Bulgaria: a Nation Seeks Freedom

What was going on in southeastern Europe in the 14th century? Why is the year 1389 so deeply ingrained in the history of Yugoslavia?

In that year, Islamic armies defeated the combined defenses of Serbs, Albanians, and Hungarians, and began an extended military occupation of the Balkans and of southeastern Europe in general.

In the 14th century, the various ethnic groups of southeastern Europe fell under the oppression of the Muslims. For almost five hundred years, they were geographically and politically isolated from the scientific and cultural advancements of Europe.

With the help of numerous rebellions and their own intellectual advancements, first the Serbs, and then the Greeks, returned to the larger cultural community of Europe. The British poet Lord Byron died helping in Greece’s successful effort to throw off the tyranny of the Islamic occupational armies in 1824.

In 1876, the Bulgarians also began to assert their desire for freedom. The first major step in this liberation was the in April of that year: although many of them died in this rebellion, the Bulgarians began to believe more and more in the possibility that they could stop the Muslim aggression and be free.

Many Europeans cheered the Bulgarian desire for liberty: Victor Hugo, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Otto von Bismarck, William Gladstone, Charles Darwin, Konstantin Jirecek, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Dmitri Mendeleev, and others.

A glance over that list of names will see that Christians and atheists, scientists and poets, Englishmen, Russians, and Germans all united in their desire to see Bulgaria liberated from Islamic oppression.

Six months after this April uprising, the nations of the region gathered at a conference in Constantinople and saw that the Bulgarian question was one of the central matters in the diplomacy of the era.

One of the many heroic Bulgarians who died in the quest for freedom was Hristo Botev (also spelled Khristo Botev), who demonstrated that his poetry was backed up by his selfless actions as he sought liberty for his fellow countrymen.

The Origins of Modern Political Communism

The international communist movement started in the nineteenth century and caused massive death, destruction, and misery in the twentieth century. It presented itself as a movement to liberate the working class.

In reality, the founders, leaders, and key figures in communism did not work strenuously in factories or on farms. They inhabited the comfortable libraries and homes of the upper middle class.

Karl Marx was born to a wealthy business class family in 1818. His chief confederate was Friedrich Engels, who was born in 1820 to an even wealthier family, and whose inherited wealth ensured that neither he nor Marx would ever need to labor to earn their bread.

Another communist leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was born 1870 to middle class family. His father was a school administrator. Lenin studied Greek and Latin, and attended the university after completing high school. Many other communist leaders had similar backgrounds: claiming to fight for the lower classes, they actually emerged from comfortable middle class or even upper class settings. As historian John Stormer writes,

The story of communism is a story of contradictions. Despite Marx’s call for the workers of the world to unite, communism has never been a working class movement. Its strength is in the intellectual and thought centers of the world.

Both Joseph Stalin in Russia and Fidel Castro in Cuba, between them responsible for mass executions and torture, never worked at manual labor.

Modern political communism, unlike its ancient nonstate forms, claims to be an uprising of the blue-collar factory or agricultural class, but is in reality an exercise in social engineering carried out by university-educated sociopaths.

Hating the Hand that Feeds

Following the Russian Revolutions in February and October of 1917, and the civil war which engulfed that nation for several years afterward, the agricultural policies of the new Soviet Communist government caused a famine there.

Death by starvation threatened millions. Despite the fact that the new USSR government declared its hatred for the United States, the Americans wanted to provide humanitarian relief for the ordinary Russian citizens, who were victims of their own government.

Food delivered to the Russians from the United States saved lives. The chief organizer of this rescue effort was Republican Party leader Herbert Hoover. As the Encyclopedia Britannica states,

Hoover was the natural choice to head the American Relief Administration. The ARA sent shiploads of food and other life-sustaining supplies to war-ravaged Europe — including Germany and Bolshevik Russia during the famine in that country in 1921–23.

The communist government of the USSR, in the person of Vladimir Lenin, continued its war on the Russian people - its war on its own people.

Instead of thanking the United States for life-saving aid, Lenin continued his accusation that America was a capitalist society. As an excuse for his hostility toward the U.S., Lenin referenced American aid that had been given during the Russian Civil War.

A Bit Less Oppression: A Bit of Hope?

In the Muslim-majority countries of Middle East, life has long been difficult for those who follow Jesus. They’ve been beaten, jailed, and killed when times were bad. When times were good, they were merely confined to the lowest and least-paid jobs, and denied educational opportunities. They don’t even hope for freedom of speech.

Such conditions are not restricted to the Near East; they are found in places like Bangladesh and beyond.

Jesus followers were heartened in 2016, therefore, when at least one small aspect of this harsh oppression was moderated in Egypt. As historian Jayson Casper writes:

“Long live the crescent and the cross!” shouted Egypt’s parliament in joy. All 39 Christian members joined the two-thirds majority to vote to end a 160-year practice instituted by the Ottomans requiring Christians to get permission from the country’s leader before building churches. The long-awaited reform was promised by the 2014 constitution after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

For nearly two centuries, Jesus followers had to ask permission simply to gather for prayer or worship. In practice, this meant that the answer was usually ‘no.’

In the late 600s and early 700s, when Islam expanded westward from Arabia across North Africa, in Egypt, as in the other lands conquered by Muslim armies, churches and synagogues were burned, and the construction of new ones was forbidden.

At various points in time over the intervening millennium, brief periods of leniency emerged, and a precious few such worship buildings were constructed, but often only to be again destroyed by a reinvigorated Islam which emerged after these periods of moderation.

Jesus followers are a small fraction of the population in Egypt. After centuries of suffering from Islamic hegemony, will they be allowed to quietly and peacefully gather for prayer? The events of 2016 seem to suggest that they will.

But over the centuries, they’ve seen such moments of toleration quickly evaporate. Will Islam reassert itself, or will tranquility prevail? The Jesus followers of Egypt have seen too much, and experienced too much, to naively raise hope. But perhaps there is cause for cautious optimism.

Assessing U.S./Russian Relations

The diplomatic situation between the United States and Russia decayed steadily after early 2009. Vladimir Putin, who has been alternately the President and the Prime Minister of Russia, managed to outmaneuver the Obama administration.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, using a firm diplomatic hand, had kept Putin within some manner of boundaries until January 2009, when she left office.

When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, her ambiguous use of the word ‘reset’ introduced an uncertainty in U.S./Russian relationships, an uncertainty which Putin was quick to exploit.

In short order, Russian behavior became noticeably more aggressive, e.g., in the Crimean Peninsula and in Syria.

One German newspaper, Bild, carried comments by German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeyer. Writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper, Caroline Mortimer reports:

In a piece for German tabloid newspaper Bild, Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote: “It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous.”

Putin was able to use, for eight years, the equivocation of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to foster Russian expansionism. As Steinmeier’s comments reveal, other nations were disappointed that the U.S. had failed to continue managing Putin effectively.

Jews in Spain: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times

From the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. until the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain offered more than mere tolerance to Jews: until 711 A.D., Judaism flourished in Spain.

After the end of Roman rule, Jews and Christians lived in a peaceful and even cooperative coexistence. Spain was governed by Goths, who'd set up a monarchy there. The Goths showed no interest in persecuting Jews.

The Muslim military leader Tariq ibn Ziyad led an invasion force which arrived by boat from northwestern Africa in 711. By 712, his army defeated Spain’s King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete. Shortly after than, Islam controlled most of Spain, although small pockets of resistance remained in the Northwest.

Soon the Muslims would boast about having burned “thousands” of synagogues and churches. Whether the numbers were that large is not clear, but the fact that they would brag about arson reveals the nature of their occupational forces in Spain.

Conditions for the Jews became even worse in the 12th century. A new wave of Islamic military forces took over Spain. These were, according to historian Ken Spiro, the “cruel Muslim Berber Dynasty” known as the “Almohades.”

Ken Spiro also notes that the Jews “excelled in trade.” Because “the Jews became traders who covered the Far East,” they were directly impacted when Islam effectively blocked most or all land routes between Europe and places like India and China.

With Muslims controlling Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Persia, and the surrounding areas, the traditional caravan routes were blocked.

The great voyages of discovery, many of which launched from Spain or Portugal, were attempts to find alternate routes to connect Europe with India and China, bypassing the obstinate Muslims.

One of these explorers, seeking safer routes to the Far East, was, of course, Christopher Columbus. Many historians now consider it possible or even probable that Columbus was Jewish.

China’s Han Dynasty: Lower Taxes Bring Prosperity

After the collapse of the short-lived Qin Dynasty, a leader named Liu Bang took power as emperor, and took the throne name ‘Gao.’ He founded the Han Dynasty.

Determined to give his reign a reliable foundation, both for his personal popularity and for national prosperity, Liu Bang worked to reduce the intrusiveness of government. As historians Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write:

Emperor Gao did not disband the centralized government created by the Qin, but he did remove its most unpopular features. He set up his capital at Chang’an, not far from the old Qin capital. He eliminated some laws, cut taxes, and otherwise lessened the burdens on the people. After a century of almost constant war and huge labor mobilizations, China was given several decades to recover. Responding to the desire to restore the old order, Emperor Gao gave out large and nearly autonomous fiefs.

Liu Bang introduced a measure of decentralization by creating these fiefs. In some ways vaguely similar to European feudalism, this system allowed for more local, and therefore more flexible, governance.

The Han Dynasty began, around 202 B.C., with tax cuts, deregulation, and decentralization leading to local control. These measures were wildly popular with the Chinese.

Ironically, the Han would eventually be overthrown, around 9 A.D., by a rebel named Wang Mang, because they had lapsed into high tax rates, regulation, and central control.

Wang Mang’s rebellion caused the Han to reform, and they were able to regain the throne in 23 A.D. by reducing taxes. Tax policy is the key to understanding the history of the Han Dynasty.