Anna Comnena Quotes
So he sent for twelve Chasii, as they are called in Persian, who breathe murder, and sent them off quickly in the guise of ambassadors to the Sultan, having first suggested to them a way of killing his brother. "Go," he said, "and first have it proclaimed that you have certain secrets to reveal to the Sultan, and, when you have been granted an audience, go up close to him as if you wanted to whisper in his ear, and then slay him quickly." Then these ambassadors, or rather assassins, went off in very high spirits to kill the Sultan, just as if they had been invited to a dinner or a festivity. On arrival they found him drunk, and everything was made easy for them, because the guards entrusted with the watch over the Sultan were standing at some distance, so they approached him, and drawing their swords from under their arm, promptly dispatched the wretched man. For the characteristic of these Chasii is to rejoice in bloodshed, and to consider it a treat to be allowed to thrust their swords through a man's entrails. And if, perchance, others were to attack them at that very minute, and mince them up like sausage-meat, they reckon that kind of death an honor.
This is one of the early descriptions of Islamic Terrorists and Assassins. Tutuses employed them to kill his brother, the Sultan. This passage also illustrates part of the history of Islamic sultans being deposed and/or killed by their own relatives which explains the hostility of Sultans to their own family during the Ottoman Empire. Note also the glorification of their own death which has been characteristic of many Islamic subgroups throughout history. So the modern suicide bomber is in a sense not a new phenomenon; the weapon is what has changed.
Anna Comnena, 1083-1153, Byzantine Princess of Constantinople & Historian, Eldest Daughter of Emperor Alexius Comnenus, The First Female Historian of Note, The Alexiad, ~1148
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First Saxon King in Britain. The Saxons had come to Briton as “allies” to defend the Northern border in exchange for some Northern provinces. See {617659}. After doing so at a celebration of Britons and Saxons, the Briton nobility was murdered and Vortigern had to cede other provinces in the Midlands. The Saxons have been entrenched in Britain ever since with most people having little idea of how they first got there.
Following his orders from higher religious authorities, Lee led an attack on an emigrant wagon train and murdered all but 17 young children in what has become known as The Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is one of the worst scandals of Mormon history. Lee and the others thought that they were “defending” their religion, not unlike some Muslims who justify their terrorism.
Nathaniel Bacon had led a rebellion in Virginia and had routed the Governor’s troops and caused him to flee leaving control of Virginia to Bacon and his followers who were far more democratic and advanced. However Bacon succumbed to swamp fever, and his followers could not hold the colony together giving the Governor a chance to establish his authority. He then went on a vengeful reign of terror, executing all of Bacon’s followers he could get his hands on. With no danger to the authority of the Crown, King Charles felt that Berkeley had gone too far. The King’s father Charles I had been executed in the aftermath of the English Civil War, but he had executed far fewer than Berkely had done in Virginia.
The Turkish revolution was by historical standards relatively bloodless as compared especially with other republican revolutions like the United State and France. However, the revolution that brought Ataturk to power was a relatively mild one in terms of the immediate changes that unlike many revolutions which produced instant radical change. In Turkey, the radical change took place in the years after the revolution when Ataturk with hardly any bloodshed produced compulsory public secular education, scientific elevation in society, separation of mosque and state, gender equality including universal voting, change to western dress, elimination of the caliphate, speech and press freedom, and many others including changing the entire language to use the Latin alphabet instead of Arabic. No nation in history has gone thought more social and cultural change and modernized so fast as Turkey after its revolution. The result is the most modern and successful Islamic country in the world.
See Robert F. Kennedy for a later expression of this sentiment. 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Two years later they won an electoral majority.
See Banjamin Disraeli for an earlier expression of this idea.
St. Domingue was the name of Haiti which had had the only successful national slave revolt, but it was incredibly bloody with many casualties.
The king was found guilty and was decapitated, but not wearing a crown.
He stormed offstage leaving the other panelists shocked. This boorish behavior and other at a dignified world intellectual meeting shocked most participants, diplomats, and government officials who castigated Erdogan. However, he returned to large popular approving crowds of his religious Islamic base who thought his behavior heroic. One irony of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Middle East as that with 60 years of war, occupation and conflict, the winning and dominant Israelis have killed very few Arabs, especially when one compares the number with the Arabs who were killed by their coreligionists. The Jordanian Army killed 7000 Palestinians in a single week when the Palestinians tried to take over Jordan. The Syrians killed 20,000 and decades later killed over 100,000 of their own people in their internecine civil war. Sunnis have butchered Shiaas and vica versa for over 1000 years, and more Muslims have been the victims of Arab Terrorism than Jews. But in the killing of Arabs, the over 1000 years of Turkish Rule of the Middle East produced incredible butchery by the Turks, which even they exceeded in the Armenian Genocide of Christians in the early decades of the 20th century. The Turks however tend to deny these events were deliberate policy and action but claims the dead were collateral damage of legitimate war. But killers they were, and they currently have one of the best and strongest militaries of the world.
These battles with the Irish—in this case the MacDonnell clan—were brutal atrocities where the winners of the battle killed all the losers and the women and children with them in the case of the Irish.
The motivations and willingness to die of the suicide bomber is not unique to Islamic terrorists. On occasion our CIA has used the technique. Official CIA instructions on “lost assassination” were distributed within the agency and sometimes to our “allies” who we were training.
Anna Komnene, commonly Latinized as Anna Comnena, was a Byzantine princess and author of the Alexiad, an account of the reign of her father, the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I Komnenos. The Alexiad is the most important primary source of Byzantine history of the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Although she is best known as the author of the Alexiad, Anna played an important part in the politics of the time and attempted to depose her brother, John II Komnenos, as emperor and seize the throne herself.
