b’shalom

bananabrain

Where in South America?

b’shalom

bananabrain

As for telling me what’s a ’suffix’, well, how typical…

If Islam has Islamists, Judaism has Zionists.

oi!!!!

…and science has scientists.

because two words end in “ist” it does not mean they are connected. it’s called a “suffix”.

islamists are, as i understand it, committed to bringing about the domination of islam through the political process and using a variety of means. zionists, by contrast, are people who, by and large, not unlike myself, support the right of the jewish people to self-determination in their homeland, rather like people who, say, support the right of the palestinian people to self-determination in their homeland. not unlike myself.

the reason i say “by and large” is that beyond that, it’s a hyphenated identity. there are left-wing and right-wing zionists, there are cultural zionists and secular zionists. there are religious zionists and anti-religious zionists. there are labour, territorialist, revisionist and post-modern zionists. zionists don’t have global designs like islamists. they are interested in israel and the middle east and, in the vast majority of cases, are only interested in more or less the same area currently involved. i’m a zionist and both a political and religious one. by some people’s standards (the arab-hating, land-grabbing brigade) i am a bleeding-heart liberal. by others’ (e.g. secularist) standards i am a religious nutter. you really can’t win. it doesn’t stop people from using the word “zionist” as if it were a catch-all term of abuse, for some reason.

b’shalom

bananabrain

You said this @ 32:

What?! Oliver Cromwell did more than anyone in British history to ensure that we have religious tolerance in our society.

and then you said this @ 59:

Similarly, it is pretty obvious that Cromwell didn’t like Catholics, as this was a time of great religious hatred.

My, somewhat minor historical point, is that he didn’t just dislike them, he killed them. Especially the Irish ones.

Unless your point is that – by exterminating the opposition – you reduce religious hatred, I am at a loss to understand where you are coming from.

Thanks for the information.

thank your lucky lucky stars we arent malicious.

In order to make him something other than a bad guy, you’d have to invent an artificial standard that is neither contemporary nor modern. I’ve no idea why you would do that, but it sounds a pretty dubious thing to do.

The fact that religious wars and massacres happened didn’t mean that either people in general, or the relevant elites, approved of them. They happened, just as they happen in the modern third world: sporadically. If you looked out the window and saw one happening, you would be shocked, not treat it like rain in Manchester: ‘turned out a bit massacry today, better stay indoors’.

Most kings got through their entire reign without killing more than a few hundred non-combatants: killing thousands on a day may not have been a world record, but it was still exceptional. The times something comparable happened in the UK over 600+ years can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, and Timur the Lame might well have judged him to be a girly wimp when it came to butchery. But I’m not sure those are the right people to be taking as a baseline.

I do think some modern Irish Catholics tend to put him in that category of Great Villains from history, which is at least an exaggeration. He was a routine bad ruler, killed a few thousand unnecessarily, a Pinochet rather than a Saddam.

Cromwell _was_ quite strong on building unity and tolerance amongst mainstream Protestant groups (if only in order to better band together and smash the Catholics and Anglicans).

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t on the more brutal and intolerant side of average when compared to his contemporary peers.

Oliver Cromwell though, bit off topic?

I am going to make these my last words on the subject:

- Please produce some evidence that Cromwell was an intolerant ruler by the standards of the time. If you cannot, there is nothing more to say.

I stand alongside Sorus’ comment at 56. He was, contrary to what you thunk, here:

I just wanted you to produce evidence that he was a religiously intolerant bigot. And you failed to do so.

Well, if you hang around here long enough there are three buses that come together.

The arguments of apologists that this was within the laws of war at the time are contradicted by the evidence in Cromwell’s own account that he himself understood the scale of the massacre to be exceptional. It would, he admitted, have prompted ‘remorse and regret’ were it not intended to have exemplary effect as both collective punishment and a warning for the future. Contemporaries fully understood the atrocity, and its repetition at Wexford a month later, to be shocking, terrible events.

Damned out of his own words, I’d have thought. You do realise he didn’t really like Catholics? At least of the Irish persuasion.

There was a piece in the Observer today about Cromwell that could have been written by someone reading this thread:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/24/history

Cromwell’s resort to extreme violence was not a reaction to the conditions of the actual conflict he was engaged in, but a predetermined exercise in religious and ethnic vengeance.

…

The arguments of apologists that this was within the laws of war at the time are contradicted by the evidence in Cromwell’s own account that he himself understood the scale of the massacre to be exceptional. It would, he admitted, have prompted ‘remorse and regret’ were it not intended to have exemplary effect as both collective punishment and a warning for the future. Contemporaries fully understood the atrocity, and its repetition at Wexford a month later, to be shocking, terrible events.

Obviously, there is some value in judging by the standards of the day, instead of modern ones. On the other hand, you want to avoid judging by some fantastic a-historical standard, where just because in any given decade there would likely be a massacre somewhere in Europe, they were a routine and uncontroversial part of war.

“Heh, nice try but the Gurus had strict rules, they didn’t believe in conspiracy theories, neither were they religiously intolerant.”

By the Hundal-Clark measure they were intolerant, because Sikhs under Guru Gobind Singh (amongst others) killed Mughals.

“The question isn’t whether people get killed during war, but why the wars started and whether a certain version of history is being promoted to gloss over Cromwell’s nature.”

And what was Cromwell’s nature? In simple terms, he was a military dictator who destroyed much of this nation’s constitutional heritage while searching for a system that would ensure liberty of conscience and a godly commonwealth. He was far more interested in the end than the means. Laws and institutions to him were “dross and dung compared to the glory of Christ”. A constable of a parish was how he saw himself, and in that sense he was right.

“We he the worst guy around? Probably not. We weren’t around to judge and given the relative lack of heroes from that time, I’m sure British historians have (like historians around the world) glossed over certain parts. I just don’t agree with the hero worship.”

I don’t know where you and Douglas got the ‘hero’ angle from, this is (or was) a debate about whether there was any evidence that Cromwell was religiously intolerant by the standards of the time. And since no evidence has been produced, the debate is over.

Don and Sonia are right that the problem comes not from judging people by the standards of their time, but doing so why telling people in the present day to follow their example.

It’s fair enough to look back at legendary military/leader figures such as Moses, Alexander, Mohammed, Saladin, Henry V (Part 2) or Cromwell etc and say that by the standards of the time they were acting unexceptionally and probably better than their contemporaries were used to.

But (other than Saladin, as far as I know) they all carried out acts which most of us would now consider morally abhorrent and which would mark them out as war criminals at the very least. So to present them as contemporary models seems at odds with the claim that they should be judged only by the standards of the time.

(Not that Rumbold was doing this with Cromwell.)

Yes, he did. It is called a war Sunny. By your measure a number of the Sikh Gurus must be intolerant bigots, as they also killed people of a different religion while fighting.

Heh, nice try but the Gurus had strict rules, they didn’t believe in conspiracy theories, neither were they religiously intolerant.

The question isn’t whether people get killed during war, but why the wars started and whether a certain version of history is being promoted to gloss over Cromwell’s nature.

We he the worst guy around? Probably not. We weren’t around to judge and given the relative lack of heroes from that time, I’m sure British historians have (like historians around the world) glossed over certain parts. I just don’t agree with the hero worship.