>The Fall of Constantinople

>From Saturday’s edition of Gates of Vienna:

Five hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire came to an end. The sack of Constantinople inaugurated centuries of brutal Islamic rule in southeastern Europe. Greece was finally liberated from the Ottomans in the 19th century, but to this day a small portion of Europe remains in Turkish hands, and the city of Istanbul — formerly Constantinople — remains a Turkish city.

Below is a guest-post about the fall of Constantinople by an author who writes under the pen name of Anestos Canelides. He has this to say about his essay:

I am half-Greek, and I wrote this as a memorial to those who fought in the epic battle against Islamic expansionism. I wrote it also as a memorial to the other Christians in the Balkans who lost so much to Islam. I have spent time in Istanbul, and I bear no hatred towards the modern Turks.

The Last Empire
1453: The Siege of Constantinople

by Anestos Canelides

On June 9th, 1453, three ships sailed into the harbor of Candia in Crete with a crew of mostly Cretan sailors. The sailors had arrived from Constantinople shortly after its fall to the Ottoman Turkish armies of Sultan Mehmet Bey. The Cretans had brought with them the tragic news about the fall of Constantinople to the armies of Islam, despite a heroic stand by the Greeks and their allies. The sudden news induced great anguish amongst the people of Crete and later the Christian west. The Ottoman conquest of the queen of cities had brought a tragic end to the Roman Empire, often referred to as the Byzantine Empire today. It was the final nail in the coffin of the center of the Byzantine world, but in turn it would bring about the rise of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic state.

Constantinople was attacked from land and sea, but the land walls, known as the walls of Theodosius, had never been breached in their thousand-year history. In the same way that three hundred Spartans had defied the advancing armies of the Persian Empire, the citizens of Constantinople also stood heroically and defended their city against tyranny. It was both the Byzantine Greeks’ desire for freedom from enslavement, and the belief that God would miraculously save them from defeat, that led them to resist the Turks fiercely for almost two months.

The Turks had sought to enter the city with a fanatic spirit because the Prophet, in the Qur’an, offered them a special place in paradise. Sultan Mehmet only mimicked the Prophet Muhammad when he said, “…even if some of us should die, as is natural in war, and meet our destined end, you know well from the Qur’an what the Prophet says, ‘that he who dies in battle shall dine whole in body with Mahomet, and drink with him in paradise and he shall take his rest in a green spot and fragrant with flowers, enjoying the company of women and lovely boys and virgins and he will bathe in gorgeous baths. All these things he will enjoy in that place by God’s favor.’” Despite facing such great odds, the Byzantines would defend their ancient Christian capital with great tenacity against the armies of Mehmet…
***

Read the rest.

Then consider this post, also from GoV.

Perspective, on a Day of Remembrance.

Freedom or death.

>Codrea and Vanderboegh Via Romanian Media

>Read it all.

Read also why the Romanian people must be celebrated and remembered for as long as free men and women draw breath.

Just don’t tell Glenn Beck.

He’d be a-skeered.

>Volk On Freedom

>

(click to enlarge image)

Courtesy of Oleg Volk.

>Quote Of The Week

>From EU Referendum:

It’s not just that they are a bunch of low-grade, two-faced sh*ts that sticks in the craw – it’s that they’re doing it with our money and then sticking us with increased tax bills to pay for it all. The time for slaughter comes ever closer.

>Jennifer III On WorldGov 2.0

>Jennifer synthesizes many parts in this essay.

Read both it and the embedded links.

Still gonna live by your Glenn Beck pledge?

>Word

>As linked by Venlet:

I will be free if I have to break every law in the history of jurisprudence to do it. I will be free if I have to spend the rest of my life in prison to do it. I have no part with people who beg and plead for the privilege of exercising rights they were born with, people who pride themselves on how very law-abiding they are and count that as a measure of their “goodness,” people who kiss the hands that rivet on their chains.

>Escorted Thugs: The SEIU and the DC Police

>PowerLine has an important series on the recent police-escorted SEIU demonstration at a bank attorney’s home in the Montgomery County, MD suburbs of DC:

A Thug Too Far, Part I

A Thug Too Far, Part II

A Thug Too Far, Part III

A Thug Too Far, Part IV

A Thug Too Far, Part V

Read the stories and embedded links, please.

Listen to this oath-taker from the DC police:

Do you understand yet?

>’Civil Rights’ And Total War

>Read Will Grigg’s latest.

Think about what is coming.

The divisions in this country cannot be reconciled, except by force.

Leviathan knows that.

And it will act.

>I Thought You Couldn’t Successfully Fight The G When It Comes To Get You?

>
David updates us on the situation in Jamaica:

Jamaica ‘A Gun Control Paradise’

Jamaica’s Problems Due To Government

He must be a criminal.

The government says so.

And he’s resisting arrest.

Imagine what this cat knows about local corruption.

Imagine what the Jamaican government would do to keep those stories quiet.

Do you understand yet?

>Beck: The Hinge Generations

>From the irreplaceable Billy Beck:

McPhillips:

“The Left worked through academentia, through its media salons, through its sniffs and conceits, through its exhausted disdain for Americans themselves, through deep liars like Chomsky and cracker-barrel Marxists like Zinn.”

It’s pretty simple for a whole paragraph: just one sentence and not especially complex, although one must know the players, an awareness present in far, far too few Americans now. Not much to it, really, except for fact and truth, which is all one ever really needs.

No; what I find compelling in it is the past tense. Last night, I was driving up the road and thinking about some fairly large-scale writing. I conceived a section-lead that went like this:

“The long train of human history had been filled with endless revolutions, evolutions and chance transmissions of arbitrary power. People had grown habitual to the ridiculous and endlessly horrible idea that some could presume the power — not the right — of life and death over countless others, and this idea had rolled across centuries without principled question, gathering priceless and unique individuals as the grease under its wheels. In all the annals, however, an America had never fallen.”

This is my working concept, now: that it’s over, and that all that’s left are the particular details of collapse. That will be a rich story in itself, for sure, but we are living a truly unparalleled tragedy. It is unparalleled in that this was the first country in history founded on rational ideals of individualism (even accounting for the original sin of black slavery), and it is a tragedy in that it has been destroyed from within.

It is interesting to note that there are those alive today who are living a uniquely notable experience because they are now still alive to see the end of America, but old enough to have lived its peak. The past century or so has seen the seeding and cultivation of ideas only now coming to terrible yield. However, the enormous impetus of America’s original conception, coming together as it did with the Industrial Age, managed to carry various aspects of this country’s culture (material, intellectual, aesthetic, etc.) to heights which were the apple of the world’s eye through most of the twentieth century, and for good reasons. Even to this day, one can easily find anywhere in the world some benighted peasant who still longs for The Great Feast of Ostentatious Consumption that America represents to most people who haven’t been studied by critical sociology. Of course, that poor bastard never got to blast gas through a Chevy 454 SS at three gallons (or more) for a dollar, never had the quality of information delivered to his door that we once had, and his country never celebrated life on the scale that ours did before everybody really started hating themselves and then — of course — everything else, and their arts showed it.

There was a time, within the lives of people alive today, when American life was a celebration. God’s curse of rot upon all those who took it in heart and mind to cast some as outlaws by way of race, but we were producing our way out of that. By the time rock & roll came along, all that rot was on its way to the grave, even if the best days of Dr. King’s life had to be burned down in that cause. Naturally, the blight of racism will never be completely gone because you can’t do a damned thing about stoopidness. However, there were also generations in this country seeing each other across racial lines and the laws were being beaten into shape. No more Bull Connors cracking attack dogs on black people in the street in broad photographic daylight: now, everybody can get their door kicked-in in the middle of the night when the SWAT-Fifes don’t have their poop in a group.

There are many alive today who satisfy themselves as “Americans” even as they remain ignorant of things that were being lost before they were born — “free spirits” who were tattooed with federal numbers on traditional paperwork and who have never worked a day in their lives without accounting their very existence in dollars to the law. Their grandfathers could build houses if and where they wanted to once they had accrued the moral authority (that’s “money”, kids) to do it: these people can barely un-flatpack a bookshelf, but at least they wouldn’t have to beg zoning permits for that.

Even as it slides, though…

(“Won’t be nothin’
Nothin’ you can measure anymore”

– Leonard Cohen, “The Future”)

…they will notice the cold bite of the state. These are special generations — the earliest of them just passing now and the last of them alive in albums with long hair and bell-bottoms — who can see it all freezing right in front of their eyes. Their children are groomed to the cold from birth now. All the time, they know less and less about the sheer gaiety of life that once was this country, and what it took to produce that. They take for metaphysically-granted political (and their consequent cultural) structures emergent right in front of them that were once the stuff of “fevered McCarthyism”. The worst part of that is the complicity of their parents, who should know better because they actually lived a great deal of what’s been lost, now.

This is my working concept: there is no America anymore.

This is because it’s not really about geography, although there just can’t be an America anywhere else; not after all the history-blazing mind, body, heart and soul that countless heroes have stamped upon this land. It’s not about some stumbling homunculus of a land, however, propped upright on stilts of pious nonsense.

There is an idea to it — a mind to drive the machine, which is what it takes to keep the whole species in out of the cold and happy and thriving. It is one of the great, great things monumental to history that nobody grasped technology the ways that Americans did, and for all the whining and crying from brainless snots through much of the last half of the twentieth century, it must be said that they lived beyond the reach of kings only few generations before them because of the ways that tools multiply the power of the human mind and body.

And only free people do this. That’s why we were what we were, and why we won’t be soon enough for these people to live that, too.

Vandam/McPhillips sings countermelody in reply.

Forward — unto the breach.

>Lessons From Lithuania — Part I

>Extended a business trip to London with a detour to Vilnius, Lithuania and environs. Got back today.

While in Vilnius, I went to the NKVD/Gestapo/KGB Museum, and on my last day, the massacre site at nearby Ponary/Panieriu.

In between, I got a rental car and drove about 100 km to the west of Vilnius to a city called Kovno/Kaunas — site of the infamous ‘Ninth Fort’.

And no, the trip wasn’t all death and gloom. In fact, I found Vilnius and its inhabitants to be charming and worthy of another visit.

But I did draw a series of lessons from what I saw on my excursions; part I is below:

1) Government identification records are the clerical basis for mass murder and other atrocities: No, not every government ID scheme leads to genocide and expatriation. But for the collectivists of both the German Reich and the USSR, each victim’s identity card was both part of the initial targeting and the final “production record”.

2) Get to the forest early if you want to live: If you think they will be coming for you, you are probably right. Plan not to be where they know you work and live. Act early if you want to maximize your chances. You and your family will die if you are at your government-approved address.

3) The Bad People will have lots of help from your neighbors: The most disturbing moment for me in the KGB museum was not in the execution or interrogation/torture cells. It was realizing, while moving through the excellent exhibits on the mass deportations of Lithuanians after “liberation” by the Soviets in 1944, that most of the deportees (many of whom were subsequently executed or starved or died of exposure and disease) had been betrayed to the NKVD/KGB by their neighbors.

4) “Fascism” is not the only mortal enemy of freedom and life; the real enemy is collectivism in any form: At each of the memorials, one could tell the provenance of any signage by its reference to “fascism”. Mostly, such markings were from the Soviet era, during which — not coincidentally — many more millions of innocent human beings were killed by the “enlightened” Communists than had been slaughtered by the Hitlerites and their collaborators. While it is too much to expect the Soviets to acknowledge these facts, it is essential that freedom-minded folks grok that collectivism, in any form, can and usually does lead to the mass grave.

5) Never report en masse when ordered to do so: Nothing good ever happens to folks who do.

6) Food and ammunition will be the vital shortages you must address in order to live: Empty weapons and bellies a successful resistance does not make.

7) The Bad People will torture and kill those who help you: Get used to the idea. Retribution killing is a standard totalitarian play. Try to avoid jeopardizing your allies to the extent possible, but know that they too will be swept into the whirlwind.

8) The Bad People will torture and kill your family members: Sippenhaft ain’t just a chapter in Vanderboegh’s long-awaited novel. The KGB museum was filled with execution orders with notations indicating that not only had the subject been killed per order of the Party, but that “special measures” had or would be taken against the victim’s family.

9)You must be prepared to fight until victory or death: Once you go to the woods, you are there for the duration. The Baltic “forest brothers” stayed out until they were killed or captured. More on them in the next part of this report.

10) If you think it can’t happen here, you are wrong. The Polish and Lithuanian Jews who were ground into dust by the Einsatzgruppen thought the same thing. So did the Lithuanians who couldn’t believe that the Communists under Stalin and subsequent regimes would hold their passionate patriotism against them.

Almost all of those folks who believed “it couldn’t happen” died. A few survived by running into the woods, or by bearing up under the brutal realities of the Gulag, year after year after year.

Each of them knows the single biggest lesson from Lithuania: naked, brute force can and does triumph over kindness, love of kin and country, and simple human decency — often for decades or more.

Lose your illusions.

While there is still time.

>Welfarization & The Capsizing of Democracy

>Please read this article by Jim Bovard, which begins:

The Founding Fathers intended that America be composed of self-reliant individuals who would not hesitate to pull the reins in on their rulers. However, in the past 75 years, the soaring number of government dependents has made it far more difficult to curb politicians’ power. Federal policy is dividing society between “those who work for a living and those who vote for a living,” as H.L. Mencken quipped during the New Deal.

In recent decades, politicians have launched one recruiting campaign after another to persuade Americans to accept federal handouts. The Heritage Foundation created an Index of Dependency to measure the rising number of Americans reliant on government. The index gauges “the pace at which federal government services and programs have been growing in areas in which private or community-based services and programs exist or have existed to address the same or nearly the same needs.” The index is based on housing aid, healthcare and welfare assistance, retirement income, and subsidies for college and other post-secondary education.

The Heritage Index rated the level of dependency in the United States at 22 in 1964, the year that Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society. By 1980, the year before the Reagan Revolution commenced, the index had risen to 100. By 2008, the index had soared to 240, signaling a ten-fold increase of dependency on the federal government over the prior 40+ years.
***

Take the time to read the rest.

Do you understand that scores of millions of your fellow Americans (“Americans” at least by nation of residence, if not by individualist ethics) would tear you and yours into bloody chunks were you ever to attempt to reduce their “benefits”?

Are you ready to starve the monkeys yet?

To quote Billy Beck:

You’re either at the table or on the menu. Life under Amsoc.

>Claire Wolfe’s "Living Freedom" Blog

>I have been negligent in not previously adding Ms. Wolfe’s blog to the WRSA blogroll, but that oversight has now been fixed.

As a start, please read her take on this excellent article by Larken Rose.

Much food for further thought and action, I’d say.

>Double-Dip Recession Guaranteed

>Read the latest from Charles Hugh Smith, which begins:

Whether you believe the U.S. economy ever exited recession or not, a further decline is already baked in by numerous macro factors.

A “double-dip recession” makes no sense to the 76 percent of Americans who believe that the US economy remains in recession. And indeed, I argued in Suppressing the Cognitive Dissonance of a Bogus Recovery that the “growth” touted by the mainstream media and the Central State propaganda machine is a mirage.

To the 24% of the populace who believes the U.S. exited recession in fine fettle, I offer a “Two Scoop Special”: a Double-Dip recession is guaranteed for the following reasons:

1. The Eurozone is heading into deep recession, taking U.S. corporate profits with it. Three things are certain in the Eurozone: Austerity, higher taxes and more of each nation’s budget will be carved off to pay interest on their ballooning debt. All three mean less money in consumers’ pockets, and in local government pockets.

Please see Why the Eurozone Is Doomed for more on the Eurozone’s structural problems…

Read the rest here.

Plan accordingly.

>Quote of the Week

>From Colonel Cooper:

When I used to teach irregular warfare at Quantico, I borrowed a doctrine from Lord Dunsany in his book “Guerilla.”

The guerillero does not fight – he kills.

Guerilla warfare is usually conducted with what we might call “spare parts,” over- and underage types, wounded, and disabled. Such people cannot be organized into combat units with which to confront regular forces. If a guerilla actually gets into a fight he will almost certainly be wiped out, so he by choice takes the initiative, strikes and vanishes. This sort of thing enrages regular armies, as it did those of the French in the Peninsular War. It usually results in savagery on both sides. It is an ugly thing, but it will not go away just because it’s ugly.