Hiện nay, ngay trước mắt mọi người, các lãnh thổ tổ cò quốc gia lại đang bắt đầu chuyển mình tiếp tục. Nhiều nơi như phi Châu- Sudan- hoặc như Âu Châu- sau sự tan rã của tổ cò lãnh thổ "tiền nhân SôViết để lại" đã có những tổ cò mới ra đời, và hôm nay Ukraine cũng đang có những "giống nòi" mới, "lãnh thổ HIỆN NHÂN đang XÂY DỰNG" xuất hiện!
Bản đồ tổ cò Trung đông cũng đang chuyển mình co giãn. Các "giống nòi" cũng đang tái hình thành chưa ngã ngũ -vì cũng đang bận rộn tiếp tục chém giết nhau, đua nhau xây dựng lãnh thổ giống nòi với "kì (cục) vọng" để lại cho con cháu thế hệ sau cái "di sản đẫm máu linh thiêng" và lòng "hận thù ngất trời"!
Và ngay cả bản đồ Âu Châu, Mỹ Châu cũng cứ đang đổi thay, nhưng "có vẻ "trí tuệ: hơn, bằng các cuộc tranh cãi vận động và TRUNG CẦU DÂN Ý, nhưng tuyệt nhiên chẳng ai tỉ tê, nức nở, hay hùng hồn viện dẫn "sự xây dựng xã hội quốc gia mới" là di sản lãnh thổ tổ tiên hay tiền nhân hậu vật gì hết, hoặc là vì giống nòi bất khuất hay bất tiện, cần...tách rời để tinh túy nối giòng. Mà họ tranh luận dựa trên nguyên lý và điều kiện sống giá trị tự do, tự chủ đồng thuận của bất cứ ai mong muốn. Họ xây dựng một cộng đồng gồm những con người bất kể gốc tích mầu da tín ngưỡng, ngôn ngữ (nghĩa là không có màn thử máu xét lý lịch gốc tích mấy đời để xác minh "dân tộc tính") v.v, miễn ĐỒNG THUẬN NHỮNG GIÁ TRỊ XÃ HỘI NHÂN BẢN. Đây gọi là nguyên lý CỘNG ĐỒNG của GIÁ TRỊ- Community of Values. Như Quebec, Vermont, Catalan... và sẽ còn nữa! Lịch sử chẳng bao giờ dừng lại ở thời điểm nào hết! Cái chấm xanh mờ nhạt chẳng có biên giới tổ cò nào trên đó hết cả! Nó là NHỮNG ĐƯỜNG TƯỞNG TƯỢNG TRÊN MẶT ĐỊA CẦU do nhu cầu điên loạn của chính trị đẻ ra mà thôi!
Để nói rõ hơn, thiết thực sát da sát thịt hơn, ta hãy cứ tạm cho là LÃNH THỔ ĐẤT ĐAI là do TIỀN NHÂN để lại và là DI SẢN CHUNG của giống nòi hay nôm na là "mọi người hậu duệ con dân".
Thế thì tại sao, mỗi người dân khi sinh ra từ "giống nòi" đó KHÔNG TỰ ĐỘNG có một mảnh đất để gọi là mái nhà do "tiền nhân " họ để lại? Mà mọi người, trừ bọn lãnh đạo quyền chính, phải cật lực hộc máu nai lung ra làm việc để có tiền đi thuê, hoặc may mắn hơn, nếu thu nhập cao, buôn bán thành đạt, mới có khả năng mua được mảnh đất cái nhà. Nếu không may mắn hơn, là do CHA MẸ trục tiếp của mình để lại, không phải tiền nhân anh hùng dân tộc, sau khi chính bản thân cha mẹ cũng phải nai lưng cật lực hết cả một đời mới có được? Bằng không sẽ trở thành "vô gia cư" (homeless)?
Miếng đất cái nhà- Nó khó khăn kinh khủng đến độ "đồng bào dân tộc" người trong một nước- phải tranh giành phấn đấu- lắm khi phải lừa đảo chém giết nhau để có một mảnh đất còi làm mái nhà của mình, trong cái gọi là lãnh thổ di sản của tiền nhân để lại cho tất cả mọi người cùng "dân tộc"... (thực tế là trành dành, nai lưng lao động, lừa đảo lấn áp nhau để... mua phần chia "di sản" mới có- nhưng cái thằng bá vơ -di dân- từ xứ khác, không phải con cháu của tổ tiên giống nòi, nó đến, nó có nhiều tiền hơn, nó mua nhà cao cửa rộng đất đẹp hơn những hậu duệ con cháu "giống nòi" của "tiền nhân"!!!
Trong khi trên thực tế, thậm chí đa số con cháu chinh qui chỉ là kẻ thuê mướn nho nhỏ trên "đất tổ di sản của tiền nhân" họ mà thôi ) Ngay ở những xả hội khá hơn như Anh, Mỹ, Úc, Pháp v.v người dân họ "mơ màng" gọi là Giấc Mơ- DREAM ( the Australian dream, American dream v.v chỉ là đã mua được căn nhà- có thể là chưa trả hết nợ nần, và sẽ bị ác mộng mất khi mất việc như đang thấy hiện nay (foreclosure!!!).
Kể cả ngay khi bạn còn may mắn giữ được khế ước chủ quyền toàn diện đất kiểu vương tộc thời phong kiến trung cổ (allodium (land)!!! xxHow do you Obtain an Allodial
Đó là chưa nói sự thật cũng chỉ là THUÊ MƯỚN của thằng Nhà nước Chính phủ, vì nếu không đóng đủ thuế thổ trạch, hay gọi là thuế nhà đất, các loại thuế v.v thì nhà nước chính phủ sẽ tịch biên đấu giá cái "lãnh thổ tiền nhân" đó!(You Don't Own Your Home and Never Will)
Trong đời sống thực tiễn kinh tế xã hội hàng ngày tương tranh kiếm sống- Chẳng có thằng nhà nước chính phủ, hoặc các cái mồm ái quốc, tổ cò, lý thuyết gia dân tộc giống nòi nào nói đến cái "lãnh thổ di sản tiền nhân chung" để chia cả! Tiền trao cháo múc! Có tiền, đủ tiền thì mới có chia phần của "tiền nhân" không thì vô gia cư, lang thang ăn mày đầu đường xó chợ!
Ở nhiều quốc gia tổ cò vì tiền nhân ngu xuẩn - để lại tổ cò nghèo khó xấu xí bất ổn lạc hậu- Cho nên khi có nhiều tiền nhiều của và kiến thức hiểu biết, thì "con cháu khôn ngoan" này, đấm vào cái di sản tiền nhân thổ tả ấy và tìm đủ cách mà DI DÂN đến xã hội tổ cò khác tốt đẹp hơn, để sống vui vẻ hạnh phúc hơn, mua mướn một mảnh lãnh thổ "hiện đại" hơn!
Ngày nay là thế! Chứ lịch sử khi xưa, khi các thằng vua con chúa "anh hùng dân tộc" nó đi chiếm đất giết người mở mang bờ cõi....(cho chúng nó) thì nó chỉ ngồi trên phất cờ, cái đám dân đen không nhà cửa làm thuê mướn, gia nô người ở v.v mới phải trực tiếp cầm dao cầm kiếm mà tàn sát kẻ khác để sống còn và "mở mang" bờ cõi!!!. Vì nếu không tuân lệnh, thì ngay cái thằng "anh hùng dân tộc" đó nó chém đầu mình ngay! và vợ con mình bị đọa đầy tù tội! Ở Việt Nam ai đọc "Hịch Tướng Sĩ" của "anh hùng dân tộc" Trần Hưng Đạo sẽ thấy ngay!
Mà khi các tên "anh hùng dân tộc" thành công chiếm được nhà cửa đất đai của người ta, chúng nó có chia cho DÂN và LÍNH đâu!!! Chúng Nó chia cho giòng họ con cháu của chúng nó gọi là phong vương, phong hầu, phong tước, phong đất v.v theo đúng "phong kiến"! Dân chúng lính tráng dù chính họ mới là kẻ đã đổ xương máu, mất thân nhân, lắm khi tàn phế v.v lại phải BỎ TIỀN THUÊ MƯỚN đất của vương tộc, không thì tiếp tục làm con ăn, người ở, tá điền đủ loại làm công nô lệ suốt đời cho các nhà "vương tộc", con cháu của các "anh hùng dân tộc"!
Đời nhà Trần, nó còn lý sự rằng "Quí tộc như chim cắt diều hâu, dân đen thì như đàn gà đàn quạ sinh ra, đẻ ra để cho diều hâu chim cắt nó bắt nó ăn" đó là lẽ trời tự nhiên cơ đấy! Và chúng nó, từ đất Tầu di dân qua đất Việt- làm nghề chài- dùng mẹo thoán ngôi vua nhà Lý- cũng từ đất Tầu trốn qua- Lý Công Uẩn-Lý Khanh Vân- Ngô Chân Lưu- rồi thành "quí tộc" - nên để bảo vệ quyền lợi cai trị nắm đầu dân cho nhau, bằng cách chỉ lấy nhau trong họ,(Royal Incest- Inbreeding) không cho "truyền giống quí tộc" ra ngoài bá tính. Trần Hưng Đạo thì mò mẫm trèo tường, lấy ngay EM CỦA BỐ MÌNH, tức là cô ruột của mình cơ đấy! Thiên Thành công chúa- (Ai chưa biết, thì tự tìm "đọc chính sử" sẽ biết!).
Đông Tây đều như vậy, bọn côn đồ võ biền, dùng bạo lực và bạo ngược leo lên làm vua, phong nhau làm "quí tộc", rồi lấy lẫn nhau bảo vệ "giòng máu"!!! Có nơi, có thời Cha lấy con gái, Mẹ lấy con trai nữa! Không thò "ra ngoài" cái gì cả!!! Mở đầu ra mà đọc các chính sử, tiến trình nhân văn quyền chính của loài người về định chế xã hội quốc gia nhà nước sẽ biết! (Royal dynasties as human inbreeding laboratories)
Đấy! Cái đất nước lãnh thổ là di sản chung của tiền nhân thực chất nó là như thế ở BẤT CỨ ĐỊNH CHẾ NHÀ NƯỚC nào là như vậy! Nhà nước chính phủ CHỈ tận dụng TRÁCH NHIỆM CHUNG khi nó động viên người ta đi chiến tranh chết cho nó, chứ không có QUYỀN LỢI CHUNG.
Cho nên lúc may mắn sống sót trở về, nếu vợ con, cha mẹ giỏi, có cơ ngơi sẵn thì cưu mang mình tươm tất, bằng không còn khả năng sinh sống tự túc, "tổ quốc" nó bỏ bê vất vưởng! Đông Tây thưong phế binh đi ăn thuê ở mướn, hoặc vô gia cư lê lết bệnh tật, tự tử hà rầm! Trong khi các thằng tướng lãnh lên lon, thăng chức dinh thự hưu bổng dư giả tùm lum!
Gần đây, có thêm ông giáo sư sử học người Do Thái gốc đông âu, tại đại học Tel Aviv, giáo sư Shlomo Sand thấm đòn quốc gia dân tộc Do thái của Ông, nên đã viết quyển sách làm chóng mặt choáng váng giới cầm quyền và giới theo chủ nghĩa yêu nước giống nòi- "Việc Bịa Đặt về Dân Tộc Do Thái Giáo" (The Invention of the Jewish People)- Nhân Chủ có đăng và giới thiệu- đã hiểu ra chính xác rằng "Cái ý niệm hay quan niệm về một vùng đất tổ là một trong những điều quái lạ và cũng có lẻ là một trong những điều tác hoại nhất của kỷ nguyên cận đại" (The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and also, perhaps, one of the most ruinous of the modern era)
Chưa hết làm cho Do Thái choáng váng, Ông còn đưa bằng chứng minh xác rằng các thứ dân tộc đất nước như Pháp, Nga, Đức, Ý v.v cũng chỉ mới được "tác tạo" khoảng 500 năm đổ lại đây theo nhu cầu chính trị của đám quyền chính chủ nghĩa nhà nước!
Tôi có gốc từ đất Việt Nam, không thể nói thay thế cho ai khác, tùy người khác truy cứu tìm hiểu. Nhưng với cái tên nhà nước dân tộc gọi là Viêt Nam, thì quả thật nó chính xác!Từ một đám dân thổ cư ven sông Dương tử, Động đình hồ, bị nhóm dân khôn ngoan đông hơn lấn chiếm, cứ lùi dần xuống, pha nhập với các nhóm bản xứ khác, rồi chạy dần về phía Nam. Sau này vì phải "lập quốc", khôn ra một chút xíu như mọi thói tật chung của mọi thứ người trong cõi "nhân văn người ta" này, mới bắt đầu đẻ ra huyền thoại vớ vỉn mẹ trăm trứng, rời tên họ đổi lung tung "đậu phọng đỏ" rồi Viêt thường rồi Nam Việt, rồi Vạn Xuân, Đại cồ Việt, rồi Đại Việt v.v tùy thằng vua con chúa nó tùy tiện theo ý nó. Dân chúng thì theo lẽ tự nhiên, di dân, chung đụng với bản xứ lấy nhau sinh ra con cháu... chứ có giống nòi, giống giòi khỉ gì!!! Đó là chưa nói, khi lùi xuống "Nam Tiến" giệt chủng người khác, cướp hiếp đàn bà con gái người ta, đẻ thêm ra "giống đậu phọng đỏ" sau khi cũng từng bị "người ta ở phương Bắc Tàu- tràn xuống hiếp đàn bà con gái mình v.v Rồi hiếp đáp tàn giết lẫn nhau vì những cái tên vương triều tổ quốc từng thời kỳ nữa! Thế mới biết cái gọi là "tình dân tộc nhiễu điều phủ lấy giá gương " nó "chân lý" đến cỡ nào!!!
Ngay như cái thời Triệu Đà, biên tướng nhà Tần, đến Hán thì thuần phục, lấy vợ Hán, đẻ con là Triệu Ai Vương, dẫn theo giòng họ thân tộc nắm quyền đất phương Nam, chưa đủ dân số, còn xin viện dân khai hóa khoảng 50 ngàn từ nhà Hán đất Tầu vào Nam giúp lập quốc, lập "giống giòi." (Ai chưa biết cứ TỰ đi truy tìm đọc- Tôi chủ trương khiêu khích để độc giả "giống giòi ta" tập thói quen truy cứu học hỏi, nếu VẪN UẤT ỨC, cảm thấy xúc phạm "tổ cò giống dòi, anh khùng dân tộc"!!!- còn lười biếng thị tự ngu ráng chịu)
Thiết nghĩ đã tạm đủ! Tất cả còn lại tùy sự hung hăng, ấm ức của độc giả đi truy cứu học hỏi tìm thêm ra! Tôi xin gác cái chuyện lẽ ra ai cũng phải biết ở cái kỷ nguyên thông tin rộng mở sẵn có google này!
Thiên hạ ở những nơi tiến bộ, người ta chẳng ai còn ấm ức chuyện vớ vẩn tổ cò dân tộc giống giòi nữa! Người ta đang quan tâm đến nền nhân chủ, nhân phẩm và nhân quyền của tất cả con người trong cái CHẤM XANH MỜ NHẠT này để sao cho sống chung tương tác hòa bình hạnh phúc với nhau mà thôi!
Và nếu có nói đến "di sản tiền nhân", người ta không nói về lãnh thổ, mà nói về những di sản TƯ TƯỞNG tiến bộ nhân bản, những THÀNH QUẢ PHÁT MINH, KHÁM PHÁ về khoa học, y học những thứ đã và đang giúp cả nhân loại này phát triển đi lên, sống gần lại với nhau tốt đẹp hơn. Những "di sản tiền nhân" mà TẤT CẢ MỌI NGƯỜI trên địa cầu này ĐÃ và ĐANG THỤ HƯỞNG!
Có lẽ chỉ có dưới chủ trương nhân chủ phi quyền chính (anarchism) thì mỗi con người khi sinh ra đều tự quyền có một miếng đất làm nhà của chính mình sở hữu cho đến khi chết trả lại cho người còn sống mà thôi!
Lịch sử chính trị nhà nước của nhân loại đã chứng minh khẳng định của Lord Acton quá đúng: "Quyền lực có hướng băng hoại và quyền lực tuyệt đối băng hoại tận cùng. Những vĩ nhân hầu như luôn luôn là những tên gian ác, ngay cả khi chúng dùng ảnh hưởng thôi chứ chưa cần quyền hạn" (Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority) Lord Acton.
Và viện đại học Hawaii đã đúc kết bằng chứng khẳng định này của ông Acton: chỉ trong thế kỷ 20 ( thì 260 triệu nhân mạng đã bị các nhà nước quốc gia giết hại ! 20th Century Democide - University of Hawaii). Chưa kể các nghiên cứu về "thói lệ loạn luân" để bảo vệ đặc quyền tài sản của bọn cầm quyền đủ loại! (Royal Incest- Inbreeding). Cứ tìm mà đọc để lớn lên thành Người cùng nhân loại hôm nay!
nkptc
nhanchu.org
TB:
Cảnh giác khi đọc sách do các "tác giả Việt" nhất là "sách sử" Việt. Cái xã hội mảnh đất và những con người đi từ mảnh đất gọi là Việt ấy, chưa đủ trưởng thành tư duy và tuệ trí cũng như trình độ khoa học nhân văn để có óc khoa học tự phê chất vấn như Etienne dela Boetie, Voltaire, Descartes.. hoặc như hôm nay Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, Shlomo Sand, Daniel Elberge v.v Họ vẫn còn bám chủ nghĩa ái quốc dân tộc nhà nước quốc gia làm nền tảng, nên sách vở luận cứ của họ đầy dẫy những lập luận trẻ con không cần bằng chứng. Nền tảng lập luận diễn giải của các tác giả "đậu phọng đỏ" là ăn cây nào rào cây ấy! Tốt khoe xấu che. "không vạch áo cho người xem lưng! Sợ tội chống lại giống nòi bôi bác dân tộc! Ở Nam thì Ngụy giỏi. Ở Bắc thì tài ba v.v
Tôi chỉ xin nhắc nhở! Tùy quí độc giả vậy!
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Author of 'The Invention of the Jewish People' vents again
The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand.
By Dalia Karpel 12:34 24.05.12 
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17 The concept of homeland is one of the most amazing and also, perhaps, one of the most ruinous of the modern era, says Prof. Shlomo Sand. In his new book, “When and How Was the Land of Israel Invented?” (Kineret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Hebrew), Sand examines the attitude of the Zionist movement toward that territory since its inception. More particularly, he is out to discover how Zionism adopted the idea of the “historic right” to that land, and consolidated an ethos based on the memory of an ancient people whose ancestors were Hebrews who lived in the Kingdom of Judah in the First and Second Temple periods. According to Sand, the Land of Israel was not the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
“Zionism plundered the religious term ‘Land of Israel’ [Eretz Yisrael] and turned it into a geopolitical term,” he says. “The Land of Israel is not the homeland of the Jews. It becomes a homeland at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th − only upon the emergence of the Zionist movement.”
Sand’s previous book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso, 2009; translated by Yael Lotan), stirred a furor. Sand rejected the existence of a Jewish people that was exiled two millennia ago and survived. The majority of the Jews of Eastern Europe, he maintained, are descendants of societies or of individuals who were converted to Judaism on European soil. This concept flagrantly contradicts Israel’s Declaration of Independence, according to which “Eretz-Israel (the Land of Israel, Palestine) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books” [source: Israeli Foreign Ministry]. Sand argues that for 2,000 years the Jews did not constitute a people and that only religion, belief and culture united them.
It was to be expected that “The Invention of the Jewish People” would not be greeted in Israel with great acclaim. However, its author admits that he did not imagine the book “would fall with the impact of a bomb.” The negative reactions have been diverse. Some rejected outright the principal conclusion and the historical facts on which it was based, while others dismissed the research and claimed there was nothing new in the book, that everything was known and accepted, at least by historians. (For a slightly different reason he was also disappointed when the Arabic-language edition of the book was published in Ramallah: Sand was not invited to the book launch, though he was hosted at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem by the institution’s president, Prof. Sari Nusseibeh.)
That was about four years ago, but the hostility toward him seems to be intensifying. Recently, he says, he has been receiving more hate mail and getting obscene phone calls. Last week, he received an envelope in the mail that contained a white powder and a letter branding him an “anti-Semite” and a “Jew hater,” together with a promise that his days were numbered.
“The Invention of the Jewish People” was on Israel’s best-seller lists for 19 weeks and has been translated into 16 languages. Editions in Chinese, Korean, Indonesian and Croatian are in the works. In March 2009, he received the Aujourd’hui Award, presented by French journalists for a leading nonfiction political or historical work. Previous winners of the award include renowned scholars such as Raymond Aron and George Steiner.
Sand also racked up a lot of flying time en route to lecture on the book in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Belgium, Japan, Russia, Germany, Slovenia, Morocco, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Italy. His desk drawer and inbox contain hundreds of letters from around the world, from both Jews and adherents of other religions, taking issue with him.
Sand teaches political ideas and cultures in the history department of Tel Aviv University. When he walks down the corridors of the Gilman Building, which houses the Faculty of Humanities − where he was a student 40 years ago and afterward returned as a lecturer following 10 years in Paris − he feels a growing sense of loneliness. Colleagues who were once his friends and invited him to their homes pass him by as though he were invisible. “They are just envious,” Sand snaps.
Do you feel pleased to be at the center of a controversy in which so many scholars have attacked you?
“A man of my age who decided to write these books and became a pariah of the academic community in Israel gets no enjoyment from it. I would rather be liked, and not squabble. I am liked better abroad. Scholars from Tony Judt to Eric Hobsbawm ... told me the book is groundbreaking. I have an ego like everyone else, and maybe a little more, and without such appreciation I could not have written the new book. I imagine that people will find a few mistakes in it, too. It is impossible to cruise across civilizations and cultures over that span of time without making mistakes. In the previous book, the most vituperative review found four mistakes, which have since been corrected. But if someone were to prove that the book’s basic theses are totally unfounded, that would crush me.”
Are you aware of the fact that some of your critics hold you in contempt?
“They are not contemptuous, they hate me. [Historian] Anita Shapira accused me of ‘denying the Jewish people,’ but added that the book is brilliant. [Historian] Israel Bartal, who assailed me and ‘The Invention of the Jewish People,’ is living off me by appearing on all kinds of academic platforms around the world and arguing against the book. I understand that the book generated considerable distress.”
Why?
“If my thesis is correct, and 500 years ago there was no French people, Russian people, Italian people or Vietnamese people − and, by the same token, no Jewish people − and the story of the exile of a Jewish people in the first or second century C.E., in conjunction with the destruction of the Second Temple was imagined − the implication is that historians from the departments of the history of the Jewish people have been dealing with brara [Hebrew slang for rubbish] for years. Their departments have no legitimization. You will not find a department of the history of the English people at Cambridge University. Along comes Sand, from the Department of General History, and claims these people are working in a department that is a myth and whose existence is unjustified, because there was no Jewish people of a single extraction. If I am right, they are standing on water.”
Nationalizing the Bible
“And all the congregation of Judah, with the priests and the Levites, and all the congregation that came out of Israel, and the strangers that came out of the land of Israel, and that dwelt in Judah, rejoiced.”
− 2 Chronicles 30:25
− 2 Chronicles 30:25
The idea for the new book, Sand says, was sparked by the criticism of “The Invention of the Jewish People.”
“The pro-Zionist British historian Simon Schama wrote that my book had failed in its attempt to sever the connection between the land of the forefathers and the Jewish experience. Other critics wrote that my intention had been to challenge the Jews’ historic right to their ancient homeland, the Land of Israel. I was surprised. Not for a moment did I think the book challenged that right, because I never thought the Jews had a historic right to this land.
“I never imagined,” Sand continues, “that at the beginning of the 21st century there would be critics who would justify Israel’s existence through arguments based on patrimony thousands of years old. Since I have been aware of myself, I have defended our presence here owing to the plight of the Jews, from the end of the 19th century, when Europe spewed out the Jews and the United States shut its gates at a certain stage, and not because of national yearnings or historical right.”
Were you persuaded that “Invention” is a flawed book?
“I realized that the book was not sufficiently balanced and that I had to add what was missing by means of another study, about the modes of invention of the Land of Israel as a territorial space of the Jewish people. This refers to the concept of the Land of Israel in Zionist historiography, focusing on territory and on the settlement process that has been going on here for the past 120 years.
“I applied my theoretical assumptions both in regard to the emergence of nations and peoples, and with respect to the term ‘homeland.’ I examined when this place became a national territory for the Jews and why it was necessary to adhere at any cost to the narrative of a people with one origin, who left its homeland 2,000 years ago, wandered and wandered, reached the gates of Moscow, made a U-turn and decided to return to its native land.
“The second myth that needed to be deconstructed is that the Land of Israel was always the property of the Jewish people and was promised it by God, who even gave his emissaries a deed of title, namely the Bible, which Zionism, despite its secularity, nationalized and turned into a salient work of history.”
In this year’s Bible quiz, at Pesach, Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar said, “We believe with all our heart that the actualization of settlement is a return to the land of our forefathers and that this right is intertwined with the Jewish people’s right to national security ... The patriarch Abraham and the patriarch Jacob came to Beit El and Hebron almost 4,000 years ago, long before they were the subjects of media interest.”
“There is no such thing as national territory that has belonged to the Jewish people since the biblical period, and I prove that in the book. That is a mythic statement which is characteristic of national leaders in the modern history of the last 200 years. The territorial myth has worked well since the start of the 20th century. Zionism is not the only case. To create nations in the present and with a view to the future, ‘eternal’ peoples are created with a view to the past. Seventy years ago, every Frenchman was convinced that he had been a Gaul, just like the Germans in the first half of the last century, who believed they were the direct descendants of the Teutons. That [sort of perception] generally disappears amid the philosophy and thought and everyday life of the Western Europeans. Here, though, it remains implanted within the historical-political consciousness of many Israelis.”
Many studies cast doubt on the Bible’s historical truths. In his new book, “Ha-Shem: The Secret Numbers of the Hebrew Bible and the Mystery of the Exodus from Egypt” (Hebrew), Prof. Israel Knohl, who is religiously observant, challenges the Mount Sinai event as it is described in the Torah, and maintains that the Exodus from Egypt has no connection with reality.
“I have a higher regard for studies by archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein and Ze’ev Herzog from Tel Aviv University, and for the Bible scholar Nadav Na’aman, but I do not agree with all of them. I am far more persuaded by Bible research conducted by non-Israeli and non-Zionist scholars, like Niels Peter Lemche, Philip Davies and Thomas Thompson. I rely on them and have adopted their approach that the Bible was written more or less between the fifth century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. It began to be written after the political-intellectual elite was exiled from Judah to Babylon. The books of the Bible were apparently composed only after many of those who had been in Babylon came to Jerusalem with the agreement of the Persians. There is no doubt that the talented authors knew the meaning of exile first-hand: It resonates like a concrete threat throughout the Torah and the books of the prophets.
“Researchers such as Thompson view the Bible as theological fiction: In the same way that Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ is not informative in regard to the ancient period of imperial Rome, the Bible cannot teach us historical facts. The stories in the Bible are the basis of Western civilization and also the basis for the New Testament and the Koran. They are astonishing literary texts, but the last thing they are is history books − which is why I, as a historian, ignore them. Finkelstein and Herzog found that the Exodus from Egypt never happened and that the land of Canaan was not conquered swiftly; not to mention Abraham, who is a mythological figure. In short, I think that modern Jewish nationalism − Zionism − took theology and turned it into history.”
Christian heritage
“Now when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying: Awake, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel; for those who sought the life of the child are dead.”
− Matthew 2: 19-20
− Matthew 2: 19-20
The word homeland (moledet, in Hebrew), appears 19 times in the entire Hebrew Bible, about half of them in Genesis, but the term refers to one’s land of birth or to the place from which a family originates. The heroes of the Bible never set out to defend their homeland in order to win an election or for reasons of political patriotism, Sand points out in the new book. The biblical texts, he writes, show that the “Jahwist religion” did not spring up in the territory which God earmarked for his chosen ones. Indeed, he emphasizes, according to the Bible itself the birth of monotheism occurred outside the Promised Land.
God appears for the first time in the context of a passage about Haran, in today’s southern Turkey, where he commands Abram, an Aramean, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee” (Genesis 12:1). Abram indeed makes his way to the land, but does not stay there long and goes on to Egypt. The second encounter with God − the giving of the Law to Moses − takes place in the Sinai desert, according to the Bible, after the Exodus from Egypt.
Sand reminds his readers that neither Abraham (as Abram is later referred to) nor Moses were natives of Canaan. Abraham sends his son, Isaac, back to his homeland to marry, and Isaac in turn sends his son, Jacob, from Canaan to Aram Naharayim, where he marries Leah and Rachel, and fathers 12 sons and one daughter with them and with his concubines. The sons, together with Joseph’s two sons, will become the “fathers” of the Tribes of Israel; all were born in a foreign land with the exception of Benjamin, who was born in Canaan.
“Abraham, his wife, his son’s bride, the daughters-in-law and concubines of his grandson and nearly all his great-grandchildren were, according to the mythic story, natives of the northern Fertile Crescent who immigrated to Canaan at the commandment of the Creator,” Sand writes. He recalls that all of Jacob’s sons “went down” to Egypt, where his offspring − that is, the “seed of Israel” − were born in the course of 400 years and did not hesitate to marry local women.
In that case, what is the origin of the term “Land of Israel” as the homeland of the Hebrews?
“In my view, the term appeared after the Romans changed the name of the country from Judah to Syria-Palestine, and people then started to emphasize the term ‘Land of Israel.’ But in the Talmud it is an area that extends geographically from south of Acre to north of Ashkelon, and the term appears in the context of a commandment. The Talmudic Land of Israel is not a geopolitical term; it is a theological term which refers to a holy land whose residents must obey special commandments relating to that land.”
Sand notes that neither in the past nor today does the term “Land of Israel” correspond to the area of jurisdiction of the State of Israel. In Hebrew it has been used for many years as the standard name for the region that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In the fairly recent past, it was also applied to extensive areas east of the Jordan.
Sand looked in vain for the term “Land of Israel” in both Books of Maccabees and in the historical writings of Josephus Flavius, all of which are about the Second Temple period. “When he [Josephus] describes the territory that was the arena of the events for the rebellion,” Sand writes, “he divides it into three separate lands: the land of Galilee, the land of Samaria and the land of Judah. These three regions do not constitute a single territorial unit, and the Land of Israel as a ‘concept’ is not to be found in his writings.”
Sand reached the conclusion that the name “Land of Israel,” as one of the many epithets for this territory − others being Holy Land, land of Canaan, land of Zion, land of the Hart − probably first appeared after the destruction of the Second Temple, and, ironically, in the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. However, even that is an exceptional one-time usage: the New Testament generally preferred “land of Judah.”
Within Jewish communities as well, the term “Land of Israel” only took root some time after the destruction of the Second Temple, when Jewish monotheism showed signs of regression across the Mediterranean Basin in the wake of the failure of three anti-pagan revolts that were fomented within 70 years (the Great Revolt, the Diasporic Revolt and the Bar Kochba uprising). It was only in the second century C.E., when the Romans named the territory Palaestina and many of the inhabitants began to convert to Christianity that we find, in the Mishna and the Talmud, the first hesitant use of the “Land of Israel,” Sand notes.
But that term, he writes, in its Christian or Jewish rabbinic version, differs from its modern meaning: “It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, after a sojourn of years in the crucible of Protestantism, that the theological Land of Israel was finally converted and polished as a saliently geo-national term.”
Yet the Declaration of Independence tells a different story: “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.”
“This land is a holy place in which it is difficult to subsist. I cite, without distortion, references about how careful the Jews were not to live here, because they feared they would desecrate the holy soil due to the great burden of fulfilling the precepts on it. They were concerned at the possibility of contaminating the holy place by pursuing everyday life: having children, falling ill and so forth.
“For 1,600 years believing Jews did not want to come here. The Talmud contains an explicit prohibition ‘not to storm the wall,’ which remains in force from the Talmudic period until the time of Moses Mendelssohn, the first of the Jewish philosophers of the modern era. They all know that the Jewish people must not ‘storm the wall,’ meaning that there must not be a collective immigration to the Holy Land.”
Why did Christian pilgrims come to the Holy Land in their masses, whereas only few Jews came, and even those for the most part only to die and be buried there?
“I was surprised to discover that thousands of Christian pilgrims came here, whereas until the 11th century we do not know of one case of a Jewish pilgrim. Other testimonies, too, do not suggest that Jews came here before the 11th century. We know about the poet and thinker Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, who planned to come to the Holy Land in the year 1140 but did not succeed. One reason for this is that the Jews belonged to conservative communities who feared for their very existence and did not welcome spontaneous private journeys. A Jew who wanted to embark on a journey like this knew that there was no institutional structure to help him.
“The Christian pilgrim, in contrast, could avail himself of churches and inns everywhere. The journey was also far more difficult for Jews, who had to eat kosher food and fulfill the precepts and ensure the existence of a prayer quorum. Jews came to the Holy Land at the end of their life, in order to die and be buried there and thus to ensure themselves a place in the next world. Why did my father’s grandfather betray his family, take all the savings and travel from Lodz to Jerusalem? Because he wanted to be like those who pass you on the right: He wanted to be first before the onset of the resurrection of the dead.”
You write that it is not the homeland idea that spawned nationalism, but nationalism that spawned the homeland in the modern era. Was it Zionism that set this development in motion among the Jews?
“No. Zvi (Heinrich) Graetz wrote his 11-volume ‘History of the Jews’ beginning in the 1850s. That is the first proto-national work of [Jewish] history. Graetz invented the Jew in the modern sense of the term and set his place of birth in a Middle Eastern land. He writes: ‘Such a strip of land was Canaan (now called Palestine), which abuts the border of Phoenicia in the south and lies along the Mediterranean coastline.’ He did not know what the Land of Israel was or where its borders lay, as he mentions at the beginning of the book.
“The first practical Zionist,” Sand continues, “was Israel Belkind, who was one of the first settlers in Palestine, before the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. Belkind, the coordinator of the Bilu movement [whose members arrived in Palestine in 1882], wrote that the Arabs were descended from the ancient Hebrews. He and the first Bilu group, he added, encountered ‘a good many of our people, our own flesh and blood.’ Belkind drew his map: In the north the land extended as far as Acre, in the east to the Syrian desert and in the south as far as the river of Egypt.
“Similarly, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, in his book ‘Land of Israel,’ published in 1883 in Jerusalem, imagines the new land according to ‘the borders of Moses’ Torah, from Wadi el-Arish to Sidon, from Sidon to Mount Hermon.’ They conjure up an imagined territory and take the Bible as proof of its existence. They do not believe in God, but they believe in the Promised Land. Before dying, God promised them the land.
“The first book that demarcates and analyzes borders was written in Yiddish, in 1918, by the two brilliant intellectuals of the period. Its title is ‘The Land of Israel in the Past and the Present’ and the authors are Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion. Their map of the Land of Israel encompasses both sides of the Jordan, includes the El Arish region and extends to Damascus.”
What about the Zionist Congresses?
“Herzl talked about a territory. There were no borders here in his period, because the country was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the word ‘Palestine’ refers to an indeterminate region. The term ‘Palestine-Land of Israel’ was devised by representatives of the British Mandate. The first Zionist Congresses used the term ‘Palestine’ but did not yet talk about borders; the Bible resonates powerfully in the background. That is very important. What, after all, is Zionism? It is a secular movement that knows it has to exploit a myth and turns to the Bible. Zionist leaders from Max Nordau to Arthur Ruppin took the Bible and turned it into secular history. This should not be considered manipulation per se; they truly believed in that. Such creators of myths cling to the myths and need land and an eternal people; in their imagination they construct a national territory. Zionism, which thought big, appropriated the term ‘Land of Israel’ from the Talmudic heritage and translated it into a national geopolitical term.”
Recollections of ’67
“On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution.”
− Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
− Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
Sand opens his new work by sharing with his readers a personal experience. His aim is to make clear the source of his intellectual approach to the mythology of “national soil, tombs of ancestral forefathers and large chiseled stones.” On June 5, 1967, Sand was a young reserve soldier in a brigade that fought in the Jerusalem area. His battalion conquered the Abu Tor neighborhood, at a heavy cost: 17 soldiers killed and dozens wounded. “My luck held, and with no few efforts I remained alive.” After the battle he and his buddies were taken to see the Western Wall.
“The size of the hewn stones made me fearful,” Sand writes. “I remember feeling small and very weak in their presence. I did not yet imagine that it had never been the wall of the Temple and that for most of the period since the destruction − in contrast to the summit of the Temple Mount, where Jewish believers were forbidden to tread for fear of being contaminated by the dead − it had not been considered a holy place.”
However, he continues, “secular agents of culture” started to recreate a tradition with the aid of so-called victory albums and focused on a photograph of three soldiers [the reference is to a photo by David Rubinger of soldiers at the Wall − eds.], “their eyes blurred with 2,000 years of longing for the thick wall and their hearts overflowing at the ‘liberation’ of the land of the forefathers.”
After the war, Sand and other soldiers were sent to guard the Intercontinental Hotel atop the Mount of Olives, previously in Jordanian hands (today it is the Seven Arches Hotel), adjacent to the old Jewish cemetery. When he called his father to tell him where he was, the latter reminded him about the story of his grandfather, a Hasid from Lodz, who decided shortly before his death to make the trip to Jerusalem and be buried on the Mount of Olives.
Shlomo Sand was born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Linz, Austria. He was raised in a secular communist home. His father left the synagogue to protest the removal of his mother (Sand’s grandmother) from the front rows after her husband died and she could not afford the price of the seat. Sand’s father did not want to have him circumcised, but when he went to Hamburg to demonstrate against the forced disembarkation of the illegal immigrants aboard the Exodus on German soil, his mother and grandmother yielded to tradition and to social pressure. (“I am in favor of circumcision on condition that everyone circumcise himself,” Sand says.)
In 1948, Sand’s communist father decided that his place was in Palestine, alongside the fighters against the British forces. The family moved into an abandoned apartment in Old Jaffa. Sand’s father found work as a porter and as a night guard in the building of the Communist Party; his mother worked as a cleaning woman. At his parents’ recommendation, Sand joined the Communist Youth League as a teenager. In the meantime, the family moved to a two-room apartment near the Noga Cinema in Jaffa. Sand was not much of a student but devoured books. Thrown out of school in the 10th grade, he started to study electronics in the evening, working by day for a radio repair business.
Sand was drafted in 1965 into the Nahal paramilitary brigade, serving in Yad Hanna, a communist kibbutz. After his discharge he renewed his ties with the party. In 1968 he was offered the opportunity to join its ranks and to study film in Lodz. Instead, he signed a petition against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and stayed in Tel Aviv. He joined the radical left-wing group Matzpen and was arrested a number of times for distributing leaflets. But he did not remain long in Matzpen, either. Sand recalls that he was among the few in the group who were not at university, either as students or lecturers, and accordingly suffered from the power structure of the organization’s intellectual hierarchy. In addition, the organization’s questioning of Israel’s existence was not to his liking, and he left.
After obtaining a matriculation certificate in 1971, he studied history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 1975, he enrolled in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Georges Sorel and Marxism. Ten years later he returned to Israel and has been teaching at Tel Aviv University since. He is currently at work on a new book about identity politics in Israel and elsewhere, with the focus on the problem of maintaining a secular Jewish culture in the face of Israeli culture.
In his new work about the invention of the Land of Israel he reveals a secret he kept for 45 years. Two months after a stint of reserve duty in 1967, he was called up again and posted to the police station at the entrance to Jericho. The soldiers there told him that Palestinians who tried to cross the Jordan at night and return to their homes were gunned down systematically, whereas those who made the attempt in daylight were arrested. Sand was assigned to guard those prisoners.
One night in September 1967 he witnessed soldiers abusing an elderly Palestinian man who had been arrested with a large amount of dollars in his possession. “I climbed onto a crate and watched a harrowing scene through the window,” he writes. “The detainee was sitting tied to a chair, and my good buddies were beating him all over and occasionally pressing burning cigarettes into his arms. I climbed down from the crate, threw up and returned to my post shaking and frightened. A little later, a pickup left carrying the body ... My friends shouted to me that they were going to the Jordan River to dump the body.”
You were armed − why didn’t you intervene? You could have fired in the air, summoned help.
“I lost my senses completely. I was afraid to intervene. The fact that I did not try to do anything to stop them depressed me for years and resonates within me to this day. That is why I write about in the book, because I still have guilt feelings. I am ashamed that I did not do anything. When I got back from reserve duty in Jericho, I went to see MK Meir Wilner [head of the Israel Communist Party] and told him about it. I also consulted with [the writer] Dan Omer, whom I had met during the fighting, when we both shook as we shot in Abu Tor. Omer, who was five years older than I, adopted me. He and Wilner said there were too many cases like that and there was nothing to be done. That night I felt that I had lost my homeland, namely my childhood neighborhood in Jaffa, along with my parents, the neighbors and the school. A concrete homeland that I lost at that time.”
Why are you invoking this now?
“In the book I do a national reckoning. You know, I am not anti-national. I am an Israeli and you can call me an Israeli patriot. There are neighborhoods in Tel Aviv which I feel are mine, street corners connected to events and experiences of friendships and loves. Israeli patriotism is not only a discourse about land or war myths. It partakes of small loves and small demonstrations and experiences connected to Hebrew literature and language. I lived in France for 10 years, and readers of my books discern my Frenchness in the mode of analysis and the approach to theories, but the books are written in Hebrew. I am approaching the exit: I am at an advanced age and can no longer become someone else.”
Did you go back to the murder of the Palestinian man in order to say , “Look, I am one of you and once I was even made to be a bit of a war criminal”?
“Like everyone, I too am a bit of a war criminal. That is part of my life. Some time after that reserve service in Jericho I became a daily activist in Matzpen and distributed leaflets and sprayed slogans on walls at night and got beaten up. I was a member of the political fringe. I am not a victim, but my psychological distress started then, at the age of 20. The years in Matzpen gave me a great deal, and the political activity was a type of healing. I later left the organization heartbroken, and in despair sank into drugs. My partner and my best friend got into heroin. Maybe because I am Polish I did not follow them, and instead of heroin I took matriculation exams and entered university. The best friend committed suicide. Others left the country.”
You left too, but came back. Have you ever considered leaving Israel since then?
“My Israeliness is without Holocaust justifications. It is a simple, everyday Israeliness which I did not choose. There was a moment when I could have stayed in France; I already had French citizenship. I returned here because of the Tel Aviv sun, because of the beach and because of Jaffa. I recently reread the famous interview with [writer and journalist] Amos Elon, in which he explains why he is leaving Israel for Tuscany. He said he no longer wanted to live here. I do not want to leave. I write a book instead of pulling up stakes. I am not some idiot who thinks books change the world, but I know that when the world changes, people look for other books.”
It takes a village
“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”
− Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
− Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
Sand dedicates his new book to the memory of the inhabitants of the village of Sheikh Munis, “a specific space that is enshrined as a wound within me.” The last chapter discusses the history of the village, on whose land Tel Aviv University and several museums were built after its original, peace-seeking inhabitants became refugees in 1948. Sand himself, in addition to working at the university, lives in Ramat Aviv Gimmel − an upscale neighborhood that also stands on land of the former village.
He does not propose “to erase the university in order to establish a village and plant orchards instead.” He does believe, however, that “it is the State of Israel’s obligation to recognize the catastrophe that was inflicted on others by the very fact of its establishment.” As for the university, it should “place at the entrance gate a memorial plaque for those who were uprooted from Sheik Munis, the peaceful village that disappeared as though it had never been.”
Why, in a historical work based on research and theory, did you find it necessary to promote your view that Israel should be “a state of all its citizens”?
“In my previous books I focused on intellectualism and on the connection between history and cinema. In ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ and in the new book I wanted to be more honest, and I reveal my ideological motivations. The two books constitute a direct and even scathing attack on Zionist historiography. I quote Walter Benjamin, who said that the historian should brush history against the grain.
“The fact that I espouse an ideology does not make me either a good historian or a bad historian. All historians possess an ideology. A historian who writes national historiography must acknowledge that. I decided to set forth my ideology so that the reader will understand that I am coming from a very specific place.”
Weren’t you afraid of reprisals?
“I did not think the first book would fall with the impact of a bomb. I knew it would stir opposition, but I did not imagine that it would engender a tumult. When [the journalist and critic] Boaz Evron put forward similar arguments in his 1988 book ‘A National Reckoning’ [English version, 1995: “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”] − no one protested. I understand now that I went out on a limb. [Former MK] Avraham Burg told me that in the 1950s the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team [identified with the right-wing Herut party] had 5,000 fans and Hapoel Katamon [identified with the labor federation] had one fan. In one game the Beitar fans shouted ‘The ref is a son of a bitch’ and the Hapoel fan got up and attacked them. Burg said I am like that fan.”
Some people took it as a provocation, and maybe there is something a bit megalomaniac about it.
“I am deeply fearful and the opposite of a megalomaniac. Do you want to say that I am impelled by being egocentric? Yes and no. I ponder things. If I were a megalomaniac I would not have written these books. I would have written ‘A Short History of Mankind,’ for example [referring to a current Israeli best-seller].
“It is also not accurate to say that I am preaching a political approach. In my previous book I am critical of an ethnocentric state, and in the new book I set forth a critical approach to a country that expands endlessly.
“I would like to exchange Land of Israel patriotism − which clings to myths and cannot leave Hebron, and is leading us to be an occupier nation of a conquered population − for Israeli patriotism. I am against a binational state. As a democrat, I advocate an Israeli republic within the 1967 boundaries, because of the fact that Zionism has succeeded in forging a life, society, language and culture here that cannot be erased. The justification for our existence here is the fact that the Zionist project created here an Israeli people, not a Jewish people. The ideal thing would be a type of confederation between two republics: Israeli and Palestinian.”
Finally, did a Palestinian people exist?
“No. The Palestinians were Arabs who lived in this region for hundreds of years. Zionist colonization forged the Palestinian people. Of all the fine reviews I received, one that stood out was by Moncef Marzouki, who is now president of Tunisia. He wrote: We should applaud Shlomo Sand and we too are obliged to write books like these about the history of the Arabs.”
Shapira and Bartal vs. Sand
Prof. Anita Shapira heads the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University. This fall, University Press of New England will publish her book “Israel: A History,” which tells the story of Zionism, the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine and the State of Israel, “from the beginning until the 21st century.”
“There was nothing new in Prof. Sand’s first book,” Shapira says. “It is, after all, the old debate about nationalism, from the 1980s: Does nationalism contain an ancient historical core, or is it a creation of the 19th century? Other than resorting to extreme terminology, Sand does nothing there that we didn’t argue about earlier.
“We [in the institute] teach on the basis of an established historical concept that there was in fact a Jewish collectivity which considered itself a people − not only in the religious sense, but in the sense of an entity whose essence transcends the merely religious. The expression ‘All Jews are responsible for each other’ is not a religious one. Sand repeats the same mantras that were already trite in the 1980s and 1990s, and recycles them. (And, by the way, I did not say that Sand’s book is ‘brilliant’; I said it is well-written.)
“The Jews are an extraterritorial people. When a Jew in Europe cares for a Jew in Yemen, he does so because he identifies with him as a member of his people. In the case of the Damascus blood libel − when the Jews of France and Britain, who are ostensibly French and English people of the Mosaic faith, were outraged − it was because they identified with the Jewish nation. It is a national identity. I have not seen concern among Catholics for their coreligionists in another country.”
Says Prof. Israel Bartal, from the Department of the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “I am ‘living off’ Sand? That is a wild exaggeration. I don’t recall ever having been invited to talk about his book. The only case in which I discussed his book was ... at a public event held at Tel Aviv University.
“I deplore the ... impertinent manner of speech which certain people take the liberty of using when their colleagues disagree with their opinions. It’s a style that generates sorrow and compassion and is intended to arouse passions. My work deals with Eastern Europe and with Polish history, and when I read Sand I am somehow reminded of the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s. I wrote a review of his first book, but I am afraid he did not grasp the depth of my criticism − namely, that he took most of his arguments from Zionist historiography and then claimed that what these departments are doing in the universities is of no importance.
“In fact, I am one of the first researchers of the history of the Land of Israel and the history of Jewish nationalism who argued that Zionism recreated the Jewish people as the concept of a nation. My first book described how the Zionist movement took a pre-modern group and redefined it as a people and a nation. What, then, is he saying that’s new, and why does he say that it’s the opposite of what the Zionist historians say?”
==
Cannes, April 5, 1887
Dear Mr. Creighton,
{1}The point is not whether you like the Inquisition . . . but whether you can, without reproach to historical accuracy, speak of the later mediaeval papacy as having been tolerant and enlightened. What you say on that point struck me exactly as it would strike me to read that the French Terrorists were tolerant and enlightened, and avoided the guilt of blood. Bear with me whilst I try to make my meaning quite clear.
{2}We are not speaking of the Papacy towards the end of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when, for a couple of generations, and down to 1542,there was a decided lull in the persecuting spirit. Nor are we speaking of the Spanish Inquisition. . . . I mean the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Innocent III down to the time of Hus. These men instituted a system of Persecution, with a special tribunal, special functionaries, special laws. They carefully elaborated, and developed, and applied it. They protected it with every sanction, spiritual and temporal. They inflicted, as far as they could, the penalties of death and damnation on everybody who resisted it. They constructed quite a new system of procedure, with unheard of cruelties, for its maintenance. They devoted to it a whole code of legislation, pursued for several generations. . . .
{3}It is perfectly familiar to every Roman Catholic student initiated in canon law and papal affairs. . . ; it has been constantly attacked, constantly defended, and never disputed or denied, by any Catholic authority. There are some dozens of books, some of them official, containing the particulars.
{4}Indeed it is the most conspicuous fact in the history of the mediaeval papacy. . . . A man is hanged not because he can or cannot prove his claim to virtues, but because it can be proved that he has committed a particular crime. That one action overshadows the rest of his career. It is useless to argue that he is a good husband or a good poet. The one crime swells out of proportion to the rest. . . .
{5}I see clearly how a mild and conciliatory view of Persecution will enable you to speak pleasantly and inoffensively. . . . But what amazes and disables me is that you speak of the Papacy not as exercising a just severity, but as not exercising any severity. You do not say, these misbelievers deserved to fall into the hands of these torturers and Fire-the-faggots; but you ignore, you even deny, at least implicitly, the existence of the torture-chamber and the stake. . . .
{6}You say that people in authority are not [to] be snubbed or sneezed at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude. I really don't know whether you exempt them because of their rank, or of their success and power, or of their date. The chronological plea [that they lived a long time ago] may have some little value in a limited sphere of instances. It does not allow of our saying that such a man did not know right from wrong, unless we are able to say that he lived before Columbus, before Copernicus, and could not know right from wrong. It can scarcely apply to the centre of Christendom, 1500 after the birth of our Lord. . . .
{7}I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science. . . .
{8}The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency [that is, set aside the integrity with which historians should judge the past] for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of . . . [high moral standards. Then history] serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst better than the purest.
==
Origin
Absolute monarchies are those in which all power is given to or, as is more often the case, taken by, the monarch. Examples of absolute power corrupting are Roman emperors (who declared themselves gods) and Napoleon Bonaparte (who declared himself an emperor).
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely" arose as part of a quotation by the expansively named and impressively hirsute John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
The text is a favourite of collectors of quotations and is always included in anthologies. If you are looking for the exact "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" wording, then Acton is your man. He didn't invent the idea though; quotations very like it had been uttered by several authors well before 1887. Primary amongst them was another English politician with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778, who said something similar in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770:
"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it"
Acton is likely to have taken his lead from the writings of the French republican poet and politician, again a generously titled individual - Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine. An English translation of Lamartine's essay France and England: a Vision of the Future was published in London in 1848 and included this text:
It is not only the slave or serf who is ameliorated in becoming free... the master himself did not gain less in every point of view,... for absolute power corrupts the best natures.
Whether it is Lamartine or his anonymous English translator who can claim to have coined 'absolute power corrupts' we can't be sure, but we can be sure that it wasn't Lord Acton.
Lord Acton
(John Emerich Edward Dalberg)
Letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton
(Apr. 5, 1887)
Excerpt of the full text at the Online Library of Liberty.
This letter is part of a larger conversation about how historians should judge the past. Mandell Creighton, an Archbishop of the Church of England, objected to what he saw as a modern tendency to be unnecessarily critical of authority figures. When Creighton wrote about the past, he tended toward a moral relativism that was uncritical of past leaders (for example, glossing over past popes' corruption or abuse).
Lord Acton disagreed. Although he was Roman Catholic, he could not ignore popes' corruption or abuse. He argued that all people -- past or present, leaders or not -- should be held to universal moral standards.
(NB. Paragraph numbers apply to this excerpt, not the original sources.)
Lord Acton disagreed. Although he was Roman Catholic, he could not ignore popes' corruption or abuse. He argued that all people -- past or present, leaders or not -- should be held to universal moral standards.
(NB. Paragraph numbers apply to this excerpt, not the original sources.)
Dear Mr. Creighton,
{1}The point is not whether you like the Inquisition . . . but whether you can, without reproach to historical accuracy, speak of the later mediaeval papacy as having been tolerant and enlightened. What you say on that point struck me exactly as it would strike me to read that the French Terrorists were tolerant and enlightened, and avoided the guilt of blood. Bear with me whilst I try to make my meaning quite clear.
{2}We are not speaking of the Papacy towards the end of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, when, for a couple of generations, and down to 1542,there was a decided lull in the persecuting spirit. Nor are we speaking of the Spanish Inquisition. . . . I mean the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Innocent III down to the time of Hus. These men instituted a system of Persecution, with a special tribunal, special functionaries, special laws. They carefully elaborated, and developed, and applied it. They protected it with every sanction, spiritual and temporal. They inflicted, as far as they could, the penalties of death and damnation on everybody who resisted it. They constructed quite a new system of procedure, with unheard of cruelties, for its maintenance. They devoted to it a whole code of legislation, pursued for several generations. . . .
{3}It is perfectly familiar to every Roman Catholic student initiated in canon law and papal affairs. . . ; it has been constantly attacked, constantly defended, and never disputed or denied, by any Catholic authority. There are some dozens of books, some of them official, containing the particulars.
{4}Indeed it is the most conspicuous fact in the history of the mediaeval papacy. . . . A man is hanged not because he can or cannot prove his claim to virtues, but because it can be proved that he has committed a particular crime. That one action overshadows the rest of his career. It is useless to argue that he is a good husband or a good poet. The one crime swells out of proportion to the rest. . . .
{5}I see clearly how a mild and conciliatory view of Persecution will enable you to speak pleasantly and inoffensively. . . . But what amazes and disables me is that you speak of the Papacy not as exercising a just severity, but as not exercising any severity. You do not say, these misbelievers deserved to fall into the hands of these torturers and Fire-the-faggots; but you ignore, you even deny, at least implicitly, the existence of the torture-chamber and the stake. . . .
{6}You say that people in authority are not [to] be snubbed or sneezed at from our pinnacle of conscious rectitude. I really don't know whether you exempt them because of their rank, or of their success and power, or of their date. The chronological plea [that they lived a long time ago] may have some little value in a limited sphere of instances. It does not allow of our saying that such a man did not know right from wrong, unless we are able to say that he lived before Columbus, before Copernicus, and could not know right from wrong. It can scarcely apply to the centre of Christendom, 1500 after the birth of our Lord. . . .
{7}I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science. . . .
{8}The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history. If we may debase the currency [that is, set aside the integrity with which historians should judge the past] for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then history ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of . . . [high moral standards. Then history] serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst better than the purest.
You Don’t Own Your Home and Never Will
By Pete Sisco January 04, 2014 "Information Clearing House - I’m not talking about the bank holding the mortgage on your home. Even if you think you own your home free and clear, you really don’t own it at all. You lease it from the State and it sets the terms and conditions that allow you to occupy the house or sell it to another lessee. The State owns the house and land in perpetuity and you can not alter this arrangement.
When I was a kid my dad bought a new four-bedroom house in 1964 for about $28,000. He had a good job and stuck his financial neck out by taking on a whopping monthly payment of $190 on a twenty-five year mortgage. He and my mom would talk about how when they got the house paid off they would not have to pay the $190 every month and that would basically put them on Easy Street.
My dad never made it the twenty five years. By the time my mom paid off the mortgage the monthly property tax bill was $450 per month! There is no way to pay that off once and for all and, in fact, it is subject to constant increase by political whim. Eventually the money paid in relentless property taxes exceeds the cost of the home. What was true for her is true for all homeowners.
Moreover, the terms and conditions under which you occupy “your” home are a further burden to you. You can’t add onto the home without permission, you can’t subdivide the land without permission. You can only have certain pets and only a certain number of them. You must maintain the home to a certain standard. Violation of any rule can cause you to lose the home and be evicted for repeated non-compliance with State orders. (After all, they are the true owners.)
Depending on your tax jurisdiction, when you die a large portion of your home’s value can be claimed by the State and your heirs would either have to pony up the cash or sell the home to pay the inheritance taxes. Then the State resets the clock with the new “tenant.”
Throughout the long life of the home the State does not contribute a penny to the expense of the home’s upkeep or the costs of complying with the myriad of regulations concerning things like fence heights, swimming pool regulations, tree trimming, wildfire regulations and dozens of other ordinances or bylaws.
Moreover, the State-granted monopoly utilities provided to the home – water, phone, gas and electricity – are further taxed at constantly increasing rates which you must pay in order to occupy the home.
Claiming to be an “owner” under these unilateral and coercive terms and conditions begs the definition of the word ownership. I have briefly lived in a communist country and I can tell you there is very little practical difference in home ownership there. Oh, plus their kids didn’t have put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the State every morning at school – I guess that would be too Orwellian for communists.
Pete Sisco grew up in Canada, emigrated to California in his twenties and to Idaho in his thirties. He left the USA and has since lived in Belize, Mexico, China, Thailand, England and Spain. Since 2006 he and his wife have been traveling the world non-stop as digital nomads. http://www.petesisco.com
===
By Pete Sisco January 04, 2014 "Information Clearing House - I’m not talking about the bank holding the mortgage on your home. Even if you think you own your home free and clear, you really don’t own it at all. You lease it from the State and it sets the terms and conditions that allow you to occupy the house or sell it to another lessee. The State owns the house and land in perpetuity and you can not alter this arrangement.
When I was a kid my dad bought a new four-bedroom house in 1964 for about $28,000. He had a good job and stuck his financial neck out by taking on a whopping monthly payment of $190 on a twenty-five year mortgage. He and my mom would talk about how when they got the house paid off they would not have to pay the $190 every month and that would basically put them on Easy Street.
My dad never made it the twenty five years. By the time my mom paid off the mortgage the monthly property tax bill was $450 per month! There is no way to pay that off once and for all and, in fact, it is subject to constant increase by political whim. Eventually the money paid in relentless property taxes exceeds the cost of the home. What was true for her is true for all homeowners.
Moreover, the terms and conditions under which you occupy “your” home are a further burden to you. You can’t add onto the home without permission, you can’t subdivide the land without permission. You can only have certain pets and only a certain number of them. You must maintain the home to a certain standard. Violation of any rule can cause you to lose the home and be evicted for repeated non-compliance with State orders. (After all, they are the true owners.)
Depending on your tax jurisdiction, when you die a large portion of your home’s value can be claimed by the State and your heirs would either have to pony up the cash or sell the home to pay the inheritance taxes. Then the State resets the clock with the new “tenant.”
Throughout the long life of the home the State does not contribute a penny to the expense of the home’s upkeep or the costs of complying with the myriad of regulations concerning things like fence heights, swimming pool regulations, tree trimming, wildfire regulations and dozens of other ordinances or bylaws.
Moreover, the State-granted monopoly utilities provided to the home – water, phone, gas and electricity – are further taxed at constantly increasing rates which you must pay in order to occupy the home.
Claiming to be an “owner” under these unilateral and coercive terms and conditions begs the definition of the word ownership. I have briefly lived in a communist country and I can tell you there is very little practical difference in home ownership there. Oh, plus their kids didn’t have put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the State every morning at school – I guess that would be too Orwellian for communists.
Pete Sisco grew up in Canada, emigrated to California in his twenties and to Idaho in his thirties. He left the USA and has since lived in Belize, Mexico, China, Thailand, England and Spain. Since 2006 he and his wife have been traveling the world non-stop as digital nomads. http://www.petesisco.com
===
Agenda 21: The BLM Land Grabbing Endgame Alex Jones ...
www.infowars.com/agenda-21-the-blm-land-grabbing-endgame/Agenda 21: The BLM Land Grabbing Endgame. Share on Facebook 0 Tweet about this on Twitter 173 Share on Google+ 0 Email this to someone Print this page ...Local Land Grab Part Of UN Agenda - The Liberty Sentinel
www.libertysentinel.org/article.php?id=LandGrabPrivate land ownership, according to Habitat I, contributes to “social injustice.” The two ideologies are irreconcilable, but Agenda 21 marches on with the support ...Blaze Magazine Exclusive: Wondering What Agenda 21 Is ...
www.theblaze.com/.../blaze-magazine-exclusive-wondering-what-agenda...Nov 16, 2012 - The special report by Mike Opelka, “International Land Grab,” takes a look at the two-decade-old U.N. Agenda 21 program that remains ...Alabama Fights a UN Land Grab - Townhall.com Staff ...
townhall.com/columnists/townhallcomstaff/2012/05/...landgrab/.../fullMay 31, 2012 - Enter Agenda 21, the 40 chapter document from the United Nations that establishes environmental “principles” at local, national, regional, and ...Global Landgrab Coming Soon To Your Neighborhood
www.rense.com/general63/ree.htmWithout a grasp of the larger picture having to do with Agenda 21, Sustainable ... You should care because the global land grab is coming to your neighborhood.The BLM Land Grab Endgame: Agenda 21
www.economicpolicyjournal.com/.../the-blm-land-grab-endgame-agend...Apr 23, 2014 - Why is the federal government so obsessed with grabbing more land? After all, the federal government already owns more than 40 percent of ...Property rights Under Attack in NJ Re-zoning Land Grab
www.americans-for-liberty.com/page.asp?ID=2750A land grab such as this one seems to have only one true goal, and it is the goal that is ... Sub categories of Agenda 21 include The Wildlands Project and its ...UN Agenda 21 – One World Order – Land Grab ... - TRUTH
truthlover5.com/.../un-agenda-21-one-world-order-sustainable-develop...Dec 8, 2012 - Link to UN Agenda 21 alarming to communities where being implemented NOTE TO READER from truthlover5: YOU MUST become aware of ...Globalist Gangsters Use Agenda 21 for Nevada Land Grabs
21stcenturywire.com/.../21/chinese-takeaway-globalist-gangsters-use-age...Apr 21, 2014 - The Agenda 21 model is evident for the entire world to see as the ... you delve into the monumental financial motives behind this land grab, the ...Agenda 21: The BLM Land Grabbing Endgame
www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=29921Agenda 21: The BLM Land Grabbing Endgame 2014 04 23. By Michael Snyder | The Daily Sheeple. Why is the federal government so obsessed with grabbing ...
The Risks and Rewards of Royal Incest
King Tut’s family was not the only royalty to have close relations among its close relations.
When New England missionary Hiram Bingham arrived in Hawaii in 1820, he was dismayed to find the natives indulging in idolatry, hula dancing, and, among the ruling family, incest. The Hawaiians themselves did not share Bingham's shock at the royals' behavior. Royal incest, notes historian Joanne Carando, was "not only accepted but even encouraged" in Hawaii as an exclusive royal privilege.
In fact, while virtually every culture in recorded history has held sibling or parent-child couplings taboo, royalty have been exempted in many societies, including ancient Egypt, Inca Peru, and, at times, Central Africa, Mexico, and Thailand. And while royal families in Europe avoided sibling incest, many, including the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Bourbons of France, and the British royal family, often married cousins. The Spanish Habsburgs, who ruled for nearly 200 years, frequently married among close relatives. Their dynasty ended in 1700 with the death of Charles II, a king so riddled with health and development problems that he didn't talk until he was four or walk until he was eight. He also had trouble chewing food and couldn't sire a child.
The physical problems faced by Charles and the pharaoh Tutankhamun, the son of siblings, point to one possible explanation for the near-universal incest taboo: Overlapping genes can backfire. Siblings share half their genes on average, as do parents and offspring. First cousins' genomes overlap 12.5 percent. Matings between close relatives can raise the danger that harmful recessive genes, especially if combined repeatedly through generations, will match up in the offspring, leading to elevated chances of health or developmental problems—perhaps Tut's partially cleft palate and congenitally deformed foot or Charles's small stature and impotence.
If the royals knew of these potential downsides, they chose to ignore them. According to Stanford University classics professor Walter Scheidel, one reason is that "incest sets them apart." Royal incest occurs mainly in societies where rulers have tremendous power and no peers, except the gods. Since gods marry each other, so should royals.
Incest also protects royal assets. Marrying family members ensures that a king will share riches, privilege, and power only with people already his relatives. In dominant, centralized societies such as ancient Egypt or Inca Peru, this can mean limiting the mating circle to immediate family. In societies with overlapping cultures, as in second-millennium Europe, it can mean marrying extended family members from other regimes to forge alliances while keeping power among kin.
And the hazards, while real, are not absolute. Even the high rates of genetic overlap generated in the offspring of sibling unions, for instance, can create more healthy children than sick ones. And royal wealth can help offset some medical conditions; Charles II lived far better (and probably longer, dying at age 38) than he would have were he a peasant.
A king or a pharaoh can also hedge the risk of his incestuous bets by placing wagers elsewhere. He can mate, as Stanford classicist Josiah Ober notes, "with pretty much anybody he wants to." Inca ruler Huayna Capac (1493-1527), for instance, passed power not only to his son Huáscar, whose mother was Capac's wife and sister, but also to his son Atahualpa, whose mother was apparently a consort. And King Rama V of Thailand (1873-1910) sired more than 70 children—some from marriages to half sisters but most with dozens of consorts and concubines. Such a ruler could opt to funnel wealth, security, education, and even political power to many of his children, regardless of the status of the mother. A geneticist would say he was offering his genes many paths to the future.
It can all seem rather mercenary. Yet affection sometimes drives these bonds. Bingham learned that even after King Kamehameha III of Hawaii accepted Christian rule, he slept for several years with his sister, Princess Nahi'ena'ena—pleasing their elders but disturbing the missionaries. They did it, says historian Carando, because they loved each other. —David Dobbs
In fact, while virtually every culture in recorded history has held sibling or parent-child couplings taboo, royalty have been exempted in many societies, including ancient Egypt, Inca Peru, and, at times, Central Africa, Mexico, and Thailand. And while royal families in Europe avoided sibling incest, many, including the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Bourbons of France, and the British royal family, often married cousins. The Spanish Habsburgs, who ruled for nearly 200 years, frequently married among close relatives. Their dynasty ended in 1700 with the death of Charles II, a king so riddled with health and development problems that he didn't talk until he was four or walk until he was eight. He also had trouble chewing food and couldn't sire a child.
The physical problems faced by Charles and the pharaoh Tutankhamun, the son of siblings, point to one possible explanation for the near-universal incest taboo: Overlapping genes can backfire. Siblings share half their genes on average, as do parents and offspring. First cousins' genomes overlap 12.5 percent. Matings between close relatives can raise the danger that harmful recessive genes, especially if combined repeatedly through generations, will match up in the offspring, leading to elevated chances of health or developmental problems—perhaps Tut's partially cleft palate and congenitally deformed foot or Charles's small stature and impotence.
If the royals knew of these potential downsides, they chose to ignore them. According to Stanford University classics professor Walter Scheidel, one reason is that "incest sets them apart." Royal incest occurs mainly in societies where rulers have tremendous power and no peers, except the gods. Since gods marry each other, so should royals.
Incest also protects royal assets. Marrying family members ensures that a king will share riches, privilege, and power only with people already his relatives. In dominant, centralized societies such as ancient Egypt or Inca Peru, this can mean limiting the mating circle to immediate family. In societies with overlapping cultures, as in second-millennium Europe, it can mean marrying extended family members from other regimes to forge alliances while keeping power among kin.
And the hazards, while real, are not absolute. Even the high rates of genetic overlap generated in the offspring of sibling unions, for instance, can create more healthy children than sick ones. And royal wealth can help offset some medical conditions; Charles II lived far better (and probably longer, dying at age 38) than he would have were he a peasant.
A king or a pharaoh can also hedge the risk of his incestuous bets by placing wagers elsewhere. He can mate, as Stanford classicist Josiah Ober notes, "with pretty much anybody he wants to." Inca ruler Huayna Capac (1493-1527), for instance, passed power not only to his son Huáscar, whose mother was Capac's wife and sister, but also to his son Atahualpa, whose mother was apparently a consort. And King Rama V of Thailand (1873-1910) sired more than 70 children—some from marriages to half sisters but most with dozens of consorts and concubines. Such a ruler could opt to funnel wealth, security, education, and even political power to many of his children, regardless of the status of the mother. A geneticist would say he was offering his genes many paths to the future.
It can all seem rather mercenary. Yet affection sometimes drives these bonds. Bingham learned that even after King Kamehameha III of Hawaii accepted Christian rule, he slept for several years with his sister, Princess Nahi'ena'ena—pleasing their elders but disturbing the missionaries. They did it, says historian Carando, because they loved each other. —David Dobbs
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