'The Mayab'

I am aware of the plethora of really bad analogies that have attached themselves to the situation in the Middle East. 

And in spite of that I am going to put one of my own out there, based largely on a historical counter-factual which derives from my own geographical location and its often troubled history.

You may find reasons to object to it. If you so, say why, because I would be genuinely fascinated to know about them and debate them.

Here we go....

Iberian Catholic colonisers arrive in Central America and establish a measure of control. But the Maya in particular put up a persistent pattern of resistance and eventually the conquerors conclude that they have little choice but to send the majority of the Maya away and into exile around the world.

Centuries pass. The empire lingers on in one form or another until the early part of the twentieth. 

At the moment it finally collapses, a group of modern powers from outside the region intervene, partly, but not completely, for selfish reasons, their basic aim being to oversee a transition to a new era of relatively stable nation states based on ethnic and cultural identity.

There are pressures within and without. Those who predominantly identify with the colonising Catholic culture are not sure if they want their own sovereign states or whether they want to form their own ‘imperial’ blocks. They fight it out for a while.

Meanwhile, the remaining Maya in the region declare a desire for their own sovereign territory which will consist of a fraction of their ancient homeland, the Mayab. They declare an intention to invite members of the Mayan diaspora to return there and help build this new society where Yucatec Mayan will be the main language and they will worship their ancient deities.

The international community decides that they can have the Peten region and the southern part of the Yucatan peninsula for their new state. Within this territory some 40% of the population will be non-Maya, either mixed blood mestizos or individuals of European descent who have been broadly content with the colonial culture, if not the empire itself. Let’s call them Iberians.

Their property rights are not under threat, but they will have to adapt to living within a sovereign Mayan state.

It is already a well-known fact internationally that non-Mayans will be more secure inside a Mayan state than vice versa, which is one of the reasons that the need for a Mayan state was so pressing in the first place, as well as the fact that while discussions about the new lines on the map continue, many Mayans residing in Europe start to experience a terrible persecution.

The international community really ought to have done more for the other non-Catholic ethnic groups in the region, but in the end caved in blackmail from the resource-rich Iberian League, and allowed them to assume control of 97% of the former empire. Within these Iberian states much of the former colonial system would persist and minorities would suffer, and none of them would show any inclination to follow a path of liberal democracy.

Anyway, at the very moment the new Mayan state declares its independence, some of the non-Mayans inside it and those beyond the borders get ready to rise up and murder all the Maya. The mere existence of Mayan self-determination is a profound offence to their Catholic God, they announce. 

With help from the neighbouring ‘post-colonial’ Iberian states they begin a war of extermination, but the Maya have had enough of their nonsense and are better organised and thus achieve an unlikely victory.

At this point several hundred thousand Iberians are forced to abandon their homes and become refugees. This occurs in part because the Maya no longer feel safe living next door to people who want them dead, but also because they were told to get out of the way by their invading allies.

When the war ends, nearly all the Maya who had been living outside the Mayab in Central America are also displaced and most of them come to live within the new Mayan state. They number more than the Iberians who lost their homes as a result of the war, yet almost nobody remembers this.

Nor really that many Iberians continue to live inside the Mayab and enjoy civil rights there that no other Iberians are able to enjoy outside of it.

However, the displaced Yucatec Iberians are never in turn absorbed by their co-religionists in the neighbouring Iberian states. Instead they are told to hold position as long-term political pawns in 'camps' for as long as it takes (even if this is forever), because the Iberian League wants the world to know that they did not in fact lose this war, they are simply awaiting their eventual God-given victory. From the late 1950s onward they pervert the UN body set up to assist the refugees so that it is fully on board with the underlying ideological project.

For decades the Mayan state is repeatedly attacked and repeatedly triumphs against its aggressors. After one of these intense wars, the Mayab takes back control of the northern Yucatan. They do not formally integrate it into their nation however, as their plan is to trade it back to the Iberians in return for lasting peace: the so-called two state solution. But it is thereafter referred to as ‘occupied Yucatan’, which effectively disguises the real blame for the on-going situation.

The sad truth is that the Iberians don’t want peace. In the 1960s they change their name to Yucatecos and demand ‘freedom’ for the whole of the Yucatan peninsula ‘from the gulf to the sea’ including the Peten. They don’t want their own state, they simply want to put a definitive end to the affront posed by the Mayan state.

They realise that in the English-speaking world there are some particularly dumb students who can be persuaded to see the Mayans who returned to the sovereign Mayan state after their long exile as ‘settler colonists’ who stole the Yucatan rather savagely from the poor oppressed Iberians, and duly leverage their support.

They are also getting a lot of help from another regional power with its own distinct ethnic base, the Inca, who have become Catholic fundamentalists and desire nothing more than to see the elimination of the Maya. 

'Occupied Yucatan' now has a measure of self-government, even international recognition. Half of it is run by a crazy fascist mafia financed by the Inca, and the other half by a corrupt mob that pays out cash rewards to any scumbag who murders a Mayan.

And that’s it. The analogy could be extended from here, but you get the general drift. People who chant ‘Free Palestine’ imagine themselves to be bravely anti-colonial, when in fact they are precisely the opposite.

The Yucatecos lost the war. They need to finally accept this, then accept the peace and the territorial deal that comes with it, and all the surrounding Iberian powers need to be on board, including the Incas.

They will have their own state, but this state needs to be able to live alongside the Mayab and function within an international order where the legitimacy of everyone’s sovereignty in the region is both recognised and protected.

Yucatecos should be free to travel around the Mayab, and Mayans around the Iberian world, without fear of violence or repression on either side. 

The Battle of St Giles's Fields

Name a battle associated with King Henry V. (They don't get much easier than that, do they?)

But one year before Agincourt in 1414 Henry assembled an army at Clerkenwell and marched west to confront the Lollards at roughly the present location of that cutesy, hidden urban green oasis known as Phoenix Gardens, which featured rather heavily in the romcom Last Christmas.

The loser that day was Sir John Oldcastle, a former MP and long time friend of the young King, who had escaped from the Tower of London following a conviction for heresy, and had then decided to organise a full-on rebellion. It is said that Sir John was the chap Shakespeare had in mind when he created the character Falstaff.

Inside the battlefield zone today a Palladian-style parish church from the 1730s holds the name of St Giles-in-the-Fields and stands in the late afternoon shade of Centre Point.

This is where, some six hundred years before its construction, a leper hospital had been established by "Good Queen Maud", Henry I's wife Matilda of Scotland (1080-1118, grand-daughter of the King Duncan offed by Macbeth) at a location believed to be at the midpoint between London and Westminster. Today it is not quite Bloomsbury, not quite Soho, not quite Covent Garden and not quite the West End.

Wherever you find a church of St Giles in England it is typically at a location outside the old medieval walls. He has always been the patron saint of people with disabilities, but lepers were for long a particular specialisation, and Anglo-Norman Christians had apparently learned a trick from the ancient Israelites when it came to positioning facilities for those suffering from that disease, 'outside the camp'.

Anyway, back to the battle of St Giles's Fields of 1414. Oldcastle was leading a force of religious and political radicals, in a way proto-Protestants who presaged similar movements and their societal impact two centuries later.

The Lollards were against the doctrine of transubstantiation, against priest confession, against clerical celibacy and against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while they compared the Pope to the Antichrist and had secretly translated scripture into English.

That they were against capital punishment too didn't help them that much after their defeat to Henry. Sir John had managed to escape after the rout but was captured and returned to the same area, where he was duly hung and barbecued above a wood fire at the same time.

This parish would later be home to Patient Zero in England's Great Plague of the spring of 1665, one of a pair of Frenchmen living at the end of Drury Lane, where Pepys would see a door marked with a black cross for the first time.

But not before it was ground zero for another rebellion, in 1570, this time by Catholics under Anthony Babington against the reigning Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I. He had solicited a letter from Mary Queen of Scots expressing her tacit approval for his plot and this would lead to her execution on 8 February 1587.

By that period the priory was surrounded by narrow streets, containing inns, brothels, butchers, watchmakers, booksellers, belt-makers, justices of the peace and nobility. Maybe not so much different from now, though undoubtedly lacking all those shops selling saxophones and electric guitars in 'Tin Pan Alley'.

Black Legend

A string of esteemed British writers came to Mexico in the last century and, with the exception of Sybille Bedford, could barely conceal their sniffiness to the verge of contempt for the place: Greene, Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, and Somerset Maugham, the last of these quipping, when asked what he thought of the country by Frieda Lawrence, “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

Leonora Carrington, the English writer and surrealist painter who settled in CDMX's Colonia Roma, observed that she "felt at home in Mexico, but as one does in a familiar swimming pool that has sharks in it."

I was however surprised by how willing American travel writer Paul Theroux was to add himself to this rather long list when I read the account of his relatively recent Mexican excursion, On The Plain of Snakes...

"The Mexican border is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures—hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies—a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me."

 

To a certain extent he is knowingly exploiting the obvious caricature there in order to reach a specific no-passporty, north of the border audience, but in other ways, one becomes aware, he is also THAT gringo...

"It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm."

Maybe it makes an important difference if you enter from the south. Theroux notes how just 50 yards across the northern frontier things have turned 'improvisational'.

There's a certain abruptness to the other borders too, because Mexico is after all, Mexico, but of a rather different order. The south of course has more indigenous Mexicans and it is these people who have seemed to most unsettle the anglophone authors. Huxley: “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

It's as if this land is also the edge of known humanity. Paul Bowles served up similarly garish depictions of the wily natives, but largely in a Muslim country, and they have name for this 'delito', Orientalism, and so today he has been at least semi-cancelled, but Mexico remains fair game for these apprehensions of lurking, wicked otherness, in the mainstream foreign press as well as literature. 

Theroux again: "From the mutters and guarded warnings, I became aware—as anyone would in the sinister rustling of these whispers—that there is a substratum of criminality even in Mexico’s prosperous places, especially in the prosperous places, and it takes unexpected forms."

Now, I have been shaken down in the past by Mexican cops, and in my own experience of travel there I have concluded that it is near impossible to visit the country without experiencing at least one really negative interaction with one of the locals, and so it was this time too.

But I'd say the same thing about France, frankly, and so I am wary of this tendency to stoke the 'Black Legend'.

Great Fire

 September 4, 1666 — the Great Fire of London.

Perhaps ironically, when we look at it from our own precisely contemporary perspective, this enormous conflagration was the prime instigator of the modern practice of home insurance. (Prior to 1666 only the concept really existed.)

Samuel Pepys famously saved his wine, some important documents and his Parmesan cheese from the ‘infinite fury’ of the fire by digging a big pit in the ground outside, prior to evacuation.

I wonder how many people in LA were aware of this option?

 

 

Foreign Filibusterer

Outside the US Capitol, Filibustering has been a (mainly 19th century) pastime for wealthy Americans inclined to meddle abroad, and it has rarely ended well.

Meanwhile, Signore Guido Fawkes discovered in 1605 that England was already one of the earliest modern states with an apparatus to protect itself from foreign riff-raff inclined towards plotting and insurrection.

Since then, many other nations have acquired similar self-defence mechanisms. I would argue that today, the UK, the USA, Russia, China and Israel are the stand-out five which possess a professional service dedicated to watching over their interests, internal and external, that anyone from outside would generally not want to fuck with, on principle...except perhaps someone who works for one of the others.

Musk is steadily moving onto the thinner ice.

 

 

"God loves a cheerful giver"

The Middle Ages need, in the first instance, to be understood on their own terms, not ours.

The other day someone waylaid me on the interwebs rather like that anachronistic anarcho-syndicalist peasant played by Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“…because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”), suggesting that the Tithe (Diezmo, in Spanish), introduced to by King Edgar in the 10th century, was a uniquely British form of oppression, whereby the Church extracted its one tenth share of the crop just so that it could indulge in ‘bling’.

A satisfying double riposte ensued, for not only could I refer to the ancient near-eastern history of the Tithe, I could simultaneously torch some of this person’s ‘Jesus was Palestinian’ presumptions: the word derives from Hebrew and the procedure was a key part of Jewish religious teachings, recommended in the New Testament by the Big J himself as an important part of spiritual discipline, and there are other Old Testament biblical descriptions of how it is supposed to work, binding the Israelite community together, funding festivals and supporting the Levites.

Edgar became King at precisely the moment when the monarchy was seeking some spiritual and symbolic fairy dust in order to move on definitively from the era when the man on the throne had been little more than a barbarian war-band boss.

The Church did not use the quota it gathered in order to indulge themselves in luxuries, instead most of it went into Mission-support, including the care for the sick and the needy, and the already very needy rarely had to pay the full 10% of this tax, which was nowhere near as regressive as later medieval poll taxes.

So in a sense, a precursor to National Insurance, which means that in some ways the early medieval English enjoyed better social care than modern Americans!

(If there were abuses to speak of, they tended to occur over on the Continent, where the Bishops sometimes ‘leased’ the Tithe rights to secular lords.)

This book will be going straight into our loo. One can either read it cover to cover, or dip in all over, rather like Rayuela.

In the A section, I learned that Abad (Abbot) is an Aramaic word for Father (Jesus referred to his viejo as 'Abba') and also that the Abbey of Fontevrault was at one stage run by an Abadesa.

Imagine, a woman in charge of all those repressed males.

Deuteronomy 14:22-29

"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year"

De-Platforming

With Gringolandia seemingly on the cusp of adiosing Tiktok, not far south of the border they have been approaching the problem from the other end, removing influencers one by one.

Two that have lately closed their accounts, so to speak, are Justin Paul, 'El Pinky' and 'El Gordo Peruci'.

And now flyers like this one are being dropped by small plane over the Culiacán area, inviting users to terminate their relationship with a range of content creators, kind of literally.

The issue seems to be that many of these prominent public figures have acted as 'prestanombres' e.g. collaborated via DM with Los Chapitos, a spin-off cartel run by the offspring of El Chapo remaining in Sinaloa.

 

'Relaxed' Hate Speech Rules

There's a bit more to this, I believe, than tech bros realigning out of self-interest with the incoming Orange Blob.

The Wokies themselves have some of the blame to share.

The protections that they offer have been exposed as partisan. They have an in group and an out group for their fact checking and sometimes the facts involved are evidently not even facts.

Significant sections of society have been left high and dry, exposed to constant abuse, most notably a subset of Jews and feminists.

Once it became clear that these checks were as partial and political as they were moral and essential, an outcome like this became that much more likely.

When you become complacent about allowing others to be openly slurred in a supposedly tolerant society, do not be all that surprised when you are suddenly surrounded by trolls yourself.