Most by now have read or heard about the comments made in 2010 by EPA official Al Armendariz in which he described how he believed the EPA should go about making examples to oil and gas companies that did not toe the line to his satisfaction. As of today, he reportedly issued an apology for the use of the work "crucify".
I will not go on about the Obama Administration’s continued war on the organizations that provide so much of our energy. What I saw in his statements that bothered me even more was his bizarre falsification of history and yet another dig at Western Culture.
"I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff…the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.
And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there."
Our educational system is so far gone that the patently false picture Armendariz paints will be lost on too many people.
Firstly, to pretend to be under the impression that Rome spent her time going into "villages" in a piecemeal fashion insults the intelligence of everyone. The Mediterranean world of that time was a million miles away from being a community of villages. Much of Greece was ruled by Macedon. Egypt was under the Ptolemies (Another Macedonian dynasty). The Seleucids (Macedonian rule again) ruled much of modern-day Israel, Syria, Lebanon and modern-day Turkey. Carthage, Numidia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Pergamum, Epirus Rhodes, and others were all kingdoms or states. There were no independent villages at that time in that region.
Secondly, Roman cruelty, while it pales in comparison to that of the Mongols and the Turks, and though well known itself, was in no way what he pretends to believe that it was. Rome utilized crucifixion for criminals, not to make examples of people to terrorize them. We can look at Caesar’s treatment of the Veneti after their revolt, where he had the hands of the males of that group cut off and compare that to the work of the Persian King Darius II, who did the same thing to Alexander the Great's soldiers whom he came upon in them in hospitals behind the Macedonian King's lines. The flogging of the British Queen of the Iceni, Boudicca, and the rape of here daughters was an isolated act by a greedy and cruel local commander. Note that Rome paid dearly for that outrage as Boudicca’s revolt caused tremendous losses to Rome. Although Rome expanded her Empire to include many peoples and nations, they did it by warfare, not sending in a few guys to isolated villages (That were not on their own but parts of major Kingdoms). This is just another example of making a Western power look as badly as possible
Thirdly, the worst claim of them all is the mention of "Turkish" Villages. No such thing. The people of Anatolia(Asia Minor), which comprise most of modern-day Turkey, was peopled by Indo-European peoples such as Greeks, Phrygians, Cappadocians, Iranics, Armenians, those of Luvian and Lydian descent, etc. No Turks existed in that region at the time. In fact, and I am not employing hyperbole, there wasn't a single Turk within a thousands miles of that region at the time that Rome was expanding. When Rome did encounter Turks in that region, it was almost six hundred years after the Empire in the West had fallen. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire did in fact fight Turks - when the Turks began to invade in the 11th century AD. The Byzantine defeat at the battle of Manzikert in 1071 was a watershed moment for the Christian world (And the rest of the world also) and was the catalyst for the call for the Byzantine Emperor to the Medieval West for help. This resulted in the Crusades. The Empire regained some of the land lost after 1071, but was again defeated by the Turks in another major battle at Myriocephalum in 1176AD. The Empire was so weakened by that battle, and the loss of tax revenues from the Venetian - extorted treaties favorable to Venice so damaged the imperial exchequer that Constantinople fell to Western crusaders in 1204AD. The Byzantines rulers-in-exile in Anatolia continued to hold the Seljuk Turks in check and also retook their city from the Western forces, but, with the disruptions caused by the Mongols, more Turks came. These pushed the Byzantines out of Anatolia. The most successful of these tribes were the Ottomans. They gained control of the other Turkish tribes and eventually conquered (In Europe) Greece, the rest of the Balkan states, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Constantinople, the city built by Constantine and the last city with an unbroken connection to classical times, fell to the Ottoman Sultan Mohamet II in 1453AD. Turks were conquering nomads who moved in to stay.
Leftist-minded people actually relish painting over history and giving us pictures that are completely different from what actually happened. The Turks are portrayed as a sort of indigenous Anatolian people. Left-leaning individuals like to sign on to the claims by Turks that St. Nicholas of Myra (Santa Claus) was a Turk. Again, Nicholas lived in Myra in the 4th century AD, when Turks were still running around the region from the Steppes eastward to the borders of China and would not show up in Anatolia until seven hundred more years later.
The Left has a fondness for the Ottoman Empire as it was pan-national (Leftists detest free peoples and nation). The extol the virtues of the "Tolerant” rule of the Ottomans, who enslaved tens of thousands of Christian boys to be raised as Muslim soldiers for the Sultan , and did the same with Christian girls for sex-slaves in Harems.
It is of course OK to the Left that they attacked Vienna three times, the last major siege of that city being 1683 – a scant one hundred years prior to the recognition of the independence of the American Republic by Britain.
The infatuation that the Left has for Islamic rule extends to Spain, where people of Spanish descent who happen to convert to Islam are celebrated for getting back to their "Islamic roots". Again, no such thing. Muslim armies conquered, at first, almost the whole of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century AD, but the Christian Kingdoms, in the Reconquista, regained their lands. The last Islamic-ruled region of Spain was Granada, which fell in 1492. Granada had remained as an Islamic frontier state, and a very small one at that, since 1250AD, the rest of Spain and Portugal having been steadily returned to its rightful owners. Thus, the claim of 800 years of Islamic rule in Iberian Peninsula is terribly deceiving as Muslims never held the entire region, and the last 200+ years of Islamic rule, consisted of Granada alone, a tiny piece of the region.
If one does not read the history of Western Civilization on his own or study it as a Major in a good college, I am afraid that he is likely to believe whatever the Left tells him it is.
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