Podcasts about Uzbeks

There has been a Christian community in Syria since the first century AD. But it is shrinking fast and faces terrifying new threats as the country's government, following the overthrow of President Assad, forges alliances with hardline Muslims including foreign jihadists – Uighurs from China, Uzbeks from Central Asia, Chechens from Russia, Afghans and Pakistanis. Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester who is now a Catholic priest of the Ordinariate, has written a heartbreaking piece for The Spectator about the Christians of Maaloula in southwest Syria. It's one of the last remaining communities to speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. ‘Were this community to be destroyed, something precious and irreplaceable would be lost', he writes. Yet that is exactly what may happen. When the then-Bishop Nazir-Ali visited the town in 2016, he discovered that the predecessors of the jihadis who recently toppled Bashar al-Assad ‘had systematically destroyed and desecrated the town's churches and monasteries. Orthodox nuns were kidnapped and held to ransom … young men had been singled out and executed when they refused to convert to the extremists' version of Islam.' Will it happen again? Ahmad al-Sharaa, head of the new Syrian transitional administration, has told Church leaders they have nothing to fear. But can he be trusted? As Mgr Nazir-Ali tells Damian Thompson in this episode of Holy Smoke, it is time for the West to act.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

There has been a Christian community in Syria since the first century AD. But it is shrinking fast and faces terrifying new threats as the country's government, following the overthrow of President Assad, forges alliances with hardline Muslims including foreign jihadists – Uighurs from China, Uzbeks from Central Asia, Chechens from Russia, Afghans and Pakistanis. Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester who is now a Catholic priest of the Ordinariate, has written a heartbreaking piece for The Spectator about the Christians of Maaloula in southwest Syria. It's one of the last remaining communities to speak Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. ‘Were this community to be destroyed, something precious and irreplaceable would be lost', he writes. Yet that is exactly what may happen. When the then-Bishop Nazir-Ali visited the town in 2016, he discovered that the predecessors of the jihadis who recently toppled Bashar al-Assad ‘had systematically destroyed and desecrated the town's churches and monasteries. Orthodox nuns were kidnapped and held to ransom … young men had been singled out and executed when they refused to convert to the extremists' version of Islam.' Will it happen again? Ahmad al-Sharaa, head of the new Syrian transitional administration, has told Church leaders they have nothing to fear. But can he be trusted? As Mgr Nazir-Ali tells Damian Thompson in this episode of Holy Smoke, it is time for the West to act.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/central-asian-studies

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies

In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan, recently published by Cornell University Press. Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan that relies on oral history accounts: we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor. In the interview, Dr. Kamp shares insights into her interactive approach to history, the process of collaboration, and the challenges of working with such a colossal body of narrative and putting it out into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last time we spoke about the Long March. Amidst escalating conflicts, the Red Army, led by the newly empowered Mao Zedong, faced immense pressures from the Nationalist Army. Struggling through defeats and dwindling forces, they devised a bold retreat known as the Long March. Starting in October 1934, they evaded encirclement and crossed treacherous terrain, enduring heavy losses. Despite dire circumstances, their resilience allowed them to regroup, learn from past missteps, and ultimately strengthen their strategy, securing Mao's leadership and setting the stage for future successes against the KMT. During the Long March (1934-1936), the Red Army skillfully maneuvered through treacherous terrain, evading the pursuing National Revolutionary Army. Despite harsh conditions and dwindling numbers, advances and strategic ploys allowed them to cross critical rivers and unite with reinforcements. Under Mao Zedong's leadership, they faced internal struggles but ultimately preserved their unity. By journey's end, they had transformed into a formidable force, setting the stage for future victories against their adversaries and solidifying their influence in China.   #131 The Complicated Story about Xinjiang Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. I've said probably too many times, but theres one last major series of events I'd like to cover before we jump into the beginning of the 15 year war between China and Japan. When I say Xinjiang I imagine there are two responses from you in the audience, 1) what the hell is Xinjiang or number 2) oh what about that place in northwest China. That pretty much sums it up, the history of this province, or region if you want to call it that is almost never spoken about. It was a place as we have seen multiple times in the series, where conflicts come and go like the weather. But in the 1930's things really heated up. What I want to talk about is collectively part of the Xinjiang Wars, but more specifically I want to talk about the Kumul Rebellion. There's really no way to jump right into this one so I am going to have to explain a bit about the history of Xinjiang.  Xinjiang in a political sense is part of China and has been the cornerstone of China's strength and prestige going back to the Han dynasty over 2000 years ago. In a cultural sense however, Xinjiang is more inline with the Muslim dominated middle-east. It's closer to th Turkic and Iranian speaking peoples of Central Asia. From a geographical point of view Xinjiang is very much on the periphery. It is very isolated from western asia by the massed ranks of the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Tien Shan, the Indian Subcontinent of Karakoram, Kunlun, the Himalaya ranges and of course by the Gobi desert. It neither belongs to the east or west. As a province of China its the largest and most sparsely populated. It can be divided into two main regions, the Tarim Basin and Zungharia and then into two lesser but economically significant regions, the Ili Valley and Turgan Depression. The Tien Shan mountain range extends roughly eastward from the Pamir Massif, creating a formidable barrier between Zungharia and the Tarim Basin. This natural obstacle complicates direct communication between the two regions, particularly during winter. The Ili Valley, separated from Zungharia by a northern extension of the Tien Shan, is physically isolated from the rest of the province and can only be easily accessed from the west. This western area came under Russian control in the mid-nineteenth century and now forms part of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Now it has to be acknowledged, since the formation of the PRC in 1949, Xinjiang changed in size and ethnic composition. The CCP drove a massive Han migrant wave over. Regardless, Han's make up a minority and according to some population statistics taken during the 1940s, Xinjiang was dominated by 7 Muslim nationalities, roughly 3.5 million people out of a total population of 3.7 million. 200,000 of these were Han settlers, while 75,000-100,000 were Mongols, Russians, Tunguzic peoples (those being Sibo, Solon and Manchu), a few Tibetans, Afghans and Indians. Among the various indigenous Muslim nationalities of Xinjiang, the Uighurs stand out as the most numerous and politically important. This Turkic-speaking group primarily consists of sedentary agriculturalists who reside in the oases of the Tarim Basin, Turfan, Kumul, and the fertile lowlands of the Hi Valley. In the late 1940s, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang was estimated to be approximately 2,941,000. Following the Uyghurs, the second-largest Muslim nationality in the region is the Kazakhs, with an estimated population of around 319,000 during the late Republican Period. Kirghiz come in third, with an estimated population of about 65,000 at the same time. Both the Kazakhs and Kirghiz in Xinjiang are nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples, with the Kazakhs primarily found in the highland areas of Zungharia and the Hi Valley, while the Kirghiz inhabit the upland pastures of the Tien Shan and Pamirs. There also exist a small group of Iranian-speaking 'Mountain' Tajiks living in the upland Sarikol region in the far southwest, with an estimated population of 9,000 in the mid-1940s; a primarily urban group of Uzbeks residing in larger oasis towns and cities of the Tarim Basin, numbering approximately 8,000 in the mid-1940s; and a smaller group of Tatars settled mainly in Urumqi and the townships near the Xinjiang-Soviet border, estimated at 5,000 during the same period. Lastly, it is important to mention the Hui, a group of Chinese-speaking Muslims dispersed throughout China, particularly in Zungharia and Kumul within Xinjiang, as well as in the neighboring northwestern provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Known as 'Tungan' in Xinjiang, the Hui population was estimated at around 92,000 in the mid-1940s and held significant political and military influence during the Republican Period. Excluding the Ismaili Tajik's of Sarikol, the Muslim population of Xinjiang, whether Turkic or Chinese speaking, are Sunni following the orthodox of Hanafi Madhhab.  As for the non Muslim population, excluding the Mongols who numbered roughly 63,000 and inhabit a narrow strip of land along the northeastern frontier between Xinjiang and the Mongolian People's Republic, Tien Shan, Ili Vally and Chuguchak, most were newcomers, migrants from the mid 18th century while the region was being conquered. Again according to the same statistics from the 1940s I mentioned, Hans represented 3-4 % of the population. Although the Han population disproportionately held power with the main administrative areas, they had no sizable territorial enclaves. The Han population can basically be divided into 5 groups; descendants of exiled criminals and political offenders; Hunanese settlers who came over after Zuo Zungtang's conquests; Tientsin merchants who were supplying Zuo's army; Shanxi caravaneers who came to trade and Gansu colonists. Lastly there were the Tunguzic Peoples and Russians. The Tunguzic speaking Sibo, Solon and Manchu settled mostly in the Ili region. The Russians also tended to live in the Ili region. These were mostly White Russian refugees from the civil war.  Xinjiang's first Republican governor was Yang Zengxin, a Yunnanese native. He had previously worked as the district magistrate in Gansu and Ningxia earning a reputation as a good manager of the local Tungan Muslim population. In 1908 he was transferred to Xinjiang and quickly found himself promoted to by the last Qing governor of Xinjiang. He held out his post after the Xinhai revolution and quelled a Urumqi rebellion soon after. Yang Zengxin's survived politically by always siding with whichever faction he thought was winning. For example in 1917, President Li Yuanghong dispatched Fan Yaonan to watch over Yang and try to replace him if possible. Yang recognized quickly whichever Warlord faction held power over the Beiyang government should be courted. Thus Yang held out for a long time and his province was comparably peaceful compared to most of warlord era China. To maintain his power, Yang enacted a divide and rule style, trying to placate the conflicts between certain groups within Xinjiang, but made sure to exclude Russian influence. Basically Yang tried his best to keep groups who could come into conflict away from each other, keeping the Uyghurs of southern Xinjiang away from the pastoral nomads of Zungharia and Tien Shan. Above all Yang considered the Bolshevik Russians to be the greatest threat to his regime, in his words “The Russians ... aimed at ... isolating the country from all outside influence, and at maintaining it in a state of medieval stagnation, thus removing any possibility of conscious and organised national resistance. As their religious and educational policy, the Russian administrators sought to preserve the archaic form of Islam and Islamic culture. . . Quranic schools of the most conservative type were favoured and protected against any modernist influence”. During his 16 year of power, Yang established himself as a competent autocrat, a mandarin of the old school and quite the capable administrator. Yet his economic policies were long term exploitative causing hardship and exhausting the province. Yang realized he was reached the threshold of what the population was willing to endure and endeavored to allow corruption to emerge within his administration provided it remained within acceptable limits. IE: did not spring forward a Muslim revolution. He opened junior positions in the administration to Muslims which had a duel effect. It made the Muslim community feel like they were part of greater things, but placed said officials in the path of the populations anger, insulating senior Han officials. Ironically it would be his fellow Han Chinese officials who would become angry with him. Some were simply ambitious of his power, others felt that Xinjiang should be more closely inline with China proper.  Rumors have it that after a dinnr party, Yang deliberately surrounded himself with opium addicts, stating to his subordinates “the inveterate opium smoker thinks more of his own comfort and convenience than of stirring up unrest among his subordinates”. Needless to say, Yang later years saw him seriously alienating senior officials. By 1926 he claimed “to have created an earthly paradise in a remote region” so he seemed to be quite full of himself. That same year he turned against his Tungan subordinates. He accused many of conspiring with Ma Qi, a Tungan warlord of Xuning in Qinghai, whom he also thought were driven by Urumqi. Deprived of his formerly loyal Tungans, Yang found himself increasingly isolated. A expedition was sent to Urumqi in 1926, whr G. N Roerich noted “The Governor's residence consisted of several well-isolated buildings and enclosed courtyards. The gates were carefully guarded by patrols of heavily armed men ... The Governor's yamen seemed to us to be in a very dilapidated condition. The glass in many of the windows on the ground floor was broken and dirty papers and rags had been pasted on the window frames. Numerous retainers roamed about the courtyards and villainous bodyguards, armed with mauser pistols, were on duty at the entrance to the yamen.” It seems likely Yang had decided to leave Xinjiang at that point. He had amassed a immense personal fortune and sent much of it to his family in China proper and also to Manila where he had a bank account. Further evidence of this was provided by Mildred Cable and Francesca French, two members of the China inland Mission who reported 'Wise old Governor Yang ... as early as 1926 ... quietly arranged a way of escape for his family and for the transference of his wealth to the security of the British Concession in Tientsin. Later in the same year, accompanied by several 'luggage cases of valuables', Yang's eldest son was sent out of Sinkiang, travelling incognito, in the company of these missionaries”. It was also at this time Yang erectd a statue of himself in th public gardens at Urumqi. According to Nicholas Roerich, this memorial was paid for with forced contributions 'from the grateful population'; by all accounts the statue was in execrable taste . While the NRA was marching upon Beijing in June of 1928, Yang ordered the KMT flag to be raised in Xinjiang. This gesture indicated to all, Yang was about to depart the province. One of Yang's most dissident subordinates, a Han named Fan Yaonan decided to act. Fan Yaonan was an ambitious modernist who received his education in Japan and someone Yang distruste from day one. Fan was appointed the post of Taoyin of Aksu by the Beijing government, an appointment Yang could have easily ingored, but was grudgingly impressd by Fans abilities. Fan proved himself very useful to Yang and was soon promoted to the Taoyin of Urumqi alongside becoming the Xinjiang Provincial Commissioner for Foreign Affairs. It seems Fan and Yang mutually disliked each other. At some point in 1926 Fan got together with a small group of like minded officials, such as the engineer at Urumqi's telegraph station and the Dean of the local school of Law, and Fan told them he wanted to assasinate Yang. Some believe Fan sought to gain favor with the KMT as motivation. Regardless on July 7th of 1928, 6 days after Yang took the post of Chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Government under the KMT, Fan attacked. On that day, Yang was invited to a banquet to celebrate a graduation ceremony at the Urumqi law school. Fan had arranged the banquet, with 18 soldiers present, disguised as waiters wearing “red bands around their arms and Browning pistols in their sleeves”. During the meal, Fan proposed a toast to the health of Yang at which time “shots rang outsimultaneously, all aimed at the Governor. Seven bulletsin all were fired, and all reached their mark. Yang, mortally wounded, but superb in death, glared an angry defiance at his foes, 'who dares do this?' he questioned in the loud voice which had commanded instant obedience for so many years. Then he fell slowly forward, his last glance resting upon the face of the trusted Yen, as though to ask forgiveness that he had not listened to the advice so often given to him”. According to Yan Tingshan who was also wounded, Fan Yaonan finished Yang Zengxin off with two shots personally. After the assassination, whereupon 16 people were killed or wounded, Fan went to Yang official residence and seized the seals of office. He then sent a letter summonig Jin Shujen, the Commissioner for Civil Affairs in Xinjiang and Yang's second in command. Jin called Fan's bluff and refusing to come, instead sending soldiers to arrest the assassin. It seems Fan greatly miscalculated his personal support as a short gun battle broke out and he was arrested by Jin and shortly thereafter executed with his complices on July 8th. And thus, Jin Shujen found himself succeeding Yang, a less able man to the job. Jin Shujen was a Han Chinese from Gansu. He graduated from the Gansu provincial academy and served for a time as the Principal of a Provincial normal school. He then entered the Imperial Civil Service, where he came to the attention of Yang, then working as the district Magistrate at Hozhou. Yang took him on as district magistrate and Jin rose through the ranks. By 1927 Jin became the Provincial Commissioner for Civil Affairs at Urumqi. After executing Fan, Jin sent a telegram to Nanjing seeking the KMT's official recognition of his new role. Nanjing had no real options, it was fait accompli, they confirmed Jin into office and under the new KMT terminology he was appointed Provincial Chairman and commander-in-chief. In other words an official warlord.  Following his seizure of power, Jin immediately took steps to secure his newfound power. His first step was to double the salaries of the secret police and army. He also expanded the military and acquired new weaponry for them. Politically, Jin maintained the same old Qing policies Yang did, pretty much unchanged. Jin did however replace many of the Yunnanese followers under Yang with Han CHinese from Gansu. Jins younger brother, Jin Shuxin was appointed Provincial Commissioner for military affairs at Urumqi and his other brother Jin Shuqi was given the senior military post at Kashgar. His personal bodyguard member Zu Chaoqi was promoted to Brigade Commander at Urumqi. Jin maintained and expanded upon Yang's system of internal surveillance and censorship, like any good dictator would. According to H. French Ridley of the China Inland Mission at Urumqi “people were executed for 'merely making indiscreet remarks in the street during ordinary conversation”. Jin also introduced a system of internal passports so that any journey performing with Xinjiang required an official passport validation by the Provincial Chairman's personal seal, tightening his security grip and of course increasing his official revenue. Travel outside Xinjiang became nearly impossible, especially for Han officials and merchants seeking trade with China proper.  Under Jin Xinjiang's economy deteriorated while his fortune accumulated. Yang had introduced an unbacked paper currency that obviously fell victim to inflation and Jin upted the anty. Within a process of several stages, he expanded the currency, causing further inflation. Under Yang the land taxes had been a serious source of the provincial revenue, but Yang was not foolish enough to squeeze the Turkic peasantry too hard, he certainly was intelligent enough to thwart peasant revolts. Jin however, not so smart, he tossed caution to the win and doubled the land taxes, way past what would be considered the legal amount. Jin also emulated Ma Fuxiang, by establishing government monopolies over various profitable enterprises, notably the gold mine at Keriya and Jade mine at Khotan. He also monopolized the wool and pelt industry, using his police and army to force the sale of lambskins at a mere 10% of their market value. Just as with Yang's regime, wealth flowed out of the province in a continuous stream, straight into banks within China proper. According to George Vasel, a German engineer and Nazi agent hired to construct airfields in Gansu during the early 1930s, he knew a German pilot named Rathje who was secretly employed by Jin to fly a million dollars worth of gold bullion from Urumqi to Beijing. Jin did his best to keep all foreign influence out of Xinjiang and this extended also to KMT officials from China proper. Jin also of course did his best to conceal his corrupt regime from Nanjing. For all intensive purposes Jin treated Xinjiang like a feudal, medieval society. He tried to limit external trade to only be through long distance caravans. All was fine and dandy until Feng Yuxiang occupied Gansu and thus disrupted the traditional trade routes. Alongside this the Soviets had just constructed a new railroad linking Frunze, the capital of Kirghiz with Semipalatinsk in western siberia. This railroad known as the Turksib was aimed primarily to develop western Turkstan, integrating it within the new soviet system. The railroad was constructed 400 miles away from the Xinjiang frontier, on purpose to limit any activities with capitalists. When the railway was completed in 1930 it virtually strangled Xinjiang. China's share of Xinjiang's market dropped by 13% and the value of trade with the Soviets which had dropped to zero since the Russian civil war was not rising past 32 million roubles by 1930. The Soviet trade gradually was seizing a monopoly over Xinjiang and this of course affected the merchants and workers who were unable to compete. The revenue of the merchants and workers declined as new taxes were levied against them. Meanwhile alongside an increase in Soviet trade, the new railway also increased Soviet political influence over Xinjiang. It was also much faster and easier to travel from China proper to Xinjiang via Vladivostok, the trans-siberian railway and Turksib than across the North-West roads of China. For the Turkic speaking Muslims of Xinjiang, it was quite impressive and many wanted to do business and mingle with the Soviets. However to do so required a visa, and thus KMT officials in Nanjing held the keys. Jin's policies towards the Turkic Muslims, Tungans and Mongols were extremely poor from the very beginning. It seems Jin held prejudice against Muslims, some citing bad experiences with them in Gansu. Whatever the case may be, Jin rapidly antagonized both his Turkic speaking and Tungan Muslim citizens by introducing a tax on the butchering of all animals in Xinjiang and forbidding Muslims to perform the Hajj to Mecca. Some point out he did that second part to thwart a loophole on leaving Xinjiang for trade. Obviously the Muslim majority of Xinjiang and the military powerhouse of Torgut Mongols in the Tien Shan bitterly resented Jin. Despite wide scale hostility against him, the first challenges at his autocratic rule came not from various minority groups, but some ambitious Han officers under his command. Palpatin would say it was ironic.  In May of 1929 the Taoyin of Altai attempted a coup against Jin, but he was forewarned and able to confine the fighting to the Shara Sume area. In the spring of 1931 troubles broke out in Urumqi as discontented Han officers and soldiers attacked Jin's yamen. The attack failed, and the instigators of the plot were all executed. The same year, Jin annexed the Kumul Khanate, known to the Chinese as Hami, finally pushing the Turkic speaking Muslims into open rebellion. Going back in time, after Zuo Zengtangs reconquest of Xinjiang in the 1870s, a few local principalities were permitted to survive on a semi-autonomous basis. Of these Kumul was the most important and was ruled by a royal family dating back to the Ming Dynasty and descended from the Chaghatay Khans. The Khanate of Kumul dominated the chief road from Xinjiang to China proper and was therefore of strategic importance to the Chinese. It extended from Iwanquan northwards to the Barkul Tagh and along the mountains to Bai and south to Xingxingxia along the Xinjiang-Gansu border. During the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Maqsud Shah was sitting on the throne of Kumul. He was known to the Chinese as the Hami Wang, to his subjects as Khan Maqsud or Sultan Maqsud and to Europeans as the King of the Gobi. He was the last independent Khan of Central Asia as the rest were tossing their lot in with the progress of the times. During Yangs regime he was content with allowing Kumul to train its semi autonomous status, mostly because Maqsud Shah was very friendly towards the Chinese. He spoke Turkic with a marked Chinese accent and wore Chinese clothes. On the other hand he had a long whit beard and always wore a turban or Uyghur cap. He was a staunch Muslim ruling a petty oasis kingdom from an ancient and ramshackle palace in Kumul proper, one of three towns making up the capital of Kumul, known to the Chinese as Huicheng. He had a bodyguard consisting of 40 Chinese soldiers armed with mausers and had a Chinese garrison billeted in fortified Chinese town. The third city in his domain was known as New City or Xincheng, populated by a mix of Chinese and Turkic peoples. By 1928, shortly after the assassination of Yang, it was estimated Maqsud Shah ruled over roughly 25,000-30,000 Kumulliks. He was responsible for levying taxes, dispensing justice and so forth. His administration rested upon 21 Begs, 4 of whom were responsible for Kumul itself, 5 others over plains villages and the other 12 over mountain regions of Barkul and Karlik Tagh. Maqsud Shah also maintained a Uyghur militia who had a reputation as being better trained than its Chinese counterpart at Old City. Throughout Yangs regime, Kumul remained relatively peaceful and prosperous. Maqsud Shah paid a small annual tribute to Urumqi and in return the Xinjiang government paid him a formal subsidy of 1200 silver taels a year. Basically this was Yang paying for the Sultans compliance when it came to moving through his strategic Khanate. For the Uyghurs of Kumul, they were free from the typical persecution under Chinese officials. The only tax paid by citizens of Kumul was in livestock, generally sheep or goats, given annually to the Khan. The soil of the oasis was rich and well cultivated. Everything was pretty fine and dandy under Yang, but now was the time of Jin. In March of 1930, Maqsud Shah died of old age. His eldest son Nasir should have inherited the throne of Kumul, but Jin and his Han subordinates stationed in Kumul Old City had other plans. Shortly after Maqsud Shah's death, Nasir traveled to Urumqi, most likely to legitimize his rise upon the throne. Nasir was not very popular amongst his people, thus it seemed he needed Jin's aid to bolster him. However there also was the story that it was Jin who ordered Nasir to come to Urumqi to perform a formal submission. Now at the time of Maqsud Shah's death, Li Xizeng, a Han Chinese divisional commander stationed in Kumul suggested to Jin that the Khanate should be abolished and annexed officially. There was of course a great rationale for this, if Jin took control over Kumul it would offer increased revenue and new positions for his Han Chinese officials. Thus Jin ordered a resolution be drawn up by his ministers to abolish the Khanate, dividing Kumul into three separate administrative districts, Hami centered around the capital, I-ho and I-wu. When Nasir arrived in Urumqi he was given the new position of Senior Advisor to the provincial government, but forbidden to return to Kumul. Basically it was the age old government via hostage taking. Meanwhile another official named Yulbars was sent back to Kumul with a group of Chinese officials to set up the new administration.  While the people of Kumul had no love for Nasir and were taxed pretty heavily by his father, this did not mean that they wanted the Khanate to end. For the Turkic Muslims the Khanate held a religious significance. For Uyghurs there was a question of national pride associated with it. Of course there were economic issues. Within Xinjiang Han were allowed to settle, but in the Khanate there were restrictions. In the words of the Nanjing Wu Aichen on the situation “subject peoples obstinately prefer self-government to good government”. Well Jin's government was definitely not good, so what outcome does that give? The newly appointed Han administration upset the people of Kumul from the very minute of its installation. When it was announced the privilege of being except from direct taxation by Urumqi was to be abolished, ompf. To add insult to injury, one years arrears of taxes were to be collected from the Uyghurs. On top of that, Kumul was tossed wide open to Han settlers who were incentivized to settle by giving them a tax exemption for two years. Yeah that be some wild policies. To add even more misery, Kumul being situated on the chief road from northwestern Gansu to Xinjiang saw an enormous flow of refugees from famine and warfare going on in Gansu. A column of these refugees were seen by Berger Bohlin of the Sino-Swedish Expedition of 1931. His account is as follows “During my stay at Hua-hai-tze I witnessed a curious spectacle. The Chen-fan region had for a number of years been visited by failure of the crops and famine, and large numbers of people therefore emigrated to more prosperous tracts. Such an emigration-wave now passed Hua-hai-tze. It consisted of a caravan of 100 camels, transporting 150 persons with all their baggage to Sinkiang, where it was said that land was being thrown open”. It seemed to Bohlin that the refugees looked carefree and happy and that the ruler of Xinjiang, Jin Shujen, a Gansu man himself was enthusiastic to have them come settle his province. Jin had his official in charge of I-ho district Lung Xulin provide land for the would-be settlers coming from Gansu. Lung Xulin responded by forcing his Uyghur population to leave their cultivated land and simply handed it over to the refugees. The expropriated Uyghurs were compensated for their land by being given untilled lands on the fringe of the desert where most soil was barren. The Uyghurs were also assessed for their land tax based on their old holdings. To make this even worse hear this, untilled land was exempt from taxation for two years, so they didn't even get that, while the Gansu refugees were excused from tax payments for three years. So yeah the Kumul people quickly organized a petition and sent it to the yamen in Urumqi. There was zero acknowledgement from the yamen it was received and nothing was done to address the long list of grievances, especially from the Uyghurs. Instead the Gansu settlers kept flooding in and with them the price of food skyrocketed, largely because of the enormous amount of provincial troops sent in to watch over everybody. Now for the moment the Turkic speaking Muslims in the region remained relatively peaceful, and this perhaps lulled Jin into a false sense of security. But according to Sven Hedin of the Sino-Swedish Expedition “Discontent increased; the people clenched their teeth and bided their time; the atmosphere was tense and gloomy. Inflammable matter accumulated, and only a spark was needed to fire the powder magazine.”  I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. The history of Xinjiang is unbelievably bizarre, complicated and quite frankly really fun. Before researching this I had no idea about anything and am really enjoying this as I write it. The next episode is going to be on the Kumul Rebellion, so buckle up buckaroo. 

The Church & The State Matthew 22:15-22 For the bulletin in PDF form, click here. The Distinction The Relationship The FutureThis Week's Growth GuideGod's Word is both central and critical to your spiritual growth. We invite you to utilize the Growth Guide during the week to further your application of the Truth from the message.•. Monday - Matthew 5:13-16•. Tuesday - Matthew 22:15-22•. Wednesday - Romans 13:1-7•. Thursday - 1 Timothy 2:1-4•. Friday - Philippians 3:20-21Home Church Questions1. Have someone read Matthew 22:15-22. The goal of the two groups was to trap Jesus. Why would this question about paying taxes potentially be a trap?2. What is the meaning of Jesus' answer to their question. Why does He answer this way?3. This passage suggests a distinction between the Roman government and God. It was mentioned in the sermon that some governments have not recognized a distinction between the church and government. What are some of the negative consequences that can occur when there is no distinction between these two spheres? For example, why would it be a problem if the state tried to force someone to convert to a particular religion?4. In an ideal situation, what should Christians expect of government? What is the responsibility of the government to the church?5. While the government has responsibilities to the church, we have responsibilities to the state. First, we are supposed to be salt and light (have someone read Matthew 5:13-16). Why is it important that we are being transformed by the Gospel and becoming more like Christ in order to have an impact as salt and light wherever we live? What are some ways you are representing Christ to the people in your neighborhood, your workplace, your school, your team?6. Second, we also have certain responsibilities to obey the government God has placed over us (see 1 Tim 2:1-3 and Romans 13:1-6). Why is it important for Christians to be diligent to obey the laws?7. Third, we live under a government in which we can have an influence on policies and laws. What are some ways we can have an influence and why should we try to have an influence?8. Philippians 3:20-21 reminds us our ultimate citizenship is in heaven. If we truly believe this, how should this impact how we live as citizens in Conway? Mission Highlight - Pray for the Unreached: The Northern Uzbek in Uzbekistan Uzbekistan has a population of 27.5 million, with Islam as the main religion and Uzbek as the primary language. Christians make up less than 0.1% of the population. While the complete Bible is available in both written and oral form, no movement of the gospel has been reported. An estimated 550 workers are needed, with a ratio of 1 worker per 50,000 people. Focus Prayer on sending long-term laborers to the Uzbeks, fostering religious freedom, and spreading the Good News through strong local disciple-making households. The goal is for Uzbek families to embrace Jesus and build movements of faith across the country.FinancesWeekly Budget 35,297Giving For 10/20 35,240Giving For 10/27 14,135YTD Budget 600,052Giving 511,958 OVER/(UNDER) (88,094)Fellowship 101We invite you to join us next Sunday, November 10, at 9:00 a.m. to learn more about Fellowship. This is a great opportunity to hear about our mission, values, and our ministries. If you're new to Fellowship, join us in the conference room (first floor) to hear what God is doing and where He is taking us. During this time, you will meet some of our ministry leaders and get to ask questions. Register at fellowshipconway.org/register. New to Fellowship?We are so glad that you chose to worship with our Fellowship Family this morning. If you are joining us for the first time or have been checking us out for a few weeks, we are excited you are here and would love to meet you. Please fill out the “Connect Card” and bring it to the Connection Center in the Atrium, we would love to say “hi” and give you a gift. Feed the Need - TODAY 10-2:00 p.m.Join us in filling the Conway Ministry Center's food pantry. Simply grab a list of preferred items at one of the participating grocery stores, purchase the items, and drop them off with the volunteers at the truck in the store's parking lot! Fellowship is hosting the Wal-mart neighborhood Market today! Operation Christmas Child - Our 2024 Operation Christmas Child season is in full swing! Your involvement in Operation Christmas Child is one of the easiest ways to place your fingerprints, or your children's fingerprints, on the great things God is doing worldwide. These shoeboxes are Gospel opportunities used by God in church planting, multi-generation discipleship, and changing the lives of entire villages across the world. Would you consider how many boxes you and your family might be called to pack? For more information go to fellowshipconway.org/occ. If you want to volunteer at the Dallas Processing Center, email Paul Bradley at paul@fellowshipconway.org. The last day to sign up is November 10.Fellowship Kids Family HikeFellowship families plan to join us on Saturday, November 9, at 10:00 a.m. Please bring a picnic lunch and meet us on the playground at Woolly Hollow. We will head out for a fun hike and come back to enjoy a picnic lunch together. Prayer During ServiceWe love to pray for one another. Our prayer team will have people at the front of the Auditorium under the signs Hope and Love to pray for you after the message. Please feel free to walk up to them for prayer or encouragement during the first worship song after the message.

This week we discussed an excellent study of migrant workers in the Soviet Union which focused on Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis who came to Leningrad and Moscow in toward the end of Union's existence.Sahadeo, Jeff. 2019. Voices From the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow.Send us a Text Message.Support the Show.

Cette semaine dans ABDR, débrief d'une bonne carte du Glory avec une très belle perf de Petchpanomrung contre Haraguchi, une petite preview des forces en présence aux JO en boxe (des Kazakhs et des Uzbeks principalement) et de la défense de titre d'Edwards contre Muhammad à l'UFC 304.

Jared Taylor was born in Japan, traveled the world and became fluent in several languages, yet has wasted his life on white separatism. In this way, he extracted all the benefits of diversity—personal, professional, developmental—then decided to shut the door behind him. A longtime white supremacist, Jared Taylor nonetheless looks down on the vast majority of whites, telling Phil Donahue that he wants to be at “white cocktail parties” in “wealthy neighborhoods” full of “good-looking people”. After Donald Trump emerged, Jared Taylor was forced to reinvent himself as a Trump-style populist interested in the plight of the white working class. In this video, Dan Schneider and Alex Sheremet dissect Jared Taylor's appearance on Phil Donahue, his lies and omissions on immigration law, his ignorance of history and the plight of former Soviet nations, his new, politically-correct brand of white supremacism, Jared Taylor's Freudian slip-ups, and much more. You can also watch this discussion on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/TA1UWUI5A-0 To get the B Side to this conversation, support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/automachination Dan Schneider's YT channel: https://www.youtube.com/@cosmoetica Dan Schneider's Cosmoetica: http://cosmoetica.com/ Jared Taylor on Danielle Romero's on NYTN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QWz5uwyFQc Subscribe to the ArtiFact podcast on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3xw2M4D Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3wLpqEV Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3dSQXxJ Amazon Music: https://amzn.to/2SVJIxB Podbean: https://bit.ly/3yzLuUo iHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/3AK942L Read more from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com Read Alex's (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/automachination Timestamps: 0:00 – Jared Taylor as a politically correct white male; the NYTN (New York to Nashville) channel; Danielle Romero & ethnic ambiguity; how YouTube censors racial language 5:46 – Jared Taylor on Phil Donahue; Jared Taylor puts a slick corporate face on his personal biases; Jared Taylor's racial Catholicism; why Jared Taylor is not an anti-Semite 11:05 – are immigrants taking over America; is Texas a Spanish state; the Mexico-Texas conundrum; the US creates refugees; Jared Taylor doesn't know what he doesn't know; Jared Taylor sneaks his way around 9/11 & questions of terrorism 19:24 – immigration & GDP; Jared Taylor lies about the 1965 Immigration Act; prior immigration systematically excluded ‘undesirable' Europeans such as Russians; Jared Taylor calls Arabs “shifty eyed”; Jared Taylor flip-flops on overpopulation; “if diversity was so great, the Indians should be happy” 33:24 – Jared Taylors fails to say WHY “New York looks like Afghanistan”; Robert Moses demolished black neighborhoods; Alex goes OFF on “white comradery”, “white consciousness”, & “white culture”; Alex: only other Russians have put me in dangerous situations; Jared Taylor has little curiosity about the world 43:30 – Jared Taylor has WASTED his life & squandered every opportunity; Jared Taylor reveals his condescension & hatred of white people; Russians, Uzbeks, and Koreans vs. ethnicity; Native American solidarity 01:09:26 – Jared Taylor & anti-Semitism; shtetls, ghettos, & European identity; South Africans & Zimbabwe whites as “persecuted minorities”; Jared Taylor is inconsistent on the role of homosexuals in his white ethnostate 01:23:49 – Jared Taylor's appearance on Danielle Romero's “New York to Nashville” show; Jared Taylor's modern strategies for a new racial world; critiquing “it's OK to be white”; Dan Schneider's experience being pulled into a KKK rally; Taylor is reserved with a younger woman he wants to “educate”; many Soviets would consider Koreans “white”; if we assume Jared Taylor is a straight white male, should we expect him to find black women attractive; race & sexual attraction; Italian ambiguities 01:35:25 – there are no white lobby groups because whites are the lobby; Italian ambiguities; race & the Mediterranean; shifty-eyed Jared?;  black culture is hegemonic; Jared Taylor is a Freudian basket case; Jared Taylor's Golden Age thinking; people naturally wish to intermix; South Asians & Indians in Texas 01:52:00 – the China comparison; Jared Taylor is already a minority; Jared Taylor says black Americans have not assimilated; James Baldwin vs. Jared Taylor; Irish slurs; proto-Arabs precede Jews in the Levant 02:05:11 – the KKK; race & unions; Jared Taylor's Rachel Dolezal rubric for “whiteness”; race & the bog mummies; Jared Taylor's political correctness 02:21:20 – Jared Taylor takes credit for Shakespeare's plays & Mozart's symphonies; Jared Taylor doesn't understand art; are Russians adopting European culture 02:31:15 – race & sexuality; biology & the science of beauty; Dorothy Dandridge; Diahann Carroll; Dona Drake; Bernadette Stanis; Halle Barry; Ida Ljungquvist; Nicole Meyer; Kylie Johnson; Dan opines on the Sports Illustrated Lovely Lady of the Day; Dan on how men think Tags: #politics #roast #debate

Mitch McConnell froze again while speaking with reporters in Kentucky. Trump pleaded not guilty in the Georgia election case. Five pro-life activists were found guilty on charges of conspiracy and violation of the FACE Act. Joe Rogan interviewed Oliver Anthony. A new video of Prigozhin has surfaced. A smuggler with ties to ISIS helped Uzbeks cross the US-Mexico border. Don't worry, the White House says they aren't terrorists. A fifth-circuit court blocked the expansion of access to the abortion pill. College football is back!

Hurricane hits Florida, Uzbeks in Mexico, Chicago news crew robbed, and Eminem becomes a lame old man. Plus, the Message of the Day, Kamala Harris and the truth behind mass shootings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on What's Right: Biden's negligence on the border Dozens of Uzbeks smuggled into the US by an ISIS sympathizer Those who disobeyed government officials at Maui roadblocks survived, those who obeyed perished One of Trump's indicted lawyers, John Eastman, talks about the dangers of this prosecution Trump asked if he'd consider Vivek Ramaswamy for Vice President Part 1 of John Eastman's interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Thanks for tuning into today's episode of What's Right! If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and make sure you leave us a 5-star review. Have personal injury questions? Visit ⁠⁠Sam & Ash Injury Law⁠⁠ to get free answers 24/7. Connect with us on our socials: TWITTER Sam ⁠⁠@WhatsRightSam⁠⁠ What's Right Show ⁠⁠@WhatsRightShow⁠⁠ FACEBOOK What's Right Show ⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/WhatsRightShow/⁠⁠ INSTAGRAM What's Right Show ⁠⁠@WhatsRightShow⁠⁠ To request a transcript of this episode, email ⁠⁠marketing@samandashlaw.com⁠⁠

HOUR 1Ukraine launches its counter-offensive against Russia  / (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/05/world/russia-ukraine-newsChina warship cuts off American warship / (CBS) https://www.cbsnews.com/video/chinese-warship-cuts-off-us-navy-vessel-as-tensions-between-countries-escalate/China is our greatest threat says Congressman Dusty Johnson (R-SD) / (FOXNews) https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinas-defense-minister-says-war-us-would-unbearable-disaster Robert Kennedy was killed 55 years ago / (NPR)https://www.npr.org/2023/06/05/1179430014/robert-kennedy-rfk-assassination-anniversaryEast Turkistan's Prime Minister Salih Hudayar joins Tom with an update on the Chinese subjugation of the Uyghurs (Turkic-speaking Muslims from the Central Asian region). The Uyghurs are the largest population in the region and the most severely persecuted Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and Hui. Support them here:  https://east-turkistan.net/leadership/US birth rate falls to lowest number in 32 years / (FOXNews) https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/american-birth-rate-plummeting-not-some-statesHOUR 2Tom and Charles discuss America's birthrate - is a decline good or badNevada's lawmakers decide whether to offer up to $380 million in public funds to help build a baseball stadium in Las Vegas for the Athletics / (MB) https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/06/04/nevada-public-financing-athletics-stadium?Edward Snowden has been in Russia for over 10 years while U.S. tech laws have changed / (NPR) https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1176747650/a-decade-on-edward-snowden-remains-in-russia-though-u-s-laws-have-changedHomeless Clean-Slate Strategy Townhall meeting in Anchorage / (ANS) https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2023/06/03/town-hall-held-clean-slate-strategy-permanent-homeless-shelter/California spent $17 Billion on homelessness / (WSJ) https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-homeless-population-oakland-wood-street-encampment-78d42cc3?mod=hp_lead_pos7Chuck Todd retires from Meet the Press / (NBC) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/chuck-todd-will-depart-nbcs-meet-press-kristen-welker-become-host-rcna87618

WORLD: Uzbeks vote on reforms to strengthen president | May 1, 2023Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net Follow us: Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital Check out our Podcasts: Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer Stitcher: https://tmt.ph/stitcherTune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein #TheManilaTimes #WORLD Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last time we spoke about the Dungan Revolt. Yes it was a grand little side story that only encompassed something that should have required at minimum three podcasts, but I do my best. Northwest China was a wild place and multiple groups on the frontiers of other nations saw an opportunity when the Taiping Rebellion kicked out to try and rebel themselves. Multiple muslim groups and some foreign leaders like Yaqub Bek fought the Qing, the Russians and other groups to try and consolidate control over key areas. However when the Taiping were finally quelled, the Qing sent Zuo Zongtang northwest to deal with the Dungan problem. Zuo Zongtang led a brutal campaign to reclaim Xinjiang and was successful, a large part to muslim chinese defectors. Now we need to venture back to the issue of Japan, China, Korea and a truly stressful situation for poor old Li Hongzhang.   #39 This episode is the imo uprising   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. The 1880s were an extremely turbulent time for China, Japan and Korea. Each nation faced the same anxiety, that of western encroachment, the danger of colonization. Each of these nations would face challenges from the west and this would affect all 3 of them and in turn their relations to another. There were leading figures in each nation that sought to cooperate together to resist western colonialism. At the time the greatest threat was Russia. The Russian empire was beginning the process of building the grand trans-siberian railway. The railway would only begin construction in 1891, but by the 1880's settlers were being pushed east into Siberia and discussions were being held to push the process forward. Now when Japan pulled the sneaky maneuver of getting Korea to sign treaties acknowledging her independence from China, both Korea and Chinese officials were deeply concerned and no wonder. Japan had kept pressing the buttons and this was a major red flag moment. But the Chinese and Koreans had a multitude of problems at the time taking up much of their attention. Thus the Chinese and Koreans tried to ignore the implications of the Japanese treaties in the hopes they could be stamped down later thus easing Japan back into a passive role.  You might be asking yourself why are the Chinese and Koreans backing down so much and allowing Japan basically to stomp over them, to put it simply, they had too much to deal with. You might remember when I barely talked about some of the rebels going on in China during and after the Taiping Rebellion. One of those known as the Dungan Revolt of 1862-1877, well that little guy was not such a little guy. If you go on wikipedia for example and look up the Dungan revolt you will notice a few things right off the bat, the first most likely the death toll which was in the millions, possibly up to 21 million. It hit Shaanxi, Gangsu and Xinjiang provinces very hard. But alongside the death toll, you would probably notice secondly the participants list which is extravagantly long and holds many surprising participants. The Ottomans, British, Russians, Uzbeks all hands their hands in the Chinese cookie jar. While the Dungan Revolt is certainly a big one, it gets even bigger, much bigger. The Dungan Revolt basically is part of “the Great Game”. Now you're probably asking yourselves what game? The Great Game was this mashup of conflicts between the British and Russian empires of multiple territories spanning the middle east and Asia. They fought for and over numerous things, for example the British believed Russia had plans to invade India. The Russians thought Britain wanted to expand into central asia. This led to countless wars such as the 1st anglo-afghan war of 1838, the first anglo-sikh war of 1845, the second anglo-sikh war of 1848, the second anglo-afghan war of 1878 and theres even more than that. Now for China this cultivated the Dungan Revolt somewhat and Russian began encroaching in Xinjiang. From 1871 to 1881 the Qing dynasty and the Russian empire were on the verge of a massive war over Xinjiang. Now I am literally pulling out my hair as I write this series because I planned to write a single podcast explaining how the situation in Korea led to what will be one of the most important wars, the first sino-japanese war of 1894-1895 and as I do so I keep skipping over major events, such as the multitude of rebellions in China, and this “great game situation”. Oh and its not just the great game, in the 1880s emerges another fantastic war known as the Sino-French War of 1884-1885 first involving Vietnam and France and then China gets mixed in. Needless to say I face two options, option number 1; I give a summary of these events and gloss right over them to carry on with my intended little narrow narrative about Korea, China and Japan. Option 2) I carry on as I am and write two separate episodes, “the great game” and “the Sino-French War of 1884-1885”. I am electing to do option 2, so please bear with me for the time being I imagine those 2 episodes will come right after I am done with the Hermit kingdom. Stating that I keep glossing over major events, but its simply impossible to hit them all, so if there are some you just are dying to hear about, or simply other things you want to hear about that I can't hit here please let me know on the Pacific War channel discord, comment my Youtube channel or become a patreon, if ya do I promise I will make content just for you, that's why it's there. So needless to say, these major events were hitting China at an extraordinarily bad time. These were major variables thwarting China from seeking a firmer hand against Japan when it came to Korea. China was waiting for things to simmer before they confront the Japanese. And do remember despite Japan's actions, they still represented the greatest possible ally against the looming Russian bear to the north who were gradually expanding into Asia. The prospect of large numbers of Russians moving into East Asia concerned Korea, Japan and China all the same. On top of this the Russians began plans in 1882 to start a steamship line from Ukraine to Priamur, on the coast of Siberia and this also meant a large development of Priamur. Korea had the great misfortune of being what one author has called ‘a shrimp among the whales”. The whales being China, Japan and Russia. Korea had a long history of being fought over, in 661 the Japanese sent troops, then the Yuan Dynasty forces of Kublai Khan used Korea to try and invade Japan in the 1190's and in the 1590s Hideyoshi invaded Korea. So Korea had this unfortunate history of simply being stuck in the middle. In 1882 China still held suzerainty over Korea…well from their point of view, the Japanese certainly did not see it that way. Korea was grasping at straws, trying to avoid conflict, but she was playing a game between two tigers. Now in 1881 Korea began expanding its relations with all 3 major players, Russia, China and Japan. Awhile back I mentioned that Korea sent Kim Hong-jip to Japan and after his journey he strongly suggested Korea send more envoys to learn more from Japan. In 1881 this led Korea to create the Gentlemen's sightseeing group. These were 12 young Koreans who went to Japan to learn more about the Meiji restoration efforts. The mission was akin to Japan's Iwakura Mission, the Koreans inspected administrative agencies, military facilities, education facilities, everything they could. The Koreans were very impressed by what they saw and when they came back home they sought ways to push Korea onto the same path as Japan's modernization efforts. Amongst the 12 gentleman was one Kim Ok-kyun. After the tour had ended Fukuzawa Yukichi one of Japans top liberal minded intellects arranged for Kim Ok-kyun to remain an extra 6 months at Keio university. Kim Ok-kyuns stay convinced him that the Meiji restoration was the essential path for Korea to self strengthen and thwart western encroachment.  Now Kim OK-kyun will be a key player in many things to come, but I bring him up now just to signify the efforts of Japan to win over Korea. People such as Kim Ok-kyun began championing Japan as Korea's savior and this prompted King Gojong to look to Japan for some assistance in modernizing, such as the employment of Lt Horimoto Reizo who trained the Pyolgigun. But while Japan was making inroads to circumventing China, China was not sitting idly by.  Li Hongzhang had emerged probably as the most influential person in all of China by the 1880s. The Qing government authorized the man who was the Grand Minister for the Northern Sea, the governor general of Zhili province, Commander of the Huai Army, associate controller over the board of admiralty and Grand secretary, yes China was continuing the practice of placing as many titles as possible onto a single man. Above all else Li Hongzhang was responsible for Korea. As much as I have talked about Zeng Guofan's pupil I have not really talked all that much about the man himself. Li Hongzhang dominated Chinese foreign policy for nearly quarter of a century. He was 6 feet tall and quite a lot of western diplomats noted him to have a fine physique, a vigor to his nature, piercing eyes, a commanding presence and a no-nonsense approach. As a Qing official he wore multicolored silk robes, a large triangular hat with the traditional three-eyed peacock feathers. As noted by his mentor Zeng Guofan “Li Hongzhang possessed a bearing and manner of speech sufficient to bring men to their knees”. Li Hongzhang was frankly a go-getter as we say in the west. George F Seward, a minister of the US to China called him “a giant among his fellow Chinese and the best foreigners who have met him in affairs will not hesitate to accord to him intellectual powers, which would command admiration in any cabinet or council”. Russia's count Sergei Lil'evich Witte, the architect of the empires industrialization program for over two decades and a man not known to overstate others said this of Li “I have met many notable statesmen in my career and would rate Li Hongzhang high among them. In fact, he was a great statesman; to be sure he was Chinese, without any kind of European education, but a man of sound Chinese education, and what is more, a man with a remarkably sound mind and good common sense." The socialist French newspaper, Le Siecle, called him "the yellow Bismarck." I particularly like that last one, yellow Bismarck thats a flavourful one isn't it.  Li Hongzhang was Han Chinese, from 6 of 7 generations that passed the imperial examinations, a scholar through and through. He passed the third highest out of 4000 other students for the highest imperial degree and built up the Huai army with help from Zeng Guofan quickly becoming one of if not the dominant military ruler in China. It was in fact his rule over the most powerful army in CHina that led to many of his appointments as the Qing needed to try and rein him in somehow. He and Empress Dowager Cixi would have a long-standing relationship. Li Hongzhang aided her in installing her nephew as Emperor in 1875, though in reality he would not actually rule anything it would be Cixi and Li was loyal to her. On the note of Cixi, Li Hongzhang was criticized heavily for corruption and indeed he became fabulously wealthy. Yet I do not think you can point fingers simply at Li, as it was not just him but the Qing bureaucracy that was corrupt. A foreign employee under Li had this to say about him and corruption “The Viceroy was a diplomat of world-wide fame; but to his countrymen - before the war - he was chiefly reputed as a great military and naval organizer. He was not nor could he be that; for the corruption, peculation and nepotism which infested his organizations had their fountain-head in himself, and to an extent which was exceptional even for a Chinese official. He was himself enmeshed in the national machine of organized inefficiency; to him also it was a normal condition, and any other, had it been indicated, would have been incomprehensible to him.” You have to understand at this time in the Qing dynasty corruption was simply the status quo. Bribery was the normal source of political influence. The Qing salaries were insufficient, so all officials bribed and embezzled to make ends meet. To get anything done politically in China at this time one had to bribe whether it was for good means or bad, Li was no different. Li's activities were some of the largest in scope China would ever see and thus required enormous sums of money. None the less Li was a Han, and the Manchu were never going to let the Han simply run the show, so even if Li had idea's about reform to stop the corruption they would not allow him to do so as it would put a Han in the drivers seat. And so Li was a master operator within the corrupt system of Qing politics, he had to grease the corrupt wheels of power. Unlike the Meiji restoration which took daring reforms backed by the Genro of Japan, Li had major shackles.  I think I already said this before, Li Hongzhang is one of my favorite characters of modern Chinese history, but he is also a terribly tragic character. One would call him a man before his time. He showed great foresight about how China could modernize but he was hampered by the system. Yet despite all of that he did an incredible amount to help modernize China nonetheless. He also never got a chance to really see the outside world until late in his life unlike most of his Japanese counterparts. He would also take the lionshare of the blame for the many humiliations CHina would receive, literally right until his death he just kept fighting bitterly. Many champion those who do great feats during good times, but we often forget those who lived in dire times who struggled to do great feats, and Li is one of those. Now as the man responsible for Korea Li Hongzhang advised his Korean counterpart in 1879 "There is no human agency capable of putting a stop to the expansionist movement of Japan: has not your Government been compelled to inaugurate a new era by making a Treaty of Commerce with it? As matters stand, therefore, is not our best course to neutralize one poison by another, to set one energy against another? You should seize every opportunity to establish treaty relations with Western nations, which you can use to check Japan." The advice was carried to King Gojong who in 1822 solicited Li Hongzhang to negotiate on Korea's behalf for a treaty with the United States. The Josen-United States Treaty of 1882 or Treaty of Peace, AMity, Commerce and Navigation would be signed in 1882 heavily influenced by Li Hongzhang. It was Korea's first treaty with a western nation, albeit an unequal treaty. It established mutual friendship with the US and mutual assistance in the case of attack. The treaty became the template for others as soon Germany signed one in 1883, then Russian and Italy in 1884 and France by 1886. The idea obviously being, Li Hongzhang trying to bolster up Korea so Japan would not try to invade her. Now despite the fact these treaties were intended to counterbalance Japan, they also indirectly undermined China. Combined with the Japanese treaties they all worked collectively to shatter Korea's isolation and severed China's suzerainty over her. To be blunt, while China could continue to scream about how Korea was still her tributary, now a collective group of other nations saw her as independent. This also began a process of creating pro-Japanese and pro-Chinese factions within the Korean political system. There were those who missed the times of the Daewongun reign. They believed the current actions of Korea were unfaithful to Confucianism. And then in 1882 a small problem would evolve into a larger one. Remember the Japanese military attache, Lt Horimoto Reizo? Well in January of 1882, his work ended up reorganizing the existing 5 army garrison structure into the Muwiyong “palace guards garrison” and the Changoyong “capital guards garrison”. But alongside that he also created the Pyolgigun “special skills force” which was basically the yolk of a new modern Korean army. This is all fantastic and good fun, however Korea held a very tight budget and was forced to reduce the number of her old-style troops. For those of you who know your Satsuma Rebellion that occurred in Japan, here in Korea a similar event unfolded. In July of 1882 many Korean soldiers were retired against their will. They protested that for over a year after the forced retirement they had not received back pay. 1000 men, mostly the old and disabled were let go, and they were not paid their stipends of rice for 13 months. They began to protest, and who wouldn't. Hearing about this, King Gojong ordered that a months allowance of rice be given to the soldiers and he directed one Min Gyeom-ho, the overseer of the Joseon's government finances to see to it. Min Gyeom-ho was the nephew of Queen Min, and that is an important fact as the Min family would be seen as culprits. Well Min Gyeom-ho handed the job over to his steward who sold the rice he had been given for the soldiers and used that money to buy millet which was further mixed with sand and bran, the good classic old case of embezzlement, like cutting cocaine with baking powder. Well the the substance by the time it got to the soldiers had gone rotten and as you might imagine it really pissed off the already pissed off protesting soldiers. So on July 23rd of 1882 a riot broke out in Uigeumbu. Pissed off soldiers marched upon the residence of Min Gyeom-ho who they suspected was the culprit swindling them all. Min Gyeom-ho heard of the incoming rioters and ordered the police to arrest their ringleaders and have them executed the next day. The rioters received word of these orders and broke into Min Gyeom-ho's home, but by that point he had fled so they simply trashed the place. Without the man to exact their vengeance upon the rioters marched to the armory and began stealing arms and ammo. Then they went to a local prison, overwhelmed its guards and released the arrested ringleaders alongside other political prisoners. At this point Min Gyeom-ho was hiding at the Royal palace. He panicked and ordered the army to quell the revolt, but by this time the revolt was snow balling. The armed rioters then turned their attention to two different groups of people, the first were the Japanese and second Korean progressives aka the reformers supporting the new changes to Korea propped by Japan. A group of rioters headed to Lt Horimoto's quarters where they grabbed him and took turns stabbing him to death. Another group of over 3000 rioters marched upon the Japanese legation. Over at the legation were the minister to Korea Hanabusa Yoshitada alongside 17 staff members and 10 legation police. The legation was quickly surrounded prompting Hanabusa to order all the documents within to be burnt. As the smoke and flames increased, many of the legation staff used it as a cover to escape through the rear gate. The Japanese fled to the nearest harbor where they took a boat down the Han river enroute to Incheon. From there they thought they would be safe, but Korean soldiers continued to hunt them down, soon they were fleeing to another harbor, but this time the Koreans caught up to them. 6 Japanese were killed with another 5 severely injured. The survivors got onto a boat and made a break for open sea, eventually running into the British survey ship HMS flying fish which took them in.  The rioters certainly did not stop at the Japanese legation, on July 24th they took to marching upon the royal palace still hunting Min Gyeom-ho. They got their hands on Min Gyeom-ho killing him alongside a dozen high ranking Joseon officials including Heungin-gun Yi Choe-Heung, the older brother of the Daewongun. It should be noted that while he was the brother to him, he was also publicly critical against his isolationist policies and could be seen as an ally to the Min clan. The rioters also hunted for Queen Min, intending to kill her as well. They saw the Queen and the rest of the Min allies as the main culprits behind the corruption going on in the government. Queen Min managed to escape the palace being carried literally away on a guards back dressed as a commoner. She fled for refuse in the home of Min Eung-sik in Chungju of Chungcheong province. Meanwhile the rioters managed to kill an official of the Min family and the entire ordeal became known as the Soldiers Riot of 1882 or the Imo uprising.  Now the Imo uprising was sort of a symptom of something else going on in Korea. I had mentioned previously that the Korean politics had created sort of a faction situation. It was not necessary one side was Pro Chinese and the other Japanese, a lot more was going on, but I will try to summarize it as best as I can. During the reign of the Daewongun, many of the Korean literati, you know the political, scholar, high society types, well they considered a lot of what the Daewongun was doing to be unfaithful to confucianism. However when the Daewogun was kicked out, they began to see all the grand reforms and treaties emerging under King Gojong as even worse. In fact they never really saw it as “King Gojong's” but rather Queen Min and her entourage of family members in high positions taking Korea to hell in a handbasket.  During the Imo uprising incident there was a rather important figure amongst the rioting troops, Prince Waneun, the illegitimate son of Daewongun and one of his concubines named Kyeseongwol. He was the older half brother to King Gojong. Now When the Daewongun was “forcefully retired” he actually did not go without a fight and attempted a coup, which just saw him getting deported to China, and this greatly upset Prince Waneun. But he bide his time, entering the Korean military as a low ranking officer. When the rioters struck in 1881, Daewongun had sent agents to instigate them, one of which was Prince Waneun. It seems the Daewongun was trying to replace King Gojong with his illegitimate son, but the riots failed. When they arrested the rioters many of their leaders were executed, one of which was Prince Wanuen. Who ordered his specific execution is unknown, myth has the Korean politician Yi Yun-yong being responsible, but there is also evidence he did so under orders from Queen Min and King Gojong. On October 28th of 1881 he was poisoned to death while in prison at Jeju. The reason I bring up this minor part of the story is to highlight that there were serious efforts being made by political factions to usurp King Gojong and steer Korea in certain directions. The Daewongun clearly supported the rioters and their cause. In fact it is known the Daewongun exhorted the rioters to specifically bring down the Min clan and expel the Japanese. Daewongun was very much in the China camp politically. King Gojong clearly did not support their cause, but he saw the writing on the wall. King Gojong asked his father to return to the palace, who promptly showed up with 200 of the rioters backing him up. King Gojong capitulated to their demands, one of which was to restore his father to power. King Gojong basically said this to his father when he showed up to the palace “put an immediate end to the wild melee and I will give power over the small and large matters of the government”. And thus the Daewongun was back in power. His first order of business as you might imagine was to remove from office all officials of the Min family, he even had his own brother executed because he had allied to them! At the time it was believed Queen Min had been killed, thus he had a funeral process begun for her. Now in response to the killing of the Japanese officials, well Japan was not too happy about that. The foreign office under Inoue Kaoru ordered Hanasuba to return to Seoul to hold a meeting with senior Korean officials to get them to bring the rioters responsible to justice. If any more of these rioters were to attack Japanese, Japan was going to bear military force against them, regardless of whatever the Korean government did. Inoue instructed Hanabusa, that if he saw the Koreans making any attempts to hide the perpetrators and not punish them, or if they refused simply to comply at all with their demands this would constitute a breach of peace and thus the IJA would be rolling in. Japan also sent an official letter to the Korean government with an envoy, indicting it for the crimes that had been done to the Japanese and that Japan would be sending forces to occupy the port of Chempulpo. Hanabusa meanwhile was instructed that if China or another nation attempted to mediate on behalf of Korea, he should refuse this, but to reiterate none the less that Japan still believed her relations with Korea were friendly and that they best restore that friendly relationship. Thus Hanabusa was to go to Seoul with IJA and IJN forces to protect him and other Japanese officials. Now while Japan was doing all of this, in the background they were also calling up reserves for their military in advance and Inoue Kaoru made sure to notify western ministers in Tokyo they were sending IJA/IJN forces to Korea to “protect their citizens”. He strongly emphasized this was all in good faith and that their intentions were peaceful, but when the Americans offered to mediate he declined this off the bat, not a great look. As for the Chinese reaction, Li Hongzhang who was in charge had left his post just before the crisis had broken out, taking a leave of absence because his mother had just died. How fate tosses the dice sometimes eh? Thus China's de facto foreign minister was left out of touch and Korea did not have a Chinese legation on hand. Li Shuchang, the Chinese minister in Tokyo received word of the situation and sent word home. On August 1st, Zhang Shusheng dispatched 3 warships of the Beiyang Fleet under the command of Admiral Ding Ruchang to Korea with the Qing official Ma Jianzhong to assess the situation. 4500 Qing forces led by General Wu Changqing arrived and they quickly aided the Korean government in quelling the rioters thus thwarting a full blown rebellion. The Qing forces took control over Seoul. This was the first time that China had military intervened in Korea since 1636 and constituted a major departure in her foreign policy over Korea. Would this situation ignite a war between the Qing and Japan? I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. The imo uprising was going to escalate things for China, Japan and Korea, simply boiling the pot of war gradually over time. How long could the diplomats and politicians keep those rattling the sabers of war?  

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Last time we spoke about the modernization efforts of China, Japan and the Hermit Kingdom of Korea. China and Japan undertook very different paths to modernization, and little Korea was stuck in between them. Yet there was even another play joining the mix, the empire of Russia who was threatening all 3 of the Asian nations with her encroachment. The 3 Asian nations attempted to cooperate against the common threat, but Japan and China were growing ever more and more hostile towards another, particularly over the issue of who should influence Korea more. Yet today we are actually doing something a bit different, this will be sort of a side episode, for China had too many events going on during the 19th century to cohesively tell. One story goes often forgotten, yet it encompassed numerous groups, vast amounts of territory and a lot of bloodshed.   #38 This episode is the Dungan Revolt   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.   I am not going to lie, I have no idea where to even start with this one. Originally I wanted to write a single episode, perhaps a two parter, explaining how China and Japan find themselves going to war in the 1890's largely over Korea. Yet the late 19th century is probably one of the most jam packed time periods for Chinese history. So many uprisings, rebellions, wars with foreign states occurs for the Qing dynasty, there's simply no way to tell them all, but here I want to touch upon just a few. Now I keep bringing up but barely talk about, the Dungan Revolt of 1862-1877. If you go right now and please do, to the wikipedia article on the Dungan Revolt, check out the list of Belligerents. You will see the Qing, the Russian Empire, a short lived state called the Kashgaria, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and an unbelievable number of Muslim rebel groups from all over the place. Events like this do not live in a bubble, as we say in the research world of neuroscience, this requires multivariable analysis. Well that's what I hope to accomplish, in a single episode. Now I expect when I say the Dungan Revolt, the first question that comes to mind for many of you is, who are Dungans? Its complicated. They can be described as Turkic or Chinese speaking, Hui Muslim people who inhabitant Xinjiang province, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and parts of modern Russia. Now you are saying, wait are they Turks or Chinese, thats a very politically motivated question haha. Today you could call them, Hui, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Uzbeks, Tatars, etc. In essence they inhibit a part of the world that has so many different groups around and their history goes very deep, before the time of the Qing dynasty. When the Qianlong Emperor hit the scene in the early 18th century, he named the province Xinjiang, meaning “new frontier” and the people there were known by many as Hui, but specifically for those Chinese speaking muslims in the northwest, well they were often referred to as Dungans. Prior to the Qing rule, Xinjiang was ruled by the Oirat Mongols of the Dzungar Khanate. I am sure you veteran listeners before I came to this podcast know much of these peoples and their history, you probably could teach me a thing or two, as this is very much so out of my specialization. One thing you might remember that I touched upon I believe in the very first episode of this podcast series was the Dzungar genocide. As ordered by the Qianlong Emperor  “"Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say." It is estimated perhaps 80 percent of the 600,000 or so Dzungars were killed through war and disease between 1755-1758, enough to argue the annihilation of them as a people. Now with Xinjiang so devastated and depopulated, the Qing sponsored a large-scale settlement of Han, Hui, Uyghur, Manchu and other Chinese. Thus the demographics of the region changed dramatically, Xinjiang became mostly Uyghurs around 60% or so, followed by 30% Han and Hui and the rest of various minority groups like Manchu. The Qing did their best to unify Xinjiang, and one of their policies was to turn over 17,000 acres of steppe grassland over to Han Chinese to farm and colonize. Some historians point this out to be an attempt to replace Uyghurs, but in truth its messier than just that, as the Qing also banned Han Chinese from settled in Uyghur concentrated areas of the province. Now the Oirat Mongol's come back to the scene, this time in the form of the Kalmyk Khanate. They were mostly Tibetan Buddhists and in 1770, over 300,000 of them tried to seize control of parts of Xinjiang from the Qing. However when they began their great expedition, their traditional rivals the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz attacked them the entire way leading them to show up to Xinjiang, worn out, starving and ridden with disease. Many of them simply came and surrendered to the Qing upon arrival and managed to settle within Qing territory. Now these were nomadic people, but the Qing demanded they give up the nomadic lifestyle to take up farming, which was a deliberate policy to break them as a people. They utterly failed at becoming farmers and quickly fell into poverty, undergoing such horrors as selling their own children into slavery, becoming prostitutes, bandits, and such, terrible times. Alongside the terrible treatment of the new coming Kalmyks, Uyghurs were being abused by Manchu officials. It is said Manchu officials were gang raping Uyghur women, such as the official Su-cheng. A rebellion occurred, and the Qing violently quelled. There were reports of mass rape by Manchu troops causing even more hatred from the Uyghur population.  Now fast forward to the Taiping Rebellion, during 1862 as Taiping forces approached Shaanxi province, the local population began to form militias known as the Yong Ying. The Yong Ying or “brave camps” were similar to our friend Zeng Guofans “Yung-Ying” Xiang army, just less well structured and terribly under equipped. If they were lucky the Qing government would hand over some Jingalls, but more or less the old sword and spear were their choice of weapon. Now the Yong Ying's being propped up by the Qing were Han Chinese, but around them were large populations of Muslim Chinese who, well lets just say were having PTSD episodes from the countless atrocities performed upon them by these same people for centuries now. So the Muslim groups formed their own Yong Ying's and this is where our story really begins.  In 1862 sporadic conflicts such as skirmishes between groups, riots, smaller uprisings and such. They ran the gambit for reasons, could be just a barroom brawl as they saw, trivial type of stuff. During this time any rebel groups that emerged drew attention from the Qing and by proxy association were believed to be possibly working with the Taiping. To add some more chaos to the situation, the Green Standard army as you would assume took its recruits from populaces all over China. Their job much more as a police force than a real army was to keep things running smoothly in all the provinces of the Qing dynasty. In northwest China this meant numerous Hui and other muslim chinese groups were amongst their ranks and thus training for combat and armed, so keep that in mind. There were numerous incidents that sprung the Dungan revolt, but one in particular involved of all things the price of bamboo poles. Some Han merchants were overcharging Hui and this led to a major fight. Bamboo poles were traditionally used to make spears. During a time of major conflict and open rebellion suddenly the Hui communities began to buy large quantities of bamboo poles and this led to the belief they were planning to set up an Islamic state in northwestern China. Organized mosques run by popular mullahs in Shaanxi were purchasing more and more bamboo poles, which they were indeed making into spears. The Hui communities were worried about their safety, seeing all these local militias pop up meant there would be fighting over resources and such. Well the non muslim merchants, mostly Han saw the paint on the wall and were obviously worried about selling bamboo poles to people who might attack them, or better said might defend themselves. Thus many merchants began to increase the prices on bamboo poles and this led to a major uprising known as the Shengshan bamboo incident.  Manchu general Duolongga, the same man we talked about during the Taiping Rebellion was leading a cavalry unit in the north when the Hui revolt suddenly turned into a siege laid against Xi'an in Shaanxi province. Duolongga led a campaign against the muslim bands and by 1863 the siege was lifted and the rebels were pushed out of Shaanxi into neighboring Gansu province. In Gansu the Muslim leaders began to spread rumors of an impending Qing crackdown on muslims. They spread fear that the Qing would soon massacre many and this allowed them to organize another siege, this time against Ling-chou, a large city 40 miles north from Jinjipu. Jinjipu happened to be the HQ of a major Muslim leader named Ma Hualong, more about him later. While Lingzhou was laid siege, another strategic city was also attacked by Muslim forces, the city of Lanchow. The Governor General at Lanchow, En-lin reacted by trying to apply a policy of reconciliation. He advocated to the Qing court to not alienate the Muslims and began sending edicts in Gansu reiterating non-discrimination policies towards Muslims. His efforts seem to have been all for naught, as the rumors of a Qing massacre upon the muslims won out the day and large scale violence just grew. Within Eastern Gangsu, many of the Shaanxi Muslim refugees formed the what became known as the “18 great battalions”. Their purpose was to train and arm themselves to take back their homes in Shaanxi. Now while Gansu and Shaanxi were kicking off the beginnings of the Dungan revolt, this also opened the door to more groups to join in. Yaqub Bek, was born in the town of Pskente in the Khanate of Kokand, today's Uzbekistan. There region he lived in was drawn into conflict continuously with outsiders like the Russian and from within as it was deeply factionalized. Yaqub Bek claimed to be a descendant of Timur Gurkani the Turco-Mongol conqueror of the Timurid Empire, probably a ruse to give himself more credibility as a great ruler. He conspired against factions such as the Qipchaqs, taking part in a horrible event known as the Qipchaq massacre. Eventually in the 1860's he fought for the Kokand khanate as a General against the Russians, but they defeated them in 1866 resulting in the major loss of Tashkent. The ruler of Khokand, Sadik Beg dispatched Yakub Beg to Kashgar to raise and find new troops amongst Muslim allies. Yaqub Beg instead invaded Kashgar, defeated its Chinese defenders and declared himself ruler. Now Yaqub Beh was stuck between the forces of the Russian, British and Chinese empires who were all vying for control of the surrounding area, this was part of something called “the great game” which I simply cannot get into for it is too great, pun intended. Thus Yaqub Beg began a campaign that basically saw him conquer Xinjiang province, and this drew the ire of the Qing as you can imagine.  So the Qing were now dealing with multiple Muslim rebel groups in the northwest and on top of this some of them were foreigners, who held considerable backing. The Qing dynasty sent one of their most formidable Generals, Zuo Zongtang in 1867 to Shaanxi to pacify the region. Zuo Zongtang as you already know was instrumental in the downfall of the Taiping, working closely with Zeng Guofan. Zuo Zongtangs task was to restore the peace, promote agricultural output particularly that of grain and cotton and to promote Confucian education. As we have seen throughout the series, northwestern China is a rough place to live, stricken with poverty and thus Zuo Zongtang would not be able to rely on the resources of the territory he would have to look elsewhere. This led Zuo Zongtang to immediately demand the Qing court help fund the expedition as he personally began to take out major loans worth millions of taels from foreigners. Zuo Zongtang wanted to prepare massive amounts of supplies before going on the offensive, a smart move. Zeng Guofan likewise helped his subordinate by allocating him 10,000 Xiang forces, led by General Liu Songshan to bolster Zuo Zongtang's 55,000 man army. Zuo Zongtang's forces were mostly Hunanese, but there were also men from Henan, Anhui and Sichuan as well. Because of the Taiping Rebellion, Zuo Zongtang was a proficient army raiser now and he did his best to train the men in a western fashion and outfit them with western arms. As I had mentioned, Zuo Zongtang was one of the champions of modernization and established the Lanzhou arsenal in 1872 which produced Remington breech loading type rifles for his forces alongside artillery and munitions. Now that name, Ma Hualong I had mentioned comes up here a bit. He was the leader of the Jahriyya, known also as “the new teaching”. They were something of a Muslim sect in Gansu province and had been around since the 1760s.They periodically rebelled as a group and caused conflict with other groups, including muslim ones. When Ma Hualong took the leadership position in 1849 he gradually began to build up their forces and to do so he created a vast trade network using a caravan trade through Inner Mongolia and Beijing. His group became extremely wealthy and when the Dungan revolt heated up he began to use his trade network to purchase guns. Zuo Zongtang understandably was suspicious of the gun purchasing activity and deduced Ma Hualong sought to conquer parts of Inner Mongolia and rebel. Ma Hualong began collaborating with Muslim refugees fleeing Shaanxi for Gansu and this led to conflicts with the Qing. General Liu Songshan ended up dying in combat while campaigning against multiple Muslim militia groups, some of which were controlled by Ma Haulong. Meanwhile Zuo Zongtang was finishing up suppressing Shaanxi and establishing control over the province when he finally had a free hand to deal with Ma Hualong who had heavily fortified Jinjipu into a stronghold. Zuo Zongtang's forces erected a siege upon Jinjipu using Krupps field guns, the good old fashion sappers tunneling with mines tactic and the age old classic of starving out the enemy. After 16 months of siege, starvation took its toll upon the defenders prompting Ma Hualong to surrender his forces in January of 1871. Ma Hualong hoped to save the majority of his people, but Jinjipu saw a massacre, thousands lose their lives and the town was rape, plundered and raized. Zuo Zongtang ordered the execution of Ma Hualong, his son Ma Yaobang and 80 Muslim rebel leaders via “Lingchi / death by slicing”. This was a horrible form of execution where a sharp object like a knife was used to slowly remove portions of ones body over long periods of time until the person died. Once done with Ma Hualong, Zuo Zongtang set his eyes upon another Muslim rebel leader named Ma Zhan'ao. Ma Zhan'ao worked loosely with Ma Hualong, but his stronghold was at Hezhou, present day Linxia. He controlled the region west of Lanzhou and benefited from Ma Hualong's vast trade network managing to arm his rebel forces. Unlike Ma Hualong who was of the “new teaching” sect, Ma Zhan'ao was of the “Khafiya / old teaching” sect and they proscribing trying to peacefully exist amongst the non muslim Qing population. When the Dungan revolt began, Ma Zhan'ao escorted numerous Han Chinese to the nearest safe area of Yixin and he did not attempt to conquer the area nor molest them. Regardless he was one of the major muslim leaders purchasing arms and earned the attention of Zuo Zongtang who began an offensive against his forces in 1872. Initially his muslim defenders inflicted heavy losses upon Zuo Zongtang's army much to the frustration of Zuo Zongtang. But Ma Zhan'ao did not want war and he dispatched his General Ma Chun to try and negotiate with General Zuo Zongtang. He offered to surrender his stronghold to the Qing and provide assistance to the Qing dynasty in quelling the Dungan revolt. Zuo Zongtang suspected this all to be a ruse, but the Qing ordered him to abide by the mutual assistance and indeed Ma Zhan'ao did assist the Qing. Zuo Zongtang began to pacify other areas, while Ma Zhan'ao basically saved his people from annihilation. To this very day the area he controlled holds a muslim population who control the Linxia Hui autonomous prefecture. Many of Ma Zhan'ao's generals like Ma Qianling and Ma Haiyan defected to the Qing, including his son Ma Anliang who proved themselves instrumental to helping Zuo Zongtangs campaign. As Zuo Zongtang pacified the areas he was soon awarded governor generalship over Shaanxi and Gansu. At this point Zuo Zongtang loosely followed a strategy of divide and conquer. Those Muslim groups part of the New Teaching he violently massacred, but those of the old teachings he tried to persuade defection to the Qing. The Qing government likewise began to make edicts stating the Muslim rebels did not represent all muslim chinese, just as all the White Lotus rebels back in the early part of the century did not represent all buddhists. They advocated the Muslim community take up the old teachings over the new teachings.  With the help of the Dungan people of Hezhou Zuo Zongtang then turned his gaze west towards Xinjiang to defeat the forces of Yaqub Beg. Zuo Zongtang was now joined by defected Dungan armies led by Generals like Ma Anliang, Dong Fuxiang. By 1875 Zuo Zongtang had assembled men and supplies along the Gansu corridor and the next year began his campaign by attacking Urumchi where he massacres their garrison. Next he besieged Manas for over a month until they surrendered. Allegedly the garrison were allowed to march out of the city with weapons, but it seemed to Zuo Zongtang's commanders in the field they were planning an armed break out so they were all put to the sword as well. The women and children were spared luckily. Zuo Zongtang established a HQ at Gucheng while the Russian Empire annexed the Khanate of Kokand, squeezing Yakub Beg further. In September of 1876, Yakub Beh received reports a Chinese army was on the march 700 miles to the east and he began to prepare his defenses. He built up fortifications at Turfan and in 1877 he was visited by Aleksey Kuropatkin. Kuropatkin was sent on a diplomatic mission to Yaqub Beg to try and resolve some Russian border claims over the Fergana Valley. Kuropatkin told him he had around 17,000 troops spread over the Fergana Valley region and that he could not hope to match them. Yaqub Beg was in a very bad situation. The Chinese army had entered Urumqi pretty much unopposed, many of his eastern forces were defecting over to the Qing and in the west they were defecting to the Russians. In the spring the Chinese attacked the fort of Davanchi which lay between Urumchi and Turfan. Simultaneously an army led by Chang Yao seized Pichuan just 50 miles east of Turfan. Yaqub Beg's forces were shrinking from lost battles, desertions and defections. The Qing forces attacked Turfan where Yaqub Beg's men were beaten badly, so he fled to Toksun. At Toksun the Qing pursued him quickly and defeated him again, so he fled to Karashar, and then Korla. All of the fleeing demoralized his troops causing further desertions and defections. It would be at Korla where Yaqub Beg died and historians are uncertain as to exactly how or when. The Qing claimed he died on May 22, while Aleksey Kuropatkin claimed it was May 29th. What he died of is a bit of a mystery. The Russians state he died of illness, multiple historians think it was poisoning. Some modern historians think it could have been a stroke. Regardless with Yaqub Beg dead this pretty much closed the curtain on his forces control over the area. In autumn of 1877, Zuo Zongtang had kept his forces around Turfan as it was the hot season and he wished to gather further supplies, when he received news of the death of Yaqub Beg. Yaqub Begs forces disorganized into multiple rebel groups without a real leader consolidating anything. Zuo Zongtang sent advance parties to occupy Karashar and Korla meeting limited resistance. Zuo Zongtans army pushed the rebels further west until he eventually seized Kashgar with barely a fight and this led notable cities like Yarkand and Kohtan to submit. Xinjiang was officially reconquered by the Qing. The rebel groups dissolved gradually and no large scale revolts would occur for some time in the northwest. In 1884 Xinjiang was established as a province officially again. Zuo Zongtangs Xiang army and other Han Chinese troops began purchasing Uyghur girls from their parents to take as wives, relying often on their Hui allies to work as translators. Countless Uyghur muslim women would be married off to Han Chinese in Xinjiang during the late 19th to early 20th century. This was not limited to Han Chinese under the Qing as plenty of Hindu, Armenians, Jews and Russians also did the same. A large rationale for the situation was the amount of male depopulation from the area which caused a vacuum of single women.  The punishments for the leaders who caused the Dungan revolt were harsh. Many of the songs of the Muslim leaders were castrated by the Qing imperial household department once they hit 11 years of age and they were sent to work as eunuch slaves for Qing held garrisons in Xinjiang. Many of the wives of the Muslim leaders were likewise enslaved. To give you an idea of how prevalent this was, the Muslim leader Ma Guiyuan had 9 of his sons castrated by the Qing. The Muslim leaders themselves were mostly executed by Lingchi. Yaqub Beg and his son Ishana's corpses were burned in public view. Yaqub had 4 other sons who died imprisoned at Lanzhou, Gansu or were killed by the Qing authorities upon discovery. Even Yaqub Beg's grandchildren were hunted for, many of which were caught and executed or castrated.  The Dungan revolt led to mass migration all over the place. Some Hui people fled to Russia, settling in places like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Within the Qing dynasty, the Hui Generals who defected were all promoted by the Emperor such as Dong Fuxiang and Ma Anliang. The power of these pro Qing Hui forces would become quite important to the Qing military further down the road, particularly during the Boxer Rebellion.    I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Well I hope you enjoyed my butchering of the Dungan Revolt, again I did my best to tell it in regards to its significance to the history of China. In reality it was part of something known as the “great game” that had had a long lasting impact on many other nations history.

This episode we welcome Callum back to Hearts of Oak as he joins us to discuss his latest trip. First it was an Afghanistan vacation, then a cheeky weekend in Serbia and now his recent sabbatical takes him to Russia! He is best known for being the co-host on the hugely popular Lotus Eaters Podcast and is now carving out a 'dark tourism' niche for himself by showing us these countries in a way we have never seen before. His report on his latest trip to Russia, including the Donbass region is a must see, absolutely fascinating viewing. The media tell us one story. Callum is showing the other side. Watch the documentaries of his adventures... Russia: https://youtu.be/B0i0zbuCIIM Afghanistan: https://youtu.be/2oMW5pL9Z4w Serbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Q_Tp0IVzc&t=3s Our previous interview with him... Callum - رجل إنجليزي في كابول / An Englishman in Kabul  https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-vti5d-b2f6e6  Connect with Callum at... GETTR https://gettr.com/user/Callum TWITTER https://twitter.com/AkkadSecretary?s=20&t=jM2HdR0iXmda0vJHwrTg-w YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@BritannicaPolitica SUBSCRIBESTAR https://www.subscribestar.com/callum LOTUSEATERS https://www.lotuseaters.com/ Interview broadcast live 16.2.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video and livestreaming platforms... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please like, subscribe and share! [0:22] Callum, it is great to have you back with us once again.   Oh hello, thank you for having me again. Not at all. You go to these weird and wonderful places in the world, so it's always good to get a completely different viewpoint. So thanks for coming on and obviously the links to not only this trip but all the other ones are in the description. So people can just click and go to your Britannica, Politica YouTube, which actually gave me it gives me so many ads. So it's obviously popular if it's throwing up so many ads   I don't think YouTube's found out yet. I think they're just doing our travel vlog, right? Nothing unusual there. [1:03] I thoroughly enjoyed it but to our viewers obviously you've done, This is your third one, isn't it? because you were on talking about your Afghan trip and then you did a little sneaky week ender in Serbia. And then this is number three. Yeah. In the series.   I'm trying to go to Chitels for fun. So we did Afghanistan, which thanks to Miles. When we went to Serbia, I mean, the main thing there wasn't, I mean, it was Serbian culture and whatnot, but also we went to go meet the migrants. So loads of Afghans and whatnot, they come up through Serbia. One of the main routes because they're not in the EU to then get into the EU via Hungary or Croatia and then to the rest of where we are. So we went and interviewed those guys and those guys are just not great. I'll be honest. I was not filled with confidence meeting those people because they have no interest in us. They have no interest in anything that is with the West. It's literally just gibs. They're not in danger in the slightest. So whatever. There's that. So go check that video out. And the most recent one was I decided I'd go to New Russia. [2:12] So not only old Russia, as we know it, the Russian Federation, but the new provinces. So I went down to Luhansk and saw what life was like there at the moment. Well, let's get into all this. This is an Englishman in Russia and not some of your others. Again, the links for those documentaries there in the description. But I guess Russia is easier to get into than Afghanistan, but maybe more difficult than Serbia, so its kind of in the middle. [2:41] I mean, what do you define by more difficult, I suppose?   Well, you did. It's probably slightly more difficult. Maybe there aren't as big a range of flights and then you still have to go and pay for your visa. So, I mean, you just go to Serbia. I've been to Serbia quite a few times and you can drive there. So it's actually kind of more accessible, I guess. [3:04] But you got there, your hotel. I love the way you... What was it? Big ass bed. Very nice. Big ass TV. Very nice. Carpet. Very nice. I love the surprise to see carpet. But yeah, it was a decent hotel.   It was a very nice carpet. I'll be honest. I wouldn't have mentioned it if it was. I was like, oh, it's great. Like just to have such a high quality, who cares, carpet, right? You just leave it, you forget it for 10 years, turns into a piece of crap. No one ever replaces it. No, this has been replaced recently by the feel of it. But the getting into part, when I went to Afghanistan, you pay for the visa, you pay for the flight, whatever it was. I think it was, what was it? 30 hours or something of flights. So that was pain. But going through security, you turn up, fill in some form, no one reads it, no one interviews you. What are you going to do? Make the place worse? Good luck. But Russia right now, of course, they're taking their security extremely, extremely seriously. For the understandable reason. So I got taken to a separate room after my passport just failed to scan. [4:16] Okay, they take the passport off you. You're then looking around and you notice that the only people with you are a bunch of people from like Egypt and then some Ukrainians. That's gonna be fun. They then move you to another room where you just get told to sit and wait. How long? [4:34] Four hours later. I've been here for four hours. What's going on? Wait. Thanks. Cool. Everyone around you by that point. The Ukrainians have left. They're fine. You're still there with all the Egyptians. And then eventually you get dragged into a third room where you just have to get, I don't know if the word is interrogated, but they want to know everything about your life. And a mate of mine who's also British, who was only visiting Russia, not the new regions, he had the same experience. So apparently this is for, if not EU citizens, at least all UK citizens, which is you get enhanced security, which is they check your phone, they check what you got in your bag, They ask you what you're doing, who you know, they call them up, ask them why the hell you're here, they want to know where your parents live, the whole shebang. [5:20] So yeah, I mean, that's worse than the Taliban, but you know, it's understandable. Taliban is up there. Hey, I'm sorry, DJ Q says Zelensky green question mark. So is that a Zelensky t-shirt you have?   No, I got this before him. He's stealing my look, if anything. Victoria Willing there says, Mcduck is tasty. We'll get on to that in a bit. But one of the big things obviously is cash. So you were showing your hoards of cash on your desk when you got to the hotel. Obviously cash is the only way. I mean, tell us what that was like. [6:00] Yeah. So for the Russians, people seem to think, so I had all the cash and the people thought that everyone just uses cash there. No. As soon as we kicked them off the payment system in the West, they've just logged onto a new one. [6:13] British, it all works, it's fine. And everything they pay with this card, I saw very few people carrying cash. The only people that affects are us. So when we turn up as foreigners, we have to bring piles of cash now because you won't have a card that works. And if you think, oh, we'll just open a Russian bank, put money in there and then use a card. Yeah, you can, but it's not the easiest thing in the world. And also, I don't know, do you really want to go through that rigmarole. It's easy just to carry the cash. So yeah, if you're going to go, definitely take US dollars. That's the best thing. The other thing is euros. I tried some British pounds. No bank in all of Moscow would accept my British pounds. So I tried like five.   What was it like? I remember when I was living in Bulgaria and I could open up a bank account and it had to be US dollar. So whenever you went to get money, you'd queue up, the 20 years ago at the end of ATO, you'd queue up, you'd eventually get your dollars, you'd join another queue, and then you'd get, that would give you a slip to exchange it into lever. And then you join the third queue, and that would give you lever as about 45 minutes. But how do you just go in and you had to show ID and exchange your money? You don't even need ID. You just turn up to an exchange place, as much dollars, um, they'll give you whatever. I think if you did a high enough amount. [7:37] So if you did like a couple of grand or something like that in one go, maybe a grand, they'd ask you for ID and documentation, but if you do like a few hundred here and there, no one cares. So it's, it's very relaxed.   Or if only we were like that. And what, so you, yeah, you got there, you, You checked it. The hotel was an impressive hotel. I mean, the lobby was huge. [7:58] Yeah, it's an old Stalinist building. I think Stalin used to have dignitaries stay there. [8:03] Beautiful building from the outside as well. If people want to look it up, Hotel Hilton, Leningradskaja. Really old. They actually have a video playing in the lobby of all the different people who have stayed there and Soviet propaganda about how great it is, which is really weird. But whatever. One way of advertising your hotel, propaganda films. I think it was number 50 out of like 750. I guess it wasn't packed full of foreigners. [8:30] It was. I didn't see a single Russian person staying though. There was some Brazilian journalist I met on the last day. He was really nice. What was weird there is he was also, because we're sort of set up in this mindset of the West right now, at least generally, you know, we're combating Russia and Russia's bad and the West is good and we're helping, whatever, like your thing, right? But when you speak to someone from Brazil or the world that's just away from this dichotomy, it just didn't give a crap. I was talking to him, he was like, yeah, I just don't care. I'm just, here to cover a story about this, that or the other Russian-Brazilian trade relations. But when, it came to the conflict, he was just like, who wins, wins. Not interested. So when you met anyone in that hotel that seemed to be that position. I didn't find any Westerners. Quite refreshing. So the first thing was going to get food. I loved it. You went to McDonald's via an off license. So I'm off to McDonald's the next thing you are looking at vodka. So you seem to be more interested in getting your vodka fitting in Russia than getting your Big Mac. [9:42] Yeah, well the vodka is two euros. Sorry, two dollars, not two euros. A bottle. You know how you get to check out in this country and you'll see a bunch of confectionary? They just have crates of different kinds of vodka, all for two bucks. So if you're just popping home, why not get a bottle while you're driving? I don't know. [9:58] It works. I mean, I don't know if it works, but it's how they live. But they do survive on vodka. The Balkans survive on brandy and I guess Russians on vodka. But tell us about food. Whenever you did get food, it was Subway. That's not really Russian cuisine, is it? [10:19] No, I get criticised in a few comments. Like in Afghanistan, people were like, why didn't you eat Afghan food? I do. It's just not very interesting, I didn't find, when looking through the footage. It was me staring at a bunch of borscht or pilemi, which is like pierogis. But I don't know. It's all nice. I don't really have anything insightful to say about it other than it's nice. So it just seems like a bit of a waste of time because you don't know what it is. You don't have the flavour in your mouth. Right? But if I could tell you about their version of Subway or McDonald's, you know what that tastes like. You've got a reference point. So I just thought it was a bit more interesting. But some people say in the chat, Freddos are a safe bet. They always are. Still looking for that KitKat. Did you bring any? No, I'm not. Did you bring those? It was KitKats. I think it was Cadbury buttons. The Caramel ones and the Plain ones and some other stuff I gave away. I only filmed the buttons. I'm actually thinking of reaching out. I mentioned that I want to get sponsored by Cadbury. Why not? It'll be funny as hell for them. They've got nothing going on. You want to go to the middle of nowhere and sell Cadbury to random village people? Sure.   On this trip, I actually saw you eating more than I've ever seen you eat in my whole life. I think every next clip was you eating somewhere. [11:40] Hey, boys go eat.   Another thing that struck me was the architecture, the buildings. They look quite impressive. When you think of England and lots of things being knocked down and built up, you kind to think Russia as well, it'll be communist, it'll be massive concrete blocks, which you kind of get over all different parts of Eastern Europe. But it seemed to have a beautiful, architecture, beautiful buildings. I think you commented on that. [12:12] Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of aspects. So once you get into the more rural parts of Russia. [12:18] So Moscow and St. Petersburg are the classic amazing cities, westerners go there for a couple of days and that's their experience, which is fine. And they're the most astounding places. And the Stalinist architecture for all the bastard things that Stalin did, his Stalinist architecture is really good. The Metro is unbelievable in the sense of how beautiful it is. People big it up a lot and I always thought maybe it's overrated. I've been there before this trip, but still, every time I go back, I'm like, that's gold. I hate going to London and seeing the comparison. The Elizabeth Line opened earlier in London and people raving about it. It looks like shit. Sorry to swear, but it is awful. Just modernist nonsense that'll look terrible in 10 years. Everything in the Moscow Metro looks like that five star hotel, but underground. It's amazing how good that stuff is. But once you do get out into... So I went to Rostov in the south, which is a fairly big city, or some of the places around there, Novoshanskoye, or. [13:20] Kimishkish, or whatever the hell it was called, the one in the middle. And then, and then Luhanskoye, yeah, you get the commie blocks, commie blocks, or still a thing. But you, You do get the occasional building that they've just redone and it looks like something from the Romanov era. So they seem to be having the same sort of transition that maybe you've seen in Hungary, or I saw in Serbia where they've got the old buildings, they were run down and now they're building them back up. So the entire Slavic world seems to be experiencing that, as well as the Hungarians, which is nice. [13:53] And we don't have it.   Yeah, same in Bulgaria. You get them all being put back together and rebuilt and remembering their history after trying to forget about the communist past or life before then. They're trying to find it again. And of course, flags. One other thing I noticed, lots of Russian flags and of course, communist paraphernalia. But the two flags that were missing, which I think are our national flags, our LGBT flag and Ukraine flag, it was quite nice. Those didn't exist there.   Yeah, I mean, there's certainly one of the Ukrainian flags. What is funny about all that is that you see, I mean, I don't not understand the reasons as to why, but in Ukraine, you've seen endless videos of them smashing up statues or anything that was Russian or represents Soviet Union or anything like that. Some of them are understandable where it's like, you know, Lenin, screw that guy, Stalin, screw that guy, whatever, right? But then they started smashing up like Russian authors. Some of them were even like half Ukrainian. [14:59] It all just, I think it seems like people in Ukraine are a bit caught up in that. I don't know. But in Moscow and Rostov, from what I saw, there's loads of Ukrainian writer statues or, you know, the Hotel Ukraina, things like this. They've not got rid of anything Ukrainian, because of course they don't really seem to think they're going to destroy Ukraine as a thing or, the Ukrainian language. But you could argue being invaded and therefore have this massive of Ukraine phobia or something. So there's that argument for sure. As for the LGBT flags. [15:34] Yeah, yeah, none. Didn't see any BLM flags either. Now I think about it. But that's part of what I certainly like about Russia. And generally when you look at a lot of the Eastern European countries, that they have pride in their identity, they have confidence in their identity. And in the West, we've lost that. all of kind of big bear Russia and for it can seem like an aggressor maybe to some of the smaller countries. Actually, at least it has pride in its identity.   Absolutely. I mean, that is one of the things people get confused about. There's some aspect of the right, specifically the right I'm going to talk about here, who get a bit obsessed with Russia. Many of them have never been and never going to be going there. So it's a bit strange from those folks because they kind of get caught caught up in the propaganda, I find. [16:30] But for those who have been, everyone can appreciate it. And it's not just Russia. You find this in Poland. You find this in probably Bulgaria and et cetera. An acceptance of patriotism, an acceptance of, like, this is where I'm born. It's my land. That's why it's good. Not because I'm better than everyone else, but because it's mine, which we don't in the West. We actively suppress that. It's embarrassing that we do so. And when it comes to the homosexual stuff as well, my understanding is that in Russia, it's not a crime to be gay. If you want to be gay, that's fine. If you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, I don't know how accepting Russian [17:05] Culture of that being public. But I know that the most recent thing I saw in terms of legality, just if anyone's game is planning on visit, I don't think you'll have a problem as long as there's no public displays of affection, I imagine. Like, I know that's a most traditionalist place, to put it politely. But when it comes to the legal side, the only thing they have is that they banned, firstly, it was LGBT propaganda aimed at children. That was banned. Come on, come on. Very Hungarian. [17:38] You know, Ron De Santis would probably approve of that original law, which was just, look, you can't have this stuff aimed at kids. If it's a kids program, if it's aimed 18 or below, you can't do that. If you're aiming a program 18 or above the wave, you want to give a crap. I think whilst I was there, they expanded the law now to include 18 and above, which of course is far more controversial and far less about, let's say, freedom in that regard. But that is what it says. One of the things about this sort of traveling, I don't want to pass too much of a judgment on the places I'm going because I'm just trying to tell you what's there. I ain't living there. So I'm not going to sit around and tell you how they should change their laws because It's foreign land, we have no influence, what would be the point? I barely have any influence in my own country. But I guess that's similar to that stance in Russia. It's actually similar to Serbia and certainly similar to Afghanistan. So I think that's what ties those three countries together.   [18:45] Maybe, I just know it's a bit more... Because they don't really have any pride in being Afghan in that same way that the Serbs, the Russians do, in being Serbian and Russian. Yeah, but I think that's something, I'm thinking of the LGBT stuff. Oh yeah, well they're all certainly on that train. I think the Afghans win that competition though, because Allah Akbar. Yeah Allah doesn't do the LGBT stuff very well. No.   One of the few things they'll command him or Muhammad for, but we'll not get into that conversation.   I think they're accepting of T's. I think T is still okay. T? Do you think so? So in Iran, for example, tea is okay, because if you're found being homosexual in Iran, there is a Quranic solution, which is that clearly this man is not a homosexual man, because that would be a crime against nature according to the Quran. So in fact, he is transgender. He was a woman the whole time, therefore it's not gay. So you either accept that bargain and go through the surgery or get killed. [19:48] So that's the tragedy of being homosexual in Iran. But it does mean that the transgender acceptance is a thing. So I don't know if that's your world, Silver lining. I don't know what to talk about. I'm advertising to the transgender adventure brigade out there. Anyway, moving on. The Metro, how much of the Metro did you use? Because as you said, the pictures I've seen, how impressive it is. And you had that little clip of it. But did you go on it a lot? Obviously you didn't, you got told off for filming all this. [20:25] Yeah, I don't know if that's it's a really weird place for filming in that sense. So I've never seen this in any Slavic country except Russia. Russia seems to still have it was explained to me. So, for example, if you get on a train in Russia, let's avoid the metro first. You have to present your passport. You have to go through airport style security and then you get on the train. You can't just tap and walk in. No, very serious about that. [20:51] I thought this is because of counterterrorism. I was told the reason for this, and also the fact that people checking your papers all have these communist style hats with communist logos on still, is because under the Soviet Union, of course. You mean like this? Yeah, exactly like that.   I could have given that to you to keep warm because you kept getting cold. Well, I would have looked like a police officer if I got arrested. But no, they've got these railway workers. There was no freedom of movement in Soviet Union. You have to have papers to be able to move to the next town or wherever, I was told, at least at one point. So that system is still there for the trains. So when you go on the metro, same thing. You walk into the metro and there's meta detectors. And if you're holding a bag nine times out of 10, someone will shout at you in Russian. You freak out. But then they just take your bag, shove it in a metal detector, nothing, you know, it, gets scanned, there's no bombs. They just give it back to you, bugger off. And then there's some lady at the escalators who's just like on her phone on every escalator, I don't know why she's there. Just pointless. But there's like security everywhere. So you don't know what you can and can't film. But then I tried to film too close to the tracks and then three guys came over and all, started shouting at me. I was just like, sorry, not Russian. Leave me alone.   How visible was your filming? [22:16] I always found it's better to be, if you're ever going to travel to somewhere strange and film, do it publicly. If you're seen trying to secretly film, that's way worse because you can explain, oh, sorry, I'm a stupid foreigner from the foreigner land. And in any culture, they'll be like, yeah, whatever, just bugger off and it'll be over. So always just hold up the camera, look like an American tourist pretty much. And that's usually what I do. The only exemptions to that is probably when I was in Taliban land and we try and maybe, not attract attention.   But the black markers. Yeah, I mean, you don't really want to attract that attention. So the only exception. What was it, did people look at you cynically or with suspicion? Because obviously someone from the West must be coming to put something negative out about Russia. Was that part of it? Because you said you had to wait four hours to get in. Is that a kind of thinking behind a lot of the maybe suspicion of the West? [23:25] To be honest, maybe this is just me being lucky. On this entire trip, I didn't find any suspicious people being suspicious of me except security, and that's their job, so fair enough, or in Luhansk. So the civilians there were a bit distrusting because we spoke to people and tried to ask, do you mind if we interview you, ask you these questions, we're showing the questions. I had a guy look over them just to make sure it wouldn't spook the hell out of anyone. He said, yeah, no, those are fine. But no one, no one would talk to us because they're just that scared. I think for a couple of reasons, which is that if the Ukrainians come back and they're on camera saying something nice about Russia and maybe something will happen, maybe they're worried that they'll say something wrong and get in trouble or something. I don't know. That's the only place I felt any problems. I mean, I ran into a guy in a flea market in Rostov and jabbering away in half Russian, half English with this dude and the other people around us, all friendly. Go to an Irish pub, start talking about the situation, all friendly, all smiles. I never had to explain and sit there and be like, oh yes, I am here to film about Great Russia or something to get someone's trust because they're incredibly isolated. Any foreigner who comes there and is like, yeah, I want to show what life's like, they're [24:48] immediately just like thank you for coming. You know, show people. So.   War Museums, you did some filming, some beautiful tanks in different places, but yeah, tell, us about that. And is that a, do you have a specific tank fetish? Oh, who doesn't like tanks? Come on. So, yeah, there's a few places I went. There's the Victory Museum in Moscow, which if anyone goes to Moscow, it's the easiest place to go on holiday. Go for a weekend or two with a loved one. It's a very romantic place to be as well, especially even winter. Definitely take your girl to the Victory Museum, because even though it's military nonsense, you know, women don't generally like staring at, there's enough there to be fun. There's enough light shows and stuff I didn't really have time to show in the video that they have. There's some old remakes of the Reichstag you can go and see. [25:48] Uh any kind of gun any kind of tank there's patriot park i went to that's a big thing in Russia, various uh there's sort of like theme parks throughout the country and it's just piles of every weapon you could think of every tank every plane, railway tanks or railway guns, and I don't know why they're called that it's like a railway car right but covered in artillery and, and anti-tank guns and machine guns. The idea is you drive the train into the town and shoot it up. I don't remember that on Thomas the Tank Engine.   No, but it should have been. A Russian Thomas the Tank Engine is a whole other thing. But that's, you can also shoot any gun you want there. I chose the Mosin. I was kind of annoyed because we just didn't have the time on the way back out. I just, I had to leave because of time. But I'd love to go back to Patriot Park because it was 500 rubles for like 100 rounds or something on an LMG. I had loads of money left though because I just hadn't spent it. I wish I'd just gone back to Patriot Park and be like, chh, dada, dada, dada, dada, dada, for 30 minutes straight, because that's just fun. So yeah, if you like shooting, that's easy too.   Well, did you, I can't remember, you went with someone there, or did you just turn up as a foreigner saying I'd like to shoot things? [27:03] So the trip was a bit weird. I knew a couple of people in Russia from a previous trip. So I met them in Moscow. I met friends of friends of friends. Your network very quickly expands once you just ask, hey, do you know anyone who's around tomorrow? I went to like an Indian market with a lady, for example. That was really funny actually, because we're walking around and I hear the Indian music and I see the brands and the spices. I was instantly transported back to the UK. [27:29] You get what I mean? Which just was so weird because she didn't get it either. She was like, what do you mean it's like the UK? I'm like, you don't know. You just don't know. [27:41] So that was fun. So you start meeting friends like that and then when I got a train I was going to go meet someone else. So I had someone with me at any given time. Some people seem to think, that someone was chaperoning me like it's the Soviet Union. I can't transmit enough how much things have changed since the Soviet Union. It's not like that at all. Even when I went to Luhansk, the Russian soldier guy I had with me, he was only with me like half the time. And even when he was with me, he didn't even know what he was getting in for, frankly. I decided where we wanted to go. I decided what we're going to see, who we're going to talk to, what we're doing today. [28:20] He was a quirky character.   Yeah, I mean, he was just a friend of a friend of a friend was Rostov. Great guy, made friends with him. I said, look, the guy was going to go meet has been blown up by a mortar. I'm kind of buggered. Do you know what he could take me to the new regions? He says, you know, I have a friend introduced me to an Afghani weird character, big moustache, larger than life, goes to Ukraine a lot, has been fighting since 2014, killing people. He did mention to me at one point apparently he fought in Syria which okay because he talks a lot about Wagner. I never really got to the question about whether or not he worked for Wagner but whatever. [29:04] Fit as a fiddle, clearly does a lot of stuff. He's out there right now, he's upgraded his telegram, he's out fighting today I think. But he seemed to just be some guy because he agreed to take me. And then when we got to the border, it was like, don't speak about this, don't speak about that. And I'm like, brother, you don't know what you're getting in for. Because, of course we get taken to additional security and he's like, oh, it's been 10 minutes. I'm, like, no, it's not going to be 10 minutes. We're getting stuck for four hours talking to Russian border guard, then military intelligence, and then even more. We were just like, who the hell are you? And then when we're going around Luhansk, everything's fine. He knows everyone there. He's been fighting and he used to live in Luhansk for years. That's the thing about all the nationalists, the people who are fighting there, they've, all got massive connections to Ukraine, like family connections. This is a real family thing for them. It's not some group of guys who have no connection to the land. All their family live there or their grandparents live there or something. So that's fine. On the way back out, of course same border, checkpoint, more security. I just remember we got off the bus in Rostov, he was just so pissed at me. So he was just like, oh for god's sake. Like it was just some guy, he didn't know what he was getting in for. I was just like, yeah sorry man, it's gonna be a lot of stops. My passport's cancer in this place. [30:28] Yeah, it's free to travel around. If you meet friends of friends, you'll be able to meet someone in any given town. And if they're a friend of a friend, they'll be nice to you. So what was the part that's kind of partially Russian, partially Ukrainian? Is that Luhansk or the other one, Rostov? Yeah, so to explain for people who might not know the situation Ukraine became a country after the Soviet Union collapsed. It used to basically just be a Soviet Republic of USSR, I don't think a Ukrainian nation really existed before in peacetime. You could argue maybe like the kingdoms of the root of, Kevin Rusev's me, but yeah, I did I mean in modern times probably, then stuff happens, politics Russia ended up annexing Crimea and then there was an uprising in these two places called Donetsk and Luhansk, large Russian populations, Stalin's fault as most things are as to why there's so many Russians. [31:34] If I think that the next used to be called Stalino, because of course These people rose up. They've been fighting an insurgency for years with help from Moscow, And then when the Russian army moved in properly, not just, you know, unofficially, they have now annexed Luhansk province, Donetsk province, Zaporizhian and Kherson. So we went to the Luhansk province, which that place has been a battlefield for, what has it been, eight years, something like that. They've now got all of that province under control. We didn't feel any active threat. There was no, like, range for artillery to kill us. To kill us, there was range for missiles to kill us or airstrikes. You can see bullet holes in all the buildings, much for the buildings been blown up. [32:22] But as for what it is, it's according to the Ukrainians, their lands, all of it. According to the Russians, they've annexed it, it belongs to them now. And according to the people who live there, from what I saw, I didn't see anyone Ukrainian. I didn't see anything that made me think Ukraine, everything that made me think of Russia. The flags, the people, the food, the apartments. The place used to be a large Russian area, even when it was part of Ukraine. And since the uprising eight years ago, and then ever since. Anyone who is pro-Ukraine has probably left. I've read multiple stories online of people used to live in these places, more than the stories I've read, but same thing will be happening in Luhansk. If you were pro-Ukrainian or a young person who's Ukrainian or any of that sort, you've probably gone. Why would you have stayed? In which case the result, I imagine if they did do a census, even if it's done by the UN, run by Canadians or Bangladeshis, there's no interest. The demographics of that place have probably hugely changed. So that's an argument for claiming the land, obviously. I did hear a story from a Russian lady who works for a Western organization in Moscow. So she's got access to both sides. One of the things the Ukrainian government's doing, is near the front line, if there's Ukrainians living there, they desperately want the Ukrainians to continue living there. [33:51] Because if the Ukrainians leave, that's yet more territory that has a huge deficit of Ukrainians versus Russians. So whenever some kind of peace deal ends up coming, you've got less of an argument and the Russians are playing the same game. Don't get me wrong, but it's just funny to me how when it comes down to what everyone understands, the claim of a land is just having your people there. And from what I saw in Luhansk, I didn't see anything Ukrainian. [34:20] I know they're going to be Ukrainians that are like that, but that's how it is, man. I hadn't worked out actually before watching your video because in the middle you kind of look at the geopolitics of the area, but I actually didn't realize that Ukraine was, only a province of Russia because other countries like Bulgaria have got a thousand year history, and other countries had to fight and there was, I should think Slovenia had like a three-week, battle with the USSR to actually gain their freedom as a country. But Ukraine existed as a part, as a province, as opposed to a separate country. So it is quite different, Ukraine, when you look at the other kind of satellite states, the USSR. [35:02] Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, actually, because so Ukraine was basically a province of the Russian Empire, nothing special. And then when that collapse and you get Soviet Union, most of it was in the Soviet Union. Sure, it was made into a Soviet republic. This is mostly just PR. Anyone looking at the history can tell that, but it's an integral part of the Soviet Union. It's not flourishing in that way or independent in that way that Bulgaria or any of the satellites are. Since independence in the 90s, that's when you really start to get this, it's seemingly and someone could correct me if I'm wrong, this actual solidifying of what are we? And seeing because I mean that's where you get the changes of okay no we should be focusing on the Ukrainian language not this bilingual state this hyper focus and celebration specifically of Ukrainian culture to make it aware in people's minds. One of the great conversations I had was with a guy in a bar in Rostov his half of his family Ukrainian living around that region. [36:06] Again everyone you goddamn meet in this area there's cross-border families no one's some kind of rabid nationalist just for their side. It's not like I'm Bosnian, I'm Croatian or something. There's no crossover. No, there's massive crossover in ethnic times. But he mentioned that he used to go on holiday to Ukraine all the time. And he had gone to the 2000s, everything was cool, meet anywhere you want, no problem. And then around about 2014 and there throughout he started just getting random hostility from people he's on holiday with as if you know He'd like murdered 14 Ukrainian babies or something like we talking to them in Russian. They're talking [36:48] Russian to him because they think he's from Ukrainian Russian province and then if I don't hear some the Russian Federation They just stopped talking to him and they start talking Ukrainian and refused to use the Russian language, So what the hell was that about and then ever since this guy was mentioning he's been on so many more holidays, even before the special operation. And it just got worse and worse and worse. I still haven't been to Ukraine. I'd love to go if it's safe. I don't know how badly some people might take the video I made there, but I'm happy to show the Ukrainian side as well. I'm not got problem with that. But my best guess from what I can see and what I heard is that the Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian culture really is something new in historical terms in the way it is now. And that proper split of when nothing to do with Russia is very new. What was it like when you were getting the bus down to Luhansk? You're kind of thinking, well, I'm going to somewhere which is on the edge of a war zone that's disputed territory. Were you slightly apprehensive going down there? [37:54] So when we got on the bus from Rostov, you then get to the old border, and that's what the border checkpoint is, about hour three and a half into that checkpoint I did honestly sit there and think, what am I doing with my life? Why don't I just stay home? Why don't I just play video games? Who cares? Oh God. Cause you don't know. Maybe the phone call gets made and the guy at the top just goes, arrest him. Fuck him. Like, who is this? Thankfully it got to someone and they just said, yes. Um, don't know who, [38:21] Thanks bro. And then when you get on the bus to the war zone and I honestly, I felt great. Um, don't know if there's something wrong with me, but [38:32] there's something about, I was the same with Afghanistan. I don't know how to put this into words, probably. Maybe you've had this in Eastern Europe when it was less lawful as well. There's something about those kind of places where everything's a bit serious in the regard of only serious things matter, life or death matters. Whether or not you've got a vaccine passport, it's like the stupidest question you could ever ask, that kind of environment. I love it. Because it doesn't feel like you're being controlled anymore, even though everything around you is men with guns, army soldiers, people who could probably kill you if they had no reason to but just felt like it. [39:14] It still feels freer in that way. Am I making any kind of sense? Well, I think the seriousness comes from that life can be harder in those places. And I think in the West we have entertained ourselves to death where there actually life is, you're right, more serious. Here life is what you want to watch on YouTube that evening or that day. It's, or how many likes you have for something that's life is reduced down to that trivialness where there it is life and death. It is more serious. It's way more real. And you actually care about like what you're going to eat tonight, for example, such a, mundane thing. But like I genuinely was thinking about, Oh God, what we're going to have dinner. And so the kind of stress you get from that is almost rewarding in a way. I was trying to have this conversation today about like the acceptance of corruption and why it makes life better. I don't mean bribery, but I was thinking about some more. So when I got on the plane from Afghanistan on the way back. [40:13] I get to this front of the queue, blah, blah, blah, blah, sorry, man, I don't speak Pashtun English. Oh, no problem, sir. And then they take my bag, they wrap it up, And then the guy says, vaccine passport, sir. [40:26] I ain't got a vaccine. He didn't need a vaccine to get into Afghanistan. So I look at him and just go, I ain't got one. He looks at me like utter confusion, like he's never had this before. Gets his supervisor up, the supervisor just looks at him just annoyed and just goes. [40:42] Walks off and the guy just goes, oh bugger off. Just lets me through. [40:47] When like someone who's getting paid minimum wage turns down the stupid pointless laws that we all know are stupid and pointless. It's just a much better life. If he was checking the bag and said, did you put a bomb there? And I said, well, yeah, but you know, I want to blow up the plane. He obviously would have arrested me on the spot. He doesn't not care about serious things. But when it comes to stupid stuff like your vaccine pass, no one gives a crap. And they shouldn't give a crap in that country. But you do that in the West. It's still illegal for me to go to the United States because of the vaccine stuff. If I get that some TSA agent is going to be like, we haven't got it, you've got to go back. [41:24] Bro, what the hell do you care? You're getting paid minimum wage to work in the TSA. You give a crap about the vaccine? No, like you shouldn't for Christ's sake. And it's, we had that in the UK as well. It's not even that rare to us. Remember when Boris was caught with his pants down, he was having parties and the day after, none of those rules applied anymore. Security guys didn't bother trying to stop people for not wearing masks. Nobody gave a crap. We had that culture for a day there. That's what I mean. The fact that those petty laws mean nothing. And when I was in Luhansk and you're back in a zone it's, you know, state of war. [41:59] None of that petty crap means anything. I don't know, it's something spiritually that just makes you happier in a really messed up way because you're in a really messed up place. It's liberating. [42:14] When I last time was flying from Bulgaria and you had to wear masks, it must have been last summer, and everyone had to wear a mask. You wear a mask, they all get on the plane and as soon as they're sitting down, they all just drop it down to their chin. Literally, all the Bulgarians. [42:34] Here, people would have it up over their nose. Here, of course, you've got the, Air Stewardesses checking people. I know I've got friends, Air Stewardesses, and they said they spent all their time checking masks. Where in Bulgaria, they realized it just was a load of crap. Therefore, they didn't, they kind of would pay lip service, but really they knew it was nonsense where in the UK they paid not only did they pay lip service, but they believed, everything they were told. And it's that ability to think for yourselves. And it's quite weird when you come from the West. And so that's what I noticed. I guess you noticed that as well, that they just don't fit in and don't accept things just because you're told them. Yeah, I mean, like a chap in the chat is mentioning anarchism. It's not anarchism. Like in it was the same thing with Afghanistan and Luhansk there is utter security in your position, no one's gonna kill you for no reason, you know if you blaspheme or something in Afghanistan you're buggered but don't do that if uh there's an ISIS terrorist in Afghanistan, there's Taliban every hundred meters with guns that dude's dead before he gets to you in Luhansk there are tanks and army soldiers everywhere, someone tries to start something they're getting arrested or shot immediately you couldn't feel safer in terms of like no one's gonna stab me it's not, It's not like you're in Birmingham. There's none of that, personal threat. [43:51] But the actual rules of life matter again, the things the state are doing, is actually something you can respect, security. That's the number one concern. That's what's actually going on. But none of this, oh, nonsense. Mentality exists. Andrew Tate actually described this in a really interesting way. And maybe you'll get it as well. He was in Romania. He walks into the gas station. And the Romanian guy goes, you need a mask and he just, I don't know, sorry, I thought the story wrong. He's in the UK, goes to a gas station, the guy says, you need a mask. He's like, bro, I filled up the car, here's the money. He says, no, you need to wear a mask before I can make you pay. He's like. [44:31] If you take the money or I'm leaving with the gas for free, I don't. [44:35] I'm not putting on a mask. What are you talking about? The dude starts losing it and he's like, no, you have to wear a mask or I can't take your money. Bro, you're getting paid minimum wage to, to work in a gas station? What the hell do you care? Like if Shell have this policy of you worst man, you think the CEO of Shell gives a crap if the new customer walking in is wearing a mask when he pays. No, nobody cares. This rule is meaningless. Everyone in the room knows it. And yeah, I don't know if it's our Protestant work ethic or something, but the Anglosphere worker who's getting paid minimum wage just goes, the rules are the rules, like a German. And he's just like, yeah, must implement the rules. No one's going to make him implement those rules. He does it to himself. [45:15] And then Tate mentions, you do that in Romania. Same situation. You walk in, the Iranian guy will say, sir, you must wear a mask. And you say, I'm not doing it. And the Romanian worker will go, eh. Not because he wouldn't do that if you were like, I'm not going to pay. [45:31] You've got to pay. That's important. But on stupid nonsensical rules, I don't waste my time with this. And we don't have that in the West. It annoys the crap out of me.   I remember some Bulgarians telling me you have to wear a mask because they were wearing one on their chin. It's just like, it's so weird. Do you realize it's just like a piss take? It's like, we don't give a shit. You kind of pretend. It's like, yeah, so weird. But it's that part of the outside. Once you get outside the Western world, that's really the metric. It's not like corruption and bribery or the law doesn't apply. It's the, I'm not listening to nonsense mindset. And you have that in spades in Russia of the people? So I can appreciate that of the people. Sure, there's other problems. Sure, no, I don't agree with those things. But when I talk about this thing, and you'll recognize it as well in Bulgaria, Tate recognized in Romania, really the ex-Soviet nations really know how to go. I don't care what the dear leader's saying. For a good reason. One thing I want to ask you that actually didn't really talk about, I don't think, but I live in London and sometimes it's difficult to find English people living in London. I assume over there in Russia it's still fairly Russian. I guess it hasn't been hit by the multicultural nonsense. [46:59] So this is a big criticism of Putin from the Russian nationalists I found on both the trips I've done there. And it's true, it's a valid criticism, which is that if you go to Moscow, for example, yep, there's a lot of Russians, but they have some of the same problems we have. The reason for this is because not only is the Russian Federation a huge country, huge amount of ethnic diversity just because it's so big, and there are loads of ethnic republics inside that are made up of ethnic minorities that travel all over the place. They also have the Kazakhstan border, which is ridiculously huge. They don't really man it. They don't really have the ability to man it. So that's not happening. In which case, they have loads of illegals, not to mention the legal immigration from those countries, because the quality of life working in Moscow as a taxi driver is way better, blah, blah, blah. One of the funny stories I got told, so there's a huge amount of those people in Moscow, which is visible, especially in the taxi drivers. One of the stories I got told is that the mayor of Moscow was talking about the fact that they're putting up Uzbek language signs below the Russian signs in this district in Moscow because the Uzbeks are taking too long in the metro. They'll get out, they'll stare at the signs, they don't really know where, they're going. So he's putting up the Uzbek language. And this lady's telling me the story and I'm looking at her like, lady, I've been here three days, I can read Cyrillic. You're [48:18] telling me these people live in Moscow and they can't read a Russian metro sign about, which street they live on. It was just kind of strange that kind of cuck-oldery in that sense of having no standards for your ethnic minorities. You treat them like children. You should just give up all of your culture and language and everything else because, oh, well, they can't read the signs. Learn to read then. I mean, it's not a big ask, learning to read. So they do have those problems as well. It's just nowhere near what we have in the UK. And for them, it's really only in these, big hubs like Moscow where all the money is. So, you know, I don't, this is why I mean by like some sections of the right who have never been to Russia, don't know anything about it, will fetishize, Putin and be like, yeah, he's tough on immigration and whatnot. Yeah, it compared to us, sure. But it doesn't mean there's no problems. And it's [49:14] again, same solution, which is just say no. We're not putting up Uzbek language signs. Learn to read, you goddamn losers. That's the correct response. What do you mean you can't read? Education's free.   Exactly. Let's finish off on food. Looking for food you got McDuck. I'm kind of thinking, did you order a big duck and that just doesn't sound right. Tell us about it because these places, obviously, Western companies have pulled out and then you get McDuck. What was that like?   It probably takes a little bit slower. In the Russian Federation, the old Russia, the Western companies pulled out. You've got mainly the ones you'll find in day-to-day life. Ikea isn't there. Very few Russians went to Ikea. It's very much a rich person thing. So it means nothing. You've got McDonald's, which has been changed to its tasty full stop. It's now run by some Russian guy, all the profits stay in Russia. Supply chains are all the same. All the food comes from Russia. Nothing's changed. So great. That's actually a net win for them. They're no longer sending money to the McDonald's USA company. Starbucks, same deal. There were a couple of others you'll find in day to day life. [50:35] Again, all the products don't come from the West. So, I mean, remember the West is basically a service economy for a place like Russia, and in which case they can do the services. It's not hard. In fact, they could pay Russians to do it, save money. [50:49] And then in Luhansk, because that used to be Ukraine and has been for eight years in a state, of conflicts, they care even less about copyright laws. So they opened McDuck, which I still have the wrappers for. [51:02] And that's the McDonald's there. Yeah, it literally has the Disney font, which is illegal. And they have the Disney characters that they put out, which I guess is illegal. What was weird there is that the interior design of McDonald's, remember when it used to be black and white squares or whatever, and then they changed it so it was those wavy patterns, and they had these wooden things behind the benches that would have gaps missing. Yeah, like slats.   Yeah, you know the kind of design I'm thinking of? That's what they have in Ukraine, Luhansk, the Russian territory, because it's just not been touched in like eight years, it's still clean. All the fryers make the same beeping noises. [51:40] You could buy a black bread Big Mac, which I didn't do because I don't like a black bread. But in Russia, they've got the modern ones because it's only a year ago that changed. When I asked people about all of that, no one could have given a crap. This is something I really, I'm kind of annoyed about that the delusion so many people have in the West about Russia, they think it's just like the West, and it's just as effective as if we lost McDonald's tomorrow, people would be freaking out. [52:12] McDonald's was even only in quite good places in Russia. The people who went there, Russian people don't like McDonald's all that much. They've got their own fast foods, which are frankly better. Smoked salmon is so easy to get there for some reason, so cheap compared to your crappy Big Mac. And even then [52:31] If you're a Russian and some company does that, not only do you not care. If they ever came back, you're not going to go back and shop with them because they betrayed your country. So it's a lose-lose on that front. Places like Burger King hasn't left. They're making bank. McDonald's left, but they're open. So our biggest competitor decided to leave the country. What a retard. Make loads of money. And for the companies doing that, the argument is made that, oh, maybe they did it for moral reasons. [53:01] You think any of these companies do anything for moral? Are you high? No. They're not doing it for Ukrainian nationalism reasons either. None of these companies are Ukrainian. None of them have big markets in Ukraine. They've done this because some letter was sent from the White House. All their CEOs are actually that dumb and have just been taken on with the current thing and jumped in on it. I don't think any of these CEOs actually care about the morality question in any of this. And I cannot stress enough things in Russia are not collapsing as a result of the sanctions. I was re-watching the YouTube channel called LaserPig. I quite like the guy. I've got nothing against him. I love his content. Tank stuff. Love that. Anyway, so he did some videos about when the war started and I was going back and just checking out, what people were saying when it first kicked off. And one of the predictions he makes, for example, is like, oh, the conditions in Russia are perfect for being about the same as the Russian Revolution in 1918. You know, it was sort of a weird thing to say then after being there, food's cheaper than ever. Gas is cheaper than ever. I don't know if you saw it's 19 pence for unlimited gas in the Luhansk. I saw you enjoying just watching gas burn.   Oh, it was great. [54:21] Life could not be more normal. I met people who were anti-Putin as well. I met people who were anti-special operation, anti-war, all of that. And I asked them, what's changed then for you? Because I mean, you're not gonna tell me everything's fine because you're some Russian nationalist who just is sitting there writing Zeds on everything you find. And they just, all of them without thought were just like, well, not really anything. The only lady I could find who told me anything changed was she worked in selling high-tech equipment. So like high tech cameras or high tech computer systems, right? And she said, so I asked her, well, OK, that must have been blocked off now, because those companies aren't doing it in Russia. And she says, no. I said, what do you mean? Is it where they fly to Kazakhstan and then the plane flies to Moscow? So the worst thing that's happened to them on a human level is like really high tech stuff is up 20% in cost. And only rich people were buying that anyway, so they don't give a crap. And like when I went to the GUM, the GYM, the richest place, the Harrods of Russia and all the Western stores have a little sign that's saying down due to technical issues. They're all still paying rent. They all still have equipment. They also have the lights on in those stores. They are just waiting for the right time to reopen those stores. They do not want to give up those spots. They make mad money on those things in normal circumstances. And those companies, again, if you're rich and you want to buy Louis Vuitton and you're Putin's mistress, easily done. Kazakhstan exists. We'll fly it in darling. [55:50] It really kind of hurts me that it seems to have done so little, not because I necessarily want Russians to suffer or something, but just because I am being endlessly propagandized in the West, but trust me, something's being, nothing is being done. The average life of an average Russian has not been affected at all. The rich Russians, not affected at all. If someone wants to make an argument about like their banking industry has taken a hit, and maybe there's some long-term effects there, you can argue. Sure, I don't know anything about that, so I'm not going to speak on it. But if someone wants to think that the average life is about to make the Russian population rise up and overthrow, and you're not living in reality, come back down. Okay. For them, life is more normal than it's ever been. Something weird is happening in our country to do with war. Okay. I'm Russian. That happens every 20 years. It's not new. [56:39] So here, while our fuel bills have quadrupled, actually we're still winning. Even though family finances are decimated. It's a weird winning. Very weird. I actually played a game with everyone I met, even the border guards. So I messaged a mate of mine, I was like, so what's the average gas bill? Because I only have electricity in my apartment here. And he's a landlord, so he's got a few apartments and friends. So he told me, okay, so there's this lady who pays this much. That's about average right now. And so I converted it into roubles and show everyone. Same reaction every single time. [57:12] Serious not that serious. Yes. Yes true. Oh. [57:20] Then they'd ask me how much does the average English person make convert it back into roubles, It's not enough for them to think that's normal because they were like you this much of your salary goes on just gas. [57:33] Yeah, there are so many people in this part of the civilization, who I found are still deluded into thinking that they're living some cold, miserable hell, and we're the ones who are doing just a little bit rough around the winter. No, man, we're really suffering and they're not noticing it. [57:54] That's the truth of the matter. You can be mad about that, you can wish it was the opposite, it's not. Just final thought is that what you talked about, they don't survive on McDonald's, not a big thing if they lose these brands. I think a sign that the West has collapsed is people sitting at home being able to order a McDonald's to come to your home. It's just literally bonkers that actually our populations in the West are living on McDonald's. Just, a sad state of affairs. You can get it with a bike directly to your front door. What am I? And you said salmon maybe? No, no, no. Let's go for a Big Mac and fries. Okay. I'm imagining you looking out the window, seeing Deliveroo and just be like, this is the end of the West. Because I eat a lot of McDonald's. I happen to have a McDonald's right next to my apartment. So pro tip, double cheeseburger, small fries, three quid. [58:52] Best cost for money you can get. And I quite like the concept. It's a very capitalistic mindset, maximize calories, lowest cost, all that stuff gets the rightest part of my capitalist brain. Excited. I know a friend who used to work at McDonald's and he loved the calculation of how quickly you could wrap stuff, would save this many pennies and all that nonsense. [59:15] But if you're really deluded enough to think without McDonald's, Russia is finished or Saudi Arabia is finished or China is finished or some other country you don't like. [59:24] Number one, you're high. Number two, what happens when Burger King stays? That's right, nothing. Nothing happens. And we really seem to have a lot less power than we think we do. The idea that Western sanctions will really cripple the enemy in North Korea, yeah. In Iran, apparently it had some large effect. In a place like Russia that has all the damn resources, it couldn't mean less. Like, we've got all this stuff, it's just the services we don't have. High-level things but if you've already set them up for them. Okay, copy paste. Copyright, what's that?   Yeah, and of course they still have access to the Chinese markets. So what Britain says, we're not buying or whatever, that's okay, we'll just go to China.   You guys don't make anything anymore. Like the world really has changed about who makes things, who's important in that dynamic, and we mentally haven't caught up to that. We aren't, leveraging what we have and instead thinking, oh, we can make them suffer with this, and it doesn't work. [1:00:26] Callum, thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts. I don't know whether an African shithole country is going to be next on your list.   I mean, if you have any recommendations. I think I recommended Zimbabwe. I was thinking about turning up in a Rhodesian light infantry uniform. I just go and see what's left of Rhodesia. But I called a mate who used to be there, he's like, yeah, they'll probably kill you. I was like, maybe not.   Well, the guy you met, the weird guy, the dancing guy, the moustache guy, some undercover terrorist guy. Evgeny. No, no, no. He's like a soldier slash, you know, soldier of fortune. I don't know. I was just thinking whether Lotus Eaters would have paid your ransom. I could see this going horribly wrong. Originally, he didn't ask for any money either. He was just like, yeah, I'll do it for free. By the time I'd ruined his week, I was just like, yeah, here's 100 quid. Thanks for joining us. And our viewers and listeners, obviously Britannica Politica, you can find the videos there in the description. And however you're watching, the links should be in there. Or if you're listening on podcasting apps, the links are also there. So, Callum, Thank you once again for joining us. [1:01:47] Thanks so much for having me. I'll come around next time I go to some hellhole. No, no, you didn't bring any AK-47s back or t-shirts, no? [1:01:57] I got some Hello Kitty t-shirts actually. Maybe I should sell stuff. Have you still got Hello Kitty? Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know how much of that I could say. So I've got all the Russian stuff, still I've got some merch. Got on my Twitter page. There's a full list there of the things, Afghan, Serbian and Russian stuff. If it has a quote teat selling sold out, it's sold out. If it don't, I probably got it. Message me on Twitter or SubscribeStar. If you want to support me, subscribe to SubscribeStar. But the Hello Kitty shirts. So guy I knew in Afghan, I said to him, like, bring them to the UK. I'll come pick them up. He did that. [1:02:33] Bad news. He's gone bye-bye now. So the shirts I have are the last shirts I'm ever getting. So limited supply.   Like all your friends keep dying in these places. It's weird. Well, I mean, it's not Miami. That is true. That is true. Give us your handle again on Twitter. I think it's @akkadsecretary. It's called Callum. There's a picture of me with Luhansk sign behind me and a couple of Russian soldiers off to kill people. Who knows? And people can click on the subscribe star there and they can actually support your extensive travels.   Yeah. Again, if you go to the YouTube channel, you'll find these things fairly easily around there somewhere. Okay. Perfect. Well, on that, I'll say goodbye to our viewers and we'll see you on Saturday with David Vance and his week's review of the news. So thank you very much for tuning in, for watching. Have a good rest of your Thursday. We'll see you back on Saturday. Thank you very much and good night to you all.

Babur begins his invasion of Afghanistan but has to deal with the Uzbek warlord, Shaybani Khan.

War A to Z▪️Abbas I The Great▪️Born - January 27 1571, IranDied - January 19 1629, Iran▪️Wars/Battles of Note - Uzbek-Persian Wars, Turko-Persian Wars, Mogul-Persian Wars, Tabriz 1603,Sis 1606, Siege of Baghdad 1624-1626▪️Through a combination of guile, patience, and determination, Abbas the Great ruled a powerful Persian state for over forty years. Upon taking the throne he faced threats from every direction including the vaunted Janissaries of the Turks and the mighty Mogul Empire to the south. Understanding that he could only deal with one enemy at a time, Abbas prioritized each opponent and then in turn dealt with the Uzbeks, Ottomans, Moguls, and even the Portuguese. His was court of culture and when not campaigning he was a powerful patron of the arts and builder of beautiful cities. On his death the Persian Empire ran from the Indus River to the Tigris River.▪️Rate/Review/Subscribe

BBC Urdu's team of reporters has travelled across Pakistan to report on the impact of the recent floods, which have killed more than 1,200 people and displaced many more. Umer Draz Nangiana went to Rajanpur in southern Punjab to meet the farmers who've lost their homes and crops. Egypt gets serious about dominoes In Egypt dominoes is mostly an old-fashioned game played by men in local cafes. But now the Minister of Youth and Sports wants to give it a new image and get Egyptians competing at international level. BBC Arabic's Aya Hashim, herself a player, attended the country's first national dominoes championship. "Small eating" in South Korea “Mukbang” videos became famous in South Korea with viewers watching hosts eat enormous quantities of food online. But now it's being challenged by “small eating," showing people apparently full after eating only a small bite. So what's behind the change, and is it any healthier? BBC Korean's Yuna Ku finds out. Watermelons in Ukraine Why have watermelons become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance? BBC Monitoring journalist Margaryta Maliukova remembers watermelons from Kherson, and unpicks the watermelon-based social media memes. Colombia's new anti-drugs proposals The newly elected left-wing president of Colombia has proposed an overhaul of the country's anti-drugs policy, ending the US-supported ‘war on drugs'. Gustavo Petro wants to stop the eradication of coca crops and the extradition to the US of traffickers, as Luis Fajardo of BBC Monitoring explains. American Uzbeks and the American Dream Ibrat Safo of BBC Uzbek has travelled across the United States to make a documentary series about Uzbeks who've made new lives in America. He tells us about the stories and dreams he discovered, from pursuing business success, to finding religious freedom, to becoming the person you want to be. (Photo: Floods in South Punjab Pakistan. Credit: BBC)

VLOG: UAE spy Barrack cites My Cousin Vinny, Uzbeks launder money b/c corruption; UN diplomat rapist Q dodged by UN, ignored by @StateDeputySpox like 9/11 victims case @SDNYLIVE

From 1313 to 1341, Özbeg Khan oversaw what is normally  described as the Golden Horde's Golden age. As our last episode on Özbeg discussed, things were not going quite so golden for old Özbeg. The appellation of golden age belies the troubles which were growing ready to rock the Golden Horde. As our last episode looked at Özbeg and the Golden Horde's relations south and east, with the other Mongol khanates and the Mamluk Sultanate, today we take you west and north, to see how Özbeg interacted with the powers of Eastern Europe and the Rus' principalities. I'm your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   What appears almost shocking at a cursory glance, is that despite so many authors claiming Özbeg's glory, he also oversaw its first loss of Golden Horde territory. We'll begin in the Balkans, and work our way north. On his accession, Özbeg had continued the policy of the late Toqta Khan, by keeping the Bulgarian lands a part of the Horde, backed up by Mongol military presence. Özbeg's support was important for the Bulgarian tsars in this period: the Tsar from 1323 to 1330, Georgi Terter's son Michael Shishman, relied heavily on Mongol military support and kept one of his sons at Özbeg's court as a royal hostage. At the battle of Velbuzjd in 1330, a Bulgarian and Mongol army was defeated by the Serbians, in which Tsar Micheal Shishman was killed. The threat of a military response from Özbeg is probably what kept the Serbians from pressing their advantage. The journey of a Bulgarian embassy to Cairo in 1331 resulted in the Mamluk chronicler al-Umarī to report that despite fighting between the Bulgarians and Serbs, both respected Özbeg due to his great power over them. Though it was not comparable to the influence Nogai had once wielded over the region, the presentation of contemporary chronicles is that the Bulgarian lands remained dependent on the Golden Horde; Bulgaria, for example, was the base from which the Mongols launched attacks on Byzantium, rather than seen as a country they passed through. It was the eventual loss of this Mongol backing that would result in Bulgaria's vulnerability to Ottoman expansion at the end of the century.    Like Toqta, Özbeg too married an illegitimate daughter of the Byzantine Emperor, this time of Andronikos III in 1331. This wife was called by the Mongols Bayalun Khatun, and Ibn Battuta accompanied her when she returned to Constantinople to give birth. The impetus was to dissuade further attacks by Özbeg, for Özbeg had resumed raiding the Byzantine Empire. Annual attacks from 1321 to 1323, the largest coming in 1323 and causing a great deal of damage. Raids at first ceased with the marriage of 1331, but when Bayalun refused to come back to the Horde after returning to Constantinople to give birth, attacks resumed. The last recorded assault came in 1337, advancing as far as the Hellespont. Supposedly in response to the failure of Constantinople to supply its annual tribute, the Horde army spent 50 days plundering Thrace, and in the process defeated a Turkish force sent across the straits by a growing beylik in northwestern Anatolia, the Osmanoğlu. Though you may know them better as the Ottomans. So ended the last recorded attack by the Golden Horde on the Byzantine Empire. Sometimes this is compared as a symbolic act, the passing of the torch from Mongol to Ottoman, from old conqueror to new, when it came to the main threat to the region. In 1341 a Byzantine embassy was sent to the Horde to mollify Özbeg, but arrived after his death.   While in truth Özbeg's attacks on the Byzantine Empire were raids rather than efforts at conquest, he apparently played them up somewhat in his own court as great victories over Christian powers. Ibn Battuta, during his visit to Özbeg, presents the Khan as a great victor over the enemies of God who undertook jihad against Constantinople. Özbeg, it must be clarified, never showed any attempt at conquering that famous city, and his military actions against Europe all seem considerably minor efforts compared to his wars against the Ilkhanate.   Along the borders of the Hungarian Kingdom, troops of the Horde —perhaps not always with Özbeg's permission— raided regularly, especially in Transylvania. However these assaults could now be repulsed, as Hungary was rejuvenated under the skillful leadership of a new dynasty, headed by Charles I of Hungary. On occasion Charles led attacks onto dependencies of the Horde or of Bulgaria.  It is remarkable that most of these raids are known only indirectly; often only from charters, where an individual was rewarded for fighting against the Mongols, rather than through any chronicle mention. Özbeg may have preferred indirect pressure, by supporting the former Hungarian vassal, the voivode of Wallachia, a fellow named Basarab. There is no shortage of debate around Basarab and early Wallachia, and we'll avoid it here; the exact origins and timeline of the emergence of this principality is very far from agreed upon. Established on the border regions of modern Romania and Moldova, these were lands otherwise under control of the Golden Horde. Basarab himself is a target of many arguments; his name suggests a Turkic, likely Cuman origin, however contemporary sources consistently describe him as a Vlakh, a member of the Romance-language-speaking community which today mainly refers to the Romanians. Depending on how his father's name is reconstructed, it appears either recognizably Mongol, or even Hungarian. While initially a subject of the Hungarian King, by the end of the 1320s Basarab was at war with the Hungarians, and decisively defeated them at the battle of Posada in 1330. There is indirect indication that Basarab had some military support from the Golden Horde.   The independence of Wallachia appears a part of the gradual secession of authority of the Golden Horde over its westernmost border. Most dramatically was this apparent through today's Ukraine and Belarus, where the influence of Lithuania grew at the expense of the Golden Horde. Early Lithuanian-Mongol contacts over the thirteenth century seem to have consisted of raids in both directions. Several times did Nogai provide armies for Rus' princes to attack the Lithuanians, while the Lithuanians took advantage of the initial Mongol invasion in the 1240s to raid deep into the Rus' lands. The transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century is one of poor coverage for Lithuanian history; scattered Lithuanians princes of the 1200s appear in the 1300s unified and consolidated under the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, particularly from Duke Gediminas onwards. By the 1320s, Gediminas was in position to influence the succession over Galicia-Volhynia, in today's western Ukraine and Belarus and at the time subject to the Golden Horde. Between 1321 and 1323, the young princes of Ruthenia died without heir. The King of Poland Władysław I, the Lithuanian Duke Gedminas, and Khan  Özbeg were all very interested in the succession. While  Özbeg may have been caught up in his conflicts with the Ilkhanate, at this time the Polish King wrote to the Pope fearing a Mongol attack, and in 1324 Mongol ambassadors were in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Threats and diplomacy, rather than open war, was the means by which the three powers came to a conclusion. An acceptable candidate to replace the deceased princes was selected in the form of Yurii II Boleslaw, a fellow of Polish, Ruthenian and Lithaunian background, a Catholic who converted to Orthodox Christianity, and who married a daughter of Duke Gediminas. And what did  Özbeg get out of it? The continuation of tribute from Galicia-Volhynia.    This willingness for diplomacy with these western neighbours seems surprising, but the sources indicate it was very much  Özbeg's preferred order of operations in this theater. In 1331, a brother of Lithuania's Duke Gediminas was installed in Kyiv, alongside a Mongol basqaq, or tax collector. In what has been termed a Lithuanain-Mongol condominium, it seems the arrangement was that these westernmost Rus' lands paid tribute and military service both to Lithuania, and the Golden Horde. As noted by historian Darius Baronas, news of this arrangement made it as far as France, where a French poet in the 1330s described Lithuania as paying tribute to the Golden Horde. It seems that  Özbeg's calculation was simple;  Özbeg wanted the income from these western Rus' principalities, but didn't desire war over them, intent as he was on focusing his forces on the Ilkhanate. The frontier with Lithuania and Poland was long, the region as a whole rather peripheral. It was cheaper and more convenient to give the administration over to the Lithuanians while still retaining the income. When necessary the threat of the Horde's horsemen could be levied; in 1333 there was a raid on Briansk, then under Lithuanian control. Meanwhile the Lithuanians could avoid open conflict with the Mongols, allowing them to deal more fully with those troublesome Teutontic Knights. It would not be until the end of  Özbeg's life that this arrangement was challenged, but until that point it proved remarkably flexible and workable to all involved, except for those at the bottom of the ladder now  being taxed twice. But  Özbeg, however clever he thought he was, had given a foothold for Lithuanian expansion which would soon push right to the Black Sea coastline.  In 1340 when Yuri Boleslaw of Galicia-Volhynia died, the King of Poland Casimir III invaded, but quickly withdrew as the threat of Mongol retaliation mounted. While border clashes with Poland, and soon Hungary, commenced,  Özbeg actually engaged in diplomacy even with Pope Benedict XII, notifying his holiness of  Özbeg's displeasure. Papa Benedict even offered to make the Kings of Poland and Hungary pay for damages Özbeg incurred because of them. A far cry from the days of the khans demanding the submission of the Popes, but the matter was not resolved before Özbeg's death in 1341.   And what of the Rus'? Here  Özbeg intervened most forcefully, particularly compared to his predecessors. On  Özbeg's enthronement in 1313, the lead prince of the Rus', Grand Prince Mikhail of Tver', spent two years cozying up to  Özbeg in his court, eager to secure his support. In his absence from the Rus' Principalities, Mikhail's rivals got to work. His main foe was his cousin, Yurii Daniilovich, the Prince of Moscow. A grandson of the famous Alexander Nevskii, Yurii was a man overflowing with ambition. While Mikhail of Tver' was with  Özbeg in his ordu, Yurii of Moscow stormed Novgorod and took it for himself. Mikhail convinced  Özbeg to give him an army, and in 1315 they retook Novgorod. Yurii of Moscow was summoned to  Özbeg, ostensibly for punishment. But the silver tongued Yurii managed to work his way into  Özbeg's favour, with this one simple trick: convincing  Özbeg that he would be able to collect more tax revenues than Mikhail. For this, he received a yarliq installing him as Grand Prince of Vladimir, the chief Prince of the Rus', as well as receiving a sister of  Özbeg in marriage. Konchaka was her name, and she was baptized a Christian, taking the name of Agatha.   Full of confidence and the Khan's blessing, Yurii then attacked Mikhail of Tver', and was promptly defeated. Yurii fled the field, while his newly betrothed Konchaka was taken captive by Mikhail. The Prince of Tver' tried to tread carefully; in the Nikonian Chronicle,  Mikhail treats the captured Mongol generals and troops respectfully, showering them with honours, gifts and releases many of them. His intention was to re-earn Özbeg's favour, and be reinstalled as the Grand Prince. Unfortunately for him,  Özbeg's sister Konchaka then died in Tver's captivity, in mysterious circumstances. As you might guess, this was not exactly beneficial to any reelection campaign. Mikhail of Tver' was put on trial on Özbeg's court, and after several months of deliberation, Mikhail was condemned and executed in 1318. Yurii of Moscow was thus confirmed as Grand Prince by  Özbeg.   The significance of this is twofold. Firstly, the khans had previously confirmed as Grand Prince whoever was presented to them, and thus followed Riurikid tradition. That is, succession as Grand Prince normally went brother-to-brother, before passing onto the next generation.  Özbeg upended this by choosing the new candidate out-of-order, generationally speaking. Yurii of Moscow, as the son of Nevskii's third son Daniil of Moscow, was very much out of place in this rota system while the previous generation was still alive. Furthermore, this was the first time that the Princes of Moscow received the title of Grand Prince. Moscow had been a minor settlement before the Mongol invasion. Because of  Özbeg's confirmation of the title onto Yurii, Moscow was put onto the steady course to, in time, ‘gather the lands of the Rus', and eventually swallow up the remnants of the Golden Horde. But that was still some centuries ahead.   Yurii was not to enjoy his position as Grand Prince for long. After being confirmed by  Özbeg he returned to Rus' where he was met with angry princes and an angry population. The late Mikhail of Tver's sons swore bloody vengeance. Unable was Yurii to provide the promised volumes of tax. In 1322  Özbeg removed Yurii from his post, and by 1325 Yurii was murdered by Dmitri the Terrible-Eyes, a son of Mikhail of Tver'. Dmitri was executed by  Özbeg the next year, but the Grand Princely title was given to Dmitri's brother, Alexander of Tver'. Nearly did it seem that Tver' would monopolize the position; Tver's wealth was then greater than Moscow's, their right to rule better recognized internally in Rus'. So it would have stayed, until 1327, when there was an uprising in Tver' which resulted in the killing of several of Özbeg's officials. Tver' was then sacked as punishment and Grand Prince Alexander Mikhailovich fled for his life. And who stepped into the vacant spot of Grand Prince? Well, the brother of Yurii of Moscow, Ivan Daniilovich. Or as he is better known to posterity, Ivan I Kalita; Ivan “the purse,” or more usually translated as money-bags.   Ivan, as you may guess by his sobriquet, proved quite adept at providing Özbeg the much desired tax revenue. Enjoying the position of Grand Prince of Vladimir until his death in the 1340s,  Ivan Kalita's lengthy time in the position solidified Moscow's monopoly over the Grand Princely title, and began in earnest its ascendency. For Kalita greatly enriched the city itself, bringing other holdings to its authority and thereby turned the once minor city into one of the most eminent of the Rus' principalities. The Metropolitan of the Rus' Orthodox Church moved to Moscow in the 1320s, which also cemented it as the centre of Rus' Christianity, politically. On his death he was succeeded by his son Simeon —confirmed of course by  Özbeg Khan— as Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir, and so the title remained among their line. Ivan Kalita's descendents would transform Moscow and the Rus' principalities into the Tsardom of Russia, and ruled until the sixteenth century, when the extinct Rurikids gave way to the Romanovs.   But such dreams of conquest were far off in the mid-fourteenth century. Rus' history should not be read backwards. The fourteenth century Daniilovichi, the Moscow princely line, were not in a contest for independence against the khan. Far from it. As they had in effect, usurped the succession to the Grand Principality, and had numerous rivals due to it, the Princes of Moscow relied greatly on the khans for their legitimacy. The Grand Prince was the most important tax collector for the khan, and the basis had now been established for the khan to remove him if desired. And  Özbeg was not above reminding the Rus' of his might; some ten Rus' princes were executed on  Özbeg's order, more than any of his predecessors had done combined. As long as the Princes of Moscow kept bringing in the revenue that the khan wanted, then Özbeg kept the Daniilovichi propped up against any threat. Without the Golden Horde, there was therefore, no rise of Moscow.   When it came to the succession to the Golden Horde itself, as noted in our previous episode Özbeg had violently trimmed the Jochid lineage, hoping to ensure only his sons could succeed him. His favoured heir, Temür, predeceased him, leaving Özbeg with two troublesome boys; Tini Beg, and Jani Beg. Tini Beg seems to have been the favourite to succeed Özbeg, and after the death of Qutlugh-Temür, Tini Beg became the governor of Khwarezm on behalf of his father. A possible indication of falling out between though, comes from coinage minted near the end of Özbeg's life. Then, coins begin to be minted bearing the names of Özbeg and Jani Beg, and letters from foreign rulers were addressed to Özbeg and Jani Beg, perhaps suggesting Jani Beg had taken the #2 role in the khanate. Sadly our information on the internal situation on the Jochid court is scant, preventing us from making any proper conclusions or charting its history in this time, particularly as the history of Özbeg's final years is considerably less detailed.   Possible troubles between his sons were not the only issues he faced. In 1339 a coup attempt briefly had Özbeg besieged in his palace in New Sarai before the guards broke it up, captured and killed most of the conspirators. Evidently there had been Christians involved; a letter from Pope Benedict XIII thanked Özbeg for only executing three of the Christian conspirators. As this coincides with the appearance of Jani Beg's name on the coinage in place of Tini Beg, and Tini Beg apparently showed greater favour to Christians than Jani Beg ever did, we might wonder if Tini Beg had a hand in the coup attempt. How else would conspirators be so brazen as to attack the khan in his own palace? But this is mere speculation, and the origins of the coup are unfortunately lost to history.    For a man of such a lengthy reign, and relatively well covered in the primary sources, Özbeg's final days are surprisingly unclear. One Mamluk source, aš-Šuğā'īs, has Özbeg die while leading an attack on the Chagatai Khanate in 1342, an attempt by Özbeg to take advantage of that khanate's ongoing political struggles. Another Mamluk writer, al-Asadī, mentions Özbeg dying in New Sarai in 1341. Most sources simply note the fact of his death in late 1341 or 1342, with no additional details. Regardless, Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, died likely late in 1341, after 28 years on the throne. He was likely in his late 50s or 60s, making him one of the longest reigning, and longest living, Mongol khans. Only Khubilai Khaan's 34 years on the throne was longer, while Chinggis Khan himself had only 21 years as Khan of the Mongol ulus. Wealth and prosperity within the khanate, and the violent removal of rival princes, ensured Özbeg enjoyed the longest reign of any khan in the 1300s, a century when most khans hardly ruled as long as 5 years and generally died in their mid-thirties.    What do we make of Özbeg's life then? In some respects it certainly was a Golden Age, in terms of the arts, crafts and city-building in the steppe. It's a period of staggering prosperity in comparison to the anarchy which would soon follow. The internal stability of the Horde in this period alone makes it appear an oasis compared to the years on either side of his life. But Özbeg's claim to fame, his efforts at islamization, were hollow and never complete, and likely they were never intended to be. In foreign policy Özbeg largely experienced defeats, or inadvertently laid the groundwork for the rapid loss in Mongol authority in certain regions. The Golden Horde likely enjoyed its greatest period of wealth and in some respects, international prestige under Özbeg. But the precedent he had set with horrific princely slaughters would soon reign ruin upon the Jochids, as would an event far outside of any monarch's control: the Black Death.   A final remark can be made regarding the modern Uzbeks. The name is sometimes attributed, even by medieval authors, as coming from Özbeg's name.  That is, that in some sense the Uzbeks saw themselves as followers of Özbeg Khan, and thereby named themselves for him. The argument though is rather weak; the Uzbek confederation would not emerge until well after Özbeg Khan's death, and Özbeg as a name is hardly unique to the Jochid khan, for it dates back to the twelfth century, if not earlier. Much like the attribution of the Nogai Horde to the thirteenth century prince Nogai, it's an effort to attach a nomadic union to an earlier prominent figure which rests on little or no direct evidence.   With Özbeg's death, it was time for his son Tini Beg to take the throne. But things would not go well for Tini Beg, as the Jochid state was soon to experience a period of anarchy it would never recover from. So be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I'm your host David, and we'll catch you on the next one. 

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://afghannewswire.com/2022/01/16/%f0%9f%9a%a830-000-uzbeks-to-fight-taliban-nrf-killed-dozens/

Venturing into international legal issues, the Law Offices of Quibble, Squabble and Bicker obtain a client sought by none yet that has affected so many: Genocide Schmenocide. This client required Greg, Brendan and Matt to learn a little bit of history and then ignore that very same history as they ended up discussing Mr. Clean, mystical vision, Alex Jones, his head is so small, Uzbeks, SCTV, hillbillies of Russia, Israelstan, slavery is still legal, the peoples of the blacks, property of the white folks, in vino veritas, John Candy, Wikipedia Jones, Josef Stalin, fresh beautiful water, Martin Short, meth dinosaurs, individual Polands, Kanye West, the Parsley Massacre, Rohingya, California genocide, Pol Pot, Maus, Narnia, Myanmar genocide, Ukraine, salamander, baggie thingie, hooties and the tooties, Idi Amin, Onanism and lap dances are different than genocide. For other episodes, go to www.qsblaw.org. They are also internettable on: Instagram - @lawofficesofquibble; Twitter - @qsblaw; TikTok - @qsblaw; Uhive - https://www.uhive.com/web/shares/z/QTTCLFU; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quiblle.bicker.3; Tumblr - quibblesquabblebicker; Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/user/QuibbleSquabble or watch them on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/LawOfficesofQuibbleSquabbleBicker --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/qsb/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/qsb/support

This week we take a look at Uzbeks calls for aid in Afghanistan, the continuing fallout from the Kyrgyz elections, Turkmenistan's new gas deal with Azerbaijan, Russia's new project on the Caspian sea, and Tajikistan's leaders family taking even more key positions inside the Tajik foreign office. It has also been 30 years this week since Kazakhstan gained its independence, and to discuss that transition from the USSR to Capitalism we talk to the man who helped facilitate it.  Joining us this week.  - William Courtney (1st US Amb to Kazakhstan, RAND) Follow the show on @SLonCentralAsia For more info please visit - www.oxussociety.org Presented by the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs

People Group Details:  https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/14039 Listen to "A Third of Us" podcast with Greg Kelley, produced by the Alliance for the Unreached: https://alliancefortheunreached.org/podcast/ Watch "Stories of Courageous Christians" w/ Mark Kordic https://storiesofcourageouschristians.com/stories-of-courageous-christians  

Gold is now Burkina Faso's most valuable export, but it's come at a price. Last month the government announced the closure of small mines in the northern province of Sahel following a deadly attack by Islamic extremists. BBC Africa's Lalla Sy has been following the story from neighbouring Ivory Coast. Remembering Dilip Kumar Dilip Kumar, one of India's earliest and most famous film actors, died this week at the age of 98. We hear some of the many reasons why he was so special from Vandana at BBC Delhi, who has admired Dilip Kumar all her life. Ukrainian heels High heels and marching soldiers - not a natural pairing perhaps, and one that directed outrage towards Ukraine's Ministry of Defence. BBC Ukrainian's Irena Taranyuk shares the story. Afghan resistance Stories of territorial gains by the Taliban have been extensively covered by BBC Uzbek, which has a big audience among ethnic Uzbeks in northern Afghanistan. Firuz Rahimi is from Jowzjan province, where news outlets have reported that women are joining militias to resist the Taliban. Cuba's Jewish community BBC Mundo's Jose Carlos Cueta is Cuban, but only discovered by chance that the island had a small Jewish community. He got digging, and traces its history from Christopher Columbus in 1492, to its peak after the First World War and its presence today. Image: Gold panning in a Burkina Faso artisan mine, 2006 Credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The twin prods of a U.S. president trying to rebrand the coronavirus as the ‘China virus' and a bloody attack in Atlanta that left six Asian women dead have brought to the fore a spate of questions about Asian Americans in the United States. Columbia University sociologist Jennifer Lee has been answering many of those questions her entire academic career, and across four books, dozens of journal articles and untold media appearances. One of the first questions she answers in this Social Science Bites podcast is who are ‘Asian Americans'? As she tells interviewer David Edmonds, “No one comes to the United States and identifies as an Asian American.” Instead, if asked, they are likely to identify with national origin or ethnicity – say Chinese, or Japanese, or Filipino – rather than with the umbrella construct of Asian American. “'Asian American,'” Lee explains, “was originally conceived as a political identity by student activists at Berkley in the 1960s who coined the term as a unifying pan-ethnic identity to advocate for Asian-American studies in university curricula and to build coalitions with other marginalized groups.” Since then, it evolved into a demographic category, and in 1997 the U.S. Census Bureau grouped together people from East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia under the classification of ‘Asian.' (Those regions, of course, don't include everyone from the continent of Asia – where are the Kazakhs and the Uzbeks, for example – and does include people from the islands adjacent to the land mass – Japanese, Malaysians, Filipinos.) “These are groups don't have a whole lot in common in terms of language, culture, religion, history,” Lee notes, but they are bound by various forms of exclusion in the U.S. But their presence in the United States in growing rapidly. Combined, Asians are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S.; their population is up 27 percent in the last decade to about 23 million people, or 7 percent of the total U.S. population. Immigration is a key component of that growth, notes Lee, who herself emigrated to the U.S. with her Korean parents when she was 3. Some four out of five current Asian Americans are foreign-born, she explains, and continuing immigration replenishes the cohort of ‘new' Asian Americans. That, she suggests, will keep the category of Asian-American alive for some time. Immigration also contributes to the trope – a trope Lee rejects – that “‘Asians have some set of values that make them successful.” Instead, she argues that due to who has emigrated, America “engineered this idea that Asians are successful.” Asian immigrants coming to the United States are not just a random sample of the population in their countries of origin; they are extremely educated, more likely to hold a B.A. than those who don't immigrate, and they're also more likely to have a college degree than the U.S. mean. It's this ‘hyper selectivity' that largely accounts for educational and economic accomplishments of America's Asians, she argues here and in her latest award-winning book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, written with Min Zhou. Lee offers several data points during the podcast to buttress the idea that innate cultural values are not driving success. For one thing, the distribution of Asian American accomplishments are not evenly distributed: Indian-Americans have exceptionally high educational achievements while Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong Americans have relatively low graduation rates. Plus, Lee says, if ‘values' drove the success, we'd see the same successes in the immigrants' Asian countries of origin or in other areas where Asian diasporas are represented – and we don't. Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia and past president of the Eastern Sociological Society. She is or has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. She will join the board of trustees for the Russell Sage Foundation this fall.

On this episode of Icebreakers, Nathan is joined by Alison LeClaire, Canadian Ambassador to Russia, Armenia, and Uzbekistan. They discuss Alison's career history and path to becoming a diplomat, dating all the way back to high school when she noted her future ambition was to be an ambassador. Since then, the diplomatic landscape has changed; Alison and Nathan explore these changes and also reflect on Alison's experiences in Moscow, Sweden, on the Arctic file and all around the world. Alison also breaks down her perception of some of the inherent similarities Canadians share with Russians, Armenians and Uzbeks; including Northern identity (Russia), hope and energy for building the future (Uzbeks), pride in cultural legacy and heritage (Armenia), and so much more, before discussing business and trade.Learn more about CERBA here: https://www.cerbanet.org/0:00 - Intro0:39 - Introducing H.E. Alison LeClaire1:20 - How H.E. Alison LeClaire became a diplomat3:57 - How the diplomatic landscape has changed since 19876:05 - The most interesting adventure stories8:20 - Prime Ministerial visits in Sweden10:59 - Meeting with Vladimir Putin and prominent Russians12:28 - Impact of the pandemic on business, cultural exchange and diplomatic relations15:05 - What Vladislav Tretyak is like17:23 - Similarities between Canadians and Russians, Uzbeks and Armenians21:45 - Supporting business during the pandemic23:57 - Why Canada and Russia need to cooperate in the Arctic27:11 - How the Canadian Arctic differs from the Russian Arctic30:40 - Arctic - area of mutual cooperation33:15 - What made H.E. Alison LeClaire a leader34:26 - Priorities in life and hopes for the future35:47 - Conclusion

On the podcast this week, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age by John Gray. Next time: Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir. Normally Jerry writes an ideological Turing test summary for the book we discuss, but it's impossible with this one as you'll hear us say. So here are some of Jerry's highlights from the book itself: If the Enlightenment myth of progress in ethics and politics continues to have a powerful hold, it is more from fear of the consequences of giving it up than from genuine conviction. the collapse of communism was a world-historic defeat for the Enlightenment project. Communism was not a type of oriental despotism, as generations of Western scholars maintained. It was an authentic continuation of a Western revolutionary tradition, and its downfall – after tens of millions of deaths were inflicted in the pursuit of its utopian goals – signalled the start of a process of de-Westernization. It is an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance. Consider, in this regard, the central category of the intellectual tradition spawned by Rawls's work – the category of the person. In Rawls's work, as in that of his followers, this is a cipher, without history or ethnicity, denuded of the special attachments that in the real human world give us the particular identities we have. Emptied of the contingencies that in truth are essential to our identities, this cipher has in the Rawlsian schema only one concern – a concern for its own good, which is not the good of any actual human being, but the good we are all supposed to have in common, which it pursues subject to constraints of justice that are conceived to be those of impartiality. In this conception, the principles of justice are bound to be the same for all. The appearance of a plurality of ciphers in the Rawlsian original position must be delusive, since, having all of them the same beliefs and motives, they are indistinguishable. The subject matter of justice cannot, except indirectly, be found in the histories of peoples, and their often tragically conflicting claims; it must be always a matter of individual rights. It is obvious that this liberal position cannot address, save as an inconvenient datum of human psychology, the sense of injustice arising from belonging to an oppressed community that, in the shape of nationalism, is the strongest political force of our century. The task of political philosophy is conceived as one of deriving the ideal constitution – assumed, at least in principle, to be everywhere the same. This is so, whether its upshot be Rawls's basic liberties, Nozick's side-constraints, or Dworkin's rights-as-trumps. The presupposition is always that the bottom line in political morality is the claims of individuals, and that these are to be spelt out in terms of the demands of justice or rights. The consequence is that the diverse claims of historic communities, if they are ever admitted, are always overwhelmed by the supposed rights of individuals. The notion that different communities might legitimately have different legal regimes for abortion or pornography, for example, is hardly considered. If the theoretical goal of the new liberalism is the supplanting of politics by law, its practical result – especially in the United States, where rights discourse is already the only public discourse that retains any legitimacy – has been the emptying of political life of substantive argument and the political corruption of law. Issues, such as abortion, that in many other countries have been resolved by a legislative settlement that involves compromises and which is known to be politically renegotiable, are in the legalist culture of the United States matters of fundamental rights that are intractably contested and which threaten to become enemies of civil peace. Communitarian thought still harbours the aspiration expressed in those forms of the Enlightenment project, such as Marxism, that are most critical of liberalism – that of creating a form of communal life from which are absent the practices of exclusion and subordination that are constitutive of every community human beings have ever lived in. Old-fashioned toleration – the toleration defended by Milton, and by the older liberals, such as Locke – sprang from an acceptance of the imperfectibility of human beings, and from a belief in the importance of freedom in the constitution of the good life. Since we cannot be perfect, and since virtue cannot be forced on people but is rather a habit of life they must themselves strive to acquire, we were enjoined to tolerate the shortcomings of others, even as we struggled with our own. On this older view, toleration is a precondition of any stable modus vivendi among incorrigibly imperfect beings. If it has become unfashionable in our time, the reason is in part to be found in the resistance of a post-Christian age to the thought that we are flawed creatures whose lives will always contain evils. This is a thought subversive of the shallow optimistic creeds of our age, humanist or Pelagian, for which human evils are problems to be solved rather than sorrows to be coped with or endured. Toleration is unfashionable for another, more topical reason. It is unavoidably and inherently judgemental. The objects of toleration are what we judge to be evils. When we tolerate a practice, a belief or a character trait, we let something be that we judge to be undesirable, false or at least inferior; our toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone. we tolerate ersatz religions, such as Scientology, not because we think they may after all contain a grain of truth, but because the great good of freedom of belief necessarily encompasses the freedom to believe absurdities. Toleration is not, then, an expression of scepticism, of doubt about our ability to tell the good from the bad; it is evidence of our confidence that we have that ability. The idea of toleration goes against the grain of the age because the practice of toleration is grounded in strong moral convictions. Such judgements are alien to the dominant conventional wisdom according to which standards of belief and conduct are entirely subjective or relative in character, and one view of things is as good as any other. Indeed, when a society is tolerant, its tolerance expresses the conception of the good life that it has in common. In so far as a society comes to lack any such common conception – as is at least partly the case in Britain today – it ceases to be capable of toleration as it was traditionally understood. What the neutrality of radical equality mandates is nothing less than the legal disestablishment of morality. As a result, morality becomes in theory a private habit of behaviour rather than a common way of life. What a policy of toleration would not mandate is the wholesale reconstruction of institutional arrangements in Britain such that homosexuals acquire collective rights or are in every context treated precisely as heterosexuals. This is not to say that the current law of marriage is fixed for all time, any more than the rest of family law, such as the law on adoption, is so fixed. Further, it is to say that such extension of legal recognition would not be to homosexuals as a group but to individuals regardless of their sexual orientation. To make a political issue that is deeply morally contested a matter of basic rights is to make it non-negotiable, since rights – at least as they are understood in the dominant contemporary schools of Anglo-American jurisprudence – are unconditional entitlements, not susceptible to moderation In modern Western pluralist societies, policies which result in the creation of group rights are inevitably infected with arbitrariness and consequent inequity, since the groups selected for privileging are arbitrary, as is the determination of who belongs to which group. a stable liberal civil society cannot be radically multicultural but depends for its successful renewal across the generations on an undergirding culture that is held in common. This common culture need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behaviour and, in our times, it typically expresses a shared sense of nationality. The example of the United States, which at least since the mid-1960s has been founded on the Enlightenment conviction that a common culture is not a necessary precondition of a liberal civil society, shows that the view that civil peace can be secured solely by adherence to abstract rules is merely an illusion. In so far as policy has been animated by it, the result has been further social division, including what amounts to low-intensity civil war between the races. As things stand, the likelihood in the United States is of a slow slide into ungovernability, as the remaining patrimony of a common cultural inheritance is frittered away by the fragmenting forces of multiculturalism. The kind of diversity that is incompatible with civil society in Britain is that which rejects the constitutive practices that give it its identity. Central among these are freedom of expression and its precondition, the rule of law. Cultural traditions that repudiate these practices cannot be objects of toleration for liberal civil society in Britain or anywhere else. The radical tolerance of indifference has application wherever there are conceptions of the good that are incommensurable. the claim that there may be, and are present among us, conceptions of the good that are rationally incommensurable is not one that supports any of the fashionable varieties of relativism and subjectivism, since it allows, and indeed presupposes, that some conceptions of the good are defective, and some forms of life simply bad. the radical tolerance of indifference is virtually the opposite of old-fashioned toleration in that its objects are not judged to be evils and may indeed be incommensurable goods. Woodrow Wilson's project of imposing a rationalist order conceived in the New World on the intractably quarrelsome nations of Europe. Like Marxism, this rationalist conception had its origins in the French Enlightenment's vision of a universal human civilization in which the claims of ethnicity and religion came long after those of common humanity. In the wake of Soviet communism, we find, not Homo Sovieticus or any other rationalist abstraction, but men and women whose identities are constituted by particular attachments and histories – Balts, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Russians and so on. Western opinion-formers and policy-makers are virtually unanimous in modelling the transition process of the post-communist states in terms which imply their reconstruction on Western models and their integration into a coherent international order based on Western power and institutions. Underlying this virtually universal model are assumptions that are anachronistic and radically flawed. It assumes that the system of Western-led institutions which assured global peace and world trade in the post-war period can survive, substantially unchanged or even strengthened, the world-wide reverberations of the Soviet collapse; the only issue is how the fledgling post-communist states are to gain admission into these institutions. This assumption neglects the dependency of these institutions on the strategic environment of the Cold War and their unravelling, before our eyes, as the post-war settlement disintegrates. The strategic consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the return to a pre-1914 world – with this difference, that the pre-1914 world was dominated by a single hegemonic power, Great Britain, whereas the return to nineteenth-century policies and modes of thinking in the United States leaves the world without any hegemonic power. the Soviet collapse has triggered a meltdown in the post-war world order, and in the domestic institutions of the major Western powers, which has yet to run its course. the crisis of Western transnational institutions is complemented by an ongoing meltdown of the various Western models of the nature and limits of market institutions in advanced industrial societies. The alienation of democratic electorates from established political elites is pervasive in Western societies, including the United States. Contrary to Hayek, who generalizes from the English experience to put forward a grandiose theory of the spontaneous emergence of market institutions that is reminiscent in its unhistorical generality of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx at their most incautious, the English example is a singularity, not an exemplar of any long-run historical trend. The English experience is sui generis, not a paradigm for the development of market institutions, because the unique combination of circumstances which permitted it to occur as it did – immemorial individualism and parliamentary absolutism, for example – were replicated nowhere else. Where market institutions did develop elsewhere on English lines, as in North America and Australasia, it was in virtue of the fact that English cultural traditions and legal practice had been exported there more or less wholesale. Market institutions of the English variety failed to take root where, as in India, their legal and cultural matrix was not successfully transplanted. It is noteworthy that, until its collapse in 1991, the Swedish model performed well in respect of what was, perhaps, its principal achievement, an active labour policy that kept long-term unemployment very low, and so effectively prevented the growth of an estranged underclass of the multi-generationally unemployed. The German or Rhine model of market institutions, as it developed in the post-war period up to reunification, was not the result of the application of any consistent theory, but rather of a contingent political compromise between a diversity of theoretical frameworks, of which the most important were the Ordoliberalismus of the Eucken or Frankfurt School and Catholic social theology. It represented a political settlement, also, between the principal interest groups in post-war Germany, including the newly constituted trade unions. It would be false to imagine that China lacks ethnic conflict, or separatist movements. As a portent for the future, there appears to be an Islamic separatist movement in the far-western ‘autonomous region' of Xinjiang, which has borders with the new republics of Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, and with Afghanistan and Pakistan; and there are undoubtedly strong separatist movements in neighbouring Tibet and Mongolia. it would not be entirely surprising, but would in fact rather accord with long-term patterns in Chinese history, if the Chinese state were to fragment in the coming years, perhaps after the death of Deng Xiaoping; market institutions have as their matrices particular cultural traditions, without whose undergirding support the frameworks of law by which they are defined are powerless or empty. Scottish thinkers, such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, who not unreasonably generalized from their own historical experience to such a connection, this result of their inquiries evoked anxiety as to the eventual fate of market institutions, since – like later thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter – they feared that individualism would consume the cultural capital on which market institutions relied for their renewal across the generations. Our experience suggests that such fears as to the ultimately self-defeating effects of market institutions that are animated by individualist cultural traditions are far from groundless. The growth of lawlessness in Russia, the threat posed to social and business life by organized criminality, and the apparent powerlessness thus far of the Yeltsin government in the face of this threat, suggest that an authoritarian turn in Russian political life, whether by the Yeltsin government or by a successor, and whether or not the army has a decisive role in any subsequent authoritarian regime, would be in accord both with the exigencies of current circumstances and with Russian historical precedent. Authoritarian government is likely to emerge in Russia both in response to the dangers of fragmentation of the state and ensuing civil strife and as a response to growing criminal violence in everyday and business life. The Soviet collapse, far from enhancing the stability of Western institutions, has destabilized them by knocking away the strategic props on which they stood. The prospect of the orderly integration of the post-communist states into the economic and security arrangements of the Western world is a mirage, not only because of the unprecedentedly formidable difficulties each of them confronts in its domestic development, but also because the major Western transnational institutions and organizations are themselves in a flux, amounting sometimes to dissolution. The world-historical failure of the Enlightenment project – in political terms, the collapse and ruin, in the late twentieth century, of the secular, rationalist and universalist political movements, liberal as well as Marxist, that that project spawned, and the dominance in political life of ethnic, nationalist and fundamentalist forces – suggests the falsity of the philosophical anthropology upon which the Enlightenment project rested. On the alternative view that I shall develop, the propensity to cultural difference is a primordial attribute of the human species; human identities are plural and diverse in their very natures, as natural languages are plural and diverse, and they are always variations on particular forms of common life, never exemplars of universal humanity. The task for liberal theory, as I see it, is not vainly to resist the historical falsification of the universalist anthropology that sustained the Enlightenment philosophy of history, but to attempt to reconcile the demands of a liberal form of life with the particularistic character of human identities and allegiances – to retheorize liberalism as itself a particular form of common life. Agonistic liberalism is that species of liberalism that is grounded, not in rational choice, but in the limits of rational choice – limits imposed by the radical choices we are often constrained to make among goods that are both inherently rivalrous, and often constitutively uncombinable, and sometimes incommensurable, or rationally incomparable. Agonistic liberalism is an application in political philosophy of the moral theory of value-pluralism – the theory that there is an irreducible diversity of ultimate values (goods, excellences, options, reasons for action and so forth) and that when these values come into conflict or competition with one another there is no overarching standard or principle, no common currency or measure, whereby such conflicts can be arbitrated or resolved. Value-pluralism imposes limits on rational choice that are subversive of most standard moral theories, not merely of utilitarianism, and it has deeply subversive implications for all the traditional varieties of liberal theory. The thesis of the incommensurability of values is then not a version of relativism, of subjectivism or of moral scepticism, though it will infallibly be confused with one or other of these doctrines: it is a species of moral realism, which we shall call objective pluralism. Its distinguishing features are that it limits the scope of rational choice among goods, affirming that they are often constitutively uncombinable and sometimes rationally incommensurable. It is a fundamental contribution of Raz's political philosophy to have shown that a rights-based political morality is an impossibility. rights claims are never primordial or foundational but always conclusionary, provisional results of long chains of reasoning which unavoidably invoke contested judgements about human interests and well-being. If the truth of value-pluralism is assumed, such that there are no right answers in hard cases about the restraint of liberty, then it seems natural to treat questions of the restraint of liberty as political, and not as theoretical or jurisprudential questions. Despite its self-description as political liberalism, then, Rawls's is a liberalism that has been politically emasculated, in which nothing of importance is left to political decision, and in which political life itself has been substantially evacuated of content. The hollowing out of the political realm in Rawlsian liberalism is fatal to its self-description as a form of political liberalism and discloses its true character as a species of liberal legalism. The liberal legalism of Rawls and his followers is, perhaps, only an especially unambiguous example of the older liberal project, or illusion, of abolishing politics, or of so constraining it by legal and constitutional formulae that it no longer matters what are the outcomes of political deliberation. In Rawlsian liberal legalism, the anti-political nature of at least one of the dominant traditions of liberalism is fully realized. In historical practice, the effect of attempting to abolish or to marginalize political life has been – especially in the United States, where legalism is strongest – the politicization of law, as judicial institutions have become arenas of political struggle. The end-result of this process is not, however, the simple transposition of political life into legal contexts, but rather the corrosion of political life itself. The treatment of all important issues of restraint of liberty as questions of constitutional rights has the consequence that they cease to be issues that are politically negotiable and that can be resolved provisionally in a political settlement that encompasses a compromise among conflicting interests and ideals. In conflicts about basic constitutional rights, there can be no compromise solutions, only judgements which yield unconditional victory for one side and complete defeat for the other. Allegiance to a liberal state is, on this view, never primarily to principles which it may be thought to embody, and which are supposed to be compelling for all human beings; it is always to specific institutions, having a specific history, and to the common culture that animates them, which itself is a creature of historical contingency. On the view being developed here, allegiance to a liberal state is always allegiance to the common culture it embodies or expresses, and, in the late modern context in which we live, such a common culture is typically a national culture. the only things, on the account here defended, that can command allegiance. In our world they are nations, or the common forms of life which national cultures encompass and shelter. The point may be put in another, and perhaps a simpler way: there can be no form of allegiance that is purely political; political allegiance – at least when it is comparatively stable – presupposes a common cultural identity, which is reflected in the polity to which allegiance is given; political order, including that of a liberal state, rests upon a pre-political order of common culture. As Berlin has put his position: The fact that the values of one culture may be incompatible with those of another, or that they are in conflict within one culture or group or in a single human being at different times – or, for that matter, at one and the same time – does not entail relativism of values, only the notion of a plurality of values not structured hierarchically; which, of course, entails the permanent possibility of inescapable conflict between values, as well as incompatibility between the outlooks of different civilisations or of stages of the same civilisation. He sums up his view: ‘Relativism is not the only alternative to universalism … nor does incommensurability entail relativism'. Berlin's point, which is surely correct, is that there may be a specifiable minimum universal content to morality, and some forms of life may be condemned by it; but the items which make up the minimum content may, and sometimes do, come into conflict with one another, there being no rational procedure for resolving such conflicts. because the universal minimum in all of its variations underdetermines any liberal form of life, many of the regimes that meet the test of the universal minimum – probably the vast majority of such regimes to be found in human history – will not be liberal regimes. The likely prospect, on all current trends, is not only of the East Asian societies overtaking Western liberal individualist societies in the economic terms of growth, investment, savings and living standards; it is also of their doing so while preserving and enhancing common cultural forms which assure to their subjects personal security in their everyday lives and a public environment that is rich in choiceworthy options. By contrast, the prospect for the Western individualist societies is one of economic development that is weak and feeble in a context of cultural impoverishment in which the remnants of a common culture are hollowed out by individualism and legalism. The prospect for the Western liberal societies, and particularly for those in which individualism and legalism have by now virtually delegitimized the very idea of a common culture, is that of a steep and rapid decline in which civil peace is fractured and the remnants of a common culture on which liberal forms of life themselves depend are finally dissipated. The self-undermining of liberal individualism, which Joseph Schumpeter anticipated in the mid-1940s, is likely to proceed apace, now that the Soviet collapse has removed the legitimacy borrowed by Western institutions from the enmity of a ruinous alternative, and the East Asian societies are released from the constraints of the post-war settlement to pursue paths of development that owe ever less to the West. When our institutional inheritance – that precious and irreplaceable patrimony of mediating structures and autonomous professions – is thrown away in the pursuit of a managerialist Cultural Revolution seeking to refashion the entire national life on the impoverished model of contract and market exchange, it is clear that the task of conserving and renewing a culture is no longer understood by contemporary conservatives. In the context of such a Maoism of the Right, it is the permanent revolution of unfettered market processes, not the conservation of traditional institutions and professions, having each of them a distinctive ethos, that has become the ruling project of contemporary conservatism. At the same time, neo-liberalism itself can now be seen as a self-undermining political project. Its political success depended upon cultural traditions, and constellations of interests, that neo-liberal policy was bound to dissipate. liberal civilization itself may be imperilled, in so far as its legitimacy has been linked with the utopia of perpetual growth powered by unregulated market processes, and the inevitable failure of this utopia spawns illiberal political movements. Indeed, unconstrained market institutions are bound to undermine social and political stability, particularly as they impose on the population unprecedented levels of economic insecurity with all the resultant dislocations of life in families and communities. A central test of the readiness to think fresh thoughts is the way we think about market institutions. On the view defended here they are not ends in themselves but means or tools whose end is human well-being. Indeed, among us, market liberalism is in its workings ineluctably subversive of tradition and community. This may not have been the case in Edmund Burke's day, in which the maintenance of the traditions of whig England could coexist with a policy of economic individualism, but in our age a belief in any such harmony is a snare and a delusion. Among us, unlike the men and women of Burke's day, markets are global, and also, in the case of capital markets, nearly instantaneous; free trade, if it too is global, operates among communities that are vastly more uneven in development than any that traded with one another in Burke's time; and our lives are pervaded by mass media that transform tastes, and revolutionize daily habits, in ways that could be only dimly glimpsed by the Scottish political economists whom Burke so revered. The social and cultural effects of market liberalism are, virtually without exception, inimical to the values that traditional conservatives hold dear. Communities are scattered to the winds by the gale of creative destruction. Endless ‘downsizing' and ‘flattening' of enterprises fosters ubiquitous insecurity and makes loyalty to the company a cruel joke. The celebration of consumer choice, as the only undisputed value in market societies, devalues commitment and stability in personal relationships and encourages the view of marriage and the family as vehicles of self-realization. The dynamism of market processes dissolves social hierarchies and overturns established expectations. Status is ephemeral, trust frail and contract sovereign. The dissolution of communities promoted by market-driven labour mobility weakens, where it does not entirely destroy, the informal social monitoring of behaviour which is the most effective preventive measure against crime. Classical liberalism, or what I have termed market fundamentalism, is, like Marxism, a variation on the Enlightenment project, which is the project of transcending the contingencies of history and cultural difference and founding a universal civilization that is qualitatively different from any that has ever before existed. In this paleo-liberal or libertarian view, the erosion of distinctive cultures by market processes is, if anything, to be welcomed as a sign of progress toward a universal rational civilization. Here paleo-liberalism shows its affinities not with European conservatism but with the Old Left project of doing away with, or marginalizing politically, the human inheritance of cultural difference. That this perspective is a hallucinatory and utopian one is clear if we consider its neglect of the sources not only of political allegiance but also of social order in common cultural forms. Market liberalism, like other Enlightenment ideologies, treats cultural difference as a politically marginal phenomenon whose appropriate sphere is in private life. It does not comprehend, or repudiates as irrationality, the role of a common culture in sustaining political order and in legitimizing market institutions. Market liberalism is at its most utopian, however, in its conception of a global market society, in which goods, and perhaps people, move freely between economies having radically different stages of development and harbouring very different cultures. Human beings need, more than they need the freedom of consumer choice, a cultural and economic environment that offers them an acceptable level of security and in which they feel at home. The conservative idea of the primacy of cultural forms is meant to displace not only standard liberal conceptions of the autonomous human subject but also ideas of the autonomy of market institutions that liberal thought has been applied – or misapplied – to support. It is not meant to support nostalgist and reactionary conceptions of organic or integral community which have no application in our historical circumstances and which, if they were implemented politically, could end only in tragedy or – more likely in Britain – black comedy. The idea of a seamless community – the noumenal community, as we may call it, of communitarianism – is as much of a fiction as the autonomous subject of liberal theory. We all of us belong to many communities, we mostly inherit diverse ethnicities, and our world-views are fractured and provisional whether or not we know it or admit it. We harbour a deep diversity of views and values as to sexuality and the worth of human life, our relations with the natural environment and the special place, if any, of the human species in the scheme of things. The reactionary project of rolling back this diversity of values and world-views in the pursuit of a lost cultural unity overlooks the character of our cultural inheritance as a palimpsest, having ever deeper layers of complexity. It is clear only that, for us at any rate, a common culture cannot mean a common world-view, religious or secular. It is an implication of all that I have said, however, that we have no option but to struggle to make our inheritance of liberal traditions work. At present, the principal obstacle we face in the struggle to renew our inheritance of liberal practice is the burden on thought and policy of market liberal dogma. The central difficulty is that the enlargement of leisure that Mill, by contrast with the gloomier classical economists, expected to come from stability in population and output against a background of improvement in the industrial arts is occurring in the form of ever higher levels of involuntary unemployment. It may be that proposals for a basic or citizen's income, where that is to be distinguished from the neo-liberal idea of a negative income tax, and for a better distribution of capital among the citizenry, need reconsideration – despite all their difficulties – as elements in a policy aiming to reconcile the human need for economic security with the destabilizing dynamism of market institutions. Almost as significant in disclosing the Americocentric character of the new liberalism was its anaemic and impoverished conception of pluralism and cultural diversity. The incommensurability of values affirmed in doctrines of objective ethical pluralism was understood as arising in the formulation of personal plans of life rather than in conflicts among whole ways of life. And cultural diversity was conceived in the denatured form of a cornucopia of chosen lifestyles, each with its elective identity, rather than in the form in which it is found in the longer and larger experience of humankind – as the exfoliation of exclusionary forms of life, spanning the generations, membership of which is typically unchosen, and which tend to individuate themselves by their conflicts and by their historical memories of enmity. The core project of the Enlightenment was the displacement of local, customary or traditional moralities, and of all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilization. This is the project that animated Marxism and liberalism in all their varieties, which underpins both the new liberalism and neo-conservatism, and to which every significant body of opinion in the United States continues to subscribe. That liberal individuality is, in practice, invariably a prescription for abject conformity to prevailing bien-pensant opinion is, on the view being presented here, not the chief objection to it. The most disabling feature of these and other constitutive elements of the new liberalism is what they all betoken – namely, a rejection of the political enterprise itself, and of its animating value of peace. For the pluralist, the practice of politics is a noble engagement, precisely on account of the almost desperate humility of its purposes – which are to moderate the enmity of agonistic identities, and to generate conventions of peace among warring communities. The pluralist embrace of politics is, for these reasons, merely a recognition of the reality of political life, itself conceived as an abatement of war. from the truth of a plurality of incommensurable values the priority of one of them – liberty, autonomy or choice-making, say – cannot follow. Value-pluralism cannot entail, or ground, liberalism in any general, still less universal way. Pluralists reject this Old Right project for the same reason that they reject the Enlightenment project. Both seek to roll back the reality of cultural diversity for the sake of an imaginary condition of cultural unity – whether that be found in a lost past or in a supposed future condition of the species in which cultural difference has been marginalized in a universal civilization. Both perspectives are alien to that of the pluralist, which takes the reality of cultural difference as a datum of political order. A pluralist political order may nevertheless deviate from the central institutions of a liberal civil society at crucial points. It need not, and often will not possess an individualist legal order in which persons are the primary rights-bearers. The principal bearers of rights (and duties) in a pluralist political order will be communities, or ways of life, not individuals. The pluralist standard of assessment of any regime is whether it enables its subjects to coexist in a Hobbesian peace while renewing their distinctive forms of common life. … By this standard, the current regime in China might well be criticized for its policies in Tibet; but such a criticism would invoke the intrinsic value of the communities and cultural forms now being destroyed in Tibet, not universalist conceptions of human rights or democracy. Here I think Raz has grasped a point of fundamental importance, perceived by Mill but not by Rawls – that a liberal state cannot be neutral with regard to illiberal forms of life coming within its jurisdiction. Or, to put the matter still more shortly, Raz is entirely correct in seeing liberalism itself as a whole way of life, and not merely a set of political principles or institutions. The trouble is that, if value-pluralism is true at the level of whole ways of life, then the liberal form of life can have no special or universal claim on reason. In the late modern period in which we live, the Enlightenment project is affirmed chiefly for fear of the consequences of abandoning it. (The United States is, as ever, an exception in this regard, since in it both fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist affirmations of the Enlightenment project remain strong. The collapse of these fundamentalisms in the United States, however, were it to occur, would likely be accompanied by an outbreak of nihilism of a violence and intensity unknown in other Western countries; such an outcome is prefigured in much contemporary North American art, literature and popular entertainment.) There can, in my view, be no rolling back the central project of modernity, which is the Enlightenment project, with all its consequences in terms of disenchantment and ultimate groundlessness. … the thought of Nietzsche, especially but not exclusively his thinking about morality, is unavoidably and rightly the starting-point of serious reflection for us, at the close of the modern age which the Enlightenment project, in all its diversity, inaugurated. the political forms which may arise in truly post-Enlightenment cultures will be those that shelter and express diversity – that enable different cultures, some but by no means all or even most of which are dominated by liberal forms of life, different world-views and ways of life, to coexist in peace and harmony. For this development to be a real historical possibility, however, certain conceptions and commitments that have been constitutive, not merely of the Enlightenment and so of modernity, but also, and more fundamentally, of the central traditions of Western civilization, must be amended, or abandoned. Certain conceptions, not only of morality but also of science, that are central elements in Enlightenment cultures must be given up. Certain understandings of religion, long established in Western traditions, not as a vessel for a particular way of life but rather as the bearer of truths possessing universal authority, must be relinquished. The most fundamental Western commitment, the humanist conception of humankind as a privileged site of truth, which is expressed in Socratic inquiry and in Christian revelation, and which re-emerges in secular and naturalistic form in the Enlightenment project of human self-emancipation through the growth of knowledge, must be given up. Further, and perhaps decisively, once liberal practice is released from the hallucinatory perspective of liberal theory, it will be seen for what it always was – not a seamless garment, but a patchwork quilt, stitched together and restitched in response to the flux of circumstance. … If, as I believe, liberal practice is best conceived as a miscellany of ad-hoc improvisations, made over the generations in the pursuit of a modus vivendi, then no part of it can be regarded as sacrosanct; it can, and should, be rewoven, or unravelled, as circumstances and changing human needs dictate. The conception of the natural world as an object of human exploitation, and of humankind as the master of nature, which informs Bacon's writings, is one of the most vital and enduring elements of the modern world-view, and the one which Westernization has most lastingly and destructively transmitted to non-Western cultures. In this last period of modernity, Western instrumental reason becomes globalized at just the historic moment when its groundlessness is manifest. The embodiment of instrumental reason in modern technology acquires a planetary reach precisely when the animating humanist project which guided it is overthrown. Nothing remains of this project but the expansion of human productive powers through the technological domination of the earth. It is this conjunction of the global spread of the Western humanist project with the self-undermining of its most powerful modern embodiment in the Enlightenment that warrants the claim that we find ourselves now at the close of the modern age. In truth, the likelihood is that, now that the imperatives of the Cold War period are over, the European countries and the United States will increasingly decouple, not only strategically and economically, but also culturally, so that their cultural and political differences will become more, not less, decisive. It is difficult to believe that the forms of liberal culture will not diverge greatly, as a result of this likely decoupling, between the United States and the various European nations. Indeed, even as things stand now, Rorty's post-modern liberalism is an expression of American hopes, which are far from being shared by other liberal cultures, such as those in Europe. For liberalism to become merely one form of life among others would involve as profound a cultural metamorphosis as Christianity's ceasing to make any claim to unique and universal truth. The surrender of the will to power has its most important application in our relations with other forms of life, and with the earth. The project of subjecting the earth and its other life-forms to human will through technological domination is Western humanism in its final form.

Uzbeks are know for being extremely hospitable, but you won't know it by just looking at them. Listen up and find out how to warm them up. This podcast aired November 2018 on 93.8Now FM's Come Fly With Me.

“An Uzbek Patron and the Limits of Eurasian Power” - Morgan Liu (The Ohio State University) Can the rich and powerful (“elites”) make society a better place? How can they transform structural problems and are there limits to what elites can accomplish for the common good? I present a case from Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan where an Uzbek grand patron claimed to act for the communal good by building urban institutions serving people of all ethnicities. As a result, Uzbeks, who have experienced discrimination in Kyrgyzstan, actually flourished in this city under politically adverse circumstances for the first two decades of post-Soviet independence, until the violence of 2010 brought this Uzbek patron’s endeavors to a crashing and burning halt. We conclude with the global implications about what elites can and cannot do for the public good.

In the Philippines two journalists, Maria Ressa, the head of an investigative news website called Rappler, and one of their former writers, Reynaldo Santos Jr, have been sentenced to prison for libel, in a case that many see as an attack on freedom of the press, and on critics of the government, as Howard Johnson reports. In Spain, healthcare workers, from doctors and nurses to hospital porters, were badly affected by the coronavirus, making up twenty percent of confirmed cases. Ed Habershon was there during the peak of the crisis. Ten years ago ethnic clashes broke out in the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan, when Kyrgyz residents turned on ethnic Uzbeks. Hundreds were killed, many more injured, around two thousand homes burnt down. The violence took place at a time of deep political instability in the country. For Rayhan Demytrie, an Uzbek herself, these were among the most horrific events of her journalistic career. The island of Bougainville is in Papua New Guinea, but residents have voted overwhelmingly to secede and become independent. Key to its future economy is a former copper and gold mine. Its closure had contributed to civil war, so how do local people see its possible re-opening now, asks Mark Stratton. The murder of the popular prime minister Olof Palme in 1986 shocked Sweden deeply, and left an open wound as the killer was never found despite decades of investigations. Conspiracy theories abounded. And then last week the Swedish authorities announced that they had identified the perpetrator, that he was dead, and that they were therefore closing the case. But how convinced is the Swedish public that the true culprit has been found, asks Maddy Savage. Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Arlene Gregorius

A new bill in Uzbekistan proposes to fine people who throw expensive parties. Uzbekistan's Ministry of Justice intends to fine people up to $230 for throwing costly parties. Venues that host these festivities could also receive penalties up to $700 for the first offense and incur $1,200 for repeat offenses. By January 1, 2020, festivities will only be allowed to start and end at specific times, and guests for celebrations like weddings and birthdays will be limited to 250. Police, tax inspectors, and state prosecutors will also be notified about the celebrations so that they can monitor compliance with the new regulations. The bill was proposed to reduce extravagant celebrations in a country where the average monthly wage is only around $200. The legislation also aims to diminish the pressure felt by people to work hard just to hold expensive parties. A common Uzbek wedding happens within four days where rituals heavily rooted in the Uzbek culture are done. It is also attended by over 400 guests. Such expensive celebrations usually cause families to be in great debt. Therefore, young Uzbeks usually work overseas for months or years to save up for their wedding ceremonies. The legislation has been met with support and skepticism on social media. Many social media users said that the regulation can prevent wastefulness and help Uzbeks avoid working abroad just to make money for these events. However, some doubt that the legislation will be effective. They even challenged officials to set an example in observing the new regulations, especially since previous campaigns have failed to put an end to Uzbeks' lavish celebrations.

We love Thanksgiving, and our diplomats especially love the holiday when celebrated overseas.  What better way to celebrate an American tradition of thanks than to share it with our friends abroad?  Plus, what's the best way to slaughter a turkey?  Better ask the Uzbeks because the Americans really don't know. Cheers!

Jonathan DeBurca Butler joins Sean in studio for this week's 'News From Around The World' . News stories that you might not have heard of from Tunisia, Chad, Germany, Chechnya, Russia, Uzbeks and Laos.

It’s time to zero in on the Uzbeks with the central Asian side confirmed as the Socceroos’ next hurdle in their Asian Cup defence. We ask McIntyre what we can expect from them and gauge his thoughts on all the latest from the continent’s premier tournament. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Nilufar Allayarova and her daughter Hanifa Kodirova came to New Zealand from Uzbekistan when Hanifa was four (now she's 18 and about to head off to university). They explain how Uzbeks prepare and celebrate food, bringing recipes for a dish of celebration and peace, Uzbek Plov, as well as Uzbek Manti (steamed dumplings) and Uzbek Somsa (Buttery Pastry filled with either meat or vegetables)

Uzbekistan - the most populous country in Central Asia is, is sometimes called the country of a hundred shrines or the “second Mecca”. It is home to hundreds of well-preserved mosques, madrasas, bazaars and mausoleums, dating largely from the 9th to the 17th centuries, almost untarnished by the time. In fact, many shrines find their roots in pre-Islamic and pagan times. The strict Soviet anti-religion stance couldn’t stop believers from paying respect their holy sites of pilgrimage. Neither could the Muslim Ulema who say that visiting shrines may contradict Islamic teachings. Locked for most of the past 150 years under the Russian rule, it emerged as an independent nation in 1991 – only to slide into a totalitarian state with restricted religious freedoms. Poverty, the loss of identity and the closeness to volatile neighbours such as Afghanistan and Tajikistan have contributed to the spread of radicalisation. Hundreds of Uzbeks fight alongside militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Mideast. In the last couple of years several radicalised Uzbeks committed terror attacks in the USA, Europe and Russia prompting the fears that the many young Uzbeks might be joining militant Islamist groups. Now the new Uzbek government is ready to restore and open all shrines to public in a bid to boost tourism and most importantly – to fight the growing radicalism among young Uzbeks. Rustam Qobil travels to the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in his native Uzbekistan to find out if the increased interest to shrines can indeed stop radicalism. Presenter: Rustam Qobil Producer: Natalia Golysheva Photo Credit: Festival of Silk and Spices, Bukhara Natalia Golysheva/ BBC

  Mud brick fortification walls from the 10th century at Merv, Turkmenistan SOURCE: Manu Sobti Dr. Manu P. Sobti, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, discusses his co-authored GAHTC module, Peripheries of Contact, which explores the architecture and urbanism created by migrant populations who traversed Central Asia and engaged with 'settled' peoples at the edges of their world. We discuss migration, loss and memory; graphic design, photography and cultural landscapes; the Mongols, Timurs, Uzbeks, Russians, Delhi Sultanates and Islamic identity in the medieval times.   Biography MANU P. SOBTI is an Islamic architecture and urban historian, specifically focused on examining changing borderlands in the Asia-Pacific. Prior to his recent arrival at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture as Senior Lecturer and Director of the Higher Degree Research Program, he served as Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA, Coordinator of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim and Uzbekistan Summer Program (2008-15), and directed the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13) in partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sobti also chaired SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies. Mapping urbanity and its scalar geographies feature prominently in his ongoing projects, a vantage determining how future urbanists view the multiplicity of emergent stakeholders within the contentious realms of the historical city and its changing meanings. His recent explorations have focused on the urban histories of early-medieval, Islamic cities along the Silk Road and the Indian Subcontinent, with specific reference to the complex, ‘borderland geographies’ created by riverine landscapes. Within a trans-disciplinary examination of medieval Eurasian landscapes straddling the region’s Amu Darya River, he is completing a project entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians – an unprecedented work on the historical, geo-politics of the Amu Darya, collating his extensive fieldwork and employing multiple Arabic, Persian, Russian and Uzbek sources. The Oxus borderland is also the subject of his ongoing filmic project entitled Medieval Riverlogues (intended for Public Television) which captures archival research within a re-drawn map series, state of the art computer-generated renderings and live footage on this cultural crucible, while suggesting provocative connections to enduring questions on cultural ‘indigeneities’ and identities, sustainability and resources. Mapping and the spatial humanities remain central to his work on the fast-changing urbanscapes of Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad & Bhopal, documented in the completion of two forthcoming book manuscripts - the first titled Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (under contract with I. B. Tauris Press, expected April 2018); the second titled Riverine Landscapes, Urbanity and Conflict: Narratives from East and West (under contract with Routledge Press, expected Dec. 2017). His continuing work on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Asia has resulted in a third publication entitled Chandigarh Rethink (ORO Publishers, published June 2017).

Dr. Morgan Liu‘s book, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) brings to light the life of ethnic Uzbeks living in the city of Osh, located in the country of Kyrgyzstan. His ethnographic fieldwork shines a light on the unique culture of the Uzbeks living in this area. From the history of Osh as a city on the ancient Silk Road, to its current existence as an intriguing mixture of cultures, the reader is given a glimpse of a world that is mostly unknown to westerners. Located on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Osh is a city subject to the divergent paths created by the political reform that underscores the culture of this city. Based on Liu’s fieldwork during 1993 to 2011, this work touches on many issues concerning Asia and the Middle East today.  The interviews and observations of these ethnic Uzbeks living in Osh reflect upon the nuances of what makes creates identity for a person, and a group of people who feel as though they really fit nowhere. Liu has presented this group in many facets, so that the reader is able to gain insight into the complexity of their existence in Osh. An Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University, Dr. Morgan Liu teaches about the Middle East, Central Asia, Islamic revival and social justice, and cultural theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Morgan Liu‘s book, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) brings to light the life of ethnic Uzbeks living in the city of Osh, located in the country of Kyrgyzstan. His ethnographic fieldwork shines a light on the unique culture of the Uzbeks living in this area. From the history of Osh as a city on the ancient Silk Road, to its current existence as an intriguing mixture of cultures, the reader is given a glimpse of a world that is mostly unknown to westerners. Located on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Osh is a city subject to the divergent paths created by the political reform that underscores the culture of this city. Based on Liu’s fieldwork during 1993 to 2011, this work touches on many issues concerning Asia and the Middle East today.  The interviews and observations of these ethnic Uzbeks living in Osh reflect upon the nuances of what makes creates identity for a person, and a group of people who feel as though they really fit nowhere. Liu has presented this group in many facets, so that the reader is able to gain insight into the complexity of their existence in Osh. An Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University, Dr. Morgan Liu teaches about the Middle East, Central Asia, Islamic revival and social justice, and cultural theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Morgan Liu‘s book, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) brings to light the life of ethnic Uzbeks living in the city of Osh, located in the country of Kyrgyzstan. His ethnographic fieldwork shines a light on the unique culture of the Uzbeks living in this area. From the history of Osh as a city on the ancient Silk Road, to its current existence as an intriguing mixture of cultures, the reader is given a glimpse of a world that is mostly unknown to westerners. Located on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Osh is a city subject to the divergent paths created by the political reform that underscores the culture of this city. Based on Liu’s fieldwork during 1993 to 2011, this work touches on many issues concerning Asia and the Middle East today.  The interviews and observations of these ethnic Uzbeks living in Osh reflect upon the nuances of what makes creates identity for a person, and a group of people who feel as though they really fit nowhere. Liu has presented this group in many facets, so that the reader is able to gain insight into the complexity of their existence in Osh. An Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University, Dr. Morgan Liu teaches about the Middle East, Central Asia, Islamic revival and social justice, and cultural theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Natalia Antelava reports on Uzbekistan where women have become the new target of one of the most repressive regimes on earth. She uncovers evidence that women are being sterilised,often without their knowledge, in an effort by the government to control the population. The programme speaks to victims and doctors and highlights the fear and paranoia that have made this such a difficult story to tell. Women have fled the country in order to escape the practice. Only a few brave Uzbeks have been willing to speak, often telling horrific stories the government don't want told. Producer: Wesley Stephenson.