Here's a random post. Hold tight. May be controversial. But fun.
Well, he was from Levant so he is technically Asian indeed. There is a reason he is called Jesus of Nazareth rather than Jesus of Texas.
Fun fact: Santa Claus is technically from Turkey.
It's only a
fun fact if you don't know history at all and care about it even less.
Subtlety in politics is probably too much to expect from a place like this one, but still...
Would you say that Tecumseh was from United States?
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Saint Nicholas was from
Myra which is in south-western
Anatolia. He lived in 4th century CE which places Myra in
Greece in ethno-cultural terms and
Rome in political terms.
Myra had been culturally under Greek influence at that point for over seven centuries and before it was
Lycian, which was part of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European culture in the region. As a coastal region Lycia grew under the direct influence of the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece and before very likely was influenced by the seafaring Minoan/Cretan culture which dates to 2000 BCE. Lycia was never part of the Hittite empire. It only became a vassal state as part of the
Xaca i.e. the multi-cultural Achaemenid Empire which was the pinnacle of the world's oldest civilisation - the Fertile Crescent - and spanned the "known world" from the Nile to the Indus.
But it actually gets worse once you attempt to understand, rather than just merely record, history.
"Turkey" is a country created from the Middle Ages onwards by several waves of conquest by Turks, a Central-Asian culture that is characterised by its relative cultural simplicity and nomadic pastoral lifestyle as well as... focus on violence, warfare and plunder as means of generating wealth. That's nomadic pastoralists. Consistently the worst humanity has to offer.
That cultural template can be seen to this day in indigenous Turkic cultures in Asia. It is a culture (speaking of
culture and not
society) largely incapable of innovation and arguably even successful assimilation. Turks - all of the branches, including the most notorious: the Mongols - have been the closest thing we have to plague in cultural terms.
It's not an attack at Turkish cultures. Their festivals are very colourful. But so is
mold. We eat it in cheese. But you don't want it everywhere in your kitchen. And that's what happens during Turkic conquests. What should stay in Central Asia... doesn't and everything goes wrong.
For example the current state of the Middle East and Islamic culture can be plausibly traced to the centuries of plunder and conquest by Turks, at the time when Islam had its "golden age" which really denotes the resurgency of Xaca/Sassanid empire under Islam following the Abbasid revolution in 750. Islam could never have a golden age being derived from a fanatical, genocidal ideology which brought the first/second caliphate to the brink of collapse not more than a century after the conquests began. It was saved precisely by the Abbassids which also laid the foundation for a relatively peaceful co-existence with Christian cultures in Europe, including the Byzantines and opened Middle East to trade with the rest of Asia. That's where the story of Sinbad comes from.
Abbasid Caliphate
Turks - first the Seljuks, then the Mongols - not only destroyed that culture and grievously wounded the civilisation but adopted the most primitive and aggressive form of Islam as most suitable to their goals of conquest and subjugation of Islamic territory.
Seljuk Empire (1037-1194)
Sultanate of Rum (Rome) (1077-1308)
What follows the Sultanate of Rum is the Osman (Ottoman) Empire which existed entirely by virtue of conquest, slavery and extortion of trade. And tales of delusional grandeur that continue to this day in Turkey. Without the Ottoman Empire and their avarice there would be no European colonial era. It began as remedy to Ottoman extortion. Even at the time of rivalry between Roman/Byzantine and Parthian/Sassanid empires both understood that trade was vital. Turks didn't. You can't understand trade if all you ever do is steal livestock on the steppe. That's also how Mongols "facilitated" trade to rip off traders.
Interestingly the arguments about Mongols being somehow a "good empire" because of that trade co-incided with the emergence of US empire in the 1990s/2000s. Curious coincidence, no?
The legacy of Turk rule is poverty and backwardness across the entire region, that historically used to be the richest. This is the difference between Turkish empires and all the others that preceded them. Only the Turks managed to plunder the very basis of prosperity of the region because being a primitive culture, they couldn't understand civilisation. They only understood its external vestiges, not its substance. Their "civilisation" was grotesque and pompous. Their attempts at revival in the 19th century even more so. Even the modern secular model of Ataturk is merely European Enlightenment and nationalism brought to Anatolia about 1-2 centuries too late and even that is being resisted by the culture that Turkish conquerors brought with them. This ended the "Eternal State" as the Ottomans called themselves, while lasting not even half a millenium.
Yuan dynasty was founded because Kublai Khan was not a fool but an educated man, well versed in the culture of the empire he was to conquer. That was the difference between him and his predecessors. If he was like the other rulers of Turkic tribes the Turkic plague would devour China like they did everywhere else. China wasn't special. It was lucky. And so was Europe during Mongol era.
Everything that contemporary Turkish people are proud of is either not their legacy or should not be an object of pride. Language and song are fine. The culture of plunder and imperial delusion are not.
So don't insult good Saint Nicholas by calling him either an overgrown garden gnome (Santa Claus), or a Turk. For all we know he did nothing to deserve either.
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Treat the following as an artistic piece as far as rhetoric is involved and do not connect it to contemporary politics. It's a meditation on culture and history based on logic rather than emotion, which is what I recommend to anyone reading this. Especially those coming from Turkey. If you can't do it, you only confirm everything that I said here.
Ok, that was random but sometimes I get triggered by some misguided remark and I have to let go the stream of consciousness.
Now I'm off. EOT.
