Are We the New Byzantines?

 YOU decide:

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.

Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell. 

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.

In fact, 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople. 

Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.

The 14 th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city. 

But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.

The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.

They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.

They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.

Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.

The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.

Meanwhile they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.

**

About 40 percent of Canadian children ages 0–14 do not live with married parents, according to a new report by Cardus, a think tank.

Data collected during COVID-19 suggested “a significant decline in marriage rates, divorce rates, and fertility,” according to the report, “Canadian Children at Home: Living Arrangements in the 2021 Census,” published Feb. 28. The report indicated it used previously unreleased Statistics Canada data from the 2021 census to examine the living arrangements of children from newborn to age 14 in Canadian families.

Parental marital status and the portion of intact families is an indirect measure of family stability, suggested the report. “Measuring instability in the family lives of children is important because instability is correlated with a higher risk of poor outcomes among children,” it said.

The report analyzed how many children live in single-parent families, married-parent families, and common-law families. It also considers children living in step-families, and compares the data to previous census cycles over a 25-year period.

According to the report, 60 percent of children in Canada live in families with married parents. Back in 1996, about 73 percent of children lived with their married parents, but the report said although the number had been declining for decades, the numbers have held steady since 2016, declining only 0.3 percent.

Similarly, the number of children in single-parent homes has remained relatively stable for the last five years. In Manitoba, Yukon, and British Columbia, the number of married-parent families saw a slight increase.

One in five Canadian children are living with a lone parent, while roughly 17 percent of children live in common-law families. One in three children living in common-law families are in step-families, while less than 7 percent of children in married-parent families are in step-families.

** 

Again, why does a cultural subset feel a need to dance half-naked in front of children?:

The bylaw was rushed through Council, debated in one session, not subjected to the customary committee review, with city staff even admitting that the bylaw is the first of its kind in Canada.

It’s clear why supporters of the bylaw wanted to rush its adoption – despite the misgivings of certain Councillors during this week’s Council debate – as there was an immediate chance to score political points with certain groups on the back of American culture wars, while creating a convenient pretext to silence the Council majority’s political opponents.

Further scrutiny and study would have revealed that not only is Calgary’s bylaw a solution in search of a problem, but that it is one of the more egregious and unconstitutional exercises of authority in a major Canadian municipality in recent memory, and will actually prevent most, if not all, public demonstrations – even those that Councillors might endorse.

There are already laws to address actual “physical harm” caused to community members. Assault, uttering threats, and mischief are all offences under the Criminal Code. Hate-motivated offences can attract additional criminal penalties. Alberta already has trespass laws that prevent demonstrators from entering certain private spaces.

Councillors presumably know this, which is why they needed to extend their authority to prevent the “psychological harm” they feel occurs when protestors raise uncomfortable issues. Unfortunately for these Councillors, however, the Charter protects the freedoms of expression and assembly, and any infringement of these rights must be justified as a reasonable limit.

As the bylaw targets only “specified protests” (which is so broadly-defined as to include nearly every type of protest), the Courts will find that the bylaw infringes the Charter, but will consider whether the bylaw restrictions are rationally connected to their objective (“preventing physical and psychological harm”) and whether the restrictions are minimally impairing and proportionate.

**

South Korean marriages fell to a new record low last year, auguring a further downshift in the country’s dismal fertility rate.

South Korea’s crude marriage rate — the number of marriages per 1,000 people — slid to 3.7 from 3.8 in 2021, according to data released Thursday by the national statistics office. About 191,700 marriages took place in 2022, down 0.4% from a year earlier.

The increased reluctance among South Koreans to marry is a warning sign that the world’s lowest fertility rate may fall even further. Matrimony and fertility are closely associated in Korea, where births outside marriage remain rare.

Low fertility threatens to undermine Korea’s productivity by shrinking its workforce and slowing consumption. The government has introduced a slew of measures to encourage more births in an effort to reverse the trend, including a tripling of monthly allowances for parents by President Yoon Suk Yeol, who took office last year.

A variety of factors are blamed for Koreans’ reluctance to tie the knot, ranging from the high costs of housing to the difficulties of raising a child. Increasing gender tensions are another reason regularly highlighted.

**

The tree is in a quiet, sunstruck park, lost in a grimy exurb of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The tree is decorated with hundreds of bracelets and trinkets, with the occasional teddy bear and kiddies’ drink – poignantly Blyton-esque touches, perhaps.

But if you look close at the bark of this tree, you can see tell-tale abrasions: chops, scars, bruises. These blemishes mark the places where peasant soldiers would swing screaming children against the tree, smashing their skulls to pulp. This was done, quite deliberately, in front of their naked, wailing and soon-to-be-murdered mothers. Because this is the infamous Baby Bashing Tree, in the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. ...

Why? Why was this regime so mad? This is the question many have asked. After this latest visit, finally going to Choeung Ek, I think I perhaps have an answer. In his fine, troubling book – The Elimination – about his interviews with Duch, Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh quotes Duch saying that in his world ‘there is no place for the individual’, and ‘beauty is an obstacle’.

This is important because it reveals the insane yet inexorable logic of the Khmer Rouge. If Marxism means enforced equality, its ultimate endpoint is this. Individuals cannot be ‘allowed’ as they might be ‘different’, they might laugh or be happy, unlike others. Beauty – physical, artistic, sexual, spiritual, intellectual – must likewise be ruthlessly extinguished, because it too prevents a Marxist Utopia. Beauty is unfair. It must be eliminated.

Does this matter? Yes, because we live in a time when kids think Marxism is cool again. When self-confessed Marxist Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an amusing old uncle.

This cannot stand. Just as we teach children about Hitler, the ne plus ultra of rightwing ethno-nationalism, they need to be taught about the ultimate leftwing cruelties of the Khmer Rouge, and the horrors of Pol Pot. That is to say: we need to take young people from the cocktail bars of modern Phnom Penh, down that long, littery suburban road, to a sunlit stupa full of human skulls, to trenches gleaming with human teeth, to the place where babies were smashed to death, in the name of Karl Marx and Chairman Mao, the Saucepan Man and Moon-Face of communism. We need to show them the Satanic Faraway Tree.