reminder of talk by judith herrin

Socialist History Society Public Meeting

Professor Judith Herrin will speak on

Byzantium and What We Can Learn from the Empire

with a particular focus on the role of women

7.00pm, Friday 8^th February 2013

Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, Liverpool Street

Free to attend; all welcome

About the Speaker:

Judith Herrin is Emeritus Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London. She has long been associated with Past and Present and is currently the Vice Chairman of the journal’s Editorial Board. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on Byzantine history, culture archaeology. Her specific research interests include women in Byzantium and Byzantium in relation to Islam and Europe. Professor Herrin is the author of The Formation of Christendom; Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium; and most recently Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.

About the Talk:

Professor Herrin argues for a contemporary appreciation of Byzantium which stresses its civilisation of quality, intelligence and success, and sees aspects of its society as a kind of positive model from which modern civilisation can learn. In her work, she challenges the old stereotype of Byzantium, whose very name is an insult. She sees the core strength of Byzantium as coming from its “inner Greek fire”, with its unique combination of Pagan energy, Greek education, Roman law and administration, and Christian faith. “When the capital city was inaugurated in 330,” Herrin writes, “all these elements were present and the society that resulted, with its extraordinary self-belief, was “born old”. This was the cultural background to its capacity to play the long game when necessary. It also gave it immense self-confidence and flexibility, permitting innovation and invention, from the unprecedented domed structure of Hagia Sophia to the secret of Greek fire itself. It was quite capable of delivering ruthless and crushing defeats as well as developing the arts, techniques and insignia of diplomacy…”

From Christmas 2012 to Easter 2013

From Christmas 2012 to Easter 2013
By Khatchatur I. Pilikian

http://www.kongrakurdistan.net
http://norkhosq.net/2012/12/02/turkey-is-supporting-and-setting-jihadist-groups-against-the-kurds/
Turkey is supporting and setting Jihadist groups against the Kurds
Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) Executive Council — 26.11.2012
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http://www.info-turk.be/412.htm#Final
Final Resolution of the International Conference on Kurds in Brussels
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Probably not forgetting the massacre of 80 thousand Alawites by Ataturk’s government in Dersim 1937–1938, which included mostly women, children and the elderly, here is what an US ambassador uttered, just recently, with serene calmness:
“At a recent meeting hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador who witnessed ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, made a chilling prediction.
“The next genocide in the world,” he said, “will likely be against, the Alawites in Syria.”
http://www.enduringamerica.com/home/2012/11/17/syria-and-beyond-live-coverage-insurgents-change-the-situati.html
Mesopotamische EntwicklungsGesellschaft – Mezopotamian Development Society
I do confess that my feelings tend to be emotionally critical towards this third inhuman, social and cultural vandalism, in Syria, after Iraq and Libya. In fact I would not hesitate to draw our attention to the genocidal crimes by Jihadists of the destabilising armed gangs acting all over Syria. To ‘eradicate’ the ‘infidels’ anywhere – all those who oppose their blind intolerance — they are now targeting Christian Armenians too. Apart from the destructive vandalising of the main Armenian church of St George in Aleppo, plus the desecration of the Armenian Genocide Memorial Chapel in Der-el-Zor (the notorious camp for the genocide of the Armenians in 1915), the Sham Times has reported the massacre of an entire Armenian family in a street in Zamlaka, a suburb of Damascus – husband, his sister, his wife and their three children.

It’s worth noting that all these Jihadist crimes are accomplished with impunity thanks to their Big Boss’ ‘humanitarian assistance’ plus the zealots’ training in Turkey under the umbrella of NATO’s Patriot missiles, sponsored all by the resources of Arab oil and their ruling elite in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For sure this in itself is the greatest insult to the Arab nation and a disgusting anathema to the religion of Islam which preaches “There is no hatred in religion” (Surat al Baqara, HOLY QUR’AN). For sure the armed gangs of Syria plus their ‘faithful’ are now dancing their macabre dithyramb with the devil, while the cacophony band is conducted by the Maestro of the Supreme Military Power of the world.

God forbid for the worst to happen. Alas, it seems all is set to prepare for the Jihad terrorists to use chemical weapons, to then bamboozle the world as if it is the crime of the Syrian government. Lo and behold the so named ‘Syrian government in exile’ has now a political hypocrite, a self-acclaimed ‘communist Christian’ as its leader, with Jihadist bosses relishing and propagating his political and religious ‘credentials’, before reciting loud ‘God is Great’…
All the above hints, at least for me, that if and when the terrorist Jihadists overcome Syria, they will accomplish the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds helped by NATO’s obedient Turkish government militias (as the Young Turk government, then the Kemalists, did less than a century ago, with the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities — all Ottoman citizens…). The Kurds now are a ‘convenient’ tool for those mostly foreign Jihadists to brainwash the uninformed as if there is a civil war in Syria, simply because the Kurds count ca 3 million Syrian citizens. unlike the fratricidal tragedy of Lebanon that lasted ca. fifteen years, where all warring factions were Lebanese citizens. Paradoxically, the Syrian forces had gone there yielding to US advice to help the Christian Lebanese — what a macabre devilish plan it was to create decades of agony and hatred between Lebanon and Syria…Lebanon paid the ‘price’ with more than 150 000 dead, Who knows the near future ‘price’ of Syria. CHI BONO? = For Whose Benefit Is It?

Undoubtedly, the recent Syrian tragedy is being thrown into the vortex of one of the 21st century’s greatest multi-states crimes of genocidal proportions the world is yet faced to witness, following the rehearsals in Iraq and in Libya. With all the mass media explosion of the last century, one wonders with rage, how easy it must have been at its onset to commit genocides during the first half of the last century… QUO VADIS HOMO SAPIENS ?

Few months after The Hague (Haag) Peace Palace (housing the International Court of Justice) was inaugurated (with Carnegie’s philanthropy), the WWI kindled, swiftly accompanied by a proto-Nazi Genocide. It was followed just a quarter of a century later by WWII, culminated by another, now a full-fledged Nazi Genocide… A further quarter of a century, then a multi-genocidal war in Vietnam (against humans, nature and all — as rightly defined by the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam back in 1967, Presided by Jean-Paul Sartre) became the ‘norm’ for the warmongers of neo imperialism. Eventually Afghanistan fell victim to the Globalised cauldron of that ‘norm’, soon to be emulated, hence vested with the masque of ‘democracy and human rights’, dragging into its criminal orbits religious radicalism, racial, national and political bigotry to try and destroy humanistic internationalism, that which humanity was and still is crying out loud for and struggling to achieve…

Christmas 2012 alright, while the Syrian people are crucified by Jihadist bigots armed to their teeth by the most undemocratic and anti-human-rights governments of the Middle East that categorically refused on the onset to negotiate a peaceful solution — as Kofi Anan himself confessed. Alas. the Jihadist terrorists have the ‘tacit’ but belligerent ‘benediction’ of the Big Boss, uncle Sam and Co. Ltd, including the so-called ‘socialist’ President of the country of Marseillaise, while Russia and ‘communist’ China continue preaching in the wilderness their moto perpetuo appeal for peace negotiations…

Lo and behold, after killing his own mother, a young man of 20 in Connecticut, USA, has just committed a latter-day massacre of the innocents at a school, killing couple of dozens of children mostly aged between six and seven, then killing himself as if emulating a suicidal Jihadist, having acted first as a latter-day mini-king Herod…

Is it too far fetched to visualise this latest massacre in an elementary school in Connecticut as a microcosm of the macrocosm crime facing thousands of Syrian children, not forgetting the staggering 44,000 hungry children dying each day of the year, as if a Hiroshima bomb is unleashed every single day just to kill children?

I do pray for omnipotent time to at least manifest the reality that the spectre of a latter-day Apocalypse in the Middle East is just a bad dream, albeit a mirage of our turbulent times, and not a MISERERE NOBIS, before the Holy Easter 2013.
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15 December 2012, London