Demons and Angels

By Israel Shamir

Demonisation of one’s enemy is a relatively new invention. In the good old times, men fought and then made friends – and then fought again, like the valiant heroes of the Iliad and like the gallant knights of King Arthur. The warriors who fought and killed each other will forever drink mead and fight at the same table in the Valhalla. True, the Old Testament tells of Joshua who initiated the first Nuremberg trial by killing five captive kings in the name of the Lord for they “hated Jews and fought against them.” [Joshua, 10]. But from the time of Joshua and until the 20th century, defeated kings were rarely killed and a good fight had little to do with hate. The ideological wars of faith – the Crusades – weren’t exceptional from this point of view as the Muslim and Christian warriors did not forget they – and their enemies - were human. Don Rodrigo El Sid served in turns the King of Castile and the Emir of Saragossa; Pagan Clorinda was a heroine of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. At the famous wedding in besieged castle of Kerak, the Crusaders had sent besieging Saladin a slice of wedding cake, and he enquired which tower the newly-weds would sleep in, so his army would turn their mangonels elsewhere. Prince Igor of Kievan Rus attacked the Kipchaks, the people of steppe, was defeated and captured, but married the Kipchak Khan’s daughter while in captivity. In 19th century, Goethe of Germany and Lermontov of Russia admired Napoleon the enemy of their countries, while Kamal and the Colonel’s son exchanged gifts after exchanging shots at Fort Bukloh of Kipling’s ballad.

Things began to change a hundred years ago, with advent of democracy and mass media as there was the need to convince a lot of people that a war is necessary and justified. The “good guys/bad guys” simplification of Hollywood supplanted the old division of “friend/foe”, and the foe became intrinsically and irredeemably “bad”. This was bad news, because a foe can become a friend, but a bad ‘un can’t become good. He had to be killed, and indeed he usually was killed at the high noon. Admiration for the enemy became impossible; every war became a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. In such a war, there is no place for compassion; cruelty towards civilians is de rigueur.

A first serious bout of enemy demonisation was launched by the US media in order to pull unwilling America into the World War One against Germany, as the reward promised by Weitzman to Balfour for Palestine. In the words of Benjamin Freedman, “after the Zionists saw the possibility of getting Palestine, everything changed, like a traffic light that changes from red to green. Where the newspapers had been all pro-German, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies' hands.”

The Germans were accused of making soap out of British POWs (yes, the soap story of Nuremberg fame is just a replay of the old sham), of bayoneting Belgian babies (this was replayed in 1991 when the Iraqis were accused of throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators), of sinking a passenger liner (loaded with munitions, but this was considered quite an atrocity thirty years before Dresden). There is a wartime poster showing the German as a dreadful gorilla snatching a fair maiden, a precursor to King Kong.

This demonisation of Germans only increased in 1930s, allowing for boycott of German goods with Zionist Palestine as an opening, and after the war it was crystallised into a new hierarchy of evil with Hitler incarnating a new Satan of flesh and blood. Since then, evil Nazis appeared more often than cowboys in so many Hollywood movies, and we live today in a world, where reference to Hitler equates to ultimate evil.

Now, in order to demonise, one has only to draw a similarity with Hitler, and that will do. Arabs and Muslims fight against Jews, thus they are Nazis and may be considered evil. In 1956, the British PM Macmillan described Jamal Abd el Nasser as a “new Hitler”, for he nationalised the Suez Canal. In 1982, Begin called Yasser Arafat “a new Hitler” as he had to justify his aggression and bombardment of Beirut. Stalin was “worse than Hitler” in a speech by President Bush. Now it is the turn of Iran, whose president is habitually described as “new Hitler” and his people – as “islamofascists”. Ironically, supporters of Iran compare Bush with Hitler, and Bushites with Nazis. This brings to mind Huey Long of Louisiana; when asked whether fascism could ever come to America, he replied, "Sure. Only it will be called anti-fascism".

Hollywood has produced a few movies featuring demon-exorcising priests; they can make one about a demonising rabbi based on Shmuley Boteach, an author of a book on the necessity of hating evil who wrote: “Ahmadinejad is an international abomination who can lay strong claim to being the single most hate-filled man alive.” The politicians weren’t far behind, thus Netanyahu: “Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first.” And Gingrich: “This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we’ve seen”.

The Israelis wax livid with fury when they are compared with Nazis. They immediately open endless “point out the difference” contest: the Nazis shod boots, we boot shoes, they snarl in German, we sing in our melodious Hebrew, the Nazis were against wonderful Jews, we are against beastly Arabs. Surely Israelis are different from Nazis; and it’s preferable to be a Frenchman in German-occupied France, than a Palestinian in Jews-occupied Palestine. There is no Palestinian Celine, no Palestinian Sartre or Gide to side with the occupying power for the Jewish occupation is harsher.

The Americans like to consider themselves the ‘good guys’ vs. Hitler’s ‘bad guys’. But objectively speaking, there was not much to choose between the two sides. The Americans were beastly enough: they burned Dresden, nuked Hiroshima, starved to death millions of German POWs. Even their racism was quite comparable: in the US, a sexual union of an Aryan and a Black was considered a criminal offence many years before the Nuremberg Laws, and remained so many years after the Nuremberg Laws were voided (Alabama dropped it from their book of laws in 2000).

I do not bother even to speak about the Soviet side in the war, for it became a commonplace to view Stalin as morally equal to Hitler, and the Communists as being morally equal to Nazis, though this claim is based of some fantasy of Cold War statistics, and actually Stalin’s Gulag never had as many inmates as George Bush’s prisons.

Now, demonisation is a heathen thing. Only an arrogant and godless man can, in his hubris, claim inherent moral superiority over another mortal. This is why demonisation was not known until the Church was marginalised. It is no better to demonise flesh and blood than to idolise it. We have learned “Do not make for yourself a god”; now it is the time to learn “do not make for yourself a demon”. We are blessed with our friends, and we are blessed with our enemies. We are not angels, and our enemies are not demons.

In understanding this, we may learn from Jews who stubbornly and wisely refuse to demonise their own. Ariel Sharon was a brutal killer of women and children who reputedly wanted to be “a Hitler to Palestinians”; but The New York Times of Sulzberger disregarded our futile attempts to demonise him, he was well received by the high and mighty, and he went down in history as a kind old soldier. The Jews did not allow the demonisation of the Jewish executioners of Stalin’s Secret Police nor even of ruthless Jewish mob killers and recorded them all as “men who loved their Jewish mothers”.

The Jews do not fall into the trap of demonisation for they know: everyone can be demonised. This lesson is given in Talmud on the example of Job, who “was perfect and upright and feared God and eschewed evil”. Still the Sages proved him a bad ‘un, just for fun of it. The Writ said that Job did not sin with his lips. Sages said: but he did sin within his heart. If this were not enough, Job had said “he that goes down to Hell shall come up no more” – and thus denied the resurrection of the dead, etc. Thus anyone can be demonised, and therefore none should be demonised.

Moreover, the wise Jews did not demonise Satan himself. Why did Satan incite God against Job?, asked a Talmudic Sage, and he answered: God became overenthusiastic over Job, and He almost forgot the love of Abraham. Satan interfered for the best of reasons, in order to preserve the rightful place of Abraham. “When Satan had heard this homily he came and kissed the Sage’s feet”, says the Talmud (Baba Bathra 15). This was wise, for Satan is not equal to God, and he has a place in His plans.

This theological fallacy of demonisation was well understood by the German Catholic political scientist Carl Schmitt. He is often presented as a man of no moral scruples; but this is a result of misunderstanding him. For him, “the distinction between friend and foe cannot be grounded in morality. It is a matter of us against them, not of good against evil. Both sides are human, so a politician who characterizes “them” as morally inferior or “bad” risks not only the hubris of arrogance but also the blasphemy of denying God to be the creator of all. The power of the Lord is over all, even over one’s enemies. It would be blasphemy to treat one’s foes as less than human. We are all moral equals, on Schmitt’s view, even though politics sometimes makes it “necessary” to kill one’s enemies”, in the short but precise presentation of modern American philosopher Newton Garver.

Scott Horton misunderstood the idea of Schmitt so completely that one wonders whether it is even possible. He wrote: “For Schmitt, the key to successful prosecution of warfare against such a foe is demonisation… According to Schmitt, the norms of international law respecting armed conflict reflect the romantic illusions of an age of chivalry.” It's the ther way around: Schmitt was for the War of Uniforms, carried out between two armies, where civilians are kept out of trouble. He was against demonisation, for it is unacceptable for a religious man. Horton is aware that his reading of Schmitt is flawed, for he writes, correctly: “Schmitt expresses from the outset the severest moral reservations about his concept of demonisation. It is, he fears, subject to “high political manipulation” which “must at all costs be avoided.” He uses Schmitt to attack John Yoo, a Bush appointee who followed Alan Dershowitz into permitting torture, but instead of referring to Dershowitz the Zionist, he appeals to Schmitt who can be presented as a “Nazi legal thinker”. The goal (attacking Yoo) is worthy, but the means (connecting to Schmitt) are foul.

Horton’s article can be understood as a follow-up to the extreme demonisation of 30’s Germany. He refers to Leo Strauss, “a lifelong admirer of Carl Schmitt, a scholar and teacher of his works” but fails to see the great difference. Schmitt was aware of God, Strauss was so godless that he shocked Zionists in Jerusalem of 1930s by his total atheism. Of these two men, of Strauss the Neocon precursor and Schmitt the Nazi legal mind, it’s Schmitt who was calling for a human attitude to an enemy, while Strauss dehumanised all.

Horton writes: “Carl Schmitt was a rational man, but he was marked by a hatred of America that bordered on the irrational. He viewed American articulations of international law as fraught with hypocrisy, and saw in American practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a menacing new form of imperialism.” I wonder what is irrational about it? Even a man on our side of the barricades (and Horton is here) can’t admit that the state that vetoes every resolution condemning Israel and calls to war on Iran is so hypocritical that Molière would rewrite his Tartuffe if knew about it? Horton’s typically Jewish attitude – “if we are criticised, this is irrational hatred” – became the hallmark of American thinking which grew out of demonisation of the enemy.

You can’t demonise just one person and stop: the demonisation of one causes more demonisations to follow. The attacks on Muslims, Arabs, Iranians are a follow up of the preceding attacks on Germans. Thus the Canadian Jewish columnist Mordecai Richler wrote: “Germans are an abomination to me. I'm glad Dresden was bombed for no useful military purpose. The Russians couldn't withhold and mistreat German prisoners of war long enough for me.” And Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel improved on him: “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.” From here, it was a short jump to Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative at UN, calling the Hezbollah “ruthless, indiscriminate animals”, to 1982 Israel's chief of staff Rafael Eitan pushing Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches into a bottle”. But now, even Germans happily follow this line of accusations against their late Fuehrer, and join in the universal condemnation of Iran and Arabs. “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a rising Adolf Hitler with his stand on Iran's nuclear programme, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said”.

Indeed, people who suffered from attacks of hostility are keen to join the group and to be hostile to somebody else, it is only a human, or even simian quality. Enchanting Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias mentions such a case in his immensely entertaining book on Bali. In a Balinese household, an angry tame ape climbed up on a tree and tossed coconuts all over. In vain the owners tried to get the ape down by offering him sweetmeats. Then they cornered a pitiful dwarf, a servant, and made a convincing scene of thrashing and punching him, and lo! The ape climbed down and joined the persecutors in the free-for-all. In no time the silly beast was back in a cage. In order to stay out of the cage, the ape should steer clear of the temptation to join in a permitted attack on somebody else. Apparently, this is a hard task even for humans.

Thus, if we want to restore peace in the world, we have to eschew demonisation altogether, including the Pole of Evil, Adolf Hitler. I really could not care less about Hitler, one way or other. I neither admire nor demonise, neither love nor hate him, nor Napoleon nor Genghis Khan. These scourges are dead. I have a warm spot for the present Hitler, Ahmadinejad; I feel no qualms about yesterday's hitlers, be they Saddam Hussein, Nasser or Yasser Arafat. My father fought for Stalin, and you were told by President Bush that Stalin is worse than Hitler. For me “Hitler” is a generic name of an enemy of Jews, like “Amalek”.

Indeed, a man who feels so strongly about Hitler is a heathen; he denies God and chooses flesh and blood as his personal god and his personal demon. That is why the observant Jews of Neturei Karta could go to the Teheran Conference, while godless ones were scared off by the name of the dead Austrian. The demonisation of Hitler caused the deification of Jews, and thus the new theology of thoroughly heathen neo-Judaism was created.

Creation of a man-made Pole of Evil caused a number of anomalies in public discourse. The demonisation of racism is a result. One may disapprove of a silly man who considers himself being of a better breed than others. Still this is a very common sort of vanity, shared by many people of “higher castes”, i.e. of noble, priestly and Jewish descent in our society. Belief in superiority of the white race, or of Anglo-Saxon stock is just a democratic version of the higher-caste vanity, suitable for people who can’t claim noble or Jewish descent. If and when these supposedly higher-caste persons will give up their vanity, when they renounce their titles and make a bonfire of the Threat of Assimilation book by Lipstadt, then they may attend to the mote in their commoner neighbour’s eye.

Small-time racism is hardly a problem in our society. I, a dark-skinned and moustachioed Mediterranean man, have never been on the receiving end of it for 60 years of my well-travelled life. Admittedly I never tried to annoy the native inhabitants by playing loud foreign music, practising strange customs in public or behaving in conspicuous way. There is some tribal like and dislike in Israel, mainly between various Jewish tribes, and it is surely unpleasant enough, but I am not sure it is up to bad old racism.

Racism is so little of a problem, that the search for sacrificial racist went completely astray. French MP Georges Freche was thrown out of his party because he said that the national football team of France should not be all black. He publicly said, “nine of 11 players in our national football team are black. Three or four black players would have been a normal proportion.” Blacks indeed are well endowed in sports and music, like the Greeks of Homer, but maybe the native French are also interested and are entitled to play football in their own team. Yes, this sentence appears slightly off the strict reading of political correctness; but it is certainly common sense.

These equality ideas should be given a say, not a free run. It is all right for Swedes to have a female pastor from time to time, but there are no male pastors anymore, and very few worshippers. Likewise, if all football players were black, maybe the native French will not be interested enough even to watch football anymore. Indeed, the French national football team should not be all (or predominantly) black; and the leading journalists and talking heads of French TV should not be all (or predominantly) Jewish. The Africans and the Jews came to France, are happy with French hospitality, and do not intend to displace the natives. If the French socialists continue to be that strict with their members, they will frogmarch into oblivion with the dinosaurs; and Segolene Royal will be just the name of a politician who stopped le Pen to advance Sarkozy.

In England, a ballet dancer Simone Clarke expressed her view that the country has enough immigrants, and the endless process of importing workers should slow down or even cease. Well, it is a view, certainly a reasonable one, and within the Bill of Rights, or Magna Carta or whatever nowadays authorizes freedom of speech. Some crazy anti-racists went to demonstrate against the dancer’s being engaged in the Ballet. The dancer is a good person, not a racist in any meaningful meaning of the word; not that it matters, but she is even married to a Chinese dancer; but for godless, obsessive Hitler-demonisers even such a moderate view may not be expressed, and if expressed, the person should be kicked to the street, unemployed and homeless. As a Communist, I do stand for Simone Clarke’s right to belong to BNP and to dance Giselle on the scene of English National Opera, and the active protesters should go first to protest Barbara Amiel writing in the Daily Telegraph.

In Germany, these anti-racists and anti-Nazis walk around with the Israeli flag and demand kaffiyehs to be taken off like Schneider of Leipzig:

“What we all share is support for Israel and coming out against any form of anti-Semitism, fascism and sexism,” says the center's director, Christian Schneider, 26.
A good example of the pro-Israel activity in Leipzig is the public campaign against wearing kaffiyehs, once an essential accessory in the European left-wing activist's wardrobe. "Do you have a problem with Jews or is it only that your neck is cold?" was the slogan for the campaign organized by the center in recent years. The campaign aimed to prevent young people from wearing what the center perceived as a symbol of identification with the Palestinians and with anti-Semitism, reported Haaretz.

These crazy things are a result of the extreme demonisation of Hitler. Again, we may learn from Jews, who expel immigrants by planeloads, fight miscegenation and assimilation while always adding “this is not racism”. Why is it not racism? In a Jewish joke, a Rabbi was delayed on a trip, he noticed Sabbath is approaching, so he prayed and a miracle occurred: it was Sabbath everywhere, but still Friday in the Rabbi’s Cadillac. Likewise, opposing (or even mouthing the word) miscegenation is racist; but miraculously, not for a Jew.

“Racism”, i.e. preference given by a native to a native at the expense of a stranger is a perfectly normal and normative behaviour. This attitude is ordered by the Bible, this attitude safeguards the intimate relationship between a man and his soil. In the Jewish prayer, God is asked to give rain and to disregard the prayers of a stranger who asks for a dry weather. Some moderate “racism” is the best guard of the land; and you have no reason to worry: cosi fan tutti, they all do it.

Mind you, “racism” is not a virtue in the Christian book. But nor are greed, gluttony, lust, envy and pride. Still we do not see a politician being expelled from, say, a Socialist party for running a gourmet column, for giving an advice on the stock market, for marching on a gay pride parade, for buying a car as good as that of his neighbour. There are “anti-hate” laws, but no “anti-pride” laws.

Whatever one may think of racists of old, today this title of contempt is given to anyone who does not deny roots and attachment of a man to its soil and community. The archetypal racist of our days, say, a racist saint, would be Simone Weil, who considered roots a virtue, and uprooting a sin. (She vehemently objected to the demonisation of Germany in France 1939). Thus, whoever supports immigration, sins, for he supports uprooting. So one can argue whether it is better to be good to one’s neighbour the potential immigrant by allowing him to come and stay; or by forbidding him to leave his home country. There is no sure-fire answer to this question, and I say that as a perpetual immigrant. And if you are told ‘you are racist’ for you object to mass immigration, respond with ‘You are uprooting poison’, as Simone Weil did.

Being unable to “demonise back” the Jews and the Americans; the Nationalists and the Far Right tend to demonise the Russians, the Soviets, the Communists. They are not too successful, so we do not have to fight it much. Suffice to say, the mad numbers of “millions killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot” are just a figment of imagination. None of them killed as many as the American Empire did and does. None of them exiled so many as Israelis did.

There are no Evil Empires, only unchecked ones. Soviet Russia was not an Evil Empire, nor was Communism embodied in Stalin and the Gulag. Sholokhov, Block, Pasternak, Esenin, Mayakovsky and Deineka embraced the Revolution and expressed its ideas in art. It was a land of the great and partly successful experiment in equality and brotherhood of Man, of a brave attempt to defeat the spirit of Greed. Communists and their supporters tried to liberate labour, to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, to remove poverty and free the human spirit. Communism brought forth the social democracy of Europe.

Germany was not an Evil Empire, nor was the spirit of organic traditionalism embodied in Hitler and Auschwitz. The Traditionalists tried to establish an alternative paradigm based on Wagner, Nietzsche and Hegel, to go to the roots and traditions of the folk. Not in vain, the best writers and thinkers of Europe from Knut Hamsun to Louis Ferdinand Celine to Ezra Pound to William Butler Yeats to Heidegger saw a positive element in the Traditionalist organic approach. If Russia and Germany had not been demonised, it is quite possible we would not have seen them coming to such extremes.

We have to restore the balance of mind and discourse lost in the aftermath of the World War Two, due to the too-complete victory of the bourgeois ‘Judeo-American’ thought. While condemning excesses and war crimes, we should regain the kingdom of the spirit from Mayakovsky to Pound. There are no evil men, we are created in the image of God, and all ideas are needed to produce new thought.

Ottoman Empire, please come back!

by Israel Shamir

On Mt Carmel, there is a pleasant townlet, slightly more than a village, called Zichron Yaakov. Now known for its robust wine and Frenchy restaurants, in the days of World War One it was a home for the Zionist pro-British espionage ring, NILI. Its members, prominent Zionist settlers and citizens of Turkey, communicated with the British troops in Egypt, delivered to them news of the Turkish forces’ disposition and contributed to the Empire’s defeat. They were connected with Haim Weitzman, who squeezed the Balfour declaration from unwilling Brits and became the first president of the Jewish state. To this day, the NILI is greatly venerated in Israel, and schoolchildren are often taken to the museum where they are indoctrinated in Jewish loyalty to the Jews only, and in their duty to betray any other power if it is called for by their loyalty as Jews.

They had a good reason to betray their country, the Ottoman Empire, for if the Empire were still intact, the Jewish State with its millions deprived natives immured beyond the high wall, its millions of equally deprived guest workers locked in shantytowns would have never come into existence. Incidentally, the US attack on defenceless Iraq with its hundreds of thousands dead and ensuing civil strife would have never materialised, either, for Iraq was a part of that powerful Empire.

And not only has the Middle East suffered from the Empire’s demise, but NATO planes would have never had the fun of bombing Belgrade, if the Empire were still with us. Even Greece, the first break-away province, now devastated by the introduction of the Euro, and reduced to the status of an hotelier for wealthy Northerners, has a good reason to regret the days when Greeks formed the elite of the Empire from Alexandria to Constantinople. The Turks, the Empire-building nation, were admired and feared in Europe, while now they are treated as unwanted competitors for dish-washing jobs in Frankfurt and London.

We, the heirs to the Byzantines and the Ottomans, have now to deal with a great new challenge, the American colonisation project. The Mammonite forces now at the helm of the US are using the dismantlement of the great continental Empires to build their world-embracing neo-liberal one. In this new Empire, Western Europe will be ‘the old country’, Greece to Rome, object of imperial benevolence and guidance; while the rest of the world will be re-colonised. Instead of trying to fit into this plan by trying to join the EU, as some Turkish leaders hope to do, a better response would be to re-establish a big civilisation-based framework. Mankind is ripe for a new stage in its development, the re-formation of civilisation blocks. By the end of this stage, there will be five super-states, five civilisations: the US, Europe, China, Latin America and ours, the Commonwealth of the East. The alternative is a world colonised by Mammonite America.
Indeed, it is the right time to give a thought to bringing the Ottoman Empire back. The Empire did not fail because it was too big and unwieldy: in its heyday it was smaller than Brazil or Russia. It failed because inexperienced local elites grasped the poisoned fruit of nationalism, offered by the western Masters of Discourse.

Nationalism, this European invention, has probably killed more people than the Black Plague of old. Worse, it has not offered a plausible alternative to the unity of the Empire, where dozens of tribes and ethnic groups felt at home, in peace with each other. None of the break-away countries has succeeded in creating a viable state, and the Western predators continue to spread strife among smaller and smaller groups, as the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey and Iraq reminds us. The Pan-Arabism of Nasser and the Ba’ath Party, the Islamism of Osama, the Pan-Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edib Adivar have all failed to propose a viable ideology to counteract the continuing onslaught of the Mammonite forces.

We should take a leaf from the book of our brothers in the EU. Europe has succeeded in bringing back the Empire of Charlemagne, which collapsed a millennium ago; our Empire is still alive in the memories of people, and in the glorious palaces, fortresses, mosques and churches. Our reconstituted Empire may and should embrace the entire post-Byzantine expanse: the bright future of Turkey, the Middle East, and the Balkans lays in joining in with Russia, Ukraine, and the Turkic republics of Central Asia.

These two heirs to the glory of Byzantium, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires, fought each other for centuries; but the same can be said of the French and the Germans, the heirs to the Western Roman Empire. If these eternal enemies in the West could succeed in uniting, it can be done in the East, too.

This summer as I travelled in Russia and Ukraine, I noticed much in common between the Russians and the Turks (or Tatars, in Russian usage). “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Turk”, fumed Churchill, his cigar in full blast. “And the other way around”, quipped Leon Gumilev, a great and late Russian historian, the guru of the Russian pro-Eastern tendency. Indeed, Russia as a state came into being as the union of the steppe-dwelling Muslim Turks and the forest-based Orthodox Slavs. Gumilev demolished the Western myth of the ‘Tatar (Turk) Yoke’ and correctly described the Moscow Rus as the successor state to the Golden Horde founded by the Turkic Genghisid princes. “Russia is unbeatable in its union with the brave Turks”, said Gumilev who identified the West as the greatest source of danger for Russian identity.

The National Bolshevik leader and a prominent writer, Edward Limonov, wrote recently of Russia being ‘a Turkey with German coating’. Russians still prefer ‘sharovary’, baggy trousers popular among Anatolian peasants and the Ottoman nobility of old. They squat like the Turks do, noticed Limonov. This positive feeling of Russians towards the Turks is so different from the European mistrust of them. It finds its way into the cinema: the new Russian blockbuster called The Turkish Gambit describes the Russo-Turkish war for Plevna without the usual, for Hollywood, racist overtones and presents Osman Nuri Pasha as a hero.

The commonality of Turks and Slavs goes back a long way. In northern Ukraine, I visited the erstwhile capitals of Russian princedoms, Novgorod, Chernigov and Kiev. Their princes married Turkic princesses, daughters of the steppe, and Turkic warriors formed an integral part of their retinue. The Russian epic lay of the 12th century depicts a Novgorod Prince Igor war raid into Turkic steppe; the prince was defeated, but his captor Konchak Khan gave him his daughter in marriage, and he returned home to Novgorod. A sizable part of Russian nobility still has Turkic names, be it Nabokov, the author of Lolita, or Usupov, the wealthiest Russian prince at the court of Nicolas II.

In a recent book, The Eurasian Symphony by St Petersburg writer van Zaichik, an alternative history of our part of the world is proposed. What would have happened if the Turkic Golden Horde’s enlightened ruler Sartak Khan, a friend of St Alexander Nevsky, had survived an assassination attempt and, as a consequence, the Russians and the Turks had remained in one prosperous state? Van Zaichik calls this resulting empire ‘Ordus’, an amalgam of Horde and Rus, embracing the bulk of the Eurasian landmass. Ordus is a land where modernity has incorporated tradition and religion; the family has remained intact; and even though there are wealthy men, the unbridled pursuit of wealth is frowned upon.

“We work together and contain our egoism”, this is the credo of Ordus, a model suitable for the East. Mosques and churches are plentiful; however, all the citizens are united in harmony. This image of an alternative universe was so attractive to the Russians that I spotted a few cars carrying stickers “I want to live in Ordus”. By the way, Ordus includes a Jerusalem Vilayet, where many of the descendents of Jews found refuge from Hitler’s rise in Germany (yes, there was a Hitler and a Germany even in the alternative universe), but live as equals with the native inhabitants.

A fascinating new Russian historian, Fomenko, has proposed a heretical model of history: in his eyes, there was always an Empire, or rather, The Empire; and the city on the Bosporus is the natural capital of Eurasia. Whether or not it was ever the case in the past, it can certainly be the case in the future.

Instead of fighting for leadership in Eurasia, the Turks, Slavs, Arabs (and their smaller neighbours) can unite their forces and make Constantinople (‘Istanbul’ is just a corrupt reading of Constantinople) their joint capital and the seat of the Imperial government. Constantinople can be our answer to Brussels, New York and Beijing. While the centuries-long quest for hegemony in Eurasia has caused many wars, a union would satisfy all desires: the Russians will have Constantinople as their capital, without dislodging the Turks; the Turks will have lifelines to the Crimea and Tashkent, even to the far-away diamond reserves of Yakutia, the land of the Pravoslav Turks, restored without fighting a single Russian. The Middle East will once again be incorporated in Eurasia as it was; and it won’t have to listen to orders from Washington, London or Brussels. Instead of being a far-away place, Turkey will become the meeting place for the people of Baghdad and Kiev, Belgrade and Cairo, Vladivostok and Ankara.

Let us raise the twin-headed eagle of Byzantium once again as the symbol of our Eastern Civilisation’s unity of the Orthodox and the Muslims, invest our ruler with the twin crown of Caliph of Islam and Emperor of the Orthodox, bury petty nationalisms of the recent past and begin an exciting new page in our history and the history of the world. The reconstituted Commonwealth of the East, the rightful successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman Empires, will possess vast material and spiritual resources, making it a world superpower, next to a united Europe, to the US and to China.

This Commonwealth will be united by an idea, as well as by material considerations. For East and West are different, split by a metaphysical cleavage. In the West, the Mammonite heresy brought in the American troop carriers of the World War, had won the day. They accepted a brutal faith of greed, of unbridled desire for individual success, of the right and duty to grab and consume as much as possible. They rejected solidarity in the name egoism they call “absolute freedom of man”. They destroyed Woman by turning her into an imitation of man; they destroyed Man by making him compete with women. Having rejected God, their churches are empty, their cities are centred on the business quarters, while ours are centred on learning, art and prayer.

The East has retained its Christian identity, for Islam is just a form of Christianity, though as distanced from the Nicene Orthodoxy as is the Calvinism of the Swiss. The East denies Mammon for we have not rejected God; we put spirit above material considerations as we have not rejected Christ al Mesih, we adore Woman for we have not rejected His Mother, Sitt Maryam. The East still loves nature, despises the dishonest rich, believes in the value of work, and prefers harmony to success. We like manly men and womanly women. We respect tradition and family. The US-led West creates a nomad civilisation out of an open society of atomised individuals disconnected from family and soil. In the Commonwealth of the East, we shall proceed in the opposite direction. We will discourage immigration and encourage capital transfer. We shall be in favour of the autochthon, for the autochthon knows the needs and desires of his locality better.

The West has proclaimed the sanctity of private property. We respect it so long as it is small, but reject its excesses. We shall rule against greed by taxing the super-rich, confiscating their property and sending them for re-education and ‘de-greeding’ to a friendly Anatolian or Siberian village. There will be no privatisation of resources, no sale of lands to foreigners, no dispossession of peasants. We shall discourage the growth of cities and promote the countryside. The West over-regulates private life; we shall uphold the eternal liberties of the East. We shall be good friends to our neighbours, or terrible enemies, if they so choose.

This fantasy is actually the only plausible alternative to having our lands colonised by the US or by the rising superpowers of Europe and China.