XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: bredband.net@ojevind.lang   
      
   "William Cloud Hicklin"  skrev i meddelandet   
   news:op.tqspqczvrwd1fl@emachine...   
      
    [snip]   
      
   > The Rhineland pogroms were indeed an atrocity- but not part of Urban's   
   > plan, or conducted by the Frankish armies.  It was, like most pogroms, an   
   > eruption of ignorant violence among the commoners. In most cases the local   
   > Bishops attempted (unsuccessfully) to protect the Jews.  Ugly, but a side   
   > issue.   
      
   I am sure the fact that the Bishops were against the massacres was a great   
   comfort to the Jews who were murdered. And the crusaders were very active   
   participants in the massacre.   
      
   >> followed by mass murdering people every time they captured a city. When   
   >> the   
   >> crusaders conquered Jerusalem, they murdered everyone they got hold of -   
   >> even local Christians,   
   >   
   > Yes....   
   >   
   >> because they couldn't tell them from the rest of the   
   >> population.   
   >   
   >   
   > NO.   
   >   
   > They murdered everyone they could get ahold of because the Law of Arms, as   
   > it was understood at the time, provided that such was the fate of a city   
   > which resisted a siege and was taken by assault.  The threat of massacre   
   > was a major tool in inducing surrender (under which the populace would be   
   > spared).  The Early Medievals never remotely considered the killing of   
   > civilians to be a 'war crime.'  It was just war.   
      
   Looting cities, raping and murdering was quite common,. But here we are   
   talking about the wholesale massacre of the population, and that was not the   
   norm.   
      
   > The real violator of the "international law" of the day was Saladin, when   
   > he retook the city in 1186. The defenders surrendered on terms, chief   
   > among which was the standard no-pillage-and-slaughter provision, and   
   > indeed Saladin (famously) killed no-one:  but as soon as th defeated   
   > garrison had marched away he sold the entire civilian population into   
   > slavery. Tricky devil.   
      
   The old "tu quoque" argument. Saladin's behaviour does not mean that the   
   Crusades were a good thing. They were a very evil thing.   
      
   >>   I think it is valid to say that the Crusades were very evil.   
   >   
   > I don't.  They were typical of the warfare of the period: nasty, brutish,   
   > and prolonged. Guilt-tripping Westerners love to self-flagellate over them   
   > as some sort of proto-imperialism (as if anyone at the time thought   
   > imperialism was wrong!), and Muslims like to weave them into their favored   
   > victimhood pose, but really they're not much different at all from Godfrey   
   > and Bohemond's Norman cousins' conquest of England thirty years before, or   
   > the incessant warring between Papal and Imperial allies, or the   
   > contemporary Saga-era fights among the Norse, or for that matter the   
   > brutal and atrocity-filled wars beween and among Turks, Arabs and Kurds.   
      
   I don't recall a big massacre of the people of Hastings. I don't recall any   
   big massacre in Rome, or Palermo. And I am rather taken aback by the way you   
   manage to make out that the massacre of the people of Jerusalem was sommehow   
   the Muslims' own fault because of "their favored  victimhood pose".   
      
   Öjevind   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)