web analytics

Tag: Geography

Categories
Eduardo Velasco

Heartland, 7

by Eduardo Velasco

 

Middle Ages: Pax Mongolica

If initially Hindu and Bactrian traders had dominated the Silk Road trade, between the 5th and 8th centuries the Sogdians and, after the Muslim conquests, the Arabs and Persians would do so. At the western end of the route, Byzantium was the first European power to realise that the Heartland was a geopolitical reality to be taken into account. Alternating diplomacy and war with the peoples of the steppe (Avars, Pechenegs, Kipchaks and others), Constantinople could prolong its existence for a millennium after the fall of Rome.

Closely intertwined with the history of Byzantium is that of the Varangians (as the Slavs called the Vikings of Sweden), who moved up the great Russian rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea basin and allied with the Slavs in an attempt to defeat the Khazars—a steppe confederation in southern Russia that had adopted Judaism as its official religion and is probably the ancestor of much of Ashkenazi Jewry. The Varangians took Kiev, the southernmost of the cities on the Dnieper, which allowed them to maintain constant contact with Byzantium, and eventually conquered the Khazar capital, Sarkel, not far from present-day Volgograd. In doing so, they came to dominate the trade corridor where the Don and Volga rivers come closest, jumping from the Black Sea basin to the Caspian basin—thus to the Heartland—and establishing themselves as a sort of second Byzantine Empire to connect Europe with Asia. The history of the Russias begins, clustered around cities like Kiev, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, Pskov or Muscovy, in generally heavily forested territories, where the Orthodox faith will eventually prevail.

Red: areas subject to Viking colonisation. Green: areas subject to Viking influence. Russia was born as an intermediary between the Scandinavian and Byzantine worlds, just as Germania was born as an intermediary between the Scandinavian and Roman worlds. The Vikings, as the founders of the first Russian states, laid the foundations of the only power capable of dominating the Heartland in the long run and connecting it with Eastern Europe. Although the core of historic Russia was born in Kiev, it slowly moved northwards, passing through cities such as Smolensk, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, Moscow and St Petersburg.

Genghis Khan, a tall, white, red-haired, blue-eyed man, was in many ways the Asian and medieval counterpart of Alexander the Great. His extraordinary personality succeeded in uniting the tribes and clans of Mongolia and in seizing control of the Silk Road, so that by his death in 1227 he was ruler of an empire stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Caspian, ruled from the Mongol capital of Karakorum (not to be confused with the mountain range of the same name). The strongly continental character of these domains was brilliantly portrayed when the Mongol invasion of Japan failed: the steppe horsemen, who had never seen the sea before, suffered severe seasickness and vomiting in their naval adventure, and what the Japanese called kamikaze or ‘divine wind’ caused such heavy losses to the Mongol fleet that the invasion failed. Other environments where Mongolia was never able to make its dominance felt emphatically were the mountains and forests—the Mongols were a people of plains and steppes, and both Siberia and the Russian principalities had huge forest masses. Indeed, at the time of the ‘Mongol yoke’, during which the Russias were tributary to the Tartars, the khanate of the Golden Horde ended where the steppe gave way to the forests of the North. From these closed and impenetrable spaces, Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Peresvet and other national heroes of Russian history forged the greatness of the future Principality of Muscovy.

The Mongols’ military adventures reached Syria, Poland, Hungary and the gates of Vienna, but they were unable to cross the Sea of Japan or other maritime spaces. You don’t have to be a lynx to appreciate that the Mongol Empire drew its power from the dominance of the Heartland. In the West, the Mongols were able to advance thanks to the excellent information provided at all times by the Venetian merchant intelligence network. One of these agents was Marco Polo’s father.

For better or worse, the Mongol conquests provided the Pax Mongolica (or Pax Tatarica) and a relatively stable territorial continuity from the Near East and Eastern Europe to China. Thanks to it, from 1245, on the occasion of the First Council of Lyon, we can find European emissaries sent to the Mongol dominions by order of the Pope and the King of France: Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Ascelin of Lombardy and André de Longjumeau. The aim was, on the part of the Papacy, to gain influence in Asia, especially by winning over the ancient communities of Nestorian Christians and, on the part of France, to forge links between Louis IX of France and Güyük Khan and to solidify a Franco-Mongol alliance, supposedly to make common cause in the Levant (the time of the Crusades).

In 1253, the Flemish Franciscan monk William of Rubruk was able to cross all of Central Asia and reach Karakorum, where he found French, Russian and Hungarian captured in Hungary. The friar also reported the presence of German prisoners working in iron mines in Central Asia—it seems that Stalin was not the first to capture Germans in Eastern Europe and deport them as slaves to the Heartland. In Mongolia, Islam, Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity were already flourishing under the religious tolerance of the Khans. Rubruk returned to Europe with a detailed report for King Louis IX of France, entitled Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes Orientales.

Travels of Friar William of Rubruk. At the time, Sarai played the same role that the Khazarian Sarkel had played before and the Soviet Stalingrad would play later: to serve as a bridge between the Don and Volga rivers, between the Black Sea and Caspian basins—and thus between Europe and the Heartland.

Later in the same century, the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, Venetian merchants, were able to establish prosperous trading emporiums in Constantinople and in Sudak or Soldaia (see map of the Mongol conquests above), where the presence of the powerful Venetian thalassocracy was strong. Encouraged by the wealth of the Golden Horde khanate, the Polo brothers eventually settled in its capital, Sarai, already within the confines of the Eurasian Heartland. Sarai was located in southern Russia, close to ancient Khazarian Sarkel and modern-day Volgograd, shared with these cities its role as a hinge between the Black Sea and Volga basins (the latter being part of the Heartland) and, with 600,000 inhabitants, was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of the 13th century. There, the Polo brothers became acquainted with the customs of the Tartars, the world of the steppe and the information brought back by foreign traders about distant routes further east. Following these indications, the Venetians proceeded to Bukhara, present-day Uzbekistan, where they lived for three years. They travelled up the Silk Road to Dadu (Beijing), where the throne of Kublai Khan, Genghis’s grandson, was located. The Asian monarch provided them with a Mongol ambassador to the Pope in Rome, safe conduct to travel throughout the Mongol dominions, and a letter to the Pope asking for a sample of oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as a hundred ‘wise men’ to teach Christianity and Western customs in China. Sino-Roman relations, which had never been able to take shape in antiquity, were beginning to take shape in the middle Ages thanks to Venice, the Papacy and the Mongol conquests.

Pope Gregory X received the missive from the Mongol Khan in 1271, sending only two Dominican friars with the Polo brothers, this time accompanied also by Niccolo’s seventeen-year-old son Marco. The friars did not complete the journey out of fear, while the Venetian merchants completed the Silk Road from one end to the other, arriving in the capital of the Khanate in 1274, three years after their departure. Welcomed by the Khan, they lived under his hospitality for se¬¬venteen years before returning to Europe. The Polo voyages would never have been possible without the existence of a single state from the Middle East to the Pacific; thanks to this, Europe was able to read Marco Polo’s accounts, accessing first-hand testimony about what lay at the heart of Eurasia.

Thanks to the stability of the Pax Mongolica, Marco Polo was not the last European to set foot in Eurasia. In 1318, four years after the dissolution of the Order of the Temple, the Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone embarked on an impressive journey that took him from Venice to Armenia, Persia, India, China, Indonesia, and other places in the Far East. He even described Tibet as ‘where the Pope of the idolaters dwells’.

Several events ultimately brought the Pax Mongolica to an end:

• The virulent spread of the Black Death in the 1340s. Originating in Central Asia, the plague spread along both land and sea trade routes, affecting Europe as well as China, India and Arabia and introducing terror, distrust and the quarantining of entire cities along the trade routes.

• The Mongol horsemen were becoming fat, comfortable and decadent, and the Chinese, seasoned in palace intrigue, seized power, driving out the Mongol Yuan dynasty and other foreign (including European and Christian) influences and founding the Ming dynasty in 1368. The coup d’état in China was heavily influenced by a secret society: the White Lotus.

• The fleeting rise of Tamerlane, the last great steppe conqueror, who annihilated the Nestorian Christians of Persia and attacked the khanate of the Golden Horde (southern Russia), causing Muscovy, then ruled by Vasily I, to stop paying tribute to the Tatars. Yet in 1382, Moscow was still sacked by the Tatars.

• Buddhism, a new cultural and ideological trend very different from the ancestral paganism that the Mongols had hitherto professed, had penetrated Mongolia itself. It would take a couple of centuries for Buddhism to gain a foothold in the country. Still, it was only a matter of time before the new monks would win over the local shamans, winning over the Mongol aristocracy and erecting monasteries at crossroads and in the great pasture lands where large numbers of herdsmen gathered to perform sacrifices and other rituals. It has always been rumoured that it was the Chinese who favoured the introduction of Buddhism into Mongolia, hoping that the new creed would defuse the ancient warrior mentality of the Mongols and in turn ease the pressure on the Great Wall fringe; in fact, the White Lotus was a Buddhist society. The process would culminate centuries later, in 1568, when Altan Khan granted the head of the Tibetan lineage, Gelug, the title of ‘Dalai Lama’.

But if the Black Death, Tamerlane’s raids and the collapse of the Khanate had cut off communications between East and West, a new and at first-sight unfortunate event was to restore them: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 closed the ‘Varangian route’. It blocked the natural maritime outlet to the steppes, while many Greek immigrants migrated in stages from Constantinople across the Black Sea to Ukraine and eventually Moscow. Europe became an island, surrounded to the west by the Atlantic, to the south by the Mediterranean, to the southeast by the Ottoman Empire and the east by the Golden Horde and other khanates. In this situation, the only states capable of breaking Europe’s insularity and reuniting it with the Greater East by land were the Russian principalities. So the catastrophe of 1453 forced the peoples of Russia to turn eastwards to conquer the Tatar dominions, just as it forced the peoples of the West to turn to the Atlantic to conquer the new world. Both European movements, East and West, initially had a similar goal: to reconnect with Stasia. However, while Europe’s western thrust would accentuate its insularity and maritime character, the eastern thrust would emphasise its terrestrial character.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Philosophy of history

Heartland, 6

by Eduardo Velasco

Antiquity

The first great empire of the Heartland, the Persians, arose after the irruption onto the Iranian plateau of various Aryan tribes from present-day Russia and Ukraine: the Medes, Persians and Parthians. Since then, Persia has been a country that has merely recycled itself as an empire over and over again throughout history, tending to project power across the five seas of Penthalasia (Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caspian, Persian Gulf and Red Sea) and to be a bridge between Europe-Esthasia, Stasia-Africa, Central Asia-Indian and the Eurasian and Arabian Heartland.

The 4th century saw an event that would have a decisive influence on the consolidation of the Silk Road as the backbone of international trade: the eastward thrust of Alexander the Great. Starting from their Balkan base in northern Greece, the Macedonians conquered Anatolia, the Levant, Pentalasia, Egypt and the Achaemenid Empire, reaching as far as India. The Greeks founded several Alexandrias in the Heartland: Alexandria of Aria (today’s Afghan city of Herat, through which passes a strategic gas pipeline and road, and near which there is a Spanish-Italian military base), Alexandria Eschate (today’s Jodzend, Tajikistan), Alexandria of Oxo (today’s Ai Khanum, Afghanistan), Alexandria Caucasus (probably present-day Bagram, Afghanistan, where there is a major NATO air base) and Alexandria Aracosia (present-day Kandahar, Afghanistan, where there is another US military base). According to Isidore of Carax, the Parthians called this region ‘White India’. North of these militarised and fortified Greek colonies, the Scythians and Masagetes—whom Alexander the Great never dared to attack—flowed freely across the steppe. The Macedonians had reached the gates of Gog and Magog.

Citadel of Herat (Afghanistan), the ancient capital of a Persian province described by Herodotus as ‘the granary of Central Asia’. Given the success of Macedonian conquests in the Greater East, it is understandable that Pompey, Trajan, the medieval Crusaders, Napoleon, today’s NATO armies and any Western power seeking to penetrate deep into Asia would look to Alexander the Great.

Greek expeditions from the Tajik valley of Fergana reached the city of Kashgar (present-day Uiguristan), home to an Indo-European tribe, the Tocaryans. The Dayuan (‘great Ionians’) of the Han Chinese chronicles are believed to be descendants of these Greek settlers of the Heartland. Alexander the Great was the first who, by stabilising a vast space between the Great West and the Great East, opened both domains to mutual trade. Thus, the most important and lasting effect of the Macedonian campaigns was the definitive opening of the Silk Road.

When Alexander the Great died in 323 b.c.e., the Diadoks (generals of the Macedonian army) divided up his empire, fighting for twenty years for regional hegemony. After his death, the epigones, his successors, reigned over the territorial units resulting from the fragmentation of the Alexandrian empire. The one that interests us most in this article is the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, centred in Bactria (present-day Balkh, northern Afghanistan). The 3rd century b.c.e. saw the entry into this Greek domain of Buddhism from the Maurya Empire of India, with which the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom maintained numerous political and commercial relations. It is the beginning of an extraordinary Hellenistic-Buddhist civilisation, led by Greek monks and a Greek military aristocracy, descendants of the ancient Macedonian armies, in the heart of Central Asia, an episode rarely remembered in modern historiography.[1]

Approximate extent of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in 180 b.c.e. By this time, Buddhism with pagan-Hellenic influences was already the dominant religion, to the extent that reliefs of the Hindu Buddha protected by the Greek Herakles were sculpted. Despite the problematic mountain barriers, the kingdom was mainly oriented towards India. It dominated an important segment of the Silk Road, controlling the exits from China to the West.

The earliest artistic depictions of the Buddha, which strongly influenced Buddhist imagery throughout Asia, occurred in this kingdom. It has even been reasonably speculated that Apollo influenced the early sculptures of the Hindu saint so that the legacy of the more typically Western god would have reached the Pacific—something the shepherd warriors of the Balkans could surely never have imagined. The entire Gandhara artistic current is of Greek and therefore European genesis. In the middle of the Silk Road, the colossal Buddha statues in Bamiyan (Afghanistan, demolished by the Taliban in March 2001), were clearly of Greco-Buddhist heritage. This cultural stream is a superb example of the extraordinary fruits that a healthy and positive interaction between the West and the East could bring.

Museum, Lahore, Pakistan. This 2nd-century Gandhara statue is the Greek Athena, sculpted in the Greek style and with facial features typical of the aristocracy of classical Greece. It is part of the legacy of the first European state in the Heartland.

Around 130 b.c.e., the Greco-Bactrian kingdom was overrun by the Toccharians, who eventually founded the Kushan Empire. For a time, however, the Indo-Greek kingdom survived, detached from the Greco-Bactrian when the latter conquered the Indus basin and part of the Ganges basin in an expansion reminiscent of the Indo-Aryan conquests fourteen centuries earlier.

Indo-Greek kingdoms in 100 b.c.e., in what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. 14: Pushkalavati. 15: Taxila. 16: Sakala. They occupy a position straddling the Heartland and the fertile, overpopulated, rich plains of the Indus and Ganges. They include what are now the AFPAK frontier and the troubled tribal areas of Pakistan. These kingdoms, following in the footsteps of the ancient Indo-Aryans, will eventually conquer much of the Indus and Ganges basins. It will be noted that the regions of Nuristan (Afghanistan) and the Chitral and Hunza valleys (Pakistan), where European physical features have been best preserved to this day, fall within this area of Hellenistic influence.

The Macedonian push into the heart of Asia was merely the logical climax of the process initiated centuries earlier by the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, now western Turkey. By now it will have been appreciated that in Hindu civilisation, centred in North Hindustan, the influence of the Heartland predominates, even though India was later conquered by a typically maritime empire such as the British.[2] It seems that since then, the mountainous territories separating Hindustan from Central Asia have been a clear battlefront between thalassocracy and telurocracy. Inevitably, this reminds us of the role of Afghanistan and Pakistan on the international scene today.

Both Rome and China were mutually aware of the existence of the other empire and maintained to some extent essentially indirect relations. The Han Empire regarded Rome as a kind of Western counterpart, and Rome probably had the same image as China. However, between the two powers stood two states in the former Alexandrian conquests: the Parthian Empire and the Kushan Empire. Rome tended to push eastwards, eventually conquering the Caucasus and what is now Iraq, but problems in the Levant meant that Roman conquests in the rest of Pentalasia were rather short-lived. The Mediterranean was the only sea that Rome could call Mare Nostrum; neither the North Sea, the Atlantic, nor the Black Sea, nor the Red Sea—let alone the Caspian or the Persian Gulf—could be called fully Roman.

The Roman Senate even proclaimed several edicts prohibiting, in vain, the use of silk, since its trade bled the Empire of its gold reserves, which indicates that two millennia ago, what happened at one end of the Silk Road influenced the opposite end—an example of proto-globalisation. Pliny the Elder said in Natural History that ‘by the lowest estimate, India, Seres and Arabia cause our Empire to lose 100 million sesterces every year: this is what our luxuries and our women cost us’. There seems to have been phenomena in Rome comparable to the flow of silver to China before the opium wars, as well as the loosening of patriarchy in the West today.

In 56 b.c.e., Rome fights the Parthian Empire at the battle of Carras (modern-day Kurdistan). The feared Parthian cavalry manages to defeat the legion and Crassus, the Roman general, is executed. Ten thousand Roman soldiers were taken prisoner and deported to the far east of the enemy empire, to the Eurasian Heartland; specifically to Bactriana (Afghanistan). Plutarch and Pliny the Elder tell us that many of the Roman survivors were enslaved or sent to forced labour, but that some managed to make their way into the world of labour as mercenaries. These Roman troops were supposedly used by the Parthians to fight the Huns in the province of Margiana, which is now Turkmenistan. The Roman Empire and the Parthians signed a peace treaty in 20 b.c.e. and attempts were made to bring back the prisoners, but by then all traces of the ill-fated legion had been lost. Han chronicles from 36 b.c.e., describing a Chinese military campaign in western China, tell of a disciplined enemy army guarding the square of Zhizhi, present-day Uzbekistan. These chronicles mention a quadrangular wooden fortress and enemy soldiers entering the battle perfectly aligned and building a fish-scale-like formation with their shields: the ‘tortoise’ of the Roman legions had arrived in the Heartland. After finally being defeated, these soldiers were taken, again as mercenaries, to the southern frontier of the Gobi Desert, to protect China from barbarian raids. They were eventually settled at Li-Jien (present-day Liqian), a node on the Silk Road whose very name is a corruption of ‘legion’. The presence of the ‘lost legion of Crassus’ was brought up in 2001 and genetic analysis has confirmed the trace of European blood in this area, a presence that can be seen with the naked eye in the high frequency of more aquiline noses, wavy brown hair and light eyes.

The journey of the ‘lost legion’.

The incursion of the Roman legions into the Levant catalysed a historical process of enormous importance. In the 1st and 2nd centuries, several ethnic cleansings of Greeks took place in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Crete, Crete, Sicily, Rhodes and elsewhere saw Jewish communities, taking advantage of the absence of Roman legions engaged in a military campaign against the Parthian Empire, rise in complete synchronicity against the hated Greek communities of the region. Although these Jewish revolts would be harshly put down by Rome, the Europeanisation of the Levant would never come to fruition, Jewish collaboration with the Parthian Empire would continue and, in the long run, the entire Roman Empire would be semi-ethnicised and would see the eradication of the Greco-Latin legacy, this time under a Christian sign, in a much more resounding way. These ethnic cleansings of European populations were a reaction to the will of the deserted, dry and infertile East, the effect of which was to break the continuity of Greek culture from the Roman Empire to India. The Greek pockets in India and Central Asia, deprived of the source of their culture and human capital, would gradually lose influence until they were swallowed up by the Heartland. It would be fourteen centuries before another power, this time Russia, would reintroduce the flame of Greek culture into the heart of the continent.

The Huns, who emerged from the Heartland in the latter days of the Roman Empire, are of nebulous ethnogenesis. We know that they were a society of pastoral warriors whose main foodstuffs were meat and milk, and whose military tactics were based on large formations of light cavalry masterfully employing the bow and javelin throw. The Huns were, rather than a specific ethnic group, a confederation of steppe horsemen, whose ranks included Ural-Uralic, Turkic, Mongol, Iranian, Germanic, Slavic and other peoples, probably dominated by a Turkic-Mongol aristocracy, although in the Hunnic territories of Eastern Europe, the lingua franca was Gothic. At Attila’s death, his confederation dissolved as quickly as it had appeared, but the effects of its brief existence—notably setting in motion the great migration of the Germanic peoples who were to constitute the medieval nobilities of Western Europe—were to endure for a long time.

The case of the Huns is comparable to that of the silk trade in terms of the repercussions at one end of the Silk Road of what happened at the other end, for if the Huns spilt over into Europe, it was because they could not spill over into China. Europe, unlike Stasia, lacked a state with a clear strategic doctrine that took into account the importance of the Heartland. On the contrary, the Chinese, who had already built dams to control the disastrous floods of the Yellow River (whose sources are in the Heartland), had decided to dam the human floods coming from the heart of the continent by building the Great Wall of China—again, to preserve their ‘political order’. The Great Wall is an impressive testimony to the importance of the Eurasian hinterland; in many sections, it coincides exactly with the boundaries of the Heartland. It seems that the Chinese emperors saw the Heartland as an impenetrable domain, a source of barbarians and a hornet’s nest best left alone. But the Great Wall was not merely a military barrier, it was also a transport corridor and a system of locks to extract taxes, fees and tolls from Silk Road trade, levy tariffs and control migratory flows.

The fact that the Great Wall is more like an infrastructure of countless different walls, built over eighteen centuries, shows that defending against the Heartland tribes was a constant obsession for successive Chinese dynasties. The Mongols had a diet based on animal products and were, as a people, more warlike than the Chinese, although China had the most effective martial traditions in the world.

In 431, Nestorian Christianity was condemned by the First Council of Ephesus, leading to a great exile of Nestorian Christians to Sassanid Persia. Henceforth, Baghdad and Seleukia-Ctesiphon were centres of Nestorianism, which sent large numbers of missionaries (or perhaps better said ‘agents’, mainly Syrians and Persians) to the far reaches of the continent, founding Christian communities throughout most of Asia. Cities such as Herat, Farah, Almalik (known to 14th-century Christians as Armalec), Samarkand, Kashgar and even Tang-era Beijing itself, were home to thriving Nestorian communities from the early Middle Ages onwards.
 

___________

[1] More information here.

[2] Conquerors of India from the Heartland include the Indo-Aryans, the Macedonians and the Mongols (Moghul dynasty, still active in the 18th century). Nor can the Persian influence be underestimated: Persian was in many parts of India the cultured language of the social elite until the arrival of the English.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Racial studies

Heartland, 5

Previous Heartland entries: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

 

A Brief History of the Heartland

Prehistory

During the last ice age (the Würm glaciation), geographic pockets surrounded by glaciers formed in the Heartland, and it is in the extreme conditions of one of these icy pockets that an extraordinary human type, ruthlessly selected by the environment, was able to develop. In the article on racial classification, we saw that the Nordic Central Asian race, progenitor of the R1a and R1b genetic lineages and thus paternal ancestor of most of the world’s modern ethnic Europeans, was born in the Palaeolithic in the heart of Eurasia, the Zungaria and Altai regions being proposed as possible Urheimaten of this evolutionary type. Mackinder himself, who lived at a time when eugenics and the study of human biodiversity were not politically incorrect taboos, related the Heartland to brachycephalic skulls and considered the Central European ‘Alpine’ racial type to be an appendage of the anthropological world of ancient Central Asia,[1]separating the dolichocephalic populations of southern Europe (‘Mediterranean’) from the dolichocephalic populations of northern Europe (‘Nordic’) like a wedge.

After the deglaciation, the hunter-gatherer way of life was still dominant throughout the world, but two new ways of life had emerged: in the Near East, the farmer (evolution of gathering), and in the Heartland, the herdsman (evolution of hunting). From the Neolithic onwards, the Heartland did not cease to spew horde upon horde of pastoralist and mountain peoples over the margins of Eurasia, these peoples eventually forming the aristocracies of many ancient Middle Eastern civilisations.

Through the Persian plateau and the mountainous areas of the Middle East, the R1b lineage will reach Europe, up the Danube and accumulate in breeding nuclei in the Alpine region (Unetice and related cultures), as well as in the French-Cantabrian strip. The R1a took the simpler steppe path to end up in Eastern Europe and the German-Polish Plain. It is here that the properly ‘Indo-European’ world was born, linked to the mobility of large conquering troops, the use of the chariot and the horse, patriarchy and the sense of vast spaces and horizons that would give rise to empires, to such an extent that millennia later, ‘knight’ continues to designate a man considered worthy of respect. It is therefore in the pastoralist-herding cultures of Yamna (or Yamnaya), Poltovka and the Volga battle-axe that we must look for the origins of the chivalric and imperial traditions of history.

The earliest metal-age culture typical of the steppe Heartland is probably that of Sintashta-Petrovka. The Arkaim site in the southern Ural Mountains in the middle of the steppe, dated 1600-1900 b.c.e. is the best-known material evidence of this mother culture. Called the ‘swastika city’, ‘mandala city’, ‘Russian Stonehenge’ (located at approximately the same latitude as the English Stonehenge) and even the ‘capital of the ancient Aryan civilisation’, Arkaim is a fortress-village of concentric circles, oriented according to the cardinal points and the stars, and its inhabitants were probably the ancestors of the Aryans described in the Rigveda (India) and the Avesta (Persia).

Birth and expansion of the use of the two-wheeled radial war chariot, the forerunner of modern armoured military formations. Its emergence is within the Heartland, in the southern Urals, now Kazakhstan, which according to Mackinder was ‘the very pivot of the Pivot Area’. Here the Sintashta-Petrovka culture flourished, where animal husbandry, copper mining and bronze metallurgy played a central role, along with the war chariot and well-fortified human settlements, such as the Arkaim site. Later came the Andronovo (orange) culture with its burial complexes where the warrior was buried in burial mounds along with his weapons, horses and chariot. In Anatolia and Syria, the chariot came from the Hittites, in Egypt from the Hyksos, in Mesopotamia from the Kassites and in Europe from the Celts.

In the Bronze Age, the entire steppe is in ferment. On their chariots and horses, the Mitanni fall on Penthalasia, the Mycenaean Achaeans invade Greece and the Hyksos conquer Lower Egypt. The Rigvedarecounts how three and a half millennia ago the blond Arya, led by the god Indra, swept through the cities of the Indus civilisation, scattering the ‘black skin’ and establishing themselves as the new aristocracy of the region. In India and Persia, conquered by pseudo-Scythian Indo-European peoples from the Heartland, the most important gods are depicted as chariot drivers. In Greece, the Homeric ‘Iliad’ is a hymn to the lifestyle of the Indo-European warriors of the Bronze Age. Even in far-off, inhospitable Scandinavia, the red-haired Thor was conceived as driving a chariot pulled by billy goats. Even after the civilisation of vast areas of Europe and the Middle East, the steppes of the continental interior will continue to be inhabited by peoples of Iranian (‘Aryan’) stock who, like the Scythians, Sarmatians and Alans, will maintain a barbaric modus vivendi until they are swept away or pushed back by new migrations from the interior.

Metal Age cultures where horse husbandry was established. The use of the horse was closely related to a landscape of open spaces and flat horizons such as the Eurasian steppe, as well as to forms of warfare based on speed. This culture would end up having tremendous social and military success across the globe.

These Indo-European steppe societies had a clear predominance of R1a paternal lineages – associated with the Slavs, Persians and North Indian high castes – and bequeathed to archaeology (first Soviet and then international) the phenomenon of kurgans: earthen burial mounds in which important men were buried, found from Western Europe to Central Asia. Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, was buried in a burial mound. This imaginary ritual is the origin of the legends of the lost king: missing and often red-haired rulers (such as King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa or Genghis Khan) who sleep inside a mountain waiting for ‘the moment of greatest need’ for their people.

Kurgan in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. The origin of myths about kings sleeping inside mountains is to be found in the kurgans (burial mounds) of the Metal Age, where important warriors were buried together with their weapons, horses and other belongings. This is where the genesis of the Indo-European world is to be found.

In the article on Indo-European genetic heritage in Central Asia we saw, in addition to some maps illustrating the subject under discussion, to what extent many anthropological-physical traits considered Europoid survive in some ethnic pockets of Central Asia, including Mongolia and Uyghuristan. Precisely from China come references to Western peoples called Dinlins and Boma, who surprised the indigenous population with their ruddy appearance, blue eyes and reddish hair. Some Russian archaeologists link these peoples with descendants of the Afanasiev culture.

_______________

[1] The Geographical Pivot of History, p. 428.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Philosophy of history

Heartland, 4

by Eduardo Velasco

Previous Heartland entries: 1, 2 and 3.

‘The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on Earth’. —Mackinder.

Heartland comes from heart and land, ‘cardinal region’. The Heartland is the sum of a series of contiguous river basins whose waters flow into bodies of water inaccessible to oceanic navigation. It is the endorheic basins of Central Eurasia plus the part of the Arctic Ocean basin frozen in the Northern Route with an ice cover of between 1.2 and 2 metres, and therefore impassable for much of the year—except for atomic-powered icebreakers (which only the Russian Federation possesses) and similar vessels. Although the word was first used in its specific meaning by James Fairgrieve (a Mackinderian disciple) in Geography and World Power (1915), the concept of Heartland was first defined by the English geographer Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947), one of the founding fathers of modern geopolitics, in his work The Geographical Pivot of History (1904), where he drew the first graphic representation of what he initially called the ‘Pivot Area’:

Mackinder says in his more comprehensive Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919):

The northern margin of Asia is an inaccessible coast, clogged with ice except for a narrow waterway which opens here and there along the beach during the summer, owing to the melting of the local ice formed during the winter between the floes and the land. It so happens that three of the world’s largest rivers, the Lena, the Yenisei and the Obi, flow northwards through Siberia to this coast, and are therefore divorced for practical purposes from the general system of ocean and river navigation. South of Siberia are other regions at least as extensive, drained into salt lakes with no oceanic outlet; such are the basins of the Volga and Ural rivers flowing into the Caspian, and of the Oxo[1] and Jaxartes[2] into the Aral Sea. Geographers usually describe these internal basins as ‘continental’. Taken together, the Arctic and continental flow regions occupy almost half of Asia and a quarter of Europe and form a large continuous patch in the north and centre of the continent. This entire patch, stretching from the icy, flat shores of Siberia to the torrid, rugged coasts of Baluchistan and Persia, has been inaccessible to oceanic navigation. Its opening by railways—for it had no roads beforehand—and by air routes shortly, constitutes a revolution in the relations of men with the greatest geographical realities of the world. Let us call this great region the Heartland of the Continent.

Sticking strictly to the Mackinderian definition of the Heartland, its exact extent would be as follows:

Mackinder describes the interior of this Heartland in these terms:

The north, centre, and west of the Heartland are a plain, rising only a few hundred feet at most above sea level. In that greatest lowland on the Globe are included Western Siberia, Turkestan, and the Volga basin of Europe, for the Ural Mountains, though a long range, are not of important height, and terminate some three hundred miles north of the Caspian, leaving a broad gateway from Siberia into Europe. Let us speak of this vast plain as the Great Lowland.

Southward the Great Lowland ends along the foot of a tableland, whose average elevation is about half a mile, with mountain ridges rising to a mile and a half. This tableland bears upon its broad back the three countries of Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan; for convenience we may describe the whole of it as the Iranian Upland. The Heartland, in the sense of the region of Arctic and Continental drainage, includes most of the Great Lowland and most of the Iranian Upland; it extends therefore to the long, high, curving brink of the Persian Mountains, beyond which is the depression occupied by the Euphrates Valley and the Persian Gulf.

The Eurasian steppe is the most traversable and open part of what Mackinder called the Great Lowland. It can be considered the backbone of Eurasia and the cradle of pastoralism, the spirit of chivalry and land power. Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia are the key countries for its domination, indeed control of the steppe is a strategic imperative for the Russian Federation—in the same way, Atlanticism ensures that the steppe is never under the control of a single superpower. The Dzungaria Gate, marked on the map, is a mountain pass that separates Uyghuristan from the rest of Central Asia. Mastering such a mountainous strait is as important to a tellurocracy as control of a sea strait is to a thalassocracy. Between the Great Western Steppe (from Hungary to Kazakhstan) and the Great Eastern Steppe (mainly Mongolia and Manchuria), there is only one major barrier: the Altai massif. Budapest, Bucharest, Odesa, Kiev, Volgograd (Stalingrad), Astana, Omsk and Ulan Bator are key cities in the structuring of the Eurasian steppe.

The basis of geopolitics is the contradiction between sea power (‘thalassocracy’ in Greek) and land power (telurocracy). Sea power tends to engender commercial and liberal states, and land power productive and autocratic states. Typical historical thalassocracies have been Phoenicia, Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Hanseatic League, the Republic of Ragusa, the Republic of Salé, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Holland, the British Empire and the United States after 1898. Clear telurocracies have been the Scythians, Sparta, the Holy Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Russian Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the USA before 1898 and the USSR.

Both types of power have their natural citadels and their spheres of influence in the terrestrial geography. The citadel of thalassocracy is the northern half of the Atlantic (Midland Ocean or Mediterranean Sea) and its sphere of influence is Oceania described in 1984 by George Orwell, who knew geopolitics. The citadel of the telurocracy is the Heartland and its sphere of influence is Orwellian Eurasia. The Eurasia of 1984 would, in reality, be, along with other regions of the globe, contested between the two archetypal powers, or have a mixture of both: Southeast Asia, Korea, South India and the Chinese coast would have strong oceanic influence, while Tibet, Uiguristan, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Manchuria and Northern India would have continental influence. According to Orwell, in a world where geopolitics has taken over, the contested areas of the globe—perpetually at war, changing hands and being conquered and reconquered again and again by the three superpowers—form a quadrangle with corners at Tangier-Hong Kong-Darwin-Brazaville, as well as the borders between Stasia and Eurasia. These disputed territories loosely correspond to the Muslim world.

Above, the natural citadels of the thalassocracy and the telurocracy. It will be noted that the shortest way between the two is Scandinavia and the Arctic Ocean, near the Russian-Norwegian border. Europe in general has the misfortune of being the natural battleground between thalassocracy and telurocracy. At present, a new thalassocratic space is forming in the Asia-Pacific, which, together with the Atlantic from the West, besieges the Heartland from the East.

Above, in George Orwell’s novel 1984, there is a fictional essay entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, which explains how the USSR has conquered Western Europe to become Eurasia (red), the United States and the British Empire have united to form Oceania (blue), and Stasia (yellow) has emerged after a decade of confused struggles. None of the three superstates can be conquered even by the other two combined, as their military might be at the same level and their natural defences are too formidable. Within the Tangier-Hong Kong-Darwin-Brazaville quadrangle lie the contested zones of the planet. The borders between Eurasia and Stasia are not entirely clear, except for a reference to the unstable border in Mongolia.

Globalisation has its throne in ‘markets’ (mainly banks and multinationals) and in international trade, 90% of which is conducted by sea, even though rail and pipelines are cheaper, faster and more efficient—or would be if it were not for timely instabilities in the most strategic links of land routes. A landlocked state thus has a large vector of influence projection at its disposal and shares a de facto border with all countries with a coastline on the body of water in question.

Unlike the emerged lands, the planet’s seas constitute a single body (Panthalasa or World Ocean theory), so that whoever goes out into the World Ocean and dominates it will tend to envelop all the world’s emerged lands and infiltrate its power into them, especially through the valleys and plains of the great river basins. But despite this great advantage, the sea, changeable, capricious and shifting, serves only to transport things that come from the land and to lay siege to the land itself. If dominating the sea is merely a means to dominate the land, dominating the land is an end in itself so that a maritime superpower needs to besiege the land only confirms the importance of the land itself.

Halford J. Mackinder

This article will therefore take the point of view of the sea’s natural antagonist. The land represents the firm, stable, fertile, nourishing, productive, organised and disciplined, if the sea is very similar to the ‘becoming’ with its ups and downs, the land is close to the ‘being’ with its obstinate permanence. If the sea rises only in stormy moments, the land rises forever in the mountains, which could be defined as ‘concentrated land’. In the economic sphere, the telluric strategy is not to move goods from one place to another but to produce them and make them stay as close as possible to the soil from which they sprang.

Productivity and fertility thus replace trade and speculation to form a political, economic and social system very different from the one that prevails on the planet today. Likewise, the opening up of spaces of free navigation, which is the obsession of Atlanticism, is replaced by the tendency of the great land masses to strangle maritime traffic in delicate bottlenecks, to break up Panthalasa, turning the various seas into mere inland lakes under tight control. For, as we shall see in another article, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Aegean, the entire Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Andaman Sea, the South China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and even the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay, can be excised from the bosom of the World Ocean and turned into lakes as inaccessible as the Caspian, just by activating natural locks: sea straits like Gibraltar or Hormuz, or island barriers like Japan or the Andaman Arc.

_____________

[1] Oxo or Oxus was the Greek name for the Amur Darya (Pamir) river.

[2] The Greek name for the Syr Darya.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco

Heartland, 3

by Eduardo Velasco

 
Endorheic basins and the importance of river systems

The word endorheic comes from the Greek ἔνδον (éndon, internal) and ῥεῖν (rheîn, to flow). The second word shares a root with the Rhine and Rhea, a chthonic primordial goddess in Greek mythology. An endorheic river basin is thus an internal flow basin or, if you prefer, a closed-loop basin, where waters don’t spill into the seas, but remain enclosed until they flow into terminal central ‘navels’, especially lakes (often saline, such as the Caspian, the Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake), cave systems, underground streams, aquifers, oases, swamps, quicksands and other enclosed spaces. Unlike other river basins, which are open to an ocean and therefore imperfect, endorheic basins are perfect water-holding basins, closed caverns where water currents flowing over the surface can neither enter nor leave.

If the world within conventional sea basins represents the waste, change and explosion of the perishable (‘our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea, which is death’, wrote Jorge Manrique in the 15th century), within endorheic continental basins it represents the conservation, fermentation, cultivation and implosion of the perennial. Indeed, civilisation itself, whose essence is becoming and dilapidation, was born in sea basins: that of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf—although interestingly, Jericho, the first city in the archaeological record with walls, towers and fortifications, arose in a small endorheic basin: that of the Dead Sea.

Endorheic basins usually correspond to dry climatologies, since in areas of frequent rainfall, these basins overflow through their lowest outlet, connecting to a conventional basin, or eroding the barrier of least resistance until they find a hydrological outlet (as happened with the Black Sea, formerly a lake, after the last ice age). In dry climates, water evaporates or is absorbed by the subsoil before this can happen. For this reason, humid Europe has hardly any endorheic basins (although the Caspian accounts for 19 per cent of European territory), and these are generally tiny exceptions such as the Akrotiri salt lake in Cyprus, where the UK maintains a Gibraltar-like strategic enclave. In Spain, endorheic systems are small, such as Los Monegros (Aragon) or the Puerto Real Endorheic Complex (Cadiz).

Endorheic basins of the planet.

In geostrategy, river basins aren’t a random or capricious criterion, since they show better than any other force of gravity, that is, the influence of the Earth when driving power. The reason why we will pay so much attention to river basins in this article is that Nature and the will of the Earth always win out in the end—and river basins are an expression of these forces, as their waters descend in obedience to the gravitational pull of the simplest and most logical route.

In Chinese writing, political order is expressed by the ideograms ‘river’ (water element) and ‘dam’ (earth element). The river represents the ‘chaotic’ forces of Nature, which try to be controlled and contained by human civilisation, by ‘order’. As echoed in modern geopolitics many millennia later, rivers are supranational political systems: not for nothing do river basins cross borders, channel goods, influences, technology, armies, religions, ideologies, animals, economies and strategies, as well as provide fertile, wetland on which to grow grain. It was on the banks of the Jordan River that the first proto-civilised societies were born, the Tigris and especially the Euphrates formed the backbone of Mesopotamian civilisations and the Nile was and is the backbone of Egypt, as the Wei River and later the Yellow River basin was at the birth of China. In front of the river, constructing a dam is nothing more than an attempt to create an artificial endorheic basin.

River basins are also natural infiltration routes from the sea: the Neolithic entered Europe via the Danube, as the Ottomans will do millennia later—the First Crusade will take the same route in reverse.

The Romans entered Hispania via the Ebro and the Moors via the Guadalquivir, and from the tributaries of these rivers, they branched out their strategy of conquest and domination.

The simple fact of going up rivers (Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and St. Lawrence) gave the French control over an area of North America far greater than that controlled by the English, while the Belgians were able to dominate what is now Congo-Kinshasa thanks to the Congo River and its tributaries.

Even the Vikings had the great, easily navigable rivers of the East to thank for their domination of the Russias or their arrival in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate of Baghdad. Thanks to the rivers of Western Europe, the Vikings were able to reach such important cities as Paris, Seville and Pamplona.

The Pearl River was the gateway for British influence in China, and the Yangtze for Japanese influence. Further south, the Mekong was crucial to incorporate Indochina into the French Empire.

In South Africa, the Orange, Vaal and Limpopo rivers were key to Boer expansion. The Zambezi basin gave its name to Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company’s geopolitical project in the African interior, which was called Zambesia before being renamed Rhodesia.

The conflicts in Rwanda were also about a river basin struggle (Nile vs. Congo), as in Darfur (Nile vs. endorheic basin of Lake Chad) and today in northern Nigeria (Niger vs. Lake Chad).

Nor is it necessary to recall the extent to which the fertile basin of the Duero provided the backbone of Castile at the time of the Reconquest, the central role of the Ebro in the Spanish Civil War, the role of the Vistula (whose internationalisation was even proposed) and its mouth, the free city of Danzig, in triggering the Second World War, or the importance of the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata for several South American states.

As for North America, the river system of the Mississippi basin plus the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway provides more kilometres of navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined, as well as feeding and surrounding the largest continuous stretch of arable land on the planet, making it a de facto island.

In early 2014, the conflicts in Crimea and Ukraine turned our eyes back to the river basin map, revealing the huge silhouette drawn by the Don River basin, which easily geo-blocks into the Kerch Strait, separating Crimea from Russia. The most pro-Russian part of Ukraine coincides suspiciously with the Ukrainian region of the Don basin. Almost confirming this, the Don Basin People’s Militia (Donbass), a pro-Russian paramilitary group, was formed in these areas.

Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, Alexandria, Antwerp, Rotterdam, London, Gdansk, New Orleans, New York, Buenos Aires, Dhaka, Calcutta, Cairo and Ho Chi Minh City all have in common that they owe their importance to dominating places where a large basin meets the sea. Nor can the development and history of inland cities such as Moscow, Kiev, Volgograd, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Basel, Paris, Milan, Rome, Budapest, Belgrade, Montreal, Asunción or Chongqing—or in Spain Valladolid, Zaragoza, Toledo, Madrid, Seville or Córdoba—be understood as part of the rivers over which they preside: yet another reason not to underestimate the importance of river systems.

For all these reasons, in States worthy of the name, what happens in their river basins, especially when they are shared with other countries (as in the case of Egypt-Sudan-South Sudan-South Sudan-Uganda-Ethiopia, Bangladesh-India, Burma-China, Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos-Thailand-China, Spain-Portugal, Holland-Germany, Ukraine-Russia or Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina-Uruguay), is a matter of national security.

To give examples, Serbia was stripped of its Mediterranean outlets after it conflicted with NATO, but they could not take away the Danube (a navigable river and therefore a river connection that broke the isolation to which NATO wanted to subject Belgrade), and if Ethiopia and/or Uganda were to do something ‘weird’ at the source of the Nile, they would strangle a nation of 80 million souls in a tremendously effective way.

The same can be said of Turkey, which can take 90% of the waters of the Euphrates from Iraq by diverting it. Syria was also in a position to pressure Israel over the Jordan Springs issue—until Israel invaded and occupied (to this day) the Golan Heights.

Pakistan, too, has tensions with India over the fact that India controls an upper reaches of the Indus River, on which Pakistan’s irrigation systems depend, although its sources are in Tibet.

Perhaps the clearest example is Bangladesh, an unviable state with an ultra-dense and explosive demography (150 million inhabitants, more than Russia, concentrated in a territory the size of Nepal, ultra-flat and low-lying, very sensitive to flooding and rising sea levels), which is completely dependent on the Ganges River, which in turn is controlled by India. As we saw in the article on the Libyan war, the struggle over aquifers and water sources is an irresistible geopolitical reality and will become increasingly so as humanity driven mad by economic and techno-industrial growth pollutes and squanders the planet’s freshwater reserves.

Between basins, there are always natural boundaries such as mountain ranges, or at least a clear watershed, so river basins delimit natural geographic domains. Thus, at the time of the Spanish Empire, the Crown of Castile corresponded essentially to the Atlantic basin of the Iberian Peninsula, while the Crown of Aragon corresponded to the Mediterranean basin: both entities had a geographical coherence that tended to give them political coherence.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire also suspiciously coincided with the Danube basin and the English Thirteen Colonies in North America with the Atlantic basin of the continent; one of the reasons England went to war with its colonies was because it forbade the colonists from crossing the Appalachians (the Proclamation Line), which would have made them break into the huge Mississippi basin, making them a continental entity that would more easily escape the heavily maritime power of London. In those cases where rivers lack this central role, they have a peripheral role as a border between states (the Rio Grande, the Congo, the Orange or the Amur), so their importance remains unquestionable.

When you stand in a conventional sea basin, following the force of gravity and the ‘easiest route’, the land invariably leads you to the sea, which is why it happens so often in history that when a country increases its political and economic power, producing a surplus of material power, it ends up going to sea. But there are other basins where the land leads… to the land. The peculiarity of endorheic basins is that if you are outside the basin, the land will never naturally lead you into it, and if you are inside, the land will never naturally lead you out; in this simple fact, there is an almost metaphysical significance: Heartland is, to all intents and purposes, a bubble, an anomaly, a contradiction in the general geographical system, which is governed by totally different and even opposite laws to those of the rest of the planet’s land surfaces.

Finally, in endorheic basins, the water dams the key to the ‘political order’ are already set by geography.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Philosophy of history

Heartland, 2

by Eduardo Velasco

K A L K I (‘Destroyer of filth’).

If in the West we have inherited legends of Atlantis—a wealthy maritime trading state that, for its sins, was punished by the gods to perish beneath the sea—the East is also rife with mentions of lost lands. In the vast Buddhist regions of Central Asia, there are myths galore of underground cities and hidden valleys, such as Shambhala, where the ancient traditional and spiritual powers of the world would have retreated, waiting to manifest themselves in the final war between the spirits of good and the spirits of evil. The Mongols identify Shambhala with various valleys in southern Siberia, while in Altaic folklore, the gateway to the secret city is hidden in the Altai mountain range’s Mount Beluja, where legend has it that Genghis Khan was buried.

The Kalachakra, a Tibetan Buddhist tantric scripture with strong Hindu influences, states that when the world degenerates into a maelstrom of war and greed, out of Shambhala will emerge Kalki (‘white horse’, or ‘destroyer of filth’), a kind of messiah who will form an army and fight the demonic forces, killing by the millions the ‘barbarians’ and the ‘thieves who have usurped the royal power’. Gathering all the Brahmins of the world, he would find a new race to populate the golden age to come. In their shamanic past, the Turkic-Mongol peoples spoke of Ergekenon, an isolated valley supposedly located in the Altai, where their ancestors were imprisoned for four centuries until a blacksmith succeeded in melting the barrier that enclosed them. The myth of Ergenekon would later be used strategically by Turkish nationalism to promote pan-Turanianism.

From China, tradition had it that Lao Tse (‘wise old man’, the founder of Taoism) rode out of the country on a white buffalo to the West, i.e. to Central Asia, perhaps to the Kunlun Shan Mountains, where the sources of the Yellow River were located, a place considered holy by monks and hermits, where the air was pure and energising, where healing herbs grew and huge glaciers advanced, where schools of martial arts were born and in whose rivers long-lived fish lived. Taoist folklore explained that in this kind of spiritual Eden, in the ‘mountain at the centre of the world’, royal men found the drink of immortality in ancient times, and that King Mu (a millennium b.c.e.) found there the jade palace of the Yellow Emperor, the founder of Chinese civilisation. Mythologically speaking, the mountain range connected Earth with Heaven and somewhere in its bosom stood a jade palace where Xiwangmu, the ‘Queen Mother of the West’, dwelled. Like an Eastern version of the Greek myth of the garden of the Hesperides, a huge tree grew there, bearing peaches of immortality every three thousand years.

The Kunlun Shan mountain range.

In the West, the interior of Eurasia was also viewed through a prism of legend. In Histories, Herodotus speaks of a place ‘to the north-east’, beyond the Sea of Hyrcania (the Caspian) and the Scythians, where there are vast quantities of gold guarded by griffins. Buran (a strong winter wind from the north, equivalent to the Greek Boreas), blew there strongly from a mountainous cavern in the so-called Zungaria Gate, which separates Uiguristan (also called Chinese Turkestan or Xingjiang) from the rest of Central Asia. Beyond this domain was the ‘land of the Hyperboreans’, whose territory reached the sea (probably the Arctic Ocean). In the Byzantine myths, Alexander the Great found no other solution to the hordes of ‘Gog and Magog’ (barbarians from the continental interior, sometimes assimilated to the Scythians and destined to fall upon the rest of the world in the future) than to contain them with a wall of iron or adamantium. This is probably the Caspian Gates in southern Russia, where centuries later an army of Slavs and Vikings would annihilate the Khazar kingdom and found the first Russian state. The metaphorical content of the construction of the Caspian Gates was served—especially since, in Central Asian folklore, an ‘iron gate in a lake’ or a ‘hole in a mountain’ is considered the origin of the winds. After the ill-fated Macedonian campaigns in northern India, a Hellenistic story reached the West and circulated the idea that deep in Central Asia there was a valley carpeted with diamonds and patrolled by birds of prey and ‘deadly looking’ serpents. At the time of the silk trade, Rome knew of the existence of the Beings, a tall, long-lived and healthy people (possibly the Tocari) located in Serica, the ‘land of silk’, which would correspond to Uyghuristan. These myths and rumours somehow embodied Europe’s desire not to lose its connection with the East.

In medieval times, Rome, Byzantium and the Crusader states alike spoke of the kingdom of Prester John, a monarch who maintained order in the lands of Gog and Magog by ruling over a Christian country isolated between Muslim and ‘pagan’ (read Buddhist, Hindu and shamanistic and animistic ancestral religions) domains. Gnostic traditions considered that the Magi came from this country, where the Holy Grail, obtained by Parzival in Monsalvat and carried to the Great East in ships with white sails and red crosses, was to be found along with other holy relics of Christianity… ‘John’ was probably a corruption of ‘jan’ or khan: the title of the Tatar kings. The character in question was probably a Nestorian khan-bishop of Mongol origin eager to forge closer ties with the West, but the situation soon became enveloped in symbols and archetypes in the collective European imagination. Marco Polo, who could not be missing in this writing, would place Gog and Magog north of Cathay (China), i.e. in Mongolia or Siberia. In China itself, the imperial authorities did something similar to Alexander the Great, writing off the Heartland as impossible and settling for erecting the Great Wall to protect the kingdom from barbarian incursions from the North.

Still in the 19th century, Russian settlers in Siberia, men and women of outstanding human qualities in every sense, had the idea of Belovodye, a mythical place of ‘white waters’ in eastern Siberia, which played the role of the Promised Land in their religious imagination and probably had an important influence on the flow of ethnically European populations to the East, establishing colonies ever closer to the Sea of Japan and the borders with China and Mongolia. As Russia conquered Central Asia, Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, founder of the Russian philosophical trend of cosmism, located Shambhala in the Pamir, present-day Tajikistan. Central Asia would become increasingly popular in the West thanks to Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, the incipient geopolitical science, Ferdinand Ossendowsky’s Beasts, Men and Gods and the rise of occult currents that idealised Central Asia as a sanctuary of tradition and wisdom. In the 1920s, the Russian painter, archaeologist and esotericist Nikolai Roerich also did his bit by describing an extraordinary expedition throughout Central Asia, including his visits to more than fifty monasteries and his encounters with Buddhist lamas.

Mongolia.

As can be seen, the more recondite areas of Central Asia were seen as a source of mystery, fantasy and uncertainty by the societies that gathered their influence. They were also seen as a hornet’s nest of men and animals, which could be diked but should not be stirred. All the myths we have seen agree in presenting the heart of Eurasia as a place, to say the least, interesting and worth visiting for the brave and the noble. The present article will deal with this vast space inhabited by questions and infinite possibilities yet to be unveiled, a potential new world, a huge, closed, inaccessible, impregnable, jealously traditional fortress, folded in on itself in countless valleys, mountains, plains, forests, steppes and deserts, which could not be conquered by Alexander the Great, nor by Rome, nor by Byzantium, nor by the Chinese emperors, nor by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, nor by the Portuguese Jesuits, nor by Napoleon, nor by the British Empire, nor by Hitler, nor by Japan, nor by the mafia oligarchs of the ex-Soviet space, nor by the multinationals and banks of capitalist-neoliberal globalisation—in the long run not even by the Asian khans or the terrible Soviet Bolshevism—but only by two extraordinary peoples: the Vikings and the Cossacks, who, like Alexander the Great before them, brought Greek culture (Cyrillic characters, Byzantine heritage) to the heart of Asia.

Since the dawn of history, whoever possesses the Heartland moves in it like a fish in water, for it is an ocean of land, but whoever does not possess it will crash against its walls again and again, and can only content himself with besieging it…

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Philosophy of history

Heartland, 1

The heart of the mainland

by Eduardo Velasco

The interior spaces of the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so immense, and their potential in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less remote, should develop there, inaccessible to oceanic commerce.

—Halford J. Mackinder

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One

Introduction
Endorheic basins and the importance of river systems
What is heartland?
A brief history of the heartland
Prehistoric times
Antiquity
Middle Ages: Pax Mongolica
Ancient Regime: Cossacks and Tsars
Telluric Socialisms
The Cold War
Globalisation
 

Part Two

The red banana
The heartland theory
The world according to Mackinder
Extension of the Heartland and the importance of Eastern Europe
Germany according to Mackinder—Realpolitik, Kultur, Weltanschauung, the Munich School and Haushofer’s Geopolitik
Is the heartland theory obsolete?
Are there other heartlands?
The Arab heartland Nejd and the Devil’s horn
The African heartland
The Cerrado in Brazil has the heartland of South America
The Great Basin and other North American heartlands
Castilla la Vieja is the heartland of Spain
 

Part Three

The manpower theory globalisation against the white race
The struggle for the human mind: The human being as a battlefield
The rebellion of the Earth: dismembering the world ocean is widening heartland
Big Time versus Big Space
Potentials for Heartland: A new world, or the empire of closed land
Genesis of Atlanticism
The closed commercial state: Autarchy vs. globalisation
The Cossack example and the geopolitical and social importance of armed forces
New Vikings and Cossacks for Eurasia: the need for a demographic reproductive and ethnic biopolitics for the heartland
Spain in the context of the heartland from Iberia to Siberia

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Eduardo Velasco Egalitarianism Jerusalem Judea v. Rome Nero Slavery

Apocalypse for whites • XXIX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Christianity takes hold outside Judea
As soon as the Jews learn about the events in Rome with the Christians, they begin to plan an uprising and, perfectly coordinated, rebel throughout the Roman Empire. Thus, in the year 66, in a rapid and well-planned coup d’état, they put to the knife all the non-Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem except the slaves. Nero uses his legions to crush the revolt harshly in the rest of the Empire, but in their capital the Jews become strong. In the year 68, just as General Vespasian left to take Jerusalem, Nero is mysteriously murdered.
Vespasian, then, becomes emperor and sends his son Titus to the front of the X Legio, with the aim of crushing the Jews. The year 70 Rome triumphs; Jerusalem is devastated and sacked by the Roman legionaries and it is said that in the process a million Jews died under Roman arms (only in Jerusalem the town had accumulated, during the siege, three million Jews). This year 70, fateful, traumatizing, outrageous and key for Jewry, sees the enslavement and dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean (Diaspora), greatly enhancing the growth of Christianity.
There are successive emperors (Trajan, Hadrian) very aware of the Jewish problem, who do not pay much attention to Christians, mainly because they are too busy with the Judaic puzzle in ‘holy land’, repressing the Jews again and again, without destroying them completely.
In this time, the new religion grows little by little, gaining followers among the enslaved masses thanks to its egalitarian ideology and also in high positions of the administration: among an increasingly decadent and materialist bureaucracy. Christianity glorified misfortune instead of glorifying the struggle against it; considered suffering as a merit that dignifies itself and proclaimed that Paradise awaits anyone who behaves well. (Remember how the pagans taught that only fighters entered the Valhalla.)
It is the religion of the slaves, and they willingly subscribe to it. Early Christianity played a very similar role to that of the later Freemasonry: it was a Jewish strategy dressed up using weak and ambitious characters, fascinating them with a sinister ritualism. The result was like a communism for the Roman Empire, even favouring the ‘emancipation’ and independence of women from their husbands by capturing them with a strange and novel Christian liturgy, and urging them to donate their own money to the cause (a scam quite similar in its essence to the current New Age cults).

This map in Spanish shows the extension of Christianity around the year 100. The Roman Empire is represented in a lighter shade than the barbarian territories. Note that the areas of Christian preaching
coincide exactly with the densest Jewish settlement areas.

It is at the beginning of the second century that the figure of Christian fat cats called ‘bishops’ begins to take on importance. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote in the year 107, in the most corny way: ‘It is obvious that we must look to a bishop like the Lord in person. His clerics are in harmony with their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ of minds that feel in unison’. St. Ignatius is captured by the Roman authorities, and thrown to the lions in 107. (It is interesting to pay attention to the names of the preachers, since they always come from eastern mestizo and Judaized areas; in this case, Syria.)
Around the year 150, the Greek Marcion tries to form a kind of ‘de-Judaised’ purification in Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament; giving pre-eminent importance to the Gospel of St. Luke and adopting a Gnostic worldview with Orphic and Manichean airs. This is the first attempt of reform or Europeanization of Christianity: trying to deprive it from its obvious Jewish roots.[1] Marcion’s followers, the Marcionites, who professed a Gnostic creed, are classified as heretics by mainstream Christianity.

This map shows the general expansion of Christianity in 185. Note the great difference with respect to the previous map and note also that the area most influenced by Christianity is still the Eastern
Mediterranean: a highly Semitic zone.

Sometime after the year 200, in view of the incorporation into Christianity of great new masses that did not speak Greek but Latin, a Latin translation of the Gospels began to circulate in most western Christian centres.
The emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305) divided the Empire into two halves to make it more governable. He keeps the eastern part and hands over the western part to Maximian, a former comrade in arms. He establishes a rigid bureaucracy, and these measures smell like irremediable decadence. Despite this, Diocletian is a just and realistic veteran. He allows its Christian legionaries to be absent from pagan ceremonies, provided they maintain their military discipline.
But this was precisely the trickiest issue, where the bishops insolently defy the authority of the emperor. Diocletian, however, is benevolent and only one Christian pacifist is executed. However, he now insists that Christians participate in state ceremonies of a religious nature, and the Christian response to this decision is growing pride and arrogance, with numerous revolts and provocations.
But even at this point, Diocletian renounces to apply the death penalty, contenting himself with making slaves of the rebels that he captured. The answer to this are more riots and a fire in the imperial palace itself, and provocations and Christian insolence occur throughout the Empire. But the most Diocletian does is to execute nine rebellious bishops and eighty rebels in Palestine, the area most troubled by Christian rebellions.
One of these rebels was a spawn named St. Procopius of Scythopolis. To get an idea of which kind of creature Procopius was, let’s see the words of a contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea: ‘He had tamed his body until turning it, so to speak, into a corpse; but the strength that his soul found in the word of God gave strength to his body… He only studied the word of God and had little knowledge of the profane sciences’. That is to say, this sub-man was a sick body and a crushed and resentful spirit, moved away from all the natural goods of the world, and who only knows the Bible and the speeches of the bishops.
In the beginning Christianity was nourished of similar men: Jewish practitioners of an asceticism bordering on sadomasochism who turned their bodies into a wreck, and their spirits into tyrannical and resentful shepherds.
Despite the softness of these persecutions, Diocletian goes down in history as a monster thirsting for Christian blood (history is written by the victors). The certain thing is that, after emperor Diocletian’s reign, Rome entered frank decay.
 
____________________
[1] Note of the Editor: In our times, adepts of Christian Identity also desperately try to square the circle by claiming that Aryans descend from the biblical characters.

Categories
Alexander the Great Alexandria Bible Christendom Eduardo Velasco Indo-European heritage Judea v. Rome Library of Alexandria Miscegenation St Paul

Apocalypse for whites • XXVI

by Evropa Soberana

Chapter 3

When Yahweh your Lord brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you other peoples… when Yahweh has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must crush and destroy them totally; make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy… This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred images, cut down their sacred forests and burn their idols. For you are a people holy to Yahweh your Lord (Deuteronomy, 7: 1-7).
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?… but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, He has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong (I Corinthians, 20, 27).

 
Christianity and the fall of the Empire
On the basis of what happened during this bloody history, there is a laborious process of adulteration, falsification and distortion of religious teachings: firstly, many centuries before Jesus at the hands of Jewish prophets, judges and rabbis; and then at the hands of the apostles and fathers of the Church (St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Augustine, etc.), usually of the same ethnic group. There existed an ethnic base of those conflicts, which we have already discussed in the previous chapters.
The Eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, the Aegean, Carthage, Egypt, Phoenicia, Israel, Judea, Babylon, Syria, Jordan, etc.) was formerly a fermenting melting pot for all the good and bad products of the Ancient World: the confluence of all slaves, the downtrodden and banished; criminals, trampled peoples and pariahs of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Hittite Empire and the Persian Empire. That melting pot, so full of different characters, was present in the foundations and the origins of Judaism. Its vapours also intoxicated many decadent Greeks of Athens, Corinth and other Hellenic states centuries before the Christian era.
When Alexander the Great conquered the Macedonian Empire, which extended from Greece to the confines of Afghanistan and from the Caucasus to Egypt, the entire area of the Persian Empire, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa received a strong Greek influence: an influence that would be felt on Asia Minor, Syria (including Judea), and especially Egypt with the city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander in 331 BCE.
This inaugurated a stage of Macedonian hegemony called Hellenistic, to differentiate it from the classical Hellenic (Dorians, Ionians, Corinthians). Alexander fostered knowledge and science throughout his empire, sponsoring the various schools of wisdom; and after his death his Macedonian successors continued the same policy. Many centuries later, in the lower Roman Empire, after a terrible degeneration we could distinguish in the heart of Hellenism two currents:
(a) A traditional elitist character, based in the Egyptian, Hellenistic and Alexandrian schools, which advocated science and spiritual knowledge, and where the arts and sciences flourished to a point never seen before; with the city of Alexandria being the greatest exponent.
Such was the importance and ‘multiculturalism’ of Alexandria—included the abundance of Jews who never ceased to agitate against paganism—as the world’s largest city before Rome, that it has been called ‘the New York of ancient times’. The Library of Alexandria, domain of the high castes and vetoed to the plebe, was a hive of wise Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Hindus and Greeks; as well as scientists, architects, engineers, mathematicians and astronomers from all over the world. The Library stood proud of having accumulated much of the knowledge of the Ancient World.
(b) Another countercultural and more popular current: liberal, sophist and cynical (more freely established in Asia Minor and Syria), had distorted and mixed ancient cults. It was directed to the slave masses of the Eastern Mediterranean: preaching for the first time notions such as ‘free democracy for all’, ‘free equality for all’ and ‘free rights for all’. This was characterised by a well-intentioned but ultimately fateful multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that enchanted the minds of many educated slaves; by the exportation of Greek worldview and culture to non-Greek peoples, and by the importation of Jewish culture to non-Jewish peoples.
This last current was the Hellenistic background that, disfigured, united with Judaism and the decomposing Babylonian matter, formed Christianity: which, let us not forget, was originally preached exclusively in the Greek language to masses of serfs, the poor and commoners in the unhealthy neighbourhoods of the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The first Christians were exclusively Jewish blood communities, converted into cosmopolitans with their enforced diaspora and Hellenistic contacts. To a certain extent, these ‘Jews from the ghetto’—of which Saint Paul is the most representative example—were despised by the most orthodox Jewish circles.

The Seven Churches mentioned by John of Patmos in the New Testament (Book of Revelation, 1:11): Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum,
Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. As can be seen,
all of them located in Asia Minor.[1]

This geographic core is to Christianity what Bavaria is to Nazism: the centre in which the new creed ferments and its expansion is invigorated. This area, so strongly Hellenized, densely populated and the seat of a true ethnic chaos, is where the apostles, in Greek language, were inflated to preach; and here also took place important Christian theological councils (such as Nicaea, Chalcedon or Ancyra).
Christianity, which to expand itself took the advantage offered by the dispersion of Semitic slaves throughout the Roman Empire, represents an Asian ebb spilled all over Europe.
 
____________________
[1] Editor’s Note: It is very significant that the last word that the Christian Bible confers to an author is the word of John of Patmos. Most likely, the author of the Book of Revelation was Jewish, as his hatred of Rome seems absolute (which he calls ‘Babylon’). The Bible ends with the dream of this John of Patmos about a New Jerusalem just in those days when the Romans had destroyed Old Jerusalem to build, on its ruins, Aelia Capitolina.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • II

by Evropa Soberana

 
Chapter 1
Geopolitical, anthropological and ethnic context
The Near East or the Levant—what today are Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt—has been a very important geostrategic zone of confrontations between the Europe of the forests, the snows, the rivers and the mists, and the deep East of the dry, jealous, sterile and inhospitable spirit of the desert. In this area there have been, from time immemorial, ebbs and flows from both Europe and Asia and Africa, and crystallized in the appearance of the Neolithic and the first civilizations of the world.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we would say, ‘if you stare at the desert for a long time, the desert will also stare at you’. If there is a natural selection environment radically different from that of the glaciations, it is undoubtedly the desert: monotonous and infinite environment like the laments of the songs now preached from the minarets of the mosques. Immersed in this type of landscape for a long time, it is easy for a man to have visions and see illusions and distorted reflections; to listen voices that, according to oriental folklore, come from evil spirits and, finally, to lose one’s way and sink into despair and madness, and let your mind take a journey into darkness, from which it will never return.

The deserts are the places where the total absence of the fecundating power of heaven—represented by rain and lightning, and by typically European gods such as Zeus or Jupiter—has propitiated the triumph of the Earth, and therefore the death of Nature and the levelling, the devastation, the equalization of the horizons and the lack of permanence of the same floor that is stepped on. It is totally imprudent to think that all these elements do not leave a deep mark on the idiosyncrasy and collective imagination of a people.
The subject that we treat is revealed as a confrontation that, in last instance, is reduced to an evolutionary insurrection of the East not to disappear in an unequal competition with the European human varieties. In 56 BCE, in a speech entitled De Provinciis Consularibus given in the Senate of Rome, Cicero himself describes the Jews, along with the Syrians as a ‘race born to be a slave’.
Syrians and Jews were ethnic communities in which the Armenid race was strongly represented, and which are encompassed as Semitic cultures. The Semitic waves constituted, for millennia, a source of pain, malaise, violence and tragedy for Europe, from the Carthaginians to the Ottomans. The present book will deal particularly with the Jews, without forgetting other groups that, like the Arabs, Persians and Syrians, made common cause with them on many occasions, including during the rise of Christianity.
Although today they try to unload Europe with an unreal multiculturalism, the daily and historical reality is that the coexistence between different races has only two results: third-worldization and/or balkanization: ethnic conflicts and territorial ruptures. What we are going to see in this book, of course, has nothing of multi-cult and nothing of ‘peaceful coexistence’, since for centuries and centuries the coexistence between Greeks and Jews was marked by great waves of bloody violence. It did not work.
Far, therefore, from the politically correct fantasy of the ‘coexistence of cultures’, we will investigate the beginning of a series of ethnic cleansings throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, which would culminate in the low Roman Empire with eradication, in North Africa and in the Near East, of the Greek and Roman communities and of most of the classical legacy at the hands of the East.