I have read, although I don’t know if it is actually true or not, that the mother-daughter relationship is the most important relationship of all human relationships. Men are expected to break away from their mothers and very often have no relationship whatsoever with their fathers. Women often have rocky relationships with their mothers, but very rarely do they break the relationship because women so heavily identify with their mothers. (Men identify with their fathers, but not with the same intensity women identify with their mothers.)

Yet, more and more you hear about women in the U.S. who no longer speak with their mothers and it is almost always blamed on the fact that the mother places too many demands on the behavior of her daughter so the daughter has to break all bonds in order to cut the apron strings.

I think there may be a historical basis for this issue and I think it might also explain why narcissism is becoming such a widespread societal problem.

Before the industrial revolution, both men and women raised the children because most men worked at home. The image of women as stern but angelic caretakers of children arose with the industrial revolution when men had to go to work and were no longer home to help raise the children. (The view of children had also drastically changed.) The American Government under Roosevelt created a sort of “angel in the home” campaign which was an attempt to make women feel compelled to be the sole care-takers of the household. This was how society was to be held together while men left home to work in the factories.

This is from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech “On American Motherhood” (1905):

The woman’s task is not easy—no task worth doing is easy—but in doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to her the highest and holiest joy known to mankind; and having done it, she shall have the reward prophesied in Scripture; for her husband and her children, yes, and all people who realize that her work lies at the foundation of all national happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.

Motherhood took on romantic angelic images as a way to make good servants out of women so society could enter into the industrial age with as little disruption as possible. Get the women to take over the duties of the household and the fact that men are no longer at home to share in the workload won’t disrupt society.

So what happens to women who don’t want to be stuck in this role but have been convinced that it is their godly duty to fulfill it? They put a lot of the stress for household duty on their daughters. This is because the only control many mothers felt they had at the turn of the century was over their children - especially their daughters. If the mother had bought into the “angel in the kitchen” idealism, then it was very likely she was going to repress self-expression in her daughters at a very young age. If this is done early enough, narcissistic disorders are very likely to develop. And what happens when mothers with narcissistic disorders raise children? They tend to repress self-expression in their own children and their children grow up with heavy amounts of narcissism, too. Families of narcissists often appear to be extremely well-behaved because the children believe that if anything goes wrong, it is the fault of the child, not the parent. The child is made to believe the narcissistic parent has it all together and this compels compliant behavior. (Compliance is gained by making the child feel worthless unless he complies rather than being gained through a development of mutual respect.)

C.S. Lewis, Huston Smith, Richard Rohr and many other theologians I’ve read claim that Fundamentalism is a product of the industrial revolution. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that Christianity became a factual, mechanized religion to be marketed. In that fundamentalism tends to see everything as an extension of itself, fundamentalism is also highly narcissistic. It’s not the religion or belief system that is problematic, it’s the people who don’t comply with it. If you do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God in a very specific way, you will be sent to Hell by a very narcissistic God who carries on like a 6 year old when he doesn’t get the compliant behavior he demands.

It’s really difficult for kids to break out of narcissistic families because they feel that they are betraying their family through their non-compliance. I imagine this is what it is like for a lot of fundamentalist Christians, too. You start making that break with your religion and you are told you are horrible, no good, worthless, and evil. I had a similar but somewhat less intense experience breaking with conservative mainstream Christianity. But I think the same is true of people who are raised atheist who join a church when they get older. They are heavily chastised for it and sometimes considered “evil” for becoming religious. (Fundamentalist atheism.)

Sam Keen says that with the industrial revolution, we ceased being homo-sapians. Homo-sapiens are creatures who look for wisdom and knowledge to explain their being. With the industrial revolution, we became homo-faber- makers of things. Now we are homo-economicus and are dominated by ideas of onward, and upward (which is a secularized version of the utopianistic ideals in religion - we want to believe we are safe). As Allen Callahan points out, the current onward upward mentality is a sort of greed that is at the expense of unprecedented numbers of people. There have never been so many displaced people in the history of humanity. And it’s getting worse.

An inner journey almost always turns you away from what your family or your culture tells you which involves a certain amount of suffering. We don’t want to accept the absurdity of what it is we have bought into because it feels like a loss of innocence. We think of that as negative and avoid it. We’d rather act out the culturally accepted norms than to become who it is we are because that is much more comfortable than going against the culture. But if we don’t become who it is we are, we are likely going to create our own destruction.

I have been watching Heimat for almost 6 weeks now and have finished at last. I guess it was made for television but it was also shown in cinemas. I can’t quite figure how that would have worked because the film, from start to finish, is 15 hours, 40 minutes and 10 seconds! That’s a long movie. In the 1980s, it was considered the longest film ever made.

Edgar Reitz said he had hit a low point in his life and career and was snowed in on an island with nothing to do but watch Holocaust which was an American made film on what had happened in Germany. He was greatly troubled by the American perspective so started taking notes about how he would want to present what happened to Germany from the German perspective.

There is actually very little in the film about the Holocaust. Reitz centers the film around a small village in the Hunsruck (which is where he grew up). The town is fictitious as are the people, but they are based on his experiences and memories.

There isn’t a good translation for Heimat in English. It means homeland, but the deeper meaning has melancholic overtones of not being able to go home again - wanting to go back to that place where you were happy in childhood and that being an impossibility. Heimat refers to the drama of the fact that we can never return to where it is we have been.

It’s a fascinating saga that centers on Maria who is born in 1900 and dies in the 1980s. The film focuses on different people in every episode (there are 11 in all), but only she and the narrator (who is viewed as the village simpleton) are the in the film the entire way through. The film begins with the village boys returning home from WWI and how this has altered their relationship to the village. It continues with technology becoming more and more sophisticated, showing what building a highway through Germany does to village life, all the way on up to the 1980s when big business is beginning to take over and many of the locals are “selling out” their heritage.

I’m not sure I had ever made these connections before, although I know they’d be different in the U.S. But I could kind of relate because my grandmother was born right at the turn of the century - she’d be a few years older than Maria. And I can remember how hard she worked - her way of life was so foreign to anything I was used to. (My mother has stories of she and her brother being in charge of churning butter.) I think a lot of my homeschooling friends may be living something similar - building their own homes, baking their own bread, canning their own food, raising egg laying chickens, educating their own children, I think there is a definite yearning to go back to something more simple even though it is much harder work.

Reitz said he wanted to stick to “hard facts” through fiction and to try not to let his intellectualism get in the way. I think for the most part, he probably succeeded. There were so many different characters represented and we were allowed to see through the perspective of each and to see how these perspectives sometimes clashed with one another.

I have watched film after film on the Holocaust because my husband’s father is a German Jew who left Hamburg, Germany just as the horrible Nuremberg Laws were taking affect. He says he remembers the Jewish stores being defaced but he left before things got too bad. His parents thankfully had the forsight to send him to relatives in the U.S. He was only 11 years old and he sailed here by himself. I can barely imagine it.

It was nice to watch something about Germany that wasn’t focused exclusively on the Jews. The issue came up on several occasions, of course. The village has been the same for 100s of years until the turn of the century and there is definitely a narrow-mindedness toward villagers. The first episode shows a “gypsy” being run out of town. The problems the Jews are facing comes up in several instances, but is never the focal point. The focal point is this little town of Schabbach and the changes it faces from 1919-1982. This film was Edgar Reitz’s attempt to understand his past.

1776

by David McCullough

I had intended to finish this book by July 4th but got distracted by the kazillion other books I have sitting on my night stand. I happened upon it at the library and thankfully, they’ve let me have it for quite some time and I finally finished it today!

I have to admit that war tactics, strategies and struggles are never going to be number one on my list of favorite reads. But I enjoyed this book because it made Washington and all of the people who fought in the Revolutionary War seem so human.

Who would have ever guessed that Washington could have been indecisive at times? It seems what he had was an ability to inspire a group of inexperienced soldiers through incredible suffering and hardships against what seemed to be an undefeatable enemy.

The suffering the men had to endure was immense. Absolutely horrific. While what they did is most definitely admirable, I can’t help but hope that we will figure out a way to deal with one another at a different level one of these days. A lot of the men fighting were only 14 or 15 years old and the war killed of one-percent of the American population at the time.  (25,000 Americans died.)
McCullough says that outcome seems little short of a miracle. After reading his book, it definitely does seem so.

Very informative.

Irish in America is definitely not the sort of music I’d just sit around a listen to, but I found it really interesting after having watched Out of Ireland and learning about the long-standing oral tradition that still remains in Ireland since Celtic times.

Dan Milner says he has been involved in Irish traditional song all of his life. He and Bob Conroy lecture on Irish American themes at the International Folksong & Ballad Seminar in Co. Donegal. They say that the Irish recorded their experiences in folk songs and this CD is a musical record of the Irish People in the U.S. from 1780-1980.

Interesting way to experience history.

Out of Ireland

by Paul Wagner (II)

I watched Out of Ireland about a week ago. I was inspired to watch this video after having watched two films on the Celts. It’s about the Irish Emigration to America.

A good portion of my heritage is Irish. On my mother’s side, my aunt has done a lot of research which links us right back to Ireland. My father’s family comes out of Ireland in part, too, although he had always considered himself to be Scottish. Both sides of the family had claimed they were Scotch Irish and I think my mother had always thought of this as being Scottish, too, until my aunt’s research.

What I learned from the film was that the Scotch-Irish were Irish protestants who were persecuted by the Irish Catholics so immigrated to Scotland. Ethnically, they are Irish, but many who came to the U.S. preferred to think of themselves as Scottish. The Scotch-Irish had made their way to the U.S. prior to the large Irish Emigration that came after the Potato Famine and they made a deliberate distinction of themselves as Scottish to separate themselves from the poor Irish that were viewed by the American culture in an extremely negative light.

I had no idea how ill-treated the Irish had been in America!! They came to America downtrodden, starving, and impoverished hoping to find a better life. But many felt that life in the U.S. was even worse than what they came from (which had been absolutely horrific – many were enslaved in Ireland and some had even been sent to the U.S. as slaves!!)

I am so glad I watched this DVD.

The sexual images and moaning and groaning in this film were terribly irritating and didn’t fit at all because watching the film was like being in a boring classroom rather than experiencing an engaging documentary. But it has a lot of great information. So, notes…

Here is a theory: In hunter gatherer societies, children were nursed with very little supplementation until the age of 5. The act of nursing serves as a sort of natural birth control so children were fairly well spread out. But, once the clay pot was invented, things could be boiled and supplementation for the young was much easier to come by. As soon as this occurred, it was easier for women to have their babies closer together. The clay pot marked the move from the hunter gatherer society to the agrarian society. And with women having children closer together, they began to view sex more as a job than as something pleasurable.

The goddess became extremely important during the shift from hunting-gathering societies (which typically worshipped animals as gods) to the agrarian society. The rise of the goddess may have actually been the origination of the decline of the female. A common ritual was for a King to copulate with a hag who would later turn out to be a territorial goddess. This copulation legitimized the king as a sacred king and was said to bring about the fruitfulness of the land. If the land is fruitful, the women get pregnant, the corn grows, there are fish in the sea, etc. This all comes about through the copulation of the king with the territorial goddess. If he is the wrong king, then there will be famine, enemy attacks, and death.

The societies that existed prior to the neolithic period were characterized by sexual and gender equality. This use of the goddess in agrarian societies was the first step to the control and dominate of women. It likewise provided a means for the control and exploitation of the land which could be mined and controlled without consequence or respect. The goddess is associated with the reverential worship of the earth, but the earth is now viewed differently than it was in hunter gatherer societies. It is now OK for the earth to be “raped”.

With the introduction of the Bronze Age came the introduction of the phallic symbol. This was a pull away from the feminine symbol and was accompanied by an increase in violence and warfare. It may have come about from the reproductive changes that the new stone age had ushered in. Pulling children away and weening them abruptly from the mother is one of the signs of a warlike society. These people are more interested in bloodlines and lineage and therefore obsessed with paternity. Raiding and combat becomes a normal way of life. The status of women becomes perceived as beneath that of males and a child’s paternity is considered a vital issue.

But even with this diminished status, Celtic women owned property, had the right to bare arms, became Druids, and engaged in politics. They could also divorce their husband’s for a variety of reasons including failure to satisfy them sexually. The union between the sacred King and the territorial Goddess remained the central myth that fueled the spiritual and political consciousness of the society. It’s not just a human king ruling benevolently - the union gives him god-like status.

In early Celtic tradition, the earth mother goddess engaged in the sexual union with king after king and it was said she always had a man in waiting. this may have represented a pre-Celtic social order where women retained a high degree of sexual autonomy. In later Celtic literature, the earth mother goddess is transformed into an evil, manipulative queen who uses men to satisfy her lusts and to do her bidding.

The popular Celtic man-God, Cuchulainn, gains his power by being able to resist the seductive magic of women and sublimates his sexual energies into superhuman acts of heroism. The earth mother goddess sends her daughter to seduce Cuchalainn, but he impales her on a pillar of stone. He is a sexual misfit and sexually ambivalent. He sleeps with women, but his greatest affection is for men and usually the sexual encounters involved three men rather than two.

It is possible that men began to fear what they thought of as magical powers that women possessed. Birth is only necessary because there is death and it is women who brings birth about. In the Christian era, the Goddess as Hag was still celebrated during Halloween but was no longer considered part of the great cycle of birth and death. In fact, she was presented as the barren winter. She is made out to be angry, ugly and in need of an aspiring King for her well-being. (In pre-Christian times, it was the king who was in need of the hag who became the beautiful territorial Goddess of fertility.)

Mysogynistic Christianity brought with it a radical new way of viewing the relationship between man and woman. In the early Irish Church, women were said to be the gateway to Hell and there was literature written by a Irish monks that said it would be better to kill women than to live with them. St. Patrick likewise did not have patience with wayward women. Legend has it he crushed one under the wheels of his chariot because he didn’t want to see her commit a sin. Patrick’s church was so anti-sexual that several church patriarchs even condemned marriage as a sinful way of life.

Holiness was equated with pain rather than with pleasure. The greater the pain, the holier the hermit and the greater the reward in heaven. The documentary goes through tale after horrible tale of hatred toward women written by Irish monks.

The Catholic Handbook for Penitents originated in Ireland and then spread to the rest of Europe. This was the book that told priests how to define and punish sins. 40% of the text is about sex. If people were to stick to the rules that were assigned in the handbook, people could only have sex 2 times a week. In old Irish, masturbation was called a hand festival. But when the monks came along, they created penitential practice for 9 different types of masturbation!

The more monasticism expanded in Ireland, the less purist and more pagan Catholicism became. It also absorbed the pagan sexual outlook that it had tried so hard to suppress. Married priests became the norm. Women were also powerful figures as an attempt was made to replace the Celtic Druidesses with women like Saint Brigid. The transition from a religion that paired gods with goddesses to a monotheistic religion that was entirely male was an extremely difficult transition.

In the 1100s, however, the king of Ireland had an important Abbess raped. This would have been equivalent to raping the British Queen. And at the same time, religious orders were sent to Ireland to insure papal supremacy and to get marital laws under control. (Divorce, concubinage, etc. was allowed in Ireland at the time.) Henry II invaded Ireland and Ireland was brought under the control of Rome however sexuality remained lax by papal standards. There is the story from a cistercian monk about how his fellow monks watched nuns bathing naked in a lake and then brought them back to their monastery to “pray in a very unchristian like manner”. The Norman conquistadors who had been sent to bring Ireland under papal power also ended up mixing paganism and Christianity and became as Irish as the Irish. Some of the Norman chiefs were reported as having as many as 27 sons which most definitely were not begotten by the same woman.

When protestant England came into being and sought to gain control of Ireland, it did so by closing it’s monasteries. There were long period of fighting and starvation in Ireland during this time period. In 1641 Ireland had a population around 1.5 million. A decade later, it had been reduced by two-thirds. The remaining Irish were abused and enslaved by the protestant settlers. Many were transported to England and America as slaves and women became the sexual playthings of their masters and were sometimes mated with African slaves. Any offspring also became slaves. Many Irish women not enslaved became prostitutes and unwilling mistresses. The streets became a sexual nightmare for women. They were often ripped from the protection of their husbands and raped by the soldiers who were supposed to be protecting them.

In the Victorian period, sexuality outside of marriage was condemned but brothels thrived. Pornography was common and often graphic. Many diseases were invented (like nocturnal emissions) in order to discourage sex and terrible appliances were created to prevent the spread of these made up diseases. There were terrible devices invented to prevent masturbation. If an erection occurred during the night, one such invention would provide an electric shock. The Gothic world came into being as a reaction to that which could not be discussed in the polite society of the Victorian world. Western Ireland, however, was much freer sexually and the position of women was also much freer.

In the 1800s, the Potato Famine spread across Ireland and reduced it’s population by 2.5 million in 5 years. The communities that were entirely dependent upon the potato were completely destroyed. People fled Ireland to the United States. An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes worked the streets of New York and abandoned Irish kids were numerous as well.

The famine was presented by the Catholic Church as God’s way of purifying Ireland. This view created the militant puritanical views that were present in Ireland for the next 1 1/2 centuries. The numbers of priests and nuns grew to that of industrial proportions. Every family was to provide at least one son or daughter to the nuns, priests or brothers. By 1911, the ratio of priests to Catholics was 1 to 210. By 1926, 1 in 50 single males (age 45 to 54) were priests or monks. Thanks to the extreme sexual suppression established by the Church, the Irish population fell from 8.2 to 4.3 million making the Irish birthrate the lowest in the world. The people had been demoralized by the Potato famine so were more willing to be molded by the Catholic clergy. Ireland became highly puritanistic and grew even more so over time.

Contact between the sexes was limited. Men married late if at all. In the 1930s, 3/4s of 25-45 year old men remained single which produced a huge increase in admission to mental hospitals. Women were considered to be the source of all temptation but the moral guardians of the families. Sinners were called upon to do penance by providing labor to the Catholic Church. People sometimes provided unpaid labor for their entire lives as repayment for their sins. Girls who were raped, illigitmate, or orphaned, or even so pretty as to be a danger to their souls, were forced to work for the Immaculate Sisters, sometimes for their entire lives. They were enslaved and beaten by the nuns and as late as the 1970s, were subject to horrible sexual abuse.

Today’s Irish culture is far more sexually open but as of the time of this documentary (the DVD came out in 2005, but I think it is from a much older Video), the Irish society was still facing massive problems pertaining to sexual abuse - especially sexual abuse in the home. Church and State still used every means at their disposal to cover up problems to make Ireland more respectable to the rest of the world. Child abuse is a massive problem.

I recently watched two documentaries on the Conquistadors. One was an excellent documentary from PBS entitled The Conquistadors and the other an informative documentary entitled The Roads to El Dorado (from The Secrets of Archaeology series).

It’s such an incredibly sad history. Hernan Cortes was the first of the conquistadors. He managed to get a slave girl who knew both the Mayan and Aztec languages to help betray her people. I can’t help but wonder if you are a slave to your people if it is your people you are betraying? But the Mexican people to this day consider her a traitor and a whore.

It was said that the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II believed that Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl who had been expelled from Mexico and said he would come back and regain his Kingdom in the same year as Cortes conquered. The film doesn’t say this, but I have read (and it seems likely to me), that this was a Spanish fabrication. (It’s not unlike claiming that the Bible predicts the falling of the temple in Jerusalem and then later discovering the texts referring to the fall of the temple were written after it’s fall and not before. It’s an effective means to cement “believers”.)

Cortes made alliances with enemies of the Aztecs and it was through their help that he was able to destroy a civilization virtually singlehandedly. This is almost unheard of. But the Aztecs didn’t have guns or horses. And the starvation of women and children was not a part of the Aztec idea of warfare. Unfortunately, the Spaniards had horses, guns and the starvation of women and children was part of their warfare. Cortes starved women and children in every village and this was a big part of how he was able to bring the civilization down. It’s no wonder the Aztecs viewed the Spaniards as contemptible people. They were contemptible.

Francisco Pizarro (around 1527) is another famous conquistador whose conquest was the Incas. The Incas worshiped the Sun as their God and were obedient to their rulers. They revered their ancestors and the mountain spirits which gave the Spanish Catholics justification for war - they claimed it was in order to save the souls of the Incas.

The way the Incas saw it - if the Spanish rule Spain and the Incas rule Inca civilization, all is right with the world. But, if Spain tries to rule land that is not their own, it will create disorder and the world will be upside down. The plundering of the lands of the Incas is the greatest plundering raid in history. It is a wonder that the leader of the Incas, Atahualpa, allowed the Spanish to travel freely.

A deal was made between Pizarro and Atahualpa that Atahualpa provide a large amount of gold and the Spanish would leave. Atahuala kept his word and delivered the gold, but Pizarro put Atahualpa on a mock trial - mock because the jury was Pizarro’s brothers. Not surprisingly, they found him guilty of failing to uphold his end of the deal and killed him. These events were beyond belief to the Inca people and the world had indeed been turned upside down for them. For the Incas, this was the end of sacred time and the beginning of profane time.

It is thought that the Incas came from Asia 18,000 years ago. Their territory covered Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia. For the Incas, everything belonged to the state. There was no monetary taxation, but people had to pay a tax in the form of work which is likely how they built their incredible walls and buildings. Yet another great civilization came to an end through the Spaniards.

After the Spanish conquered, Spaniards flooded into Peru in search of gold. The Incas called this the “more syndrome”. “You have enough, why do you want more?” Many were in search of El Dorado which was an Inca myth the Spaniards believed was literally true.

In search of El Dorado, Pizarro took off on an expedition with Francisco de Orellana but Orellana’s ship was separated at the Napo River and Orellana ended up travelling the full extent of the Amazon.

In the sixteenth century, before Orellana arrived from Spain, the Amazon had big, well-organized towns all along it. There were well over 6 million people who lived in an elaborate series of ancient kingdoms united by the Amazon River itself. So what happened to all of these people? Today, there are only 250,000!

Of course, El Dorado was never discovered.

One of the nicer Conquistadors, Cabeza de Vaca, came to Texas (long before it was Texas, of course). He started in Florida where he met the Seminole Indians (the American tribe to never sign a peace treaty with the U.S. government). He traveled on to Galveston Island where he met the Karankawa. These were hunter gatherers and Galveston was their winter residence. The “uncivilized” men shared their food with him. And when he broke down in desparation, they cried with him which made Cabeza de Vaca recognize their common humanity.

The Karankawa saved Cabeza de Vaca to their own detriment because the Karankawa eventually vanished for good. The Spanish didn’t want human beings, they wanted slaves. But Cabeza de Vaca recognized that these people were human beings, not animals. He argued for benevolent rule but failed. He died a pauper and his only legacy is his book of travel.

The Karankawa’s compassion and Cabeza de Vaca’s efforts were not entirely in vain. Catholic Spain began questioning the Spanish conquests and a philosophical debate on the ethics of the treatment of the “New World” was organized by King Charles V. Sepulveda, a famous philosopher and theologian, argued that the conquest was a natural state of affairs. Some people are simply superior to others and so it is just and fair to make of those that are inferior, slaves: “Those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves of nature. It is better for them to be ruled thus.” He said the natives are “as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people”

Bartoleme de las Casas was a priest who argued that all people of the world are human beings and all are rational and take pleasure in good. He said that the conquests in the New World must be stopped. The torture and genocide of the natives of the Americas and Caribbean (West Indies) was completely unethical and against the will of God.

After the debate, the King ordered that all conquests be stopped. But it didn’t matter, the conquests continued without his approval.

Lost Civilizations [Collector's Edition] [4 Discs]

While I was looking for stuff on the Chinese Revolution, I also came across Time Life’s series on Lost Civilizations. This was another absolutely gripping series. There are 10 programs, almost 1 hour each on different civilizations that have been lost over time. They start with the most ancient and move toward the more recent: Mosopotamia - Return to Eden, Ancient Egypt - Quest for Immortality, Aegean - Legacy of Atlantis, Greece - A Moment of Excellence, China - Dynasties of Power, Rome - The Ultimate Empire, The Maya - the Blood of the Kings, The Inca - Secrets of the Ancestors, Africa - A History Denied, Tibet - The End of Time.

I took a few notes - primarily on Tibet because of my recent interests, so bare with me as I record them. (I’ll start from the end),

On Tibet:

Tibet was the very last surviving major ancient civilization and is currently a diaspora and threatens extinction. In the 7th century, the Tibetans were feared conquerors, their methods being not unlike those used by Ghengis Khan. After 1000 years of military might, Tibet decided to demilitarize. This is the only civilization ever known to voluntarily give up it’s military might so is absolutely remarkable from a historical standpoint. No other country has done this, most tend to go the other direction and strengthen their military might. By the end of the 17th century, Tibet had given up it’s fortresses for monasteries and violence was replaced with spiritual wisdom. A peaceful, self-sufficient society emerged dedicated to the pursuit of non-violence and it existed this way for 800 years.

It’s a very interesting experiment for a country to say “I do it for the other”. Tibet maintained it’s independence by trading spiritual blessings with China. But when Mao Zedong gained rule, religion came to be seen as a superstition and the Tibetan society was viewed as one that was in need of education. In 1949, China invaded Tibet. In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India. He was only 23 years old.

100,000 Tibetans follows the Dalai Lama to Tibet, but 1.2 million more died. This was a Holocaust, not unlike what happened to the Jews. But like it took quite a while for the details of the fate of the Jews to emerge after WWII, we don’t yet have the details of what happened to the Tibetans and don’t yet know the full extent of the carnage. Some of the survivors have horrible stories - of terrible torture: being suspended upside down, having their legs imprisoned in casts for years, being so hungry they were tempted to eat their own excrement. Many of these Tibetans have been imprisoned all of their lives, being arrested when they were young and only released when they are elderly.

The Tibetans remain in India, not having access to their land. The Dalai Lama believes that there is still hope for their survival, if they can somehow negotiate some sort of self-rule with China. But if they cannot obtain this, then their society will become extinct, leaving no surviving ancient civilizations on earth.

I have just a few notes on the other shows:

On Mesopotamia:

1. Ten Commandments: Did you know that the Ten Commandments come from Hammurabi’s Code? 1200 years before the Israelites had been taken captive, Hammurabi was a Babylonian king who had a stone inscribed with laws that bare his name. This stone emerged in the late 19th century. This Babylonian code is the precursor to the laws we find in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

2. Noah’s Ark: In 1852, Nineveh was discovered in Northern Iraq. This was an Assyrian civilization and contained the Library of Nineveh in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered. This story predates the Bible by 2000 years and contains within it, a story of a man building a boat that is exactly like the story of Noah in Genesis. The major cities of Sumer were Uruk, Ur (said to be the birthplace of Abraham) and Eridu. The Sumerians invented the wheel, gardening, government and were the first civilization on earth to invent the 60 second minute. And most significantly, they wrote things down - they invented Cuneiform. They are the first civilization.

3. Garden of Eden: Part of the Epic of Gilgamesh contains a story of a Garden of paradise, complete with a serpent. Archaeologists now think the myth was based upon an actual place - the Island of Bahrain which would have seemed like paradise compared to the surrounding areas. They have found embalmed remains of people and serpents - embalmed serpents are everywhere on the island of Bahrain.

On Egypt

All I have written down is the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon. This was a signficant discovery because there was a Greek translation under the Egyptian Cuneiform which finally allowed experts to break the code of the Egyptian writing. One of my favorite Catholic priests claimed that this proved that Moses did not actually exist - that his story was based upon an accumulation of stories that can be found in the Egyptian libraries. He said that Moses and Abraham were symbols for groups of nomadic tribes - not actual individuals. Many archaeologists concur with this, since absolutely nothing can be found on Abraham or Moses, but similar stories about other people abound.

On Greece

Athens was a boys club and women were nothing. This tends to continue to be true in most of Greece.

Socrates was accused of not believing in the gods and was said to corrupt the minds of the youth. His trial and conviction would not have happened under Pericles who ruled during the city’s Golden Age. Socrates embodies Athens at it’s best.

On the Maya

I think the most interesting thing about this show was one of the experts claiming that the decline of the Mayan civilization is not particularly mysterious or significant. What is significant is that a civilization like the Mayan civilization could be maintained for 2000 years.

The civilization was completely reliant upon a system. In order to survive, the people had to believe in the power of the King. When the people no longer had faith in the King, the civilization collapsed. As more and more people lost faith in their ruler, they left the cities.

The Mayan civilization was a bloody one. The King and Queen had to give blood in exchange for immortality. They would pierce their tongues and their genitals which caused great bleeding, and offer this blood to the gods in great ceremonies. As they kingdoms began to falter, rather than increase military might, they created even more fearful ritualistic blood sacrifices, which of course, did not save their civilization.

It was very easy for the Mayans to accept Jesus because they were already so heavily into blood sacrifice. The idea of a King sacrificing himself for the people and becoming immortal made perfect sense to them. So they embraced Christianity without a qualm.

An interesting note: the Mayan calendar is among the most accurate ever developed and it abruptly ends in 2012. The Tibetans believe we are entering an Apocalyptic age, and some scientists claim we are in for a reversal in our magnetic field. This reversal has occurred at fairly regular intervals during the history of the earth. Could it be the Mayan’s calendar ends with the estimated reversal?

China - A Century of Revolution

While reading Bill Porter’s Road to Heaven, I decided I needed to learn more about China’s Cultural Revolution.

Thankfully, my library had the DVD series - China - A Century of Revolution and it wasn’t check out. It was actually three 2 hour films: China in Revolution (beginning in 1911 with the fall of the last emperor through 1949 with the rise of Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek); The Mao Years (1949 to 1976 - The People’s Republic of China); Born Under the Red Flag (Mao’s death in 1976 to leadership under Deng Xiopang).

I had no problem encouraging myself to watch this documentary at all. In fact, I looked forward to it - which isn’t always the case with long series like this. I guess most of us don’t know that much about the history of China because it is so well guarded by the Chinese authorities. That was one thing I realized from Bill Porter’s book. He and his photographer were just taking pictures of temples and got arrested because the government thought he was a spy.

Anyway, I have a much better understanding of the political turmoil and changes going on in China than I did previously. The capitalistic communism is a very interesting experiment, too. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

According to the hermits Porter interviewed in Road to Heaven, they have more freedom now than they did during Mao’s rule. But during Mao’s rule, religion was completely outlawed, religious texts burned, sacred temples and burial sites destroyed. But hermits were always revered in China and so still maintain a certain amount of freedom that other citizens don’t have. They are the uncontrollable few because they cannot be coerced by the material lures that most citizens are lured with.

Auschwitz - Inside the Nazi State

by Laurence Rees

I finished watching the last DVD my library has on the Holocaust. (At least it’s I think I’ve watched them all.) It’s a BBC Video entitled Auschwitz. It has six 1 hour programs and some interesting interviews following each program.

What’s amazing to me is that the Nazis that were stationed at Auschwitz and other concentration camps genuinely believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do. They feel no sense of remorse and outside of the concentration camps, do not seem like monsters at all. It’s very scary to me because it’s so easy to dehumanize someone you think of as different than yourself and rationalize something as atrocious as destroying millions even if you are apparently very humane in every other way. They kept reading from Rudolf Hoss’s memoirs and never once did he apologize for what he did. If anything, he was proud of it. The one thing he was sorry about was not spending more time with his family while he was busy running Auschwitz. It consumed all of his time.

The film really drives home the Nazis who were in charge of the killing of millions were not people you’d meet and think, “Oh - something is very off with this person.” They were very logical, rational, eloquent individuals. That is what is so damned scary about it. It would be so much easier to think of people who could do such a thing as inhuman. But they weren’t. These were our fellow human beings who committed these atrocities, not monsters. They were able to do this because they genuinely believed that what they were doing was right. Very rarely did any Nazi commander who was interrogated show any sort of remorse because they genuinely believed that what they were doing was in the best interest of Germany. They were blinded by their nationalistic self-righteousness.

(Oh - must digress at this point. Interesting article in the New York Times that showed up in our paper today by Paul Krugman entitled They Told You So. It’s about how all people who were predicting the current state of Iraq and warning against going to war were called unpatriotic and had their sanity questioned when the decision to do so was being made and how we should now acknowledge their courageous efforts to warn us. Check it out.)

OK - back on topic, sort of….

The Nazis scapegoated other groups of people besides the Jews. They didn’t like the Gypsies and killed more than 20,000 of them in the concentration camps. What danger could these people possibly pose? I’m assuming this meant the Roma people? The Nazis did not like their nomadic lifestyle and felt it was a threat to the future of Germany. OK?? How do peaceful nomadic tribes create the downfall of civilization? I guess it flew in the opposition of the conformist nature of Germany at the time. If you can’t get people to conform to a specific way of life, kill them.

They killed homosexuals who wouldn’t or couldn’t change their sexual preferences. Prior to the Third Reich, Berlin was a liberal city with lots of gay bars and female impersonation acts. As early as 1919 in Berlin, an Institute of Sex research had been founded in Berlin and pioneered efforts in civil rights and acceptance of homosexual and transgendered people. But because gays did not reproduce and populate the master race, they did not belong in a Germany run by the Nazis. The Nazi Youth destroyed the Institute of Sex Research. And because gays were said to corrupt public morality and were considered a direct threat to the German birthrate, leaders set up institutions to coerce these men into having sex with women. (Sounds a little like the Ex-Gay movement to me. NPR had an interesting segment on this here.) Those who would not or could not feign a sexual-orientation conversion were eventually sent to the concentration camps and killed.

Now this is just a tad scary because, as I’ve mentioned before, I live in a state that fairly recently made it unconstitutional for gays to get married. It wasn’t necessary to make it unconstitutional because it’s already illegal. But the fine citizens of our state overwhelmingly agreed that we should state constitutionally that marriage is only between a man and a woman. Now here’s the problem - this is the first time in Texas an amendment was made to our bill of rights that took civil rights away from our citizens rather than protecting them. And when protestors cornered our governor on this, he said that if we don’t like it, we can move to another state. Of course, he didn’t mean we had to go to our deaths. But you can’t let a like it or leave it attitude run amuck. Democracy is about checks and balances and meeting the needs of the majority while allowing the minority a voice as well. It’s not about shutting up or getting rid of the minority.

Anyway, back to the documentary. This is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen on the subject of the Holocaust and I’ve seen a fair amount. You can learn more about it here.