Pre-publication of chapter XXVII 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, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI and 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.
Until now, 16 chapters have been uploaded as partly pre-publication of the book; the present chapter is therefore the 17th (out of 33). At the end of the present pre-publication, 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.
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Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Ali Qapu Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Western historiography enters a stage of exorbitant falsification when attempting to reconstitute the History of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (1501-1736). What stands at the forefront of the Western forgery and distortion of the History of Iran during the said period is the theory that the Safavid dynasty was ‘Shia’, and also that they ‘converted’ the Turanian population of 16th c. Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. Of course, such fictional conversion never took place, and the Safavid rulers would reject the fake division of Islam into two denominations, since they always proclaimed their Islamic authenticity and integrity, fully refuting the concept of a ‘divided Islam’.
However, this fake division is instrumental for the colonial distortion of History, because on this fallacy hinges the entire Western involvement in the Orient and the conflicts that the criminal and evil states of England, France and America generated across Afro-Eurasia. In order to fully and irreversibly embed the vicious divisive scheme of a supposedly bi-polar Islamic world revolving around two rival empires, namely the ‘Sunni’ Ottomans and the ‘Shia’ Safavids, the Western Orientalists, agents, explorers, diplomats, and statesmen invented the fallacy of the so-called “Safavid conversion of Iran to Shia Islam”.
Of course, at the time (: early 16th c.), the Western colonial powers did not have the chance to impose their false version of History on the Ottomans and the Safavids; they even had not developed Oriental studies properly speaking in their already established pernicious universities. At the time, History was in the making. The only thing that the colonial empires could do, and which they viciously did, was to frame the divisive plot and to pull their diplomatic strings in order to trigger as many Ottoman – Safavid wars as they could. The distortive interpretation and the evil misrepresentation of these facts would come later – in due course of time.
And the malignant fallacy ‘happened’ truly when it ‘should’ have; when the collapsing Ottoman and Iranian empires were eroded through colonial infiltration and evil subversion, then the colonial gangsters and the 19th c. Orientalists started carrying out the projection of the already preconceived forgery onto the Western powers’ local stooges, who by means of shameful bribery and high treason (termed as ‘scholarships for studies in Western Europe’) started diffusing pathetic nonsense and bogus-academic lies in their respective countries only to fit the needs of their masters, namely the colonial powers. At the last stage, the monstrous and murderous forgery of France and England was presented as “History” worldwide only because their colonial empires subjugated almost the entire world and imposed the racist Anglo-French intellectual-academic contamination.
So, the historical forgery that the Western academic murderers have been teaching for over two centuries in their bogus-universities as “Oriental History” is merely the coverage of their inhuman deeds, which plunged Afro-Eurasia into ceaseless local and regional wars, countless rebellions, and two world wars. But the original concept behind the inhuman diplomacy of England and France was already there at the beginning of the 16th c., when they started fallaciously calling Iran, namely a totally Turanian country, “Persia”; this was preposterous. Soon afterwards, they started also naming the Ottoman Empire “Turkey”, which is another expression of their evilness and forgery, because the Ottoman Empire was in reality the most anti-Turkic state in World History.
No less than eight (8) times the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran came to war during the period of 235 years of Safavid rule over Iran. Actually, the wars started in 1514 and ended 1736 with the fall of the Safavids; of course, the historical fact of 8 wars does not mean in this case only 8 years consumed in wars! Most of these wars lasted many years. And actually, the Ottoman-Iranian wars did not end with the demise of the Safavid dynasty. Wars were resumed at the times of the Turanian Afsharid dynasty of Iran (1736-1796) and also during the period of the Turanian Qajar dynasty of Iran (1789-1925). So, from 1514 until 1823, in only 309 years, the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Empire made eleven (11) wars one upon the other. In total, during 309 years, the two empires were engaged in wars against one another for no less than 81 years. About:
If one takes also into consideration the fact that both empires made many other wars with numerous neighboring empires (such as the Mughal Empire, the lately risen Russian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and several colonial kingdoms (Spain, Portugal, France, England, etc.), one concludes easily why the two empires gradually collapsed. Furthermore, taking into account first, the diplomatically instigated and deliberately machinated twelve (12) wars between the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, which took place during a period of 350 years (1568-1918) and lasted for no less than 57 years, and second, the five (5) wars between the Iranians and the Russians, which occurred over the span of 177 years (1651-1828) and kept going for 19 years, one can plainly assess the evilness of the divisive intrigues that the Western European colonial diplomats instigated across Afro-Eurasia, and the unprecedented bloodshed that they caused.
Gate of Felicity (Bâbüssaâde), Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Imperial Hall with the throne of the sultan, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Central Hall, Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Open recess (iwan) of the Yerevan Kiosk, Topkapı Palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Chehel Sotoun Palace, Safavid Isfahan
Scene from the Surname-ı Vehbi, located in the Topkapı palace, Ottoman Constantinople
Battle of Chaldiran (1514); Grand painting at the Chehel SotounPalace (despite the fact that the battle ended with Ottoman victory), Safavid Isfahan
The Third Courtyard of the Topkapı Palace in the Ottoman Constantinople, as depicted in a miniature of the Hünername, 1584
Paintings in the main hall of the Chehel Sotoun Palace,Safavid Isfahan
All the wars, which were machinated and instigated by the colonial English and French diplomacies, needed a sophisticated coverage, e.g. some fake reasons, which would ‘explain’ or ‘justify’ to anyone why these wars happened (or ‘had’ to happen). To be convincingly fake, these reasons were based on a total distortion of the identity of both empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid; these distorted identities, which ‘explained’ the Ottoman – Safavid wars to the average public opinion in Europe at the time, became later the vertebral column of the fallacious Western Orientalism and its entirely fake branches, namely Turkology and Iranology.
To describe the extent and the depth of the Western Orientalist fallacy, suffice it that I herewith state the following: a major topic for Turkologists to study should become the Safavid Empire of Iran as a Turanian state, because it was ethnically a Turanian Empire whereby the outright majority of the population used to speak diverse Turkic languages as their native tongues.
Similarly, a major topic for Iranologists to study should become the Ottoman Empire, because an overwhelmingly Iranian culture permeated the state to such extent that, when Mehmet II entered Constantinople on 29th May 1453 and proceeded to the Palace of the Eastern Roman Emperors, the first words that he uttered were neither in Ottoman Turkish nor in Medieval Greek nor in Arabic, but in the classical, literary language of all Turanians, i.e. in Farsi.
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes;
the owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
These verses written c. 180 years before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) by the great Iranian poet Saadi (known as Saadi Shirazi, 1210-1291) reveal
– the absolutely identical nature of the Turanians and the Iranians,
– the common cultural background of all Iranian and Turanian nations,
– key elements of the Iranian-Turanian apocalyptic and soteriological eschatology,
– the last moments of the ailing Iranian rule (Chosroes: the last major Sassanid emperor Khusraw Parvez; 570-628), and
Mehmed II, by uttering these verses, clearly indicated that he viewed his victory in terms of Iranian-Turanian culture and eschatology, before all the other eventual or hypothetical parameters involved in the topic (Palaeologi-Ottoman imperial family rivalry; Christian-Muslim religious conflict; Eastern Roman-Turkic ethnic quarrel; economic interests).
In fact, there should have never existed Turkology and Iranology within the context of Western Orientalism, if this unit of academic disciplines were to serve the true purpose of exploration and search for the historical truth. The reason is simple: Turan and Iran have always been an indivisible historical – cultural entity.
However, the false portrait of the Ottoman and the Safavid empires, which had been systematically produced by the 16th c. colonial powers, involved two dimensions of distortion of the reality, namely religious and ethnic. Then, 19th and 20th c. French and English academics and explorers misinterpreted the 16th c. Ottoman – Safavid wars that their countries’ duplicitous diplomats had instigated as of both, religious and ethnic, reasons; and in both cases, these scholars lied, pretty much like today’s Orientalists lie when presenting, teaching and propagating the following forgery: “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids”.
In fact, at the beginning of the 16th c., with the exception of Eastern Iranians (namely the Tajik / Dari speaking populations), there was not one Persian ethnic alive; Iran had already been almost entirely Turanized at the ethnic-linguistic level. Farsi was a highly respected and widely used language of Literature, History, Spirituality, Art, Architecture and Culture that all the educated people felt obliged to learn in young age at the various madrasas of the cities, the towns and the villages of Iran. But in reality, Farsi was at the time a dead language like Latin in 16th c. Germany.
Only later and mainly during the 20th c., following the aggressive and extensive English involvement and the shameful colonial rule of Iran, which was carried out by local puppets, a ‘new’, systematized ‘modern education’ was imposed on all Iranians, the true, traditional Iranian History (based on Ferdowsi, Nezami Ganjavi and many other illustrious epic poets) was forcefully and calamitously replaced by the fake, materialistic, atheistic and evil Iranian ‘History’ of the Orientalists, and Farsi became obligatorily the meaningless ‘national’ language. These tasks have been completed by the pathetically ignorant, uneducated and charlatanesque soldiers, who were later called “Pahlavi dynasty shahs”.
The Universal Empire of Iran disappeared, and a fake, nationalistic, ‘Persian’ pseudo-kingdom was established only to implement the ensuing culturally anti-Iranian and ethnically anti-Turanian, nationalist tyranny. It was a villainous Freemasonic plot and eschatological conspiracy against Iran, involving many ulcerous English, French, American and other enemies of Imperial Iran, who postured as ‘friends’ of ‘Persia’ or ‘admirers’ of the ‘Persian civilization’. They only wanted to fool the Iranians and to insult Iran diachronically, after the absurd and abominable example given by ancient rascals like Herodotus and Aeschylus.
While the rocambolesque and even wacky Pahlavi pseudo-dynasty was in power, the criminal English colonials prepared their substitute, namely several pseudo-theologians, who composed pathetic theoretical systems, triggered absurd religious fanaticism, and engulfed the entire Iranian nation in colonial dilemmas and utmost confusion of political nature. Farsi, as the language of the systematized Western education, was indeed revivified particularly among the incessantly increasing urban populations, who started forgetting their native tongues, notably Azeri, Turkmen and other.
During the time of the Pahlavi bogus-Iranian ‘shahs’ (1925-1979), a ‘white’, nationalist terror was imposed on the misfortunate nation; the use of other languages was strictly prohibited. However, this linguistic revival is a fake, and it looks like an awakening of the mummy. The people, who speak Farsi as a native language in today’s Iran, are of Turanian ethnic origin in their outright majority; even worse, their culture is entirely Turanian–Iranian, and their most celebrated rulers and beloved emperors are all Turanians, like Shah Isma’il I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty.
This does not mean that there are not several genuine Iranian languages spoken today in Iran by native speakers; of course, there are many: they speak Baluch, Lori, Bakhtiari, Gorani, Faili, Kalhori, Gilani, Laki, Talysh, etc. But these ethno-linguistic groups represent rather small minorities in Iran. These populations are certainly of Iranian ethnic origin, but they share the common Iranian-Turanian culture with all the populations of Turanian ethnic origin in Iran and in many other countries.
The present situation in Iran looks strange and absurd to all the local victims of the diffusion of Western propaganda of educational-academic-intellectual character; in fact, the systematic propagation of the erroneous Western notion of ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’ triggered only troubles and conflicts. This noxious development relates to the inhuman intellectual perversion that is called ‘Enlightenment’ in the Western world. This consists in intellectual darkness and educational paranoia that caused numerous wars over the past 250 years.
For millennia, various ethnic groups -Iranian and Turanian- speaking different languages, shared always their common culture and tradition without feeling or caring about the unsubstantiated and otherwise nonexistent, fake borders and the evil division lines that the 18th c. Western European concept of ‘nation’ produced worldwide. This historical reality of Turanian-Iranian indivisibility was irrevocable within the universal Iranian Empire, which was the supreme blessing of God and the best present that the divine world had bestowed upon Mankind.
Whatever fallacy the Western Orientalists may eventually invent and include in their often nonsensical bibliography falls apart in the light of all historical sources and texts. If the modern Western academia and intellectuals cannot understand the true reality, this is due to their degenerate minds, the advanced rottenness of their decomposed educational and social structures, and the nauseating putrefaction of their moral core.
Then, the fabrication of the fake divide “Turks vs. Persians” helped the criminal colonial powers spread divisions among the Turanians of Western, Central, Southern and Northern Asia, and the Caucasus region. The parallel creation of the fake divide “Sunni Muslims vs. Shia Muslims” was instrumental in plunging the entire Islamic world in permanent strife. Then, the combined fallacy “Sunni Turkish Ottomans vs. Shia Persian Safavids” is an explosive mixture geared to prolong and perpetuate the catastrophic division of all the populations living between the Bosporus and the Indus River Delta.
However, if they destroy the evil deeds of the local puppets of the Anglo-Saxon colonial governments, these populations could triumphantly unite in a secular super-state of ca. 450 million people and thus become the new superpower and Western Asia’s real locomotive of nations. Alternatively, if the existing colonial divisions are allowed to further exist, they can trigger new fratricidal wars among the Turks, who are culturally Iranian, and the Iranians, who are ethnically Turks.
For all the aforementioned national divisions and historical distortions to be duly presented and propagated worldwide by the Western historical forgers in a complete manner, a key point had to be invented: the supposed Safavid conversion of Iran to ‘Shia Islam’. This Orientalist fallacy hinges of the misrepresentation of the mystical Safavid Order, which founded an entire empire for themselves: the Turanian Empire of Safavid Iran.
However, the falsification of the identity and the deeds of the Safavid Order would never be successfully undertaken worldwide, if the entire Western world was not already totally confused about two totally different issues, which were systematically presented to the average people of all the Western countries as supposedly ‘one’ by their religious, academic and intellectual authorities alike: spirituality and religion.
Nevertheless, spirituality and religion are totally distinct activities of the spiritual and the material hypostases of the human being.
Sultanahmet Square in Ottoman Constantinople: the Eastern Roman hippodrome and Obelisk of Theodosius, which was transported from Luxor
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Safavid Isfahan
Procession of the guilds in the hippodrome as per a miniature of the Surname-i Vehbi (1582)
Naqsh-e Jahan, the imperial square in Safavid Isfahan
—————- BLUE MOSQUE, OTTOMAN CONSTANTINOPLE —————-
Blue mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii): built between 1609 and 1617
Blue mosque, part of the interior decoration
Blue mosque, the mihrab (center) and the minbar (right)
—————– SHAH MOSQUE, SAFAVID ISFAHAN —————————-
Shah Mosque (Masjid-e Shah): built between 1611 and 1629
The winter hypostyle
The dome
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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 X: Iranian and Turanian Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran
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
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
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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”
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
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:
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.»
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:
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
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?
‘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:
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
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):
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:
Former French President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac and Helene Carrere-d’EncausseState Banquet at the palace of Elysee. Helene Carrere d ‘Encausse and the president Chirac in Paris, France on November 20, 2006Jean-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.
Western Orientalist historiography; early sources of Iranian History; Prehistory in the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia
6- Western Orientalist historiography
The modern Western European specialists on Iran were first based on the Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Latin sources and on travelers’ records and descriptions. On his way to China, the Italian Franciscan monk Odoric of Pordenone was the first European to probably visit (in 1320) the ruins of Parsa (Persepolis) that he called ‘Comerum’. The site was then known as Chehel Minar (چهل منار /i.e. forty minarets) and later as Takht-e Jamshid (تخت جمشید/i.e. the throne of Jamshid, a great hero of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and of the Iranian legendary historiography about which we discussed). The Venetian Giosafat Barbaro visited the same location in 1474 and, being the victim of the delusions about which I spoke already, he attributed the erection of the majestic monuments to the Jews!
After the rise of the Safavid dynasty and the formation of the two alliances (the French with the Ottomans and the English with the Iranians), an English merchant visited Persepolis in 1568 and wrote a description that was included in Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ (1582). Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions were first noticed and reported by the Portuguese António de Gouveia, who visited the site in 1602 and wrote about it in 1611. It is only in 1618 that the Spanish ambassador (to the court of the Safavid Shah of Iran Abbas I/1571-1629; reigned after 1588) García de Silva Figueroa associated the location with the great Achaemenid capital that was known as Persepolis in the Ancient Greek and Latin sources.
The Italian Pietro Della Valle spent five years (1616-1621) in Mesopotamia and Iran, visited Persepolis (1621), made copies of several inscriptions that he noticed there and took them back to Europe, along with clay tablets and bricks that he found in Babylon and Ur. This was the first cuneiform documentation brought to Europe. With respect to Persepolis he wrote that only 25 of the 72 original columns were still standing.
Good indication of the lunacy that Western Europeans experienced at those days due to their erroneous reading of the untrustworthy Ancient Greek historical sources about Achaemenid Iran is the following fact: after traveling in Asia and Africa, Sir Thomas Herbert wrote in his book (1638) that in Persepolis he saw several lines of strange signs curved in the walls. These were, of course, Old Achaemenid cuneiform inscriptions, but at the time, the modern term ‘cuneiform’ had not been invented; however, excessively enthused with Greek literature about Ancient Iran, he ‘concluded’ that these characters ‘resembled Greek’! He mistook cuneiform for Greek! So biased his approach was!
The term ‘cuneiform’ (‘Keilschrift’ in German) was coined (1700) by the German scholar and explorer Engelbert Kaempfer, who spent ten years (1683-1693) in many parts of Asia. The monumental site of the Achaemenid capital was also visited by the famous Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn (1704) and the famous jeweler Sir Jean Chardin, who also worked as agent of Shah Abbas II for the purchase of jewels. He was the first to publish (1711) pertinent copies of several cuneiform inscriptions.
The German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr took the research to the next stage when he copied and published (1764) the famous rock reliefs and inscriptions of Darius the Great; in fact, he brought complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe. He realized that he had to do with three writing systems and that the simpler (which he named ‘Class I’) comprised 42 characters, being apparently an alphabetic script. Niebuhr’s publication was used by many other scholars and explorers, notably the Germans Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, who published the most advanced research on the topic in 1798, and Friedrich Münter, who confirmed the alphabetic nature of the script (in 1802).
The reconstitution of the Iranian past proved to be far more difficult a task than that of the Ancient Egyptian heritage. This is so because, if we consider the Old Achaemenid Iranian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest stages of the two respective languages and scripts, Coptic (the latest stage of the Egyptian language) was always known in Europe throughout the Christian and Modern times, whereas Pahlavi and Middle Persian (the corresponding stages of the Iranian languages) were totally unknown. For this reason, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the first French Iranologist and Indologist, played a key role in the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, although he did not spend time exploring it. But having learned Pahlavi and Farsi among the Parsis of India, he managed to study Avestan and he translated the Avesta as the sacred text of the Zoroastrians was preserved among the Parsi community. Pretty much like Coptic was essential to Champollion for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the pioneering work of Anquetil-Duperron and the knowledge of Avestan, Pahlavi, Middle Persian and Farsi helped the French Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend make critical breakthroughs and advance the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid.
Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1802, but it was rejected; in fact, he had deciphered only eight (8) letters until that moment, but most of his assumptions were correct. He had however to wait for an incredible confirmation; after Champollion completed his first step toward the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822, he read the Egyptian text of a quadrilingual inscription on the famous Caylus vase (named after a 18th c. French collector). Then, Champollion’s associate, the Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, announced that Grotefend’s reading of the imperial Achaemenid name ‘Xerxes’ did indeed correspond to what the Egyptian hieroglyphic text testified to. This situation generated an impetus among Orientalist scholars and explorers; until the late 1830s and the early 1840s, Grotefend, the French Eugène Burnouf, the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen, and Sir Henry Rawlinson completed the task.
Shush (Susa), an Elamite and later an Achaemenid capital, was explored in 1851, 1885-1886, 1894-1899, and then systematically excavated by the French Jacques de Morgan (1897-1911), whereas Pasargad (the early Achaemenid capital) was first explored by the German Ernst Herzfeld in 1905. Persepolis was excavated quite later, only in the 1930s by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Not far from Hamadan (the ancient capital Hegmataneh/Ekbatana of the Medes), the splendid site of Mount Behistun (Bisotun) had become world-famous even before it was excavated (initially in 1904) by Leonard William King and Reginald Campbell Thompson (sponsored by the British Museum). This was due to the fact that the famous trilingual Behistun inscription and the associated reliefs were carved at about 100 m above ground level on a cliff, and explorers had to scale the cliff. Several fascinating descriptions of the extraordinary location were written by travelers and visitors, before academic work was carried out there. Putting his life in risk, Rawlinson copied the Old Achaemenid text in 1835, and this helped him advance considerably the decipherment of the script.
Without the decipherment of the Old Achaemenid, it would be impossible for Rawlinson to decipher the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform, and later for others to read the Hittite script which enabled us to have access to the most important and the most original Anatolian literature of pre-Christian times.
Behistun (Farsi: Bisotun / Old Iranian: Bagastana, i.e. ‘the place of God’) was mentioned by Ctesias, who totally misunderstood the inscription, attributing it to the ‘Babylonian’ Queen Semiramis and describing it as a dedication to Zeus! In reality, the text is part of the Annals of Emperor Darius I the Great, duly detailing his victory over a rebellion; the Iranian monarch dedicated his triumph to Ahura Mazda. Now, Semiramis seems to be an entirely misplaced Ancient Greek legend about the historical Queen of Assyria (not Babylonia!) Shammuramat. The Assyrian queen was consort of Shamshi Adad V and co-regent with her son Adad-nirari III (during his reign’s early phase). But the Assyrian Queen had nothing to do with Mount Behistun and the Achaemenid Iranian inscription.
In the early 17th c., Pietro della Valle was the first Western European to come to Behistun and sketch the remains. As a matter of fact, many European travelers and explorers visited Behistun, saw the impressive inscription, and disastrously misinterpreted it, due to their preconceived ideas, mistaken readings, and unrealistic assumptions.
A foolish English diplomat and adventurer, Robert Sherley, visited the location in 1598, and he considered the astounding reliefs and the inscriptions as ‘Christian’! Napoleon’s subordinate, General Claude-Matthieu, Comte de Gardane, visited the place in 1807 only to see in the monuments the representation of ‘Christ and his twelve apostles’! In 1817, Sir Robert Ker Porter thought that the impressive relief and inscriptions detailed the deeds of Emperor Shalmaneser V of Assyria and the transportation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the NE confines of Assyria. Last, quite interestingly, the German spiritual-scientific society Ahnenerbe, which used Hitler for their non-Nazi, highly secretive projects, explored Behistun in 1938.
7- Early sources of Iranian History: Assyrian-Babylonian Cuneiform
The early sources of Iranian History are Assyrian-Babylonian historical documents pertaining to the military, commercial and/or administrative activities of the Neo-Assyrian kings in the Zagros mountains and the Iranian plateau; these sources shed light on the earliest stages of Median, Persian and Iranian History, when the ancestors of the Achaemenids were just one of the many tribes that settled somewhere east of the borders of the Assyrian Empire.
Since the 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian and Akkadian historical sources referred to nomads, settlers, villages, cities, strongholds and at times kingdoms situated in the area of today’s Iran. Mainly these tribes and/or realms were barbarians who either partly damaged or totally destroyed the Mesopotamian civilization and order. That’s why they were always described with markedly negative terms. On the other hand, we know through archaeological evidence that several important sites were located in the Iranian plateau, constituting either small kingdoms or outstanding entrepôts and commercial centers linking Mesopotamia with either India or Central Asia and China.
For instance, settled somewhere in the Middle Zagros, the Guti of the 3rd millennium BCE constituted a barbaric periphery that finally destroyed Agade (Akkad), the world’s first empire ever; and in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Kassites descended from Middle Zagros to Babylon, after the Old Babylonian kingdom was destroyed (in 1596) by the Hittite Mursilis I, and they set up a profane kingdom (Kassite dynasty of Babylonia) that the Assyrians never accepted as a heir of the old Sumerian-Akkadian civilization.
As both ethnic groups learned Akkadian / Assyrian-Babylonian, their rulers wrote down their names, and thus we know that neither the Guti nor the Kassites were a properly speaking Iranian nation; the present documentation is still scarce in this regard, but there are indications that some of these people bore Turanian (or Turkic) names.
For thousands of years, South Zagros and the southwestern confines of today’s Iran belonged to Elam, the main rival of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. Viewed as the true negation of the genius of Mesopotamian civilization, Elam was ruled by the ‘kings of Shushan and Anshan’; the two regions corresponded to Susa (and the entire province of Khuzestan in today’s Iran) and South Zagros respectively. The name that modern scholarship uses to denote this nation and kingdom is merely the Sumerian-Akkadian appellation of that country. In Elamite, the eastern neighbors of the Sumerians called their land ‘Haltamti’. Their language was neither Indo-European (like Old Achaemenid and Modern Farsi) nor Semitic (like Assyrian-Babylonian); it was also unrelated to Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic, the languages of the indigenous populations in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. Recent linguistic research offers tentative approaches to the relationship between Elamite and the Dravidian languages, thus making of it the ancestral language of more than 250 million people.
Elamite linear and cuneiform writings bear witness to the life, the society, the economy, the faith and the culture of the Elamites, as well as to their relations with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. But they cannot help us reconstitute the History of the Iranian plateau, because the Elamites never went beyond the limits of South Zagros.
With the rise, expansion and prevalence of Assyria (from the 14th to the 7th c. BCE), we have for the first time a Mesopotamian Empire that showed great importance for the Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau; consequently, this means that, for the said period, we have more texts about these regions, which earlier constituted the periphery of the Mesopotamian world, but were gradually incorporated into the ever expanding Assyrian Empire. Thanks to Assyrian cuneiform texts, we know names of tribal chieftains and petty kings, cities, fortresses, ethnic groups, etc., and we can assess the various degrees of Assyrianization of each of them; but it is only at the time of Shalmaneser III (859-824 BCE) that we first find a mention of the Medes and the Persians. The former are named ‘Amadaya’ and later ‘Madaya’, whereas the latter are called ‘Parsua’ (or Parsamaš or Parsumaš).
Assyrian cuneiform texts about the Medes and the Persians more specifically are abundant during the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BCE) and at the time of the Sargonids (722-609 BCE). It is noteworthy that the Parsua were first located in the region of today’s Sanandaj in Western Iran and later they relocated to the ancient Elamite region of Anshan (today’s Iranian province of Fars), which was devastated and emptied from its population by Assurbanipal (640 BCE). After the great Assyrian victory, which also involved the destruction of Susa, Assyrian texts mention the grandfather of Cyrus the Great, Cyrus I, as Kuraš, king of Parsumaš. He sent gifts to Nineveh and he also dispatched his eldest son (‘Arukku’ in Assyrian from a hypothetical ‘Aryauka’ in Ancient Iranian) there – nominally as a hostage, but essentially as a student of Assyrian culture, sacerdotal organization, and imperial administration and procedures.
The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III
Tiglathpileser III
Sarrukin (Sargon of Assyria) with his son and successor Sennacherib (right)
8- Pre-History in the Iranian plateau, and Mesopotamia
During the 4th, the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE, the major hitherto excavated Iranian archaeological sites are the following:
Tepe Sialk
Located near the modern city of Kashan, in the center of the Iranian plateau, and excavated in the 1930s by the Russian-French Roman Ghirshman, the site was first occupied in the period 6000-5500 BCE. The remains of the zikkurat (dating back to around 3000 BCE) show that it was the largest Mesopotamian style zikkurat. Tepe Sialk IV level (2nd half of the 4th millennium BCE) testifies to evident links with Sumer (Jemdet Nasr, Uruk) and Elam (Susa III). The site was abandoned and reoccupied in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium BCE (Tepe Sialk V and VI). Its location and the archaeological findings let us understand that the site was a key commercial center that linked Mesopotamia with Central Asia and China.
Tureng Tepe
Located close to Gorgan in Turkmen Sahra (NE Iran) and excavated by the American Frederick Roelker Wulsin in the 1930s and by the French Jean Deshayes in the 1950s, the site was inhabited in the Neolithic and then continually from 3100 to 1900 BCE, when it appears to have been the major among many other regional settlements and in evident contact with both, Mesopotamia and Central Asia. There was a disruption, and the site was occupied again only in the 7th c. BCE (Tureng Tepe IV A) by newcomers.
Tepe Yahya
Located at ca. 250 km north of Bandar Abbas and 220 km south of Kerman, the site was of crucial importance for the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley; it was also in contact with Central Asia. Excavated by the Czech-American Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky, the site was inhabited from ca. 5000 to 2200 BCE and then again after 1000 BCE. The genuine ‘Yahya Culture’ covered the first half of the 4th millennium BCE. The Proto-Elamite phase started around 3400 BCE (Tepe Yahya IV C); few proto-Elamite tablets have been unearthed from that stratum. This period corresponds to the strata Susa Cb and Tepe Sialk IV. During the 3rd millennium BCE, the site appears to have been the center of production of hard stone carving artifacts; dark stone vessels produced here were found / excavated in Mesopotamia. Similar vessels and fragments of vessels have been found in Sumerian temples in Mesopotamia, in Elam, in the Indus River Valley, and in Central Asia.
Not far from Tepe Yahya are situated several important sites that testify to the strong ties that the entire region had with Sumer and Elam in the West, the Indus River Valley in the East and Central Asia in the North; Jiroft gave the name to the ‘Jiroft culture’ which is better documented in the nearby site of Konar Sandal and covers the 3rd millennium BCE. Further in the east and close to the triangle border point (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Shahr-e Sukhteh was an enormous site which thrived between 3200 BCE and the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. It was associated with both, the ‘Jiroft culture’ and the Helmand culture, which was attested in several sites in South Afghanistan. Elamite texts were also found in that site, which already offered many surprises, involving the first known artificial eyeball and the earliest tables game with dice.
Several important prehistoric Mesopotamian sites demonstrate parallels and contacts with the aforementioned sites, notably
– Tell Halaf (near Ras al Ayn in NE Syria; the Neolithic phase lasted from 6100 to 5400 BCE, and the Bronze Age covers the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BCE),
– Tell al Ubaid (near Ur in Dhi Qar governorate; 6500-3700 BCE),
– Tell Arpachiyah (near Nineveh; the site was occupied in the Neolithic period, like Tell Halaf and Ubaid),
– Tepe Gawra (close to Nineveh; the site was occupied from 5000 to 1500 BCE),
– Tell Jemdet Nasr (near Kish in Central Iraq; 3100-2300 BCE), and
– Uruk {near Samawah in South Iraq; type site for the Uruk period (4000-3100 BCE), it was a major Sumerian kingdom and it was the world’s most populated city in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE with ca. 40000 inhabitants and another 90000 residents in the suburbs}.
In the next course, I will present a brief diagram of the History of the Mesopotamian kingdoms and Empires down to Sargon of Assyria – with focus on the relations with Zagros Mountains and the Iranian plateau.
Tepe Sialk
Tureng tepe
Tepe Yahya
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To watch the video (with more than 110 pictures and maps), click the links below:
HISTORY OF ACHAEMENID IRAN – Achaemenid beginnings 1Α
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:
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:
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:
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 1500The Ottomans around 1520The 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 AsiaThe 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 empireThe 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 throneThe exiled Bahadur Shah II in his small cabinVahdettin, 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 IIRussia’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 MankindPu 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.
NinevehEtemenanki, the world’s holiest location as per the BabyloniansIshtar’s Gate, Babylon – Berlin MuseumParsa (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.
What follows is my brief response to an Oromo scholar and friend from Occupied Oromia in the colonial state of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia). While Ahmed Abiy, the criminal butcher of Addis, indiscriminately kills daily hundreds of Oromos, Sidamas, Afars, Ogadenis, Shekachos, Gedeos, Kaffas, Kambatas, Hadiyas, Wolayitas, Agaws, Bertas, Nuer, Anyuaks and other subjugated and persecuted nations of Eastern Africa, the evil states of England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. keep silent about the vicious crimes incessantly perpetrated in Occupied Oromia and across many other illegally occupied territories that have been illegitimately incorporated into Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia), i.e. the realm of the Amhara and Tigray thugs, who have been the local agents of the colonial powers for 170 years.
The guilty states of England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. are not only the enemies of all African, Asiatic, Central and Eastern European, and Amerindian nations, but also the scheming perpetrators of the 19th c. worst evildoings, namely the Opium Wars against China.
The gangster states of England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. constitute the worldwide epitome of bias, atrocity and monstrosity, while pretending to care ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and whatever else is included in their filthy and paranoid jargon; these are the beasts that wanted to ‘liberate’ Syrians, Libyans and Yemenites in 2011 only to plunge them into civil wars, bloodshed, cholera, and Saudi-led or Turkey-engineered aggressions.
Although the unrepentant England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. murderers entered into wars in order to gradually split the socialist relic of Yugoslavia to pieces, their rulers do not apply the same measures in the case of Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia). Their acts speak for themselves: for them, the life of a Slovene costs more than that of an Ogadeni, the freedom of a Croat matters whereas that of an Oromo does not, and the peace of a Kosovar counts, but that of a Sidama is next to nothing.
The lawless states of England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. appear now to very much care about the religious freedom of the Uighurs; but the Chinese did not invade, occupy, and dissolve a local state or kingdom in the way 19th c. Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians did, fighting with English and French guns against the aforementioned Cushitic nations of Eastern Africa, who defended their most ancient and noble kingdoms with shields, swords and spears. About: https://www.academia.edu/43645563/Links_to_my_articles_about_Official_Czarist_Russian_Envoy_Alexander_Bulatovichs_books_on_1890s_Abyssinia_and_his_expedition
The felonious states of England, France, US, Canada, Australia, Vatican, Israel, Holland, Belgium, etc. set the foundations of their colonialism, racism, white supremacism, discrimination, perversion, and anti-African, anti-Asiatic, anti-Chinese, anti-Amerindian, anti-Christian, anti-Islamic and anti-human hatred and rhetoric on an erroneous and peremptory assessment of their own historical past and on a deliberate distortion of the World History, which has been effectuated in a way to ‘justify’ their fake values, to suit their dirty interests, and to present them as ‘civilized’ whereas they (and their forefathers) have always been crude barbarians.
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THE EVIL MODELS OF THE ENEMIES OF CHINA, ASIA, AFRICA AND THE ENTIRE MANKIND
Nicolas Poussin, the Modern European Classicism, and the distortion of Pre-Christian Rome and GreeceRaffaello Sanzio, Renaissance, and the peremptory, fallacious, paranoid representation of Ancient Greece absurdly portrayed as important and civilizedThe racist, corrupt and fallen system of the Roman RepublicThe historically unimportant, ancient town of Athens, their corrupt and racist political system, Pericles and Thucydides: a politician of empty rhetoric and a fake historian who exalted a devious state that caused a Civil War only to be ultimately defeated. Modern West Europeans and North Americans made of that evil system their ideal form of governance because they identified themselves, their barbarian cruelty, and their mendacious rhetoric with Ancient Athens’ miserable evildoings.
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All those, who fight to eliminate the calamitous consequences of the 16th–20th c. West European and North American colonialism, and those who struggle against the French-Anglo-American intellectual-academic-educational-cultural neocolonialism and hegemonism, must join forces with China and carry out the vast preparatory work needed: the fake ‘story’ of the West, namely the Greco-centric, Romano-centric, Euro-centric, and Occidentalo-centric version of History must be systematically, comprehensively and irrevocably refuted, rejected and canceled.
Greece, Rome and Western Europe are not the center, but the margin of History.
Europe is not a continent; it is Asia’s less civilized peninsula.
The Valley of the Nile (Egypt and Cush), Syro-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Iran, Turan (Central Asia– Siberia), and China constitute the real axis around which the History of the Mankind revolved for millennia; to this axis are also appended the African Atlas and the Sahara, Punt (Somalia), Yemen, Anatolia, Caucasus, the Indus Valley, and the Ganges Valley.
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THE PERFECT EXAMPLES OF CHINA, ASIA, AFRICA AND THE ENTIRE MANKIND
Hammurapi of BabyloniaThutmose III of Egypt (Kemet)Hattushili III of Hittite AnatoliaSargon II and Sargonid AssyriaDarius I the Great and Achaemenid IranAshoka of HindShorkaror of Cush-MeroeEastern Han China: Dahuting tomb murals from Zhengzhou, HenanShapur I and Sassanid IranJustinian I and the Eastern Roman EmpireKhusraw I and Sassanid IranTang emissaries to King Varkhuman of Sogdia (Afrasiab murals, Samarkand) 7th c. CEOpera in Yuan ChinaEmperor Taizu of Ming ChinaTimur (Tamerlane) and the Islamic Intellectual and Scientific Revival
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These facts must become known to all the people around the world, while true History must replace the racist and nonsensical Western myth. China must not sell only its products; Beijing has the task to write a Western-fallacy-free History, while demolishing the West European-North American Renaissance historical revisionism, which is the reason of all the wars, and of the bloodshed that ensued.
———- BRIEF COMMENTS FROM AN ORMO FRIEND —————-
Thank you, Prof.! You & Cheikh Anta Diop inverted/changed my mind upside down. Bless!
Yea. Colonizers invented ‘Nubia’ to dismantle Kushites’ unity, but they couldn’t succeed.
—————————— MY RESPONSE ————————
Exactly! One must undertake an enormous effort of refuting the Wikipedia because many people go there and get misinformed and confused.
With the exception of the Temple of Mandulis (Maluli) at Kalabsha (Talmis), almost all the monuments between Abu Simbel and Khartoum are Cushitic. Yes, there are few Ancient Egyptian temples (at Soleb, Sedeinga and Sai Island) but they are few and mainly date back to the New Empire, when Kemet (Egypt) occupied Ethiopia (Cush/Sudan).
But no one can call the Cushitic sites of Kerma, Napata (Karima), Meroe, Mussawarat as Sufra, Naqa, etc. “Nubian”. This is done on purpose; they prepare a state between Egypt and Sudan (after cutting territories from both) and they want to ‘endow’ that state with a ‘History’ that is not its own.
There is not one Kurdish nation, but many different nations that they call Kurds: Kurmanji, Zazaki, Sorani, Gorani, Bahadinani, Faili, Yazidi, etc. Yes, there was a 12th-13th c. Arabic/Farsi term ‘Akrad’ (‘Kurds’); but it was collective. Same as ‘Atrak’ (‘Turks’). It is wrong to translate ‘Atrak’ as ‘Turks’; the authors did not mean ‘Turks of Turkey’, but some (in every case different) types of Turkic nations (Turkmen, Azeri, Uzbek, Tatar, Kipchak, etc.).
Colonial historians, Orientalists and Africanists, never wrote a word to eventually reveal / represent the truth; in any case, they don’t search the truth altogether. They try to always transform everything that they find into a compatible element of their preconceived, arbitrary and extremely false version of History that they want to impose on the entire world.
And the best method for them to achieve this evil target (that they implement) is their effort that they carry out be meticulously separating colonized nations from colonized nations:
Oromos do not study Azeri History,
Baluch do not study Oromo History,
Nigerian Hausa do not study Somali History, and
Uzbeks do not study Ancient Egypt and Sudan.
That’s how the fallacious colonial model of History remains unchallenged in most of the world’s universities with
a) Turkish professors teaching parts of this historical model that damage the national interests of Turkey,
b) Egyptian professors teaching parts of this historical model that damage the national interests of Egypt,
c) Sudanese professors teaching parts of this historical model that damage the national interests of Sudan,
d) Yemeni professors teaching parts of this historical model that damage the national interests of Yemen, …
… and so on, and so on.
My sole hope is that the Chinese Anti-Occidentalism (which is due to the fact that the Chinese – thank God – did not forget the Opium Wars that England, France and other Western countries waged against them before 150-170 years) will drive today’s Chinese to the only correct conclusion, namely that ………
………….. the only way for China to destroy the West is to outfox and dismantle the fallacious colonial model of History first.
All the History of Islam, of Christianity, of Asia, of Africa, of Europe, of Ancient Greece, of Ancient Rome, and of the Ancient Orient, which is known today, is false.
In fact, this is what all people ‘know’ today as ‘history’: whatever part of History (plus all the well-prepared distortions that are associated to it) is necessary to today’s political interests of the colonial powers.
So, by saying that “today people do not know anything about the true historical past”, one describes only half of the truth.
The other half is this: the fallacy that most of the people know today as ‘history’ is something that
i) detrimentally damages their own interests, and
ii) ultimately serves the interests of the evil colonial states of France, England and America.
Without the complete demolition of the fallacious colonial model of History, the Chinese will risk becoming … ‘Westerners’.
In this manner, they will stop being properly Chinese and become …. mere Western puppets, like the Egyptians, the Sudanese, the Iranians, the stupid Turkish Islamists of Erdogan, the Tunisians, and all the rest.
To become a true historian, I first rejected Ancient Greece, and second realized that Modern Greece is a fake state.
In the altered world of today, no one can reach the Truth, without rejecting himself many times. All historical texts are either concealed or taught through distortion lenses.
All points, moments, circumstances and periods of History have been altered, and all the people today know systematized lies as History.
Jesus has nothing to do with what today’s Christians think/believe that he was.
Muhammad has nothing to do with what today’s Muslims think/believe that he was.
And the same is true about Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, etc.
Those idiots, who say that the Holy Books are ‘clear’, are either uneducated and ignorant crooks or demented and paranoid schizophrenics or conscious agents of the colonial gangsters, like the Islamist criminals at Ankara, who want to kill me.
The only to know the Truth are few people living in remote villages with no technology, no electricity, and no modernity, but close to their traditions, spirituality and wisdom; they may be among the Tuareg of Algeria, the Oromos of Occupied Oromia, the Yemenites of Mahra, the Hazara of Afghanistan or the Qashqai of Fars in Iran.
Yes, these few lucky ones don’t know the History of the World, but they don’t need to know it. They already know the Truth, each of them in his respective location, and Waaqo/Allah knows them. And this is quite enough.
Thank you for your kind words, compliments and news!
megalommatiscomments 