Yevardiaղ Profile picture
Mostly bookposting account. Threads in 'Highlights'
3 subscribers
Jun 12 18 tweets 9 min read
Exerpt thread of "Likud's Leaders". As an originally Hebrew book, its about internal Israel conflicts. Still, interesting history on the transformation the Likud party brought after its 1977 victory, after spending decades on the extremist fringes of Israeli society. /🧵Image The uniting narrative of what would become Likud.
Only months after Israel's declared independence, its 1st (Mapai, socialist) leader Ben-Gurion, tried to have his chief rival Begin killed, as he arrived by boat. This was a one-time attempt, only enabled the chaos of the 1948. Image
May 21 27 tweets 15 min read
Thread w/excerpts of "Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena".
Same tone on 🇺🇸-🇦🇺 relations as former PM Malcolm Fraser's "Dangerous Allies". Found this far better on specific incidents & laws, many pathetically abject or darkly amusing, depending on your POV.Image Author makes clear from the start that 🇦🇺 is not some poor exploited US colony: its leaders are enthusiastic participants in the 🇺🇸 Empire.
Imperial identity instrinsic to Australia. Aus-army rejected superior 🇨🇦rifles in favour of full inter-operability with 🇬🇧guns during WW1. Image
Image
May 9 14 tweets 9 min read
Since I've read books on the Basques & Welsh already, decided to read an introduction on the only other culturo-linguistic survival from the Western Roman Empire, the Berbers. This book passes over Antiquity in a few paragraphs, focuses on post-Islamic 🇲🇦history. Exerpt🧵. Image Furthest Roman expedition into the Atlas. Its leader, G.Suetonius Paulinus, later defeated Boudica's revolt in Britain.
Only ancient texts concerning Berbers (Numidia, now🇩🇿) is Sallust's Jugurthine War & scraps in Livy/Polybius, but they contain almost no ethnographic info.Image
Jan 9 15 tweets 9 min read
Started reading. Quite excited to get going on this. Image Berezovsky's unstoppable personal drive & his thoughts on the *reality* of how the American government is run. Image
Dec 16, 2024 16 tweets 12 min read
Thread on the multinational origins & fall of the interwar 2nd Polish state.
Excerpts from Lukowski's "Brief History of 🇵🇱" - nothing specialist. but discussion of widely divergent strategies to recreate 🇵🇱, each with very different envisioned alliances were most interesting.🧵 Image The biggest movement for 🇵🇱 independence, the National Democrats, had very different ideas from Piłsudski's faction that won out after WW1.
The ND founder, Dmowski 1st aimed at autonomy under 🇷🇺. He saw 🇩🇪as the real threat to Polish culture. He was a hard-right Social Darwinist. Image
Image
Image
Image
Nov 29, 2024 14 tweets 9 min read
Thread w/excerpts of "The Sociology of the Yoruba".
One of 3 main nations of Nigeria, with Hausa & Igbo.
Also the overwhelming original ethnicity of most USian slaves, or what @tariqnasheed dubs "Foundational Black Americans". I prefer Hakan's term "Afro-Saxon" as more precise.Image Pre-colonial culturo-political divisions of the Yoruba. Like the Greeks or Sumerians, they were divide into warring city-states, but acknowledged their unity in language and religion.
Author (1970) notes older people identified with their local tribe/dialect over being Yoruba. Image
Oct 18, 2024 72 tweets 56 min read
Thread w/excerpts of How Long Will South Africa Survive (1982).
Much new info here to me; as a millennial, how apartheid SA worked as a state is a blank. Parallels with🇮🇱 are constant, though author never draws them. SA however, couldn't rely on a powerful lobby or diaspora.Image Author opens with the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, contends SA government very narrowly missed a violent overthrow, just as the Tsarist Russia barely dodged the abortive 1905 Revolution.
Both states had experienced breakneck economic growth alongside boiling social tension. Image
Image
Image
Oct 9, 2024 11 tweets 9 min read
Thread w/excerpts of Toynbee on the lost Minoan Civilisation, which had been discovered only 33 years prior in 1900.
Most curious are speculations on possible subterranean influence on Ancient Greek religion. The Minoan culture & language (undeciphered) have no known relatives.🧵 Image
Image
Greek authors had acknowledged from earliest times there had been on their lands an earlier Civilisation than their own, which they had since taken over. But beyond their existence, nothing was known of these "Pelasgians" or "Trojans".
Völkerwanderung means "mass migration".Image
Image
Aug 23, 2024 12 tweets 8 min read
First of threads on the Hellenisation of Ancient Anatolia.
A millenium-long process that saw its transformation from an unruly province of the Persian Empire, to the main surviving bulwark of Greek culture by the early Middle-Ages.
Summarising the pre-Hellenistic period here.🧵 Image There are very few good sources on Anatolian between the Hittite civilisation's collapse & Persian conquest.
Known for certain is its unusual linguistic diversity (even by ancient standards) with at least 2 non-Aryan, non-Semitic language families. Because fractured geography. Image
Aug 12, 2024 12 tweets 9 min read
Thread w/excerpts of Spencer & Gillen's "Native Tribes of Central Australia" (1899). One of the latest anthropological accounts of Aboriginal societies in a relatively 'pristine' state, though early comments in the book say their isolation wouldn't last much longer.🧵 Image Authors state urgency of their mission, having scant remaining time to describe Aboriginal social organisation & beliefs, already rapidly going extinct at the time of writing. Book mostly focuses on the Arunda (Arendte, spellings vary) still one of the most numerous groups today.
Image
Image
Jul 4, 2024 26 tweets 10 min read
Thread on the lost Greco-Roman historians.
Hopefully again relevant, with the decipherment of burnt & damaged scrolls from Herculaneum.
Naturally we can only speak of Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" -histories we know only via reference or quotation by other ancient texts.🧵Image
Image
Though we can only guess at the true number, roughly between 80-95% of all Greco-Roman literature has been lost.
You can get a vague sense of this from (e.g.) Plutarch, Athenaios or Polybios, attacking, praising & quoting dozens of authors, who now lack 1 line of surviving text. Image
Image
Jun 17, 2024 12 tweets 10 min read
Short thread on life of the Tasmanian Aborigines prior to European arrival - the most isolated & primitive human society that has ever existed.
Excerpts from Edgerton's "Sick Societies".
Photos from my own last holiday there.🧵Image
Image
Tasmania is a cool temperate, mountainous & windyswept island, roughly the size of a united Ireland.
Humans crossed the landbridge to Tasmania from mainland Australia during the Ice Age, at least 20K years ago. From 10K BC that connection was flooded, & they were totally alone.

Image
Image
Image
Jun 13, 2024 25 tweets 12 min read
Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak's "Jewish History, Jewish Religion".
Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.🧵Image A key point to understanding this book:
Shahak's descriptions are mostly about traditional (not liberal/reform) Jewish religious communities, who were the only kind of self-identifying Jews that existed before the 1800s.
They were hermetic enclaves of totalitarian theocracies.Image
Jun 7, 2024 16 tweets 8 min read
Thread on Alexander's invasion of the Persian Empire from the Iranian POV.
In particular, how its last Emperor, Darius III, responded to the crisis. Post-conquest Iranian resistance was also far more widespread than recognised.
Excerpts from E. Badian's paper "Conspiracies".🧵
Image
Image
Darius III (hence just Darius) won the throne of the world's largest yet-known Empire as a usurper, from fairly obscure origins.
He was of royal blood -alongside 100s of fellow contenders. Murderous Ottoman succession struggles derived from the harem have an ancient pedigree.Image
May 27, 2024 36 tweets 28 min read
Earliest human remains (9000 BC) yet found in Nigeria are comparatively extremely recent compared to China, MENA or Europe whose earliest homo sapiens date between 100K to 33K BC.
But this may be simply due to a lack of investigation - the Stone Age isn't an area I know about.Image
Image
With a lack of any written records, the process of state formation in the Nigeria region remains murky.
Whilst early farming villages were organised in a relatively "democratic" manner, major decisions & "foreign relations" were conducted by martial Secret Societies.
Image
Image
May 14, 2024 17 tweets 13 min read
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.🧵Image 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. Image
May 9, 2024 34 tweets 20 min read
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.🧵Image 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.Image
Image
Image
Image
May 3, 2024 17 tweets 12 min read
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.🧵
Image 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):
Image
Image
May 1, 2024 7 tweets 3 min read
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: Image 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.
Image
Image
Apr 27, 2024 25 tweets 18 min read
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.

Image
Image
Image
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.
Image
Image
Apr 12, 2024 13 tweets 8 min read
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".
Image 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. Image