Imposing Misery, Jailing Dissidents: Venezuela Repeats Standard Socialist Patterns

In February 2014, a article in The Michigan Daily carried the headline, ‘Venezuelan opposition head waits to hear about charges.’ This was merely episode in a long protracted struggle between Venezuela's socialist dictatorship and its freedom-oriented dissidents.

The story, from an AP wire item, explained that an opposition leader was being ‘held at a military jail’ for his opposition to ‘15 years of socialist rule.’

This particular leader was named Leopoldo Lopez, and the dictator who put him in jail was Nicolas Maduro, but the general pattern of a liberty-seeking dissident being jailed by a socialist dictator has been the pattern for several decades in Venezuela.

The net impact of socialism in Venezuela follows a standard pattern which was clear in the various Soviet-bloc countries until 1990. The planned economy with high taxes and extreme regulation of all aspects of business, along with state ownership of almost all assets, leads to declining standards of living and brutal repression of civil rights and human rights.

These symptoms lingered and intensified both during the decade of rule by dictator Hugo Chavez, and during the reign of his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

The declining standards of living led to outright poverty, with shortages in basic goods, like food and toilet paper. Medical care deteriorated, and the average lifespan among Venezuela citizens’s shortened considerably.

By 2018, the condition of the nation was desperate, with many citizens near starvation. These sad developments were, however, reliably predictable twenty years earlier: such is the pattern of socialist governments.

Toward a New Global Balance of Power: China and Russia Pose Threats to Small Independent Nations

The world’s geopolitical equilibrium during the first two decades of the twenty-first century was shaped by several factors. Russia discovered or invented its post-Soviet identity. China relapsed into autocracy after its flirtation with a less personality-driven power structures. Condoleezza Rice’s firm hand on Putin was replaced by Hillary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s ambiguous and indecisive approach to Russia. The world in general moved away from its now irrelevant Cold War configurations and wondered how to respond to Islamic terrorism.

By 2018, it had become clear that the new, post-Soviet Russia was not a clear friend or ally to Europe, to NATO, or to the United States. Robert Maginnis writes:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seems immune if not somewhat irritated by Western sanctions over his seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his ongoing misadventure in eastern Ukraine, which some label a civil war. Putin responded to Western sanctions with disinformation campaigns against Western elections, significant saber-rattling along Russia’s Western border with former satellite states, and increased harassment of NATO and US military vessels and aircraft across the world.

Parallel to Putin is China’s leader, Xi Jinping. While Russia had a readymade substantial military establishment leftover from the Cold War, China was still in a phase of military ascendancy. While China had nuclear weapons since 1964, it lacked an army, navy, and air force of global stature.

In the early twenty-first century, China, in contrast to both Russia and the United States, has gone on a diligent and focused building spree, developing world-class capabilities to strike anywhere.

China’s ability to intimidate militarily works in conjunction with its financial and political influence. It has been able to advance toward its goal of controlling shipping in and around the South China Sea, marginalizing the other nation-states in the area - Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc. - and having at its mercy a disproportionately large percentage of the world’s shipping.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is an autocrat as well with a great vision for a modern, global armed forces and an economic arm reaching broadly, thus pushing China’s influence abroad seeking to dominate the globe’s democratic regions, a view shared by China experts in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a total, protracted struggle for regional and global supremacy,” said retired Navy Captain Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief who testified in May 2018. “This supremacy is the heart of the ‘China Dream.’ China’s arsenal in this campaign for supremacy includes economic, informational, political and military warfare.” Rick Fisher, a China expert with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, testified that this poses “grave challenges” for American security and warned the US has “about a decade” to take action to counter the threat.

The Chinese Navy’s hold on the South China Sea, as well as the construction, arming, and weaponizing of artificial islands there, is one early step in a larger plan.

Although China and Russia do not have, at this time, an explicit alliance, observers like Robert Maginnis see some form of cooperation as both likely and dangerous. Militarily, Putin could continue bullying eastern Europe, and Xi Jinping would bully the Pacific. Economically, Russia exerts its influence by means of energy supplied to Europe, while China is poised to have even more economic influence than Russia by means of its manufacturing and cyber-technology assets.

A global balance of power dominated by China and Russia would not bode well for smaller nations hoping to retain their sovereignty and enjoy some measure of personal freedom and political liberty. If the United States fails to strengthen itself to the degree at which it represents a credible counterbalance to China and Russia, the notion of a free society governed by freely-elected representatives could become a rare thing on the planet.

The Textual Basis of Islam: Historic Consensus

When Muhammad died in 632 A.D., he left behind a powerful organization, but no authoritative written texts. The Qur’an (Koran) would not be written until decades later.

In the absence of an official text, various traditions about what Muhammad might have said about different topics emerged: vacuums attract filling.

Collections, both written and spoken, appeared, presenting themselves as the words of Muhammad. These collections were not always mutually compatible. When the contradictions became evident, crisis and conflict arose.

If Islam were to continue as a viable social and political order, some harmony would be needed.

In legal matters, e.g., some foundational core of unchanging doctrines was necessary for establishing sharia. There would be some flexibility for interpretation and competing regional precedents, but there would also be fixed set of axiomatic laws.

A non-negotiable axiom within sharia is called a hadd (the plural form is hudud). The collected hudud constitute the basis of sharia and of the broader Islamic social worldview.

To formulate hudud and other invariable Islamic doctrines, early Muslim scholars began to sift through the competing collections of sayings. These collections were called hadith. In the meantime, the Qur’an was beginning to emerge in written form. The need to harmonize the hadith with each other, and with the Qur’an, was growing.

These scholars worked to form a consensus about which hadith would be regarded as authoritative, as Timothy Furnish writes:

Two aspects of individual hadiths became the focus of scholarly criticism within the early Islamic world: the matn (plural mutun or mitan), or “text,” and the isnad (plural sanad), or “chain of transmission.” A matn might well be rejected on the grounds that it seemed to contradict the Qur’an. But the focus of hadith criticism was channeled into investigating the isnads rather than the matns. The number, credibility, and seamless­ness of the transmitters became more important than what the tradition actually said. And so as long as a hadith text did not actually contradict the Qur’an, it had a shot at being accepted by at least some segment of the early Islamic community, especially if what it said proved useful in some manner, usually political. Hadiths were ranked into three categories based on the trustworthiness of their chains of transmission going back to the Prophet: sahih, “sound”; hasan, “good”; and da'if, or “weak.”

So it was that Qur’an began to accumulate out of various fragments which were circulating at the time. Simultaneously, some hadith were gaining recognition as authoritative while others were being relegated to a questionable status.

Two processes were happening, and they overlapped somewhat in time: the process of composing the final edition of the Qur’an, and the process of sorting out various hadith. These two processes most probably influenced each other.

Together, the two processes formed the finished social and political order which is Islam.

This categorization was largely worked out by Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafï i (d. 820 CE), who had been disturbed by the proliferation of questionable, even down­right false, traditions in his time and developed the gauge of isnad legiti­macy as a means of differentiating spurious hadith from acceptable ones. If a consensus of scholars agreed a particular hadith was acceptable, then it was deemed so for the entire Islamic world.

This scholarly consensus shaped the history of Islam permanently. Not only were the Hudud fixed, but more significantly, the nature of Islam as political and social movement was determined.

The fact that modern Islam is less about the agency and personhood of the deity, and more about public and communal paradigms which humans should institute and maintain, can be traced to the formative stage of development in which the texts of Islam were accreted and given their relative degrees of authority.

African Physical Geography: Unnavigable Rivers and Absent Ports

The landscape of Africa is a significant obstacle to its inhabitants.

Africa has thousands of miles of coastline, but sub-Saharan Africa has few or no usable deep-water ports. This has historically limited imports and exports and the accompanying exchanges of ideas with other cultures.

LIkewise, the Sahara Desert is an effective obstacle to land transportation between the southern part of the continent and the northern part.

It is the land itself which has kept the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa isolated from contact with the outside world.

This geography has also kept these cultures isolated from each other. The rivers of Africa are, on average, measurably less navigable than rivers on other continents. This has led, in turn, to less contact between the various nations of sub-Saharan Africa, as Tim Marshall writes:

Africa, being a huge continent, has always consisted of different regions, climates and cultures, but what they all had in common was their isolation from each other and the outside world. That is less the case now, but the legacy remains.

A glance at a map of Africa can be misleading. One might think that it would be a straightforward overland journey from, e.g., Libya to Angola. But it is not. Likewise, one might imagine that Namibia (German South-West Africa) or Mozambique would be situated to engage in large-scale international trade by means of cargo ships. This, however, is not the case.

The map fails to reveal the impediments to travel within the continent, and the barriers to shipping from and to other continents, as Tim Marshall notes:

The world’s idea of African geography is flawed.

For cultural, social, political, and economic purposes, Africa could be considered as two continents, with the impassible Sahara between the two.

The geography of this immense continent can be explained in several ways, but the most basic is to think of Africa in terms of the top third and bottom two-thirds.

Understanding the physical geography of Africa will help the reader to understand why the continent is filled with ‘developing nations’ that don’t develop. All manner of aid from other parts of the world, and all types of schemes to encourage development - formulated both by native Africans and by outsiders - cannot change the shape and structure of the land itself.

Hinduism’s Treatment of Women: The Practice of Sati

One of the most gripping concepts in history is the Hindu practice of suttee or sati - the practice of expecting, or even requiring, that a widow, upon the death of her husband, commit suicide. This was often carried out in the form of self-immolation: the widow threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre.

This is the most jarring example of Hinduism’s view of women, but there are many other more mundane examples.

Hinduism lays a conceptual foundation for cultural and social practices which ascribe a secondary status to women, as scholar Richard Cavendish notes:

Orthodox Hindus believe that women cannot attain salvation as women, but only through being reborn as men. Women are evil and unclean, and the virtuous Hindu woman, who must treat her husband as if he was a god, is considered inferior to the worst of men.

Cavendish goes on to note that “the tirade in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata” is a “condemnation of woman” which says that women are “a curse. In her body the evil cycle of life begins afresh.” Male children are born “fouled with the impurities of woman. A wise man will avoid the contaminating society of women.”

In comparison, Cavendish says that the Judeo-Christian tradition within European culture is “by no means as hostile to women as orthodox Hinduism.” Western civilization is not “appalled by sex.”

British authorities began legislating to end suttee in the early 1800s. After India achieved political independence in the late 1940s, the Indian government continued to combat suttee, but instances of the practice have been recorded as late as 2008.

Improving Standards of Living: Industrialization Makes Life Better for Lower and Middle Classes

Historians use the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ to refer to an era which began in the early 1700s in England. Like most constructs, this era does not have specific and clear starting and ending points in time, but is general concept rather than a specific and concrete one. Although the concept is not precise or definite, there are certainly specific and concrete events which form the historical data underlying the construct.

Much later, a wave of industrialization spread across the United States. Historians sometimes refer to this as the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ or the ‘Technological Revolution.’ Prior to this era, more than 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture and lived in rural settings.

Industrialization changed various aspects of society. Increasing percentages of the population lived in cities: urbanization. Transportation and food-preserving techniques reduced the ability of a poor harvest to cause starvation. Standards of living, especially for the lower and middle classes, improved, as mass-produced goods fell in price.

Modern sewage and drinking-water systems improved public health. Specialization of the labor force made both skilled and unskilled labor more productive, which in turn improved wages.

Although the original Industrial Revolution included instances of child labor, the Second Industrial Revolution decreased child labor and replaced it with more years of childhood education.

The middle class expanded as upward mobility created opportunities for the lower class to increase their wages and join the middle class. As historian Tanya Lee Stone writes,

In the late 1800s, millions of Americans left small towns and farming areas to move to cities, where workers were needed more than ever before. Of course, they had to have places to life.

People were drawn to factory towns because they could earn better wages than they had earned on farms. Industrialization created opportunities.

The technological revolution meant that even the lower classes would obtain benefits like telephones and electric lights. Even the working classes could travel by train instead of long, uncomfortable trips on horseback or on a horse-drawn wagon.

A small number of wealthy people began to buy as much land as they could and build houses and apartments buildings. They charged people fees, or rent, to live there.

The real benefit of industrialization was the increase of wealth. The landowners received more money in the form of rent paid to them. The workers received increasing wages and could buy consumer goods at decreasing prices. The remaining farmers earned more because, as some people the farms to move to factory towns, the other farmers could farm larger areas of land and get more money when they sold their harvests.

As machinery for agriculture developed, one individual farmer could farm more land.

All the people in society can benefit when wealth is increased. If the system is a free-market system, then not only the rich, but also the middle class and lower class people have chances to earn better wages.

Not everyone was happy about this prosperity. Some people hoped to create unrest and conflict, so they began calling the rich people of this era ‘robber barons.’ They said that these factory owners were inflicting misery on the poor.

But the working class didn’t believe that the factory owners were so bad. The workers were experiencing rising wages and increasing standards of living, and they were paying lower prices for the products they wanted. So the factory workers didn’t want to organize a rebellion against the factory owners.

In the years between approximately 1870 and 1920, all social classes in the United States experienced rising standards of living. The economic foundation created during these decades helped the United States face the challenges of the 20th century.

Africa’s Problems: Not Who’s To Blame, But What’s To Blame

The continent of Africa, with its many distinct nations, has perpetually lagged behind the rest of the world in the standard metrics of development. Fewer international patents are granted there, the literacy rate is lower there, medical care is substandard.

To be sure, there are individual major cities in Africa which rival any high-tech city in the world: life there is very much like life in New York, London, Berlin, or Vienna. Africa’s modern large cities are every bit as good as the rest of the world’s.

But those large cities are a rare exception to the average life of the average African.

Africa’s developmental delays are due, at least in part, to the physical structure of the land itself, as scholar Tim Marshall writes:

Africa’s coastlines? Great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbors. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America.

The landscape of Africa, then, is an obstacle to internal connections between different regions of the continent, and an obstacle to external connections to the rest of the world.

The problems in Africa have resisted a bewildering diversity of attempted solutions, both those proposed by the Africans themselves, and those proposed by outsiders.

There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa.

The landscape of Africa sharply divides the northern edge on the Mediterranean coast from the much larger southern part of the continent. The Sahara Desert forms an effective barrier between these two areas.

Tim Marshall explains that the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa were

separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.

The coastline of Africa, with its lack of harbors, and the mostly uncrossable Sahara Desert effectively cut much of Africa off from the rest of the world. Much more important than the exchange of material goods is the exchange of ideas, but the Africans got neither.

Inside the continent, unnavigable rivers kept the communities of Africa apart from each other.

It is therefore a what and not a who responsible for Africa’s lack of development: the land itself kept Africa away from the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of goods. Africa’s greatest obstacle is the lack of deepwater ports, its unusable rivers, and the impassable Sahara Desert.

New Alliances with Old Allies

Countries generally work with other countries when they have mutual interests: each nation first determines what is in its own best interests and pursues this; then it finds other nations who are pursuing the same goal. Then, cooperation is possible, desirable, and mutually beneficial.

Alliances are not limited to wartime situations. On the contrary, most alliances are peacetime affairs. Countries cooperate on matters of transportation, agriculture, and communication. The joint efforts of Canada and the United States in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Sault Ste. Marie locks are examples.

In September 2018, the Wall Street Journal described the emergence of a trade coalition:

The prospect of resolving the U.S. trade battle with China is fading as the White House presses for a revised North American Free Trade Agreement.

As a new NAFTA nears completion, a strengthened working relationship between Canada, Mexico, and the United States would enable the three countries to more effectively resist Chinese efforts to dominate world markets. Other nations will join this alliance.

A successful coordination of Japan, the EU, and the NAFTA countries would be a diplomatic and economic success.

Chinese firms are able to dump products onto the world market at prices below their cost because they have access to labor at substandard wages. Many Chinese workers are given no choice about where they will work, or about how much they will be paid.

The outcomes are related, U.S. officials say, because relaxing trade tensions with Mexico and Canada — plus a preliminary trade pact with the European Union — make it easier to forge a multilateral front to oppose Chinese trade practices. The U.S., EU and Japan have held meetings on such a strategy last month.

In addition to exploitative labor practices, Chinese firms often receive unfair subsidies from the Chinese government. These companies sell products at a loss, and receive payments from the Chinese government to keep the company profitable.

It is somewhat misleading to call these entities ‘companies’ or ‘firms’ because they are, in essence, a branch of the Chinese government. They are not exposed to market forces. They are not under any pressure to be profitable. They are a tool of Chinese foreign policy, inasmuch as they are used to harm the national economies of other countries.

The horrific working conditions of some Chinese laborers borders on slavery.

What can a coalition of Japan, Canada, Mexico, the United States, and the EU nations do about this situation? Trade boycotts and tariffs seem to be the first line of actions.

If this coalition, approximately representing the free world, can coordinate such trade actions against China, then it may be possible to place enough pressure on China to encourage substantive action.

China, however, is currently set on a program of military buildup parallel with its effort to obtain economic hegemony over a number of smaller nations. China will not readily give up its dream of imperialistic expansion.

Yugoslavia Betrayed: Tito Enables Soviet Oppression

During World War II, the country of Yugoslavia was occupied by Nazi troops. As in other occupied territories, local groups arose to resist the invading army.

In Yugoslavia, more than one resistance group existed. One group was led by General Dragoljub “Draza” Mihailovich. His fighters were called the Chetniks. They were very effective at guerilla warfare, and disrupted Nazi activity.

A second group was led by Josip “Tito” Broz, a communist. Tito was not very effective in military action against the Nazis, but he was politically astute: he worked to create conditions which would allow him to seize power once the war was over and the Nazis had left.

Draza worked continually to styme the Nazis. He also worked to link his Chetniks to the Allies, i.e., to England, France, and the United States. They could supply his group with materials and equipment; he could supply the Allies with information.

Tito’s communists worked with the USSR. They received support to set up Tito as a dictator after the war’s end; in return, Tito would rule Yugoslavia in a way that was favorable to the Soviet Socialists. Tito left Yugoslavia in May 1944, and spent the last year of the war hiding: his communist group gave little resistance to the Nazis.

Draza continued to fight against the Nazis until the end of the war, and he helped to liberate Yugoslavia.

The Allies were naturally inclined to support Draza. But the Soviets had a spy planted within the British intelligence agencies, specifically, in an office in Cairo, Egypt. James Klugmann worked for British intelligence, but was actually an agent for the USSR. For the British, he compiled reports about how the resistance movements were working in Yugoslavia. For the Soviets, he gave those reports a certain slant or bias.

Klugmann’s reports gave the impression that Tito was a brave hero, fighting the Nazis, and that Draza was ineffective in trying to liberate Yugoslavia.

Misled by Klugmann’s descriptions of the situation, the Allies gave less support to Draza and more to Tito. This slowed the eventual liberation of Yugoslavia, and meant that more people died in the fighting. As historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write,

Based on a steady stream of such reports, London turned decisively toward Tito. By the end of 1943, the British Foreign Office concluded that “There is no evidence of any effective anti-Nazi action initiated by Mihailovich,” and that “since he is doing nothing from a military point of view to justify our continued assistance,” a cutoff of material to the Chetniks was in order. A few months later, this would in fact be the policy adopted by the Western allies.

The war finally ended in May 1945. The Soviet army had large numbers of troops in Yugoslavia. More importantly, the Soviet espionage network was working to ensure that Tito could seize power without any meaningful resistance.

Before the end of 1945, the Soviet Socialists had staged a rigged election - the Communist Party was the only party on the ballot - and Tito was installed as dictator. Communists would oppress Yugoslavia for the next four decades.

Once in power, the communists moved quickly to arrest Draza. By July 1946, a show trial had convicted Draza of alleged crimes and executed him. In 2015, after documents from communist intelligence agencies revealed that the charges against Draza had been fabricated, a court in Serbia examined the documents, made them public for the first time, and declared that Draza was innocent.

Mussolini’s Fascism: One More Variety of European Socialism

The early years of the twentieth century saw a number of violent and radical political movements: fascism, communism, Naziism, and socialism. The revolution in Russia in October 1917 is the most famous incident in this trend, but it was not the only one.

Although carrying different names, these movements all shared several characteristics: they devalued individual political liberty, trading personal freedom for subordination to government directives; they reduced or eliminated the concept of a free market, instead requiring individuals and groups to buy and sell at certain prices.

These groups also increased taxation and brought various segments of the economy into government ownership.

These movements grew out of each other. Hitler’s Nazi Party was a socialist party: the word ‘Nazi’ means “national socialism.”

Benito Mussolini had experimented with various coalitions of socialists and communists before he formulated his own socialist movement: fascism. Mussolini was working on his political movement at the same time that Soviet Socialism was emerging from the October Revolution, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

On March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists.

Mussolini did not work in isolation. The socialist and communist activists of various countries constituted an informal network and were in communication with each other.

Both Hitler and Lenin worked with Mussolini. In 1930, Mussolini gave Hitler advice about how to take over the German government. Although Mussolini and Hitler had a disagreement in 1934, they soon got past the conflict and resumed working together. Lenin regarded Mussolini as a ‘rising star’ within the socialist movement, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:

In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.

Competition between the different socialist groups became more intense: Hitler’s political party was the National Socialists, and he didn’t get along with other socialist parties in Germany, and ultimately didn’t get along with the Soviet Socialists.

Likewise, although Mussolini had enjoyed Lenin’s praise, fascist Italy declared war on the USSR in 1941.

These conflicts between various socialist and communist countries reflect competing ambitions and egos. These countries remained, even in war, agreed that government needed to regulate people’s lives.

Romans, Jews, and Christians

The religious landscape inside the Roman Empire was quite diverse. Since emerging out of the Roman Republic, the empire had absorbed influences from locations as remote as Egypt and England.

The Romans were relatively tolerant during the early years of the empire. The governors of Roman provinces were concerned about tax and pax - about providing a steady stream of revenue for Rome and about maintaining tranquility within the province. The local religions could be tolerated or ignored as long as they didn’t interfere with these two goals.

Except for the uprisings of the Zealots, the Romans regarded Judaism as odd but harmless. Judaism was an outlier on the spectrum of religions because it was monotheistic and because it systematically wove ethics into its religious thought.

The other belief systems around the empire were polytheistic. They were less concerned with the ethics of good and evil, and more concerned with the pleasing or displeasing various deities. As historian Timothy Maschke writes:

During this same time period since the time of Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD, ruled 27 BC - 14 AD), Judaism had been recognized as a legitimate religion in the Roman Empire. While small numerically (estimates of 5-7% of the Roman populace), Judaism’s influence greatly exceeded its diminutive size. Judaism was an ancient religion with a revered tradition. Furthermore, it was the religion into which Jesus was born and from which the Christian church developed. This meant that more than a few of the beliefs and practices of Judaism carried over into Christianity, e.g., monotheism, Ten Commandments, and singing Psalms.

Later, Rome became less tolerant and began to persecute both Christians and Jews. Tellingly, the Romans at first made little distinction between the two groups.

The persecutions began because the Christians and Jews objected to the notion that the emperor was divine. Probably few Romans truly believed this formal declaration that the emperor was a god, but they were willing to publicly pronounce it as an official procedure.

Jews and Christians, on the other hand, were not willing to state the emperor’s divinity and thereby incurred Roman wrath.

Initially, the Romans rightly treated Christianity as a movement within Judaism, and punished Christians and Jews without distinguishing between the two. Later, Romans saw Christianity as a distinct group, especially as an increasing number of non-Jews became Christians.

Eventually, the number of gentile Christians being arrested, jailed, interrogated, tortured, and killed by the Romans far exceeded the number Jewish Christians, and by the end of the empire, Judaism and Christianity were seen as almost unrelated.

Why the South China Sea Matters

A disproportionately large percentage of the world’s shipping moves on massive vessels through the South China Sea. Every economy in the world is connected here: from India to Brazil, from Namibia to Norway. China is increasingly manifesting its ability militarily to dominate this body of water.

The Chinese navy is expanding, both in the number of its ships and in their technical sophistication. China’s civil engineers have created artificial islands in and around the South China Sea. These islands are now home to missile bases and artillery units.

The islands and even the subsurface coral reefs are the objects of competing and conflicting territorial claims. The nations surrounding this body of water include Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and China.

The Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands are the major, and almost the only, islands in the South China Sea. Various shoals and reefs, which are either submerged a few feet below the surface, or which project themselves only a few feet above the surface, can serve as a foundation for man-made islands which help to make up for the scarcity of naturally occurring islands.

In 2014, Robert Kaplan wrote:

It is not only location and energy reserves that promise to give the South China Sea critical geostrategic importance, it is the territorial disputes surrounding these waters, home to more than two hundred small islands, rocks, and coral reefs, only about three dozen of which are permanently above water. Yet these specks of land, buffeted by typhoons, are valuable mainly because of the oil and natural gas that might lie nearby in the intricate, folded layers of rock beneath the sea. Brunei claims a southern reef of the Spratly Islands. Malaysia claims three islands in the Spratlys. The Philippines claims eight islands in the Spratlys and significant portions of the South China Sea. Vietnam, Taiwan, and China each claims much of the South China Sea, as well as all of the Spratly and Paracel island groups. In the middle of 2010 there was quite a stir when China was said to have called the South China Sea a “core interest.” It turns out that Chinese officials never quite said that: no matter. Chinese maps have been consistent. Beijing claims to own what it calls its “historic line”: that is, the heart of the entire South China Sea in a grand loop — ­the “cow’s tongue” as the loop is called — ­surrounding these island groups from China’s Hainan Island south 1,200 miles to near Singapore and Malaysia. The result is that all of these littoral states are more or less arrayed against China, and dependent upon the United States for diplomatic and military backing. For example, Vietnam and Malaysia are seeking to divide all of the seabed and subsoil resources of the southern part of the South China Sea between mainland Southeast Asia and the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo: this has elicited a furious diplomatic response from China. These conflicting claims are likely to become more acute as energy consumption in developing Asian countries is expected to double by 2030, with China accounting for half of that growth.

China’s presence in the South China Sea is both expansionist and xenophobic. China’s nativist tendencies express themselves by using this body of water as a barrier to prevent foreign influence.

While eager to develop international economic opportunities, China’s diplomacy retains much of its traditional isolationism.

The South China Sea connects in many different ways to a variety of China’s national ambitions. For this reason, the Chinese government is incorrigibly committed to dominating, militarily and economically, this body of water.

Among the keys to China’s foreign policy, the South China Sea ranks high. The question of Taiwan ranks high, as well. The Taiwan question and the South China Sea are closely linked. These are so important to the Chinese government that war cannot be ruled out. David Goldman writes:

Along with ensuring internal stability at all costs, China’s leaders are determined to make China impregnable from the outside. We hardly hear the term South China Sea these days, because that sea has become a Chinese lake. It has become a Chinese lake because the Chinese have made it clear they will go to war over it. There’s a Chinese proverb: “Kill the chicken for the instruction of the monkey.” China has an even greater concern over Taiwan.

Economic ambition is also a key to Chinese foreign policy. The immense amount of cargo going through the South China Sea - both raw materials and finished consumer goods - means that this waterway is not only a military desiderata but also an economic one.

Economic globalization does not reduce, and in some cases increases, the risk of war. Over the years, the risk of open military conflict in this region has increased, as Robert Kaplan noted:

“Paradoxically, if the postmodern age is dominated by globalization,” writes the British naval expert Geoffrey Till, then “everything that supports” globalization, such as trade routes and energy deposits, becomes fraught with competition. And when it comes to trade routes, 90 percent of all commercial goods that travel from one continent to another do so by sea. This heightened maritime awareness that is a product of globalization comes at a time when a host of relatively new and independent states in Southeast Asia, which only recently have had the wherewithal to flex their muscles at sea, are making territorial claims against each other that in the days of the British Empire were never an issue, because of the supremacy of the Crown globally and its emphasis on free trade and freedom of navigation. This muscle flexing takes the form of “routinized” close encounters between warships of different nations at sea, creating an embryonic risk of armed conflict.

The Chinese navy acquired decommissioned aircraft carriers from the Australian and Russian navies. After studying them, the Chinese have begun building their own aircraft carriers, and intend to strengthen their fleets.

Missiles of various types are also being developed by the Chinese military. The intent to control the South China Sea is clear from tactical and strategic documents; the Chinese make no effort to hide this.

In the twenty-first century, the world’s diplomatic, economic, and military history will be shaped in large part by what happens in the South China Sea.

A Good Time To Be Alive

The news, whether on the smartphone or on TV, seems full of violence and death. The constant talk of murders and Islamic terrorism could fuel a great deal of anxiety.

But we are now living in one of the safest times in world history.

If you lived in, e.g., the year 1018, the average person would have witnessed violent death in person. Now, the average person learns about it on news websites or on television - where it is usually not directly shown, but reported, along with images of what happened either immediately before or immediately afterward.

For a human being to stand 10 or 20 paces from soldiers who are battling with swords and clubs, to see heads and limbs cut off in a single blow, to see blood pouring out of a human body in a rush - this is a horrifying direct experience of human violence.

A thousand years ago, much of the human race personally witnessed such violence.

Now, millions of people will live their entire lives without seeing, firsthand, a knife or ax or gun being used in violence. Yet these same millions will see innumerable instances of such violence on video - whether fiction or news.

It is therefore difficult for some readers to grasp the truth that the current time is in fact one of the safest and most peaceful eras in human history. Surveying the years leading up to 2017, the historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in that same year:

In most areas war became rarer than ever. Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 percent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 percent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it is responsible for about 1 percent of global mortality. In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

By these numbers, 1% of deaths are due to violence. Yet internet news and broadcast news feature nonstop coverage for days if some skirmish in some war kills 10 or 20 people.

News media devote far less time and energy to covering diabetes and obesity, which are killing many times more people, and are sometimes avoidable.

Yuval Noah Harari continues:

Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.

Given that human nature is what it is, it will not be possible to completely eliminate violence among human beings. But it has been reduced to record lows, making life on planet Earth better than it’s been in centuries.

But why is there widespread depression and anxiety if life is now so safe? Why such deep political division and passionate protest if violence has been virtually eliminated?

Because of social media use and recreational drug use; because of news media ginning up the public with skewed, bias, and otherwise distorted reporting, and beyond reporting, opining.

Given that the world is incorrigibly flawed and imperfect, certain phenomena will never be, and can never be, entirely eradicated: disease, death, and violence.

But human society can greatly reduce these things, and has in fact already done so. This world can never be perfect, but people can make it better than it is. They’ve already made it better than it was.

The Vatican, the Church, and Pius XII

Looking back at the Holocaust, many historians have investigated the resistance organized against the National Socialists (Nazis) by the Roman Catholic church. Although this effort saved the lives of many Jews, it has also been alleged that pope Pius XII did little to support the work.

The debate has filled many books. Some painted Pius XII as a hero who worked to undermine the Nazis and save Jews; other have depicted him as unmotivated and doing little to help the victims of the Holocaust. Which view is correct?

This brief blog post cannot hope to answer this question.

A complex situation can be disentangled by recalling that the Pope, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic church are three distinct, if closely intertwined, entities.

The Curia is the bureaucracy which operates the Vatican. The Vatican is the complex of buildings and organizations serving as the leadership of the Roman Catholic church. The pope can influence, but not control, the Vatican.

Regarding efforts to thwart the Holocaust and save the lives of Jews (and other victims like Slavs), there are three questions: Could more have been done? Could something different have been done? Could something better have been done?

These questions need to be posed separately regarding the pope, regarding the church, and regarding the Vatican.

These same questions also need to be posed regarding the English, the Soviets, and the United States.

In each case, it will be found that something a bit more, or a bit better, could have been done - but not significantly more or significantly better.

The question, it is to be noted, is about what was possible.

The best response was not possible.

In the case of the Soviets, however, unlike the English, the Americans, and the Vatican, there were actions clearly designed to maximize the number of Jews murdered, e.g., when the Soviet army stopped outside Warsaw so that the Nazis could continue murdering Jews before the Soviets occupied Warsaw.

While some isolated individuals, like FDR, were unmoved by the plight of the Jews, such inertness cannot be attributed to, e.g., the U.S. government as a whole.

What must be dismissed is the notion that there was some widespread conspiracy to allow the Nazis to murder many Jews. Allied responses, when they were suboptimal, were usually so because of physical limitations.

The Holocaust remains one of the most horrific genocides and one of the most shocking human rights violations in history. There is a natural psychological tendency to respond by blaming someone - the English, the Americans, the Vatican - who should have been able to stop it or prevent it.

While the efforts of the Western Allies and of the Vatican, of the pope, and of the Roman Catholic church were imperfect, they were sincere, significant, and represented a major effort.

Norse Mythology: Human Sacrifice in Ancient Scandinavia

In the narrowest sense, ‘Scandinavia’ is Sweden and Norway. In a broader sense, the word also refers to Denmark and Iceland. Its widest usage includes parts of Finland, Germany, and Poland, as well as the Faroe Islands.

There is a difference between the geographical and the cultural use of the word.

As historian Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson notes, paganism survived late in Scandinavia. After nearly all of Europe had given up the practices of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the sale of women as property, the Norse were still engaging in such activities. Paganism was still widespread until the twelfth century.

Perhaps because heathen practices continued later in this region, they are more documented than in other areas. Saxony, e.g., discontinued pagan practices several centuries earlier, and few written records remain about their human sacrifices. Ellis Davidson writes:

In south Sweden can be seen hundreds of rock carvings from a still earlier time, recording rites and symbols; while at holy places like Thorsbjerg in north Germany or Skedemose on the island of Oland in the Baltic, offerings of men and animals, weapons, ornaments, ploughs and food were made over a period of centuries in the lakes and marshes, as careful excavation has now revealed.

Among the pantheon of Norse mythology, Odin was a chief or king among the deities, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the Norse idols. Germanic royalty sometimes claimed descent from him, and he appears in some of their genealogies.

Odin was therefore especially worshipped by aristocrats and military men. In the case of Odin, human sacrifice took the particular form of prisoners of war, as Ellis Davidson reports:

Odin was the ancestor of Scandinavian kings, and was worshipped by those who lived by their weapons and went out to plunder and conquer in many lands in the Viking Age; war captives and animals might be sacrificed to him and their bodies hung from trees.

Human sacrifice was a standard and essential feature of Nordic spirituality. As a general feature of pre-religious culture, mythology, including Norse mythology, included magic.

Magic is the attempt to manipulate natural events or human events. Sacrifice, of animals or humans, is done in an attempt to persuade some supernatural being to intervene on one’s behalf.

Moving from pre-religious societies to religious societies, attempts at magic recede, and there is more of an emphasis on forming a relationship with the deity rather than merely attempting to cajole the deity to act in one’s favor. By the 1200s, both human and animal sacrifice had become quite rare in Scandinavia.