[BRIEF NOTE] Elsewhere on Livejournal

• charlemagne77 writes about the new natalism that's become a prominent theme of late among American conservatives.


• jhubert reposts a still-topical article on reproductive cloning and why it's not such a big deal, really.

[BRIEF NOTE] Settler States at the Head Heeb

In his most recent posting, Jonathan Edelstein examines the phenomenon of sponsored settlement programs in disputed territories.

Populating conquered territory with settlers is a tactic that may be as old as warfare. All the ancient empires practiced it; one Assyrian attempt at demographic engineering led to the legend of the lost tribes, and Roman coloniae played a crucial part in the Latinizing of the Mediterranean world. Modern empires continued the practice, on a grand scale in the New World and Australasia and a lesser scale in their other colonial domains. For millennia, the logic of settlement was irrefutable: once a territory was full of your people, it was yours.

In the modern post-imperial world, this pattern of sponsored settlement has gone into abeyance, given the general taboo against permanent conquests. The Baltic States, incorporated forcibly into the Soviet Union, are only marginal exceptions to this rule. After the Second World War--as the Baltic States demonstrate, here much more closely--settlement programs have occured mainly within individual states, as governments try to secure vulnerable and potentially secessionist regions through demographic engineering.

If Jonathan's survey demonstrates anything, it's that once intra-state sponsored settlement programs are started up, their effects are very hard if not impossible to reverse absent the collapse of the state. It's telling that in all of the situations noted, the Israeli program of sponsored settlement looks like the easiest one to reverse. Tibetans, West Papuans, Sahrawi, and Cypriots (among others) are going to have to wait a very long time indeed for any change.

[NON BLOG] Internet in Toronto

When I get home this evening, I'll finish setting up my desktop computer and turn it on. It will be so nice to have it again after almost six months. My sweet, my precious.

Having home Internet will, of course, be a necessity. Bell's Sympatico service and the Rogers internet service are the frontrunners. The staff at the Bell store at 2 Bloor West offered better service than their counterparts at the Rogers store on Yorkdale, and Bell offers 11 E-mail accounts to Rogers' five at 29.95 dollars per month in the DSL basic package. Then again, the Rogers service (Hi-Speed Internet Lite) doesn't have a bandwidth limit, unlike the Sympatico 2 megabytes-a-month limit.

Does anyone have any relevant experience with either of the two services in the GTA?

[NON BLOG] Report from the Acquisitions Directorate (Recent Acquisitions Division)

• Whitney Biennial 2002, on sale and after employee discount only $7.48, incorporating into its front cover a compact disc featuring aural composition and including in the book itself images of the works of contributing artists including Toronto's A.A. Bronson.


• Do They Know It's Christmas single, featuring not only the apparently lacklustre 20th-anniversary version but the stirring and excellent original 1984 version. (At least, stirring when compared to the contemporary American and Canadian contributions.)


• An umbrella bearing the TQS logo.

[QUIZ] Via aisb23

( Which Hellenistic school of philosophy would I belong to? )

[META] Blogroll Updates

I've edited my blogroll, adding The Long View, blog of occasional soc.history.what-if poster John J. Reilly to the list of soc.history.what-if bloggers. The Butterflies and Wheels collective blog, along with Geitner Simmons' Regions of Mind and Diane Duane's Out of Ambit, have been added to the non-SHWI list.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Turkey versus Iran: Notes towards a comparative history

Earlier this week, I was rereading my two-volume abridgement of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History when I noticed his treatment of Islamic civilization. Contra Huntington, he doesn't think that a single Islamic civilization exists. Rather, he believes that the Islamic lands, like the Christian lands, are divided into two civilizations, one Arabic and one Iranic. Iranic civilization, as the name suggests, is defined by Toynbee as a civilization centered upon Iran and Persian culture. As the unreliable but useful Mihan Foundation notes, in A Study of History

Toynbee shows that prior to the advent of Shah Isma’il the founder of Safavid dynasty, Iran was the real literary and cultural center through which the Saljuqs, Osmanlis, Transoxanians, and the Indian Muslims drew their inspiration and power.

In this vast area that Toynbee calls "Iranic World," the people had discarded Arabic in favor of Farsi as its secular literary vehicle.

The territories which were conquered from Orthodox Christendom by the Seljuqs and the Osmanlis were a kind of colonial extension of the Iranic World, and the representatives of the Iranic society in these partibus infidelim, like its representatives in Hindustan, depended for the maintenance of their culture upon a study flow of arts and ideas, and of immigrants to import them from the homelands of the Iranic civilization in Iran itself.

Toynbee further compared the relationship between Iranic and Arabic civilizations within Islam with the relationship between Western and Eastern Orthodox civilizations within Christendom. In his theory of history, the Arabic and Eastern Orthodox civilizations were, later overtaken and subjugated by the later converts to their religion on their geographical fringes. Thus, Westerners eventually sacked Constantinople; the Turks conquered the Arab world and the influence of the Persian court led to the growth of Persian as a Muslim lingua franca alongside or even supplanting Arabic, connecting lands as far separated as Anatolia, Turkestan, and North India.

Now, a lot of things are wrong with this theory, which like other macrohistorical theories overlooks the seemingly small details that make all the difference. (Googling, I note that the very annoying Stephen Schwartz has made a similar argument.) Nonetheless, Toynbee's argument got me to thinking about Iran and Turkey, and the many ways in which they are similar, and the critical differences between the two.

( Some comparisons. )

( Why is Iran differentiated from Turkey only by its failures? )

In the 21st century, Iran and Turkey may see some degree of convergence. Iran's not at all likely to join the European Union of 2050, of course; the Canadian and Argentine applications for membership would likely be more welcome, and less difficult to manage. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the likely absence of Iraq as a factor, the impending chaos of Saudi Arabia, and the case that Bernard-Henry Lévy makes for Pakistan, Iran stands a reasonable chance of being the only regional power of note. Certainly it has enough assets working in its favour, with an economy that compares quite well to almost all of its neighbours, and a relatively large, well-educated and healthy population.

And the future for Iranian religion and the theocracy? All that I can say--likely, all that needs to be said--is that in society after society, it has proven impossible for a bankrupt ideological system to repress an educated and mobilized population indefinitely. That, and the fact that converting a strain of religious belief once notable for its principled opposition to corrupt power into an aggressive ideology closely associated with oppression, terror, and death is a very good way indeed to delegitimize it. It wouldn't surprise me if the next Iranian regime tended towards French-style laicism. Hey, that system has worked well enough in Turkey so far.