Slate: Where Europe Begins, or Where It Ends?

The Black Sea has played a formative role in the creation of the idea of Europe. It was here where the ancient Greeks first came into contact with the nomadic Scythians, out of which developed the Greek discourse of “civilization” vs. “barbarism,” argues Neal Ascherson in his brilliant Black Sea. “In this particular encounter began the idea of ‘Europe’ with all its arrogance, all its implications of superiority, all its assumptions of priority and antiquity, all its pretensions to a natural right to dominate,” he writes, “a ruthless mental dynasty which still holds invisible power over the Western mind.” [...]

Herodotus’ was the minority view: Most of his contemporaries put the Europe-Asia border much farther north, where the Black Sea meets the Don River in today’s Russia. And Georgia, which considers itself the successor to Colchis, has generally been considered geographically part of Asia. To the British historian, statesman, and diplomat James Bryce, touring the Russian empire in 1876, Poti was a port through which “every traveller from the West is condemned to pass through, the most fever smitten den in Asia.” [...]

Saakashvili left power in 2013, but his version of Georgia’s history in Europe has remained the consensus. In 2015, political scientists surveyed Georgian officials from across the political spectrum and found that they espoused a remarkably consistent narrative about Georgian history and its ties to Europe: that Georgia was part of the ancient Greek world and then medieval Christendom, both of which tied it to Europe’s history. In addition, according to this narrative, Georgian values have traditionally been the same as those of other Europeans, with an inherent love for freedom and individuality. [...]

The irony of Georgia’s European identity is that, when it first emerged in the 19th century, it was essentially a Russian import, and the Georgians who picked it up used it to justify closer ties with Russia. Tbilisi was the center of the Russian colonial administration in the Caucasus, and tsarist officials encouraged a sense of shared European identity in order to co-opt Georgians against the more rebellious Caucasian highlanders like Chechens and Dagestanis.

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Foreign Affairs: Don't Fear Muslim Immigrants

Trump is tapping into a deep-rooted fear. It is the same fear that sustains the popularity of many extreme right-wing parties throughout Europe, from France’s National Front to Greece’s Golden Dawn. It is thus legitimate to ask whether the recent wave of immigration into Europe and the United States from Muslim-majority countries is compromising the safety of host populations. But the evidence suggests that the fears are misguided: Liberal democracies are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants. [...]

By studying a population of Senegalese Christian and Muslim immigrants from the Serer and Joola religiously mixed communities who migrated to France under identical conditions, we found that Muslim immigrants face greater discrimination in the labor market, earn less monthly income, express less attachment to their host country, and exhibit greater attachment to their country of origin than do their Christian counterparts. And these patterns do not improve in subsequent generations. The cause of this failure of integration is twofold: Islamophobia on the part of French society and Muslim immigrants’ tendency to identify more with their home communities in response. As a result, Europe is creating a class of under-employed immigrants who feel little or no connection with their host societies.

But linking Muslim immigration to terrorism is a mistake. Liberal societies should not condemn people simply for having the same cultural background as murderous criminals. (It would be as ludicrous as blaming all Italian-Americans for mafia killings.) Moreover, the obsession with Muslim immigration focuses on the wrong targets. Terrorists tend not to be poor, uneducated, or even, in many cases, of Muslim heritage. Olivier Roy, an expert on Islam, has used data from France’s “S File”—the French government’s antiterrorism watch list—to create an evidence-based portrait of today’s French jihadists. French jihadists are for the most part either second-generation French citizens—the children of relatively non-religious immigrants, who were born and raised in France—or native French converts—French citizens with no immigrant background who have converted to Islam. What unifies these two groups is not Islam; it is a sense of generational revolt. Similarly, among Western recruits who join the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), a disproportionate number are converts to Islam. This is why Roy describes the threat not as the radicalization of Islam but as the Islamization of radicalism.

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The New Yorker: Pope Francis Is the Anti-Trump

Last week, the Grand Master knelt, symbolically yielding his sword to the Pope. Fra’ Matthew Festing, a Brit, had been embroiled in a nasty squabble with an underling, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German, whom Festing fired for allowing the Order’s charity to distribute condoms in Myanmar—a violation of Catholic practice. The details of the dispute matter less than Pope Francis’s firm intervention on the side of Boeselager, who, after Festing’s resignation, was reinstated. Defenders of the Order objected to the papal intrusion, calling it a violation of sovereignty—and with condoms at issue, many also caught a whiff of the Pontiff’s liberalizing incense. Conservatives, as usual, gagged. (Ross Douthat, for example, saw a “characteristic move of the papacy” of which he famously disapproves.) Traditionalists have become increasingly peeved with Francis since last November, when he released the encyclical “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which seemed to provide an opening for divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments. The conservative Order of Malta is not to be confused with anything having to do with the actual island nation, a fact underscored last month when the Catholic bishops of Malta, appealing to “Amoris Laetitia,” declared that a separated or divorced person “at peace with God” cannot be denied communion. [...]

Burke’s opposition to Pope Francis is as much geopolitical as it is theological. Pope Francis is, at this point, the world’s staunchest defender of migrants, and of Muslim migrants. A year ago, in a gesture widely understood to be a rebuttal to Donald Trump, he went to the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, and on his flight back to Rome said expressly of Trump, “A person who thinks only of building walls … is not Christian.” On Inauguration Day, Francis sent “cordial good wishes” to Trump, but added that America’s “stature” depended on “above all its concern for the poor, the outcast, and those in need who, like Lazarus, stand before our door.”

The American prelate who most closely resembles Francis in thought and style is Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, whom Francis made a cardinal only days after the U.S. election. This week, in a resounding rebuke to Trump, Cupich described the President’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations as “a dark moment in U.S. history.” The Catholic Church, despite retaining some of the trappings, costumes, and mental habits of the past thousand years, has left its war with Islam behind. The West seemed to have done so long ago, but now, with the West at war with itself (a match to the intra-Islam conflict), the questions have returned. Who are the faithful? Who are the infidels? Who would have thought that, on an elemental point of liberal democracy, the United States could take instruction from the white-robed man in Rome? And who would have thought that liberal democracy itself could have a stake in the unfinished struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church?

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Wisecrack: Are We Living in a Simulation? – 8-Bit Philosophy

CrashCourse: Poverty & Our Response To It: Crash Course Philosophy #44

Al Jazeera: Why the Quebec mosque shooting happened

Hatred and antipathy do not grow in a bubble. They fester and grow over years, fed by rhetoric that is, at its core, dehumanising towards the targeted group. Neither Trump's "Muslim ban" nor Quebec's "Mosque shooting" emerged in a vacuum.

Anti-Muslim sentiments similar to those Trump has so adeptly encouraged in the US have been present in Quebec City, whose mayor previously spoke of mosques as a hotbed of radicalisation. These sentiments are found across Canada and in Quebec, a province that has, in very recent history, actively enabled Islamophobia. [...]

The Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence reported an increase in reports of right-wing propaganda targeting Muslims and mosques in Quebec, 20 percent of which came from Quebec City alone. [...]

And although radical right-wing sentiment was identified as a bigger threat to Canada than radical Islam, innocent Muslims continue to be targeted by such legislation instead of white supremacists. Bill C-51 was supported by the then-minority Liberal Party led by Trudeau, despite opposition from Canadian Muslim communities.

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The Conversation: Fornication, fluids and faeces: the intimate life of the French court

Historical scholars have been quick to point out the loose way in which “history” is applied in such dramas. These televised counterparts of well-documented historical figures at times seem to bear little resemblance beyond sharing the same name. [...]

How do these popular interpretations of the past relate to historical scholarship? Reign’s creator Laurie McCarthy suggests: “I don’t feel bound by [history], I feel liberated by it.” Wolstencroft argues for Versailles that “when it comes to history there isn’t one singular truth — we can’t know, it’s all speculation.” [...]

But there is one, perhaps unexpected, way in which both series engage with a historically verifiable experience of the past: our preoccupation with the most intimate moments of courtly life, right down to the bodily emissions of its most powerful members (and I use that word quite deliberately).

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JSTOR Daily: The Invention of Pets

Pet are a relatively recent invention. Most date the pethood concept to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, human beings lived with animals for much longer—dogs have been domesticated at least 30,000 years—but pets are a very special category. The pet, says Marc Shell, is the “one essentially inedible animal,” the ultimate indulgence in the long history of using animals for food and/or work.

The OED’s first reference for “pet” is from 1539, meaning a baby lamb raised by hand. Another old meaning: the pet as a favored or indulged person, as in the still-current “teacher’s pet.” Ingrid H. Tague argues that both these definitions merge into the modern usage, a pet being a tame animal much-indulged in the home. Since the nineteenth century there has been a particular split between domesticated farm animals and domesticated house animals. Today, few Westerners have daily contact with working animals or those destined to be eaten. The richer parts of the world have the most pets: there are an estimated 163.6 million dogs and cats in the U.S. (compared to some 73 million children under 18) and Americans spend more than $60 billion a year on them.

“Once most animals were moved away from intimate human contact, it became possible for some to be marked out as special by virtue of their sharing the same domestic space as their human owners,” writes Tague. She analyzes eighteenth-century literary works in Britain. Among the hundred plus British epitaphs or elegies for pets in that century, she finds 6 for monkeys, 12 for canaries, 17 for cats, and 53 for dogs. As is often the case when people write about animals, the subject was really “the ways people used animals to think about humans’ place in the world.” By the end of the period, “pet keeping could come to symbolize all that was best in the human spirit, and mourning a pet could be seen as praiseworthy rather than ridiculous.”

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Deutsche Welle: Iranian artists featured in Berlin amid outrage over Trump's travel ban

With US President Donald Trump's recent travel ban for holders of passports from Iran and six other Muslim-majority countries, the timing of the Goethe-Institut's event couldn't have been more apt. However, political awkwardness has not just arisen between Iran and the US lately, but also between Iran and Germany. [...]

Several events during the three-month program look at Iranian writers and their approach to their work. Authors like Nahid Tabatabai, Belgheis Soleimani and Nasim Marashi will contemplate the issue of remaining loyal to their cultural roots while writing as part of the Diaspora.

Another writer featured during the talks is Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, whose works are forbidden in Iran. Still, he is considered one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary Iranian literature. Authors Shahriar Mandanipur, who lives in the US, and Amir Hassan Cheheltan, who lives in Iran, are scheduled to discuss Iranian literature created both within the country and abroad.

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