and cognition

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125387/

Blue Mosque, Istanbul: the most representative Ottoman architectural masterpiece

Masjid-e Shah / The Mosque of Shah, Isfahan: the most representative Safavid Iranian architectural masterpiece

Taj Mahal, Agra: the most representative Mughal architectural masterpiece

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FORTHCOMING

Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey

2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists

By Prof. Muhammet Şemsettin Gözübüyükoğlu

(Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

PART ONE. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: A World held Captive by the Colonial Gangsters: France, England, the US, and the Delusional History Taught in their Deceitful Universities

A. Examples of fake national names

a) Mongolia (or Mughal) and Deccan – Not India!

b) Tataria – Not Russia!

c) Romania (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) – Not Greece!

d) Kemet or Masr – Not Egypt!

e) Khazaria – not Israel!

f) Abyssinia – not Ethiopia!

B. Earlier Exchange of Messages in Turkish

C. The Preamble to My Response

CHAPTER II: Geopolitics does not exist.

CHAPTER III: Politics does not exist.

CHAPTER IV: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: Orientalism, conceptualization, contextualization, concealment

A. Orientalism

B. Conceptualization

C. Contextualization

D. Concealment

PART TWO. EXAMPLE OF ACADEMICALLY CONCEALED, KEY HISTORICAL TEXT

CHAPTER V: Plutarch and the diffusion of Ancient Egyptian and Iranian Religions and Cultures in Ancient Greece

PART THREE. TURKEY AND IRAN BEYOND POLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS: REJECTION OF THE ORIENTALIST, TURKOLOGIST AND IRANOLOGIST FALLACIES ABOUT ACHAEMENID HISTORY

CHAPTER VI:  The fallacy that Turkic nations were not present in the wider Mesopotamia – Anatolia region in pre-Islamic times

CHAPTER VII: The fallacious representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran 

PART FOUR. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SO-CALLED HELLENISTIC PERIOD, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AND THE SELEUCID & THE PARTHIAN ARSACID TIMES

CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

PART FIVE. FALLACIES ABOUT SASSANID HISTORY, HISTORY OF RELIGIONS, AND THE HISTORY OF MIGRATIONS

CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

PART SIX. FALLACIES ABOUT THE EARLY EXPANSION OF ISLAM: THE FAKE ARABIZATION OF ISLAM

CHAPTER XVII: Iran – Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th – 8th c. CE

CHAPTER XVIII: Western Orientalist falsifications of Islamic History: Identification of Islam with only Hejaz at the times of the Prophet

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

PART SEVEN. THE FICTIONAL DIVISION OF ISLAM INTO ‘SUNNI’ AND ‘SHIA’

CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

PART EIGHT. THE DISTORTED TERM ‘PERSIANATE’

CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

PART NINE. FALLACIES ABOUT THE GOLDEN ERA OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

PART TEN. FALLACIES ABOUT THE TIMES OF TURANIAN (MONGOLIAN) SUPREMACY IN TERMS OF SCIENCES, ARTS, LETTERS, SPIRITUALITY AND IMPERIAL UNIVERSALISM

CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

CHAPTER XXVI: the Timurid Era as Peak of the Islamic Civilization, Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

PART ELEVEN. HOW AND WHY THE OTTOMANS, THE SAFAVIDS AND THE MUGHALS FAILED  

CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’

CHAPTER XXIX: Selim I, Ismail I, and Babur

CHAPTER XXX: The Battle of Chaldiran (1514), and how it predestined the Fall of the Islamic World

CHAPTER XXXI: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals: victims of their sectarianism, tribalism, theology, and wrong evaluation of the colonial West

CHAPTER XXXII: Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals from Nader Shah to Kemal Ataturk

PART TWELVE. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER XXXIII: Turkey and Iran beyond politics and geopolitics: whereto?

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List of the already pre-published chapters of the book

Lines separate chapters that belong to different parts of the book.

CHAPTER VII: The Fallacious Representation of Achaemenid Iran by Western Orientalists

https://www.academia.edu/106013407/The_Fallacious_Representation_of_Achaemenid_Iran_by_Western_Orientalists

CHAPTER VIII: The premeditated disconnection of Atropatene / Adhurbadagan from the History of Azerbaijan

https://www.academia.edu/105841665/The_premeditated_disconnection_of_Atropatene_Adhurbadagan_from_the_History_of_Azerbaijan

CHAPTER IX: Iranian and Turanian nations in Achaemenid Iran

https://www.academia.edu/105880180/Iranian_and_Turanian_nations_in_Achaemenid_Iran

CHAPTER X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran 

https://www.academia.edu/105664696/Iranian_and_Turanian_Religions_in_Pre_Islamic_Iran

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CHAPTER XI: Alexander the Great as Iranian King of Kings, the fallacy of Hellenism, and the nonexistent Hellenistic Period

https://www.academia.edu/105386978/Alexander_the_Great_as_Iranian_King_of_Kings_the_fallacy_of_Hellenism_and_the_nonexistent_Hellenistic_Period

CHAPTER XII: Parthian Turan: an Anti-Persian dynasty

https://www.academia.edu/52541355/Parthian_Turan_an_Anti_Persian_dynasty

CHAPTER XIII: Parthian Turan and the Philhellenism of the Arsacids

https://www.academia.edu/105539884/Parthian_Turan_and_the_Philhellenism_of_the_Arsacids

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CHAPTER XIV: Arsacid & Sassanid Iran, and the wars against the Mithraic – Christian Roman Empire

https://www.academia.edu/105053815/Arsacid_and_Sassanid_Iran_and_the_wars_against_the_Mithraic_Christian_Roman_Empire

CHAPTER XV: Sassanid Iran – Turan, Kartir, Roman Empire, Christianity, Mani and Manichaeism

https://www.academia.edu/105117675/Sassanid_Iran_Turan_Kartir_Roman_Empire_Christianity_Mani_and_Manichaeism

CHAPTER XVI: Iran – Turan, Manichaeism & Islam during the Migration Period and the Early Caliphates

https://www.academia.edu/96142922/Iran_Turan_Manichaeism_and_Islam_during_the_Migration_Period_and_the_Early_Caliphates

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CHAPTER XVII: Iran–Turan and the Western, Orientalist distortions about the successful, early expansion of Islam during the 7th-8th c. CE

https://www.academia.edu/105292787/Iran_Turan_and_the_Western_Orientalist_distortions_about_the_successful_early_expansion_of_Islam_during_the_7th_8th_c_CE

CHAPTER XIX: The fake, Orientalist Arabization of Islam

https://www.academia.edu/105713891/The_fake_Orientalist_Arabization_of_Islam

CHAPTER XX: The systematic dissociation of Islam from the Ancient Oriental History

https://www.academia.edu/105565861/The_systematic_dissociation_of_Islam_from_the_Ancient_Oriental_History

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CHAPTER XXI: The fabrication of the fake divide ‘Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

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CHAPTER XXII: The fake Persianization of the Abbasid Caliphate

https://www.academia.edu/61193026/The_Fake_Persianization_of_the_Abbasid_Caliphate

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CHAPTER XXIII: From Ferdowsi to the Seljuk Turks, Nizam al Mulk, Nizami Ganjavi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Haji Bektash

https://www.academia.edu/96519269/From_Ferdowsi_to_the_Seljuk_Turks_Nizam_al_Mulk_Nizami_Ganjavi_Jalal_ad_Din_Rumi_and_Haji_Bektash

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CHAPTER XXIV: From Genghis Khan, Nasir al-Din al Tusi and Hulagu to Timur

https://www.academia.edu/104034939/From_Genghis_Khan_Nasir_al_Din_al_Tusi_and_Hulagu_to_Timur_Tamerlane_

CHAPTER XXV: Timur (Tamerlane) as a Turanian Muslim descendant of the Great Hero Manuchehr, his exploits and triumphs, and the slow rise of the Turanian Safavid Order

https://www.academia.edu/105230290/Timur_Tamerlane_as_a_Turanian_Muslim_descendant_of_the_Great_Hero_Manuchehr_his_exploits_and_triumphs_and_the_slow_rise_of_the_Turanian_Safavid_Order

CHAPTER XXVI: The Timurid Era as the Peak of the Islamic Civilization: Shah Rukh, and Ulugh Beg, the Astronomer Emperor

https://www.academia.edu/105267173/The_Timurid_Era_as_the_Peak_of_the_Islamic_Civilization_Shah_Rukh_and_Ulugh_Beg_the_Astronomer_Emperor

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CHAPTER XXVII: Ethnically Turanian Safavids & Culturally Iranian Ottomans: two identical empires that mirrored one another

https://www.academia.edu/105744200/Ethnically_Turanian_Safavids_and_Culturally_Iranian_Ottomans_two_identical_empires_that_mirrored_one_another

CHAPTER XXVIII: Spirituality, Religion & Theology: the fallacy of the Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’

https://www.academia.edu/105770339/Spirituality_Religion_and_Theology_the_fallacy_of_the_Safavid_conversion_of_Iran_to_Shia_Islam

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Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: From the Jadidist Intellectuals to Brezhnev to Putin – Obituary

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse : Des Intellectuels Jadidistes à Brejnev et à Poutine – Nécrologie

Элен Каррер д’Анкосс: от интеллектуалов-джадидистов до Брежнева и Путина — некролог

Contents

Introduction

I. D’Encausse is not Encausse!

II. L’Empire éclaté

III. Bobojon Ghafurov, the Tajik Soviet Orientalist, and his Hajj

IV. The Islamic Republic of Mecca & the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

V. Broadened horizons: Orientalism and Sovietology

VI. ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ & Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s writing style

VII. Suslov, Pravda, and ‘The State and Revolution’

VIII. My classmates at Sciences Po: today’s ignorant, worthless and miserable administrators and politicians

IX. Nicos Poulantzas’ suicide & the Western leftist intelligentsia’s funerals

X. Either Leonid Brezhnev or Ronald Reagan – or get lost!

XI. How the Jadid Intellectuals impacted the formation of the Hélène Carrère d’Encausse School of Sovietology

XII. Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse

XIII. Soviet Union, Spirituality, Religion and Eschatology

XIV. John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Polish quagmire

XV. Viewpoint from the Mount Elbrus

XVI. The European convictions and the pragmatism of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse

XVII. The limits of historiography: a History of leaders and governance or a History of peoples and culture?

Содержание

Введение

I. Д’Анкосс – это не Анкосс!

II. «Расколотая империя»

III. Бободжон Гафуров, таджикский советский востоковед, и его хадж

IV. Исламская Республика Мекка (Теракт в Мекке) и советское вторжение в Афганистан

V. Расширение кругозора: ориентализм и советология

VI. «Конфискованная власть» и стиль письма Элен Каррер д’Анкосс

VII. Суслов, «Правда» и «Государство и революция».

VIII. Мои одноклассники в Science Po: сегодняшние невежественные, никчемные и жалкие администраторы и политики

IX. Самоубийство Никоса Пуланцаса и похороны западной левой интеллигенции

X. Либо Леонид Брежнев, либо Рональд Рейган — или проваливай!

XI. Как интеллектуалы-джадиды повлияли на формирование школы советологии Элен Каррер д’Анкосс

XII. Шарль де Голль, Жорж Помпиду и Элен Каррер д’Анкосс

XIII. Советский Союз, Духовность, Религия и Эсхатология

XIV. Иоанн Павел II, Рональд Рейган и польская трясина

XV. Смотровая площадка с горы Эльбрус

XVI. Европейские убеждения и прагматизм Элен Каррер д’Анкосс

XVII. Пределы историографии: история вождей и правления или история народов и культуры?

Permanent Secretary of the French Academy, Helene Carrere d’Encausse and her husband Louis Carrere d’Encausse attend the Private View of “Icones de l’Art Moderne, la Collection Chtchoukine” at Fondation Louis Vuitton on February 20, 2017 in Paris, France.

Introduction

She died 94; I am 67, and I was her student before 42-43 years, back in 1980-1981 at the illustrious Institut d’études politiques de Paris (also known as Sciences Po or IEP). Back at those days, the Anglo-Saxon countries and ‘universities’ were filled with nonsensical Kremlinologists, who were mere Anti-Soviet propagandists rather than objective scholars and impartial researchers.

It is certainly to the credit of my late professor, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (6 July 1929-5 August 2023), that she killed this term in France, across the member states of the Francophonie, and throughout the Francophone world. The extremely absurd term ‘Kremlinologie’ never existed in French, as it was duly replaced by the far more reasonable word ‘Soviétologie’ – to large extent thanks to the deceased academician.

In fact, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was the founder of the French School of Sovietology; she actually entered the academic arena in 1963 with her celebrated thesis “Réforme et révolution chez les musulmans de l’Empire russe, Bukhara 1867-1924” (Reform and revolution among the Muslims of the Russian Empire; Bukhara 1867-1924) {Préface de Maxime Rodinson (Thèse, Doctorat 3e cycle; Histoire Paris)}. But I am digressing! About:

Соболезнования в связи с кончиной Элен Каррер д’Анкосс

http://kremlin.ru/events/president/letters/71992

Condolences on the passing of Helene Carrere d’Encausse

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71995

https://www.academie-francaise.fr/actualites/deces-de-mme-helene-carrere-dencausse-f14-secretaire-perpetuel

https://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/helene-carrere-dencausse

Путин выразил соболезнования в связи с кончиной Каррер Д’Анкосс

https://regnum.ru/news/3824659

https://www.1tv.ru/news/2023-08-07/458731-vladimir_putin_vyrazil_soboleznovaniya_v_svyazi_s_konchinoy_glavy_frantsuzskoy_akademii_elen_karrer_d_ankoss

Putin pays homage to late Helene Carrere d’Encausse

https://tass.com/society/1657513

RUSSIAN HISTORIAN HELENE CARRÈRE D’ENCAUSSE PASSED AWAY IN FRANCE

https://russkiymir.ru/en/news/316382/

Death of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: “A great friend”, Vladimir Poutine speaks on the death of the academician

https://euro.dayfr.com/local/amp/627056

https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/64cef6d29a7947ff31dbfbe9

https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/deces-d-helene-carrere-d-encausse-premiere-femme-a-la-tete-de-l-academie-francaise-20230805

http://evene.lefigaro.fr/citations/helene-carrere-d-encausse

https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/destin-exceptionnel-personnalite-incomparable-le-monde-litteraire-et-politique-rend-hommage-a-helene-carrere-d-encausse-20230805

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a great connoisseur of Russia “in the middle of the fog”

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2023/08/07/helene-carrere-d-encausse-first-woman-to-head-the-academie-francaise-has-died_6083167_15.html

Французский политик Кристиан Ваннест: Европа живет в худших советских традициях

https://news2.ru/story/489445/

https://valdaiclub.com/about/experts/205/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Каррер_д’Анкосс,_Элен

https://ka.wikipedia.org/wiki/ელენ_კარერ_დ’ანკოსი

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Carr%C3%A8re_d%27Encausse

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Carr%C3%A8re_d%E2%80%99Encausse

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Carr%C3%A8re_d%27Encausse

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Carr%C3%A8re_d%27Encausse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Carr%C3%A8re_d%27Encausse

法国科学院第一位女性院长埃莱娜·卡雷·丹考斯去世

https://fahrenheitmagazine.com/zh-CN/艺术/信/法兰西学院第一位女性院长海伦·卡雷尔·登考斯-%28Helene-Carrere-Dencausse%29-去世

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/الن_کارر_دانکوس

I. D’Encausse is not Encausse!

I did not move to Paris (in October 1978) for postgraduate studies in Sovietology and Political Science; there was a time when I did not know her grand name. If someone asked me in 1978 whether I knew “d’Encausse”, I would certainly reply positively only due to my own misunderstanding, because I would recall my earlier readings and my research about Gérard Anaclet Vincent Encausse (also known as Papus), the illustrious French Freemason, occultist, hypnotist, thaumaturgist and mystic (1865-1915). Of course, as you can imagine, ‘Encausse’ was not ‘d’Encausse’, but still there was a certain Franco-Russian connection in this case, because Papus was sought after by none else than Nikolai Vtoroy (Czar Nicholas II)!

Facing social unrest after a calamitous and very humiliating defeat by the Japanese (1905), the Russian Emperor invited the famous mystic to Tsarskoye Selo (now known as Pushkin, 25 km from St. Petersburg), the imperial residence. It is said that in a particular séance, Encausse-Papus evoked the spirit of Alexander III (father and predecessor of Nicholas II, who had died one year earlier), and the … ‘spirit’ gave counsel for more repression (this was understandable at least) to ‘avoid a revolution’.

The ‘spirit’ must have apparently come from another universe, because ‘it’ did not know that the revolution had already taken place and it had been duly squelched. However, one of the most intriguing rumors maintained that Encausse-Papus said to the distressed Nicholas II that the fearsome revolution would not break out as long as he himself was in life (note that he died in 1915). About:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Папюс

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarskoye_Selo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution_of_1905

II. L’Empire éclaté

As a matter of fact, I relocated to Paris in order to undertake postgraduate studies in Egyptology, Assyriology, Hittitology, Northwestern Semitic languages, History of Religions, Gnosis, Manichaeism, and Oriental Christianism; soon afterwards I added Iranology, thus covering a vast area from North Africa to Central Asia and from Anatolia to the Indus River Valley. I also studied Russian Literature, thus continuing my earlier intensive studies of Russian language at the Greek Soviet Friendship Association in Athens (греко советское общество дружбы; 1975-1978), during my undergraduate studies. The interest for Russia/USSR was permanent, as part of my family had lived there.

It was in early 1979, in a rainy Saturday afternoon, that I found a fascinating book while spending some time in a bookstore; the title was ‘L’Empire éclaté’ (the Shattered Empire). It was published in 1978 and the author’s name was Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. As you can guess from the previous paragraphs, it was easy for me to retain the name! Reading few lines from several pages that belonged to different chapters, I realized that the core purpose of the well-written book was the solemn announcement of the forthcoming fall of the USSR. About:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovi%C3%A9tologie

https://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsp_0035-2950_1971_num_21_2_418057_t1_0428_0000_002

https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελληνοσοβιετικός_Σύνδεσμος

https://studylib.ru/doc/2075199/obraz-grecii-v-sovremennoj-rossijskoj-presse

https://klex.ru/vg7

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Empire_%C3%A9clat%C3%A9

Saying something like that at the time was not a joke; it was an entrance ticket to the madhouse. In 4-5 minutes, I was able to find out the major reason that the author evoked to support her claim; the Muslim populations of Central Asia and Caucasus were creating a major demographic challenge for the Russians, who -after some decades- would end up as the minority within the borders of the Soviet Union. It was enthralling. I bought the book and in the next few months, in parallel with my heavy schedule, I managed to read it all. It was certainly a best-seller in France. But there was a reason for this. On 16th January 1979, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi left Iran, and on 1st February 1979, the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran.

In her ‘L’Empire éclaté’, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse did not discuss issues pertaining to Islamization or radicalization; but the scarecrow of a USSR -with the Russians as minority and the Turkic Muslim nations of Central Asia as the majority- could after some decades end up with either a nationalist revival or an Islamic theological conservatism.

It was not a bluff; there were many indications for this, well beyond the events in Iran. I was then shaping my understanding on the basis of diverse data and pieces of collected information. As I was studying the past of many countries of North Africa and the so-called Middle East, I befriended many students originating from those nations; they were next to me as we attended together various courses (Egyptology, Assyriology, Aramaic & Phoenician, History of the Red Sea region, etc.) and, before the courses started or ended, they used to become my source of information for what happened in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, etc. I was constantly discussing with them in order to evaluate how the overall situation was from Morocco to Pakistan and from Turkey to Yemen. There was no Internet, no mobile telephony, and not even computers at those days, but people corresponded with others, and the news from Soviet Union did not look like the governmental or partisan propaganda of the last Brezhnev years.

III. Bobojon Ghafurov, the Tajik Soviet Orientalist, and his Hajj

The story of Bobojon Ghafurov was known to me already in 1979; Igor Diakonoff (Игорь Михайлович Дьяконов; 1915-1999), the famous Soviet Assyriologist, was friend of my French professor, the renowned Orientalist Jean Bottéro (1914-2007), and like that, I started corresponding with him; in parallel I also knew several other academics in USSR through my Communist connections. The Bobojon Ghafurov story was included in Diakonoff’s auto-biographical ‘Book of Memories’ (Книга воспоминаний) and it can be found in the Russian Wikipedia entry about him, but the news had already spread those days, because Ghafurov had just died.

The great Tajik Soviet statesman (Бободжан Гафурович Гафуров; 1908-1977) was also an outstanding Orientalist; he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan from 1946 to 1956, and from that date to the end of his life, he was the Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. His doctorate thesis about the Ismailiyah (الإسماعيلية; the Isma’ili Order of Muslim mystics) was a most recommendable publication, and his contention about the Tajiks and Tajik History became easily a matter of grave polarization (Are the Tajiks ‘Persianized Turks’ or are the Uzbeks ‘Turkified Eastern Iranians’? / at the time, I did not side with either position, but now I accept the Ghafurov thesis, which is the second leg of the aforementioned dilemma). I have to add here that the Tajik Orientalist had become known to me through his academic partner and co-author, the Greek Soviet historian Dimitrios Tsibukidis (Димитриос Цибукидис; 1921-2006).

However, in 1974, Ghafurov found the correct political pretext (namely the initiation of some state contacts) to get a special permission to travel for Hajj to Mecca and Medina – at a time there were no diplomatic relations between USSR and Saudi Arabia; but apparently the real reason for this travel was a latent faith that had been meanwhile developed. No diplomatic improvement happened following this trip, but when the Tajik Orientalist returned, he made shocking revelations to all of his Orientalist colleagues; more specifically, he said that for him his career as statesman was meaningless, his academic employment was pointless, but the pilgrimage that he had just performed was highly considered among his friends and neighbors in the village. Afterwards, he lived the rest of his life at home. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Гафуров,_Бободжан_Гафурович

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobojon_Ghafurov

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дьяконов,_Игорь_Михайлович

http://www.orientalstudies.ru/rus/index.php?option=com_publications&Itemid=75&pub=3109

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Цибукидис,_Димитриос

https://forum-eurasica.ru/topic/3572-борис-литвинский-«мы-подарили-таджикскому-народу-первую-полноценную-и/

These words constituted an indirect confession of Muslim faith; the rumor spread among academics, Orientalists and partisans throughout the vast country and also beyond the borders; it was actually the time when Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) had become a Muslim. With her ‘L’Empire éclaté’, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse had caught the pulse of the moment. This made of her one of the very few people worldwide who predicted the fall of Soviet Union more than 10 years before it occurred. Two critical events took also place in 1979, setting the new stage of Soviet-Muslim polarization.

IV. The Islamic Republic of Mecca & the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

First, from 20th November to 4th December 1979, the short-lived Islamic Republic of Mecca shook the foundations of the obsolete Saudi monarchy, particularly if we take into consideration the fact that king Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1906-1975) had been assassinated. This development ended up in terrible bloodshed, but it acquired a fascinating eschatological dimension in the minds and the hearts of hundreds of millions of Muslims; now, it is somewhat forgotten and deliberately minimized as the ‘Grand Mosque seizure’, but it then made many Muslims believe that the arrival of Mahdi and Prophet Jesus was a really imminent affair, i.e. for the people of this generation. Actually, all the discourses and speeches made by the Juhayman group were strongly eschatological of character. It goes without saying that they undertook this operation, apparently guided by the criminal rascals of the English secret services.  

Few days later, the Soviet army entered Afghanistan (24 December 1979) thus directly involving Moscow in a confrontation with the local stooges of the CIA. Contrarily to what many believe today, the Soviet operation in Afghanistan was not a mistake; things went wrong only because the Marxist-Leninist authorities did not realize that the Western secret services were not the enemies and the opponents of the Islamists but their producers, protectores and promoters; even worse, the Soviet leadership did not have a correct plan as to what to do after invading the country, which is a difficult mountainous terrain inhabited by many different nations that have nothing in common. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juhayman_al-Otaybi

However, thanks to the then existing SSRs of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a large part of Afghanistan should have been divided and annexed by these three Central Asiatic SSRs. Another large part of Afghanistan should have been established as the Hazara SSR and then adequately helped to integrate with the USSR. The rest would form the secluded Pashtun territory and Pashtun populations from other parts of the fake state of Afghanistan should have been relocated there. After the resettlement of all the populations as per the aforementioned arrangements, the Soviet army would only need to militarily occupy the Pashtun territory which would not be larger than 150000 km2. But all the good Soviet Orientalists had failed to realize that there is no Afghan nation and that Afghanistan was (and still is) a fake country fabricated by the English colonial gangsters of the East India Company as a means of weakening the Iranian Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Empire.

V. Broadened horizons: Orientalism and Sovietology

For me, my studies and my understanding, the books of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse constituted an exquisite opportunity to establish bridges between Russia and the Ancient Orient, Russia and Central Asia, Iran and Central Asia, and Russia and Africa. It was then that I became fully conscious of a fact that I already knew somewhat superficially: that Russia was part of the ‘Orient’, and not of the ‘Occident’. This was actually the first territorial expansion of my research interests.

That is why after two years of postgraduate studies in the aforementioned disciplines of Orientalism, I decided to also enroll in the department for doctoral studies in Sovietology (Cycle Supérieur d’Etudes sur l’URSS et l’Europe Orientale) where, in addition to the seminar offered by the head of the department, I would also follow courses conducted by the Polish-French scholar Eugène Zaleski (a very remarkable specialist on Political Economy and Soviet economic planning), Patrice Gélard (who became later a senator), who scrutinized Soviet Constitutional Law, and many others. It was a well-organized department superbly put in order by Renée Sergent, an excellent administrative assistant who was of great help for all the students. About:

https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-et-strategique-2002-3-page-158.htm

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_d%27%C3%A9tudes_politiques_de_Paris

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Институт_политических_исследований_(Париж)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciences_Po

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugeniusz_Zaleski

Click to access eugene_eugeniusz_zaleski_19182001.pdf

http://stephanezaleski.chez-alice.fr/eugene/

https://www.senat.fr/senateur/gelard_patrice95034f.html

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_G%C3%A9lard

https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2020-posts/2020/6/2/obituary-patrice-gelard

VI. ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ & Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s writing style

It was then (1980) that a new book just published by France’s best Sovietologist confirmed that my aforementioned decision was correct and that I should truly add Sovietology to the other fields of my Orientalist specialization: ‘Le pouvoir confisqué’ (‘The confiscated power’). I read it while taking intensive summer courses of Russian Literature at the (run by the French Jesuits) Centre d’Etudes Russes Saint Georges à Meudon; my intention was to have very strong linguistic skills in Russian, adding the Christian Orthodox czarist jargon (that had been obliterated in USSR). Little did I know at the time! My professor had indeed preceded me there by a quarter century. This ‘detail’ I learned many years later. It was truly amusing to learn the alphabet that Lenin had abolished. About:

https://www.persee.fr/doc/polit_0032-342x_1980_num_45_4_3018_t1_1025_0000_2

https://www.persee.fr/doc/russe_1161-0557_2018_num_50_1_2833

https://www.leparisien.fr/hauts-de-seine-92/l-avenir-incertain-du-centre-d-etudes-russes-27-04-2002-2003020633.php

https://data.bnf.fr/11988643/centre_d_etudes_russes_saint-georges_meudon__hauts-de-seine/

Before having the compulsory interview with the head of the department prior to the final decision (September 1980), I knew already much about the very personality of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. The way she was elaborating her books was very different from the writing style of all my other professors in the disciplines of Orientalism. With this I do not mean the contents or the stylistics of the text, but her temperament and powers of attraction. She was writing to pugnaciously convince the reader and she was engaged in her struggle to make others accept her approach, analysis, and descriptions.

Only two among my Orientalist professors, the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, and Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004), a very exceptional connoisseur of the Orient (mainly for the Late Antiquity, Islamic and Modern times), were writing with great passion and/or empathy for the topics that they analyzed and the historical persons that they portrayed. But Carrère d’Encausse, who had also been the student of M. Rodinson, did not express any feelings for the subject of her text; on the contrary, she displayed passion in her effort to convince.

Maxime Rodinson

In French, this is not called ‘amour’ (love), but ‘amour propre’ (self-esteem). She was struggling to convince her readers about her judgment, evaluation and conclusions; she was therefore using the French language and structuring her sentences for this purpose, making always grammatically strong statements. The titles of her two books that I had already gone through offer a very good example in this regard; the structure ‘noun + past participle’ is in French far stronger than any similar structure in any other language.

VII. Suslov, Pravda, and ‘The State and Revolution’

Her seminars were attended by European, Asiatic, African and American students; we were all urged to subscribe to Pravda (Правда) and follow the directives as to how to decipher and interpret those heavily impacted by ideological jargon articles that had to always get an ‘imprimatur’ (official license) by hierarchical bureaucrats, who formed the Soviet equivalent of the Western ‘bourgeoisie aisée’ under the ‘spiritual’ or ‘sacerdotal’ or ‘ceremonial’ auspices of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov (Михаил Андреевич Суслов; 1902-1982). And, to my eyes, this was a very serious problem.

No 2 in the Soviet hierarchy after Leonid Brezhnev, the ‘theoretical Custodian’ of the October Revolution, Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1965-1982), Senior Secretary of Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1948-1982), and (to use a Western vulgarity) ‘Chief Ideologue’ of the Communist Party of USSR, had failed to detect something truly crucial that was so obvious to my eyes: from the impulsive language that Lenin had used in his venerated ‘The State and Revolution’ (Государство и революция) there was nothing left in the routinely written, bureaucratic, apathetic, crystallized jargon of the Pravda scribes.

Irrespective of his ideas, opinions and choices, Lenin wrote in a vivid, sentimental manner with strong contrasts impressively painted thanks to his well-selected words; there was indeed life in his sentences. But Pravda texts in the 1970s were fossilized combinations of grammar, syntax and lexicography. I have to also add at this point that my familiarity with the ancient scribes of Mesopotamia and Egypt and with their role in the formulation of imperial and Pharaonic Annals helped me greatly understand that the role of the Pravda scribes in reality endangered the existence of the revolutionary Soviet state. Turning a ‘revolution’ to mere ‘ceremony’ is tantamount to funerals.

Suslov was at the time portrayed as a ‘hardliner’, but although I was under 25, I was already able to understand that such silly statements and descriptions were typical Anglo-Saxon propaganda good only for the ash-heap of history. But due to the ostensible mummification of the October Revolution, Suslov risked justifying the Anti-Soviet propaganda of the Western world. The long awaited, quasi-Messianic society that Lenin defined as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ had unfortunately died in the meantime due to a malignant tumor named ‘Nomenklatura’. It was very clear to me at the time that the USSR could not live thanks to enthralling, impulsive and enthusiastic movements and ‘revolutions’ generated elsewhere (Vietnam, Cuba, Somalia, Yemen, Angola, etc.), simply because the heart (: Moscow) had already died.

Political science, economics, political economy, law, and international relations were apparently new scientific fields for me and I definitely had to make an extra effort; but the fact that I continued attending all my other courses in Orientalism offered me the unique opportunity to study in parallel international affairs in the times of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (mainly during 1st half of the 1st millennium BCE) and in Modern Times. The comparisons that I was able to then establish in the scholarly approach to either topics was of cardinal importance in my formative years and in the judgment of the modern societies that I was empowered to formulate in striking contrast with political scientists, geopolitical analysts, and politicians who think they know whereas they know nothing. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Suslov

VIII. My classmates at Sciences Po: today’s ignorant, worthless and miserable administrators and politicians

To most of my classmates in Orientalism, political developments and politics were entirely unimportant issues; still, by having learned aspects of the historical past of mankind, they had gradually acquired a certain perspective and they were able to make pertinent judgments, seeing things from far. Quite contrarily, to my classmates in Sciences Po, political developments and politics were of vital importance; to judge based on the passion that they expressed for these topics, I would say that they truly lived in order to monitor and comment politics. This was totally futile and useless, because they knew too many details about a topic for which they did not have any perspective and which they could not see from far. In reality, they could not ‘learn’ (let alone ‘understand’) politics and the ongoing political developments, because they only were part of them, i.e. part of the problem.  

However, I have to state that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse stood perfectly well at her level; she was never induced to enter into political discussions that most of my classmates were eager to initiate supposedly making a ‘question about the course’! It was then clear to my eyes that she was not only a shrewd observer and an excellent author, but also a well-disciplined professor and a regimented academic, who never confused the political analysis of a system with the political talk. 

Even worse, my classmates, who -in their majority- were graduates in Political Science, Law and Economics, could not distinguish between the fake historical narrative that political instructors of every government, party, elite or regime write and the true, objective, unbiased and impartial History as evidenced by textual and epigraphic sources, archaeological findings, ethnographic data, and the cultural life of each and every genuine nation. Please, note that I don’t mention here anything about spirituality, cult, faith and religion, because had I uttered one of those words, my classmates would have asked me to return to my theological seminar. So, to all of them, ‘History’ was only the historical forgery that their respective governments had forced them to ‘learn’ in the primary and secondary schools; in other words, it was a recently invented sketch that had absolutely nothing with the historical process.

I still remember the reaction of an Algerian schoolmate who was shocked when I spoke to him about the Berbers, the majestic mausoleums of the Ancient Numidian kings, and the Ancient Berber writing system. Having ostensibly been indoctrinated in the colonial falsehood of Panarabism, intoxicated with French Enlightenment, inculcated with Marxism-Leninism, and duly brainwashed against the importance of the Berber Islamic civilization, he wondered how I knew all that! He then started being too apologetic against his national identity (‘there are only few Berbers now’), imperial heritage (‘only for vacations we go to Tipaza’, i.e. the location of the tomb of Juba I of Numidia), cultural integrity (‘we don’t care about old traditions’), and historical continuity (‘no one reads Ibn Khaldun nowadays’). It then became clear to me that, with such people in the administration, Algeria under either Houari Boumédiène (1932-1978) or Chadli Bendjedid (1929-2012) would always be expendable stuff in the hands of either French or Soviet diplomats.

This situation made me realize, already back at those days, the worthlessness of politics; if the people, who study in order to learn and then get involved in politics and in the administration of their countries, first have been indoctrinated due to a totally constructed pseudo-historical narrative (geared only to validate infamous if not criminal political purposes and interests), and second fail to see from far the world in which they are, then ‘politics’ is an interminably reproduced problem that engulfs us all in temporary misery, compact absurdity, spiritual prison, and intellectual swamp with no way out.

IX. Nicos Poulantzas’ suicide & the Western leftist intelligentsia’s funerals

So, in the very last months of 1980 and in the first months of 1981, thanks to my conversations with Sciences Po classmates, I was able to early draw a very correct conclusion about an event that had already taken place before 12-15 months, shaking the academic-intellectual-political establishment of France: the suicide of Nicos Poulantzas (October 1979). Of course, when this event occurred, I did not bother at all about it, and my conventional response to pathetically ideologized friends and acquaintances was always the same:

– You cannot study cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts, learn about Hammurapi and Ramses III, pass exams on Thutmose III’s campaigns in Syria and Neo-Assyrian imperial Annals, and possibly spend one second for worthless leftist intelligentsia.

But I must admit that at the time I could not fathom why this incident happened. All the same, 15 months later, due to my contacts with postgraduate classmates in Political Science, the reason for this suicide was revealed to me quite easily. Simply, it was a natural circumstance. Such were those days of the ideologically leftist lunatics, such was the extreme focalization on absurd ‘thinkers’ and ignorant ‘intellectuals’, and such were the incommensurately high expectations of all these fools, that I conclusively realized that the entirely failed realm of anti-USSR (anti-Soviet) and anti-US (anti-capitalist) European theoreticians was predestined to doom, pulling -in the process- Western Europe (as we called the capitalist part of the continent) to final extinction. In other words, I saw back in 1980-1981 the impasse that many attest in Europe nowadays; it was inevitable.     

The paranoia of those days had impacted our distinguished professor too; if you search among Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s publications, books, lectures and public speeches, you will find many great essays and treatises about several czars and valuable presentations of the French-Russian relations; but if you check the dates, you will soon notice that they have all been published after 1991. It was a pity for us back in 1980, but it could not happen otherwise. She could certainly write at the time, as she finally did later, fascinating researches and comprehensive conclusions about Nicholas II, Alexander II, and Catherine II, but few people would read those books back in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

Alexander II and his groundbreaking tenure are the key to understanding Russia before the Romanov, during the Soviet rule, and also today, but in 1980 most of the people and the students would feel that the brave imperial visionary was closer to Sargon of Akkad than to us! Such was the madness we lived in, and that’s why the people of my generation failed, the global situation deteriorated, and the entire world heads now to an unprecedented but well-deserved disaster. About:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicos_Poulantzas

X. Either Leonid Brezhnev or Ronald Reagan – or get lost!

Speaking and writing about Soviet Union at the time necessitated a bold character and guts; this is so, because there were only two positions that you could defend before triggering a ‘tollé’ (an outcry) against you! From one side, you had all the Communists and the PCF (parti communiste français), who routinely reproduced the endless volumes printed by the Academy of Sciences of USSR and supported blindly whatever Brezhnev and his associates would decide.

From the other side, you were constrained to face the dark nebula of anti-Soviet European leftists, socialists, social-democrats, Trotskyists, anarchists, nihilists and atheists, who were so pathetically ideologized, so foolishly unrealistic, and so absurdly outlandish that you could not help but wish them all the same abominable fate as that of the aforementioned miserable self-murderer. All those trivial and useless scoundrels detonated volumes of hatred and negativity, described as hypothetical problems facts that were not troublesome, and -overwhelmed by their enormous psychological complex of inferiority- reached to unprecedented levels of theoretical, ideological, pseudo-scientific, and bogus-intellectual delirium.

Cursed and pathetic figures, the likes of Max Weber, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser, Cornelius Castoriadis and many other nauseatingly defeatist faces, are the sole reason for all the problems standing in front of Europe, Africa and many other parts of the world today. But back in 1980 they constituted the ‘holy saints’ for mentally sick, psychologically abnormal, sentimentally dead, intellectually corrupt, and lazy students who had failed to understand first that not a shred of truth could possibly be found in the infernal texts of those petty ‘philosophers’ and second that they did not truly read, understand and appreciate all those texts, but they instantaneously accepted them beforehand only to obtain psychological support, socio-professional status, and economic privileges as ‘consecrated’ and ‘respected’ ‘followers of Adorno’, ‘admirers of Gramsci’, and ‘fans of Max Weber’. All this was disgustingly lowly but fake proletarian.

Opposite the aforementioned two standpoints, every liberal or conservative criticism of the USSR and of the European Left was automatically denounced as ‘betrayal of the labor class’, ‘petty bourgeoisie deviation’, ‘bloody imperialist exploitation’, ‘fascist reaction’ or even ‘feudal resurgence’. Last, the insults were culminating with the following words: ‘bigot’, ‘pietist’ or ‘Russian émigré’. So, it took strong courage and real guts for Hélène Carrère d’Encausse to launch a new, modest but realist, objective (as much as possible), and balanced approach and school of Sovietology. It would even be accurate to state that she created the discipline in France.  

XI. How the Jadid Intellectuals impacted the formation of the Hélène Carrère d’Encausse School of Sovietology

Technically, Carrère d’Encausse’s approach must be categorized as belonging to the ‘totalitarian school’, namely all the Western academics who viewed the October Revolution as a historical accident and the Soviet state as a form of totalitarianism. She certainly does not make part of the ‘revisionist school’ that attempted to refute, cancel or condition the arguments made by the opposite school.

Although in her books, she may momentarily give the impression of being a political scientist and astute commentator, Carrère d’Encausse was a historian, and to this testifies her thesis. It was therefore normal for her to see things in perspective and to introduce new parameters to the academic discourse about the Soviet Union, notably the ethnic identity, the cultural integrity, the spirituality, and the religious affiliation.

Having learned Turkish to work on a vast documentation that her professor and mentor Maxime Rodinson guided her to find, having studied the texts of the great Uzbek Jadidist intellectual and scholar Abdurauf Fitrat (عبد الرؤوف فطرت; Абдурауф Фитрат; 1886-1938), and having understood what was at stake in Central Asia for either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse knew very well what and when to put on the table for discussion. Her approach was superior to that of many others, because it was at the same time systematic, realist, serious and comprehensive. About:

https://uz.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdurauf_Fitrat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdurauf_Fitrat

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Фитрат,_Абдурауф

https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/jadidism-ideology-conceptual-approaches-and-practice

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Джадидизм

https://jhss.ut.ac.ir/article_59453.html?lang=en

https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jadidism

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedidcilik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadid

XII. Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse

Of course, she had the advantage to have also lived at a time when major statesmen like Charles de Gaulle were constantly giving the tuning note (‘donner le la’) to all the rest, specialists or not. But she was also a perspicacious researcher, and therefore she carefully noted that the illustrious French general and statesman never called the USSR with any of the country’s various appellations; to him, Moscow was always ‘Russia’ – either imperial or soviet. And this is what came to surface with her ‘L’Empire éclaté’.  

Carrère d’Encausse was proud to say in one of her recent interviews that the man who welcomed her at the Sciences Po (where she also studied) was none else than Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), the former President of France; but before being elected in the presidency of his country with 58% (1969), Pompidou was the French Prime Minister who faced and vanquished the notorious May 1968 rebellion. And yet, Pompidou had never been elected before his appointment as prime minister (1962), having only been a close associate of General de Gaulle, a professor of French Literature in Sorbonne University, and the PDG (CEO) of the Rothschild Bank (1956-1958).

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – “À Sciences po, l’homme qui m’a interrogée était Georges Pompidou”

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Pompidou

It was therefore only normal for my former professor to conclude that the soviet system had failed to find and implement updates, introduce constructive criticism, and initiate changes that would enable the vast country to cope with the various international socioeconomic developments; as long as the Soviet Union was not a sealed off territory and Moscow maintained commercial relations with other states, it would be imperative for the USSR to renovate accordingly.

XIII. Soviet Union, Spirituality, Religion and Eschatology  

I mentioned spirituality earlier; this was entirely absent throughout Soviet Union, at least across the society and the government. The state was entirely composed by partisans who were ‘convinced’ that man was an entirely material entity, because ‘there was no spiritual universe’ and, as Lenin had said, thought ‘is’ the supreme function of the material world.

There were certainly psychics, astrologers, and many clairvoyants in the USSR, and many of them were consulted by the ruling elite of the Communist Party, but their abilities, skills, activities, energies and vibrations were believed to merely be the yet unstudied part of the material universe; it was thought that, once these fields would be duly explored and fully assessed, they would turn out to be new scientific disciplines.

Far from the fooled society and the faithless rulers, spiritual life was the deep, lifelong experience of several individuals, who happened to be indiscriminately Shaman, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish or other; worshipping God does not really demand public space. Even more importantly, it does not demand seclusion and anachoretism or asceticism. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse knew this fact very well. As spirituality is a phenomenon that makes people focus on the spiritual universe and quite often disregard the material world, it was normal for every objective observer to expect that the October Revolution was too tiny an event to possibly eliminate spirituality.  

Spirituality is personal, but religion is institutional; as such, religion was almost uprooted in the USSR, despite the fact that Stalin finally started to scale back the anti-religious campaign in 1941, as he needed the moral support of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War (WW II). Things improved after the meeting Stalin had with the three top clerics of Soviet Union on 5th September 1943. All the same, 35 years later, it would still be absurd to expect things to change in the vast country only due to a religious revival; the Church was closely controlled by the administration. About:

The Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War

https://www.prlib.ru/en/news/658956

https://tsarnicholas.org/category/great-patriotic-war-1941-45/

https://tass.com/society/944529

https://en.topwar.ru/8094-cerkov-i-velikaya-otechestvennaya-voyna.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Sergius_of_Moscow

https://russiapost.info/politics/war_church

https://cne.news/article/2279-special-church-for-russian-forces-saying-a-prayer-between-guns-and-icons

Pope Benedict XVI is greeted by Gabriel de Broglie, Helene Carrere d’Encausse and Jean Leclant, members of French Institute, during a visit to the French Institute in Paris.

However, there were few peripheral nations from where a possible reversal, originating from a religious revival, could be initiated: Georgia, Armenia, and Poland. At this point, I have to state for the readers, who happen not to know the biographical details of the deceased academician, that she was of Georgian and Russian / German origin (from her mother side); her paternal grandfather was a Georgian statesman of the Russian Empire, whereas her father was Georges Zourabichvili (Георгий Зурабишвили/გიორგი ზურაბიშვილი; 1898-1944), a philosopher, economist, and taxi driver émigré, who was later considered to be collaborator with the German Occupation forces and then abducted and lost in September 1944. This means that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who was stateless (‘apatride’/’без гражданства’) for the first 21 years of her life, having been born Zourabichvili, knew the Caucasus region directly, pertinently, and authoritatively.

The Western involvement in this region had caused many wars between the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Iranians. But due to the denomination of the Armenians and the Georgians, any new Western interference would not bring spectacular results. Contrarily, Poland could attract a major intrusion, because Poles are Catholics. In this case, the country would serve as tool of a destabilization effort that would target the USSR, which had always been considered as a major opponent by the Roman Catholic Church, even more so because the atheist Soviet state stood on a territory that was never considered as duly Christianized by the Catholic popes, according to what the Third Secret of Fatima reveals (Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary).

This affair extended the otherwise simple ‘religious concern’ for Poland to an apocalyptic ‘eschatological apprehension’ for Russia. Of course, although we all had an idea about the Fatima (Portugal) apparitions back in 1917 (which had already become known to Nicholas II little time before his, and his family’s, bloody and appalling execution), none of us took them seriously as far as USSR/Russia was concerned. All the same, the serious developments, which took place in Vatican (in 1978) and in Poland (in 1979), were closely monitored and adequately highlighted to us by our head of department. 

XIV. John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Polish quagmire

Following the brief passage (26 August-28 September 1978) of the assassinated Albino Luciani Pope John Paul I from the ‘Holy See’ (Sancta Sedes / Святой Престол), the controversial election of Karol Józef Wojtyła (1920-2005) as pope John Paul II, which was not accepted as canonical and legitimate by the Sedevacantists and Archbishop Giuseppe Siri, caused vivid discussions due to his origin and because of the fact that the circumstances were bizarre for the much disputed election of a Pole as the Roman Catholic pope. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1978_papal_conclave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1978_papal_conclave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Siri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_election_of_Giuseppe_Siri_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism

It was certainly a clear indication of degradation, if not degeneration, of the Soviet elite; the ‘old guard of Kremlin’ (namely Brezhnev, Kosygin, Suslov, Ustinov, Gromyko, Chernenko and Andropov) seemed unable to grasp the gravity of the moment and react immediately, resolutely and irrevocably. The result was that, few months only after his ‘election’, John Paul II asked the permission to visit the place where he was born. In fact, the game was lost. The papal visit took place in June 1979, and at this point, I have to herewith republish several paragraphs from a recently published article, which was written by a former American Ambassador to Vatican, only to demonstrate how clearly an astute reader can read in-between the lines of the text the otherwise invisible but extant traces of the anti-Soviet conspiracy.

The title of the article reads: “Nine Days that Sparked the U.S.-Holy See Partnership and Changed the World” (By Callista L. Gingrich, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See). I herewith include two excerpts:

« …

From June 2-10, 1979, the Polish pontiff traveled across the nation of his birth, delivering more than 50 speeches, and inspiring a revolution of conscience that would transform Poland and reshape the spiritual and political landscape of the 20th century. Millions of Poles, crushed under the weight of Soviet tyranny, turned out to see the Holy Father.  On the first day of his pilgrimage, in Warsaw’s Victory Square, Pope John Paul II declared, “There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!”»

«…

Ronald Reagan was elated. At the time, he hosted a popular radio show and dedicated numerous broadcasts to John Paul II’s historic pilgrimage. “It has been a long time since we’ve seen a leader of such courage and such uncompromising dedication to simple morality,” Reagan said.

A few months later in November of 1979, the former Governor of California announced his candidacy for President of the United States.  Soon after taking office, the President requested a meeting with the Pope.

The two leaders met in Vatican City in 1982, and it was then that President Reagan asked Pope John Paul II when he thought Eastern Europe would be free from Soviet domination.  When the Pope responded, “In our lifetime,” the President took his hand and asked the Pope that together they make it happen.»

https://va usembassy gov/op-ed-nine-days-that-sparked-the-u-s-holy-see-partnership-and-changed-the-world/

The above lines show that the fall of Soviet Union is not merely a Mikhail Gorbachev affair, and that the intention to spread chaos, disorder, wars, moral depravity, and disastrous deterioration of the level of life -by means of fake promises and in the name of the nonsensical terms ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and the rest of the Western world’s evil jargon- existed already in the minds of various groups of power in Western Europe and North America.

It is noteworthy that Wojtyla’s hypocritical and malignant visit to Poland antedates the early strikes undertaken by the Solidarity ‘movement’. So, every Soviet reaction against evil initiatives undertaken by the Anti-Christian West was indeed two steps behind the developments. Thinking retrospectively, an observer may eventually suggest today that Wojciech Jaruzelski’s appointment as Chairman of the Council of Ministers (11 February 1981) should have taken place already before the Gdansk Agreement was formalized (31 August 1980); however, this is quite naïve and very wrong. Jaruzelski’s nomination should have taken place immediately after the ridiculous election of the Polish Anti-pope, and in addition, it should have resolutely and permanently blocked any perspective of papal visit to Poland. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Wa%C5%82%C4%99sa#Solidarity_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Jaruzelski#Leader_of_the_Polish_military_government

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solidarity#Early_strikes_(1980)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gda%C5%84sk_Agreement

In other words, the only way for Soviet Union to survive was to up the ante, and this was then very clear to my eyes. I was not anymore a Communist at the time; in fact, I had accepted that ideology, with the strict exception of its atheistic / materialistic part, for one year (i.e. 1975-1976), and then rejected it. However, a person with moral standards cannot possibly be a sectarian; consequently, he does not need to be a Communist in order to abhorrently disapprove of the US evildoing against the USSR. There is absolutely no Manichaeistic (or dualistic) reality in the realm of politics, states and governments, and only an idiot would believe that the US gangsters are ‘Christian’ and ‘good’, and that the atheistic governments represent the ‘focus of evil’, as per the well-known but ludicrous expression of the grotesque former US president Ronald Reagan.

What was the main mistake in the Soviet policy-making and propaganda? They did not understand that they denounced the US and the Western world in terms that were comprehensible or valid only to them (to the Soviet elite) and not to others. Quite contrarily, they should have identified the reasons for which the US and the other colonial states of the Western world were unacceptable, abhorrent, and also repugnant to others (Africans, Asiatics, Latin Americans, etc.), and they should have decried them accordingly.

The Soviet elite was making a propaganda war against the West, utilizing theories and ideologies instead of strikingly focusing on the down-to-earth reality, which would have offered them the most convincing elements of their anti-Western propaganda. In other words, the West was not contemptible because the theory of Marxism-Leninism defined so, but because numerous, real facts supported this conclusion.

To offer an example in the case of Poland, the pathetic and worthless Yuri Andropov should have identified the final target of Solidarity and he should have therefore warned the Poles that, instead of driving them back to the Christian faith, the secret guides of that execrable movement would impose the ‘freedom’ of prostitution, incest, homosexuality, fornication, and drugs throughout their country; many documentary movies from the abominable Woodstock Music and Art Fair (1969) should have been widely popularized to plainly reveal the true, pseudo-Christian, and execrable face of the lawless and valueless Western world. Even worse, the so-called Christian clergy of the West should have been accused for not campaigning against the Woodstock contamination in their own country in the first place.

But, quite unfortunately, this is the permanent error of every kind of sectarianism: you must never evaluate the ‘other’ as per your measures, standards and criteria, but according to his principles, values and virtues; and Marxism-Leninism had already become a sort of sectarianism in the USSR.

Most of my classmates were anti-Soviet, hawkish idiots, who confused Political Science with politics, and interstate relations with hypocritical and silly propaganda.

It is certainly to the credit of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse that she never allowed the enthusiastic anti-Russianism of our German, American and Polish classmates to affect our judgment and evaluation of the overall situation; it was clear that she was consciously educating future ambassadors, statesmen and diplomats, who would have to take into consideration the weight of History, many other parameters, and the bilateral relations in depth in order to compose. This standpoint was also obvious in her books; she was even criticized for not being an outspoken negator of the USSR. The following book review of one of her earlier published books is an example:  

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, L’Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline, 1917-1953 [compte-rendu] sem-linkGeorges Mond

https://www.persee.fr/doc/receo_0035-1415_1974_num_5_4_1230

Immediately after the election of Ronald Reagan (4 November 1980), it was very clear to her that the détente was over, and this was what our professor immediately conveyed to us. The news shocked many of our classmates, who thought that this situation would last for long, whereas others were jubilant; but I was frozenly indifferent. From the heights of Sargonid Assyria or Nabonid Babylonia, which constituted my main field of specialization, my vivid concern, and my basic criteria, every Reagan and every Brezhnev looked to me as an insignificant mosquito. My good professor had actually reconfirmed my inclination repeatedly; if she forced herself to see things from distance, why shouldn’t I do the same?

About:

https://herzenlib.ru/main/news/detail.php?ID=32247&special_version=Y

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Разрядка_международной_напряжённости

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tente

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/detente

The Decade of Détente

https://nversia.ru/news/den-v-istorii-zarozhdenie-ispanskoy-inkvizicii-i-razryadka-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha/

XV. Viewpoint from the Mount Elbrus

‘Petite fille du Caucase’ (granddaughter of Caucasus), Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was always able to take the distance and observe from far. Physically, she was in Paris; but her academic and intellectual outpost was at the peak of Elbrus. She was able to discern crucial issues and unnoticed dimensions that no other specialists were able to timely identify – let alone incorporate in their conclusions. The viewpoint from the peak of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus range of mountains must be very serene. The late academician was confident that, if they wanted, Georgians, Azeris, Armenians and other Caucasus nations could have -all- lived peacefully within one multi-ethnic state instead of mercilessly killing one another.

This was apparently a rightful conclusion, if one takes into consideration the Special Transcaucasian Committee (9 March 1917), the Transcaucasian Commissariat (11 November 1917), the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (22 April – 28 May 1918), and all the events that took place before the Ottoman and the German involvement in the region. About:

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/comme-personne/helene-carrere-d-encausse-petite-fille-du-caucase-devenue-secretaire-perpetuel-de-l-academie-francaise-6973550

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Elbrus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Transcaucasian_Committee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcaucasian_Commissariat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcaucasian_Democratic_Federative_Republic

The title of a tour schedule organized by the Connaissance & Partage Association reads ‘Cocasse Caucase’; echoing the name of the mountain, this adjective means ‘funny’ in French. But Caucasus is not funny. It is serious, tense, intense, and grave; and so was the presence of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: sober, terse and austere. She was able to take her colleagues and assistants to a higher level of understanding, widen the horizons of her readers, and enrich the knowledge of her students with valuable data that they would need considerable time and a certain dose of luck to eventually find. About: https://www.connaissanceetpartage.net/new-blog/2020/11/26/caucasse

She was much demanded in politics (member of the European Parliament for the period 1994-1999), science (elected to seat 14 of the Académie Française, one of the five sections of the celebrated Institut de France on 13th December 1990; voted for the position of Permanent Secretary on 21 October 1999), and public debates (with an extraordinary record of interviews and participation in TV programs), but she always found the time to come up with new, outstanding books, groundbreaking lectures, and pertinent comments about socio-political, linguistic, bilateral and international affairs.

Despite her undeniable Georgian origin (her cousin being Salome Zourabichvili, the incumbent President of Georgia), and notwithstanding her evident congruence with the Russian mindset and mentality, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was indeed a Parisian original. Although she became French only in 1950 at the age of 21, she dedicated herself to the vocation of bringing her own country and that of her ancestors together – and with spectacular success.

– Condolences by President Salome Zourabichvili on the Twitter –

«A la peine du départ de ma cousine germaine se mêle la fierté de son exemple. Historienne de renommée internationale, qui fut également mon professeur à Sciences Po. Femme d’avant garde qui aura, du haut de la Coupole, démontré à tant de jeunes filles que tout leur est possible».

A la peine du départ de ma cousine germaine se mêle la fierté de son exemple. Historienne de renommée internationale, qui fut également mon professeur à Sciences Po. Femme d’avant garde qui aura, du haut de la Coupole, démontré à tant de jeunes filles que tout leur est possible.

— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) August 6, 2023

«Issues d’une famille géorgienne ayant combatttu et fui le totalitarisme soviétique, nous avions en héritage une même reconnaissance envers la France et une même conviction européenne qui porta l’une au Parlement européen et l’autre à la Présidence de la Géorgie».

Issues d’une famille géorgienne ayant combatttu et fui le totalitarisme soviétique, nous avions en heéitage une meme reconnaissance envers la France et une même conviction européenne qui porta l’une au Parlement européen et l’autre à la Présidence de la Géorgie.

— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) August 6, 2023

———————————————————————

With Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, one was certain that he would learn the truth about the essential of a topic. She was committed to displaying raw material, to making all the data available to the students, and to evaluating the synthesis that we were able to make. Her lies -or to put it better her untruths- concerned basically the form of the narrative or the description of a situation. But it was easy for a shrewd student to discover that this was rather her break time consumed in literary description and not her ordinary, scrupulous work of academic analysis.

To underscore the apparent lack of reassessments, amendments and rearrangements in the Soviet Union that were badly needed for the country’s survival, she used to often speak about «les septuagénaires et les octogénaires», who ruled the world’s leading communist state. The underlying fact was correct indeed; in many aspects Soviet Union was almost ‘archaic’. But the statement itself was deceitful; in 1980, Brezhnev was 74 years old, Suslov 78, Gromyko 71, Chernenko 69, and Andropov 66. But why on earth should the age of the ruling elite of the USSR be truly a matter of concern, when Ronald Reagan was 69, François Mitterrand 64, James Callaghan 68, and Willy Brandt 67? Of course, our professor certainly recalled that Charles de Gaulle returned to power in France (in 1958) at the age of 68 and served as president until 1969 (when 79), Konrad Adenauer was in office until 1963 (when 87), whereas Alcide De Gasperi was prime minister until 1953 (when 72). Furthermore, Winston Churchill served as prime minister until 1955 (when 81), Amintore Fanfani was appointed as prime minister in 1982 (for a fourth time) at the age of 74. However, by duly utilizing the age of the Soviet rulers, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was trying to basically impress young audience.

Serving as adviser to many presidents, the granddaughter of Caucasus could do and actually did many good things for the benefit of the French-Russian relations and to the advantage of France; European Union (then ‘European Communities’) could also capitalize thereon. As she was sought after by the French political elite, she did her best in every sense, but she did not take any political decision as she was never a minister, prime minister or president. And this was the problem for France; because to mostly benefit from her advice, understanding, and perspective, the various elected governments and presidents of France should have taken very different decisions on many other topics, which would affect and also be affected by the Franco-Russian relationship.

For France and Europe, it is as simple as that: you cannot possibly imagine having good relations and strong partnership with Russia as long as you don’t follow the example of Charles de Gaulle against UK, NATO and the US. And it is so, either we live in 1965 or in 2023.

No French president could possibly utilize Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s pertinent advice, as long as he had not taken in advance a long series of measures to restore continental (or if you prefer ‘landmass’) concord and integration and to keep the various maritime powers out of Eurasia. This is the task of Russia/USSR to do, as far as Russian/Soviet territory is concerned; similarly, this is the imperative duty for France, Germany, China, India, Iran, Turkey, Italy, Spain and several other countries to carry out respectively. But to do this, the French political class should first uproot the parasitic weeds and remove the toxic pro-UK, pro-US and pro-NATO elements by any possible means. There are no foreign policy perspectives before the clearance of internal enemies. All the problems that France faces now are due to the absurd and calamitous way the country was governed after 1969, and more particularly after 1981. But an erudite academician and a formidable connoisseur is not a determined statesman.

XVI. The European convictions and the pragmatism of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse

I got my DEA (Diplôme d’études approfondies) in July 1981; the extra part of studies that I wanted to add to my Orientalist formation was completed, and after 3 years of studies in Paris, I moved to London, only to continue next year to Brussels and then to Muenster. Due to Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, many of my convictions were fully confirmed, my horizons greatly broadened, and my perception of the Afro-Eurasiatic continental unity finally born. Only after 1981, I started realizing that borders mean truly nothing; this definitely proved to be indispensable for my life and explorations in the following years, when I moved to the Orient.

The formation that was given to all of us was certainly Western, but thanks to my Orientalist background and my explorations in Eastern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and other countries, I gradually converted it to the new terms and codes of comprehension that I was then creating in order to better assess the objects of my researches. The education that all my professors in Greece, France, England, Belgium and Germany gave to me and to all of my classmates was good but only up to a certain extent; I confirmed my opinion in Israel. I did the same in Syria and Iraq where I realized that the education given to locals, who had studied in Europe, was in reality ‘bon pour l’Orient’, i.e. a unilateral viewpoint that served the interests of few states in Western Europe, and those of their academic and intellectual elites.

But this education was too little or too erroneous for someone, who intended to objectively assess and comprehend the human genius in its entirety, the history of Mankind in its originality and the living spirit of Man in its integrity. After several years of trouble, self-contradictory opinions, and premature judgments, some time in the late 1980s, while in Iran, I realized that ultimately the academic education offered in Western Europe was ‘bon pour l’Occident’ – only!

It is not a matter of deliberate falsehood, but of partly examination of the topic; having no spherical perspective on a research topic, you condemn yourself in the position of a unilateral observer, who has no multiple viewpoints on his study subject. You cannot possibly evaluate correctly anything if you happen to view it as a parameter of your own interests. The French-Russian relationship has to be viewed from Moscow’s standpoint and from Paris’ point of view. If you don’t view this topic or any other issue in this manner and you apply a one-viewpoint approach to your study, your conclusions will be wrong, because simply you will have become, even without understanding it, part of the problem.

I kept reading books and interviews of my late professor, while living in different countries in Asia and Africa; with the advent of the Internet, I also had the chance to watch many of her speeches and lectures. She certainly gave a new dimension to her career by ‘forgetting’ Soviet Union and delving into the Russian past – well, mainly the 18th and the 19th centuries. But she always reproduced the same pattern that could not allow her to go beyond the level of ‘borders’.

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s Russia is a truthful, genuine Russia that exists only for the interests of the French vision of this world! Is that an extraordinary assessment of mine? Not at all! Read some paragraphs from her books or watch some of her online interviews! The same approach is everywhere: during five centuries, the French-Russian relations existed only for France to tame and civilize Russia! After the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, speaking to a journalist about Sergey Lavrov, she described him as ‘very civilized’! Oh! Really?

– Who provided her with a special counter, a civilo-meter if you want, so that she measures every now and then the degree of civilization of the Russians and the others?    

This incredible arrogance and absurd degree of Franco-centrism or Euro-centrism unfortunately does not constitute a personal issue of the deceased academician. It is an inherent part of the Western European education and it can be attested over the past centuries in all the major colonial countries. The personal problem of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is that her multilingual and multicultural past, family traditions, culture and knowledge proved to be weak opposite her overwhelming (I should say ‘excessive’) degree of Francization. Despite her undeniable advantages and in-depth knowledge, she functioned like a clerical assistant or a high functionary of the state administration. This partiality reduced her effectiveness and limited her pragmatism.

Although she repeatedly stated that the world decisions are not taken any more in Europe or the West world, which is very correct and very exact, she failed to attack and destroy the delusions of all those who undeservedly accused her (and Hubert Védrine) for anti-Americanism. This is not a joke! Read here the typical nonsense or the folly that is being published in France and in other European countries to get an idea:

La pieuvre. Pourquoi le régime de Poutine doit être défait

https://www.cairn.info/revue-esprit-2023-4-page-XV.htm?contenu=resume

An even worse sample of absurd disinformation you can find here:

Despite the fact that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse repeatedly admitted in her interviews that it is up to Moscow to decide where Russia belongs, i.e. either in Asia (with China, India, Iran, etc.) or in Europe (with the ‘civilized world’!), she failed to explain to her compatriots three crucial topics:

First, if the entire political-academic-intellectual establishment in Moscow finally comprehends that Russia has always been an Oriental state, this will be the first defeat of a multilateral Western European scheme systematically perpetrated against Russia for no less than 550 years by means of gradual Occidentalization, cultural identity elimination, and socio-economic subordination.

Second, Russia has always been an Oriental state, either this reality was perceived as such by all parts of the Russian Imperial, Soviet and Republican elites or not.

Third, if the entire Eurasiatic alliance, Russia included, appears as a coherently established organization at the international level in the years ahead, the European Union, France included, will have to either adhere to the new superpower or simply disintegrate.

Of course, I am fully conscious of what my late professor’s answer would have been, had I had the chance to discuss with her this topic any time recently! She would find a typical article produced by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and she would respond to me, saying:

– This is not what I only describe! This is what the Russians say about themselves in the first place!

And she would have been right! But I never pretended that this situation concerned only her approach. The problem exists also in the Russian perception of themselves, after many centuries of Western interference and compact effort to westernize Russia. Example (dating back to 2016s):

https://russiaeu.ru/en/news/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov%E2%80%99s-article-russia%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-historical-background

But, again, I have to admit that these major issues demand statesmanship decision and do not depend on academic advice; in addition, as leading historian and political scientist, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse offered either in-depth presentation of the past or pragmatic evaluation of current circumstances. However, she never attempted to spearhead dramatic changes at the international level; in this regard, she was quite different from her famous ‘heroine’, Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Александра Михайловна Коллонтай; 1872-1952), to whom she dedicated her last research and book. About:

https://www.fayard.fr/histoire/alexandra-kollontai-9782213721248s

Former French President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac and Helene Carrere-d’Encausse

State Banquet at the palace of Elysee. Helene Carrere d ‘Encausse and the president Chirac in Paris, France on November 20, 2006

Jean-Marie Rouart, Valery Giscard D’Estaing and Helene Carrere d’Encausse in Paris, France on December 16, 2004

XVII. The limits of historiography: a History of leaders and governance or a History of peoples and culture?

Great historian is not the one who writes many books and lengthy articles or comes up with the publication of new textual sources, fresh interpretations, resourceful conceptualizations, inventive contextualization of historical events and processes, groundbreaking approaches, and valuable rectifications of earlier errors, distortions, omissions and oversights; great historian is the one whose publications also offer the chance to discuss general issues of History in the light of the superb manner he/she reconstructs and represents a moment of the past throughout one of his/her texts.

Historiography is not History; it is merely a reconstruction, namely a representation of facts, circumstances, conditions, situations or even processes and developments over a certain span of time. Either you write one day or one millennium after a battle, what you write is never ‘History’; it is historiography. Of course, if you share a life experience as a real testimony or if you rely on authoritative documentation and key sources, writing little time after an event happened, your text will be considered as a ‘historical source’, whereas if you examine the historical sources about an event, your text will be classified as ‘bibliography’. However, this is a minor differentiation; the major distinction is between History and historiography; History is exclusively what happened. Even the Annals of Sargon II of Assyria or Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico constitute ‘historiography’, not History.

But by means of a forceful manner of reconstruction of the historical past (or of representation of the historical events and processes) a great historian impacts other historians who may even be specializing in other fields of History. This is due to the fact that, after the adequate completion of the documentation and the comprehension processes, the reconstruction of the data involves intellectual effort, mental endeavor, and a great deal of imagination, more particularly in the identification of data interconnection.

Assessing how each piece of data is (or may be) interconnected with another is a work that can be done by every historian; but there is an enormous difference in this regard, due to the fact that there are scholars, who proceeding mechanically end up writing a dead narrative, and others, who -ingeniously feeling human life in all the pieces of data that they have collected- manage to come up with a most vivacious narrative that fully reflects the events. After all and put in few words, History is inherent and integral part of Life. But only the great historians reach this level of reconstruction. And Hélène Carrère d’Encausse repeatedly demonstrated that she was feeling the life of the environment that she reconstructed in her books. After all, it is the charisma of the great historians to know very well where the limits stand; and by this, I mean the invisible boundaries between historiography and literature.   

Reading Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s books, one gets the impression that she wrote a History made by leaders, administrations, elites, structures of governance, and series of successive decisions that impacted one another, always bringing the respective consequences. And this is true! My late professor viewed History mostly as a matter of states and ‘political power’; she kept using the term even when speaking about Soviet Union whereas there was no politics at all in that country, due to the fact that the dictatorship of proletariat -in and by itself- is the living rejection of politics. She was at the antipodes of the renowned Soviet-Russian historian Lev Gumilev (Лев Николаевич Гумилёв; 1912-1992), who was her senior by 17 years.

Strong advocate of Eurasianism, theoretician of the ethnogenesis phenomenon, great conceptual thinker who invented the concept of passionarity, adept of historiosophy, the son of Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova portrayed History in an entirely different manner, giving the impression that History is composed by societies of people with venerated traditions, moral values, folk tales, narrative history, age-old habits, heroic legends, distinct idiosyncrasy, traditional sports, vivid spirituality, daily expression of piety, strong feeling of sacredness, rich material culture, genuine sense of communality, behavioral authenticity, imaginative impulse, unquestionable equality among the society members, strong attachment to their identity, adamant respect for their integrity, unconditional rejection of any corrupt attitude, concept or idea, and uncompromising commitment to community/society preservation.

In this case, there are no ‘leaders’; there is no bureaucracy; the administrative affairs are fast expedited; any notion of state is worthless or evil; and the male members of the community meet to decide on equal basis about every matter. They all fight together, they all migrate together, and they all resettle together. No bravery can possibly qualify for preferential treatment or ‘leadership’, because bravery is the common task for all men, and there is no exception in this regard. On the other hand, all the heroic deeds are immortalized as legends in the oral culture, which is far more valued than worthless written paperwork that can contain lies to confuse posterior generations. This is a History of peoples and culture, because for the historian, who has this vision of the historical developments, even in cases of kingdoms, empires, temples, emperors and high priests, it is culture and civilization that impact their decision-making and not vice versa.

The two schools are irreconcilable like oil and water; however there is a determinate distinction, which is intrinsic to the two diametrically opposed geostrategic models. There cannot be triumphant Eurasianism without a History of peoples and culture.  

There cannot be effective Atlanticism without History of leaders and governance. However, all people know that ‘Atlantis’ sank every time; it is irrevocably inevitable.

Despite her attachment to France, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse realized this factor. That is why she tried to preserve the invisible bridges between Paris and Moscow; with all her intellectual force and outstanding eloquence.

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Download the Obituary in PDF:

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Download the Obituary in Word doc.:

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Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’

Russia, Ukraine and the World-I: ‘Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées’

Russian Special Operation in Ukraine: One Year after – 24 February 2023

Россия, Украина и мир-I: «Москва, равнины Украины и Елисейские поля»

Российская спецоперация в Украине: год спустя – 24 февраля 2023 г.

Содержание

I- Историческая справка

II- Западный колониализм против России: проекция фальшивых концепций и исторической лжи на российские элиты

III- Западный уклон: европеизация России как дерусификация

IV- Где заканчивается заблуждение европейской России?

V- Ложная идентичность для россиян означает поражение в большой игре (в Войне теней)

VI- Падение Романовых: из-за ложной концепции «России как европейской империи»

Contents

I- The Historical Background

II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites

III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification

IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?

V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game

VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’

Before almost 60 years, a famous French song offered the most convincing, artistic yet not academic, proof of the indivisibility that characterizes Moscow and the plains of Ukraine; it was the famous hit ‘Nathalie’ performed by Gilbert Bécaud (1964). The verses described the case of a flirt between a male French tourist and a female Russian guide.

So legendary this song became, thus breaking the ice of the aptly stage-managed Cold War (just like France under Charles de Gaulle had superbly withdrawn from the otherwise useless NATO ‘alliance’ one year earlier: on the 21st July 1963) that the famous but purely hypothetical Café Pouchkine (café Pushkin), mentioned in the song’s verses as a meeting point for the French tourist and Nathalie, became real in 1999 (Ресторан «Кафе Пушкинъ»).

Dans la salle des Conférences, de gauche à droite, Messieurs Couve de Murville, Brejnev, le général de Gaulle et Monsieur Podgorny, à Moscou, URSS le 22 juin 1966

General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (R) and French President George Pompidou at the airport.

Actually, it was there that Chirac encountered Putin and created a political friendship that marked the 2000s.

About:

https://kalinareynier.wixsite.com/articles-datcha/post/2015/09/29/nathalie-au-caf%C3%A9-pouchkine

https://kalinareynier.wixsite.com/articles-datcha/post/2019/12/03/le-caf%C3%A9-pouchkine-de-la-fiction-%C3%A0-la-r%C3%A9alit%C3%A9

https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/entre-chirac-et-poutine-une-estime-reciproque-30-09-2019-8162751.php

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кафе_Пушкинъ

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Pouchkine

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_(chanson)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathalie_(song)

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Деланоэ,_Пьер

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Delano%C3%AB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Delano%C3%AB

https://fr.rbth.com/lifestyle/83582-jacques-chirac-liens-russie

Gilbert Bécaud, Nathalie – Жильбер Беко, Натали

https://ok.ru/video/440517200493

Ресторан «КафеПушкинъ» – Café Pouchkine – Café Pushkin

And it is this song that makes state of the geographical and historical unity that exists between the Red Square and the plains of Ukraine; when the verses describe the bond between the French tourist and Nathalie, the respective backgrounds are narrated in order to offer a spectacular impression of the two lands. In this metaphor, the French tourist is represented by the illustrious Champs-Élysées Avenue in Paris, whereas Moscow and the plains of Ukraine speak for Nathalie.

“Moscou, les plaines d’Ukraine et les Champs-Élysées, οn à tout melangé et l’on à chanté” (Moscow, the plains of Ukraine, and the Champs Elysees; we got them all mixed up and we sang).

I- The Historical Background

Now, this song appears to be the lost ruin of a remote past; however, this impression is entirely false, being due to the excessive propaganda made as regards this subject. Ignorant rascals promoted to ‘authors’ or ‘intellectuals’, criminal liars masqueraded as ‘journalists’ or ‘geopolitical experts’ produced an enormous volume of nonsensical trashy literature in support of the undeniable UK-US-NATO involvement in the purely Russian land named Ukraine.

If Ukraine consists today in the greatest threat to worldwide peace, this is due to the lack of proper reaction against the incessant evildoing, which started as early as the 1990s. In fact, many people are presently able to fathom that the times of Adenauer and de Gaulle are definitely bygone for Europe; this is due to numerous grave mistakes which were made by the rather mean and apparently incompetent people who succeeded these great statesmen. That is why the assessment of what happened in Ukraine is rather an effort of meditation à la recherche du temps perdu (in search of the lost time/в поисках утраченного времени).  

The problem with the examination of the root causes of the present Ukrainian quagmire is the fact that, if we widen the context of our search, the origin of the trouble appears to be even older. Then, the beginning of the ordeal goes back to the time of Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Nicholas II Romanov, and Alexander II or rather Peter I (the Great), the boyar (aristocrat) Vasily Golitsyn (1643-1714; Василий Васильевич Голицын) and the Treaty or Perpetual Peace (Вечный мир; 1686), when Russia recovered Kiev from Poland.

Vasily Golitsyn

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Perpetual_Peace_(1686)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Golitsyn_(1643)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Polish_War_(1654%E2%80%931667)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_of_Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov

Similarly, we can go back in time incessantly transposing the problem; we can reach the time of Michael of Russia (Михаил Фёдорович Романов; 1596-1645), Filaret (Feodor Nikitich Romanov/ Фёдор Никитич Романов; 1553-1633), Boris Godunov (Борис Фёдорович Годунов; 1552-1605), Nikita Romanovich (Никита Романович; 1522-1586), Ivan IV Vasilyevich (known as The Terrible/Иван Васильевич Грозный; 1530-1584), Ivan III of Moscow (Иван III Васильевич; 1440-1505) who got married with Zoe (renamed Sophia Palaiologina/Софья фоминична Палеолог;  1449-1503), the niece of the last Eastern Roman Emperor with the blessings of the great enemy of Orthodox Christianity, the Pope Paul II.

Sophia Palaiologina

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_of_Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Filaret_of_Moscow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Godunov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Romanovich_Zakharyin-Yuriev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_III_of_Moscow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Palaiologina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Paul_II

However, this method is futile; even if we go back to the time of the so-called Vasily I of Moscow, who was merely a prisoner of the Emperor Tokhtamysh, the ruler of the Blue and White Hordes (Тухтамыш/Tuqtamış, توقتمش; 1342-1406), when Moscow (or Muscovy) was merely a Tatar village, if we refer to the days of Dmitry Donskoy (Дмитрий Иванович Донской; 1350-1389) and if we direct attention to  the period of Daniil Aleksandrovich (Даниил Александрович; 1261-1303), the youngest son of Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (Александр Ярославич Невский; 1221-1263) ‘prince of Kiev’, we consistently encounter scarce documentation, later sources, excessive postulation, false interpretation, intentional distortion, concealment of intentions and facts, undeniable destruction of the material record, sectarian historiography, biased narratives, and -in one word- complete reconstruction of the historical evolution.

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_I_of_Moscow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokhtamysh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Donskoy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_of_Moscow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Nevsky

Vasily I of Moscow (Василий I Дмитриевич) and Sophia Palaiologina represented on the vestment (sakkos) of Photius (14th c.–1431), metropolitan of Kiev (in Moscow)

The Emperor of the Blue and White Hordes Tokhtamysh as represented in a miniature of the Chronicle of Ivan the Terrible

Tamerlane advancing against Tokhtamysh

But there was no Ukraine at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom; no land, no country, no people and no language of ‘Ukraine’. In fact, any person well versed in Slavic and Russian linguistics knows that this word originates from the term ‘krai’, which denotes basically an administrative division in Modern Russian. Present in most Slavic languages, ‘krai’ means ‘edge’, ‘territory’ or ‘region’; in Czech, it is okraj.

‘Ukraina’ means then the border areas or the confine / periphery of a land.  

https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/край

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krai

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krais_of_the_Russian_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krais_of_Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine

There were no Ukrainians at the time of the Kievan Rus kingdom (882-1240) for a very good reason: there were no ‘Russians’ properly speaking. The amalgamated populations of the rather tiny state varied; they were basically Turanian, Slavic, Teutonic (: German) and Scandinavian. The entirely fake History of Eastern Europe, as it was fabricated by Western European and North American universities over the past 200-300 years, involves a great number of disinformation tools. The three main subjects that the colonial forgers of England, France and America worked laboriously to effectively conceal are the following:

– the overwhelming presence of Turanian peoples in Eastern Europe eclipses by far the existence of nomads and settlers of other origin;

– the early Slavic populations (Saqaliba) were considered by all historical Islamic authors as integral part of the Turanian nations;

– the diffusion of Islam in the wider region of today’s Ukraine and European provinces of Russia antedates the propagation of Christianity in the same lands; and

– the fallacy of Europe as a continent.   

Kubrat’s Bulgaria, ca. 650 CE

The Bulgarians divided by the Khazars, 9th c.

Kimek–Kipchak confederation

Kievan Rus was a small multi-ethnic Christian state with significant Turanian population

Volga Bulgaria was an enormous Eastern European Turanian kingdom that accepted Islam long before the Kievan Rus adopted Eastern Roman Christianity.

With respect to the aforementioned three circles of topics, numerous academic terms have often been deliberately used in order to distort the truth in front of the eyes of non-specialized readership. Even worse, scores of scrupulously forged, fake maps have also been produced and they are abundant in books, scholarly reviews, mass media, and the Internet, whereas in many cases, simply they are absent, because they gravely disturb the fabricated myths and the vicious lies that Western Europe’s criminal academics and disreputable universities intend to present as ‘History’. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Location_of_Kyivan_Rus.png

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Muromian-map.png

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:East_Slavic_tribes_peoples_8th_9th_century.jpg

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#/media/File:Varangian_routes.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia org/wiki/Volga_Bulgaria#/media/File:Volga-Bulgaria.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba

II- Western Colonialism against Russia: Projection of Fake Concepts and Historical Falsehood onto Russian Elites

The aforementioned reality heavily impacts all forces, regimes and governments, scholars and journalists involved in the present conflict. This is so because, before they became active parts in the ongoing military confrontation, they were entirely formed educationally-intellectually-academically-culturally-ideologically by means of an enormous amount of forged concepts and historical distortions (i.e. of so-called ‘myths’) that they unconsciously accepted and calamitously believed and which led them to the decisions and the acts that caused the Ukrainian quagmire. In other words, the Western anti-Russian racism and the intention of the Western colonial centers to effectively colonize Russia existed since the late 15th and the 16th centuries; simply this attempt would not be materialized at the military level but otherwise.

Even more troublesome is the fact that these destructive concepts and distortions are not only a matter of our time, but also of the historical past (the last 500-570 years). In other words, this affair concerned many generations of Russians, who lived and acted, decided and performed under the impact of concepts forged and distortions made by Western European and North American scholars, diplomats, statesmen, agents and intellectuals. I don’t mention the Ukrainians at all here, because simply they are Russians, either they like it or not; in addition, the negation of the Russian identity of the populations that inhabit the plains of Ukraine is the last propagated Western fallacy and crime.

The victims of the said propaganda can easily understand the veracity of my previous statement, if they search in every historical book, every encyclopedia, every scholarly publication, every review, magazine and newspaper published before 1910 worldwide in order to find the term “Ukrainian nation” or “nation of Ukraine”; after a long effort, they will fail, because simply there was never an Ukrainian nation and not one government accepted such a nonsense before 1910. But this is another issue.

Speaking about generations of Russians confused and deceived by Western lies and historical falsehood, I imply mainly that the ‘myths’ of yesterday generated the wrong decision-making of today, and the misperceptions of today trigger the mistakes of tomorrow. There has therefore been a chain of lies (diffused by the Western powers and believed in Russia) and mistakes (made by the Imperial, Soviet and Republican establishments) that has lasted for about five (5) centuries. In fact, it antedates the Romanov dynasty and it foregoes the birth of Ivan IV the Terrible.

Ivan IV the Terrible: an Asiatic monarch fluent in Turkic languages

Even the way 19th c. Russian painters viewed their past fully demonstrates that they knew that their identity was Asiatic and Oriental, i.e. not Western and not European; Pyotr Korovin’s painting (1890) depicts Ivan IV in Kazan.

This topic is not easily identified, let alone understood, by today’s Russian academic, educational, intellectual and political establishment. And it constituted always an unknown and unscrutinized point that led to divisions, defeats, troubles or -even worse- failures to exploit splendid opportunities. So serious it is that it affects the Russians’ perception of their true national and imperial identity. Why? Because this was the foremost target of the pernicious Western colonial establishments as regards Russia.

All these distortions and falsifications undertaken by the major centers of power in Western Europe (Rome, Paris and London) have indeed a common denominator; this was the Western colonialism, namely the conquest of the world, and the imposition of vicious and evil intellectual, pseudo-religious, academic, educational, scientific and sociopolitical establishments, which totally dismantle and utterly destroy the local culture and civilization, faith and spirituality, traditions and behavioral systems (the way of life) wherever it is spread. As this reproach hinges on the criminal acts of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the English that are known as the main colonial powers, many will react pretending that Muscovy/Russia was never colonized.

This is exactly what Russians never paid attention at! In fact, what I state consists in a very subtle form of intellectual, academic, artistic, educational, scientific, ideological, socio-behavioral and imperial/political colonialism. In fact, the Western colonial establishments composed myths and elaborated falsifications that they subsequently projected onto the Russians without them realizing the trap, because they were nominally independent and eventually a militarily formidable state. The reason for this enduring but unnoticed development is double:

– first, the trap appeared as a propulsion, a praise, and a glorification of Russia; and

– second, it was linked with Russia’s apparent modernization, consolidation and fortification.

III- Western Bias: Russia’s Europeanization as De-Russification

In fact, the Western colonial establishments diffused numerous false concepts and scores of historical falsification which would drastically incapacitate the Russian state (Росийская держава/ Rossiskaya derzhava) from making most of its chances to prevail worldwide as a Christian Orthodox Oriental state inhabited mainly by Asiatic and Turanian peoples. Initially, the Western effort took the form of ‘taming’ or (even more provocatively) ‘civilizing’ the supposedly brutal Russians; in other words, they attempted to gradually ‘Europeanize’ Russia, but in this case there are four critical parameters, namely

– first, 17th c. ‘Europe’ was a nebulous, false, and truly revisionist concept that negated the true historical evolution from the Scythian, Cimmerian, Celtic, Punic and Roman Antiquity down to the Fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494);

– second, the concept of ‘Europe’ was then overwhelmingly rejected by the outright majority of the European nations, irrespective of ethnic origin, language, religion (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism), and state;

– third, in reality, this bogus-concept was essentially the method of few Western European powers to colonize the Germans, the Russians, and the numerous other nations of Eastern Europe, by destroying their cultures, traditions and faiths and by projecting onto them the vicious and evil falsehood (and version of bogus-historical narrative) that Rome, Paris and London had fabricated in straightforward denial of their Christian past; and

– fourth, cultural Europeanization was aptly confused with scientific-technological modernization, which was apparently sought after by Russian monarchs, who were willing to consolidate their vast, apparently Oriental and Asiatic, empire.

Renaissance and all the subsequent Western European intellectual movements are the epitome of worldwide revisionism or anti-historical revanchism. However, to fully comprehend the intertwined nature of Renaissance and Colonialism, one has to realize that the first to be colonized were the colonial countries themselves, namely Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England; this is valid in the sense that these lands were the first to succumb to the evil and inhuman elites that masterminded, concocted and later spread the spiritual disease of the Renaissance, thus taking hold of the local power due to their schemes (initiating kings, noblemen and priests into evil religious orders).

Confusing modernization with Europeanization, Peter I helped Europeans colonize his own country, thinking that this torturous deformation of Russia’s identity, nature and character could ever be beneficial.

Pyotr Potyomkin: an entirely Oriental and Asiatic, Russian diplomat and statesman

When it comes to Russia’s enduring Europeanization, which proved to be absolutely calamitous for all Russians and for the Russian state’s natural interests, the kingdom of France played a great role, already before Peter I the Great (Пётр I/Пётр I Алексеевич; 1672-1725). From the days of Jacques Margaret (1565-1619), Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) and Pyotr Potyomkin (also spelled Potemkin; Пётр Ива́нович Потёмкин; 1617-1700 / distant relative of Grigory Potemkin, the 18th c. statesman in whose honor was named the early 20th c. Battleship Potemkin), dense series of cultural, intellectual and imperial exchanges started taking place.

First, travelers wrote about Russia, pejoratively depicting the country and the people as purely ‘backward’; simply because corruption, faithlessness, evilness, debauchery and lawlessness did not have any place in the Russian Empire, and the local morals had not softened as in Western Europe, Russia appeared to those Western Europeans as ‘uncivilized’. Then, historians and linguists, philologists and historians of art started therefore writing about the vast empire, which they wanted to represent as they wished it to be, and not as it truly was. Furthermore, scores of Italian architects were dispatched to Russia, whereas countless German princesses married Russian noblemen and princes only to corrupt the land from the top to the bottom. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Margeret

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Auguste_de_Thou

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Potemkin

http://www.saint-petersburg.com/famous-people/great-italians/

In fact, what even today’s Russians seem to easily forget is that, due to the need of modernization, several Russian czars opened the way to Europeanization, which was tantamount to utter de-Russification. Catherine II {1729-1796; Екатерина II; born as German princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst / София Августа Фредерика фон Анхальт-Цербст-Дорнбург (Романова)} had to appear at times in the Russian national costume (also involving veil) and at times in her Western dresses. About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Екатерина_II

The true Catherine II: a Western libertarian

Catherine II masqueraded as Russian

IV- Where does the Fallacy of European Russia End?

It caused an undeniably deep division inside the Russian Empire, because the Christian priests, monks and laymen reacted to what they considered rather as Satanization of Holy Russia. If I expanded on the topic, it is due to the fact that the aforementioned situation still today affects Russia directly. For instance, when Putin speaks positively about Peter the Great, this constitutes in fact an oxymoron, because at the same time, the Russian president opposes Russia’s Europeanization today. But this is the whole problem: in fact, Peter ‘the Great’ (?), in his time, was acting in the exactly opposite direction from that of Russia’s incumbent president.    

I fully support President Putin’s efforts to block the spread of Western lawlessness, inhumanity, corruption and putrefaction in Russia; more importantly, the outright majority of the Russians today support him in this effort, irrespective of faith, ethnic origin, language, and culture. However, the truth is that Peter I acted differently (and very mistakenly as per my evaluation), willing to oppose and diminish the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian education and culture. So, I have to admit that Ivan the Terrible, Tamerlane, Stalin or even Genghis Khan are far more suitable prototypes and heroes for today’s Russia in the great national effort to defend the land from the evil intentions of the criminals who rule the West. Then, the fact that this discrepancy obviously exists today only jeopardizes Russia’s national interests and clarity as regards the national identity of the great country.

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The greatest Russians of all times: Genghis Khan (above), Timur/Tamerlane (middle) and Stalin (below)

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In a way, it would make sense if Russia’s liberal opposition, which consists in a shame and a disgrace for all Russians, expanded much on Peter I as the model. If they want to introduce in Russia today the Western European and North American decadence, depravity and decay, thinking that this is ‘modernization’, it is Peter I who took similar measures before 300 years openly supporting the presence and spread of Freemasonic lodges in his empire; but this development had negative impact on Russia’s pledge to the Holy Rus, the Kievan kingdom. About:

Putin compares modern-day Russia to the times of Peter the Great on tsar’s 350th anniversary

https://www.academia.edu/695748/Freemasonry_and_the_Occult_at_the_Court_of_Peter_the_Great

https://www.academia.edu/449346/A_Mason_Tsar_Freemasonry_and_Fraternalism_at_the_Court_of_Peter_the_Great

This is a nonsensical Western propaganda for idiots:

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/putin-endangers-russias-future-just-his-hero-peter-great-did

The scrupulously elaborated and systematically projected onto all the successive Russian establishments (Imperial, Soviet and Republican) concept of Russia as a European nation is the Western countries’ most fallacious distortion and most pathetic falsity about the vast country. It repeatedly damaged gravely the national interests of Russia. As a forgery, it helps identify the real intentions of Russia’s permanent enemies; to them, Russia would then be ‘good’ if limited in a portion of European Russia’s territory, let’s say in the triangle St Petersburg, Volgograd and Nizhny Novgorod, thus sending Moscow back to the 1500s.

The Western fallacy of a ‘European Russia’ provides with an expiry date for what the Russian Empire has always been. With Russia ‘becoming’ a state double the size of Ukraine, with the entire Caucasus region in flames, with an independent Tatarstan (enlarged with the annexation of Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Udmurtia), and with the secession of a Karelia-Komi-Nemets ‘state’ in the North, the path will be open for the detachment and colonization of Siberia and Northern Asia by the criminal Western European and North American colonial gangsters.

Bashkirs

Tatars

Chuvash

Udmurts

About:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatarstan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkortostan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuvashia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udmurtia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_Federal_District

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Federal_District

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Caucasian_Federal_District

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia

V- False Identity for Russians means Defeat in the Great Game

In addition to fallacy, deception, corruption and historical forgery, the existence of ‘colonial empires’ involves a lengthy and meticulous agenda for all continents, target prioritization, and -above all- deception continuity and, if necessary, adaptation. Whereas the British and the French colonial empires were not dissolved but merely transformed after the end of WW II (with scores of unsuspicious, credulous, and subservient Asiatics, Eastern Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans endlessly enrolling to ‘study’ in the colonial universities-factories of falsehood), the dissolution of the Russian (or Soviet) Empire became a constant parameter of the perverse and criminal expansionism of the Western powers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, they insist on the dissolution of the Russian Federation that they persistently depict as a ‘vast’ Russian ‘Empire’. To the Russians, this sounds as merely Western propaganda, and this is right – but only up to a certain extent. Quite unfortunately and more importantly, this is also historiography, colonial conceptualization, and foreign policy target.

The ‘reason’ that the Western academics, experts, diplomats and statesmen evoke in order to possibly justify their claims and demands, policies and targets is founded on the concept of ‘European Russia’ that they had long created and projected onto their agents (or interlocutors or sympathizers of ‘brothers’ or friends) in Imperial Russia. In 1850 or 1900, these naïve Russians, who believed in the good intentions of the evil Western administrations, could not understand where this vicious concept leads to; had they survived until 2022-2023, they would have understood very clearly the erroneous choice that they had made.

Who were these agents of the Western establishments?

Sergei Witte

They were high rank Russian academics, noblemen, generals, and quite often members of the imperial family; when it comes to German princesses, they were the embodiment of Russia’s Europeanization, because Germans, who are also an Asiatic origin nation, had been Europeanized, i.e. corrupted, first. Politicians and members of the State Duma (Государственная дума/Gasudarstvennaya Duma), ministers and even prime ministers, the likes of Witte (Sergei Witte/Сергей Юльевич Витте; 1849-1915), Stolypin (Pyotr Stolypin/Пётр Аркадьевич Столыпин: 1862-1911, assassinated) and, last but not least, Kerensky (Alexander Kerensky/Александр Фёдорович Керенский; 1881-1970), were the leading agents of the Western states and establishments, not in the sense of payroll agent of foreign countries, but due to their confusion between modernization and Europeanization.

Alexander Kerensky

Later, after the October revolution, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (also known as Leon Trotsky/Лев Троцкий; 1879-1940) became the main champion of Russia’s foremost Europeanization; his paranoid theory of permanent revolution is the quintessence of Western European colonialism. In fact, by this term, Trotsky merely denoted the accomplished status of Asia’s, Africa’s and Latin America’s Europeanization. English colonials had a rather shorter way to describe it: “Make the world England”.

https://www.hamiltonfortexas.com/video-6

Villainous rascal and paranoid gangster Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky

It is not a coincidence that Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization also involved Ukraine’s annexation of Russian Crimea; it was apparently due to Khrushchev’s latent but extant Trotskyism. This was also attested in the case of Khrushchev’s attempt to breach the territorial integrity of the Kazakh SSR. About:

Kazakhstan from the Göktürks (Celestial Turks) and Genghis Khan to the Jadid Intellectuals to Nursultan Nazarbayev, ch. XVIII unit c:

https://www.academia.edu/85192029/Kazakhstan_from_the_G%C3%B6kt%C3%BCrks_to_Nursultan_Nazarbayev_Illustrated_edition_Album_of_Kazakh_History_with_555_pictures_and_legends_

The following entry is filled with inaccuracies, oversights, and distortions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_Crimea_in_the_Soviet_Union

A latent form of Trotskyism

What matters most in this regard are not the persons, but the calamitous results brought about following the projection of this malicious concept onto Russia; one has also to take into consideration the opportunities that the Russian Empire lost due to the confusion between technological modernization and Europeanization that prevailed in the minds of the Russian elites.

To many it may sound bizarre that Rome, France and England first, and the US at a later stage, supported and promoted or tolerated the expansion of the Russian Empire during several centuries (16th-19th) only to plan to split and dismember it at a later stage; however, this colonial attitude is not strange at all. It only demonstrates the permanent and menacing character of the Western colonialism. The Imperial Russian expansion in the Black Sea and the Caucasus regions, in Northern and Northeastern Asia, and later in Central Asia was aptly utilized by the colonial powers, England and France, as an instrument necessary for the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, Safavid-Afshar-Qajar Iran, and Qing China.

A critical moment of the Great Game: the Russian invasion of Samarkand (1868); from the painting of Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin (Николай Николаевич Каразин; 1842-1908)

To view it correctly, the inception and the projection of the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ is tantamount to declaration of war against Russia; historically, it consists in the birth certificate of the Great Game. It definitely constitutes an act of enmity against Asia in its entirety and against all the historical nations, cultures, and empires of Asia, which -throughout the millennia- civilized the barbarians of Asia’s most worthless and most pathetic peninsula: Europe.

VI- The Fall of the Romanov: due to the False Concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’

In brief, the subtle but venomous, slow and multilayered projection of the concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’ onto the Russian elites prevented the czars from forging an alliance with the sultan at Constantinople, the shah at Esfahan, the Great Mughal (Shahanshah-e Hindustan/شاهنشاهی هندوستان) at Delhi, and the Tianzi (Son of Heaven/天子) at Beijing in order to set up a common front against the European colonial expansionism in Asia and drown the colonial gangsters in the sea.

Ottoman Empire (end 16th c.)

Safavid Iran (early 16th c.)

Mughal Empire (early 18th c.)

Qajar Iran (19th c.)

The aforementioned point alone stands as convincing proof that Russians today must rewrite their National History, removing Western European revisionism, distortions, fake concepts, and historical falsehood, in order to allow for a veracious, true and accurate perception of Russian History; this would definitely lead to the formation of a consummate, all-encompassing, and genuine Russian national identity, which would be the solid foundation of every decision-making process.

Qing China 19th-early 20th c.

An example of the extremely calamitous impact that a) the false concept of ‘Russia as a European Empire’, b) the erroneous perception of the Russian national identity, and c) the mistaken, hitherto colonially written History of Russia exerted on the imperial decision-making is Nicholas II’s alliance with France and England before and during WW I. Acting under the confusion triggered by the aforementioned parameters, the last of the czars, although recently canonized, led his empire from defeat to defeat, his people to certainly undeserved death, and his throne to an end.  

It is impermissible for a continental empire to ever make an alliance with maritime powers, which by definition constitute the embodiment of falsehood, inhumanity, barbarism, and evilness; this fact leads to destruction, because as an expression of the sea, i.e. the aboriginal chaos, sea powers play always a destructive role in the human affairs until they are annihilated – which is what they always deserve.

World History, Spiritual Revelation, and Human Civilization are the exclusive domain of continental empires, land kingdoms, and societies closely related with plains, plateaus, hills, mountains and valleys. Coastal states existed, but they never generated civilizations; at their best, they rather reflected the values, the concepts, the virtues and the principles that were identified, cherished and defended first by societies developed far from the sea.

In the eve of what is, conventionally and mistakenly, called World War One (in fact, it is an episode of the Great Game), Russia and Austria-Hungary were ostensibly continental empires; Germany and Italy, in spite of their, then recent, colonial expansion in Africa were continental empires that occupied overseas lands only to prevent England and France from further enlarging their monstrous colonial empires that spread death, oppression, corruption and inhumanity worldwide. This means that, after the disintegration of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, the only maritime powers were England and France and, to lesser extent, Holland and Belgium.

Imperial Russia’s misfortunate alliance with Paris-controlled Serbia was an awful trap. All other circumstances and instances, events and incidents cannot weigh-in on a proper decision-making, when the fundamental principles and the theoretical prescriptions impose a resolute approach based on identity consideration, foe identification, and strategic alliance evaluation.

The alliance with France and England was for Russia the stupidest decision ever made by any czar, also consisting in the Act of Death Certificate for the Romanov dynasty. England, as an island, cannot exist as an independent state as per the criteria of every historical continental empire. If one takes into account the despise with which all the great historical rulers and emperors from Sargon of Akkad to Alexander the Great to Tamerlane looked down at all the islands in general, one gets conclusive evidence about the worthlessness of the islands in terms of civilization, spiritual authority, and imperial rule.

Similarly, ever since her devilish inception, France was the foothold of a maritime monster that unfortunately Justinian I and General Belisarius failed to eliminate; the Merovingian myth details in length the abominable deeds of the Quinotaur, the maritime beast-ancestor of the villainous Merovingian dynasty, thus fully unveiling the evil nature of that state irrespective of the form that it may take. Unfortunately, Nicholas II Romanov failed to read the Chronicle of Fredegar to possibly fathom the Anti-Christian nature and character of the disreputable state of which he disastrously made Holy Russia an ally! About;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovingian_dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_of_Fredegar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinotaur

Quite contrarily, if Russia was fully and irrevocably perceived as an Asiatic Empire, the continental dimension of Holy Russia would lead Nicholas II to an alliance with the Kaiser, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, the Sultan at Constantinople, and the Shah of Qajar Iran. This alliance would be the only normal and natural expression of Russia’s historical and geographic identity. The ensuing result would be of entirely breathtaking and spectacular dimensions.

Having no apparent need to maintain armies close to the Imperial German, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman borders, Romanov Russia and Qajar Iran would eliminate the ahistorical bogus-state of Afghanistan, which is a filthy, devilish English colonial invention and fabrication (geared to merely weaken Iran); soon afterwards, no less than five million (5.000.000) Russian and Iranian soldiers would overwhelmingly invade India, irreversibly obliterating the criminal colonial presence of England in South Asia, triumphantly liberating the local multi-ethnic populations, and effectively establishing fraternal relations among the adepts of all the different religions, cults and faiths.

With the inevitable defeat and final division of France (between Germany and Italy), Russian, Austrian-Hungarian and Italian regiments would irrevocably eradicate the presence of Anglo-French colonials in Egypt, Sudan and the Eastern Mediterranean. After the prompt pacification of the three continents, an enormous German-Russian-Spanish-Italian operation would be undertaken against the ‘British Isles’ to totally eliminate every notion of insular rule and independent state in England.

Nicholas I’s total failure to understand the Asiatic nature of Russia throughout the millennia and his inability to exert continental force against the maritime powers’ treachery, evilness, and putrefaction caused Russians not only a terrible defeat in WW I, a Civil War, and an unnecessary regime change, but also a terrible bloodshed during WW II, a Cold War, the needless disintegration of the USSR in 1991, and ever since, the absolutely unneeded fratricidal conflict in Ukraine – an entirely Russian land and population that the sea powers attempt to corrupt.

The maritime powers’ evilness is identical with marine erosion; they appear friendly and innocent in order to cheat and they show their true face later. At the end, the Russians will understand the real meaning of the verse: “Moscou, les Plaines d’Ukraine, et les Champs-Élysées“. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with either the French or the Ukrainians and the Russians. It simply means that in Moscow and in the plains of Ukraine there must be as many brothels, cabarets, night bars, sexual debauchery, and inhuman anomaly as in les Champs-Élysées.

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Russia, China, the Decayed Muslim World, and the Crumbling, Savage Western World – I

By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims

II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians

IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials

V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials

VI. What Russia and China must do

Introduction

Fourteen years ago, on 4th December 2007, I published an article under title ‘Russia, Islam, and the West’, which -within few days- was officially (ИноСМИ / Inosmi) translated into Russian (‘ Россия, ислам и Запад’). I wanted to briefly elaborate on how things would develop and to also identify possible allies for Russia within the so-called ‘Islamic World’.

As the translated version of the article was extensively reproduced, I noticed that it was also well understood. Example: the great portal Centrasia (www.centrasia.org), while republishing the Russian translation, added an over-title for the use of its readers to state the following: “Экспансия западного мира не столько решала проблемы, сколько распространяла их вширь” (The expansion of the Western world did not so much solve problems as spread them in breadth). Indeed, there could not be better summary of my article’s contents. The over-title was indeed an excellent reflection of my original perception and ultimate conviction, namely that the West wanted to use the senseless Islamic World against Russia.

Here you have the links:

https://www.academia.edu/26051442/Russia_Islam_and_the_West_by_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis

https://www.academia.edu/26051219

https://inosmi.ru/world/20071210/238309.html

https://centrasia.org/newsA.php?st=1197397080

In that article’s last part, I put a title that appeared very odd, even to several Egyptian and other African friends of mine (at the time, I was living in Cairo): “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. In that part, I explained why only these two countries could possibly be Russia’s allies against the Western colonial contamination that threatens the entire world. The reason for this statement is that only these two countries had maintained until that time a correct sense of historical-cultural identity and an imperial-level establishment and diplomacy. As a matter of fact, the rest of the so-called Islamic world is constituted by fake states-puppets of the colonial powers (from Morocco and Nigeria to Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia); unfortunately, the uneducated, ignorant, and idiotic elites of these neo-colonial structures never realized what ‘national integrity’ means.

I. Fake states of fake Arabs and fake Muslims

This is so because, by describing these states as ‘puppets’, I don’t only suggest that the local governments receive and execute orders dictated by the Western colonial capitals (Paris, London, Washington D.C., etc.), often being also blackmailed by them in the most obscene manner, but I also specify that these states were entirely pre-fabricated by the colonial elites and administrations to the slightest detail.

What I imply by mentioning the ‘detail’ is simple: not only the location of the false and troublesome (notably in the Halaib triangle) borderline between Egypt and Sudan was decided by the English colonials long before the two modern states came to exist (in order to offer their successors in the colonial institutions and governments the chance of future manipulation of either local ‘governments’), but also the lack of railway connections between first Cairo and Khartoum and second Suez and Port Sudan had been programmed before the beginning of the 20th c. So, colonialism means also ‘deeds carried out with long-term perspective’; actually, it does not occur in a wide array of sectors of social activities, but across the board.

Neo-colonial governments in Algiers, Riyadh, Baghdad, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere were totally deprived of any substantive nation-building tools; entire nations were stripped of their historical-cultural identity, and their elites -which used to have idiotically been sending their children to ‘study’ in French, English, US, Canadian and Australian universities- were plunged into a scrupulously elaborated delusion that turned them into pure and permanent servants of their former colonial masters.

Even worse, all Muslim, African and Asiatic nations have been scrupulously disconnected from one another, and thus, to study Egyptology and Coptology a Nigerian has to move to England or America, whereas a Moroccan willing to specialize in Assyriology or Iranology needs to pursue university studies in France. Similarly, Muslims in Senegal and Sierra Leone have no idea about Islamic History, Art History, Architecture, Sciences, Wisdom, Spirituality and Literature in Central Asia, whereas Egyptian and Syrian Muslims know nothing about the great Islamic dynasties that ruled Eastern or Western Africa and the existing Islamic monuments there. In other words, the fake neo-colonial structures have been totally disconnected from one another at the intellectual, academic, cultural, educational and scientific levels, each of them being calamitously tied to its former colonial center.  

The aforementioned unprecedented ignorance and reciprocal disconnectedness was complemented by colonially promoted confusion and darkness. When it comes to the confusion that prevails among Muslims worldwide, the first point to mention is the materialistic evaluation of human interests, which is an entirely anti-Islamic trait and an alien element among historical Muslim societies that revolved around axes of spiritual, intellectual and scientific endeavors.

The short-sighted materialistic viewpoint on the human endeavors and interests was projected by the colonial elites onto the local Muslim populations and it permanently destroyed the Islamic moral order, eliminating all cultural values that had prevailed for many long centuries (in several cases for more than a millennium) and turning therefore all Muslims into miserable replicas of corrupt Westerners. The very use of money, the existence of the Banking system, the shameful fallacy of the so-called ‘Islamic Economics’, and the economic structure itself of today’s Muslim countries are an anathema against prophet Muhammad.

The colonially promoted confusion took also the form of a pathetic race for ‘socioeconomic development’, involving the catastrophic deformation of the traditional urban landscape throughout the Islamic world. As -generation after generation- young students were pushed to Engineering and Economis, all the neo-colonial structures and the corrupted or demented pseudo-Muslim societies were even more strongly tied to the Western colonial capitals.

Last, backwardness, obscurantism and darkness were diffused in the form of false theories, disruptive ideologies, and nonsensical theologies; by believing in the Pan-Arabic falsehood, hundreds of millions of non-Arab Aramaeans, Yemenites, Copts (Egyptians), Sudanese Cushites, and NW African Berbers were permanently prevented from achieving proper nation-building. By embracing Nasserism, Baathism and other catastrophic schemes, dozens of millions of people engulfed themselves in wars, conflicts, bloodshed, abject poverty, and irreversible misfortune.

And by accepting the pathetic, anti-Islamic doctrines of today’s totally uneducated and deeply ignorant pseudo-theologians and bogus-imams, African and Asiatic Muslims were diverted from Islamic spirituality, wisdom, moral, sciences, intellect, education, religion, culture, and civilization. Even worse for them, they were diverted to a trivial and pathetic, bogus-Islamic theological indoctrination of which all the foundations, all the elements, all the concepts, all the parts, and all the words had been previously examined, considered, authorized and approved by the Western Orientalist colonial academia, before being projected onto the local masses due to the determinant commitment of the military, administrative, diplomatic and political gangsters who controlled the vast lands of the Mughal Empire, the detached territories of the Ottoman Caliphate, the colonial puppet state of Pahlavi Iran, as well as many other earlier Muslim sultanates, khanates and emirates.

Wherever there was a sound, secular, culturally original, socially strong state, as in the case of Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia, the criminal English, American, Canadian, Australian and French diplomats employed all possible means to diffuse the fake Islamic theologies, the nonsensical political doctrines, the absurd politicization of the Muslim societies, and the villainous ideologization of the deliberately kept-ignorant masses. In total negation of today’s fake Muslim societies, there cannot be politics in a historical Muslim society; and there was no politics in both, Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Siyaad Barre’s Somalia.

In other words, all the present dimensions of social-intellectual-educational-political life in today’s fake Muslim countries had been pre-fashioned by the colonial powers in order to permanently function detrimentally against all their users, adherents, admirers, supporters and followers onto whom they were projected systematically, tyrannically and criminally. I expanded on this topic in my article titled ‘Why Former Ottoman Provinces cannot become Proper States’ that I published before 10 years: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_By_Prof_Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis?auto=download

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CHINA, INDIA, RUSSIA, IRAN AND TURKEY: THE WORLD’S FIVE MOST IMPORTANT CONTINENTAL EMPIRES FIRST CANNOT BE REVIVED AND SECOND CAN PROSPER ONLY AS SECULAR STATES

Ming dynasty Emperor Zhu Houzhao (朱厚照; 1491-1521)

15th c. painting of the Forbidden City

Forbidden city Beijing

Qing China map 1820

Qing dynasty Emperor Kangxi (康熙帝; 1661-1722)

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Superior to the paranoid lunatic Ottoman Selim I and stronger than the lascivious Ismail Safavi, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad rather known as Babur (1483-1530) was the founder of the Mughal Empire; incomparably the most adventurous, the most impulsive and the most intellectual emperor of his times.

Emperor Humayun (1508-1556) and his son Akbar

Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) receiving the four-year old Abdul Rahim following the assassination (1561) of his father Bairam Khan, who was Akbar’s leading general and mentor: miniature from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), which was commissioned by Akbar as the official chronicle of the reign. It was written by Abu’l Fazl between 1590 and 1596, illustrated between c. 1592 and 1594.

Diwan-i-Aam (Hall of Public Audience) in the palace of the Great Mughal Emperor in Agra

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‘Moscow under Ivan the Terrible’ (1902) is a famous painting by Apollinary M. Vasnetsov; the 19th-20th c. impression that the Russians had about the beginning of the tiny Muscovy principality before 350 years was very inaccurate, erroneous, and biased. This is so, because they projected their own ideas on their own past that they viewed through the binoculars of their distorted education and historiography.

Mikhail Romanov (1596-1645) and his father, the patriarch Philaret, distribute alms, in an illustration of the first Romanov coronation. From the Coronation Album of Mikhail Fedorovich; the manuscript “The Book of the Election to the Highest Throne of the Great Russian Tsardom of the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fedorovich of All Great Russia Autocrat” was produced in Moscow few decades after the event (in 1672-1673). From the 1856 reprint edition.

Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, St. Petersburg; when Russia ceased to be Russia and started imitating Western Europe corrupt pseudo-kingdoms, insidious academics, fake intellectuals, and uncivilized politicians, the divisions and the discords started. Peter I and Catherine II are the true reason of the fall of the Romanov.

When you have Western European theater, opera and dance in a theoretically Christian Orthodox Empire, sooner or later your contaminated state will collapse; Nicholas II could not save anything (here in his coronation along with Alexandra Feodorovna, 1896).

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Shah Tahmasp I of Iran & Emperor Humayun of the Mughal Empire Hindustan enjoying Nowrouz festivities, as depicted on the Chehel Sotoun palace in Esfahan

Shah Abbas I the Great (1571-1629)

The imperial Naqsh-e-Jahan (‘The Image of the World’) square in Esfahan, Safavid Iran’s most flamboyant capital

Safavid Iran, 1511

General view of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Shah Mosque (below), and the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (in the middle), Isfahan

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Stupid Ottomans! They abolished the only valuable military units they had, namely the Janissaries; the absurd development took place at the time of the idiotic Sultan Mahmoud II (1785-1839). Instead of killing all the uneducated, ignorant, dark and pathetic sheikhs, muftis, qadis and imams that contaminated and destroyed the Ottoman Empire with the fallacy of their anti-Islamic “sunnah”, Mahmoud II closed down the illustrious Bektashi Order and the formidable Janissary elite infantry, thus issuing the death warrant of his otherwise wretched state. Today, people confuse two totally different terms: ‘Ottoman Empire’ and ‘Ottoman Civilization’. All factors of the Islamic civilization in the territory of the Caliphate were indeed persecuted by the pathetic, corrupt, cruel and villainous Ottoman dynasty. As it used to be said at the time, to be a member of the Ottoman family you had to have killed your brother! The ominous empire was the World History’s most anti-Turkish state.

Topkapı sarayı at the time of Selim I (1512-1520)

Official ceremonies in the Ottoman palace were a spectacular and costly affair that was impermissible in an absurd state ridiculously governed by pathetic, biased and ignorant theologians who took their stupid theology as tantamount to the religion of Islam.

Topkapı sarayı (طوپقپو سرايى) in Ottoman Constantinople; the historical name ‘Istanbul’, which was attested in sources for more than 100 years before the fall of the Eastern Roman imperial capital (1453), became the official name of the city only thanks to Kemal Ataturk. The absurd measure of turning Ayasofya Museum to a fanciful pseudo-mosque for political circus automatically cancels the popular city name and imposes the re-introduction of the old name that was the official appellation when the monumental edifice was operating as a real mosque (1453-1923).

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II. Turkey and Iran: the two exceptions

The two most notable exceptions from this chaotic and nefarious situation have been Turkey and Iran; the Turkish exception is entirely due to the greatness of the scope and the depth of understanding of Kemal Ataturk, who was one of the very few minds to timely, accurately and plainly identify the colonial goals. The founder of Modern Turkey had understood that Islam as religion was already defunct during his time and that the uneducated, ignorant and worthless Muslims of the early 20th c. were to be re-educated from scratch and on the basis of their own culture in order to later rediscover the true historical Islam in all its width, depth and height.

Kemal Ataturk knew that all that the criminal colonial imperialists of France, England and America wanted to do was to aptly utilize and duly instrumentalize the uneducated and silly Muslims of his time, turning them to fully operable tools of Western hegemony. The basic tools of this instrumentalization were the following:

– the deceitful ideologization (theologization) of the Islamic religion,

– the execrable politicization of the Muslim societies,

– the Orientalist falsification of the History of all Asiatic and African nations, and

– the linguistic, educational, academic and cultural subordination of all, Muslim and non-Muslim, Oriental nations to the Western European and North American barbarism and inhuman model of life, which was produced in Western Europe starting with the Evil Renaissance and diffused worldwide due to the genocidal colonialism

But theology is not religion; today’s fake Muslims do not believe Islam as religion, but pseudo-Islamic theological systems that contain a modern and ahistorical bogus-interpretation (i.e. a misinterpretation) of the values of Islam, thus fully eliminating Spirituality and turning Moral from a profound understanding of virtues to a silly obedience of other humans, which is “shirk” (شرك) according to the dogma of Islam.

It goes without saying that the aforementioned situation (or condition of being) does not only consist in religious deviation for Muslims but also constitutes supreme humiliation and final demise for any nation. Kemal Ataturk was triumphantly confirmed by all the historical developments that followed his death.

The uneducated, ignorant and stupid Muslims of Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc. fell exactly into the trap of their utilization and instrumentalization by the West; from 1948 to 1967 to 1973, the fake Muslims of the wider region did indeed function as fully programmed automatons. More they hated the Zionists, stronger the state of Israel became. This does not mean that the Zionist state is rightful and correct; it is not. But this does not matter (or does not play any role) anymore, when the Aramaean Muslims of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the Coptic Muslims of Egypt are so wrong as to become dehumanized automatons focused on wrong choices that can bring only grave deterioration and final destruction.

Having no national identity, believing in a pseudo-theology (that they mistook for religion), being truly disconnected from one another, being totally unaware of one another’s historical past and cultural heritage, and acting -at the political level- like conveniently submissive monkeys of the Westerners, these fake Muslims do not have a chance in the billion to ever win. Automatons do not win; humans do. Automatons act as per their pre-fashioned mechanism and then get decomposed to pieces.

The Iranian exception was basically due to the earlier imperial tradition (Safavid, Afshar and Qajar). The English interfered in Iran in the early 20th c. in a multifaceted and multilayered manner. They deposed the true, imperial dynasty and imposed an ignorant soldier as ‘king’, after duly cheating, bribing and corrupting him; this poor and uneducated guy did not even know the historical Iranian name ‘Pahlavi’ and its meaning, but the academic instructor and tutor, whom his colonial masters assigned to him, gave him this name as ‘royal family name’ – which constitutes the most shameful and most disgraceful stigma of Iranian History.

The reason for the English intervention in Iran in the late 19th and early 20th c. is still unknown to most people worldwide. For many long centuries, the evil Anglo-French diplomacy, vicious colonial trickery, and incessant machinations pitched the silly Ottomans and the naïve Iranians in interminable wars that weakened both empires; even worse, when Constantinople and Isfahan/Tehran did not fight against one another, most probably one of the two ailing empires made a war with the Russians. This unprecedentedly disastrous series of developments occurred despite the fact that both, the dynasties and the populations of the two empires, were Turanian in their majority and the local culture in both realms was a millennia long Iranian-Turanian amalgamation.

But with Kemal Ataturk turning the world’s most anti-Turkic empire (namely the wretched Ottoman Empire) into Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, the path was open for the much needed merge of the two great states into one; but this eventuality (that had been fully materialized by Tamerlane in 1402) was the real horror of the Western colonial powers for no less than four centuries (1500-1900).

The reason of the colonial fear was the fact that the Ottoman state and the Iranian Empire were equally Iranian and Turanian at the same time; in either case, the majority of the local population was Turanian, whereas the popular culture and tradition constituted an amalgamated Turanian (nomad / military-martial) and Iranian (settled / academic-intellectual) common heritage. So, by intervening colonially in Iran, the English intended to

– devilishly ‘Persianize’ Iran (an attempt that had no historical precedent),

– reduce the universal-ecumenical Empire of Iran into a ‘national Persian kingdom’, and thus

– transform untouchable Iran into a malleable ‘Persia’.

By so doing, the evil colonials knew beforehand that they would trigger enormous reactions from the part of Azeris, Turkmens and others, who would never accept ‘their’ Iran (so, a Turanian-Iranian entity) to be degraded into a Farsi (‘Persian’) state.

However, not even an interference of this scale was enough for the English and the French to fully control developments in Iran. As the English occupied the formerly Ottoman land of Mesopotamia (Aram-Nahrain or ‘Iraq’), the colonial conspirers mobilized several naïve Shia religious leaders and turned them against the puppet soldier king Reza, whom they had imposed on his fake throne in the first place.

As the colonial ‘explorers’, ‘advisers’ and ‘friends’ pushed the idiotic, credulous and unsuspicious Reza to westernize Iran and to stupidly send his son, the crown prince Muhammad Reza, to Switzerland for ‘studies’ (which would also further westernize him: 1931-1936; at the age of 12-17), they instigated anti-royal hatred among the silly ayatollahs and the other useless religious leaders, whom they urged to react against the ‘atheist’ king Reza, whom they had raised to power for a start. This has always been the criminal nature of the Western colonial evilness: you don’t only raise a silly puppet to prominence and power; you also prepare the puppet’s opponents and eventually the puppet’s murderers.

The situation went out of control, when the soldier’s son, after being educated as crown prince in Switzerland, proved to be a perspicacious successor to the much undeserved throne of Iran. As a matter of fact, and clearly to his credit, Muhammad Reza, by noticing the conflicting agendas of the various colonial powers and by identifying tremendous discrepancies in the ultimate goals of the major lobbies of power (or secret societies) in the Western World (Jesuits, Freemasons and Zionists), understood a large and critical part of the overall scheme, took therefore his role seriously, and following the path of Kemal Ataturk, attempted to modernize Iran in order to make it truly competitive to Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and the major Western nations. This was exactly what the evil Western colonials did not want to happen, because Kemal Ataturk has always been the man whom they hated most and for a good reason: if there were another 3-4 men like the founder of Modern Turkey, as perspicacious as he was, as determined as he was, and as audacious as he was, then the entire colonial rule would crumble in Asia, Africa and Europe, ultimately and rightfully plunging the Western World into the well-deserved final implosion and irreversible decomposition. That’s why Iran’s position has severely degraded since 1979 and the so-called ‘Islamic revolution’.

III. Unsophisticated, gullible and ignorant sheikhs and theologians

It could not happen otherwise, because the nonsensical theory published by Khomeini and known under the name ‘Velayat-e Faqih’ {‘the Governance of the (Islamic) Jurisprudents’} did not exist (and consequently was not practiced) earlier, throughout the History of Islamic Caliphates; it is a modern concept, although many efforts were made to attach some historical credibility to it. As far as the so-called ‘Shia Muslims’ are concerned, quite unfortunately, this theory was the effective counterpart of the ‘Political Islam’ that the colonial Orientalists, diplomats and politicians diffused among /imposed on the so-called ‘Sunni Muslims’. I use the expression ‘so-called’, because in reality the distinction into Sunni and Shia Muslims is also fake, but this is not a topic on which I can further expand here. About: https://www.academia.edu/55139916/The_Fabrication_of_the_Fake_Divide_Sunni_Islam_vs_Shia_Islam_

The degradation of Iran’s position at the international level was stopped to some extent (not because an improvement was made in the unfortunate realm ruled by a puerile elite that failed to identify the anti-Iranian and anti-Turanian schemes of the Western colonial gangsters but) due to rather external factors. Despite the fact that Turkey followed a different trajectory, also Ankara’s position at the international level started gradually being severely degraded in 2002-2003, when the Western colonial fabrication ‘AKP’ was forcefully imposed on Turkey’s political life by direct and multileveled Western colonial interference.

The Turkish generals were constantly, boldly and gravely threatened by the US, NATO, EU, UK, and other governments and international bodies not to intervene, not to undertake a -much needed- coup, and not to cause the -much demanded- physical death of the disreputable US-UK-Israel puppet Erdogan, Turkey’s silliest, most ignorant, most uneducated, most pathetic, and most ludicrous prime minister and president.

The fact that Turkey’s Islamists came to and stayed in power only due to systematic Western colonial support clearly shows their absolutely non-Muslim, evil nature, and their servile character, which is the epitome of the disbeliever, the unfaithful and the perfidious. It also heralds the forthcoming destruction of Turkey, because this is the ultimate goal of the Western colonials, who brought the stupid Islamists of the AKP to power in order to duly, effectively and irrevocably utilize them for their plans.

Having a decomposed, divided and useless army (due to ceaseless post-2016 purges), a collapsed economy, half a trillion external gross debt, and a current account deficit of $36.7 billion in 2020, Turkey will need more than a decade to recover from the nonsensical and paranoid governmental policies of the idiots, who imagined it possible to govern a 21st c. country with oral utterances of a prophet who lived before 1400 years and with the prescriptions of a holy book manifested to indigenous people in Hejaz 300 years after the Roman Empire became Christian.

What is even worse for the brainless humanoids that support Turkey’s impossible Islamization is the fact that Muslim kingdoms and empires during the Islamic times were not governed (and did not have to be governed) on the basis of the Shariah in the way today’s uneducated and ignorant Muslim theologians understand this very vague and currently misinterpreted term. Quite contrarily, many times caliphs and sultans ruled against the Islamic Law; this is a vast topic that goes out of the scope of the present article, but at this point, I want only to indicate the original mistake and the defective approach to which are due the false interpretations and the erroneous conclusions of almost all modern Muslim theologians.

IV. How Turkey’s and Iran’s paranoid Islamists are manipulated by Western colonials

Instead of duly studying and carefully examining what truly occurred during all the periods of Islamic History and subsequently concluding thereupon, today’s fake Muslim theologians theorize on the basis of various historical texts (Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Kalam), which by definition they cannot understand in their original, correct and accurate contextualization. When you hear silly people using this style of wooden language «theologian X said: ‘about this topic prophet Muhammad said that’», you can be sure that you have in front of you an idiot duly utilized by the colonial powers in order to harm all interlocutors who would accept such fully unrealistic purposes, positions and pretensions.

This is so, because whatever prophet Muhammad (or any other individual, prophet, high priest, mystic or layman) said does not truly matter; what really matter are the moral principles, the spiritual concepts, and the divine values that are contained in what the prophet (or any other person) said. Actually, words have worth only as expression of principles, concepts and values; otherwise they are absolutely empty, meaningless and useless.

Why the use of wooden language consists in an absurdity possible to be perfectly utilized by one’s own enemies is easy to understand; the safe losers are always the ignorant, the idiotic, and the unrealistic people, as they can be easily entrapped.

First, it is a matter of idiocy to imagine that, by using citations, one can replace 1400 years of History. Citations are tantamount to nothing; only diachronic practices reveal what Islam has been.

Second, only due to lack of proper education can one think that one may be able to understand any text written or words uttered before 1400 years in the exact sense and with the correct connotation that they had at the time; this is so irrespective of language, ethnic origin, religion, literature and culture. Connotations of words always change, and this is nothing ignorant theologians can possibly speak about. Now, the much needed task to identify the specific connotation that a word had when used within a specific text would demand the skills of honest and consummate scholarship, but unfortunately there cannot be acceptable scholarship in cases of indoctrination.

Third, the easiest persons to manipulate are always the imbeciles, who believe in a doctrine, while abstracting its elements and giving to the doctrine’s terms the meaning that they want (which did not exist historically) or can (due to their ignorance and lack of education). Such unsophisticated people usually attribute to their doctrine’s words absolute value, whereas the only absolute value is that of the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind each word’s original meaning.

However, due to their crudeness, these people cannot imagine that, before duly comprehending the meaning of a word, they have to recover first the moral principle and the spiritual concept behind it. So, they end up projecting their own, debased personal beliefs and conclusions onto the texts that they mechanically read (or at times learn by heart) without ever reaching the true meaning of the texts’ contents; but this process is well known to colonial academia.

Consequently, these persons convert their own personal misery into a permanent fight for egoistic self-confirmation and self-justification, and the abstractly taken elements of the doctrine that they believe in have unfortunately -in reality- only a subliminal psychological importance to them.

The hysterical screams of today’s fake preachers, sheikhs and imams during the Friday prayer khutbahs (sermons) are not a matter of Religion to be studied, but of Psychology. The same is valid for the various heretical pseudo-Christian pastors of the West, namely the Evangelicals, the Baptists, the Mormons and their likes.

There is no religion that forces the believers to scream hysterically; only theological-ideological indoctrination can cause this devious and disastrous behavior. However, this form of pseudo-Islamic indoctrination is what the colonial powers want to achieve among today’s fake Muslim preachers, sheikhs and imams, because only under these circumstances they can easily manipulate these miserable people subliminally.

This subliminal passion fully detaches these people from down-to-Earth reality, rendering them pliable enough for all those, who -for one reason or another- want these ignorant and misfortunate persons to fight for their unrealistic purposes, thus causing enormous damages to themselves, to their societies, and to their country’s national interests, institutions, and governments.

And that’s why Turks must drastically and resolutely remove Erdogan and AKP from power at all costs and as soon as possible. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey is not a fake state like Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia; and -as I already said- it cannot be ‘Islamized’. If a pseudo-Islamic dictatorship is imposed in Ankara, Turkey will simply cease to exist.

As soon as the basic traits of the state will be altered and stop functioning, Turkey will be dangling in the vacuum. This will not turn the entire structure into ‘Islamic’, as the corrupt and besotted Islamist slaves of the US, NATO, EU and UK believe before and after making their cursed and useless prayers. After the alteration of Turkey’s basic traits, the state will soon disappear, as it will have been canceled. The entire country would then suddenly find itself under the status of the Treaty of Sevres. The decomposition, which will ensue, will be far worse than that of the Ottoman Empire or, more recently, of the USSR; it will rather look like the present case of Yemen.

V. Russia, China, and the Utilization of the Muslim World by the Western Colonials

So, more than 15 years have passed after I published the aforementioned article, but I still stick to my conclusion: “Islam is Turkey and Iran”. This is still valid, not because the two countries improved their standards and strengthened their positions, but mainly due to the fact that many other Muslim countries totally collapsed and fell into chaos or fully capitulated to the evil elites of the Western World. Many countries still existed back in 2007, but do not exist as such anymore: Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. And many other countries, like Turkey and Iran, saw their power waning: Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. However, the situation of Turkey and Iran no longer concerns Ankara and Tehran only, due to the considerable changes that occurred at the international level with respect to the world balance of power.

Internal conflicts accentuated the growing social tension in the US; the refugee crisis plunged EU and UK into an impasse; despite the undeniable mistakes made in the Ukraine crisis (2013-2014 and 2022-2023) and in parallel with the successes marked in Syria (2015-2023), Putin managed to re-establish an impressively rehabilitated Russia at the epicenter of international relations; India and Brazil made themselves felt in the world affairs; Germany remained the sole economic power of EU; and China was transformed into one pole of the bipolar system that seems to prevail for the time being. Despite Beijing’s continuous affirmation of its dedication to a forthcoming multipolar world, we still do not -properly speaking- attest such a situation. It rather seems that many powers would find a China-US bipolar world good for them, at least for some time.

Turkey and Iran, under similar conditions, can cause serious trouble – not only if pitched against one another, but also if transformed into an obstacle on a country’s way to rising to prominence. The same is also valid for the fate of all other Muslim countries; an eventual dismemberment of just one of them or also a potential war between two of them can dramatically affect the interests of a major power. For the time being, Russia, China and Iran have managed to establish an alliance at many levels, involving also Tehran’s recent adhesion to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (as a full member state). About: https://www.academia.edu/53029736/From_the_Great_Game_to_the_Final_Game_Iran_Full_Member_State_of_the_SCO_as_the_Greatest_Event_of_the_21st_Century_text_pictures_and_legends_

Contrarily to Iran, Turkey followed an erratic path for all intents and purposes. After having been a fully accredited, modern Western state and society (thanks to Kemal Ataturk), Turkey got contaminated after 2002 by Islamism, anachronism, extremism, radicalism, obscurantism and self-destructive hysteria to significant extent. But as a Muslim country, Turkey is the sole NATO member state. This hiatus consists in a tragi-comical situation that can no longer exist; it leads to extinction.

In a rather recent article published in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s foremost newspaper, on 21st September 2021, the distinguished Prof. Dr. Erol Manisali (1940-2022), a leading Kemalist intellectual and academic, made an extraordinary comparison; his article’s title was quite indicative in this regard (Erol Manisalı, AKP’nin ‘Osmanlıcılığı’, İngilizin ‘Brexit’ine mi benziyor! / https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/erol-manisali/akpnin-osmanliciligi-ingilizin-brexitine-mi-benziyor-1870529): «Does AKP’s ‘Ottomanism’ look like the ‘Brexit’ of the English?»

Prof. Manisali was absolutely right; Brexit was disastrous indeed for England, and Ottomanism (also known as Neo-Ottomanism) is definitely calamitous for Turkey. However, Prof. Manisali still clarified several points in which Brexit is (and is made) less disastrous than the forgery and the paranoia of Ottomanism. On the other hand, it is true that the two options have indeed something in common. Both political concepts constitute a form of retreat or isolation that can end up in seclusion and implosion.  

VI. What Russia and China must do

In the present article, I don’t intend to examine the troubles that will be caused by so virulently unrealistic purposes. I will come up with another article to examine the catastrophic perspectives that inconsistent, nonsensical and pathetic doctrines like Neo-Ottomanism, Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism, Neo-Czarism, and Neo-Qingism may eventually cause if given some consideration and trustworthiness. Here, I intend to discuss the dangers ensuing from the subtle and smart utilization of such delusions that the crumbling Western colonial powers may make. For the Russian and Chinese aspirations to establish a multipolar world, these dangers may be lethal. That is why I will also suggest several measures that Moscow and Beijing must take; in addition, I propose the introduction of these methods to several other countries.  

Before all the rest, it is essential for many people worldwide to understand how the colonial powers of Western Europe and North America managed to survive. Both, the EU and the US seem to be collapsing and disintegrating nowadays; NATO has already been described as ‘dead’ by a member state’s head! And after five centuries of English colonialism, two world wars, one cold war, an unnecessary adhesion to the EU, and a final Brexit, England looks like a 15th c. country in a 21st c. world. The 15th century was a terrible period indeed for Western Europe, which was a barbarian periphery that experienced many wars and lost much blood in the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). At the very end of the 15th c., Western Europe was plagued with so many problems that the local kingdoms would irrevocably implode and disappear, if they did not expand colonially.

This reality must be carefully observed today by Chinese and Russians alike, because similar situations do not exist in their own national past. Consequently, the presently ailing Western states may well manage to survive by repeating exactly the same method, i.e. by exporting their own problems to others; their tactics in Ukraine do clearly confirm my assessment. Certainly, this involves more wars, more conflicts, more bloodshed, and greater risks; but the paranoid Western elites do not try to avoid them! Quite contrarily, they try to trigger them.

The silly but dangerous AUKUS bellicose rhetoric is just one example. It is absurd to take the Western political propaganda about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ at face value. They did not want to impose ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They are criminal enough to want to trigger only the situation that the entire world has clearly attested in the aforementioned misfortunate countries. The same can also happen eventually to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and so on.

This means that the ensuing dangers are real and great, because the pulverization of numerous countries will cancel the long propagated dream of a peaceful multipolar world and significantly modify the scope of the historically founded and humanely prepared, multiply beneficial strategy One Belt One Road (OBOR/一带一路). How can Russia and China react to the chaotic plans of the Western World? To this question I will respond in the next part of this series of articles.

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From the Great Game to the Final Game: Iran Full Member State of the SCO, as the Greatest Event of the 21st Century

The Earth is one and undividable; the historical presence of several major empires over the past 45 centuries does not consist in a division but rather in a union around the same human, universalist-ecumenist ideals. From Sargon of Akkad (薩爾貢/سارگون) to the Qing, the Romanovs, the Ottomans and the Qajar, various empires incarnated these very old, common to all, and permanently cherished ideals in their respective locations. And by entering in endless commercial, cultural and spiritual exchanges, the great realms of Afro-Asia gave new dynamics to the magnificent soar made by the original civilizations that started in the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia (美索不达米亚/ بین النهرین) and Egypt. And the Silk-, Spice- and Frankincense Routes across Lands, Deserts and Seas, which are commonly called ‘the Silk Roads’, demonstrated very well the supreme human value, i.e. the Unity of Earth Life, removing in reality all the frontiers across the main landmass where the Mankind dwells. About:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/萨尔贡大帝

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/سارگن_بزرگ

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/美索不达米亚

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/بین_النهرین

Starting with the late 15th and early 16th c., mankind was hit with an unprecedented plague that originated from a minor and insignificant peninsula, which had never been viewed as the center of a civilization or the location of a meritable kingdom by any civilized nation: Europe. I mainly refer to the current territories of Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium and England. These lands alone represent nowadays the historical meaning of what people define as “Europe” today.

I. Europe is not a Continent

There is a troublesome hiatus in this regard, and it is necessary to make things clear. When people across the world think today of ‘Europe’ as a so-called continent (‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’), they only demonstrate to what great extent they have been deceived by the propaganda that emanated from the aforementioned modern states. This delusion of a ‘Europe – Continent’ does not exist in History; it’s a fake. The inhuman means of its propagation do not concern the scope of the present article, but surely involve the education, the publications, the mass media, the psychological operations (psy-ops), the so-called ‘political life’ (a low level farcical act), and the pseudo-culture that these states imposed at home and abroad.

Throughout the ages, Europe was never viewed as a ‘continent’ (in the sense we mean now); it did not actually consist in a continent, and -even worse- it was not the land of a civilization that impacted World History. Europe did not represent a unity of culture, tradition, faith, ancestry or language in any sense. In reality, all the useless elements of Asia and Africa ended up in Europe one way or another. And more tragi-comically for the well-propagated Fake History of Europe, the few civilized elements of Asia and Africa, which generated a rudimentary civilization on what is now called ‘European soil’ (Cyprus, Crete, Rome, Macedonia), did so by merely reproducing Asiatic and African values, arts, traditions, concepts and techniques and by bringing with them forms of spirituality, faith, moral, piety and virtue that were typically African or Asiatic in their original form.

What puts European colonials’ pseudo-historical propaganda beyond all intents and purposes is the fact that the very few civilized kingdoms, which were formed on what is now called ‘Europe’ did not identify themselves as ‘European’, did not view ‘Europe’ as a cultural unity or imperial entity, and did not care for the largest part of what we now call Europe, because simply it was worthless to them.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the absolute embodiment of Anti-Greek or Anti-Hellenic ruler, deployed enormous effort to succeed to the Achaemenid rulers of Iran. He was not the invader of many lands, as the modern European pseudo-historical propaganda projects him to be; he only conquered the entire Achaemenid Iran because he wanted to be an Asiatic king of kings. That’s why he deliberately made of Babylon his capital and of the Sogdian princess Roxanne his wife. But the central and northern part of the Balkan Peninsula, which would be easy to conquer, fully disinterested him. And the same is also valid for Southern Italy and Sicily where Ionians and Dorians had established colonies, let alone the useless plains of Gaul and the plateau of the Iberian Peninsula.

Achaemenid Iran

And the Roman Emperors repeatedly and convincingly proved that to them Egypt was more important than Gaul, Anatolia was more worthwhile than Iberia, and Syria was more significant than Britain. Romans undertook a naval expedition against Arabia Felix (today’s Aden), but not around the otherwise useless coasts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. Optimus princeps Trajan (98-117; 圖拉真/ تراژان), the greatest Roman emperor of all times, carried out military expeditions down to Characene (today’s southern Iraq and Kuwait) and up to Caucasus Albania (today’s Azerbaijan), but he did not have the slightest concern about the shores of today’s Poland and Estonia or the Azov Sea and the plains of Ukraine. Even more exemplarily, not one Roman Emperor bothered to invade Hibernia, today’s Ireland. About:

The Roman Empire was not a European empire.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/圖拉真

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/تراژان

Through conquests and treaties, the Romans controlled in Africa a definitely larger territory than in Europe, but today’s forged maps are systematically produced in a way to scrupulously conceal this historical reality. Even worse, scholarly Orientalist bibliography is kept far from the hands of the average public (and therefore not duly popularized in education manuals, publishing houses, and the mass media) in order not to reveal the overwhelming and cataclysmic diffusion of Oriental cults, concepts, virtues, values, lifestyles, faiths, esoteric rites, mythologies, worldviews, religions, arts, symbolisms, cosmogonies, cosmologies, systems of eschatology and messianic soteriology, rites, ceremonials, forms of spirituality, wisdom and erudition across all European territories of the Roman Empire, and also in other lands in Europe. Quite contrarily to the pseudo-historical dogma that the European colonial intellectuals produced by fallaciously naming an entire period ‘Hellenistic and Roman Times’, this same period is indeed ‘Orientalist and Orientalizing Times’, due to the above mentioned prevalence of Oriental cultures and civilizations throughout Europe.

II. Colonial Gangsters, Division of the World, and the East-West Divide

A fake concept for Europe and a bogus-historical dogma were not the only calamities with which the European kingdoms affected the rest of the world; in fact, they were only two and among the last. The six colonial kingdoms used their military edge to inflict great empires and primitive structures with all sorts of disaster, destruction, ruin, death, and unadulterated inhumanity. Settler colonialism and intellectual-spiritual-cultural-intellectual-educational-academic-religious colonialism started with the evil treaty of Tordesillas (1494; پیمان تردسییاس /托德西利亚斯条约) and they soon attained unprecedented levels of monstrosity with the evil deeds of the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadors. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-1521; فتح امپراتوری آزتک توسط اسپانیا /西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国) before exactly 500 years and the destruction of the highly civilized Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (特诺奇蒂特兰/ تنوختیتلان) only heralded what would follow. About:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/托德西利亚斯条约

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/پیمان_تردسییاس

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/悲痛之夜

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/特諾奇提特蘭

https://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/فتح_امپراتوری_آزتک_توسط_اسپانیا

The division of the seas as per the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

In the beginning of the 16th c., when such terribly inhuman crimes started being perpetrated by the first colonial empires, namely Spain and Portugal, there were still several human empires on Earth: in 1520, the Ottoman Empire covered a sizable territory in Western Asia, Northeastern Africa, and what is now called Southeastern Europe. In Western Africa, the Mali Empire (Manden Kurufaba) was still powerful, although superseded by the Songhai Empire.

In Iran, the Safavids were in power, controlling vast lands from Central Iraq to Herat to Baluchistan. The formidable Turanian-Mongolian Empire of the Golden Horde had split, but from today’s NE Balkans and Poland to the Pacific Ocean, a number of Muslim, Buddhist and Tengrist Turanian-Mongolian khanates controlled a really enormous territory. You needed only to speak Chagatay Turkic to cross (from west to east) the vast lands of the Qasim Khanate, the Crimean Khanate, the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan, the Astrakhan Khanate, the Uzbek Khanate, the Kazakh Khanate, the Khanate of Sibir (Siberia), the Turpan Khanate, the Yarkand Khanate, and the Four Oirat confederacy. In China, the Ming dynasty was still powerful, and in 1526, Timur’s (Tamerlane’s) great-great grandson Babur took power in Delhi, eliminating the earlier sultanates and founding the formidable Gurkanian Empire of South Asia, which is better known as the Mughal Empire.

The Golden Horde (Turanian-Mongolian Empire)

The divided Turanian-Mongolian Empire around 1500

The Ottomans around 1520

The Safavid Empire of Iran around 1520 which according to Western colonial propaganda was called ‘Persia’, although it was a Turanian Empire.

The Mughal Empire of South Asia

The Songhai Empire in the 15-16th c.

However, none of these empires’ human elites had an idea about the monstrous plans and the atrocious deeds of the then otherwise insignificant colonial barbarians, who aspired to conquer and disfigure the entire world through evil conspiracy, deceitful schemes, pernicious practices, and utterly inhuman deeds. The naivety of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ming emperors hinges on the fact that they did not studiously monitor the deeds of the colonial powers; furthermore, they mistook the European colonials for humans, and they did not make proper plans as to how to oppose them. The worst mistake of the great Asiatic and African empires was that they did not perceive the forthcoming encounter and clash in terms of long-term perspective, eschatological agenda, and human race extinction. Still, all these empires cherished traditions and beliefs that described the ‘evil’ extensively; but the Asiatic imperial elites failed to timely identify the European colonials as the evil par excellence.

Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West (or Orient and Occident). This forgery had a double headed axe’s use:

a) it made the colonial elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general utterly believe in their ‘proven’ superiority (whereas they are indeed multiply inferior, degenerate and inhuman), and

b) it convinced the targeted nations’ elites, academics, diplomats, administrators, army officers, soldiers, societies and average people in general that they were irrevocably inferior (whereas they are indeed superior, law-abiding and human in every sense).

III. Colonial Weaponization of Knowledge and Deceitful Schemes against the Entire Mankind (1494-1925)

None of the 16th c. great imperial establishments of Asia and Africa realized the extent of the colonial perversion, subversion and systematic falsification of the World History. Study, research, exploration, knowledge, erudition and wisdom were traits, activities, qualities and virtues invariably attested throughout millennia in Asia and Africa; however, the entire scope and the final target were always the same, namely the discovery of the truth and the improvement of understanding. There was never a claim of superiority and such an attitude or claim would appear as absurd; there was competition and quite often synergy.

All the intellectuals of Ionia, Attica, Aeolia and Macedonia willingly acknowledged that they went to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Iran to be educated in the vast temples- universities of the Oriental capitals, because there was only darkness in the multi-divided and backward, petty states of South Balkans. Scholars from all backgrounds and lands used to flock to Nineveh, to Babylon, to Iwnw (Heliopolis), and to Persepolis, and later to Alexandria, to Antioch, to Nisibis, to Ctesiphon, to Istakhr, to Gundishapur, and during Islamic times to Baghdad, to Cordoba, to Cairo, and to Samarqand without idiotic prejudices of ethnic or national, ancestral or racial superiority.

However, the weaponization of knowledge, as attested in magnificent colonial grand opuses like the famous Dutch “Hortus Malabaricus” (1669-1676) and the illustrious French “La Description de l’Égypte” (1809-1829), showed that the insidious European colonial adventure was not a simple military expedition, an economic exploitation, and a national enslavement, but it consisted in the total deprivation of the colonized nations from their natural and national resources, their urban and architectural environment, their traditional knowledge and cultural heritage, and their own identity.

La Description de l’Égypte – the cover page of the monumental voluminous publication

Even worse, the European colonial plague constituted a systematic and permanent projection of the false identity of subaltern and subservient humanoid onto all the civilized Asiatic and African humans; they had been civilized, but they were forced into abandoning their culture and civilization, into being barbarized and enslaved, and into being transformed into humanoid automatons to serve their barbarian masters, i.e. the inhuman monsters of Portugal, Spain, England, France, Holland and Belgium. European colonialism was therefore the complete, irreversible and ultimate dehumanization of the ‘Other’. In the History of Mankind, we can describe European colonialism as the Crime of Crimes.

Simply, in the case of Luso-Spanish, Dutch, and Anglo-French colonialism, the ‘Other’ was the entire world, and the vicious gangsters and forgers were the most worthless barbarians of Asia’s westernmost and most uncivilized peninsula. The result of the detrimental shock was evident: the Mughal Empire could not last more than 180 years after the publication of the “Hortus Malabaricus”, and the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist less than 100 years after the publication of the “Description de l’Égypte”. The morale of the story is easy to figure out: when the foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, you better ask the astrologers how much time is left before your state disappears.

The French colonial empire

The English colonial empire

This is so because, if foreigners know ‘your’ possessions better than you do, this means that your state is already useless and dysfunctional. It also means that your religion is apparently worthless and your sacred texts evidently valueless; and this is true, not in the sense that the religion and the sacred texts in question are meritless, but because you lost their true meaning and therefore your understanding of them is nil.

IV. Naivety and Subsequent Fall of the Oriental Imperial Elites: Mughal Empire, Qing China, Czarist Russia, the Ottomans & Qajar Iran  

It is interesting that the Opium Wars started only few years before the Mughal Empire disappeared. In 1839, the power of Bahadur Shah II was not greater than that of a puppet king in the Balkans or a tribal leader in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cornered among the Ottomans, the Russians, the English in ‘India’, and the English puppets in the pseudo-state of Afghanistan, the Iranian Qajar shahs could do nothing either to help the Chinese Qing or to organize their own defense with the much demanded final dissolution of Afghanistan and with an attack against British India.

It was too late for them; or perhaps one could say that for Imperial Iran, it was already too late in 1501, when the young shah Ismail Safavi, almost adored as the Messiah/Mahdi Incarnate in his early years, was spending his nights in fabulous banquets and sexual orgies, while the Luso-Spanish armadas were sailing across all oceans, which were literally prohibited to all Muslims, Chinese and the rest by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas of which no Iranian intelligence ever heard anything before the 20th c.

Ismail Safavi

Under such circumstances, no one has a doubt why Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar (reign: 1797-1834) did nothing else except losing one more war to the Russians and spending his long days and his even longer nights with his 1000+ concubines, thus laboriously producing no less than 100 children and ca. 600 grandchildren (although several trustworthy historical sources include even higher numbers of heirs). The same is valid for the pious but stupid Ottomans whose best way of correcting a mistake was to commit another.

Fat′h-Ali Shah Qajar

And what is the difference between the last Mughal (Bahadur Shah II) and the last Ottoman (Vahdettin)? Having got a kick in the ass, the former died (1862) in Rangoon (Myanmar) where he was exiled; having experienced the same miserable fate, the latter died in exile (1926), in Sanremo (Italy); either in the East or in the West, an exile is an exile. It is therefore a permanent shame and an irrevocable disgrace. No one can raise a claim to Neo-Safavism, Neo-Mughalism or Neo-Ottomanism without being similarly destroyed and eradicated from the surface of the Earth. And quite instructively, today’s China does not play into the Neo-Qing game; neither does Republican Russia develop Neo-Czarist delusions.

Bahadur Shah II, the powerless Mughal emperor when he was still on his throne

The exiled Bahadur Shah II in his small cabin

Vahdettin, the most execrable and the most miserable of all Ottomans leaves his palace to sail on an English ship to Italy where he lived in exile for the last years of his shameful life

The Opium Wars did not signal only the beginning of the European-American-Japanese colonization of China; they also heralded the beginning of the end for the Romanov. Yet, it was a period of stability for Russia – or so it seemed. From 1825 until 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated at the age of 63, Russia was ruled by only two czars, namely Nicholas I and his son. But there was no foresight, no real study of the European colonials, and no identity clarity.

The Zionist assassination of the Freemason czar Alexander II

Russia’s most shameful spot: the room where Nicholas II and his family were assassinated, thus paying for the mistake to associate Holy Russia to the unholy and devilish colonial states of France and England. Russia’s and the Romanov dynasty’s destiny would be different, if Nicholas II became the ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary and liberated India from the English colonial contamination.

Few people understand that only identity clarity can offer success in the governance of a realm and in the status it rejoices at the international level; on the contrary, identity confusion leads mathematically to defeat and destruction. Imperial Russia was in fact a Western European colonial fabrication – not by means of military invasion but by virtue of colonial stratagems. Colonial investors, agents and diplomats bribed, corrupted and utilized Russian noblemen and royals, and through subtle machinations convinced the Romanovs that they were a ‘European’ power. Thus, the Anglo-French colonials pulled the Russians into their historical forgery, persuaded them that the ‘Russians’ were ‘Indo-Europeans’, dragged them into the fallacious scheme ‘Christianity vs. Islam’ (whereas the English, the Dutch and the French elites were virulently anti-Christian), and engaged them in the same colonial competition (not anymore “Scramble for Africa” but for the entire world). However, all these developments were calamitous for Russia, and finally they led only to the demise of the entire dynasty.  

The Russians were subtly made to believe that the ‘common’ enemy that they had with the English and the French was the Islamic World; this was a success of the Anglo-French colonial diplomacy. In fact, the Russians had much in common with the Muslims, whereas they had nothing in common with the Anglo-French colonial contamination.

The Opium Wars: one of the worst shames of the History of Mankind

Pu Yi, the last of the Qing emperors

As a virtually Turanian, Asiatic and Oriental superpower (like the Golden Horde), Russia had to support China in the Opium Wars, by making an alliance with Iran and by attacking Afghanistan and invading British India. But when you are an Asiatic and you think you are a European, you cannot possibly opt for the correct decision. That’s why identity clarity matters above all, when it comes to national survival. Identity recognition is a very serious and at times painful process; usually, you are neither what you think (are taught that) you are, nor what you would like to be. Only a very neutral and objective/objectivist standpoint toward past atrocities and a strict detachment from national/nationalist/nationalistic narratives, present dreams, and wishful thinking can offer you the key to your identity.

Similarly, during WW I, Russia had to be the ally of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Iran against France and England. In such a case, having no apparent reason to keep significant military forces in their western borders, the Russians could support the Ottomans against the English in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Hejaz, while three (3) million Russian soldiers with their Iranian allies could eliminate the fake state of Afghanistan and march on Delhi, invading the English colony and controlling the southern parts of Asia.

States function like human beings; the same rules apply to an individual and to a group of individuals. When someone does not do the correct thing, a mishappening takes always place. Wrong choices are constantly met with disastrous results; It was very unfortunate that the Russians participated with France and England in the vicious dismemberment of Qing China and that, in 1858-1860, through several ‘unequal treaties’ (the expression is an acknowledged historical term), they detached Outer Manchuria (外滿洲 / Приамурье). That’s why less than 60 years after Alexander II did this injustice to China, his grandson Nicholas II was deposed and assassinated. Alexander II was assassinated too (1881); but after his tragic death, Holy Russia still continued to exist. However, after his grandson’s assassination (1918), Holy Russia was no more. The ‘holy’ had been progressively but completely desecrated through the alliance with England and France.

V. Intellectual Colonialism and Orientalism

While the intellectual elites of the European colonial powers composed their false historical dogma on the basis of the intellectual-academic-cultural movements that we now call ‘Renaissance’, ‘Classicism’, and ‘Enlightenment’, arbitrarily distorting the past of their own lands, they also misinterpreted the History of Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire that they –also deliberately and erroneously- associated with them; it was a real usurpation of another nation’s past and cultural heritage. Then, peremptorily selecting earlier rejected philosophers of Ionia, worthless and forgotten politicians of Attica, long dismissed Aeolian poets, self-styled historians of Carian origin, authors of obscure past and unknown ancestry, repudiated tragedians and duly banished comedians, as well as forms of decayed lifestyle involving pedophilia and homosexuality, ritualistic orgies, and other absolutely pathetic and barbarian practices and traditions of various South Balkan tribes, they fabricated -out of thin air- what we now call ‘Ancient Greece’.

Ancient Greece never existed as a historical entity in the sense Ancient Phoenicia did. The royal divisions of the Ancient Phoenicians did not impact their culture and values that are now recognized for their coherence, consistency and uniformity. Quite contrarily, the disparate cultural elements that appear in the historical sources, the divergent religious beliefs and faithless lifestyles that are documented by means of archaeological evidence, and the incessant conflicts that pitched one ‘Ancient Greek’ city against another bear witness to the undeniable reality that ‘Ancient Greece’ never existed. In case, during the Antiquity and the Christian Times, the name had only a geographical connotation. In Islamic Times, it was duly forgotten.  It is one more colonial fabrication (just like the European ‘Continent’!) geared to be an element of destructive propaganda and a double headed axe. This is what we now call ‘Hellenism’, i.e. a racist ghost.

Hitherto unconceivable concepts were then introduced, and the fallacious version of History, peremptorily produced by the European colonial elites, was instrumental in projecting onto the entire world the aberration of a division between East and West as per which

a) all the positive values, virtues, elements, contributions and exploits were delivered by the Ancient Greeks and Romans (the so-called ‘West’),

whereas

b) all the negative values, sins, disorders, embarrassments, and shames were caused by all the Ancient Oriental nations, the Eastern Christians of all denominations (Orthodox, Miaphysitic/Monophysitic, and Nestorian), and all the Muslims (the so-called ‘East’).

It goes without saying that the latter (b) were (or rather ‘had to be’) ‘lower’ than the former (a)!!

To add insult to injury, the colonial academic elites turned their intellectual and scientific robbery of the colonized nations’ natural and national resources, urban and architectural environment, traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and diachronic identity into an unprecedentedly enormous academic fallacy. Colonial explorers, epigraphists, linguists, archaeologists, philologists and historians deciphered dozens of ancient scripts, surveyed and excavated dozens of thousands of archaeological sites, penned millions of speeches, articles, manuals and books, and filled thousands of libraries and museums with an enormous documentation which consists basically in a calamitous, venomous and discriminatory misrepresentation of the historical past of Asia and Africa. This enormous falsehood is now called Orientalism. All the discoveries, analyses, syntheses, conclusions and interpretations of the colonial Orientalist scholars were published and popularized only in a way to preserve the earlier constituted pseudo-historical dogma intact; this means automatically that vast part of the said documentation was concealed far from the average public.

There are many deliberately erroneous aspects of Orientalism; it goes beyond the scope of the present article to refute the atrocities of the Western colonial Orientalists. However, I must herewith mention a persistent and critical dimension of historical falsification that concerns the use of the forged World History that the Western colonials make.

When you initially write and teach a ‘World History’, based on historical sources that cover the period 500 BCE – 1500 CE and then, at a later stage, you discover numerous anterior sources, which reveal to you (with respect to the outright majority of the world’s historical nations) diverse aspects of spiritual exploration, intellectual endeavor, scientific research, cultural life, artistic genius, economic activity, state governance, public administration, military expedition, imperial conceptualization, and interstate relations that cover 2-3 millennia of History (which antedate the period you initially knew about), then you have to amend all your earlier criteria, preconceived ideas, measures of evaluation, moral standards, virtues, world views, concepts, and standpoints, values, theories, ideas, assumptions and conclusions, because they are -most probably- entirely wrong. 

When you discover millions of texts in several languages and you get a clear idea of how life was 2000 or 3000 years before the moment you -arbitrarily and due to lack of sources- had taken as the ‘beginning of History’, then everything that you ‘knew’ (before the astounding discovery and the subsequent enrichment of knowledge) is wiped out, obliterated, and considered as obsolete once forever.

If we eventually suppose that the peremptory aberrations and the arbitrary conceptualizations of the Renaissance European colonial intellectuals were not malignant schemes providing only for the enslavement of the entire Mankind but mere errors and erroneous assumptions, then we can safely conclude that all these earlier aberrations and conceptualizations had to be immediately, completely and adequately amended in the light of the enormous amount of evidence unearthed, deciphered, studied, analyzed and interpreted.

Enuma Elish, the ancient Assyrian-Babylonian holy text that consists in the first human narrative of the Creation. After the discovery, decipherment, publication and study of the world’s earliest myths, epics and holy texts, everything changes, and we cannot afford to use posterior criteria to evaluate earlier masterpieces of spirituality and literature. On the contrary, all earlier, Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian, cultural and spiritual criteria apply to the evaluation of posterior epics and holy texts, notably those of the Hebrews, the ‘Greeks’ and the Romans.

The Hawara papyrus with text of Homer’s Iliad. After the decipherment, study and publication of Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite holy texts, myths and epics, the only value that Homer’s epics can possibly have is the one that the Ancient Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Hittite criteria allow us to assess.

The fact that this development did not happen at all and the evident practice that today’s West European and North American colonial academics and intellectuals continue diffusing the same, preconceived and widely imposed falsehood are enough to convince all persons of good intentions that the European pseudo-historical dogma has always been deliberately and inanely false from A to Z.

VI. The Fake Science of Geopolitics

Since the misrepresentation of the ‘Other’ reached such extent, it was normal for the colonial elites to develop additional nonsensical theories, which were laboriously portrayed as ‘scientific disciplines’. In fact, they were merely wishful thinking defense mechanisms that lacked historicity, objectivity, authenticity, veracity and congruity; in brief, they were tools of propaganda and means to fool the eye. One of these arbitrary schemes is what people now call ‘geopolitics’. There is no geopolitics in any sense, and there can’t be any; the term is totally meaningless and self-contradictory.  

Coined by the Swedish political scientist and politician Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), the term ‘Geopolitics’ (initially Geopolitik in Swedish and German) contains two linguistic elements in striking contradiction to one another. Being composed of two Ancient Greek words (γη+πολιτική/ge+politiki) that mean ‘earth’ (or ‘land’) and ‘politics’, the term was geared to purportedly describe “the study of the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations”.

This assumption raises many points; first, ‘earth’ (γη) is not ‘geography’; second, ‘geography’ (lit. description of the earth) was already an ancient science that the Ancient Greeks and Romans learned from the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and other ancient and highly civilized nations. Modern geography is a scientific discipline dedicated “to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets”, but Modern Geography and Ancient Geography are two completely different disciplines, methods, concepts and endeavors. This is still preliminary.

The main problem of the term ‘Geopolitics’ (‘earth’ and ‘politics’) is precisely that the Earth (or land) is unrelated to politics, and actually no politics can possibly apply to the Earth or most of the surface of the Earth. ‘Politics’ constitutes a very specific and historically marginal system of governance that can concern only a city-state (polis). There is no ‘politics’ in an empire, a kingdom, a nomad confederation, and a sizable realm of any racial, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and spiritual background. There was no ‘politics’ in Ancient Egypt, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, Cush (Ancient Sudan), Carthage, Iran, Yemen, Turan, and China. There was no ‘politics’ in any Balkan or Anatolian kingdom; and there was no ‘politics’ in Seleucid Syria, Attalid Pergamum, Bactria, Sogdia or Kushan.  

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Alcibiades taken by Socrates. Politics can exist in a small city-state with no hereditary rule. However, a major state, let alone an empire, cannot be ruled by means of politics. As it is only the result of negotiations, material compromises, desecrated social life, corruption and impiety, politics is an improper, immoral and calamitous system even for the unfortunate cities-states that happen to be organized in this manner. But Western Europeans could not possibly understand this reality, because they had disastrously idealized the misery of Ancient Athens, one of the world’s most disreputable states.

Ancient Rome offers a good example in this regard; there was no politics in the Kingdom of Rome (Regnum Romanum; 753–509 BCE); there was politics in the Roman Republic (Senatus Populusque Romanus; 509-27 BCE); and there was no more politics in the Roman Empire (Imperium Romanum; 27 BCE-476 CE).

Subsequently, there was no ‘politics’ in the Eastern Roman Empire, in the Sassanid Empire of Iran, in the Gupta Empire, in Han, Tang, Yuan or Ming China, in the Islamic caliphates, sultanates, emirates, and khanates, in the Christian kingdoms of Western Europe or in any other nomadic confederation, realm or dominion. No system of governance can possibly be called ‘politics’ except for the republican administration of a city-state with democratic participation in the rule.

Certainly, the currently prevailing confusion makes everyone imagine that politics means governance and vice versa, but this represents only one more aspect of the multifaceted colonial propaganda that was diffused worldwide during the 19th and the 20th c. Useless to add, for any sizable realm larger than a modest self-governed city, there is no ‘politics’ today; the system is a tyranny disguised as ‘republic’ or ‘democracy’ and there cannot be any comparison between today’s fake politics and Ancient Roman or Athenian politics, except in terms of corruption, evil character, pernicious attitude, and social disorder.

So, to return to the initial point, “the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations” (as per another definition of the fake term) should be rather called “geo-imperium”, “geo-tyranny”, “geo-dictatum” or “geo-control”; perhaps the best term would be “geo-sovereignty”. This is also proven by the deplorable contents that all the Western colonial academics, intelligence and military experts, diplomats and intellectuals invariably gave to the fake term ‘geo-politics’. Suffice it that one studies these ‘contents’ to realize that ‘geo-politics’ is an ahistorical mixture of criminal colonial targets with incessant distortions of the historical past. It has nothing to do with the ‘governance of one city with non-hereditary rule.  

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) came up with a debased theory, as per which the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Qing China, Japan, and the colonial pseudo-state of Afghanistan were facing existential threats from the so-called ‘two monsters’, namely England and Russia. This nonsense can only be the invention of a cruel American pro-French/pro-Republican colonial, who felt that -despite France’s disproportionate control of African lands- Paris did not play an important role in the so-called ‘Big Game’ between Russia and England. Had the Vietnamese Nguyen dynasty survived the French colonial onslaught, Mahan would surely have invented a much larger ‘zone of threatened realms’ (probably between the 10th and the 40th parallels north, not only between the 30th and the 40th parallels north)! He presented himself as a Christian, but he was a Biblical racist and therefore a pseudo-Christian.

Until today, Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) is viewed as the principal heresiarch of the geo-political fallacy. All that he did was to draw fake lines, which did not represent historical realities in any sense. His long celebrated ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904) reflected the harsh antagonism of German, Russian and English scholars and explorers in parts of today’s Central Asia and Western China. Many people read this book, but do not know that it was written immediately after the first expedition (1900-1901) of Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) in Central Asia, during which the Hungarian Jewish-English explorer and British Intelligence officer carried out surface surveys, extensive reconnaissance, and excavations at Dandan Oilik, an oasis of the Taklamakan Desert. Mackinder’s book was published only months after Aurel Stein’s ‘Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archaeological & Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan’ (1903). 

Mackinder’s texts reflect colonial concepts, diplomatic efforts, and Orientalist terms and explorations; at the time, Aurel Stein was still using currently obsolete terms like ‘Serindia’ (China, Indochina and India viewed as an entity) and ‘Innermost Asia’ (Central Asia, Western China, Mongolia, Central and Eastern Siberia) because his time was a period of pioneering research in those territories that had not been visited by Western European colonials until then. At those days, colonial Orientalists had already gathered enough evidence to fully document the History of Turan and to understand how internal Turanian (Turkic and Mongolian) conflicts generated endless historical waves of immigrants either to the South (in today’s China) or to the West (in today’s Central Siberia, Central Asia, Iran, Western Siberia, Eastern and Central Europe). This reality is hidden behind Mackinder’s concept of ‘pivot’ that he defined as the central point in his otherwise nonexistent ‘World-island’. However, his pivot area was not historically pivotal. Worse, it never existed as a geo-historical entity!

Even if we take the Afanasievo culture (3300=2500 BCE; in the Altai Mountains) and the Andronovo culture (2000-900 BCE; north of the Aral Lake) as signs of early and successive migratory waves, we cannot afford to define today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts as the real geographical ‘pivot’ of History. Quite contrarily, pivotal for the World History was the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’ – another pseudo-historical term that denotes Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine and Egypt. It is from there that civilization spread to the rest of the world. But in 1904, these regions were controlled by the Ottomans (Mesopotamia and Syro-Palestine) and the Anglo-French colonials (Egypt), and there was not much at stake. Contrarily, in the lands that Mackinder described as ‘pivot’, the possible limits of a) the German involvement, b) the English infiltration, c) the Russian advance, and d) the Chinese presence were unknown, whereas all borders were essentially ill-defined.

Last, Mackinder’s tripartite division of the world {into World-Island, offshore islands (England and Japan), and outlying islands (America and Oceania)} is nonsensical either at the historical or the geographical level. Why didn’t he include Indonesia? Probably because it was already colonized by the Dutch and nothing was at stake there. Inane!

On the other hand, Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) produced a geopolitical system that reflected many historical concepts and approaches to imperial governance. In strong contrast with Mackinder’s bizarre abstractions and ahistorical maps, Haushofer’s ideas appear sound and solid. But they are not … ‘geopolitical’! They represent merely a traditional imperial worldview, and they constitute the basics of the state prosperity and expansion as documented in 18th dynasty Kemet (Egypt), Sargonid Assyria, Achaemenid or Sassanid Iran, Han or Tang China, the Abbasid caliphate, and the Timurid Empire.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing ‘new’ or ‘modern’ in Haushofer’s ideas; they are correct, but they constitute the antipodes of the colonial nonsense that we nowadays call ‘geo-politics’. I simply wonder why the distinguished German scholar did not have the courage to decry ‘geo-politics’ as a fake science and to portray the Anglo-Saxon colonial paranoia as the supreme danger for the Mankind’s survival.

The notion of the organic state, the theory of Lebensraum, the need for self-sufficiency-self-reliance (autarky), and the division of the world into spheres of influence or distinct realms (pan-regions) can be found in cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Chinese, Middle Persian, Arabic and Farsi historical sources – millennia before Haushofer put them down on a piece of paper. But they were not described as ‘geopolitical notions’; they were viewed as basics of imperial governance. The only element that did not exist during the Antiquity and the Christian-Islamic times is the delusion of dichotomy between land power and sea power. But in this, Haushofer was apparently influenced by those whom he had to firmly oppose but failed to do so: his Anglo-Saxon opponents.

As it could be expected, on the earlier basis of ahistorical sketches and arbitrary aberrations, further fallacies and false notions were progressively added. Nicholas Spykman (1893-1943) expanded the erroneous concept as per which today’s NE Siberia, Central Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran’s northern and central parts are the ‘pivotal’ area. He then peremptorily and therefore erroneously divided the Afro-Asiatic landmass into a) the so-called ‘heartland’ and b) the ‘rimland’. These jolly delusions never existed in the History of Mankind; they actually do not consist in any worthwhile synthesis or serious interpretation of the existing historical sources. They only reflect the Anglo-Saxon regimes’ final goals, and the evil methods that they intend to use in order to achieve them; in other words, one can surely describe them as ‘wishful thinking’ and properly decry them as the most serious threat against the entire Mankind.  

Fake lines, fake borders, fake concepts and fake science: geo-politics

Before ending this unit, I feel obliged to shift the discussion from the false and fake ‘geo-politics’ to the true and genuine ‘geographical determinism’. When it comes to topics pertaining to the Earth’s impact on empires, peoples and cultures, one has to point out that these topics did not come to surface only in Modern Times; they have constituted an integral part of all the major civilizations of World History. They were known as part of the ancient wisdom, knowledge and sciences; and this was already known to Orientalists, historians and philologists. This knowledge we presently define as ‘geographical determinism’.

Ancient erudite scholars, high priests, mystics and explorers always viewed the material universe as hinging on the spiritual universe; consequently, they were adamant in identifying concordances between the two entities. Part of their scientific knowledge and understanding depended on their spiritual wisdom and exploration. Among the scientific disciplines that they developed and which they viewed as an undividable unity of spiritual and material knowledge and wisdom, ‘geographical determinism’ was only one.

Geographical determinism was not only a concept and a theory, but a practice and a set of criteria as to how to live in Ancient Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Hittite Anatolia, Elam, Cush, Canaan-Phoenicia, and Iran. The same is valid for Carthage, Yemen, the Indus Valley, Turan, and China. The choice of dwelling places, the urban plans, the construction of temples and palaces, the orientation of cities, the identification of sacred sites, the direction of prayer, the selection of specific locations for rock reliefs and inscriptions, the recognition of the correct spots to place enormous statues, pillars and obelisks, altars and thrones, in one word everything, depended on the conclusions drawn after a deep study of geographical determinism.

Nineveh

Etemenanki, the world’s holiest location as per the Babylonians

Ishtar’s Gate, Babylon – Berlin Museum

Parsa (Persepolis), the Achaemenid capital of Iran. Not only the selection of major sites (for palaces and temples) but also the minor details of a society’s daily life were arranged on the basis of geographical determinism.

In fact, the interconnection of the spiritual and material universes is the sole factor that denotes and specifies the nature and the traits of every single geographical point, therefore revealing its uniqueness, importance and possible use. High priests, mystics and hierophants were able to duly explore and describe the locally particular interaction of the five elements (i.e. Ether, Soft Waters, Earth, Air, and Salt Waters) and the subsequent generation of electromagnetic flow per point. This is how they concluded as regards the eventual use of the geographical point, ground, space or area.

It matters little whether you delve in Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian and Iranian Cosmogony and Spiritual Ontology (see above, as regards the five elements) or you explore the Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology, as per which the five elements are the following: Metal (initially conceived as Gold and corresponding to Ether), Water (evidently conceived as Soft Waters), Earth, Wood (corresponding to Air) and Fire. The conclusions were always identical. At the end of the day, either you were at the banks of Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Huang-he (黃河/Yellow River) or Chang Jiang (黃河/Yangtze), geographical determinism functioned always as (to use a modern term) a fully accredited ‘urban environmental acupuncture’.

Traditional Chinese Wuxin (五行) Ontology

The ‘woke’ attitude to transfigure the term and turn ‘geographical determinism’ into ‘environmental determinism’ reveals only the ignorance and the paranoia of the corrupt left-wing social-justice movements and ideologies that currently exist in the worthless and already defunct Western world. This is so, because ‘geography’ meant always the study of the environment (not only the earth) in historical periods.

VII. From the Great Game to the Final Game

European colonial powers’ expansion brought destruction, barbarism, pandemics, wars, deaths, misery, poverty, inhumanity, demolition of cultures, and deracination of millions of people. European colonialism caused also two world wars and a 44-year long ‘cold war’. For these nefarious results and for all the crimes perpetrated, the European colonial states (Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, Belgium, and England) and their derivatives (USA, Canada, and Australia) will have to pay dearly for their attempt to annihilate so many historical nations, destroy their traditions, and uproot their cultures.

Quite unfortunately, the Western colonial and neo-colonial powers did not regret and did not repent for the calamitous and inhuman deeds that they carried out worldwide. There is a serious reason for this grave mistake and unacceptable attitude; the unrepentant savages of US, UK, NATO and their allies are controlled by forces that push the world to the edge, as they advance in the implementation of an eschatological agenda that provides for the extermination of more than nine tenths of the current world’s population. If this claim appears farfetched, one has only to read the text of the magnificent monument known as the Georgia Guidestones; it will be enough.

The persistent manner by which the ruling classes of the colonial powers seek to achieve the extermination of the largest part of world’s population is not a reason for inactivity and despair. There are opposite forces actually working to avert the evil plans, cancel the targets, and lead the colonial powers to self-destruction, social chaos, climactic disorder, ultimate implosion, and total decomposition. Constituting a continuation of the Shanghai Five, which started in 1996 as a mutual security agreement between China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) consists in the greatest alliance in the History of Mankind as it represents more than 40% of the world’s population and almost 25% of the global GDP.

Offering a multi-level synergy in diverse fields, such as security, economy and cultural cooperation, SCO was launched in 2001 with the additional engagement of Uzbekistan; it was considerably enlarged in 2017 with the participation of Pakistan and India as full members. Observer status was offered to Mongolia (2004), Pakistan, India and Iran (2005), Afghanistan (2012) and Belarus (2015). Dialogue partner status was extended to Sri Lanka (2009), Turkey (2012), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Nepal (2015).

SCO expanded in parallel with the groundbreaking Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR) and in cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia as members and Uzbekistan, Moldova and Cuba as observers). On 17th September 2021, Iran was accepted as full member state (the technical and legal processes may take more than a year to be completed) and Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were granted dialogue partner status.

Tacikistan’ın başkenti Duşanbe’de Şangay İşbirliği Örgütü’nün (ŞİÖ) Devlet Başkanları Zirvesi düzenlendi. Zirve toplantısına katılan İran Cumhurbaşkanı İbrahim Reisi (solda), Tacikistan Cumhurbaşkanı İmamali Rahman (sağda) tarafından karışlandı. ( İran Cumhurbaşkanlığı – Anadolu Ajansı )

Governed by consensus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is not the anti-NATO or anti-EU as many people think; however, if we take into consideration the brilliant failures of NATO where one member sabotages the goals of the other and the final impasse of the European Union where every plan has been in deadlock after the European refugee crisis (2015) and the Brexit referendum (2016), no one needs to repeat the experience of these two bodies or to function similarly. The Turkish-Greek row for the case of NATO and the courageous, constant and resolute opposition of the Visegrad Group to the Brussels authorities constitute the perfect examples in this regard.

Being a forum for cooperation, synergy and engagement rather than a typical regional alliance, SCO will be able to gradually encompass Southeast Asia and Africa, thus leaving US, UK, Canada, Australia, France and Holland to implode all on their own. To mark an outstanding success as the world’s first superpower with human face and without colonial past, Beijing must steadily maintain a multilayered approach to international affairs, distinguishing bilateral alliance from multilateral cooperation.

Drawing on hitherto successes and capitalizing on its enormous resources, China must act as the liberating force within a world plagued with colonial divisions, racist concepts, discriminatory prejudices, delusional Euro-centric theories, and historical falsifications. Creating the image of a popular superpower, China must build on Education, Culture, Intellect, Science, Humanity and Justice, unveiling to all and demolishing forever the myths, the delusions, the aberrations and the forgeries that supported the West European and North American colonial adventure, i.e. mankind’s worst nightmare.

About:

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