Posts Tagged ‘fallacies’
Fallacy? What about fallacy?
Posted on: June 28, 2021
Just How Much Fallacy is Your To Quoque?
danielwalldammit posted on wordpress. Nov.7, 2010
We all learned that two wrongs don’t make a right when we were kids, didn’t we?
And we learned that ‘you too’ arguments are a fallacy back in Freshman logic class, right?
Right?
Okay, maybe not everybody, but this is a lesson a lot of us probably have in common. Most educated people ought to know that there is something wrong with answering a criticism by saying “you do it too!” or some variation thereof. Hell, most decent people ought to know better than that regardless of their education.
So, why do we do it?
Hell, almost everybody does it on at least some occasions. To be fair, some people do it more than others. They will do it every chance they get. Others try not to, most of the time anyway. So, the penchant for answering a serious concern with a quick ‘you-too’ gambit varies from one person to another, but I don’t know that anyone avoids it entirely.
This tactic also comes and goes with the times. It’s been particularly common for the last 4 years, so much so that folks even coined a new term for it; ‘whataboutism.’ The “Your side does it too” gambit has made a regular appearance in public debate for a long time, but it’s been particularly common for the space of about one presidential administration (or an administration plus the campaign before it). So, the internet collectively coined a new term to describe it.
Okay, but why is this kind of argument so common?
One reason? It’s not always a fallacy.
Another? For some people, it really is a way of life.
Variable Relevance: The (ir-)relevance of ‘you too’ games varies in a couple of interesting ways.
If someone corrects my behavior and I respond with “you do it too?” am I really engaging in a fallacy?
Variable Conclusions: If I mean by that you-too response that I am not really wrong, because you do it too, then yes. Hell yes! If that’s what I mean, then I am absolutely engaging in the tu quoque fallacy.
If, on the other hand, I mean; “Okay, I need to correct my behavior, but so should you, because you do in fact do this too,” then my response is not entirely unreasonable. I’m not denying my wrong-doing in this instance. I am just asking you to correct your own behavior right along with me.
Alternatively, I could employ a ‘you-too’ argument by of refusing to accept a rule that I have good reason to believe others are not going to follow themselves. Let’s imagine we are playing a game of soccer and you tell me I should stop touching the ball with my hands.
I could then say you do it too as a means of insisting either that you stop yourself or that we are just going to continue playing an odd game of soccer in which both of us are allowed to touch the ball with our hands. In this case, I am refusing to play by unfair rules, or unfair application of those rules.
It seems that there are at least some conclusions which could be reasonably drawn from a premise beginning with an assertion that is essentially saying “you do it too.”
Plus Alternatives: There is another context in which “you too” starts to become more relevant than it would otherwise be. In this case, the tu-quoque fallacy has some company, because the False Alternatives fallacy comes in here right along with it. This is the context of constrained choices.
If I tell you that apples bother my teeth, so I don’t like eating them, it would normally be quite foolish to respond by telling me that cookies have too much sugar. Whether or not cookies have too much sugar, apples still bother my teeth (always feels like I am biting into styrofoam). That does not change if cookies are bad for me. So, the cookie-themed response seems quite irrelevant.
…unless I want a snack, and I have exactly 2 options!
If my universe of possible choices includes an apple and a cookie, then problems with one might very well be a reasonable answer to my expressed concerns about the other. It’s not so much a logical inference as it is a conversational implicature. A possible respondent hears me complaining about the apple, realizes I have offered it as a reason for choosing the cookie instead, and responds by reminding me of a good reason to avoid the cookie
Of course apples and cookies don’t make these arguments themselves, so if this is a concern about false alternatives, how does it relate to the tu-quoque fallacy? Well, it comes into play when the apples and cookies do make these arguments themselves, or at least when we divide ourselves up into an obviously apple camp and a clearly cookie camp.
Or maybe when we try to pick a President.
If I say that Donald Trump has been self-dealing throughout his Presidency as a means of saying he is a terrible President, it wouldn’t normally help matters to say that Hillary does it too (using the Uranium One story about her charity foundation for example). Neither would it help to raise the prospect of similar corruption on the part of the Biden family.
These become relevant during elections precisely because the obvious alternative choice is understood, and so the range of viable possibilities is narrowed sufficiently to make these normally irrelevant arguments matter after all.
And here, 3rd party-proponents will have an obvious complaint of their own. What if there are better choices? What if you can point to a candidate that doesn’t have a history of self-dealing (or, more to the point, a history of having the charge of self-dealing leveled at them by political opponents)?
That’s a reasonable concern and one that speaks directly to the very kind of problem that logicians are trying to call our attention to when speaking about ‘false alternatives’ and ‘tu-quoque’ fallacies. Of course, part of the concern here lies in just how viable the third parties really are and what you are trying to accomplish with your vote, both of which speak to the question of just how constrained the alternatives here really are. If a 3rd party might really win, then it would be quite illogical to respond to a criticism of one major party candidate as though it were an obvious endorsement of another.
Conversely, you may know that the 3rd party is going to lose but choose to vote for them anyway as a means of signaling to the major parties that they should take you own political values more seriously. If enough others vote the same way, this could become leverage in the next election.
If a 3rd party candidate is, however, not a serious contender for winning an election, and the election is just too important to risk on a symbolic statement, then we may be back in the realm of 2 real choices and dirt on one viable candidate really will have to be weighed against dirt on the other. In such cases, “your guy does it too” and “the alternative is worse” start to become relevant again.
Where your choices are constrained, criticisms of one choice can provide a meaningful response to criticisms of another, but this is still problematic. Such arguments don’t erase problems, and they don’t disprove initial claims. If you tell me, for example, that Hunter Biden was using his father’s position as Vice President under the Obama administration to make money, reminding you that the Trump family profits from his role as President (e.g. through fees paid by the Secret Service to Trump properties during his visits, use of political leverage to get Ivanka’s patents in China, or simply the profits made when foreign diplomats choose to stay at Trump properties while negotiating with him) will not prove the claims about Hunter Biden are untrue.
If I want to do that, then I have to provide an argument directly debunking the claims about Hunter Biden activities. What do I get out of calling attention to similar shenanigans about Trump? I get an argument about the significance one relative to the other. I get an argument about how each balances against the other when we assume both criticisms are of roughly equal merit. That may not be the best argument I could produce on the topic, but it would not be fallacious. It’s in this context that ‘you too’ (or at least ‘your guy too’) arguments start to make a little more sense.
One fascinating thing about this is the way that the relevance of such arguments comes and goes. I understood claims about Uranium One, debunked as they are, as a concern in the 2016 election. It was fascinating to me, however, seeing Trump fans continue bringing this up in response to criticism of his actions well into the Trump administration. I found myself saying; “well let’s impeach her too” then, by which I hoped to suggest that this was no longer a relevant means of answering concerns about Trump’s own actions. As the 2020 election heated up, concerns about Biden became a more viable means of offsetting those about Trump (at least to those who care nothing about proportion or credibility of the sources). In terms of addressing the choice at hand, it was useful for the Trump camp to have a claim about political corruption in play precisely because they knew many such claims could be held against Donald. What the merits of each claim really are is of course a debatable question, but having comparable accusations on the table makes possible a kind of argument about how one wishes to weigh one relative to the other.
When we were all expected to weigh Donald Trump’s character against that of another person, complaints about that other person could pass a certain test of minimal relevance to complaints about him. So, the relevance comparison to other people to criticisms of Donald Trump came and went over the course of his Presidential administration. When he was operating on his own, and the only viable question was about his own competence and integrity, they should have gone away.
Of course they didn’t.
Constraining Personalities: This brings us to one last point; some people thrive on the sort of constrained choices I am describing here. When they face an open range of possibilities, they work very hard to create the illusion of constrained choices anyway.
Yes, I have Donald Trump in mind here.
I am also writing about his many fans.
There is a reason the Trump camp was such a source of whataboutism claims throughout his Presidency. This is both a feature of the base to which he consciously pitched his politics and to personality of Donald Trump himself.
Audience: There are people who live in a world of artificially constrained choices, and you can see it their responses to a broad range if issues. Did you say Fox news got something wrong? Well then you must be watching too much MSNBC. If there is a problem with capitalism, well then why don’t you just go try China?
Don’t like Christianity? You must be an atheist! Is the American healthcare system broken? Well then, let me tell you the horror stories coming out of Canada! Concerned about police brutality? You must support riots in the streets! Don’t like coke? Shut up and drink your Beer!
And so on…
(Okay, I might not be that be that serious about the coke and beer example.)
Perhaps all of us fall into this way of thinking from time to time, but some people really do seem to think in such terms on a regular basis. They live in a world of social Manichaeism, a world in which 2 rival forces contend with one another for control of the world and of our loyalties. Anything said against one can clearly be understood as support for the other, because all questions of value must be measured according to the standard of which force one wishes to align oneself with. Other options are always illusory.
You are with the lord of light or you are with the lord of darkness, and if you don’t declare your loyalties openly, then that is a good reason to suspect you are on the wrong side of this conflict. In effect, such people keep making use of the false-alternatives fallacy because they actually do live in a world in which their choices are always constrained. Their assumptions about the world around them and the choices available to all of us consistently reduce all choices to a binary opposition.
Always!
Brief Technicality: I should add that the not all binary opposition are equal. What typically happens here is that people looking at contrary relationships often construe them as contradictory relationships? What is the difference? In a Contradictory relationship between two claims, they two have opposite truth values. If one is true, the other is false. If one is false, the other is true. In a contrary relationship between two claims, on the other hand, one of them must be false, but it is at least possible that both will be false.
In the case of either a contrary relationship or a contradictory relationship, you could infer the falsehood of one claim from the truth of the other, but you could only infer the truth of one claim from the falsehood of the other in the case of a contradictory relationship, not in the case of a contrary relationship.
Case in point: If I know that John is voting for Biden, I can conclude he is clearly not voting for Trump (unless he wants his ballot to be thrown out). If, on the other hand, I know he is not voting for Biden, I could not normally conclude that he is voting for Trump. He might be voting for a third party after all (and whether or not that is a good idea brings up all the points made above).
So, political loyalties are not usually well modeled on the basis of a contradictory relationship. Such loyalties are contrary at best even if specific choices made on the basis of those loyalties (e.g. voting) might be framed in terms of contradictory relationships.
Another example? If you like capitalism, it’s probably safe to assume you are not in favor of communism, but could we really infer from a criticism of capitalism that you were a communist? No. You could be in favor of some alternative political economy. Old fashioned trade guilds, perhaps coupled with mercantilism, subsistence economics (as practiced in many indigenous communities), or good old Georgism (which may or may not be a form of socialism, depending on who you ask), all come to mind. (So, does rejecting the terms ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ outright as being to vague and sweeping.). Inferring support for one of these highly loaded terms from opposition to the other is hardly reasonable, and yet, people do it all the time.
People who should know better.
But people often treat contrary relationships as though they were contradictory, thus enabling a faulty implicature, the inference of a specific loyalty from criticism of an alternative commonly understood to be its opposite. This empowers both false alternatives and tu-quoque arguments. For some people this approach to decision making is just too gratifying to resist.
We sometimes encounter simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, and hence make choices between contradictory values, but much of our thinking takes place in a world with a broader range of possibilities. Those locked into the mindset of Social manichaeism are constantly pushing us to think in narrower terms to begin with. If all of us are prone to miss the possibilities from time to time, then some people seem to take this as a point of principle.
Personality: Enter a living train-wreck such as Donald Trump! He thrives on constrained choices precisely because his own actions and his own statements cannot stand up to scrutiny on their own merits. Whatever the man may have been like when he was younger, he has long since accumulated a range of of bad deals, unpaid debts, and obvious lies in a personal history of chronically abusive behavior. His own credibility would never stand up to scrutiny, not from anyone making an honest effort.
So, how does he manage?
He always brings with him a broad range of bluffs and diversions, and one of the most important is a constant penchant for attacking someone in virtually any context, and for doing it in the most humiliating way possible.
Every claim he might make, every question one might ask, is then subsumed under the effect of this personal attack. For those under attack, this means trying to balance the need to defend yourself against the effort to address any objective issues that may be on the table. For bystanders, it is a question of balancing concerns over Trump’s behavior against those he raises about others.
In the ensuing hostilities, trump can raise and drop any issues he wishes, make false claims, and set them aside at his liesure. If he is caught flat footed, the solution is as simple as insulting the person who pointed it out or any source they may rely upon. The end-result is a choice between him or someone else, and any doubts about that other person whatsoever will be enough for Donald. He has spent his lifetime exploiting the benefit of the doubt. It is a benefit does not share with others.
The logic of the whataboutism gambit suits Trump’s style perfectly.
Is Trump University credible? What about Hillary!?!
Did Donald tell a lie? Ask Obama if you can keep your insurance!?!
Is he mistreating immigrants? What are the Dems doing to protect us!?! (…and after 2016, ask Obama, because he did it first?)
Is the Trump family self-dealing through their position in government? Where is Hunter!?!
You get the idea.
This is a man in deep need of enemies. The closest he will ever get to redemption lies in the hope that those around him will think him better than the alternative. Small wonder that he preferred to keep Hillary on the table as a kind of shadow President, a mythic character he could use as a whipping woman even in the 2020 election.
At the peak of his Presidency, when she should have been off the table entirely, she was still the answer to concerns about Trump, replaced only when Biden stepped in to become Trump’s new foil, and only partially so at that. Trump has always needed a constrained choice to make a case for himself, because he is of no value on his own.
To know the worth of Donald Trump, one has always to ask what about someone else.
A man like that is made for the sort of strife we have seen this week, and throughout his Presidency. He is at his peak when the whole world has to think in terms of the constrained choices he seeks to bring about in all times and all places. For most of us these moments come and go. For the likes of Donald Trump, such moments are the only ones that count.
***
Is Donald Trump the only person like this? Not by a long shot, but he is my exhibit ‘A’, and as he is still in a position to do us all harm, he seems to be a relevant example. It was the dramatic nature of our recent elections that got me thinking about the way that certain arguments seem more compelling at some times than other.
I could just as easily have written an epitaph for nuance.
Perhaps that would have been more to the point.
Let us hope that subtlety finds room to breathe in all our minds sometime soon! It is one thing to say ‘no’ with conviction when that is what is called for, and it is quite another to live in a world that is polemics all the way down.
In the end, the point here is that there seem to be some folks who really thrive on the ability to reduce the world to a pair of choices under the assumption that to affirm one is to deny the other. Elections may be a special time to such folks, a moment in which certain patterns of thought seem a little less flawed and a moment in which the rest of the world may just be happy to join in that same pattern of thinking.
We probably all engage in similar patterns of thought in many other contexts, sports rivalries and all manner of brand loyalties come to mind. For my own part, I hope soon to set some of this aside and think about other things. I can’t quite say that i am ready yet.
I can’t quite say that the rest of America is either.
Hopefully soon!
Part 12. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
Posted on: July 17, 2018
Part 12. How Israel in 1948 committed Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, about 400,000 within days in first stage
The Fallacies of Morris’s Arguments
Israeli historian Benny Morris might deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, but Jeremy R. Hammond own research shows that this was indeed how Israel came into being.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has been very vocal of late in denying that Palestine was ethnically cleansed of Arabs in order for the “Jewish state” of Israel to be established.
In a series of articles in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Morris has debated the question with several of his critics who contend that ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred.
Not so, argues Morris. So who’s right?
It’s worth noting at the outset that, while such a debate exists in the Israeli media, the US media remains, as ever, absolutely silent on the matter.
The Fallacies of Morris’s Arguments
Now that the proper historical context has been established, let’s return to Morris’s arguments and address each in turn.
Morris denies that the Jewish leadership “carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs”. This denial is untenable. Logically, the goal of establishing a demographically “Jewish state” would require the “compulsory transfer”—to borrow Ben-Gurion’s phrase for it, in turn borrowed from the Peel Commission—of a large number of Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had explicitly stated their desire to effect this “transfer”, and once war broke out there was a clear tacit understanding between the political leadership and the military commanders toward that end.
As Morris himself has pointed out, there was an “atmosphere of transfer”, and commanders who carried out such expulsions were not punished.
Moreover, from mid-March onward, commanders were given explicit instructions for how this “compulsory transfer” was to be carried out.
If the expulsion of Arab villagers prior to Plan D had received the tacit approval of the leadership, the expulsions thereafter received their explicit approval.
Commanders like Yigal Allon understood their orders very well: it was “imperative” to “cleanse” their areas of operation of their Palestinian inhabitants.
After Blatman cited Morris to support his assertion that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948, Morris accused Blatman of attributing things to him that he had never claimed. Yet Morris himself had previously described what happened during the war as “ethnic cleansing”—and expressed his view that Ben-Gurion’s error was not doing a thorough enough job of it.
Morris argues that Blatman’s assertion “ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war”. Even if we accept his assumptions (and totally wrong) that the Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan was unreasonable and that they were responsible for starting the war, it does not follow that no ethnic cleansing occurred.
In keeping with his comments to Ari Shavit, what Morris really seems to be arguing here is not that it didn’t happen, but that it was justified;
It’s not that Palestine wasn’t actually ethnically cleansed—clearly, by his own account, it was—just that, in his view, this wasn’t a crime.
And while legal scholars may debate whether such actions were prohibited under the laws of war at the time, there isn’t any ambiguity about the fact that they are recognized today as war crimes—and, regardless of what any international treaties had to say about it, just as immoral then as they would be today.
Moreover, Morris’s assumptions that the UN partition plan was an equitable solution and that Resolution 181 lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, are both categorically false.
He bases his arguments that the Jews were acting defensively on the grounds that the Arab states had threatened “to attack the Jewish state” and then carried out that threat by “invading” Israel.
But given the illegitimacy of the May 14 declaration and the inherent prejudice of the Zionist project toward the majority Arab population, this narrative crumbles. To characterize the Arabs as the “invaders” while Palestine’s Arab inhabitants were being systematically expelled or driven into flight and its Arab villages literally wiped off the map is simply to flip reality on its head.
Morris denies that there was ever a decision by the Jewish leadership “to ‘expel the Arabs’”. He repeats that Ben-Gurion “never gave [his officers] an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’”
It might be true that No known documents (so far), including Plan D, contained those exact words, but the leadership’s intent was clear. Indeed, in the very same sentence he says Ben-Gurion gave no such order, Morris notes that Ben-Gurion “let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country”.
His implied logic is that without such an explicit order, it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. This is a non sequitur. No explicit order need have been given; it was enough that Haganah commanders understood the leaderships’ intention to have “as few Arabs as possible”, to quote Morris’s own words, in the “Jewish state” they were seeking to establish.
Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes, October 30, 1948 (Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Moreover, Plan D did make explicit the operational orders to expel Arabs from their villages.
Morris also suggests that since not all Arabs were expelled, therefore it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. But once again his logic is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow that since there were Arabs who were allowed to remain in the territory that became Israel that therefore the expulsion of the majority of that territory’s Arab inhabitants didn’t constitute ethnic cleansing. Morris can opine that Ben-Gurion didn’t do a thorough enough job of it; but he can’t sustain the suggestion that the lack of thoroughness means it wasn’t ethnic cleansing.
The “atmosphere of transfer” is acknowledged by Morris; yet he asserts that Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, who “supported the transfer of Arabs” in the 1930s and early ‘40s, later “supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.” With this comment, he implies that Ben-Gurion and other leaders changed their minds and decided that a population of 400,000 Arabs within the area they desired for their “Jewish state” would be just fine.
Once again, his argument is a non sequitur; their acceptance of the partition plan did not constitute a repudiation of their desire to rid the land of Arabs. On the contrary, it was seen as a pragmatic step toward achieving the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state with “less Arabs” (Golda Meir).
Indeed, he further acknowledges that the “atmosphere of transfer” still prevailed in April 1948, but, he argues, this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t.” But, once again, the fact that some Arabs—about 160,000, according to Morris—were permitted to remain does not mean that the rest weren’t victims of ethnic cleansing.
Once again, explicit orders to expel Arabs needn’t have existed for us to recognize what occurred as ethnic cleansing; it was enough that a tacit understanding existed between the political leadership and the military commanders, which Morris acknowledges was in fact the case—including by pointing out that those commanders who expelled Arabs from their villages weren’t punished.
Again, the “atmosphere of transfer” was translated into official policy with Plan D.
On March 24, 1948, Morris argues in Haaretz, Israel Galili “ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state.” In 1948, he specifies that “Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the ‘rights, needs and freedom,’ ‘without discrimination,’ of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas.”[97]
How does Morris reconcile this with the explicit orders under Plan D to collectively punish the civilian population by expelling them from their homes and destroying their villages? How does he reconcile it with the fact that, by his own account, commanders who expelled Arabs and destroyed villages weren’t punished for defying what Morris characterizes as a direct order? Instructively, he makes no attempt to.
But he does note that “Things did change in early April”, meaning that this ostensible order to respect the rights of Palestinian civilians was rescinded. As he notes in 1948, the policy outlined in April was “generally, to evict the Arabs living in the brigade’s area.”[98]
So how does Morris, in light of this admission, maintain that “there was no overall expulsion policy”? He notes that “here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” But, again, neither the fact that some Arabs were allowed to remain nor that many fled out of fear is inconsistent with the recognition of what happened as ethnic cleansing.
Finally, Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership as a matter of policy prevented the Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes.
Indeed, this was made largely impossible by the complete destruction of their villages. He makes no effort to reconcile this policy with his denial that ethnic cleansing occurred. Instead, he opines that this policy was “logical and just”. We see once again, thus, that Morris isn’t so much arguing that there was no ethnic cleansing as he is that the ethnic cleansing was justified.
He is attempting to argue that the ethnic cleansing that did occur—which he has explicitly acknowledged did occur, and which he documents extensively in his own writings—was not a crime.
Benny Morris is entitled to his opinions. But to deny that the “Jewish state” of Israel was established by ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes in Palestine is simply a display of the very intellectual dishonesty he accuses his critics of.
The standard he applies is telling: he defends the ethnic cleansing on the grounds that all of the Arabs who were made refugees by the war and whom Israel refused to allow to return “had tried to destroy the state in the making.” Inasmuch as their very inhabitancy in the land the Zionist leadership desired for their “Jewish state” stood in the way of that project, he has a point.
Their very existence in the land constituted a destruction of the Zionists’ ideal. Hence they had to go. In Morris’s own words, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.”
Beyond that, Morris’s hypocrisy is glaring. He knows perfectly well that most of those expelled were civilians who had taken no part in hostilities. Hence what he is really saying here is that it was “logical and just” for the civilian Arab population to have been collectively punished for the crime some among them committed of putting up resistance to the Zionists’ operations to seize control of the territory they wanted for their “Jewish state”—precisely the collective punishment that Haganah commanders were ordered to carry out under Plan D, the blueprint, by Morris’s own account, for the Zionists’ “war of conquest”.
That Benny Morris applies such a hypocritical standard should not be too surprising. He is, after all, himself a Zionist. As a historian, he has contributed greatly to the literature on the subject, and in so doing, has helped move the discussion forward. By helping us to understand the origins of the conflict, he has empowered us with knowledge that brings clarity on how to achieve a peaceful resolution.
It is unfortunate that he’s lately made such a concerted effort to move the discussion backward again. It is in the context of his own deeply held and scarcely concealed prejudice toward the Palestinians that his attempts now to deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must be understood.
Haganah men patrolling the streets of Haifa, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com)
Mount Lebanon: a few fallacies
Posted on: November 19, 2008
Mount Lebanon: a few fallacies (November, 20, 2008)
Mount Lebanon is a refuge: correct. Since time immemorial Mount Lebanon was an ideal ecological place in weather and abundance of fresh water. Fruit trees and milk and honey and snow covered mountain chains and virgin forest were trade marks of Mount Lebanon among all the invading Empires. Mount Lebanon was a refuge and a sanctuary for the mystics and ascetics. It is said that the Sufis believed that there are 70 “Abdal” (people who spend their life in prayer and in communication with God to extend peace on earth) at any one moment; 30 of these “abdals” were believed to reside in Mount Lebanon and the remaing in all over Syria.
Mount Lebanon was mainly a refuge from persecution: All kinds of sects and tribes have found refuge in Mount Lebanon but it was not exclusively because of persecution or persecution on religious ground. The inhabitants of Mount Lebanon are not a homogenous ethnic group within sectarian differences. Mount Lebanon had experienced the absorption of many different ethnic tribes to serve the interests of the Empire of the period. Mount Lebanon had tribes transferred from Persia (Caliphate Muaweya installed Persian tribes in Kesrwan), Iraq, and Turkmenistan (during the early ottoman dynasties), Kurdistan (during the Mamelouk dynasties), Ciskasians, and Greek from Byzantium to name a few. In fact, the name of the Maronite county of Kesrwan originates from the root of Khosro or people coming from Persia. There are many discoveries in caves that prove that the female inhabitants used to wear the attire of Central Europe with multilayered colorful dresses.
The Christians of Mount Lebanon are refugees from Moslem hegemonies: utterly wrong. There were four major waves of Christian sects fleeing persecutions but not from Moslems and not all toward Lebanon and Mount Lebanon. Three waves were caused by other Christian sects who were affiliated to Byzantium with Constantinople as Capital. The last wave was caused by extremist and salafist sect originating from the Arabia Desert.
Since the Council of Nicee in 325 (during the reign of Emperor Constantine) all the Christian sects who refused the new dogma or foundation of Christianity were persecuted. Emperor Constantine was a pagan by heart and nominally converted to Christianity for political reasons; he wanted his own Imperial religion and indivisible. Many sects found refuge in Aleppo, Iraq, Armenia, Kurdistan, around the Oronte River (Al Aassy) and some in the Northern part of Mount Lebanon.
The next major wave occurred around the year 1000 AC (one hundred year before the Crusades) when Byzantium had regained control of Syria and the schism between Constantinople and Rome had taken roots. The Christian Greek Orthodox persecuted the Greek Catholics and the Maronites (having allegiance to Rome or the Pope); the Greek Armenians persecuted Armenian Catholics. Many of these persecuted Christian sects moved in to Mount Lebanon. The third wave was during the Crusade campaigns as counter persecutions to Constantinople. The forth wave of mostly Greek Orthodox who were predominant in Syria and Damascus flee the successive razias incursions of the Wahabites bedwins coming from the Arabia Desert of Hijjaz around 1800. The Ottoman Sultan then sent Mehmet Ali who crushed the Wahabit and razed their capital between around 1835. Mehmet Ali will later rule Egypt and his dynasty will survive until the military revolt of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. The “Moslem” Wahabit sect has been ruling Saudi Arabia since 1935.
The Druze in Mount Lebanon are refugees of persecutions: wrong. The Druze Moslem sect members in Mount Lebanon were never refugees from no where. They lived in Mount Lebanon and were of various sects; they converted to the Fatimide Moslem sect who ruled Egypt for over a century around 950. The Fatimide dynasty were fundamentally a Chiia sect (Moslems who refused a Moslem Caliphate, especially a Sunni Caliphate) and had Sufi tendencies and other esoteric beliefs. During the Sunni Mamelouk dynasties, Druze fled Aleppo to the Golan Heights and in Lebanon, but not necessarily to Mount Lebanon.
The Chiaa in Mount Lebanon are refugees of persecutions: mostly correct. The Chiaa inhabited most of Mount Lebanon during the Ommayad Dynasty and ever since. The Sunni Caliphates made it a trend to persecute the Chiia at every opportunity. Many tribes from Turkmenistan, Persia, and Kurdistan were relocated in Mount Lebanon to balance the Chiia and keep them in check. The Chiia were persecuted by the Ottoman, especially lately when associated with the Safavid Persian Dynasty that was on the ascendance since the 16th century. The tribal sects of the Maronite and then very late the Druze (in the 15th century) managed to have a centralized religious authority but not the Chiias; thus the Chiia tribes were not cohesive enough to share authority in Mount Lebanon.
Mount Lebanon was a land of freedom: Not exactly. It was mostly and frankly a social chaos of tribal rules with loose connections to a central authority, except paying the tribute. The climate to a foreigner felt a sense of freedom but not liberty outside the tribe. Uprisings against the central authorities of the successive Empires were very rare and not locally initiated.
Mount Lebanon was militarily impregnable: utterly wrong. Mount Lebanon was not immune to military reactions from the Empires of the period. All uprisings were crushed easily and quickly. Mount Lebanon was relatively at peace because the local tribes did not make waves and were left alone as long as they paid the tributes and appropriate taxes. The few uprisings were instigated by foreign powers, Byzantium and later the European powers. Thus, Mount Lebanon was an ideal subject to central powers and was left undisturbed most of the time, except when local skirmishes necessitated local Emirs to support the Pashas of Damascus or Akka in men of war with their own armaments, mules, horses and supplies.
