Video from 2009, when the museum was still proud of its Darwin exhibits.
"The UK's Natural History Museum is reviewing options for its Charles Darwin exhibits, including possible removal, after an internal review ordered amid Black Lives Matter protests found that they could be deemed 'offensive.'" Source: RT.
"The museum's directors are scrutinizing collections that may be considered [jargon alert] 'problematic,' which could lead to removal or lesser remedies, such as renaming, The Telegraph reported, citing internal documents. Artifacts from the father of evolutionary theory are among the suspects because Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands on HMS 'Beagle' was one of the UK's 'colonialist scientific expeditions.'
"'In light of Black Lives Matter and the recent anti-racist demonstrations around the world,' the museum is re-evaluating room names, collections and statues to root out any that 'could potentially cause offense.' A large wing of the museum is named after Darwin, and a statue of the naturalist stands in the museum's main hall."
Comment: There's a lot I could say about this, but if I did I would get canceled myself.
"Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Valerius Carausius (died 293) was a military commander of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century. He was a Menapian from Belgic Gaul, who usurped power in 286, during the Carausian Revolt, declaring himself emperor in Britain and northern Gaul (Imperium Britanniarum). He did this only 13 years after the Gallic Empire of the BatavianPostumus was ended in 273. He held power for seven years, fashioning the name 'Emperor of the North' for himself, before being assassinated by his finance minister Allectus." (Wikipedia)
Note: Carausius, a Roman naval commander, was driven to revolt by accusations of treason which may or may not have been justified. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, he "was stationed by the emperor Maximian at Gessoriacum (Bononia, Boulogne) to protect the coasts and channel from Frankish and Saxon pirates. He at first acted energetically, but was subsequently accused of having entered into partnership with the barbarians and was sentenced to death by the emperor. Carausius thereupon crossed over to Britain and proclaimed himself an independent ruler. The legions at once joined him; numbers of Franks enlisted in his service; an increased and well-equipped fleet secured him the command of the neighbouring seas..."
Carausius had some success at first, beating off an attempted invasion by Maximian and forcing the emperor to acknowledge his rule in Britain, but his reign only lasted around seven years before he was overthrown himself in a pattern that was to become all too typical of the last centuries of the western Roman empire:
The rule of Carausius "continued until 293, when Constantius Chlorus (Constantius I), now the western Caesar, marched into Gaul and reclaimed it for the empire. He isolated Carausius by besieging the port of Gesoriacum ... and invading Batavia in the Rhine delta, securing his rear against Carausius's Frankish allies. He could not yet mount an invasion of Britain until a suitable fleet could be built. Nevertheless, Carausius's grip on power was fatally undermined. Allectus, whom he had put in charge of his treasury, assassinated him and assumed power himself. His reign would last only three years, after which he was defeated and killed by Constantius' subordinate Julius Asclepiodotus." (Wikipedia)
And around and around it went, the instability growing until the barbarians eventually overran the West.
English captions available. Should be on automatically.
"The historic Byzantine Chora church is returning to its role as a functioning mosque, having served as a museum for seven decades. Last month a similar reconversion was completed with Hagia Sophia, triggering backlash from Greece." Source: RT.
"On Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered to transfer a historic church in Istanbul into the care of the Religious Affairs Directorate and opening its doors to Muslim worshipers. A similar reconversion happened a month ago, when Hagia Sophia, which also had originated as an Orthodox house of prayer, was turned from a museum into a mosque."
Video from 2013 when the church was still a museum.
"The Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora traces its history back to a fourth century monastery complex just outside of the wall of Constantinople, which was incorporated into the city as it expanded. The walls of the current building have survived since a major reconstruction in the 11th century. The interior features gorgeous Byzantine mosaics and frescoes, which were created sometime between 1315 and 1321 and depict scenes from the New Testament." (RT)
Comment: I guess we're lucky that the Muslims didn't destroy the church outright, but I have to wonder how long it will be before they demolish or remove the Christian mosaics and frescoes. Next video (July 25, 2020) shows Muslims praying at Hagia Sofia for the first time in 86 years.
"After ten centuries of wars, defeats, and victories, the Byzantine Empire came to an end when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in May 1453. The city’s fall sent shock waves throughout Christendom. It is widely quoted as the event that marked the end of the European Middle Ages." Source: Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Byzantine Empire had been in decline for a long time before Constantinople was finally captured by Mehmed II (The Conqueror).
"The fall of Constantinople was a huge blow for the Christian world but, although Pope Nicholas V called for a crusade to regain the city for Christendom, no concerted military response was made. Now styled 'the Conqueror,' Mehmed declared the city his new capital and claimed to be the rightful successor to the Roman Empire." (Encyclopedia Britannica)
As corrupt and crazy as its rulers were, the fall of the Byzantine Empire was a calamity for the western world and Constantinople, at one point the largest and wealthiest city in Christian Europe, has remained in the hands of the Muslims ever since.
"The modern Turkish name for the city, İstanbul, derives from the Greek phrase eis tin polin (εἰς τὴν πόλιν), meaning 'into the city' or 'to the city'. This name was used in Turkish alongside Kostantiniyye, the more formal adaptation of the original Constantinople, during the period of Ottoman rule, while western languages mostly continued to refer to the city as Constantinople until the early 20th century. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet was changed from Arabic script to Latin script. After that, as part of the 1920s Turkification movement, Turkey started to urge other countries to use Turkish names for Turkish cities, instead of other transliterations to Latin script that had been used in the Ottoman times. In time the city came to be known as Istanbul and its variations in most world languages." Source: Wikipedia.
The Greek Orthodox Church still refers to the city as Constantinople, a stubborn and commendable tribute to the past. If the Islamization of Europe continues at its present pace, we may soon reach a point where all European cities have been given new names.
One of the greatest legacies of the Byzantine empire, a symbol both of its religious mysticism and its secular wealth, the magnificent Hagia Sofia was turned into a mosque after the conquest, later transformed into a museum and recently reconverted back into a mosque.
"A Somali migrant has admitted to setting two Norwegian churches on fire earlier this year, claiming that he committed the arson attacks as revenge for a burning of a copy of the Qur’an late last year." Source: Breitbart.
"The man, in his twenties, pled guilty to the two fires in Dombås and at Sel, with the first fire spreading to the spire of the church and doing serious damage.
"The man said the acts were revenge for the burning of a Qur’an in the city of Kristiansand by the group Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN) which ended in violence after counter-protestors jumped barricades and fought with members of the group."
"A North African migrant broke into Milan’s historic cathedral and took a security guard hostage with a knife. The migrant is said to have been sitting on the steps of the cathedral before the attack, arousing the suspicion of police officers who then approached him. As they did, he ran towards the entrance of the cathedral and overwhelmed a security guard." (Breitbart)
"According to a report from newspaper Il Giornale, the migrant took out a knife and took the security guard hostage, forcing him to kneel.
"Six police officers then encircled the migrant before tackling and disarming him."
Comment: This was just one incident in the ongoing culture war against Christianity in Europe.
Comment: Was Attila a monster? I guess that depends on your point of view. He probably wouldn't make Esquire's Best People In The World List, but I think calling him a "monster" is inaccurate because the word implies that there was something inhuman about him, that he was unusually cruel and wicked. Attila may have been a thug, extortionist and mass-murderer, but he had plenty of company then and now. Piling up corpses in the pursuit of glory, plunder and conquest isn't exactly unusual in the pages of history. If anything, it could be called all too human.
The Huns were very successful for a while, but like so many warrior cultures who carved out empires for themselves in a bloody, ultraviolent world, they couldn't hang on to what they had conquered. Despite all the mayhem they caused, their lasting contribution was probably the role they played in the collapse of the western Roman empire.
Ironically, the Germanic tribes might not have overrun the Roman frontier the way they did (or at least when they did) if the Romans hadn't been so successful at keeping the barbarians out in earlier times. Frustrated in their search for new land to the west, the Ostrogoths, in particular, started to expand to the east where they collided with the Huns in the region north of the Caspian and Black seas.
"In 372, the eastward expansion of the Ostrogoths provoked an explosive reaction from the Huns of the Volga steppe," according to The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, p. 12. "The Ostrogothic cavalry was humiliated by the faster-moving Huns, whose mounted archers destroyed every force ... sent against them." The Huns then advanced all the way to the Danube, driving the Germanic tribes before them. Fleeing from the terrifying barbarian hordes, many of the Germans ended up flooding across the frontier into Roman Gaul. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Attila came along later, a charismatic killer who united the Huns and raised hell with the Byzantine Empire. His forces spread terror and destruction wherever they went, but his record in battle wasn't all that great when you look at the big picture. He invaded Italy, causing a lot of damage, but he couldn't take Rome. His campaign against Persia failed. He was defeated when he tried to conquer Gaul. He never gave up, though, and might have had more success if he hadn't died in 453 AD.
The Huns' role in the fall of the western Roman empire was indirect. They would probably have expanded into the West in any case, but as it turned out it was the Ostrogoths who stirred them up by intruding into their territory and pulling the trigger on the Romans in the process. The Huns were savage barbarians who slaughtered a huge number of people, but they were too wild to stay unified for long in the absence of warlords strong enough to hold them all together. Led by killers like Attila, the so-called "Empire of the Huns" rose to great heights, only to fall apart soon after his death, leaving behind a legacy of smouldering cities, rotting corpses and the ruins of ancient civilizations.
Dinner with Attila the Hun. Account by Priscus, 5th century Roman diplomat.
"‘Huns’ – the very word brings up of reveries of hordes of horsemen swarming upon the resplendent Roman Empire, with their unkempt appearances, cacophonous intensity and ferocious ambitions. Well the historical truth is very different from this biased depiction heaped upon by the Christian chroniclers of the time. In fact, in spite of their branding as being 'scourges of God’s fury', it still remains a mystery when it comes to the origins of the Huns." Source: Realm Of History.
Comment: The Huns are usually represented as little more than a horde of cruel and demonic savages, but their image in the West is at least partly the result of Christian propaganda. As usual, the reality was more complicated than that and while they were terrifying fighters it's also true that they never had the political skills to hold onto their conquests for very long. Like many barbarian hordes, they could never cross the big divide that separates conquerors from rulers of stable empires.
"The Huns' society and culture remains elusive and, despite their demonization by Rome, their historical significance requires prudent assessment. Their prowess as cavalrymen was as much exploited by Roman generalissimos (in particular, Flavius Aetius) as it was turned against the empire; and, though they exacted large quantities of gold from the eastern empire, they failed to win any of its territory." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).
Note: Allied with the Visigoths, the Roman general Flavius Aetius (391-454 AD) put together an army which defeated the Huns in 451 at the epic Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. This battle shattered the Huns' aura of invincibility and established Aetius' reputation in the East as "the last of the Romans". By this time, of course, classical Rome was essentially dead.
Before the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, Aetius made a treaty with Atilla in a shortlived diplomatic effort to contain the threat:
"Before 449 Aetius had signed an agreement with the Huns, allowing some of them to settle in Pannonia, along the Sava River; he also sent to Attila, the king of the Huns, a man called Constantius as a secretary. In 449, Attila was angry for an alleged theft of a golden plate, and Aetius sent him an embassy under Romulus to calm him; Attila sent him as a present a dwarf, Zerco, whom Aetius gave back to his original owner, Aspar."
In a typical example of Rome's tendency to stab itself in the back, Aetius was assassinated by his political rivals in 454.
"The suspect, whose name has not been made public, was taken into custody on Saturday following his confession. He had been arrested and released earlier in the investigation."
Comment: The fire happened last week (July 18). When I posted the news I gave this "refugee" the benefit of the doubt because the cops had released him, but it turns out that he did it after all. Surprise, surprise. Maybe he's mentally ill, but he was pretty deliberate about setting the fire that destroyed so many priceless treasures:
"[The suspect] admitted during his first appearance for questioning before the investigating judge that he set three fires in the cathedral: at the main organ [next video], the smaller organ, and the electrical panel..." (France24, 7/26/20)
"...While firefighters were able to contain the Nantes blaze after just two hours and save the main structure, its famed organ, which dated from 1621 and had survived the French Revolution and World War II bombardment, was destroyed.
"Also lost were priceless artefacts and paintings, including a work by the 19th-century artist Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin and stained glass windows that contained remnants of 16th-century glass."
"The authorities currently believe the Roman Catholic sanctuary, also known as Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul or simply Nantes Cathedral, was torched deliberately, with an investigation suggesting three fires were lit inside: 'one at the level of the great organ and two fire starts to the left and to the right of the nave'."
Note:According to the BBC, "The detained Rwandan refugee, 39, was in charge of locking up the building the day before the fire." The police say that he was brought in for routine questioning and he has since been released, so it's unclear whether he actually had anything to do with the arson.
It's possible that this guy is Catholic himself. According to the World Atlas, "Roman Catholic Christianity is the largest Christian group and the most popular religion in Rwanda with 46.5% of the population adhering to the religion."
There has been a spate of attacks on Catholic churches in Europe and the United States recently. See Rome Reports for more details. It's hard to believe that these attacks aren't part of the larger culture war against western civilization which is happening everywhere now.