Century Of Humiliation Quotes

The wood nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But still, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.

It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom's duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation.

Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveler, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out,

In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.

One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today.

the decline of China from around 1840 to 1949, known as the “Century of Humiliation,” came about because the Western powers and Japan exploited China.

Contemporary China is thought of as the inheritor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or even of the humiliation incurred by the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, but rarely as the product of the war against Japan.

I remember he asked his father, "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be commited? How could the world remain silent?" And now the boy is turning to me. "Tell me," he asks, "what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?" And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

Sixteenth-century litigation combined the qualities of tedium, hardship, brutality, and injustice that tested character and endurance, with the element of pure chance that appealed to the gambler, the fear of defeat and ruin, and the hope of victory and humiliation of the enemy. It had everything that war can offer except the delights of shedding blood.

The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation. The United States then got a fleeting taste of old-fashioned military glory in the First Gulf War, but this only tempted it to waste trillions on humiliating military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot.

I came and knelt at the king's feet, and when he put the crown on my head, I felt that he had just honoured all the women of Iran. Only four years earlier we had been in the same category of the mentally handicapped: we did not even have the basic right of choosing our representatives. The crown wiped out centuries of humiliation; more surely than any law, it solemnly affirmed the equality of men and women.

For most of the twentieth century, it was the study of combat veterans that led to the development of a body of knowledge about traumatic disorders. Not until the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are not those of men in war but of women in civilian life. The real conditions of women's lives were hidden in the sphere of the personal, in private life. The cherished value of privacy created a powerful barrier to consciousness and rendered women's reality practically invisible. To speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life was to invite public humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief. Women were silenced by fear and shame, and the silence of women gave license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation. Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life. It was difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home.

Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No

I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed. I remember he asked his father, “Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?” And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.

Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.

If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will.

Nonsense. Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone. We Arabs are the worst. We can’t live with the world, and even more terrible, we can’t live with each other. In the end it will not be Arab against Jews but Arab against Arab. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts. The world will tell us to go to hell. We, who tried to humiliate the Jews, will find ourselves humiliated as the scum of the earth. Oh, put down that silly potsherd and let us have some coffee.

Atrocities are easier to commit if respect for the victim can be neutralized. For this reason, humiliation handed out by those with power can be ominous. The link between humiliation and atrocity is often found.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up.

The distinguishing mark of the nineteenth century is that when a noble, self-esteemed gentleman meets a man of courage, he either kills him, or claps him into jail, or humiliates him otherwise, until the latter sooner or later dies heart-broken.

Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

people who were polite to his mistress. Lloyd George spoke to the group. “That German ship delivered the guns to Mexico after all. It simply went to another port and quietly unloaded. So nineteen American troops died for nothing. It’s a terrible humiliation for Woodrow Wilson.

All of us have read of what occured during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman's mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its rememberance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alterations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil's code of honor.

Collectivization, when completed, brought starvation to much of the Soviet peasantry. Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths between 1930 and 1933. Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags”, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps.

Politeness provides a way where you can back down with dignity. In nature there is only ever one reason you cede the high ground – you are acknowledging defeat. You are bowing before a superior power. But under the rules of politeness, you let the other person off not because you are a weakling, a coward or a failure, but because you value calm over chaos. Politeness makes it easier to apologise, because apologising isn’t just an act of pure submission. Politeness is founded on a major insight into human nature and a big positive thesis about what civilisation is and why we need it. It’s a view that was advanced particularly by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes was acutely conscious that our normal, unrestrained instincts are far from being wholly nice. We may be quite inclined by nature to damage or destroy our rivals; to take advantage of those who are weaker than us; to grab more than our fair share of anything good if we can; to humiliate those who we feel are in some way alien; to revenge ourselves on anyone we feel has upset or disappointed us and to enforce our opinions and beliefs on others if we can. These are natural inclinations, Hobbes argues; therefore, we positively require a set of constraining conventions that artificially induce better ways of dealing with other people. Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.

The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own. From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.

The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its remembrance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil’s code of honour.

I read about Queen Nzinga who ruled in Central Africa in the 16th century resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch Ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I saw. and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon.

Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all! "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.’ But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

We're embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we'll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn't let our inability to know what's what diminish us. Because it'll try. We have to remains curious and open. Two words for you: ley lines. Ley lines? Straight lines of electromagnetic energy crisscrossing the Earth at special sites, drawing men and women—and ideas—to their mysterious pulse. We were drawn here, temps. No two ways about it. As many have been before. That Baedeker book? You know what it said? Go on. That 'even those whose usual avocations are of the most prosaic nature unconsciously become admirers of poetry and art in Italy.' Would that be so bad? To become an admirer of poetry and art? Until we figure it all out. It wouldn't, Cress. To be infused with all the city has to offer and has offered over the centuries? Our purpose revealing itself like the slow unfolding of an iris flower. Ulysses grinned. It's started already, Cress. What has? The poetry. Cress blushed and stood up. I'll get the cheese, he said.

In an ancient Confucian classical text, Wei found the perfect motto for the Qing’s nineteenth-century predicament—indeed, for modern China’s struggle as a whole—which he used prominently in the preface to Records of Conquest: “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.”40 This idea would be expressed again and again by others for the next century and a half. In fact, it remains the inspiration for the phrase inscribed today in the museum at the Temple of the Tranquil Seas: “To feel shame is to approach courage.

During the campaign of 2016, we took a step toward totalitarianism without even noticing by accepting as normal the violation of electronic privacy. Whether it is done by American or Russian intelligence agencies, or for that matter by any institution, the theft, discussion, or publication of personal communications destroys a basic foundation of our rights. If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will.

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

I was thinking, Mythili. All those syllables at the end of French words, all those syllables that are wasted because they are not pronounced by the French, where do they go?’ ‘Where do they go, Unni?’ ‘Theyjoin the underground Union of Insulted French Syllables.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What does the underground union do?’ ‘The syllables try to influence mankind. Over centuries, over vast ages, they try to influence man. They give humans ideas, thoughts, doubts, eureka moments. All this to help man create something, a machine probably, that would have such a name, such a word that all the syllables in the Union of Insulted French Syllables would be included and pronounced. Humans think all of science is their creation, but no, Mythili. The insulted French syllables are the ones who are giving us those ideas.’ ‘You are mad, Unni.’ ‘The leader of the union is X.’ ‘X?’ ‘Yes, the most humiliated letter in French even today. There was a time when nobody in France used to pronounce it. Don’t laugh at X, Mythili. He waited for centuries and patiently fed ideas across many generations. And finally mankind discovered the X–ray. Now the French have to pronounce X. They have no choice.

After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up. Deng made the decision on pragmatic grounds. And the opening up worked: China’s economy soared. Yet, do the Chinese view this opening up as a temporary measure until China becomes strong again? Do they have a desire to return eventually to their Middle Kingdom mentality, trading with the world while remaining culturally detached from it? When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world. Only such a major change of mind would enable the Chinese officials to lay out the red carpet for foreign businesses, including American businesses.

The sour old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before: say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault. Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger—no, fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God. (A

Prohibition—this policy I have traced across continents and across a century—consists of endlessly spreading downward spirals. People get addicted so we humiliate and shame them until they become more addicted. They then have to feed their habit by persuading more people to buy the drugs from them and become addicted in turn. Then those people need to be humiliated and shamed. And so it goes, on and on. But in Portugal after the drug war, the state helped people to get better, and then those people helped more people to get better, and then they helped still more people to get better—and so the downward spiral of the drug war has been replaced by a healing ripple that spreads slowly out across the society.

Alex: Kabimba! You know I've also fallen hopelessly behind them because of the time I spent in prison. So what am I to do now? Elbow them aside? Smash their windows? Kabimba! Hatred and resentment will never get you anywhere. They are the most barren feelings in the world. One has to rise above that and realize that we have lost centuries or decades - we've been insulted, humiliated, but that's no reason for revenge. Nor should we try. All the same we're richer than they are. Kabimba: (indignantly) We are? Richer in what way? In what way? Alex: Because we've suffered, Kabimba. Suffering is a leveler for the soul. A contented person always has an impoverished soul. It's our job to build little by little. (scene four)

I know nothing of the Other World, and I have the honesty to admit it. Other people know more about it than I do, and I'm incapable of proving that they're mistaken. I don't dream of imposing my philosophy on a village girl. Although religion does not aim at seeking for the truth, it is a kind of philosophy which can satisfy simple minds, and that does no harm to anyone. Everything is finally a matter of the feeling man has of his own impotence. In itself, this philosophy has nothing pernicious about it. The essential thing, really, is that man should know that salvation consists in the effort that each person makes to understand Providence and accept the laws of nature. Since all violent upheavals are a calamity, I would prefer the adaptation to be made without shocks. What could be longest left undisturbed are women's convents. The sense of the inner life brings people great enrichment. What we must do, then, is to extract from religions the poison they contain. In this respect, great progress has been made during recent centuries. The Church must be made to understand that her kingdom is not of this world. What an example Frederick the Great set when he reacted against the Church's claim to be allowed to interfere in matters of State ! The marginal notes, in his handwriting, which one finds on the pleas addressed to him by the pastors, have the value of judgments of Solomon. They're definitive. Our generals should make a practice of reading them daily. One is humiliated to see how slowly humanity progresses.

when Napoleon, after reviewing the troops that had returned from Egypt in the Place Bellecour, was elected chief magistrate of the Italian Republic at a meeting in the Jesuit College (today the Lycée Ampère). A Committee of Thirty, headed by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, proposed Napoleon’s name to the 450 Italian delegates present, with the gavel banged down immediately after the question was put just in case anyone had the temerity to demur.5 Melzi had organized the delegates into sections according to whether they had come from the Austrian, Piedmontese, Venetian or Papal areas, thereby deliberately maximizing disunity and minimizing the chances of opposition. Though it was humiliating that the new Italian Republic should be founded in France, where Talleyrand could better keep an eye on the delegates, this was the first time that the word ‘Italy’ had appeared on the political map of Europe since the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD.

Certainly, the Negro has been deprived. Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

fuck VULGAR SLANG  v. [trans.] 1 have sexual intercourse with (someone).  [intrans.] (of two people) have sexual intercourse. 2 ruin or damage (something).  n. an act of sexual intercourse.  [with adj.] a sexual partner.  exclam. used alone or as a noun (the fuck) or a verb in various phrases to express anger, annoyance, contempt, impatience, or surprise, or simply for emphasis.    go fuck yourself an exclamation expressing anger or contempt for, or rejection of, someone.  not give a fuck (about) used to emphasize indifference or contempt.    fuck around spend time doing unimportant or trivial things.  have sexual intercourse with a variety of partners.  (fuck around with) meddle with.  fuck off [usu. in imperative] (of a person) go away.  fuck someone over treat someone in an unfair or humiliating way.  fuck someone up damage or confuse someone emotionally.  fuck something up (or fuck up) do something badly or ineptly.   fuck·a·ble adj.  early 16th cent.: of Germanic origin (compare Swedish dialect focka and Dutch dialect fokkelen); possibly from an Indo-European root meaning 'strike', shared by Latin pugnus 'fist'.   Despite the wideness and proliferation of its use in many sections of society, the word fuck remains (and has been for centuries) one of the most taboo words in English. Until relatively recently, it rarely appeared in print; even today, there are a number of euphemistic ways of referring to it in speech and writing, e.g., the F-word, f***, or fk. fuck·er  n. VULGAR SLANG a contemptible or stupid person (often used as a general term of abuse). fuck·head  n. VULGAR SLANG a stupid or contemptible person (often used as a general term of abuse). fuck·ing  adj. [attrib.] & adv. [as submodifier] VULGAR SLANG used for emphasis or to express anger, annoyance, contempt, or surprise. fuck-me  adj. VULGAR SLANG (of clothing, esp. shoes) inviting or perceived as inviting sexual interest. fuck-up  n. VULGAR SLANG a mess or muddle.  a person who has a tendency to make a mess of things. fuck·wit  n. CHIEFLY BRIT., VULGAR SLANG a stupid or contemptible person (often used as a general term of abuse). fu·coid

Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries. The same situation prevails with regard to historical research. Theologians need not be afraid of any historical conjecture, for revealed truth lies in a dimension where it can neither be confirmed nor negated by historiography. Therefore, theologians should not prefer some results of historical research to others on theological grounds, and they should not resist results which finally have to be accepted if scientific honesty is not to be destroyed, even if they seem to undermine the knowledge of revelation. Historical investigations should neither comfort nor worry theologians. Knowledge of revelation, although it is mediated primarily through historical events, does not imply factual assertions, and it is therefore not exposed to critical analysis by historical research. Its truth is to be judged by criteria which lie within the dimension of revelatory knowledge. Psychology, including depth psychology, psychosomatics, and social psychology, is equally unable to interfere with knowledge of revelation. There are many insights into the nature of man in revelation. But all of them refer to the relation of man to what concerns him ultimately, to the ground and meaning of his being. There is no revealed psychology just as there is no revealed historiography or revealed physics. It is not the task of theology to protect the truth of revelation by attacking Freudian doctrines of libido, repression, and sublimation on religious grounds or by defending a Jungian doctrine of man in the name of revelatory knowledge.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

For the memory of Alexander’s greatness had always served the Romans as a reproach. Even worse, it provided an inspiration to their foes. In the east the model of kingship established by Alexander had never lost its allure. For more than a century it had been neutered and systematically humiliated by Rome, yet it remained the only credible system of government that could be opposed to the republicanism of the new world conquerors. Hence its appeal to monarchs, such as Mithridates, who were not even Greek, and hence, most startling of all, its appeal to bandits and rebellious slaves. When the pirates had called themselves kings and affected the gilded sails and purple awnings of monarchy, this had not been mere vanity, but a deliberate act of propaganda, as public a statement as they could make of their opposition to the Republic. They knew that the message would be read correctly, for invariably, whenever the order of things had threatened to crack during the previous decades, rebellion had been signaled by a slave with a crown. Spartacus’s communism had been all the more unusual in that the leaders of previous slave revolts, virtually without exception, had aimed to raise thrones upon the corpses of their masters. Most, like the pirates, had merely adopted the trappings of monarchy, but there were some who had brought the fantastical worlds of romances to life and claimed to be the long-lost sons of kings. This, in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean. The royal pretensions of slaves fed naturally into the swirling undercurrents of the troubled age, the prophecies, which Mithridates’ propaganda had exploited so brilliantly, of the coming of a universal king, of a new world monarchy, and the doom of Rome. So when Pompey presented himself as the new Alexander, he was appropriating a dream shared by potentate and slave alike. If any Roman was qualified to appreciate this, it was Pompey himself. The conqueror of the pirates and the patron of Posidonius, he would have been perfectly aware of the menacing links between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed

Beyoncé and Rihanna were pop stars. Pop stars were musical performers whose celebrity had exploded to the point where they could be identified by single words. You could say BEYONCÉ or RIHANNA to almost anyone anywhere in the industrialized world and it would conjure a vague neurological image of either Beyoncé or Rihanna. Their songs were about the same six subjects of all songs by all pop stars: love, celebrity, fucking, heartbreak, money and buying ugly shit. It was the Twenty-First Century. It was the Internet. Fame was everything. Traditional money had been debased by mass production. Traditional money had ceased to be about an exchange of humiliation for food and shelter. Traditional money had become the equivalent of a fantasy world in which different hunks of vampiric plastic made emphatic arguments about why they should cross the threshold of your home. There was nothing left to buy. Fame was everything because traditional money had failed. Fame was everything because fame was the world’s last valid currency. Beyoncé and Rihanna were part of a popular entertainment industry which deluged people with images of grotesque success. The unspoken ideology of popular entertainment was that its customers could end up as famous as the performers. They only needed to try hard enough and believe in their dreams. Like all pop stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna existed off the illusion that their fame was a shared experience with their fans. Their fans weren’t consumers. Their fans were fellow travelers on a journey through life. In 2013, this connection between the famous and their fans was fostered on Twitter. Beyoncé and Rihanna were tweeting. Their millions of fans were tweeting back. They too could achieve their dreams. Of course, neither Beyoncé nor Rihanna used Twitter. They had assistants and handlers who packaged their tweets for maximum profit and exposure. Fame could purchase the illusion of being an Internet user without the purchaser ever touching a mobile phone or a computer. That was a difference between the rich and the poor. The poor were doomed to the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for watching shitty television, experiencing angst about other people’s salaries, and casting doubt on key tenets of Mormonism and Scientology. If Beyoncé or Rihanna were asked about how to be like them and gave an honest answer, it would have sounded like this: “You can’t. You won’t. You are nothing like me. I am a powerful mixture of untamed ambition, early childhood trauma and genetic mystery. I am a portal in the vacuum of space. The formula for my creation is impossible to replicate. The One True God made me and will never make the like again. You are nothing like me.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany Visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery and violence?

The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the cause of progress for a century.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

Acquiescence in humiliation—that is the true characteristic of twentieth-century revolutionaries, who place the revolution and the Church of man above themselves. Kaliayev proves, on the contrary, that though the revolution is a necessary means, it is not a sufficient end. In this way he elevates man instead of degrading him. It is Kaliayev and his Russian and German comrades who, in the history of the world, really oppose Hegel, who first recognizes universal recognition as necessary and then as insufficient. Appearances did not suffice for him.

The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery. Shaving women's heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. After French troops occupied the Rhineland in 1923, German women who had relations with them later suffered the same fate. And during the second world war, the Nazi state issued orders that German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way. Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The

Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order—a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west—Russia and the European Union—and thus the future of Europe as a whole.

The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.

Monroe herself was humiliated by the photo shoot, which she resorted to only out of desperate need for money, signing the release documents with a fake name.

Take the Chinese. Chinese tourists who come in tell me, in English of course, that for a century they were oppressed by European countries, they were humiliated.

From the late 1830s to the Second World War, China was bullied and humiliated on a vast scale. And it was more shocking for the Chinese because they had lived with the illusion of power and self-sufficiency for much longer than the Ottomans. ‘Our country’s civilization,’ Liang Qichao pointed out in 1902, ‘is the oldest in the world. Three thousand years ago, Europeans were living like beasts in the field, while our civilization, its characteristics pronounced, was already equivalent to theirs of the middle ages. This wasn’t just some cultural defensiveness. China could trace its culture back 4,000 years, and political unity to the third century BC.

Instead of attention being directed to people and what war would do to their lives, it was turned to the abstraction of the nation. The survival of the nation in the evolutionary struggle, the refusal to accept an insult to the nation, the avoidance of the nation being humiliated or dishonoured, seemed of supreme importance. Nations as imaginary people were put before the real people who made them up.

Generally, the shows and skits would be comprised of the same stereotypical characters (Painter, 2006): • The stupid, lazy hayseed. • The cheating chicken-stealing thief and/or the grinning, watermelon-eating dullard. • The sharp-dressing city slicker. • The pleasant, care-taking mammy. The stereotypes perpetuated by minstrel shows made African Americans appear as useless figures worthy of nothing but distain, punishment, restriction, humiliation, and scorn. ‘Jim Crow’ changed from a smiling, laughing onstage figure to a system of severely limiting laws and rules governing African Americans well into the twentieth century. Blacks were made

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest. "Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims 'ancient' was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil. "Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.

Speaking personally, I find it helpful to detect in the four evangelists four dimensions of the saving purpose of God: its length, depth, breadth and height. Matthew reveals its length, for he depicts the Christ of Scripture, who looks back over long-centuries of expectation. Mark emphasizes its depth, for he depicts the Suffering Servant who looks down to the depths of the humiliation he endured. In Luke it is the breadth of God's purpose which emerges, for he depicts the Savior of the world who looks round in mercy to the broadest possible spectrum of human beings. Then John reveals its height, for he depicts the Word made flesh who looks up to the heights from which he came and to which he intends to raise us.

When their father, the High King, learnt how that Eochaid had brought about his daughters’ dishonour and death, he rallied auxiliaries to his aid, and marched into Leinster, ravaging it as he went. The province and its king were saved only by Eochald’s humiliated submission, and his binding the province to pay to the High King at Tara, every alternate year for an Indefinite period, the tremendous tribute which came to be known as the Boru or cow-tribute — five thousand cows, five thousand hogs, five thousand cloaks, five thousand vessels of brass and bronze, and five thousand ounces of silver. This crushing tribute was henceforth laid upon Leinster, by the High King of Tara from the time of Tuathal forward till the reign of Fionnachta, a period of five hundred years — but in most cases having to be lifted with steel hands. It caused more bloody history than did almost any other festering sore with which Ireland was ever afflicted. During these five centuries hardly a High King sat upon the throne of Tara, who did not have to carry the bloody sword into Leinster again and again, forcibly to hack his pound of flesh from off that province’s palpitating body. And only sometimes was the fight fought between Meath and Leinster alone. Often, through alliances, mutual sympathies, antagonisms, hopes, or dangers, half of Ireland, and sometimes all of Ireland was embroiled. So, together with much that was good Tuathal left to his country a bloody legacy.[15]

O’Neill and his army marched south from Ulster to meet the enemy while his ally Red Hugh O’Donnell marched in from the west. But once the Irish armies were in place, O’Neill and O’Donnell began arguing as to which of them should begin the attack. This delay proved fatal as the agreed upon hour of rendezvous with the Spaniards passed, and the window of opportunity for an Irish victory slammed shut. The Battle of Kinsale lasted three months, and in the end O’Neill was unable to defeat Mountjoy’s siege lines. Finally the Spanish troops surrendered to the English and sailed home. Thousands of Irish rebels died in the fighting or, taken prisoner, were hung. Hugh O’Neill was forced to submit to the English conquerors in a series of humiliating ceremonies, first on his knees to Mountjoy, then to the Lord Deputy and the Irish Privy Council. It was only after he’d put his submission in writing, renouncing his title of “The O’Neill and his allegiance to Spain, as well as protesting loyalty to the Crown, was he told that Elizabeth had died six days before. Mountjoy had tricked him. It was said that O’Neill wept openly and copiously for both his personal defeat and the ruination of the “Irish cause.” The rebel leader retreated to Ulster, and by the good graces of the new king of England, was pardoned once again, and his lands restored to him. He took up residency in his luxurious home, but spurred by a series of dangerous events and the realization that no hope was left for a free Ireland, O’Neill and a handful of Irish overlords and their families sailed from their homeland in 1607. The tragic “Flight of the Earls” ended the most tumultuous century in Ireland’s history. Tyrone,

the desire first to humiliate and then to eradicate those women who had demonstrated any kind of autonomy, but especially those who had actively participated in the military defence of the Republic (the milicianas).

the not uncommon sexual humiliation of priests as a prelude to their murder,

John Basilovich I. has been considered as one of the founders of the Russian empire; but his accession did not take place till the middle of the fifteenth century. He arose, like Bonaparte, in a period of national dismay, confusion, and calamity; and though described as a man of impetuous vices and violent passions, intrepid, artful, treacherous, and having all the ferocity of a savage, has been hailed as the deliverer of his country, and dignified by the appellation of the Great. It is a title which oppressed intimidated people have frequently bestowed upon tyrants. Until his time, however, Tartars were lords of Moscow -- the tsars themselves being obliged to stand in the presence of their ambassadors, while the latter sat at meat, and to endure the most humiliating ceremonies. Basilovich shook off the Tartar yoke; but it was a long time before the Russians, always children of imitation, ceased to mimic a people by whom they had been conquered. They had neither arts nor opinions of their own: every thing in Moscow Tartarian -- dress, manners, buildings, equipages -- in short, all except religion and language, Basilovich, at the conquest of Casan, was solemnly crowned with the diadem of that kingdom, which is said to be the same now used for the coronation of the Russian sovereigns.

The freedom that so many LGBT people now enjoy is based on centuries of sacrifice and success. Enlightenment thinkers questioned why leaders criminalised sexual identity. Some psychologists fought to define homosexuality as a normal part of life rather than a mental illness. Activists, artists and politicians spoke out, even when faced with the risk of humiliation and violence. David Hockney treated homosexuality expressly in his paintings, and James Baldwin bravely shared the isolation of being gay in a heterosexual world. Drag queens at the Stonewall Inn said they would not accept oppression any longer, and defied policemen who carried clubs and guns. Harvey Milk campaigned for gay rights in San Francisco, and was murdered. Each of these people has honoured the memory of the LGBT people who came before them, usually in a world that was harsher and less accepting of difference. From the gay men burned at the stake during the Middle Ages to those eliminated by the Nazis and to the LGBT men and women living in oppression in parts of the world today, progress is never even or permanent.

An early twentieth-century Spanish Catholic cardinal, Rafael Merry del Val y Zulueta, composed a beautiful prayer called the “Litany of Humility.” The prayer does not ask that we be spared humiliation, but that we be given the courage to deal with our fear of it. “From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, Master,” he implores.

It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice's growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favorable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he dispatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinople, and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton, and glass — luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city's home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was risky to navigate, as it was patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern, Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draft Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait. Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns farther up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.

Van Meegeren’s many victims—museum directors, art dealers, critics, scholars, and collectors—cringed at the thought of rehashing their gullibility in public. The Dutch state, though it was prosecuting the case, was one of those mortified buyers. An examination of that purchase promised to be humiliating.

[T]he demonization of Mahmud [of Ghazni] and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the British East Indian Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the First Afghan War (1839-42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple's gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By 'discovering' these fictitious gates in Mahmud's former capital of Ghazni, and by 'restoring' them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India's Hindus. Though intended to win the latters' gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain's catastrophic defeat just being the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus' ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since. From this point on, Mahmud's 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early twentieth century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. By contrast, Rajendra Chola's raid on Bengal remained largely forgotten outside the Chola country.

If you can't empathize with Charlie Brown, you likely lack an ability to empathize with any fictional character. Here is a child continually humiliated for desiring nothing more than normalcy - the opportunity to kick a football, the aptitude to fly a kite, the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without having a random acquaintance compare his skull to a block of lumber.

If the good-of-the-country justification isn't enough, there is always that eternally popular dissonance reducer: "They started it." Even Hitler said they started it, "they" being the victorious nations of World War I who humiliated Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, and Jewish "vermin" who were undermining Germany from within. The problem is, how far back do you want to go to show that the other guy started it? As our opening example of the Iran hostage crisis suggests, victims have long memories, and they can call on real or imagined episodes from the recent or distant past to justify their desire to retaliate now. For example, in the centuries of war between Muslims and Christians, sometimes simmering and sometimes erupting, who are the perpetrators and who the victims?

Perhaps the most important development in the differences between the Sunni and the Shia in modern history has been the development of a new school of thought in Sunni religiosity: Salafi or Wahhabi Islam.  The Wahhabis date their history back to the mid-18th century, when an Arab thinker named Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) developed a new theology that violently rejected what he saw as the corruption of Islam and the growing Christian domination of the Muslim World.  Looking for a source of the ongoing scandalous humiliation of the Muslim world, he looked inwards to flaws within the Ummah.  According to al-Wahhab, if the Muslims were the chosen people of God, their subservience to Christians was not due to Christian superiority but due to God withdrawing his favor because the Muslims had turned away from Him. In this worldview, the goal of the modern Islamic community should be the rejection of corruption and perversion and a return to the true, pure faith of the Prophet and his Companions.

I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts in pornography against my will to avoid being killed.

The collective hope of this kind of group is that through strength and triumph, vengeance will replace shame and humiliation. The leader and nation engage together in a kind of frenzy. Anyone who questions the leader who symbolizes this hope of restitution of self-esteem and power is cast as a traitor to the nation. Hence the amassing of power over the whole world and the destruction of the Jews, cast (mythically) as the source of the humiliation, became ends in themselves. This alliance of nation and leader for power itself, in order to overcome psychic humiliation, Kohut regards as the source of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. He comments, “The most malignant human propensities are mobilized in support of nationalistic narcissistic rage. Nothing satisfies its fury, neither the achievement of limited advantages nor the negotiation of compromises, however favorable—not even victory itself is enough.”43

Yes. We were talking about those excluded from the flock of sheep. For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.’ But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would in effect condemn the behavior of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always knew this. Acknowledging the outcasts meant reducing their own privileges, so the outcasts who were acknowledged as outcasts had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, maddened by their exclusion, they were not interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only to keep the leper as he is. As for the lepers, what can you ask of them? That they distinguish between two definitions of the Trinity or of the Eucharist? Come, Adso, these games are for us men of learning. The simple have other problems. And mind you, they solve them all in the wrong way. This is why they become heretics.

Then the cycle began again under the Qing Dynasty. China achieved its maximum territorial expansion, governing over a third of the world’s population while reforms under the reigns of three long-ruling emperors led to an extended period of economic prosperity.3 Then the European powers arrived. Earlier in this book we saw how the European powers, in the Age of Exploration, used their military strength to trade with and exploit resource-rich but militarily weaker foreigners. That’s what happened starting in the early 1800s, which began what is called the Century of Humiliation in China. The Europeans came offering to trade but the Chinese didn’t want anything they had to offer. This led to the British bringing opium into China to get the Chinese addicted, so that they would trade for it. A series of military confrontations followed during the 1800s (most notably the Opium Wars), which sped China’s decline. Chinese moves to stem their decline failed and there was great internal conflict and uprisings (most notably the Taiping Rebellion), which continued until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912.

These developments led to the eventual fall of the Qing Dynasty, the resignation of the Japanese government, and the continued control of India by the British. Especially in Japan and China, it also led to the realization that they needed to modernize, which prompted the Meiji Restoration (in Japan) and the Self-Strengthening Movement (in China). This move was very successful in Japan and not successful in China, which continued to suffer in what the Chinese call the Century of Humiliation. Second Industrial Revolution (1850s–early 1900s) Beginning in the mid-1800s, a second big wave of innovation took place, centered at first around steam-powered locomotion (e.g., railroads) and then electricity, telephones, interchangeable manufacturing parts, and other innovations at the turn of the 20th century. Whereas the First Industrial Revolution was centered on the UK, the Second Industrial Revolution primarily benefited the United States. As is typical, this period produced both great wealth and great wealth gaps and excesses in the capital markets, leading to an era known as the Gilded Age in the US. Invention of Communism (1848) The invention and development of communism in the mid-1800s came as a reaction against both capitalism and the wealth gaps it created and the benefits of the Industrial Revolutions going more to the owners of the new technologies than to the workers.

Undoubtedly, pagans regarded Jesus’s death by crucifixion as a folly. Augustine reports that the third-century philosopher Porphyry counseled the pagan husband of a Christian wife to seek the advice of Apollo. Through his oracle, the god replies that the husband probably will find it easier to write upon water or to fly like a bird than to dissuade his foolish wife from her commitment to a dead deity who was condemned by right-minded judges and who suffered an offensive and humiliating execution

General Motors or IBM will not step graciously into our shoes and raise the old banners of unity and emancipation which fell in battle; nor can heroes betrayed yesterday be redeemed by the traitors of today. It is a big load of rottenness that has to be sent to the bottom of the sea on the march to Latin America's reconstruction. The task lies in the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed. The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those who believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

On reaching their new dwelling places in Ottoman territory, the boys were “either persuaded or forced to be circumcised and made Muslim.” Nor were these merely symbolic or superficial acts: “The first thing they are made to learn is the Turks’ false religion, which they know so well as to put us to shame.”28 Having learned to submit, they were next subjected to a draconian training system not unlike the ancient Spartan agoge: “They make them drudge day and night, and they give them no bed to sleep on and very little food.” They were allowed to “speak to each other only when it is urgently necessary” and were made to “pray together without fail at four prescribed times every day.” As “for any little offense, they beat them cruelly with sticks, rarely hitting them less than a hundred times, and often as much as a thousand. After punishments the boys have to come to them and kiss their clothing and thank them for the cudgelings they have received. You can see, then,” concluded the Italian observer, “that moral degradation and humiliation are part of the training system.”29 Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.