Image: Siege of Constantinople (Philippe de Mazerolles, ca. 1460)
With over thirteen million inhabitants, Constantinople is by far the largest city in Europe. To the visitor, the ancient center presents itself as a confusing maze of winding streets, dilapidated townhouses, and narrow squares with weathered monuments. Nowadays, however, few Westerners are familiar with the tragic history of the place.
As we have long ago denied our Christian origins and are constantly indoctrinated by revolutionary activists to hate our own heritage, history in general has been dismissed. Failing scientific tradition and integrity, we play along with the victim-offender dichotomy of Western culpability and non-Western innocence. The price for academic cowardice in the West, complicated by poor education and common ignorance, however, may ultimately prove to be high.
Constantinople has led a turbulent life. Founded in 324 on the site of an existing city, Byzantium, whose history according to Herodotus dates back to 667 BC, it was proclaimed the capital of the Roman Empire in 330. After Germanic tribes overran the Western Roman Empire in 376–476, the invaders themselves fleeing from the Huns, the city retained its position as the administrative and cultural center of the Eastern Roman Empire until the Ottoman siege in 1453. For over a thousand years, the heir to the Hellenistic-Roman civilization experienced alternating periods of prosperity and adversity.
What sealed the fate of the Roman Empire was something like “civilizational exhaustion” and an inability to contain the belligerent energy of invading tribes. Rather than scientific and artistic inferiority, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was due to an indecisive (divided, incompetent) central government, widespread decadence, and falling birth rates. A similar decline later marked the Eastern Roman Empire which came under increasing pressure from Seljuk Turks (Ottomans) and Bulgarians. In the long run, neither the Western Roman nor the Eastern Roman Empire could resist invading masses of people with pagan and Islamic belief systems, respectively.
A sad interlude was the creation of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. Leaders of the Fourth Crusade, a pious undertaking originally intended to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims, turned against their Christian brothers, frustrated with failed intrigues, and treacherously decided to sack the city in 2004, replace the Orthodox with a Catholic emperor, and divide the province into vassal states intended for the conspirators as rewards. After a long period of decline, the Byzantine Empire was restored in 1261.
That Christians could really be so inconsiderate as to fight each other rather than join forces and confront the external enemy from the east was like a reenactment of the grueling rivalry of Greek city-states in the shadow of an expanding Achaemenid Empire. There are also parallels in more recent history.
Leaving aside the Dantean carnage of WWI, a monument to Christian suicidality, European powers have gambled with civilization time and again. Rather than allow the Russian Empire to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and capture Constantinople, both the British and the French chose to enter the Crimean War on the Ottoman side — for the sake of the “balance of power” in Europe. And in these years, Russia is waging war against Christian “breakaway provinces” (e.g. Georgia, Ukraine), as they are apparently perceived, while staying on friendly terms with Muslim strongmen from the region. It is as if the Christian suicide orgy will never end. We continue to make short-term decisions as if we do not know friend from foe.
Christians have been expelled from the Levant, Mesopotamia, and North Africa. In the Caucasus, Armenians and Georgians suffer for the sovereignty of their respective lands, sandwiched between Muslim nations in the east and west. Ominously, expectations are not much brighter in Western Europe where stagnant populations — in a vicious spiral of material indulgence, spiritual poverty (including historical unawareness), and masochistic self-doubt — are humbling themselves before the supremacist enemy. Islam has waged war against them since the seventh century. Nevertheless, on the back of irresistible migrations, it has recently been allowed to expand unhindered in the middle of their society.
As late as after WWI, Christians made up the majority in Constantinople. And after WWII, the Christian majority in Lebanon was intact. Meanwhile, the war against Christians has been dragging on. The most powerful weapon in that war is ultimately demographic. In that respect, nothing has changed since the beginning of time. Thanks to state-directed massacres, community harassment, and forced displacement, Christian majorities have been transformed into minorities. Conversely, new majorities are growing exponentially due to high birth rates, taking over entire cities and lands.
Supposedly, the proportion of Christians in Turkey declined from 20–25% in 1914 to about 2% in 1927 — further dropping to as little as 0.2–0.4% today. However, the Islamic-nationalist rulers were not finished with their work yet. Against this background, the so-called “Istanbul pogrom” took place in 1955. Atrocities planned and orchestrated by the ruling party (and a number of security agencies) were directed against Greek residents of Constantinople. As is also used in police states like the Iranian one, when there is a need to give “government repression” the appearance of “street disorder”, armed thugs from the province were drafted in for the occasion. People identified as Greeks, but also Armenians and Jews, were assaulted, and property belonging to Christians was plundered and burned down.
Like Nazi authorities on Kristallnacht in 1938, Turkish police, complicit in the pogrom, remained passive during the mob attacks going uninterrupted until a declaration of martial law. Thus, army intervention followed nine long hours of staged anarchy. Of the estimated 65,000 inhabitants of Greek origin who lived in Constantinople in 1955, a mere 2,500 descendants remain today.
On the whole, Turkish nationalists got away with their crimes once again in 1955. It is hardly unreasonable to assume that they have been encouraged by pioneering experiences on a much larger scale from the beginning of the century. In line with this suspicion, apparently without caring about international law and justice, they invaded and occupied Cyprus in 1974.
Relying blindly on Americans to come to their rescue, as they did in WWI and WWII, Western Europeans have become soft-spoken and pliant. They are said to believe in “soft power”. However, this falls short in the face of implacable enemies desiring to deceive and dominate you. Since 1979, Europeans have been conducting a “critical dialogue” with the Tehran Mullahs — without any apparent success. For years, Europeans tried to oblige the Russians to peaceful coexistence by expanding trade — unsuccessfully.
Faced with an immediate demand for military mobilization and mass production of war materiel, decision-makers in Brussels are paralyzed by concerns about welfare benefits and climate change. — It takes strength and sound judgment to be a good leader. And nations need good leaders to survive. History teaches us something about events and trends testing the will and ability of a nation to survive.
If tricked into self-loathing by Marxists and Islamists alike, we renounce our place in history. It is sobering to consider the plight of Christians in their lands of origin following Islamic conquests. Those, who mislead us with tales of “white-Christian” imperialism-colonialism, conceal the fact that Christianity preceded Islam in the Old World. Advancing from the Arabian Peninsula, warriors of the Rashidun Caliphate first put Christians to flight along the Mediterranean. From the Gulf of Guinea to the Bay of Bengal, ongoing persecution of Christians involves assault, looting, and vandalism.
For cowards to actually believe that they get another chance from above every time they fail is idiotic. Constantinople was the splendid capital of an empire that lasted for over a thousand years. However, it ultimately succumbed to ideological supremacism and unlimited brutality. Philosophical-scientific ideas and technological superiority may provide advantages in the short term. In the end, however, it is those showing both faith in destiny and resolve who emerge victorious.
The tragedy of Constantinople should be a reminder to anybody, who belongs to the Christian community, to resist defeatism, come to their senses, and save civilization while there is time. Otherwise, they may become extinct.
Source link