A while back, Ebs posted about how he used to be an American fanboy.  I wouldn’t put my feelings that strongly, but I’ve had a great respect for the principles on which America was founded.   I suspect that this respect for America comes mainly from reading way too many Louis L’Amour cowboy books.

I associate the founding of America with sentiments like this:

• "we hold these truths to be self-evident" Declaration of Independence
• "all Men are created equal" Declaration of Independence
• "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" Declaration of Independence
• "liberty and justice for all" Pledge of Allegiance
• "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" First Amendment
• "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" Second Amendment

America was created to provide the freedoms and rights that ordinary people lacked in England.  Everybody in America (eventually) was guaranteed the basic human rights of liberty, equality and justice.  Liberty included free speech & freedom of (and from) religion. 

I’ve always found the right to bear arms to be particularly significant (and not just because I’ve had a lifelong gun fetish . 

First, it suggests the right to personal self-defence.  You were allowed to be armed to defend yourself, your family and your property.  Second, there was defence of the country.  An armed populace could be expected to defend the country from enemies.  However, since the republic maintained a standing army, this wasn’t expecially significant.

The main reason for prohibiting Congress from infringing the right to bear arms was that Congress controlled the military.   Without the general population having the right to bear arms, it would too easy for Congress to abuse its power and use the military to back up that abuse.  The right to bear arms was vital so that people could rebel and overthrow the government if it got out of control.

In some ways it is heartening that Americans still have this right.  Most people in the US can buy guns, even in Walmart.  Most states allow people to obtain concealed carry permits for handguns.  The gun lobby is extremely powerful in the US.   It’s a pity that Americans aren’t so keen on standing up for their other rights (like free speech, free press and the right to a fair trial).

Technology has possibly rendered the right to bear arms effectively useless anyway.  The populace can’t really use their arms to overthrow Congress if they only have rifles and pistols and Congress has machine guns, missiles and nukes.   But still, I think the right should be preserved for its symbolism if nothing else.   It is the right to bear arms which allows Americans to defend all their other rights and freedoms … if only they cared enough to do so.

I don’t generally go in for conspiracy theories, but one thing surrounding the 9/11 attacks has always bothered me.

Scenario 1: the official story

A bunch of muslim extremists hijacked four planes.  Two were flown into the twin towers and one into the pentagon.  The fourth was brought down by passengers before it could reach its target and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.  The damage from the impacts and the heat of the fires weakened the twin towers to the point where they collapsed.  Two other WTC buildings also collapsed, weakened by fire and damage from rubble.

Scenario 2: the uber-conspiracy

Someone (maybe muslims, maybe not) organised by the US, hijacked planes.  The bosses arranged for them to disappear from air traffic control, prompting the suspicion of terror that lead to all aircraft being grounded.  The planes were flown to a US airbase, where all the passengers were transferred onto one plane.  The planes took off again and two went and hit the twin towers.  Meanwhile a missile disguised as an aircraft was fired at the pentagon and the plane full of passengers deliberately crashed into the pennsylvania countryside.  The fourth plane was presumably hidden somewhere.

Back at the twin towers, the aircraft impacts didn’t bring the towers down, so the bosses pressed the buttons to detonate the explosives that had been previously planted in all the WTC buildings, bringing them all down in controlled demolitions.

Which scenario do you think is more likely? 

This is, after all, the US government administration we are talking about here.   Dubya and friends.  They took ages to find Saddam Hussein, still can’t roust out all Iraqi insurgents, still haven’t found Osama bin Laden, and quite frankly, I don’t think they could find their ass with two hands and a map.  How the hell could they have pulled off something like that?   

And the key issue for me – how could they have done it with nobody knowing.   If you think about the number of people who had to have some knowledge of that kind of thing – painting the drones, transferring the people and so on … how can none of them have talked?

That’s the big clincher for why scenario 1 just seems more plausible – you just can’t shut up that many people (nor can you kill them all without people noticing).

The one thing that I don’t understand is the collapse of the towers themselves.  They imploded in near freefall time, looking exactly like a controlled demolition.  Not only that but two of the WTC buildings were hit by aircraft, but four of them collapsed exactly the same way.

No high-rise building on Earth has ever collapsed due to fire.  Ever.  And some of the fires have been much more extensive than the fires in the WTC buildings, covered a larger area and burned longer and hotter.

OK, I grant you that the damage done by the planes and the addition of the jet fuel could have made things worse – maybe worse enough to bring down the buildings.   I’d probably accept that if it wasn’t for the strange way the buildings fell – imploding in pretty close to freefall time, looking exactly like a controlled demolition.  I know from watching documentaries that a lot of work goes into calculating exactly how to place the explosives to bring a building down properly.  Get it wrong and the building goes sideways or everywhere else.  It’s a very precise thing.    How did two very different aircraft impacts near the top of the towers manage to have precisely the same effect as a carefully set up controlled demolition?

But OK, let’s just say that is what happened to WTC1, 2 & 6 – they collapsed due to fire.

That doesn’t explain what happened to WTC 7, which also collapsed that afternoon, and which DIDN’T have a 767 flown into it.  It was also furthest away from the twin towers, and least damaged by them.  This is in contrast to WTC 5 & 6, which were much closer and were significantly damaged by debris from the twin towers.  WTC5 in particular had extensive fires, worse than any of the other buildings including the twin towers, but it didn’t collapse.  

I just don’t get it.  What the hell happened to WTC7?

I wrote earlier about the talk by Jared Diamond on the subject of societies collapsing.  I have some further thoughts about the book that I wrote months ago but never got around to actually publishing on here.

The basic situation goes like this:

Firstly, take a relatively fragile or marginal environment: Greenland, Iceland, Easter island, Pitcairn, the American southwest, Australia, and central America are the main examples he uses.

Start off by having some nice weather for a while, a few decades or preferably even a few centuries would be good.   Favourable conditions lead to higher populations.  To sustain those populations, the society does two things – it starts utilising areas that are really marginal for agriculture, and it starts depleting resources at a rate faster than they regenerate.

Now, the straw that breaks the camel’s back can come in many forms.  Maybe there’s a wet spell, and the newly deforested land is washed away, leaving a reduced area for agriculture.  Maybe there’s a dry spell, and the now deforested land dries out and is blown away.  Maybe some allies have their own resource problems, and trade for necessary resources is no longer possible.  Maybe some enemies move into the area and compete for the already scarce resources.   Or maybe none of those, and the resources (wood, fish, animals, or soil fertility) are just depleted too far.

However it happens, the society ends up with more people than it can feed by its agricultural output.  It’s a famine; people start starving, and then they start fighting over the even scarcer resources left.  Rulers are overthrown, factions battle each other, sometimes leading to genocide and cannibalism.  It is brutal. 

What is scary is how quickly this happens after the society is at its peak.  The people in the society probably thought everything was sweet, their empire was larger, more productive and more powerful than it had ever been before – it often coincides with the peak of monument building.  And then there is a very rapid descent into society breakdown, starvation and brutality.

In some ways globalisation protects against this – local reverses can be compensated for by importing resources from other areas.  But in other cases, the collapse of one nation can be the straw that breaks the back of an already marginal neighbour.  After all, the people in one nation are not going to sit there and starve to death when just over the border their next door neighbour has surplus food. It’s no good telling them that the food isn’t anywhere enough to feed both nations – that sort of logic doesn’t work when you are starving to death.

You end up with a chain reaction of collapses that can bring down much stronger nations.

There was a brief question time at the end of each of the Jared Diamond lectures.  Some of the questions were very good and insightful and Jared made some very thoughtful responses.  However, others made me ashamed to be breathing the same air as the questioner.

Questions are in bold, Jared Diamond’s answers are beneath.  Both are reproduced as closely as I could remember, but are not exactly word-for-word. 

I’ve been wondering about this, kinda all my life.  Evolution and religion just don’t mix, you know.  But some evolutionists believe in religion, how is that possible?

Evolution and religion do mix.  Many scientists are religious.  Most religions have no difficulty accepting the reality of evolution.  The opposition to religion only comes from certain groups in the Unitd States.  The catholic church has been evolving it’s position (unintended pun).  Evolution is concerned with the diversity of life on Earth and how it got that way, wheras religion is concerned with other things, like ethics and core values.  No incompatibility.

This question has three separate but related parts.  Number one: have you read this book by [someone] in Australia that is titled [something long] and subtitled [something even longer] which concerns [some very long winded description]?  And if you have, what do you think of it?  And in particular …

[Interrupts] You can stop there.  This will be the shortest answer of the night: No, I haven’t read it.

If you look at history of the US, can you think of examples of it coping with value shifts that give you hope that it could cope with these re-evaluations in the future?

Yes, the first example is race relations.  When I was growing up, racism was institutionalised, with segregated transport and amenities.  Now whites are still a majority but not so dominant, and there is much more equality (although it is still not perfect).  Whites are a minority at UCSD, and almost a minority at UCLA.

Another example is attitudes to sexuality.  When I was at college, there were separate dorm buildings for men & women – and the women’s dorm was a mile and a half away from the mens.  Now my sons go to colleges where the dorms have men and women on the same floor.  That was unthinkable only 40 years ago.

Is America capable of reappraising its foreign policy or is it doomed to repeat its mistakes of the past?

Yes, it is capable of reapprasing its foreign policy, and it will happen on November the 7th, when we have the next congressional elections. 

How can we, as teachers and parents help children to have ego strength and to be flexible?

Um, be a good parent?

Are there any examples of modern democratic societies that have made major changes, particularly with respect to the environment?

Yes, European countries have made widespread changes that would have been unthinkable 60 years ago.  As one example, they now have low birthrates.  The highest European birthrate is France with 1.8, which is below self-sustaining.  Denmark uses a lot of wind power, and the Netherlands is one of the most environmentally conscious countries in the world.

Does the US’s higher consumption of resources reflect a higher evolutionary status?

No.

You say that the American way of life is non-negotiable.  But surely America is going to have to negotiate with other countries about things?

Our way of life is not something we negotiate with others, it is somethings we determine for ourselves.   For instance, the reason that your university has so many non-Europeans – that wasn’t something the New Zealand government negotiated with other countries.  You decided what was in your best interests and that’s what you did.  But of course America still has to negotiate with other countries about other things.

I am frustrated by the end of your lecture.  You talk about all of these changes needed, but you don’t talk about the factors that are going to produce these changes.

These changes come from lots of places: government: local, state and federal government.  Bottom up change from people.  Change from non-governmental organisation.  Change resulting from big business. 

Yesterday you said we can learn from history.  But we don’t seem to have learned from history.  We had the holocaust and we can compare the holocaust to the way we farm animals these days, so that the way we treat animals is like the holocaust so we don’t seemed to have learned anything.  What do you have to say about that? 

The holocaust is very disappointing.  We don’t always learn from history.   I remember photographs of the liberation of the concentration camps. and there was a sense around the world of ‘never again’.  But since then we have had several genocides claiming more than a million victims and a couple of dozen genocides claiming a couple of hundred thousand victims and there are cases still going on today.  So I would agree with you that we don’t always learn from history.

But we do the same thing to animals, what do you say about that?

I say that’s a very different question.

What do you think about California’s decision to take action about the world’s six largest car manufacturers?

I regard it as a political matter, by that I mean I would like to see greenhouse gasses reduced, and this proposal by California could be a useful part of a repertoire of devices, so I’m willing to give it a try.

You talked before about large companies have a lot of power, and that some of them are actually good.  But sometimes governments come up against the self interest of large businesses that have more power than some governments around the world.  When it comes to a showdown, how do you see that playing out?

 It varies.  In some cases big companies stonewall and get their way, and in other cases they don’t.

What is different between the societies of today and the socities that have collapsed that make us more or less likely to survive?

There are several differences.  There are two major negative ones:

1. Our technologies are far more destructive – we can deplete natural resources at a much greater rate than ever before.
2. Globalisation means that we are all affected by what happens elsewhere in the world.  We cannot isolate ourselves from the collapse of any segment of society, so collapses can more readily spread.

If those were the only two differences, I’d invite you all outside right now to join me in a mass suicide.  But fortunately, there two other differences in our favour:

1. The media.  Through the media we can see what is happening around the world and can learn from it straight away.
2. Historians and archaelogies.  Through them, we come to know about past societies and about how they survivied or collapsed, so we can learn how to avoid the same kinds of problems.

The third and final lecture by Jared Diamond (on Friday night) was not based on any of his previous books, and was about the need and ability of societies to reappraise their core values.

He gives several examples of America starting or needing to reappraise some of its core values, as a specific example of a general problem.  Willingness to reappraise core value is a common theme in the sucess or failure of societies.  For instance, the Greenland Norse were not willing or able to reappraise their identity as Christian Europeans; and this refusal to learn from and live like the Inuit eventually led to them all dying.

He began by talking also about re-examination of core values on a personal level in the context of personal responses to crises.  A personal crises happens in response to some situation when we discover that our usual ways of coping with something aren’t working for us anymore.  Successful resolution of the crisis involves figuring out some new and better way of coping – "what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger".

Personal crisis therapy involves helping people to ‘build a fence’ around the parts of their lives that aren’t working, and to realise that their basic identity is intact, and that it isn’t their entire life falling apart.  You can’t change all parts of yourself at once.   People who are able to build this fence are much more likely to successfully withstand a personal crisis.  It also helps to have "ego strength" (internally derived sense of self), to have a flexible personality and tolerance for ambiguity and failure, and to have role models of people who have coped with the same problem.

An individual in crisis has to evaluate what things are working for them and what things aren’t.  They then have to selectively retain the things that do work, and be willing to replace the things that aren’t working. This can be a quick process in response to an acute crisis, or can be a slow reappraisal, such as when happens when people reappraise their careers.

While the Greenland Norse failed at this reappraisal, Japan succeeded.  The Japanese abandoned their policies of isolationism, changed their government structure, sent envoys to learn about different technologies & civil structures.  Japan then adopted many of these technologies and many aspects of the European ways of live, yet they have selectively retained many aspects of their cultural identity.  They have kept their writing system, beliefs, culture, and food.  After WWII they further abandoned their military aspirations and autocratic government.  However, Japan currently has problems with not welcoming immigrants but having an aging population and low birthrate.  Solving this will require further changes to Japanse values.

Immediately after WWII, Europe was a set of isolated and competing national blocks.  This is now starting to be cast aside in favour of European nationalism.   This is still not solved problem however, but is a core value change in progress.

The US currently has three main issues that it needs to reappraise because it’s core values are under seige: 

1. Consumption rates.  Often confused with wealth & standard of living, but are not the same.  US Consumption are no longer sustainable with such a high population.  US per capita consumption is 32 times higher than the third world, and the third world are trying to catch up to first world.  World doesn’t have enough resources to support the first world at this consuption rate, and it certainly doesn’t have enough resources to support the rest of the world when it starts to catch up.
2. Relationships with overseas.  American attitude has traditionally been isolation punctuated by short-term military involvement.   Interventions in WW1 & 2 were breaks in the isolationism.    Isolationism worked while the oceans were effective barriers, but the world is now smaller and the oceans no longer successfully separate America from the issues of the rest of the world.  
3. Balancing individual rights against society rights.  America has traditionally been much more individualist than most other countries.  For instance, US people can cut down any trees on their land whenever they like, no permission required.  This is not the case in most European countries and NZ & Australia.  Individual rights are destroying natural beauty and so individual rights need to be moderated by the needs of society.  In local cases, this is starting to change.  Anti-smoking laws are an example of placing the needs of society higher than the wants of the indivdual, but still have a long way to go on this.

He quotes Dick Cheney (who he normally doesn’t like to quote) as saying "the American way of life is non-negotiable". 

Negotiate with whom?  Of course the US government is not going to negotiate their way of life with other countries, but Americans will have to renegotiate with themselves over these issues.

The second lecture by Jared Diamond (on Thursday night) was essentially based on his book Collapse.  It examines the factors that cause some societies to fail while others thrive.

Not surprisingly, given Diamond’s interest in ecology and geography, environmental factors play a large role.  The richness & fertility of the environment is one of the key factors, as is the nature human impact on the environment.  The presence of absense of both friends and foes can make the difference between life or death, as can the society’s willingness to reexamine and change some of it’s core values when faced with a crisis.

His primary example is Easter island – the most remote inhabitated bit of land in the world.  Some of his other examples were the Greenland Norse, the Anasazi of the American southwest and the Mayans of the Yucatan peninsula.  He also contrasts these with examples of societies that were at risk of collapse but managed to avert it: Iceland and Japan in the Tokugawa era.

When the polynesian colonists arrived on Easter island,  it was a lush temperate forest, with many species of large trees, including the largest species of palm tree in the world.  Initially, the island must have seemed very fertile and resource-rich.  The islanders dined on tuna and dolphin (fished from their ocean-going canoes) as well as a large assortment of seabirds and landbirds.  They began creating terraced gardens on the uplands to grow vegetables and herbs as well.  

The island provided them with such a rich lifestyle that they had sufficient time and resources spare to build and erect large statues embodying their gods.  These were quarried in the single rock quarry on the island, then dragged miles back to the group’s home area (there were perhaps a dozen separate groups on the island) using wooden sleds, ladders and ropes.  There they were raised up to stand vertical on enormous platforms.  The tribes most likely competed with each other to build the biggest and most impressive statues.

Unfortunately for the easter islanders though, their island wasn’t actually as fertile as it first appeared.  The lush resources they saw were the result of centuries of growth, and when they cut down the trees they grew back extremely slowly.  They quickly ran out of the timber suitable for making canoes, and as a result, tuna and dolphin disappeared from their diet.   They also depleted the seabird and landbirds (some to extinction) and had to rely more on agriculture.  This was increasingly marginal, as the deforestation contributed to erosion, resulting in the loss of topsoil.   Eventually they ran so low on wood that they were forced to use gravel for mulch in their gardens, and to burn leafy shrubs for firewood.  

Things eventually reached a crisis point, and the society collapsed, with the islanders retreating into caves and turning cannabalistic in order to get protein in their diet.  They toppled all the statues they had spent so much effort in erecting, causing them to fall in such a way that they were broken at the neck.

No friends or foes were a factor in the collapse of easter island – they were too isolated.  Once they consumed all the resources of their island, they literally had nowhere to go and nobody to turn to. 

One of Jared Diamond’s students asked what went through the mind of the easter islander while he was chopping down that last tree.  Some of his students had thoughts on that (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

• "It’s my private land and I can do what I want.  Government should stay out of people’s private business."
• "We don’t know that we necessarily have a  deforestation problem.  I think we need to do more research on the matter."
• "Get lost you tree-hugging hippy!  Don’t you know that loggers need their jobs – we have families to feed!"

One thing that he mentioned was a common feature of societies prior to collapsing was the ability of the leaders to isolate themselves from the problems faced by everyone else.  This can mean they don’t anticipate the problem, or don’t even see it when it arises.  They may not even do anything to solve the problem when it occurs because it doesn’t affect them personally.  However, in the long run, the masses will only take so much before they revolt and overthrow their leaders.   By that stage it could very well be too late for the society.  He spoke of seeing this happening in America today, with people having gated communities, private security companies, bottled water, private superannuation, education and healthcare, all serving to essentially isolate those people from all the problems faced by society.

The uni held its annual Sir Douglas Robb lecture series this week, with a series of lectures by Jared Diamond.

The first lecture (on Wednesday night) was essentially based on his book Guns, Germs and Steel.  It won a Pulitzer Prize (among other things), and I can highly recommend it.

He essentially tries to answer the question of why it was Eurasians (and largely Europeans) who colonized/killed Africans, Americans, Australians and Polynesians, and not the other way around.

The immediate answer is actually fairly obvious: at the time the different civilisations came into contact, it was the Europeans who had the guns, armor and superior weapons, they had nasty communicable diseases to which the other people had no immunity, and they had steel tools which enabled highly productive societies.  Those proximate causes are fairly well understood and established.  

If you look back to when the world emerged from the last ice age some 10,000 years ago, humans everywhere were stone age hunter-gatherers with essentially the same basic lifestyles and technologies.  During the 10,000 years, something happened that allowed Eurasian civilisations to progress faster than the others.   That something is the ultimate cause of Eurasia dominating the world today.  What was that something?

The most visible difference between the various civilisations is physical: different peoples look different in their facial features, hair and skin colour.  For centuries, racism has been so ingrained that nobody bothered to ask about continental differences: they "knew" the answer was that their race was superior and the other peoples were less intelligent, less hardworking, less skillful or whatever.

It’s only really in the last few decades that we have been able to recognise that there really aren’t significant differences between the peoples of different continents, and can instead start looking for other answers.

Jared Diamond provides a number of bio-geographical factors that can account for the different rates of societal advance on the different continents.  At no time does he claim that these are the only factors – he just sets out to show that these factors can account for a very large chunk of the differences.

Natural abundance of domesticable animal species

Very few wild mammal species have ever been domesticated by humans, and all of those were domesticated long ago. There are a number of attributes an animal species must have to be suitable for domestication, and lacking any one will rule it out.  Some animals cannot be corralled or penned, either because they can leap so high they can jump out, or because they go crazy in confinement and literally kill themselves trying to escape (gazelles & some deer species).  Some animals will not breed in captivity, because their mating rituals require privacy, or extended time or space, or the exact right mix of genders (cheetahs).  Some animals are just too dangerous and unpredicable to keep around (bears or tigers).  Some animals are just too difficult for humans to find food for (anteaters).  Some animals just don’t have a herd instinct and don’t do well in groups (cats and bighorn sheep).   Some animals have far too long a lifespan for us to be able to breed them and have much influence on their evolution (elephants).  Even with today’s knowledge, we have been able to tame individuals of some of these species, but we have still not domesticated them.

Of the larger mammals then, this leaves us then with domesticated cows, sheep, goats, horses and pigs.  Of lesser importance were donkeys, camels, llamas, raindeer, yak and water buffalo.   All of these animals except Llamas were native to Eurasia.  The Llama was pretty much the only domesticable large mammal in the Americas (and it was only in the South American highlands), and there was nothing in Australia, Papua New Guinea or Africa.  The Americas had more large mammals that may have been candidates, but most of them disappeared around the end of the ice age (when people first inhabited the continent).

Natural abundance of domesticable plant species

This is a similar story to the animals – very few wild plant species are suitable for domestication.  Of those that are, most occurred in Eurasia.  Agriculture is believed to have been independently ‘invented’ separately in a few different locations, and spread to other areas from there.  The fertile crescent region of the middle east was particularly lucky, with 8 very useful species that were suited to domestication.   Most other areas only had one or two species available.

Immunity to communicable diseases

This is strongly related to the previous two factors.   Because the natural resources in some areas gave those societies a much more productive agriculture, they had dramatic increases in population density.  As well as people living in much closer proximity to each other, and living in larger groups, people were in close proximity to herd animals with their own diseases.  Most of our communicable diseases came from our domesticated animals: pigs, cows, sheep and so on.   In a small or less-dense population, the disease eventually dies out (either because everybody has either died or become immune).  When the population becomes large, the disease can live on ‘moving’ through the population and eventually coming back to infect new victims.    With the disease constantly present, the population quickly builds up immunity to the disease. 

Development of writing and technology

Again this is related to the first two points. The societies that achieved the most productive food production were able to support non-food-producers, who could develop technology and writing.  The technology and writing usually fed back into society to enable to expand more easily, or to directly improve the productivity of the food production, thus supporting even more non-food-producers.

Orientation of the continents 

The major axis of Eurasia is east-west.  The major axis of the other continents is essentially north-south.  This plays quite a significant role in the relative development of the different continents.   It is relatively easy for food production to spread in an east-west direction.  Because it is the same latitude, it is generally the same climate, the same day length and the same germination cycle.  However, spreading north-south is much more difficult.  Crops that grow well at one latitude often won’t grow at all a bit further north or south, because of the difference in germination cycles and daylight hours, not to mention the climate change.   Developments in different parts of Eurasia fairly quickly spread throughout the continent, providing new crops and animals to the peoples there.    However, developments in the Americas were hampered by the axis and geography of the region.  The crops and Llamas in the Andes never met up with the crops and wheels in Mexico, because the tropical isthmus of Panama lay between them.

Jared Diamond weaves together all these factors into a very compelling explanation of why the Eurasians had all the guns, germs and steel.
I highly recommend you read the book.

Extremism only gets you more extremism.

In the early stages of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, most of the Jews and Arabs were happy to coexist together.
A very small minority of Jews weren’t – they wanted Arabs out and the promised land to be for Jews only.
A very small minority of Arabs weren’t – they viewed the Jews as invaders in their territory and wanted them to get the hell away.

Since the vast majority didn’t agree with either minority, the two fringe groups turned to violent tactics.  Jewish groups arrived in the middle of the night and bulldozed villages, sometimes with people still in the houses.  They went through other villages and killed everyone – men, women and children.  Their intention was to scare the Arabs into leaving the country.

Arab groups started bombing Jewish buildings and infrastructure, eventually using suicide bombing as a tactic. Their intention was to scare the Jews into leaving the country.

Unfortunately, the effect is to horrify and terrify the moderate people on both sides.  Their grief and anger overwhelms their empathy for the people on the ‘other side’.  The extremists aren’t really affected – their views are just confirmed.  But people who were previously happy to share the country now just want someone to pay for what happened to their mother, granson, daughter, cousin, nephew, friend.

And so a much larger slice of the people are now willing to take extreme positions, and use extreme measures.  The longer it goes on, the more polarised the two sides become.

I don’t know what happens after that.   Maybe it just escalates until one side wipes the other out.  I’d like to think that isn’t the only outcome.

Perhaps enough people on both sides eventually realise that the battle is futile and only results in more harm and hurt to everyone.  Perhaps getting revenge for past wrongs becomes less important compared to preventing even worse wrongs in the future.

Maybe the people retreat from their poles of extremism and realise that it is the extremists on their side as well as the other bear responsibility.  

Of course, sitting here in nice safe little New Zealand with no actual experience of this sort of thing, it’s quite likely that I’m just talking outta my ass.

Nothing is more representative of the wedding ceremony than the white dress.  It is pretty widely "known" that the white dress symbolises purity & virginity (even if today this is honoured more in the breach than the observance), right?

Although a lot of people seem to think this, that’s not why most wedding dresses are white.   A few hundred years ago, a woman would probably just wear her best dress.  The colour and style would be dictated by whatever was currently in fashion.   Dresses were actually hideously expensive back then.  If a woman was of a wealthy family, she would show off a little by having a dress made just for the occasion, although she would almost always wear the dress (or parts of it) again.

The craze for white was pretty much started by Queen Victoria, who wore a white dress.  Immediately, all the other society brides followed suit.   The thing with a white dress was that it was ridiculously impractical in Victorian England.  Everywhere you walked was muddy, and bathing was practically unknown.  A white dress would very quickly get dirty and be useless – it could probably only be worn once. 

To be able to afford a dress so impractical that it could only be worn was basically just an ostentatious display of wealth and status.  And that’s what the white wedding dress is really a symbol of

This is the 2nd installment in the Israel/Palestine series.  We left the story in part 1 just after the Romans destroyed the second temple, kicked many Jews out of Jerusalem and renamed the area Syria Palaestina.

The Roman General did allow a centre of learning and Jewish council to be established in Yavneh, which provided a focal point for the Jewish faith.  The Jews did try to establish the state of Israel but the revolt was put down by the Romans.  By about 400 years later, the whole area was part of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empire, and had been split into three units.   In 425BC, the Romans (with Christianity now the dominant faith) forced the Jewish council (Sanhedrin) to disband in Yavneh. 

As the Roman empire declined, the Persians managed to take over the area in about 614.  The Romans never managed to get it back, and it ended up under Arab control.   It changed hands through various Arab caliphs (interrupted briefly when the Crusaders took over) until about 1500 when it became part of the Ottoman empire.  The Jews seemed to have lived there relatively peacefully under Muslim rule – it was the Crusaders who tried to drive them out and kill them. 

Meanwhile, all the Jews who had been expelled or who fled were scattered around Europe. There was also considerable antisemitism in the Christian nations of France, Germany and Britain, so the Jewish population was particularly high in Muslim Spain.  However, during the reconquista – the Christian reconquest of Spain – both Muslims and Jews fled (or were expelled) from the area, many going to Ottoman Palestine, moving in alongside the Jews and Arabs who had been there for centuries. 

Faced with institutionalised anti-semitism throughout (now mainly Christian) Europe, a Zionist movement began to grow amongst the Jews still scattered around Europe who wanted to return to Israel and make it a Jewish state and rebuild their temple.   Most people in Palestine were happy, and things seemed quite peaceful.  Most of the people living there (Jews, Christians and Arabs) were living where their families had lived for hundreds of years.

Then, World War 1 happened.  The Ottoman empire had been pretty much declining for a while, and they ended up on the Kaiser’s side.  When Germany was defeated, the winners carved up the losers’ land.  Most of the middle east was split between Britain & France.  Out of this was eventually born the states we now know, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and so on.  Around this time, the Zionists in Europe did some serious lobbying and managed to convinced the British Foreign Secretary that now was a good time for them to regain a Jewish state.

Now, under the Sykes-Picot agreement (the secret arrangement between Britain and France about who was to get what part of the middle east), Palestine wasn’t actually allocated to either – it was marked for international administration pending consultation with Russia and others.  Palestine really wasn’t Britain’s to give away.

The text of the Balfour Declaration reads:

"His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." 

It seems that ‘His Majesty’s Government’ was telling different stories to different sides.  They were essentially telling the Zionists that they could have Palestine for a Jewish state, but telling the Palestinians that they were just agreeing to a give the Jews a national home, not a state, in Palestine, not the whole of Palestine. 

Some of the wording in the declaration was added and modified by groups representing the (large number) of non-Zionist Jews in Europe.   They were worried about the people in the area being expelled (after all, their ancestors weren’t happy when it happened to them, so why would they do that to others), so they included the bit about doing nothing to prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities.  They were also worried that if there was a Jewish state, that they would be forced to go there by the European states, so they added the bits about not prejudicing the rights and political status of Jews in any other country.

Stay tuned for the next installment.