HISTORICAL CONQUESTS AS VIEWED BY A NON-HISTORIAN

     Historians have this annoying thing. They look at historical events from the point of view of the conquering peoples. Twisting themselves into pretzels to find a positive.The Mongols did a lot of bad stuff but they United the plains of Eastern Europe. Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world around the Meditterranean sea and Indian Ocean. Persia brought stability to the Middle East. No one looks at it from the point of view of the conquered nations. Perhaps they were a loose collection of warring tribes before they were conquered. Perhaps their engineering skills, their language sophistication, their social organization were not as great as the cultures that conquered and enslaved their people, but they were free-or perhaps freer- than they were as conquered people. 

     Maybe, as in the case of the Roman Republic, they were presented with the popular vote, used by Athens before the Peloponnesian war. But it was still only available for use by the "free citizens", and in the control of the aristocracy. Sort of the way republicans like to do democracy today. But the Roman Republic soon became the Roman Empire. The Emperors could be Hadrian or Caligula.  It was always a toss-up whether the emperor or co-emperors, was a despot or an enlightened despot. And through whose eyes does a despot become enlightened? Some of the leaders of our electorate today support a despot like Vladimir Putin, or Donald Trump, for reasons that may prompt us to scratch our heads. Let's face it, half of our political leadership prompts us to scratch our heads in confusion. But those ignorant fools have managed to find ways acceptable to enough people to gerrymander districts favorable to the smaller electorate. I'm sure you can think of an example in this.     Much is written about the 200 year period of the "Pax Romana". It is credited with great cultural progress. What is not mentioned very often is that even after the accepted beginning of the pax Romana in 27 BCE, there was not much pax for the conquered nations. There was this British queen named Boudica of the Iceni. Her lands were taken after the death of her husband, an ally of Rome. She was flogged in front of her people and her daughters raped. Instead of shrinking into history, she united the clans of the Iceni, and others of what then was the Roman state of Londinium and nearly defeated the Roman general Suetanius Paulinus and his legions. She lost, was poisoned by her conquerors and her daughters disappeared to history, but her revolt inspired many others whose Romanized pax was less than they might have wished. 

     Many centuries later, after the maritime adventures of Holland, Spain, and Portugal, that claimed the new world, by which is meant previously unconquored world, for their nations, and then fought among themselves for it, France and Britain took over these remote lands. Britain won. By the end of the 19th century people were saying that, "the sun never sat on the British Empire". It was a claim similar to, somewhere in the world is happy hour, so let's get started. There were, we may surmise, many who did not share that happy hour. Of course our own nation was built in the same manner. People fleeing their native lands for the freedom of a new nation that were unconcerned by taking native lands by force and then calling ourselves native. There were also people brought here from their native lands by force to work for free. To be fair, we fought a war for that and the states that encouraged slavery lost. The people brought here by force were freed, in the manner that Rome granted citizenship to conquered people, and Republicans allow voting. 

     There is much history hidden from American students. There would be much more hidden history if Republicans could have their way in every state. During the Polk presidency there were people who identified themselves, for purposes of secrecy, as know-nothings. Among the things they claimed to believe, even though they knew nothing, was Manifest Destiny. This proposition declared that the Almighty had manifest that all of the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was to be controlled by the people who took the land from the people who had lived here for tens of thousands of years. During this time we fought this war with Mexico to claim Texas as an American territory. A gift some of us would wish to return. During this time Irish refugees were coming to this new nation to escape starvation and British oppression. We know this as the Potato famine. They were predominantly Catholic which was considered a negative by the dominant population of the United States of America. Never-the-less, they were good fighters and would accept the $50 dollars from the non-native natives to enlist in the army in the place of the settled settlers. Contrary to what Donald Trump might believe, there was no airforce back then. These Irish who wished to be Americans were persecuted among their military peers even though they were as white as David Duke might wish everyone to be. One of them, a fellow named Jon Patrick Reilly fled across the Rio Grande with a compliment of Finians, and a few Germans who had been equally persecuted, to fight for Mexico. The St Patrick's Battalion proved to be fierce fighters and soon became an artillery  battalion. Had Mexican generalship not wasted them, they might have turned the war in Mexico's favor. These San Patricios are still honored in Mexico today. Yet for over a half century later, Help-Wanted signs would have the letters NINA at the bottom. No Irish Need Apply. Later, Italian immigrants arrived on our borders escaping fascism in their lands to meet similar persecution. Fascists had adopted the Roman bundle of sticks as their standard for strength and dispersed those sticks among the rest of the world. From these people Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra, and many others, would emerge. 

     We are encountering at this moment an entirely new kind of conquered. After WWI there became a movement to make a portion of Palestine into a haven for European Jews, who had suffered historical oppression in their adopted lands. An oppression that was not only accepted but proudly practiced. The League of Nations began the process, but it faded away with the fading of the League of Nations. I would remind you that it was blocked by Republicans in Congress refusing to ratify the treaty, but you probably guessed that. Republicans that were strongly isolationists. By the end of WWII, after 6 million Jews had been killed in concentration camps in Germany and nations Germany had conquered, that Palestinian land became the new nation of Israel. The Jewish people proclaimed this new land "the holy land", ceded to the Jewish tribes in the time of Abraham by God. The Palestinians did not see it that way, they believed they were sons of Abraham. I won't go into the  different mothers that muddied this issue. Since that time in 1948 there have been repeated struggles between the people of Abraham and the other people of Abraham. Much of the hostility stemmed from the Palestinians losing the homes they grew up in to the new conquerors. A simple thank you was not offered and would not have sufficed. Israel won all of those struggles with the other sons of Abraham. The last of those struggles was in 1973 and was called the Yom Kippur war. Very recently, the opening days of October 2023,Yom Kippur, Hamas attacked Gaza and Israel with missles and brutal combat. Much of this combat was perpetrated on non-combatents. In truth, there is much blame to be shared by both parties. Rather unique to some of the examples above. Countless attempts at a two-state solution have been met with defeat because neither side wanted to admit the humanity of the other. In one case the leader of Egypt had been assassinated by Palestinians after a peace accord had been worked out by President Carter. Israel became, after this event more harsh in its treatment of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Illegal settlements were not halted, thousand year-old olive trees were bulldozed, and scarce water resources had not been shared. The people of Gaza were kept in a perpetual state of apartheid. Concurrently, both the the leader of Hamas, and the Prime Minister of Israel have been in office for 16 years. In the case of Hamas, they were leaders by fiat. In the case of Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu had kept control by coalitions between Likud and various smaller, and less accommodating conservative parties. The last being somewhat anomalous to Texas Republicans. The non-combatent people of both nations were met with unpleasant choices until and including the opening of this present hostility started by Hamas. 

We do not know how this is going to end. Thousands of civilians from babies to old people have been slaughtered. On both sides. More will likely be added to the butchers bill. Historians of a thousand years from now will have a hard time writing about this.

     They might ask, "what did you expect".