Active Reading

[Spoilers for Season 3 of Yu Yu Hakusho follow.]
 
In the universe of Yu Yu Hakusho, the rulers of the Spirit World keep a record of humankind’s atrocities known as the Chapter Black tape.  The ravages of Vlad the Impaler, the human meat grinder of the cult of Huitzilopochtli, the psychological torture of the church of Scientology, the apocalyptic slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a thousand other examples of the worst humanity has ever had to offer fill the hours and hours of Chapter Black.  This testament to the devoted, pervasive, inventive, bloody monstrosity of the human race is, the lore goes, enough to convince anyone that humanity is utterly beyond redemption.  The collected iterations of horror in Chapter Black are so intense and omnipresent that they tar the entire human race by association.
 
In the series, humans who watch even a few minutes of Chapter Black are rendered into quivering, genocidal shells of their former selves.  A former agent of the Spirit World, Shinobu Sensui, watches Chapter Black and hatches a plan to turn the whole of the demonic realm loose upon humanity.  The group of psychic teenagers he forces to watch the tape join him in his quest to let demons feast upon all mankind, unable to reconcile their previous morality with any desire to let the depicted species persist.  For what could redeem any collection of sapient creatures whose accomplishments include depopulating two continents and creating monsters like Elliot Rodger and Ratko Mladić, Che Guevara and Pat Robertson, Ogedei Khan and Pasha Küçük Mehmet?

It’s an interesting thesis, the idea that the only response to such an outpouring of horror is violence.  But what if we can look on the monstrosity of the human race’s record, and see a different solution?

Active Reading
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Shifty Lines: The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

After the binge that was Shifty Lines: South Asia, a smaller helping of international relations is in order.  And as Ukraine and Russia still have some sorting out to do before their situation makes enough sense to summarize in this space, we will visit a less grandiose conflict: the Cyprus crisis.

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire set up many of the conflicts explored in the Shifty Lines series, in particular those in the Persosphere, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Balkans.  The wholesale revolt of southeastern Europe against Ottoman rule took place in large part because of the emerging ideas of ethnic nationalism and self-determination, which prodded the long-suffering peoples of the Balkans to expel this latest empire and make their own way in the world.  At the same time, similar sentiments elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire had little chance to develop before they were commandeered and squelched by older European powers, in particular the French and British.  Where southeastern Europe divided into new nation-states that have mostly held steady (what became Yugoslavia being a notable exception), the re-colonized Ottoman possessions in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Levant remain divided along colonial lines that serve as persistent sources of conflict.  The island of Cyprus is at the intersection of these two patterns.

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Shifty Lines: The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Plural Enemies

Religious pluralism is a strange ideal.  It’s a beautiful ideal, envisioning a world where people of dozens of creeds can function peacefully alongside each other.  It’s a fine practice, bringing massive benefits to societies as diverse as Poland, the United States, Lebanon, and India by calling in the dispossessed and unwanted from miles around.  It’s an intriguing intellectual event, forcing very different perspectives to achieve at least a superficial understanding of one another.
It’s also borderline incoherent, because religions do not get along.

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Plural Enemies