Finally finished re-reading this great fat tome about a week ago. Didn't bother excerpting to 𝕏, was purely for pleasure, a well-known topic, & many Byzantine-themed accounts exist here already.
There was one argument by Treadgold that really stood out to me this time however:
Namely his explanation for Byzantium's sudden & incredibly steep decline. Over a mere century it went from Basil II's tightly-run & unified realm, ringed by either vassals or cringing & defeated enemies, to one on the verge of collapse, riddled by corruption & political anarchy.
Byzantium's rapid internal degeneration as the Macedonian Dynasty ended is especially striking, because on Basil II's death, the Empire was in extraordinarily good financial shape, whilst its traditional enemies had declined to a contemptibly weak state.
Treadgold posits a cause for Byzantium's turn in fortunes both ancient, yet eerily contemporary: Its elites simply lost interest in expansion or great projects. Deprived of constructive outlets & without external danger, the state's newfound wealth only tempted corruption, fostered inequality, bred disloyal magnates, and allowed the army to atrophy.
Basil II's gross irresponsibility in indifference to producing any heir didn't help, but the state had weathered many such crises before. The weak puppet emperors promoted by a venal bureaucracy were then a new phenomenon produced by lack of direction. Again, very contemporary.
Byzantium's strange interlude of what seemed like unprecedented prosperity combined with state neglect, venality & purposelessness couldn't last, and it didn't. Eventually reality returned with the catastrophe of Manzikert.
Turkmens were a primitive enemy that should have been trivial to fight off only a generation ago. Instead Greek factional squabbles allowed, and even actively facilitated, their initial flooding into Anatolia - dooming Byzantine society.
We see identical elite behaviour today.🧵
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Thread w/excerpts from Zubok's "Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union".
The author believe's the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable, & US pressure had little to do with it. Rereading this, I'm still astounded by Gorbachev's naivety & hubris - unshaken even to the very end.🧵
A key to understanding Gorbachev, ignored by both Western & Russian historiography: "He was the last true Leninist believer".
Gorbachev believed in the myth (for schoolchildren) of Lenin as a kindly man, only forced to rule through terror by extreme circumstances. As an adult.
Gorbachev met one of his closest confidantes & ideological bedfellows, Alexander Yakovlev, in Canada. They shared the same fuzzy idealism.
He drafted a model for the USSR inspired by US style duolopy, with "Socialist" & "People's Democratic" parties shadowboxing one another.
Thread w/excerpts of "Disorderly Liberty".
Anyone claiming "real Libertarianism🐍has never been tried" has never heard of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
For over a century, its government, by design, atrophied to almost nothing, until it was extinguished by outsiders.🧵
Background up the the 18th Century.
Despite the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's [hence PLC] compound name & bewildering ethnic diversity, by the 1600s PLC elite was entirely Polish in culture & speech.
Russians/Ukrainians were by far the 2nd largest group, mostly downtrodden.
Although the PLC became overwhelmingly Polish-dominated, the bulk of its land was taken earlier by Lithuania, then the last pagan state in Europe. In the aftermath of the Kievan Rus' collapse & Mongol invasions, these vast territories were easily overrun.
Thread w/excerpts of "The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor".
On the Turkish conquest & cultural transformation of Anatolia, Byzantium's former heartland. This process culminated under the Ottomans, who founded an Empire uniquely ruled by white/European Muslims.🧵
The disaster at Manzikert was preceded by decades of aristocratic Greek infighting & administrative drift, but most crucially the de-facto disbanding (to become tax farmers) of the Byzantine reservist core - the "Themes".
Photo from Treadgold (2nd-hand book, not my underlining):
Onto Vryonis' book. Sole digital copy found is a clunky double-column scan, still quicker than photos, but painful to underline (for you followers) digitally.
Contemporary quote on the atrocious condition of the Byzantine army. A good commander, but only as good as his tools.
Book excerpt 🧵on the Islamisation of the Javanese, the de-facto ruling race of Indonesia & nearly half its population. Over the 20thC Java went from a fundamentally pagan/Vedic society Muslim in name only, to an Islamic one now rapidly jetissoning its old culture & way of life.
Indonesia remains near-invisible globally as a country that's just competent enough to have stable government & avoid wars, but far too poor to project power/culture abroad. However, as E. Asian birthrates collapse & demand labour, this will change.
So its Islamisation matters.
Indonesia is of course, one the world's most artificial states. Even its national "Indonesian" language is the mothertongue of almost no-one, being a creole form of Malay, growing massively after promotion as a Lingua Franca under the Dutch. This unintentionally spread Islam:
Pt. 2 of Stove's review of Jaynes' theory of the Bicameral Mind. Very trenchant point on the total absence of intellectual reasoning in how people arrive at religious belief. Yet "they spring up spontaneously, with irresistible force, almost everywhere in the soil of humanity".
Stove's commendation of Jaynes' theory of religion tracing its origins to auditory hallucinations, combining both immediacy & delusiveness. Unlike nearly all other senses, hearing is "peculiarly mandatory". Well, there's also smell.. but let's not go there.
The absolute *crucialness* of hearing to communicate *any* order, prior to the spread of mass-literacy. Are preliterate sign-languages capable of complex messaging?
Moreoever, organised religion was the *overwhelming* medium of social control amongst all early Civilisations.
Thread w/excerpts reviewing one of my favourite non-fiction books ever, J. Jayne's "Origins of Consciousness.." by David Stove. Jaynes posited that human consciousness & internal monologue developed within *historical times*, evolving from involuntarily hallucinated voices.🧵
The reviewer D. Stove, was a tenured Philosophy professor at Sydney uni. He was often characterised as a Logical Positivist, a label he rejected, mainly due to his own deep pessimism on mankind's ability to think rationally. We'll see this informs his own fascination with Jaynes.
Stove introduces his review puzzling over one of the deepest mysteries of the human condition: the omnipresence of religion across nearly of recorded history, barring a few brief exceptions.
A staunch atheist himself, he finds rational explanations of religion exceedingly weak.