The date of 1066 is often presented to us as the end of Anglo-Saxon rule and the start of (Anglo-)Norman rule. Well that’s not wrong as such, but there is another way of looking at it. If you look at the kings both before and after The Conquest, there were more similarities than you would expect.
Harold Godwinson (the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England) was the son of Godwin who had been made the Earl of Wessex by Cnut the Great (a Dane) and Gytha Thorkelsdóttir a Danish noblewoman related by marriage to Cnut the Great. So he was more than a little Danish.
And if you look at his predecessor – Edward the Confessor, he himself was the daughter of Emma of Normandy who herself was descended from Danes with a French accent (i.e. the Normans). And Emma was a relative of the conqueror William.
So whilst it is quite right that 1066 was regarded as a significant date for the country with some very significant changes to law and language, in terms of the monarchs it wasn’t much of a change at all – they were pretty much all related to each other.
A while back something popped up on my Facebook stream claiming that Pushkin (Alexander Pushkin – the Russian poet) was black as a way of saying “look at all these incredible things blacks have done”. I don’t have a problem with that. I might just question the logic of classifying Pushkin as black.
Of course I also question the use of the colour of the dead stuff that keeps the squishy bits on the inside, to divide people into arbitrary categories. But we’ll gloss over that for now.
Pushkin was at least partially black because his great-grandfather (Abram Petrovich Gannibal) was black; that’s one sixteenth. So he was also 15/16ths white. Can someone be both black and white (presumably without stripes)? Of course the racists amongst us were the ones who set the standard for excluding people from the privilege of calling themselves “white”. And just to irritated the bigots, it pleases me to declare that Pushkin was white; and to avoid making those who look to trumpet the accomplishments of black people foolish., it also pleases me to declare that Pushkin was black.
Which is ridiculous of course, but that’s kind of what I feel about the whole obsession with skin colour anyway.
And finally, take a look at Abram’s bio – he’s probably more accomplished than his descendant Puskin.
Today if you are a Linux user and fire up a terminal window to “do something” at the command-line, you are using a gooey program to emulate an old terminal which was separate to the computer.
Today you are almost always using a keyboard and screen connected directly to the computer you are using and the gooey program you fire up as a terminal is in fact originally called a terminal emulator. That is, it pretends to be a real terminal.
So what were these real terminals?
The earliest “terminals” were actually teletypes for communicating text messages over long distances (over wires!). Not only was there no digital computer involved, but they predate computers by quite a way – the earliest ones were used in the late 19th century. And of course printed the text onto paper directly. The earliest digital computers used these teletypes as input and output devices, so you could type in commands and see the result immediately (or as quickly as the result could be produced). These early days still leave some traces today :-
✓ mike@Lime» tty
/dev/pts/5
The “tty” command commemorates those old printing terminals – the “tt” in “tty” is short for “teletype”.
The speed and wasted paper of those printing terminals was a bit tedious, so the 1970s saw them gradually replaced with glass teletypes – which were basically keyboards and CRT screens built into an enclosure that would attach to a central computer over a serial line.
binary comment
These terminals (and showing an ADM 3A here is a little unfair as it wasn’t quite this simple) were really simple – they had exactly the same capabilities as the printing terminals. No cursor control (meaning no full screen editing), plain text, no italics or bold, etc.
Over time, more and more features were added to the terminal allowing more usable software (in particular the learning curve was not quite as steep). These features grew to accommodate colour, graphics, the ability to load and save data locally, and even the ability to function as a microcomputer (the HP pictured below could run CP/M in certain configurations).
But where did they go?
The heyday of the terminal was in the 1980s when many office-based companies were busy trying to put something like a computer on every desk, and a terminal connected to a central computer was one way of doing that. But they compared rather poorly with microcomputers – typically very slow in comparison, less likely to offer any kind of graphics (graphics was an option but typically cost as much as a microcomputer), and just wasn’t very “cool”.
Despite several attempts at resurrecting them (they were popular amongst those who had to centrally support them), they never really returned.
But they do survive inside modern operating systems in terms of a terminal emulator (as mentioned previously) to access the operating system command line – all three main operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux) have a terminal emulator of sorts. And Microsoft is actually investing in re-engineering their terminal emulator.
I have recently re-read a bunch of stories about the Cold War where the blame for the repressive nature of the Soviet state was placed firmly on the Communist regime. Fair enough you might think, and certainly for most of the 20th century, the former Russian Empire was an extremely repressive regime whilst the Communists were in charge.
Certainly the secret policemen of the Soviets were well known – the GRU, KGB, NKVD, Cheka (where the label “chekist” comes from and all Russian secret police are labelled “chekists”), and others. But the persistent use of Russian secret policemen continues after the collapse of the Communist regime – the GRU is just as strong as they ever were, and there is also the SVR, the FSB, etc. And they’re just as active as ever – including the Salisbury poisonings and similar activities.
What is less well known is that the Russian intelligence services started well before the Communists acquired power in 1917 – the Okhrana. Whilst their headquarters were burned by the revolutionaries, there are persistent left-wing rumours that Okhrana operatives were recruited by the Cheka for their expertise. It is something that is never likely to be proved – these organisations are secret after all, and it did occur over 100 years ago, but the Cheka did become effective surprisingly quickly.
It is easy to blame the communists for their repressive regime, and they certainly deserve plenty of blame but is it really communism that is to blame here? That’s an all too easy assumption to jump on – particularly given the antipathy certain parties (old school European aristocrats and capitalists) have for anything that smacks of depriving them of their ill-gotten gains.
Communism certainly isn’t to blame for the secret police before and after their regime, so wouldn’t it be more accurate to say Russia has a chekist culture that survived two regime changes? Particularly seeing as the current president is a former KGB officer.
The Wild Chained
Does it matter?
Well for a start, Russia is currently a rogue state using intelligence services in an activist way to kill off critics of their current dictator. And it isn’t communist.
And not all communists are authoritarian communists; they may very well be wrong or misguided but they are not all authoritarians.
Well they were bad of course – you can’t invade someone’s land and call it good. At best it might be justified – such as when the Allies invaded occupied Europe and Germany to kick out the Nazis, but that is the best case scenario and the crusades were a long way from that.
But they did not happen in a vacuum – the islamic world had previous contact with the christian world, and that contact wasn’t always harmonious and it wasn’t always the intolerance of christians to blame.
First of all, which crusades are we talking about? Because despite the popular notion that the crusades were all christians trying to kick muslims out of the “holy land”, it wasn’t actually the case. There is some disagreement about whether the other crusades actually count or not – such as the Reconquista or the crusades against the pagans of eastern europe.
But as we’re not looking at those, we can ignore that little argument except to make one point about the Reconquista – this was (overly simplistic) the christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsular after the islamic conquest of starting in 711. And whilst it’s childish to say “but they did it first” (and doesn’t justify the Crusades), it is actually true.
The other aspect contributing towards the first crusade was the actions of the so-called “Mad Caliph” – Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah who reversed a previously agreed policy of toleration to christians (including pilgrims to Jerusalem) and jews. Plus the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Now this may have been exaggerated, but whatever truth lies behind the “Mad Caliph”, the effect on christian europe has more to do with the information (or propaganda) going around europe at the time. Although the first crusade was nearly 100 years later, the destruction of churches was mentioned by Pope Urban in his speech at the Council of Clermont.
We can still condemn the crusades without implying that it was an entirely unprovoked attack on the islamic world.
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