May 30

1972

Lod Airport Massacre

The next time you fuss about airport security, remember that it was once possible to board an airplane carrying an assault rifle and explosives. On May 30, 1972 three Japanese travellers stepped off a flight from Rome at Lod Airport in Israel, took out their weapons from violin cases and indiscriminately sprayed fire into the crowd. 26 people were killed, most of them Puerto Rican pilgrims, and 80 were injured. Two of the terrorists were killed on the spot but the third was captured.

What were Japanese Red Army communists doing involving themselves in the Palestine-Israeli conflict? It appears that an exchange program had been worked out with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — External Operations, a more radical offshoot of the already pretty radical PFLP, led by Wadie Haddad. Haddad, an associate of Carlos the Jackal, was experienced in airliner terror, having master-minded the Entebbe high-jacking. The PFLP-OE trained the Japanese in Lebanon, thinking, correctly, that they would be less likely to draw suspicion from airline security.

The surviving attacker, Kozo Okamoto, pled guilty to murder charges and was sentenced to an Israeli jail but he was released in a prisoner swap in 1985. He is reported to have converted to Islam and lives in Lebanon, which has resisted calls for his extradition.

May 28

A day of two maritime disasters.

1558 The Spanish Armada sets sail

Philip II of Spain was determined to end the rule of Elizabeth I and her Protestant regime. He had waited until the death of Mary Queen of Scots (a rival claimant to the English throne) before starting military operations against England, so that he, or another member of the Habsburg clan, could rule the country. The plan was to assemble an enormous fleet to seize control of the English Channel and provide cover for an invading army to be ferried over on barges from the Low Countries. Ships of the Spanish and Portuguese navies, as well as dozens of others that could be commandeered or hired, gathered in Lisbon and on this date the first of 130 ships set sail. Galleons, galleasses, caravels, naos, pataches, pinnaces, carracks, supply hulks and even (madness!) galleys carried 8,766 sailors, 21,556 soldiers, and 2,088 convict rowers. Over half the ships never returned home.

1905 The Battle of TsushimaA clash of two empires, one in the ascendant and the other in sharp decline. In 1904 Japan launched the Russo-Japanese War, primarily to expel Russia from the parts of China that Tokyo wanted to exploit and to prevent any further Russian expansion in east Asia. It laid siege to the Russian naval base of Port Arthur in northern China and won victories on land and sea. This compelled Russia to order its Baltic Fleet to the rescue. For the next six months the Russian armada made its sluggish way to the Sea of Japan, short on fuel and supplies, and having disgraced itself on the way by attacking a British fishing fleet in the North Sea under the impression it was a flotilla of Japanese torpedo boats.

By the time the Russian navy arrived, Port Arthur had fallen and the new plan of Admiral Rozhestvensky was to make his way to the port of Vladivostok where other Russian ships were waiting. Japanese Admiral Togo foresaw the Russian route; the two fleets met in the Straits of Tsushima off the coast of Korea. The Japanese gunnery and ship handling (both expertly tutored by the British Royal Navy) eviscerated the Russians — only three of their ships were able to escape to Vladivostok. Two Russian admirals were put on trial after their return home. The humiliating defeat contributed greatly to civilian unrest at home, weakening the position of the Romanov dynasty.

May 27

1332 Birth of Ibn Khaldun

The greatest of all Muslim historiographers is Abd-ar-Rahman ibn Muhammed ibn Khaldun al Hadrani or, for short, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis, of an Arab family with strong ties to Muslim Spain (especially Seville) going back to the 9th century. The family had left Seville for North Africa immediately before the city’s Reconquista by Christian forces in 1288. From there they went to Ifriqiya and settled in Tunis becoming high-ranking civil servants and scholars. His great-grandfather was tortured and murdered by a usurper in the turbulent politics of the area.

Ibn Khaldun received a very thorough education, a classical education, based on the study of the qur’an, of hadith, of the Arabic language and of Islamic law. As a teenager he survived the Black Death of 1349 and moved to Fez, then the most brilliant capital of the Muslim West. For a time he served the Sultan of Fez and then visited Spain where he was employed by the King of Granada who used him as an envoy to Pedro the Cruel of Castile. Chaotic politics saw him cast into jail for two years and serving a number of masters in Spain and North Africa. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca and saw Alexandria and Cairo where he served as Chief Justice to the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt. He went into retirement but was recalled in 1400 and sent to Damascus where he found himself inside the city as it was besieged by the Mongol conqueror Timur or Tamerlane. He was lowered from the walls in a basket to negotiate with the blood-thirsty Mongol; he impressed Timur who consulted him on historical matters and spared him when the city was taken and its inhabitants massacred. He returned to Egypt (having been stripped and robbed by bandits) and took up a position again as judge. He died in Cairo in 1406.

Ibn Khaldun began his great work of history, the Muqaddimah (Introduction) in the 1370s when he was in his late 40s and spent the rest of his life accumulating material and refining it. In the author’s intention, and as the title indicates, it is an “Introduction” to the historian’s craft. Thus it is presented as an encyclopaedic synthesis of the methodological and cultural knowledge necessary to enable the historian to produce a truly scientific work. 

 In his preface to the Introduction proper, Ibn khaldun begins by defining history – which he expands to include the study of the whole of the human past, including its social, economic and cultural aspects – defining its interest, denouncing the lack of curiosity and of method in his predecessors, and setting out the rules of good and sound criticism. This criticism is based essentially, apart from the examination of evidence, on the criterion of conformity with reality, that is of the probability of the facts reported and their conformity to the nature of things, which is the same as the current of history and of its evolution. Hence the necessity of bringing to light the laws which determine the direction of this current. The science capable of throwing light on this phenomenon is, he says, that of “a science which may be described as independent, which is defined by its object: human civilization and social facts as a whole”.

The central point around which his observations are built and to which his researches are directed is the study of decline, that is to say the symptoms and the nature of the ills from which civilizations die. Hence the Muqaddima is very closely linked with the political experiences of its author, who had been in fact very vividly aware that he was witnessing a tremendous change in the course of history, which is why he thought it necessary to write a summary of the past of humanity and to draw lessons from it. He remarks that at certain exceptional moments in history the upheavals are such that one has the impression of being present “at a new creation, at an actual renaissance, and at [the emergence of] a new world. It is so at present. Thus the need is felt for someone to make a record of the situation of humanity and of the world”. This “new world”‘, as Ibn Khaldun knew, was coming to birth in other lands; he also realized that the civilization to which he belonged was nearing its end. Although unable to avert the catastrophe, he was anxious at least to understand what was taking place, and therefore felt it necessary to analyse the processes of history.

 His main tool in this work of analysis is observation.  Ibn Khaldun had a thorough knowledge of  logic and made use of it, particular of induction, but he greatly mistrusted speculative reasoning. He admits that reason is a marvellous tool, but only within the framework of its natural limits, which are those of the investigation and the interpretation of what is real. He was much concerned about the problem of knowledge and it led him finally, after a radical criticism, to a refutation of philosophy, casting doubts on the adequacy of universal rationality and of individual reality, on the whole structure of speculative philosophy as it then existed. Having thus calmly dismissed Arabo-Muslim philosophy, he chose, in order to explore reality and arrive at its meaning, a type of empiricism which has no hesitation in “having recourse to the categories of rational explanation which derive from philosophy”. In short, Ibn Khaldun rejects the traditional speculation of the philosophers, which gets bogged down in fruitless argument and controversy, only to replace it by another type of speculation, the steps of which are more certain and the results more fruitful since it is directly related to concrete facts.

May 26

1328

William of Ockham escapes Avignon

The fourteenth century was one of the worst eras in human history. Those hundred years would see the end of the Medieval Warming Period that had brought an increase in agricultural production and population, and the start of the Little Ice Age. With this change in climate would come the massive famine of the Great Hunger and the Great Drowning when an Atlantic gale claimed tens of thousands of lives and the sea swallowed land in the Netherlands. To add to the misery would be the Black Death, six successive waves of the plague that would cut the population of Europe in half by 1400. This demographic disaster provoked peasant and urban rebellions all across Europe. Tragically, the Christian Church was in no shape to respond positively: it too was in a state of corruption and disarray.

One of the problems wracking the church was the question of poverty. In the previous century, two new orders of friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, espoused lives of poverty and a close association with the poor. When the papacy began to employ these mendicant brothers as professors in the new universities, as itinerant preachers, and as administrators of the Inquisition, their rejection of material goods proved a hindrance. How could the friars serve the Church and beg for their daily bread at the same time? Calls were made to ease their financial situation; if they could not own property, could they not perhaps enjoy the earnings — the usufruct — from property dedicated to their use? The Franciscans divided over this issue with hard-liners and moderates engaged in heated debate. The traditionalist, or Spritualist, Franciscans argued that “To say or assert that Christ, in showing the way of perfection, and the Apostles, in following that way and setting an example to others who wished to lead the perfect life, possessed nothing either severally or in common, either by right of ownership and dominium or by personal right, we corporately and unanimously declare to be not heretical, but true and catholic.” This position embarrassed the Church, whose rulers were far, far removed from poverty, and the pope in a series of bulls forced the Franciscans to accept ownership of property and declared heretical the notion that Christ and the Apostles had no possessions.

Michael of Cesena, the Franciscan Minister-General and William of Ockham, the English theologian, objected to this line. Ockham called the pope’s thinking “heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane and defamatory”. Little wonder that they eventually ended up under arrest in Avignon. While they were languishing in durance vile, a quarrel had broken out between the papacy and the King of Germany, Louis the Bavarian. Louis backed the Spiritual Franciscans (in part because Ockham went as far as to deny the papacy any kind of secular overlordship), declared that he had deposed the Avignon Pope John XXII and recognized a Franciscan as his candidate for the papal throne. Taking advantage of this split, Ockham and Cesena escaped from Avignon and made their way to Louis’ court, where an anti-papal coterie argued for a separation of secular and religious powers.

In the short run, the papacy would prevail, but Ockham’s political thought and his philosophical contributions (e.g., “Ockham’s Razor) would endure.

May 25

Pope Gregory VII

If saints are to be ranked by the sweetness of their character, Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana (1020-85), must be placed very low on the celestial hierarchy. His belligerence and intolerance led to a clash between papacy and empire that cost many lives and led to centuries of strife.

Born into a peasant family, Hildebrand became a monk. His talents were recognized by a series of papal administrations in the mid-eleventh century, at a time when reforming zeal was sweeping the church. The chief abuse that came under attack was simony, which originally meant the corrupt buying and selling of church offices, but which now came to mean any kind of lay participation in the naming of church officials. For centuries it had been the custom for nobles, kings and emperors to have a hand in the selection of bishops, abbots, and even popes. In many countries, high-ranking clerics were an integral part of the feudal system, owning vast lands, paying feudal dues, and contributing to the provision of knights; for secular rulers to step back from appointing these men was unrealistic. Reforming clergy particularly took aim at rulers investing bishops with the staff and ring of office — thus the name “Investiture Controversy” for this whole collision of world views.

Hildebrand was among the chief supporters of popes who repudiated the role of the Holy Roman Emperor in naming pontiffs. He rose in administrative rank until finally in 1073 he was elected pope, taking the name Gregory VII. He immediately quarrelled with Emperor Henry IV. The young German king had political ambitions in northern Italy which clashed with those of the papacy and he refused to relinquish the power to name church officials. Denunciations were issued from each side, political allies were sought and bribed, apologies were made and retracted, and in 1076 Gregory excommunicated the emperor and declared his throne vacant. This forced Henry to wait in the snow outside the papal castle at Canossa (shown above) for a chance to abjectly debase himself in front of the pope in order to win back admission to the sacraments and to his throne. Once the ban was lifted, however, Henry resumed the fight which continued for the next ten years.

Gregory believed that the papacy was the natural ruler of Christendom and he held a low opinion of secular rulers. His intellectual circle engaged in a pamphlet war against the supporters of kings, probably the first controversy over political theory in western Europe since the fall of Rome. Gregory’s Dictatus papae of 1076 mandated that the princes of the world should kiss the feet of the pope, that the pope could depose emperors, and he could be judged by no man.

Needing a secular ally with an army to repel Henry’s invasion of papal lands, Gregory made an alliance with an unsavoury character, Robert Guiscard, a Norman bandit and adventurer who had made himself ruler of southern Italy. In 1084 Henry succeeded in capturing Rome and crowning a rival pope, forcing Gregory into hiding, but the Germans had to withdraw as the Norman army moved north. Guiscard liberated Gregory and occupied Rome but his troops behaved so badly that they were forced to flee, taking Gregory with them. The next year Gregory died in Salerno. On his tomb are the words: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”

May 24

Home / Uncategorized / May 24

1856 Pottawatomie Massacre

Bleeding Kansas again. John Brown was an abolitionist activist who had recently moved to the Kansas Territory to aid the forces of anti-slavery settlers. In May, 1856, he joined a group riding to the aid of the town of Lawrence, centre of the Free State movement, which was threatened by a pro-slavery militia. Finding, en route, that they were too late to be of any use to Lawrence, Brown, four of his sons, and two other men decided to march toward Pottawatomie Creek, near present-day Lane, Kansas, to the homes of pro-slavery sympathizers. 

On the night of May 24th, 1856, Brown banged on the door of James Doyle and ordered the men inside to come out. Brown’s sons then attacked them with broadswords. They executed three of the Doyles, father and sons (a 16-year-old boy was spared after his mother pleaded for his life), splitting open heads and cutting off arms. Brown himself put a bullet into the head of James Doyle. The gang then sought out other pro-slavery supporters in the area. They traveled to Allen Wilkinson’s home, where, against the protestations of Wilkinson’s wife, who was sick with the measles, they took Wilkinson and hacked him to death, leaving his body alongside the road.

Brown’s men then crossed to the south bank of the creek and approached the home of James Harris. Here Brown’s group found several guests and questioned them about their views on slavery and whether they had participated in the attack on Lawrence earlier in the week. William Sherman’s answers did not satisfy Brown, and he was killed behind the residence and his body left in the creek. The Browns then disappeared into the night.

Proslavery forces launched a manhunt, plundering homesteads as they searched the countryside for the Pottawatomie killers. John Brown took to the woods and evaded capture. His sons did not fare as well; John Jr. and Jason — neither of whom had been involved at Pottawatomie — were savagely beaten. Frederick was shot through the heart at the Battle of Osawatomie and Brown’s Station was burnt to the ground. 

 

May 23

1934 Bonnie and Clyde gunned down 

Fifty bullets riddled  the bodies of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, ending the careers of the two bank robbers. A posse of Texas Rangers ambushed the pair on a little-traveled road outside Shreveport, Louisiana. The gangster and his moll were in a gray automobile speeding along at 85 miles per hour when the officers opened fire from the road-side. After the volley, Barrow and Parker were found crumpled up, their guns clutched in lifeless hands.

Said one of the posse about the hailstorm of lead that greeted the outlaw couple: “Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols. We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns. There was smoke coming from the car, and it looked like it was on fire. After shooting the shotguns, we emptied the pistols at the car, which had passed us and ran into a ditch about 50 yards on down the road. It almost turned over. We kept shooting at the car even after it stopped. We weren’t taking any chances.”

Bonnie and Clyde had menaced the Southwest for the past four years, holding up banks, gas stations and luncheonettes. The desperadoes, both from Texas and in their mid- 20’s, collaborated on the murders of 12 people (9 of them police officers) in their last two years. Parker was reputed to be as good a shot as Barrow, if not better.

When the final shootout was over, Barrow and Parker were found with a veritable arsenal:  a dozen guns and several thousand rounds of ammunition. A half-eaten sandwich, a saxophone, and 15 sets of license plates from different states were in the car. One of the Texas Rangers, Frank Hamer, said, “I hate to bust a cap on a woman, especially when she was sitting down. However, if it  hadn’t been her, it would have been us.”

The 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, glorified the sociopathic pair, while The Highway Men (2019), starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson told the story from the point of view of the law.

May 22

1968

Loss of the Scorpion

The USS Scorpion was a Skipjack-class nuclear submarine of the United States navy launched in 1960. It carried a crew of 99 and was designed to be an extremely fast hunter-killer of both surface vessels and enemy submarines. It had almost unlimited range and could travel at 61 kmh underwater. In 1966 Scorpion penetrated Soviet waters and secretly filmed a Russian missile launch.

In May 1968 Scorpion was assigned to follow and observe a Soviet task force in the Atlantic, a flotilla that included two attack submarines. Having done that, it was to return to its home base in Norfolk, Virginia. It never reached its destination. A radio message was received on May 21 that the boat was following the Soviet vessels but no more was ever heard from it. A search was launched before news of its disappearance was released to the public, but it was not until October, 1968 that  the wreckage of the Scorpion was found at the bottom of the Atlantic 740 km southwest of the Azores and over 3 km below the surface.

Cause of the loss of the boat has never been conclusively determined but many have speculated that one of its own torpedoes had exploded. A more sensational charge is that the Soviets had sunk Scorpion — dangerous games between submerged vessels of opposing navies were not unknown during the Cold War. Moreover, the Soviets had lost one of their own submarines earlier that year when the K-129 sank in the Pacific; conspiracy theorists posit that the Russian navy blamed the U.S. for this and that Scorpion was attacked in revenge.

To add to the mystery, two other submarines were lost in 1968: the Israeli sub Dakar sank in the Mediterranean and the French Minerve off the coast of France.

May 21

1856 The sack of Lawrence, Kansas

In the 1850s the question that dominated American politics was slavery, especially whether involuntary servitude would be allowed to spread west as the interior of the continent was opened up and new states were admitted to the Union. Kansas was especially divided between pro- and anti-slavery camps, each with their own capitals and armed bands of partisans willing to use force to determine the outcome. This period, known as “Bleeding Kansas”, was a foreshadowing of the civil strife that was to eventually breakout into open warfare in 1861.

The town of Lawrence, in northeastern Kansas, had been settled by Free-Stater migrants from Massachusetts who established a legislature to rival the pro-slavery official assembly in Lecompton. It was also the home to two anti-slavery newspapers, the Kansas Free State and the Herald of Freedom; these things made it a natural target of proponents of slave-holding. In April, the County Sheriff, Samuel J. Jones, attempted to serve arrest warrants on members of the assembly but he was shot by a sniper and driven away from the town. On May 21, he and a pro-slavery militia, flying flags with such mottoes as “Southern Rights” and “Supremacy of the White Race,” descended on Lawrence. They seized those they had come to arrest and proceeded to sack the town. They burned down the hotel that was the headquarters of the Free Staters, ransacked the presses of the newspapers, destroying the printing equipment, and looted shops and homes. 

The pro-slavery victory was a temporary one. Lawrence was to serve as the territorial capital as anti-slavery momentum gathered and a few years later Kansas was to enter the Union as a free state. 

May 20

325

The Council of Nicaea

Though the very earliest Christian churches had regarded Jesus as divine and the Son of God, it took the Council of Nicaea to define the exact relationship of the Son to the divine Father. In the decade after the legalization of Christianity and imperial favour falling on the Church after centuries of persecution, two major schools of thought emerged on the subject. The first, promulgated by Arius, an Egyptian priest, held that Jesus was a creation of the Father, saying “if the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not.” Arius cited Scripture in defence of this position, noting that Jesus had stated that he was inferior to the Father (John 14:28) and that Colossians 1:15 had called Jesus “the first-born of all creation.” The second position was that Jesus was of the same essence as the Father — homoousios in Greek — co-equal and co-eternal. The controversy that this debate generated prompted the emperor Constantine to call a conference of bishops from around the empire to settle the issue. They met at Nicaea in Asia Minor (now the Turkish city of Iznik).

The Christological issue was settled decisively against the views of Arius. He and two supporters were condemned and exiled; it was decreed that “if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offense, he shall be submitted for capital punishment…”

The Council also came to other decisions. A new approach to computing the date of Easter was arrived at and the schism of Melitius was dealt with. (Meletius differed with most of the Church over readmitting Christians who had apostatized under persecution.) A number of canons, or decrees, were issued prohibiting self-castration and usury as well as matters of church administration. The Council of Nicaea set the example for gatherings of clerics to set guidelines for the Church.