Medievalism Watch - Trump and ISIS

Trump likes to compare ISIS to medieval times. Here's a transcript of the latest debate, and some video.

COOPER: You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?
TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I don’t think you understood what was — this was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.
You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have — and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.
And they look and they see. Can you imagine the people that are, frankly, doing so well against us with ISIS? And they look at our country and they see what’s going on.
Yes, I’m very embarrassed by it. I hate it. But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. We’re going to defeat ISIS. ISIS happened a number of years ago in a vacuum that was left because of bad judgment. And I will tell you, I will take care of ISIS."

So beyond Trump avoiding responsibility for his pro-sexual-assault comment by talking ISIS, his "this is like medieval times" comment is a pretty frequent remark for him. Here's another set of video.

 

Trump isn't alone. Obama has talked about ISIS as medieval, as has Fiorina. So have many journalists. Read John Terry on the ISIS issues.

But there's a broader pattern. As I've said many times, the use of "medieval" to impose chronological alterity between us and something we don't like, is a move intended to deny responsibility for that thing, to deny how neatly it fits in modernity.

And it always fits in modernity very neatly.

ISIL and the Murder of Disabled Children

This Facebook post from Mosul Eye, a source that I'm told has some track record of reliability, shows a video of disabled children (just hanging out, really), then claims the following:

Through monitoring and following the death incidents of children with Down's Syndrome and congenital deformities, we were able to learn that the Shar'i Board of ISIL issued an "Oral Fatwa" to its members authorizing them to "kill newborn babies with Down's Syndrome and congenital deformities and disabled children". The Fatwa was issued by one of ISIL's Shar'i judges, a Saudi judge named " Abu Said Aljazrawi".
The information indicate that most of the children born with Down's Syndrome are those of foreign fighters who married Iraqi, Syrian and Asian women. We recorded more than 38 confirmed cases of killing babies with congenital deformities and Down's Syndrome, aged between one week to three months. They were killed by either lethel injection or suffocation. Some of those killings took place in Syria and Mosul.
This displaced child from Mosul, ISIL issues a Fatwa to kill him.
As if it is not enough for ISIL to kill men, women and the elderly, and now, they kill children

Coverage in the West has linked this to Aktion T4 (Breitbart, here, is typical), the systematic Nazi murder of disabled people at the beginning of the Holocaust. Sarah Palin has weighed in, too, with her usual pure-ID politics: "Over my dead body," she says. Lots of coverage followed.

I think it's a mistake to compare ISIL to the Nazis. The murder of 38 disabled children is terrible. The murder of 200 Syrian children, as alleged in this video, is also monstrous (this story also compares ISIL to the Nazis). In the West, though, we like to compare everyone we hate to Nazis, but 20th-century western fascism is just one kind of evil, among many, and when we misunderstand our enemy it makes it harder to defeat them.

From the disability perspective, moreover, my community tends to parse everything through the western tradition of eugenics. Eugenics is both a historical and contemporary problem that emerged directly out of the western scientific tradition. I see it as a byproduct of the Enlightenment, although that's a post for another day (or, rather, just a long list of citations of pieces by smarter folks than I). It is possible that ISIL, with its European connections, is drawing from that eugenic tradition. But I don't think so.

This is not, unlike the video of the Syrian massacre, or the specific slaughter of wheelchair users in the Bataclan theater in paris, an explicit act of terror. There's no video of murdering disabled infants. This is not about exterminating the outsider or spreading fear + hate in the world. Rather, it's enabling ISIL fighters to murder their own disabled children, eliminating the perceived "unfit" from society.

That, sadly, is an ancient tradition. The infanticide of disabled children is fairly routine throughout history and continues around the world today. I just read that 98% of all abandoned children in China have disabilities, for example, but I'm not picking on China. Ableisms, often murderous ones, infuse all cultures in their own way.

None of this excuses ISIL's fighters who are murdering their children. I'm not even sure if the distinctions matter. But traditions of infanticide do vary, and I'm already seeing pro-forced birth Americans using this fact to support anti-abortion laws in the US while also promoting ground war in Syria.

ISIS and the Crusades

Thomas Madden, one of my mentors, has a new piece in the Washington Post on ISIS and the Crusades.

In it, he rehearses the ways in which the memory of the Crusades was carried by Western European people into the colonial era and thus brought the European ideas about the Crusades into the Islamic world. Modern Islamic groups picked up on this western conception of the Crusades and adapted it into a useful past for their own contemporary agendas.

So far, so good. It's not that the Islamic world "forgot" the Crusades, but that in the grand sweep of North African and West Asian history, they weren't the cause of centuries of intense nostalgic remembrance (it's the losers who hold grudges. Winners throw a parade but move on to other things). The Islamic "memory" of the Crusades was as an incursion, a short-lived failure, and a spark that helped leaders like Saladin and, more to the point, Baybars and the Mamluks, to rise. 16th Europeans were extremely involved in the Crusade-memory project. 16th-century Western Asian Muslims had other things on their minds (largely). It's fascinating to me that modern Islamic states, groups, and cultures, especially under the pan-Arabism of Nasser in the 20th century, adopted the European Colonialist fantasy of the Crusades, then adapted it to their own anti-colonial purposes.

But I do have some concerns with Madden's piece. He writes:

The Crusades were military campaigns, but they could not have happened were they not also devotional exercises. Centuries before the first Crusader took his vow, Muslim armies had waged vigorous jihads against the Christian world.

These two sentences are, for me, a non-sequitur. They are both more or less true (it's arguable whether "vigorous jihad against the Christian world" is an accurate way to describe 7th century conquests, but I'll let someone else write about that). They just have little to with each other except in the imaginations of the western European 11th-century Christians who constructed a relationship with sacred territory in Western Asia, then claimed they had the right to "take it back." Much of that imaginary relationship emerged in the 12th century, after the First Crusade, but there's plenty of evidence that these ideas pre-date 1095.

These sentences fall into the debate of: 1) "The Crusades were truly a defensive war" in which the Crusades defended "Christian territory" vs "Islam." vs 2) "The crusaders imagined it was a defensive war in which they constructed a "Christendom" and "Islam" in perpetual conflict.

I'm a proponent of the latter (2) construct - That the Crusaders indeed typically had genuine belief in these connections, but that these connections were largely imaginary. There's no reasonable claim that Western Latin/French-speaking European Catholics in the 11th century could make for "real" ownership over land in Western Asia that Arab forces conquered from the Byzantine empire ~500 years previously. History is, however, full of people asserting such connections.

I also believe there's nothing in world history more dangerous than people who invent ideologies to justify violence. Madden writes:

Crusaders honestly saw themselves as undertaking acts of charity and love for their Christian brothers and sisters in the East.

Again, I think this is true for many Crusaders. The evidence is strong.

And it's terrifying.