The Last Showgirl, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, Magnolia
Striving for goodness
while the cruel men win.
How do you recover an irrecoverable defeat? How do you undo the past?
In 2026, this is an increasingly urgent question, not just for individual persons, but for America and the world as a whole: as one era comes crashing down, and another, perhaps, prepares to begin.
The most uncanny thing to me about living in 2026 is simply the way that everyone, elite and ordinary, Right and Left, talks--which is simply the way characters used to talk in Star Trek episodes about time travel.
Captain Picard takes Captain Garrett and aside and confides to her in a rushed, furtive tone, his eyes lowered: "The war is going very badly for the Federation, far worse than is generally known. Starfleet Command believes defeat is inevitable. Within six months we may have no choice but to surrender." The point of this intervention, though, is not to help prepare her or the public for inevitable defeat, or even to reverse the tide of war and give the Federation victory after all--it is to convince her to go back in time and change the past. "One more ship will make no difference in the here and now. But twenty two years ago, one ship could have stopped this war before it started."
To stop the war before it started. This is the real or concealed preoccupation, it seems to me, of almost every American today. Certainly, it is the main preoccupation of the American President, whose entire political program at present consists of making or pretending to make it so the war he started with the Islamic Republic of Iran was never started, the global energy crisis he caused was never caused, the critical munitions shortage he precipitated was never precipitated, the economic bubble he inflated was never inflated, or, in short, that pretty much everything he has done since taking office in 2024 was never done. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu works overtime to pretend that the never-ending genocidal campaign and never-ending security crisis and accelerating collapse of the Israeli state that he himself has caused is all simply a bad dream. In Iran, meanwhile, a predatory military elite works continually to unravel their entire state and economy in real time, in the desperate homicidal hope that, somewhere across the world, all the other states and economies are unraveling faster.
This sense of desperate undoing, though, extends far beyond the halls of power: indeed, it is hardly too much to say that it has become a kind of manic leitmotif for almost all institutions everywhere. I spoke recently of a desire for death, for annihilation, as a driver behind the institutional chaos we see around us--and I still believe this is true. Before that, I talked about the remarkable dominance of nostalgia in politics and culture--and I still think that is true. Increasingly, though, I think the most immediate desire animating America is not so much death or nostalgia as time travel. Whatever was done in the last five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, must be undone: including sometimes the very existence of the institutions and movements and beliefs that ruled those times.
And really, people have a point! Since at least the financial crisis of 2008-2009, political and economic and academic elites the world over have worked very hard, and invested enormous amounts of resources, in building up a new, all-encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural infrastructure centered in tech companies and the Internet--an effort that has only very recently and belatedly been given the terribly inaccurate moniker of AI. Looking back, more or less everyone now agrees that effort was, by and large, a mistake: that it has made the world poorer, lonelier, less populated, more frightened, weaker, more divided, more fragile, and more unhappy.
It is in fact true that unimaginable resources and time and effort and belief that might have been spent on any number of other things--including, say, the American munitions stockpile, or the American transportation infrastructure, or clean energy, or prison reform, or housing, or mental health care, or physical health care, actually effective welfare systems, or poverty relief, or community-building, or parental support, or mass redistribution of resources, or even movies that people wanted to watch and games they wanted to play, have instead been plowed wholesale into a metastatizing Soviet-style private-public tech bureaucracy whose ultimate goal and telos and outcome all along, it turns out, was unemployed homeless people sitting on crumbling streets beneath mansions watching AI-generated pornography on individual smartphones to the deafening tones of data center cooling systems. This is a hyperbole--but one that is nevertheless truer to the actual present reality of catastrophic American economic and cultural collapse than any statistical statement.
The real trouble, though, is that this effort was never, at any time, confined to American elites--it was, at one time or another, not only supported but fervently trusted and hoped in by Americans of every class and race and party. Even those who never consciously believed in it, though, have had their lives entirely transformed by its efforts--and not just economically. We all, techno-optimist or techno-pessimist, Christian or secular, have walked around these last years with a little phone in our pockets--most of us have felt the ghostly, preternatural touch of the technical regime on our daily habits, our imaginations, our dreams, our deepest desires, our most intimate and interior selves. What is to be undone is not just political, not just economic, not even just technological, but profoundly, deeply, devastatingly personal.
Most people, of course, would not say in so many words that they actually want to undo the last twenty years of technological development; nevertheless, if you ask them what they want, what they fear, what they support, and what they oppose, it mostly centers on changing the past.
For a huge part of America today, that involves a pretty much explicit desire to go back in time ten years and make it so that Donald Trump was never elected President--or at the very least, make it so that absolutely no trace of any effect of his Presidency remains. Meanwhile, Trumpism 2.0 has largely consisted of various flailing efforts to undo, uncreate, and unmake--beginning with the 2020 election and Biden's Presidency, but extending rapidly to the US aid and development policy that began in the 1960s, the free trade policies crystallized since the 1990s, the immigration surge of the 2000s onward, and at times extending to more or less the entire Federal government and nearly everything that has happened since WW2.
Culturally, things are if anything even clearer--with AI acting as both the hostile provoker and force multiplier of an unprecedented turn towards nostalgia and simulation as the prevailing notes of culture. From music to movies to television to video games to food, people love most what no longer exists.
To repeat, then: in the year 2026, every major issue, every pressing concern, every fundamental debate, and nearly every passion and hope and desire centers straightforwardly on how we can change the past.
But can we change the past? And if so, how?
To examine this question, in best Adventures of Captain Peabody fashion, I will be writing about a historical tragedy, an indie album, a Las Vegas show, and a movie about regret.
The Last Showgirl (2024)
I am by nature an emotional and sentimental person; I do not, however, cry very often. This is a failing. Emotional catharsis is a basic human need, without which no determined or constant action and no honorable character is possible. The traditional masculinity of both ancient and Christian civilizations was defined by men who cried passionately and frequently--as Achilles wept for Patroclus and Hector and his father and himself, as Job wept for his children and David for Jonathan and Christ for Lazarus and every great hero and saint of Christendom for Christ.
I did cry watching The Last Showgirl in theaters, though; which makes it among the two or three most emotionally effective films of my lifetime.
The Last Showgirl is the second film I have seen by director Gia Coppola, who is the niece of Sofia Coppola, who is one of the greatest filmic artists of the last two or three generations. The first film I saw by Gia Coppola, Paolo Alto, a coming-of-age story about a teenaged girl who sleeps with James Franco but ultimately finds age-appropriate true love regardless, did not particularly impress me, though it did show sparks of brilliance here and there--mostly in the surrealistic reality of odd moments of off-color characters in situations that had nothing to do with the main plot as such.
Refreshingly, The Last Showgirl is a film with nothing but odd moments of off-color characters in situations that have nothing to do with the main plot--if The Last Showgirl had a main plot, which it does not. More or less everything that happens in the movie has already happened before the film's first scene: which is kind of the whole point. If narrative as such is structured by the teleological nature of human desire, then The Last Showgirl is straightforwardly not a narrative. It is rather, an elegiac reflection on the failure of narrative, a funeral for unconsummated desire.
Anyway, the film is not very hard to describe--though it is almost impossible to convey. Pamela Anderson, who when the film came out was 57 years old, and who in her heyday thirty years ago was regarded as the most iconic Playboy Playmate of her generation, plays a 57-year-old showgirl, Shelley, who for the past thirty years has worked for the same revue on the Las Vegas strip, Le Razzle Dazzle. As the film opens, her manager tells her that the decision has been made that Le Razzle Dazzle is going to close down, and she will have to find another job; which is an unlikely prospect, to say the least. At the end of the film, as Le Razzle Dazzle's last show is performed, and Shelley has failed to get another job or figure out her future in any way or to any degree. The End.
The substance of the film, though, is entirely in its reflection on the past--on the choices that were made, or not made, and how they can possibly be either accepted or undone. Shelley has spent more or less her entire life dancing in the same pornographic stage show; along the way, she has turned down offers of marriage, torpedoed romantic relationships and friendships, neglected and alienated her own daughter, and failed to secure either a stable financial situation or a future career.
The question of why she has done all this is the question of the film--it is not, though, a question the film ever answers, because it is not a question that Shelley can answer. Throughout the film, Shelley offers numerous declarations of the artistic value and cultural importance of Le Razzle Dazzle, an exemplar of the Golden Age of Las Vegas showcasing the "iconic Las Vegas showgirl." At its height, she tells her bemused younger colleagues, both the show and her were featured in movies, television shows, and magazines. What she did, what she was, was beautiful, iconic, powerful, loved, adored; it meant something.
Nevertheless, what she did, as various people remind her more or less bluntly throughout the film, was prance around a stage every night topless wearing angel wings and rhinestones for an audience of irreverent strangers who viewed her as little more than a masturbation aid. At 57, though, she no longer serves these purposes--and so is logically being replaced by younger women performing in more provocative undress more explicit simulations.
To these younger woman, or at least those who work with her at the revue every night, Shelley is at once a burden and a kind of maternal figure. As the naive teenaged dancer Jodie tells her guilelessly in an opening scene, she has always viewed her fellow dancers as sisters, with Shelley as their mother and the show's manager as their father. If that were true, though, the more cynical dancer Mary-Anne asks, why do they spend so much time around their parents topless?
With the show's impending closure, the younger girls look for employment elsewhere--with the 20-something Mary-Anne already derided as too old and the childlike Jodie shunted to more explicit shows. To this, Shelley responds with passionate fury: these new shows, she tells the girls, are simply grotesque and vulgar and obscene, not at all like the meaningful beauty of Le Razzle Dazzle. After all, as she reminds the girls over and over again with self-justifying rage, Le Razzle Dazzle was inspired by French culture.
To prove the point, Shelley attempts throughout the film to revive her very-long-dormant interest in French ballet. The film is punctuated by the dreamlike sequences of her dressing in tights and performing alone in her room to classical music and images of nature--a stately beauty straining at dignity.
When she finally auditions this performance, though, she is met with derision--since, as a casting director brusquely informs her, she is not, and never has been, a talented enough dancer to make it in the world of serious art. She was cast in Le Razzle Dazzle not because she was good at dancing, he reminds her, but simply because she was hot. Now, though, she is no longer hot: and she will not be cast again.
If her career as dancer and showgirl is coming to an end, though, there are still future possibilities to explore--and, perhaps, past opportunities to recover. Shelley's friend Annette was a dancer like her, but long since fired by Le Razzle Dazzle, and now reduced to working as a cocktail waitress and gambling and drinking compulsively in her free time. In one of the film's most oddly haunting scenes, Annette dances atop a table to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," straining visibly not so much for beauty or desire as for pity, catharsis, meaning, in her loneliness and abandonment.
Shelley, though, does not want to end up like Annette--and who can blame her? What she hopes for is that she will be rescued by a man; a respectable, honest man that, in a way the younger dancers deride as old-fashioned, she can cook for and dress up for and who will in turn take care of her. Men who watch the show, after all, still regularly ask her out on dates--they are not, though, that kind of man, nor do they ask her out so they can provide for an aging retired pennyless showgirl. Once, long ago, Shelley got married; but when her husband wanted her to give up her career as a showgirl, she divorced him. Men no longer ask Annette out on dates, though they do still grope her.
There is, though, one man who does genuinely care for Shelley--who sees her as beautiful, dignified, respectable, and would gladly provide for her. This is Eddy, the also aging manager of Le Razzle Dazzle, whose job it is, night after night, to tell the girls in the dressing room that there are thirty, then ten minutes, then five, to curtain. Played in a gentle performance by Dave Bautista, Eddy is a strangely paternal figure for a man presiding over an assembly of strippers; and, we gradually learn as the film goes on, has harbored a crush on Shelley for decades. Shelley, too, is oddly shy around him, but finally gets up the courage to ask him out to dinner. The two meet at a restaurant, both dressed formally, both afraid. I'm not used to seeing you in a dress, he says. Perhaps the beginning of a new life?
Except even here, the weight of the past squeezes out all possibilities in the present. As the dinner unfolds, it becomes clear that the two, as they say, have a history. Eddy is the father of Shelley's college-aged daughter Hannah--and recently saw her, for the first time in years, when she came to visit Shelley. Shelley is horrified: surely he didn't tell Hannah who he was? Eddy, upset, denies it, but wonders out loud why Shelley gave Hannah to one of her friends to raise: surely she could have found a way to take care of Hannah when not dancing, or even quit the show and found another job? At this intrusion into her private life, Shelley breaks down in panic and rage: she loved the show, loved being on stage night after night, feeling beautiful and powerful and seen. And anyway, what business is it of his? He never even talked to Hannah. But we weren't even in a relationship, Eddy says, crestfallen. I have no regrets, Shelley concludes. No regrets at all.
Except of course, she does: especially when it comes to her daughter Hannah, an unglamorous college student with whom Shelley is more awkward than with Eddy. The two mostly make uncomfortable small talk; how is Lisa? Is she seeing anyone? What major is she considering? And then, inevitably, pleadingly, Shelley tells her: you should come to my show. See my show.
And finally, Hannah does see Le Razzle Dazzle, and afterward confronts her mother, not so much angry as numb, resigned. "It's just a dumb nudie show," she tells her. Shelley is crushed; and as she flounders, Hannah considers out loud:
I don't know. I don't know why I did come. Although...I guess it's because I just hoped...I wanted to know that it was worth it. That it was better than me after all. That you didn't put this lame trash above me. It's not.
With thirty years of her life going up in flames, Shelley tries her best to defend herself. She disagrees with her daughter on the artistic value of Le Razzle Dazzle, which is not a nudie show, but "a spectacle with dancing nudes." She didn't abandon her daughter; she provided for her. "You left me in the casino parking lot with a Game Boy while you did two shows a night," Hannah reminds her. Childlike, Shelley pleads with her: she did the best she could. She was doing what she loved; she was passionate about her career. Doesn't that mean something? Hannah delivers her verdict:
It’s rather strange, if you think about it, that the human race existed for more than a hundred thousand years without ever coming up with the word “genocide.” In that time, a lot of people were murdered--and a lot of people groups. Still, virtually everyone seems to agree that something changed somewhere in that great transition that we still, after all these centuries, have not yet managed to figure out, but which somehow resulted in the whole world becoming Modern--whatever that is.
Anyway, the term “genocide” was first coined by one Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who spent the decades before WW2 campaigning for a new international legal framework that would allow for the punishment of what he initially called “crimes of barbarity.” His inspiration for this design was not the Holocaust of Jews (in which most of his family eventually perished), but the extermination of the Armenians.
Similarly, in 1939, the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler invited the Wehrmacht commanders to his private residence high atop the Bavarian Alps and delivered a famous speech laying out his intentions of extermination. Here he was not considering, as it is sometimes misremembered, the genocide of the Jews, but the planned annihilation of the Polish nation, who were set to have their intellectuals and politicians and priests interned and executed and their women and children slaughtered without mercy. Only thus, Hitler explained to the horrified generals, could they clear the land for colonization and give the German nation the lebensraum it needed.
Public opinion in Europe, Hitler acknowledged, would likely be against him in these efforts, but history would inevitably forget the defeated victims and remember only the successful butchers. To justify this historical thesis, he pointed to two examples: Genghis Khan and the founders of the modern Turkish state. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenian race?”
This is a question that could still be posed today.
If the Armenian Genocide is the unremembered, unpunished genocide of the 20th century, it is largely because it remains, as it did then, wrapped up with the fundamental, intractable problem and perpetual crisis of the Middle East. Though the Turks lost World War 1 and had their Empire dissolved, the secularizing elite responsible for the genocide remained in control of the new Turkish nation-state; and, as it turned out, a new Turkish nation-state led by genocidal secularizing nationalists was more or less the path of least resistance for the depleted Allies struggling desperately to rebuild their economies and return to normal after the Great War. To this day, the Turkish government remains resolutely committed to a historical narrative that is not so much the denial of the Armenian genocide as its full-throated justification. Nor is this illogical, since the Armenian genocide was in a very real sense the founding act of the Turkish nation-state.
In any case, it is important to note that, despite the grotesque claims of certain parties today, genocide was not a term invented simply to respond to the Jewish Holocaust and discourage anti-Semitism. In a real sense, the concept was developed to prevent the Holocaust--but with the knowledge that that coming abomination was merely the flower and fruit of a much larger tree.
Genocide was a word invented by a Jewish lawyer to provide conceptual clarity and an unambiguous legal mandate to punishing the ubiquitous sovereign massacres of the 20th century. Something, Lemkin recognized, had changed somewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries: something that had made states all around the world turn on their own citizens and begin slaughtering them en masse. The so-called Westphalian model of international law had been entirely premised on the grotesque, irrational political-theological contradiction in terms that we still to this day persist in calling state sovereignty. State sovereignty, though, as Lemkin pointed out again and again, assumed that states had a genuine, reliable, and indeed overriding interest in the benefit or protection or at least tolerance of their own citizens.
In the throes of that universal war of all against all that we persist in calling the Reformation, newly secularized princes driven by dynastic concerns had wanted, by and large, to control as many people as directly and totally as possible. The principle of cuius regio eius religio that emerged from that desire has nothing to do with religious freedom in the modern sense; taken in the abstract, it was a license for totalizing state regulation and control of religion and hence for persecution. It had been the framework of dynastic politics and competition that had made of that license a recipe for at least relative tolerance.
Princes whose overriding goal was regulation and control of entire populations necessarily aimed at uniformity of religion within their territories. If they pushed too hard in trying to achieve such uniformity, though, the logical result was either rebellion or mass migration of valuable and often wealthy citizens to other territories, both of which were competitive disabilities rather than advantages. For this reason, tolerance of religious minorities within a legal framework of discrimination and control was practically always the correct competitive choice. Of course, rulers did not always make the correct competitive choice.
All this, though, Lemkin pointed out, assumed that rulers would not simply turn on their own citizens and try to completely eliminate large groups of them. For such crimes the Westphalian legal order provided no remedy.
In principle and in theory the history of jurisprudence provides any number of theoretical justifications for holding sovereigns responsible for crimes against their own citizens: including the natural law, the ius gentium, and the philosophical concept of tyranny. None of these, though, are practically operative in the modern world, at least in strong enough form to reliably prevent, detect, and punish crimes by sovereign actors. Genocide, Raphael Lemkin hoped, would build on and further specify earlier, vaguer designations like “crimes against humanity” (deriving from the Hague Conventions) and so help build up a new robust international-legal order that would be strong enough to prevent and punish such crimes. By the time he died penniless and alone in 1959, he had largely come to believe his efforts had failed.
Looking back from 2026 on the past eighty years of sovereign crimes, we can see a more mixed picture; one where the prevalence and rhetorical power of the term genocide has been a genuine discouraging factor on sovereign crimes, but almost entirely via public opinion, not any robust legal framework capable of punishing sovereign actors that do not happen to be the unpopular losers of recently-fought wars.
Law, though, can only take us so far; a bigger question is why the 19th and 20th centuries saw a sudden turn in sovereignty, whereby governments the world over that had wanted only recently to control and rule as many people as possible suddenly decided they wanted to rule a great deal fewer people.
The fundamentally paradoxical nature of genocide does not strike people nearly as much as it should. People have been killing people since Cain and Abel--sometimes impressively many people. Tribal societies are often genocidal in the base sense that tribes see themselves engaged in competition and warfare with other tribes and hence are willing, under sufficiently extreme circumstances, to destroy those tribes root and branch.
Mostly, though, the story of the last ten thousand years or so of recorded history civilization is the story of Empire--which is to say, of rule, taxation, plunder, and conquest. The logic of this story, though, is precisely opposed to the logic of genocide. Romans, inhabitants of the trading city of Rome and its agricultural base, do not want to eliminate the inhabitants of Verona--far from it! What they want in the short term is to plunder the inhabitants of Verona, take food and slaves and commodities from them without paying. What they want in the long term is for the inhabitants of Verona to submit to their imperium: or in other words to establish a stable relationship whereby Veronese farmers regularly give them grain, Veronese traders regularly give them money, and Veronese rulers regularly give them soldiers. This is obviously not an equal relationship; but it is also about as far from a genocidal one as can be conceived.
Put as simply as it can possibly be put, since the beginnings of history as we know it, and certainly since the rise of agriculture, states have wanted by and large to rule as many people as possible. This logic is neither absolute nor complete, but it does suffice to provide minimal context for about 90% of the history of states up until the 19th century.
Somewhere in the course of the 19th century, though, things changed: and by the early 20th century, the chief business of many of the greatest states the world had ever seen became how to eliminate, reduce, and consolidate their populations via birth control, eugenics, concentration camps, and outright massacre. In the 21st century, for the first time probably since the Mongol Invasions, the global population is set to begin declining. Clearly, something has happened; and as NPR hosts fervently debate birthrates and how we can improve them before the global economy collapses, it might be a good idea to try to figure out what.
The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus is more than a simple narrative of atrocities. Indeed, despite being written by an Armenian scholar named Vahakn Dadrian, the book strives with all its might to maintain an abstract, academic distance from the events it narrates--in service of the quite reasonable goal of understanding why they took place.
As with any great evil, Dadrian only partially succeeds in making the Armenian Genocide make sense. He does succeed to a remarkable degree, though, in making his readers understand just why it is that over the course of more than three decades several successive generations of opposed rulers, and a great part of the Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire, came to see the total elimination of the Empire’s Christian subjects as a reasonable goal. In the process, he helps to zero in on the precise moment of transition between the Imperial-Colonial world of the 19th century and the genocidal world of the 20th.
To understand Dadrian’s case, though, one has to have some understanding of Islam, not so much as a religion as of a socio-political framework; and this no one in America in the 21st century has. Over the past year or so, I have been trying with all my might to communicate that the predominant American image of Islam as a stable, unchanging, unified, totalitarian world-system is about the opposite of the truth: that Islam in modernity is and has been in the grip of a near-universal religious and political crisis of legitimacy, and that even in history Islamic societies have been marked rather by legal flexibility, theological diversity, and institutional chaos than ideological or moral uniformity. As the sheer scope of America’s mistake in making war on Iran sinks gradually in, I’m hoping there may be a more receptive audience for such truths.
In any case, the first thing Dadrian strives to make us understand about the Armenian Genocide is the way in which it both follows from, but also contradicts, the traditional principles of Islamic societies.
One cannot do without extremely broad generalizations; any more than one can do without a recognition of the inevitable complexity of history. Americans generally entirely ignore the actual complexity of the history of the quite different Islamic societies that have existed across the world over the past fourteen hundred years in favor of a ludicrously simplistic view of Islam as a more or less monolithic evil empire. In this, though, their fundamental error is not that they generalize about Islamic societies, but that they do it very badly.
Here is a historical generalization: historical pre-modern Islam has been in political and social terms mostly a method of organization and code of law and practice for a privileged ruling class within a broader society.
When we look at history as a whole, this becomes a straightforward generalization. Muslims have rarely if ever existed before modernity in societies that consisted solely or overwhelmingly of Muslims; rather, since the first Islamic conquests, they have been in most places most of the time either a privileged ruling minority or at least a privileged and characteristic but not numerically overwhelming majority.
This is not accidental, though, but to a large extent by design; and the “design” in question is mostly just the simple logic of pre-modern Empire discussed above. In the pre-modern world, both wealth and political power comes from the surpluses of agriculture; hence to be wealthy is normatively to be a privileged sort of person supported by many subordinated agriculturalists. This is still, in fact, to a large extent in the case, even in America; it was quite openly accepted as the case, though, more or less all over the world until the Enlightenment.
If one examines classical Muslim jurisprudence, as practiced in actual Muslim states, one simply sees that it describes, mandates, regulates, and incentivizes just such a society. Non-Muslims in such states have inferior legal privileges, are forbidden to bear arms, are excluded from political and usually military participation, are subject to various forms of ritualized humiliation, can under certain circumstances be killed or enslaved, and must pay an additional tax. It is the last on that list, of course, that is by far the most important historically: since it provides a straightforward and potent financial incentive both for non-Muslims to want to convert to Islam, and for Muslim rulers to discourage or outright forbid such conversion.
In any case, in a world replete with unthinking attacks on Islam, it is worth pointing out that the above list, while bluntly presented, is not in the general sweep of history all that unusual: that it describes in broad strokes the status of most Imperial subjects in most Empires of the ancient world. Jesus Christ held a more or less similar status in the Roman Empire of his day.
Still, what sets Muslim societies apart from agricultural Empires such as the Roman Empire is both the degree and type of subjection involved, and the nature and type of the privileged class. Considered very abstractly and broadly, the Roman Empire was a hierarchical alliance between the urban elites of Rome and the urban elites of other Mediterranean cities in service of more efficient subjection and taxation of rural agriculturalists. The Muslims that conquered large parts of the formerly Roman world, though, were not urban elites, but nomadic warriors and traders; and their goal was to subject, displace, and destroy the ruling urban elite itself.
Still, when the Muslims conquered the Roman provinces of Syria and Egypt, it is not the case that the inhabitants of those lands immediately became Muslim. Far from it! Until the 20th century, virtually every Muslim state contained large Christian or Jewish or Hindu minorities; indeed, during that time, many Muslim states and provinces possessed majorities of non-Muslims. This can be seen as a historical accident; but is better seen as a structural feature, even a designed feature, of Islam as an abstracted historical object, one in the light of which many features of classical Islamic religion and law can be better understood. For Muslims to be privileged and wealthy, not everyone could be Muslim.
All of this, it should be said, could be and has been treated in an entirely positive light--particularly in relation to Christianity. Historical Christianity aims at and envisions a society where more or less everyone is a Christian; and as a result has often taken rather drastic measures to ensure things worked out that way. Islam’s penchant for minority rule and Empire can easily be pitched as a kind of tolerance--as indeed it quite genuinely is. In a state ruled by Muslims according to Muslim law and structured from top to bottom by Muslim religion, Muslims are quite obviously tolerating or putting up with the existence of large minorities or majorities of non-Muslims. This is particularly true on a psychological level, and above all wherever ordinary Muslims of no great wealth or privilege are confronted by the (from their perspective) intolerable insolence of Christians or Hindus of sometimes greater accidental wealth or status.
Christian states, it is true, have not usually been like this; with legally tolerated Jewish minorities as the exception that proves the rule, and modern colonialism properly understood as the fundamental alteration of historical Christianity into a quite different form of religion (which we might polemically call Protestantism) involving a fundamental crisis of identity and legitimacy from which Christian societies have not yet recovered. Historical Christianity is a very strange object, though; born as a repressed minority religion nevertheless aiming at and working towards absolute universality, and structured from top to bottom by the dichotomy and tension and polarity between these two states. It is certainly not, though, the only historical society to aim at a more or less religiously and politically uniform civil society: as instances as distant as the later Roman Empire and many historical Buddhist states would attest.
I do not wish to contradict the point about historical Islamic tolerance: I merely wish to contextualize it by pointing out that the existence of large numbers of non-Muslims in Muslim societies has been normatively not only tolerated, but also desired or even required. Very often, where the poor Muslim has desired fewer Christians, the Sultan has wanted and needed more.
Still, for all the basic intelligence and tolerance of historical Islamic states, one could argue that there is also a fundamental and inescapable instability baked into the system thus understood. A privileged class of Muslims requires a subordinate class practically and financially and for its own self-understanding; Islamic law, though, incentivizes the gradual extinction of that subordinate class through conversion and other means; hence, the system must either (1) keep such a class artificially in existence through greater and greater degrees of exclusion and repression, usually in a manner contrary to codified law, or (2) must continually add more people to this class through immigration or conquest. Both alternatives have been frequently and pervasively utilized throughout Islamic history; and both generate conflict by their own nature.
Again, this description may seem harsh; I would point out, though, that it applies also in broad strokes to the modern United States of America, with similarly violent results.
Laying out history in these terms, though, allows us to better understand the modern crisis of Islam: a crisis that once again stands at the very heart of global events. Put unforgivably simply, in the modern world, Muslims are now an overwhelming majority in virtually every place where Muslims exist: hence the fundamental divide between modern and pre-modern Islam, and hence the modern Islamic crisis.
The power of Dadrian’s work comes in his clinical laying out of the origins and logic of this crisis: locating the precise moment when the greatest Islamic Empire in the history of the world decided that there was no alternative but to destroy all its non-Muslim citizens.
This decision can be understood in the terms of Islamic politics and history; it can also be seen, more simply, as an ultimate despair and loss of belief in Islam itself. That within a few decades it resulted in the secularization of the Turkish state and the formal abolition of the office of Caliph is about as straightforward a historical causality as one could ask for.
I would argue, then, that the history of the modern Islamic crisis of legitimacy is to a very great extent simply the history of the despair of Muslims at the viability of Islamic superiority and governance--a despair that has not yet abated, and which by its very nature continually generates all over the world violence of a kind and degree unknown to historical Islam.
As Dadrian argues, the Armenian Genocide could not have taken place without the fundamental and widespread belief in the superiority of the “ruling nation” of Muslims over the conquered nations under their sway, as well as in the specific legal form of the contract of peace and subjection between Muslim conqueror and non-Muslim conquered; but neither could it have taken place without the overwhelming loss of belief in that superiority and that form.
The 15th and 16th centuries saw the exponential expansion of the Ottoman state into the greatest Islamic Empire the world has ever seen; an Empire mostly inhabited by officially and legally subjected Christians. From the 17th century onwards, though, the Ottoman Empire saw itself militarily overshadowed and financially bought out by the rising European Great Powers; leading to a state where, by the 19th century, the glorious Empire of the Caliph was more or less owned wholesale by a coalition of French, German, and English banks and investors.
Hence arose the Eastern Question of the 19th century: the capital-q Question being how the increasingly capitalist European Great Powers could keep the Ottoman Empire going for their own overwhelming profit while at the same time preventing the Sultan from treating his Christian subjects harshly enough to trigger increasingly democratic European public opinion and so make that profit unsustainable. Obviously, it didn’t work.
Due to these basic dynamics, over the course of the 19th century, the European Great Powers were more or less forced by their own publics to accept the gradual dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The underlying cause of this dismemberment was not at all new; it was simply the natural resentment of Christian provincial majorities, especially more recently conquered provincial majorities, of their subject, exploited status, their consequent penchant for regularly taking up arms and revolting against the Ottoman state, and the consequent penchant of the Ottoman government for regularly suppressing these revolts and massacring large numbers of women and children as punishment and warning.
Unfortunately, this longstanding dynamic did not play at all well with a European public whose information now came from mass-market newspapers and whose savings and investments were now financing the daily operational costs of the Ottoman state; and so, first the Serbians, then the Greeks, then the Montenegrans, then the Bulgarians, and finally the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, were granted their independence at the behest of the Powers. In the case of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the effect on Turkish morale could hardly be overestimated, since for the first time the Ottomans saw themselves defeated and indeed routed on the battlefield, not by superior European forces, but by their own former subjects.
As Dadrian points out, under Islamic law the authority of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslims as its “ruling nation” over the non-Muslims was grounded straightforwardly in conquest and martial superiority, as was the Turks’ self-proclaimed status as the ruling group of the entire Muslim world. Likewise, the Turks had originated as steppe nomads, and hence conceived of themselves in terms of the strong, lordly, skilled, martial, heroic qualities characteristic of such peoples.
Now, though, the Turks were being crushed and humiliated by the very rabble they had once conquered--and only barely saved from destruction by the European Christian powers that owned their state, wrote their laws and constitutions, and gave away their territory at will. In straightforward terms, the superiority of Muslims to non-Muslims seemed disproven, and the reign of Islam on earth at an end.
It was in the context of this loss of faith that the genocidal policies of Abdul Hamid emerged; and in the context of an even deeper loss of faith that the Armenian genocide was consummated.
As discussed in a previous post, the Ottoman Sultan had at first worn his title of Caliph of Islam lightly if not ambiguously, preferring to rely more on his inherited Mongol title of Khan, usurped Roman title of Kaiser, and various and assorted mystical and popular and Sufi titles such as the Friend of the Friends of God, possible/presumptive Pole, and Caliph of God. From a position of strength, the Ottoman Sultan naturally preferred conquering other Muslim states to wielding a vague and nebulous religious authority over them.
It was from his new position of weakness, though, that the Sultan began in the 19th century to work actively to reinforce and exploit his alleged status as the religious and moral leader of all Muslims everywhere--especially those Muslims now living under European rule in North Africa and India. These efforts bore fruit in the Indian Khalifat movement and other manifestations of Caliphal piety elsewhere, and in the process gave the Sultan much-needed leverage in negotiations with the British and French, who were now effectively the financial and political guarantors of the Ottoman state. At the same time as he worked to increase his leverage with the Europeans by appealing to Muslim populations outside his borders, he also began working to reduce the Europeans’ leverage by decimating the Christian populations within his borders. However religious the justifications, the political logic in both cases was straightforward.
As Dadrian and others have many times pointed out, it is extremely difficult to draw a dividing line between the massacres of Armenians and other Christian minorities under Abdul Hamid, which reached their peak in the 1890s and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and the ruination of innumerable others, and the formal Armenian Genocide of WW1. Abdul Hamid presented himself as a pious religious Muslim and Caliph; the Young Turks that carried out the genocide were secularizing nationalists; both, though, used similar methods and pursued similar goals towards the Empire’s Christian subjects, rooted ultimately in a similar assertion of Muslim superiority and a similar despair about the possibility of maintaining it. Over the course of thirty years, then, an Empire in which more than a quarter of the population was Christian saw this share reduced to less than two percent, at the cost of millions of lives.
In the world of the European Great Powers, meanwhile, as Dadrian lays out in great detail, the Genocide represented an enormous failure of responsibility. Over the course of the 19th century, conflicts between Ottoman rulers and subject populations gave birth to an incipient international law grounded in the concept of “humanitarian intervention”—whose practical results proved again and again nearly the opposite of its alleged goals.
In short, massacres provoked interventions, which produced treaties and alleged reforms by which the Sultan promised to treat his Christian subjects better and accord them true civic equality with Muslims. Yet as Dadrian argues, it was this very assertion of equality with Muslims that offended the status of the Sultan and his Muslim subjects and so precipitated yet further massacres.
Both as Caliph of Islam and as ruler of the Turks, Abdul Hamid was absolutely committed to never granting his Christian subjects equality with the ruling nation of Islam; and so again and again gave rights on paper and again and again organized Muslim mobs and brigands to punish the alleged holders of those rights for their cheek in claiming them. And while these massacres might provoke more humanitarian interventions and more reforms, they never resulted in the punishment of any of those responsible for the crimes themselves. In this way, Dadrian argues, a pattern of impunity was established that encouraged greater and greater escalation.
All this time, of course, the European Great Powers were financing and propping up the Ottoman Empire, and could have ended it at any time they wished. Many of the most famous Hamidian massacres took place with European military forces just off the coast, or even on the scene. More drastic interventions, legal orders with actual means of inspections and enforcement, and even occupations were discussed by the Powers, and carried out temporarily--and most would certainly have prevented both further massacres and the resulting genocide.
Again and again, though, the Powers refrained from acting. Treaties were put in place, but deliberately not enforced; provisions were passed, but then withdrawn; interventions were planned, but then vetoed; and all the while the massacres continued. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was a vast and delicate task, difficult to carry out without advantaging some member of the European Concert against it rivals; and in the meantime the Empire offered much easier sources of profit. Hence, first the French, then the British, and finally the Germans positioned themselves as the protector of the Sultan, and reaped abundant financial rewards while taking no responsibility for the results. This essential choice for power without responsibility would later come to define the 20th century global American Empire; with similar results for the relations of Americans to Muslims the world over.
The Armenian Genocide, it should be said clearly, was not precipitated by an essentially ethnic hatred for Armenians, but by the broader religious divide between Muslim and non-Muslim. Again and again the Ottomans were faced with rebellions from and engaged in massacres against Christian ethnic groups throughout the Empire, Armenians and Greeks and Assyrians and Serbs and others, with little distinction or discrimination; and even the final Armenian Genocide of WW1 also targeted other Christian populations.
Certain factors, however, did set the Armenians apart from other groups and led to a final, overriding focus on their elimination.
Most importantly, unlike the other Christian minority groups that had gradually claimed their independence, the Armenians were spread throughout the Empire, with their greatest numbers concentrated not in a peripheral province like Greece or Serbia, but in Eastern Anatolia; also unlike the other Christian minority groups, Armenians proclaimed their loyalty to the Sultan, were mostly disarmed, and had no widespread rebel movements. Hence, Ottoman Muslim loyalists and Turkish nationalists alike warned that the success of Armenian efforts could mean only one of two things: the independence of Eastern Anatolia, a part of the sacred Turkish land itself, or else an Ottoman Empire of actual meaningful legal and social equality between Muslim and non-Muslim. Yet even the latter could hardly be granted without seriously threatening the Sultan’s status as ruler of the broader Muslim world.
Again and again, then, loyal Armenians appealed to the Porte for relief from the system of “double taxation”--a euphemism for the tolerated impunity with which Muslim ethnic groups were allowed by the Ottoman authorities to harass and plunder and exact payments from Christian subjects as a marker of their superior status. European visitors to the Empire were amazed and horrified by the constant reinforcements of Muslim superiority, and the submissiveness with which the Armenians tolerated them. Yet with the intervention of the European Powers on their behalf, no amount of personal submissiveness could save the Armenians from the fear and hatred of their neighbors, for whom the Armenians were constant, living reminders of their own humiliation and loss of status, walking portents of the coming collapse of the Empire and destruction of the realm of Islam on earth.
Still, however destructive Abdul Hamid’s policies, they were still attempts, however violently and despairingly, to maintain the traditional Islamic order: which was in essential terms an order of superiority and rule, not total annihilation. It was left for the secular nationalists of the Young Turk party, who overthrew the Sultan and ultimately abolished the Caliphate, to make the choice that would come to define the 20th century: the final and absolute destruction of the enemy.
In 1908, the Young Turk party overthrew Abdul Hamid, definitively rejected the Sultan’s rule and traditional Islamic law, and proclaimed a liberal reign of constitutional order and legalism. As it turned out, though, this liberal regime bore far from pacific implications, since in the minds of the party leadership its necessary pre-condition was the “Turkification” of the Empire--which meant nothing less than the complete denuding of the Empire of its non-Muslim subjects.
Many European observers reported remarks of their Turkish counterparts during this time to the effect that their ancestors had been fools to leave so many Christians in the lands the conquered, when they ought to have either killed or forcibly converted everyone alive. As a matter of fact, their ancestors had left subject peoples alive and unconverted quite deliberately, not only because it was their religious duty to do so, but also because it was in their material interest to do so. That, though, was the old, defunct, pre-modern order. It was left to their secularizing modern descendants to correct the essential mistake of Islam, its central incompatibility with modernity as such: the failure to establish a homogenous population capable of being governed effectively by a modern state.
As Dadrian points out, there is a paradoxical quality to the Young Turks’ appeal to religion as the basis and dividing line for a purportedly secular ethnic nation-state. Turkification did not mean the destruction or suppression of non-Turkish Muslim minorities; it meant the annihilation of Christian minorities, and Christian minorities only. Yet in truth the dividing line between ethnicity and religion was not necessarily much clearer in the Ottoman Empire of the early 20th century than it was in the Bosnia of the late 20th century, where to be Catholic was to be Croat, to be Orthodox to be Serbian, and to be Muslim Bosnian, regardless of any other characteristics. Where Islam had ceased to be in the minds of the Young Turks a religious order, it could remain the basis for a secular ethnic order.
What happened next does not need to be recounted in detail. When WW1 broke out, the Young Turks jumped at the opportunity to “resolve the Armenian Question”: and with the active tolerance and encouragement of the German Kaiser and High Command, began a series of deportations and massacres aimed at nothing less than the complete cleansing of the Empire of its Christian minorities.
In this great crime, traditional Turkish superiority and German modernity worked hand-in-hand; with many Prussian officers and diplomats quietly applauding the Turks for their courage in taking the necessary steps to build a homogenous nation-state, and many others tolerating, assisting, or even suggesting means and methods for the great work. There was a deep kinship, the Kaiser believed, between the Turkish and German peoples; and what both needed was to build truly modern, homogenous ethnic Empires without troublesome and traitorous minorities. Many German discussions of the genocide pointed to the kinship between Armenians and Jews.
For all the kinship between Germans and Turks, though, both ultimately proved the losers in the resulting Great War, with the Turks once again crushed on the battlefield, their territory lost, their soldiers humiliated, and the Ottoman Empire finally dissolved. For all that, when the dust settled the Young Turks had got what they wanted: an ethnically and religiously homogenous Turkish nation-state, which endures to this day.
While in the throes of the war the Allies had declared their war goal of punishing those Turkish leaders responsible for the extermination of the Armenians, these efforts quickly ground to a halt in the following years. In 1915, the Allies had jointly issued a statement promising the punishment of the government officials responsible for the Armenian massacres; and as late as 1919, the British Admiral Calthorpe “pointed out to the Turkish government that when the massacres became known in England, British statesmen had promised the civilized world that the persons connected would be held personally responsible; and it was the firm intention of His Majesty’s government to fulfill that promise.” Already by that time, though, seven leaders of the Young Turk party had escaped Turkey in a German warship; and though the British began arresting and detaining war criminals in 1919, this resulted in mass demonstrations by the Turkish population and helped spur the rise of the Kemalist Nationalist insurgents who would ultimately oust the Sultan once again. On November 1, 1921, the British released all remaining Turkish prisoners; and though this produced overwhelming public outcry and shame even among the British political class, the United Kingdom was now governed by a wartime Coalition government where such public opinion could be safely ignored. Life returned to normal, and the Armenians were forgotten.
Then, of course, what was done in the Ottoman Empire was done again and again, in many nations, over the course of the long and bloody 20th century. In many parts of the world, from Ukraine to Sudan to Syria, the same effort is still going on today; and if something is not done, it is likely that the 21st century will prove as much a century of genocide as the 20th.
I asked above, and have asked before, the essential question of what marks the elusive process of modernization. One broad answer might be belief in immanentized deities; another might be an essential despair at the very idea of human difference.
Pre-modern societies, by and large, were entirely premised on and structured by human difference, beginning with the essential human difference of male and female, and extending through many forms of hierarchy, subjugation, exploitation, Empire, slavery, religious privilege, social systems of honor, and legal systems of punishments and rewards. At various times, 20th century people have claimed to have transcended all such things, and rendered them needless: yet the results, to say the least, are mixed.
From one perspective, one could argue that 19th and 20th century modernity has been not the genuine reconciliation of difference but its ultimate rejection: the creation of economic and social and political systems entirely premised on and dependent on and aiming at complete human homogeneity. The Young Turks wanted to live in a modern state, with all its economic and technological and political benefits; and ultimately concluded that the only way to get one was to eliminate ethnic and religious difference within their society. Many, many, many people and governments over the course of the last two hundred years have come to the same conclusion; and many more are coming to the same conclusion now.
We can say they were wrong about the requirements of modernity; still, there must have been a reason they all thought like that. And that reason, I assure my readers, was not simply Islam.
As the cruel men continue to win...
I recently realized that I have been letting down all of my readers by confining my posts to combined discussions of fiction and non-fiction films and texts, when I really should also be talking about music. After all, if there is one singular mission statement that defines The Adventures of Captain Peabody, it is absurd, over-the-top, unrepentant eclecticism.
The song is a reflection of the marks of the past on the present, of external evils on the fragile good of the self. The narrator is "striving for goodness while the cruel men win"; she is "in search of soft sounds from another planet; in search of a quiet place to lay this to rest." For healing, though, more than simple endurance is needed; one searches not for solitude, but for love, for grace, for something beyond the world of experience. Experience itself is ruined, corrupted; hence only transcendence can save. Yet the power from beyond the self works through the self, unites with the self, so that the narrator can declare: "They'll never let you hurt me. I'll never let you hurt me." This, too, is a promise.
He picked up the phone then, as he told me, only by mistake, since he usually turned off his work phone after work hours, but on this occasion had forgotten to do so and answered without thinking. We talked for a few minutes as I sat on the carpeted stairs, and booked our first session.
Then we got into his car, and he drove me back to the gas station. A sudden downpour erupted, filling the road with falling water; and so for the first and only time, he offered to simply drive me back to my apartment, which was only about a five minute drive from the gas station where he usually left me. Amid the thunderous rattle of raindrops on the roof and asphalt, we pulled into my street, across from the little shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been set up in the woods by the Hispanic inhabitants of a nearby apartment complex. We were discussing the nature of passion and emotion; and I was saying something about the fundamental need to accept these things and their power over us. "Yes," he said. "But ultimately, acceptance isn't enough. The emotions themselves, the desires, have to be true." "Yes," I said, relieved that he had understood at last. Then I got out of the car in the pouring rain, and walked away, and never saw him again.
The goddamn regret. And I'll die. Now I'll die, and I'll tell you what...the biggest regret of my life...I let my love go.
What did I do? That's the question that, in the end, we will all have to answer--if not to ourselves, then to God. And the real trouble is that we often genuinely do not know, as Jimmy Gator protests to his wife, what we did; and even when we do know what we did in the abstract, we cannot measure the consequences, and so know truly what we have done; and even when we know all that, we still cannot change anything. To admit to another person, or to God, that we have done something terrible, with terrible consequences, that cannot be undone is perhaps the most terrifying thing in human life. Perhaps the only thing more terrifying is being asked to forgive such a wrong.
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