The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church Cuid a hAon

The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church, Part I

I’ve read a lot on Irish history, and one can indeed look at it as James Joyce did, as a “nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” But then I'm also an Irish speaker, unlike that lout, so I'm always quick to point out one could say the opposite, and argue that a small country next to a massively bigger one, and that was repeated invaded, smashed, raped, used as a “cash cow” and cheap food source for 800 years or so, yet was able to come back and get freedom from most of its territory – that seeing Irish history that way is to understand that it was not a nightmare, but a miracle.

Ireland beat the odds – up to a point. Scotland didn’t. It’s still attached, and Wales never got free. Yet Wales has the largest Celtic language-speaking population of all the ‘Celtic” countries, and Scotland, well, I’ve been there often but mostly to the West. Sad thing about Scotland was it could have been Europe’s Singapore. Instead it is a “Socialist Satrapy”. Ireland, too, could have been Europe’s Singapore, but after 800 years of fighting for their freedom, they turned around and surrendered entirely – but not to “Mother England” but rather to “Europe”, an amorphous something or other that seems to loathe itself and wants to transform itself in “Eurostan”.

Yet for their small size, Ireland and Scotland actually have had relatively influential historical effects on a wide range of things. Descendants of both countries make up significant elements of the populations of the U.S., Canada, and Australia and New Zealand. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher remembered for his Capitalism teachings, and that complete idiot “La Bon David” Hume who denied causation and devastated modern philosophy (good or bad or merely whimsical, that’s quite an achievement).

Ireland produced Edmund Burke, who greatly affected what is called “conservative” in the American and English political world. It was Edmund who gave compassion and sanity to the ideas of that old devil John Locke, the founder of what in America is called Libertarian political philosophy. (Tom Jefferson, the "Deist" or "Atheist Waiting for Darwin" was Locks' most famous pupil – and that's fitting because Johnny wanted to get rich via the slave trade and Tom actually owned slaves, so, "soul brothers", as it were.)

“Conservatives" since Burke, I think, are pulled between the Libertarian extremes of Locke and the calm sanity of Burke. It’s been said that Locke was an amazing philosopher, for despite being completely wrong in his theory of knowledge and most everything else, his teachings have had the greatest effect on modern life of any one (more or less) "modern" philosopher. To the extent that is true, Burke was right in his ideas and his effects are more subtle, but one hopes more long lasting.

In any event, modern Ireland, had it managed to return to its native language, Irish, would have stood along side of Poland and Hungary (and others such as the Baltic countries, Finland included, and some of the Balkan ones) as a significant contributor to national identity. Instead, most of what the Free State (from 1922 to De Valera in the ‘30s, and then the “Republic” – always just called “the State” – from post-World War II to Ireland’s submission to the EU) did for the language was to try to kill it. It’s a long, utterly miserable and wretched story that I’ll bypass for now.

Yet one profoundly important “cultural” effect the Irish had was on Catholicism. And we can definitely trace the shallow, soulless Catholicism of so much of the U.S. Church and the Church in Ireland itself (and in Scotland, where most of the Catholics were of Irish descent) much of England (excepting the “old English” Catholic roots that never quite died out) and of course Australian and NZ.

What was it about Irish Catholicism that was so debilitating for the Faith?

See Part II.

An Préachán

Must Read: Great Roberto de Mattei Article on Vat 2 and other current articles of importance

Professor Roberto de Mattei has a great article here about Vatican II. (See also OnePeterFive here.)

An excerpt:
On the historical level, however, Vatican II constitutes a non-decomposable block: It has its own unity, its essence, its nature. Considered in its origins, its implementation and consequences, it can be described as a Revolution in mentality and language, which has profoundly changed the life of the Church, initiating a moral and religious crisis without precedent. If the theological judgment may be vague and comprehensive, the judgment of history is merciless and without appeal. The Second Vatican Council was not only unsuccessful or a failure: it was a catastrophe for the Church.

End of excerpt.
 
An Préachán – Indeed, that first quoted paragraph is a concentrated knock-out punch, a "right cross" to the jaw of anyone who wants to argue that Vatican II, and its still churning, decomposing aftermath, was anything but a true "crash and burn." Three recent essays are important to mention in this regard:

✔First, Martin Mosebach: Pope Benedict’s Red Thread

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/08/pope-benedicts-red-thread

N.B This is now the Foreward in Peter Kwasniewsk's Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages, where it is titled For Pope Benedict XVI, On His Ninetieth Birthday.

✔Second, Eric Sammons' challenge: Evangelization, Vatican II, and Censorship

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/evangelization-vatican-ii-censorship

 

✔And thirdly, Phil Lawler takes up Eric Sammons’ challenge:

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=1236

 
I highly recommend all three, in order.

Back to Professor De Mattei; he writes, "...The judgment of history is merciless and without appeal." It is, for those who are willing to see it. As Anthony Esolen writes here:

"When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is right there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s that I won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what everybody else sees too."

                   

For some reason, no doubt involving spiritual forces primarily, but also simple human stubbornness and a overwhelming embarrassment to admit they were wrong, many, many people are "shutting their eyes toward what is right there, plain as day".  Well, that's not honest, wise, or maintainable: we must NOT pretend not to see it. 

For example, basically, from what one can glean from the various reports and studies, half the Catholics of the U.S. (to give a pretty well-known example) just left. I myself have talked to "old folks" who tell me they were just getting out of school in the early 1960s, and they just left. Twelve years of Catholic Ed and poof, they're outta there. Never looked back. "Good riddance to nonsense" kind of attitude.

And think a moment about why: Image the mind's shock at what happened in the '60s: you, your parents, your grand-parents and so on were probably immigrants within the 150 years previous to Vatican II. Most Catholics were ethnics, such as Esolen, an Italian, or my people from Ireland. That and their papist religion set them back in Protestant America. For every cocky soulless "Catholic" character who became a Protestant and then a Mason, there were millions of "salt-of-the-earth" types who kept the Faith, whatever it cost them. And it cost 'em a lot, from a worldly point of view.

As with millions of others, Esolen's parents and grand-parents worked like Trojans to provide for their families AND the Church. Catholic churches had to be built, furnished, decorated, oftentimes by bringing the necessary experts from the Old Country. Schools had to be built and maintained. Religious orders had to be supported to do the teaching. The whole Catholic American infrastructure took serious coin. And along with the financial cost, chronological and spiritual sacrifices were made: ALL to maintain a Mass in Latin, a specialized, set-apart clergy and religious who spoke and taught the same Latin, all to support that whole "Catholic thing". 

And then one day they were told: "Hey, turns out that wasn't necessary after all! Toss it!" 

Remember what old Hannibal Bugnini is quoted as saying:

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and our Catholic liturgies everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren, that is, Protestants.

L’Osseratore Romano, 19 March 1965, quoted in Michael Davies.

Nine years later the Bug expressed satisfaction that the ensuing reform was “…a major conquest of the Roman Catholic Church.”

 The psychological shock must have been devastating. I've heard stories of kids who watched as their parents took out their Latin-English missals and burned them in the backyard because the local priest told them to. Could a kid ever forget that? Try to imagine the shock of seeing what you were told was immemorial and eternal and see it replaced with the worst sort of chintzy banality that the wretched '60s and 70s could produce. (And that's saying something, because those decades were as shallow and empty-souled as any time in history! Incredibly, they even make the Bourbons look classy.)

It was the Vatican I Church, (that avatar of the Church from the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 and culminating in Vatican I, and which lasted to Vatican II), hadn't drilled into lay Catholics the idea that priests and the hierarchy were NEVER to be questioned, and that bishops were just secretaries to the pope, get-the-coffee types even though the Vatican I council reaffirmed bishops were direct successors of the Apostles. The Vat2 Revolution could not have happened without that conditioning. The "Reformers" cynically used 100 years of "Do not question us" to further their ends.

“So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
With our own feathers, not by others' hands,
Are we now smitten.”
―Aeschylus

(The Greeks knew everything.) 

Being of the Irish-speaking persuasion, I have the attitude: "These (insert unprintable description here) don't have the right now, and they didn't then, to deprive me of my religious heritage." I've just sort of been waiting for some hierarch to tell me X, or Y, or Z, as in the old Modernist party line about the TLM and the old Church: I've just been waiting. And of course that's not charitable, and according to Canon 212 we have to be polite with the clergy. But Grrr, grrrr, grrr. Somehow, someway, the spirit of St. Columbanus runs in me. (And see also here.)

Indeed, when I'm in the exquisite TLM I attend here in Budapest, once in while the thought occurs to me (not as much now as early on in my TLM attendance) and it's a shocking thought: "Those people, the "reformers" wanted to take this away from meself AND me kids, all this spiritual, soul-filling beauty; they wanted to make it extinct." Of course, that's not going to happen now.  But the restoration, the reconquista, is going to be long. From God's point of view, that's fine. A lot of time for charity, from his perspective, especially from Trad Catholics to the other sorts. And that's not going to be easy.

It's just our penance. Bergoglio is our penance. It could be worse.

An Préachán

"Trump Admin no longer supports MAGA": Sebastian Gorka resigns after Trump's Afghanistan speech...

...as he should have.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/25/breaking-sebastian-gorka-resigns-from-trump-administration/
(Though the White House is hinting that he was fired; clearly, the bottom line is: the Kelly-McMasters faction has won. That means more Afghan war.)

More Afghanistan War

Things have indeed taken a "turn for the worst" at the Trump Administration if this is true; i.e., "once again into the Afghan breach, dear friends, and wall it up with our American dead!" has been going on for 16 years. Surely that's enough?
Not apparently.
The Kelly-McMasters faction has won another round, as I noted above. But to what end?

✔What what DO they expect to win, in the end? What's the goal?

• Sure, most Muslims around the world are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere they think theirs is the best of the lot; however... 
• What distinguishes Islam from all the others, however, is pretty big; indeed, essential: it's the only religion founded by a pirate (a land-pirate, of course); indeed, it was founded by a guy who made Blackbeard look bookish.
• That brutal thug might not actually have existed, or if he did, he could have been quite different than his traditional portrayal. But that is irrelevant because his traditional portrayal is "gospel" to Muslims, and Muhammad (the name "Muhammad" is a title, "the Praised One", and had been applied to Christ for centuries) is considered the paragon of all men and someone who is to be emulated in the extreme.)
• The way their religion works, then, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely), in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.
• The way their religion works is that Allah is capricious. He can change basic physics at any time, cause the sun to rise in the West, whatever, and he can change morality too. You don't know what he wants you to do but if you feel the urge to emulate Muhammad, the only way you'll know if you should is to go try it. Allah will either favor  you or you'll be dead.
• Because of that essential Muslim world-view, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (remorseless murderer of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely in an understatement of a millennium), so in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.

Ergo: No "moderate" Muslims can ever hope to "reform" the religion because no one will ever be able to separate Muslim worship of Allah (i.e., "Allah" is the Arabic for "the God") from either what's technically called "Muslim Volunterism" (from the Latin "voluntas", or will) the will of Allah being paramount of every other divine attribute) and Muhammad, the "cap and seal" of the prophets. 

• (He didn't have any male children, even though Allah gave him an unequaled libido and a host of women of all sorts, sizes, shapes and ages, because of the basic Muslim idea: that all the prophets were related; so since M didn't have any males heirs, there can be no more prophets. Shia Islam has a story of its own here, but that would be a long essay in itself.)

Trump's election: We Were Supposed to Get Realistic About All of the Above

Turns out: NOT!

I came across a great word in the Comments section of AKA Catholic (a Trad blog on my blog list): "ethnomasochist". We've been governed (more in Europe than the U.S., at least until Obama was elected) by ethnomasochist types, folks who seem to hate their own culture and who seem to want to promote something completely alien. How else would one explain Angela Merkel, for example? Or Pope Francis? (The Italian public is fed up with him and his endless rants for no-holds-bard immigration.) The general "PC" culture refuses to accept that Islam is different, implacable, unstoppable, even if the vast majority are not terrorist themselves, the free-wheeling, free-booting Prophet-Founder left a free-wheeling, free-booting religion.

• So one major reason Trump was elected was he "called it like it was" about Islam and the endless wars we've been involved in. 
• The second was he seemed to be suggesting getting out of those wars and stop trying to be Islam's enabler. 
• For that's what the U.S. is in a sense (and it's true about the West in general); we've been "enabling" Islam since before Franklin Roosevelt (ugh, what a disaster he was and historians treat him as greater than Lincoln and Washington combined) met with old ibn Saud (Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman, etc., etc., al Saud) in February 1945.

A Bit of History

• If I remember it correctly, it was the British who created the Gulf Emirates back in WWI days – the idea being to keep coastal oil supplies available for the Royal Navy (the Brits kept tight control of Iraq and Iran's oil resources between the World Wars, too; Britain had been a staunch ally of the Turks, and the Disraeli government fell in part because of an Irish-American's reporting on the Turkish atrocities in the Balkans: see Januarius MacGahan, the "Liberator of Bulgaria"). 
• And really, the West helping the Ottoman forces "modernize" in the late 19th/early 20th century all helped to bring Islam out of the unremitting Dark Ages it had fallen into since the 17th century.  
• The Brits and the French divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Turks during World War I (see Sykes-Picot).  
• The U.S. stayed out of that then, immediately post-WWI, but by the end of WWII, the U.S. helped the Brits overthrow Iran's PM in 1953, Mosaddeq, yet by 1956, the U.S. wouldn't support the Brits and French as they tried to re-seize the Suez canal. (And that fiasco meant there weren't enough forces to do anything about Hungary's1956 Revolution.)

The one bright spot in the entire region was Israel, but our ethnomasochist types hate it with a passion.

• Turkey was supposed to be the one, only, single successful "secular" Muslim country...
• But even when Ataturk was alive, he slaughtered non-Turks (see: Slaughter at Smyrna 1922) and the continued deportation of all non-Turks from Turkish controlled territory throughout the Republic of Turkey's history, and how that "secular" government has treated Christianity.
• Today, they've gone whole-hog Islamist (if I may so put it).

We've played a complicated and foolish (and ultimately dangerous) game with Islam for some time now. Most (if not all) of the Western leaders have not seen the essential, profound civilizational threat Islam poses. The bottom line: If it weren't for us, they'd still be back in the 7th century because that's how their religion works; yet we haven't really helped them "get out from under" the one thing that holds them back. 

• (For the truth of the assertion about Islam being – as the young Churchill called it in the 1890s – the strongest retrograde force on Earth, see my reference to Robert Reilly's "Closing of the Muslim Mind" below for a book that details Islam's intellectual fall, and the reason for it.

Anyway...

• Gorka is out, and Gen. Michael Flynn is out too. 
• General Flynn was the first take down the Neo-Conservatives and Deep State crowd made in Trump's Admin. 
• Flynn pulled no punches about Islam. 
• Since then they've been working assiduously to turn the Trump Administration into another George W. Bush-type Admin on foreign/military affairs. 
• Looks like they're succeeding. As I say, the Kelly-McMasters faction is winning.

Dangerous

This is quite troubling. Gorka didn't hesitate to speak plainly about Islam and Jihad, and thus he made many, many enemies in the ethnomasochist PC "Deep State" that runs the U.S. and the Western World.

• Not surprisingly; the Left is celebrating, because they WANT yet ANOTHER "Neo-Conservative" Republican lost-in-the-swamp-of-an-unwinnable-war Admin to beat up over its "foreign wars". 
• (The American Left keeps thinking in terms of short-term political gains: they're like people in Noah's day, going about their petty affairs as the clouds gathered darker and darker.)
• Example: Keith Olbermann tweets that "Gorka resigns. So the Day isn't a total loss. Now leave the country, @SebGorka, you Nazi f_ _k." https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/fridays-hot-mic-21/ (Stay classy, Olbermann; actually, I hope such a person lives long enough to know what it is to be enslaved by a conquering amir, though in truth, it is such types as that who are the first to convert and make sex slaves of the daughters – and the sons – of their enemies.)

Culture War

Are we engaged in a cultural war with Islam? 

• How you answer that depends on how you see the modern world, 
• The massive Islamic immigration into the West, 
• The West's fulfillment of Stalin's quip that we'd sell to the Communists the ropes they would later hang us with – though it isn't the Communists who are buying the rope, it's the Muslims.
• In other words, are you an "ethnomasochist"?

This refusal to see what's happening is sort of like turning a blind eye to North Korea developing nukes. Neither scenario is going to end well. Refuse to believe we've been in a cultural war – as does the ethnomasochist PC crowd in general, the Deep State, the "Governing Party" and the mainstream media and academia (but I'm repeating myself) – refuse to believe it if you will, but as a life-long student of history, I don't see how it can be anything else but a life-and-death struggle.


As Anthony Esolen wrote here:

When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is right there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s that I won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what everybody else sees too.

 
I don't want to "un-notice" anything either.

• One other thing I'm certain of is that the Russians and Chinese – the other bearers of our complicated, soulless techno-international finance world,, would not hesitate, if the U.S. or Europe collapse and Islam tries to take advantage of that and seize control (see below about the war between the Byzantines and the Persians) – I honestly believe the world's remaining nuclear powers would try to use nukes to solve the Islam-on-the-cusp-of–final victory problem. 
• They probably hope it doesn't come to that, obviously, but unlike the West, they'd pull that trigger.

The Afghan War

It is nuts to continue the endless war in the planet's most difficult fighting terrain (difficult because of ground itself, the vicious, brutal tribes who inhabit it – among the most ruthless fighters on Earth – and the difficultly of actually reaching it and resupplying your forces). George W. Bush was nuts to "nation build" there, and Obama played a disingenuous game for 8 years about it. But Honestly, it's crazy. It makes Vietnam look like "a walk in the park". About Vietnam, too, remember:

1. They Johnson Administration didn't talk much about "victory" either, something Trump didn't mention in his speech. LBJ kept thinking he'd make some sort of deal with "Uncle Ho". Didn't happen, did it? 
2. Lyndon Johnson and his military leaders seemed to be oblivious of what an endless war would do to the country. 
3. One can make the argument that because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Thailand never fell to the Communists (the old "domino theory") but whatever the value of that argument, NO ONE can make such a claim about Afghanistan, whose main neighbors are none other than Iran and Pakistan.

Lyndon Johnson, one of the more reprehensible men ever to be president, never read Sun Tzu.
Sun Tzu wrote that a long war serves no one and no purpose, except to bring down a state.

Chapter 2 Waging War
2
When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. #
3
Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. #
...
19
In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. # https://suntzusaid.com/book/2

The Reality

About the endless, 1400-year long war between Islam and the rest of the planet, we can say:

• The West has unmatched force (though the Chinese are trying to catch up, and may have done so) but not the will to engage in an endless war... 
• Whereas Islam hasn't (yet) unbridled force (they'd need nukes) but its violent advocates have the will to kill millions for centuries to force the world to submit to Sharia. 
• That's just the lesson of history (a lesson so many on both Western Left and Right don't seem to want to learn, or even want to hear about, because, as Anthony Esolen says. everyone sees it but many pretend not to). 
• You can fight against such crazies; it's been done: the Romans fought the "Q-speaking" Celts in Northwestern Spain back before Christ, but you need a couple of hundred years of war (as they had then) and you'd have to use your absolute force. The slaughter was horrific.  
• Thus, the West hasn't the will for a true Total War against Islam. 
• We've had a few lucky battles: Charles Martel at Tours, the Battle of Lepanto, a long series of hair-breath victories by the Byzantines that no one remembers after the Battle of Manzikert (which, curiously, took place in August, August 21, 1071), and the Battle of Vienna, etc. 
• But as the Battle of Manzikert suggests, all those successes come to naught when the other side wins a "final" victory.

The Muslim leaders who want to bring down the West know all that (9/11 occurred on the anniversary of the battle of Vienna), and can wait us out.
 
Again: Most Muslims are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere think theirs is the best of the lot. But the way their religion works, in the overall scheme of things, the more radical guys come out on top and the more peaceable types keep their mouths closed to keep their heads on.

Afghanistan again

Afghanistan is not the center of Islam. It's not even backstage. It's not even in the theater's store room or even the toilet. It's the sewer behind the theater in an alley full of mutant crocodiles (as it were). 

• The Pakistanis created the Taliban, but the brutal tribesmen who are among the most effective fighters in all Islam just happen to live in this remote place. 
• If you wanted to "win" Afghanistan, you'd have to either nuke it, or conquer both Iran and Pakistan, and then occupy Afghanistan. 
• You'd definitely have to remove Islam itself and replace it with, what? Buddhism? Quakers or the Amish version of Christianity?  
• Since those are not options any Western political leader would contemplate, then what? 
• Our "leaders" clearly don't know, so why are we tolerating this endless war?

A few curious facts about Islamic military and population history:

• N.B. Arabs can't fight, Oh, on a certain level, sure. I mean historically they've not been known as good soldiers. Raiders, tribal warriors, sure; they have a "warrior" culture and a "warrior religion" with a resilient (although too often depraved) tribal culture, but otherwise, consider: 
• They're good as kamikazes, of course; the Iranians never tire of using them as suicide bombers (ever notice you never hear of an Iranian suicide bomber? Of course not.) 
• The Great Islamic Conquests Never Happened; i.e., the Arabs never had a horde of unstoppable Mujahedin Jihadi Bedouin storming out of Arabia, either out of the Hijaz or the larger peninsula; that's a fiction. They simply never had the population to do anything remotely like that, A, and B, the "Arab" conquerors of the Persian Empire and most of Byzantium were ethnic Arab-speaking peoples already in place in what's now Iraq and Syria; they began migrating to those regions in the 100 years or so after Christ. (Many came from the far south of Arabia, always the most culturally advanced peoples on the peninsula.) By the 500s, they were quite populous and financially successful. But they weren't Hijaz or Bedouin Peninsula Arabs. 
• It was these "Arabs" who staged a coup d'état at the end of another long, never-ending disastrous war, the "Great War" between the Persians and the Byzantines of the very early 600s. (It's a scenario that could easily be played out today: suppose the Russians and the US/Euros fought it out to exhaustion; and the many Muslims who have been immigrating into the West would simply seize control of the lot – something that could actually happen, given the right circumstances – you know, like exhausting ourselves in war.) 
• The Arabs never had unconquerable generals: Khalid ibn al-Walid probably is totally legendary (he was supposed to have fought 100 – or 1000, whatever – battles and won them all), or at least has been quite distorted historically.

Also, that early "Arab Empire" of the Umayyad's wasn't even "Muslim" but had a form of Christianity (see: The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History (2008) by Karl-Heinz Ohlig & Gerd-R. Puin (Editors); it was the subsequent mostly Persian Abbasids who were the first "Muslims". (The words "Islam" and "Muslim" came into use at the end of the Umayyad period. The Koran itself has a murky history, and appeared about this time.) 

• The various tribes of successive waves of Turks eventually took over the "Arab" Empire and (with through their various tribes and dynasties, and with various exceptions, like the Fatimids in Egypt or the Mongols) ruled it until 1918. 
• The point above about the Umayyads is fascinating, because the Abbasids always, always, always claimed the Umayyads were heretics and not true Muslims. The words "Islam" and "Muslim" had begun to appear before the Umayyads fell, but the Abbasids did everything they could to murder every single Umayyad they could. Eventually, they did. 
• The mostly Persian Abbasids ran the empire till the Turks began to replace them, and (as noted above) despite various ins and outs, the Turks ran the place until 1918, everything except Iran, which has been a mortal enemy of the Turks for a millennia now.

So it is that in Afghanistan we have yet another example of a non-Arab people who have been transformed by their Muslim religion into "a force to be reckoned with".

Summation

We've been in Afghanistan for 16 years and are simply no closer to victory than we've ever been. 

• And unlike Vietnam, which had a long coast line and with which we could use to advantage (we could have re-commissioned our old battleships – well, we unwisely got rid of the South Dakota class just before that war got out of control in the Lyndon Johnson Admin, and the one New Jersey BB they tried to use, they said it was too expensive; yeah, right – to just sit off-shore and bombard the daylights out of them at little cost to ourselves. (Riiight. It was FAR cheaper to lose hundreds of aircraft and their crews instead of reviving the BBs, whose best work was bombardment.) 
• But Afghanistan is a mountainous, nearly inaccessible hell-hole populated by some of the most violent and least "civilized" people on Earth. 
• It's insane to keep up such a war.

That's especially true since Pakistan borders it on the east, and the Paks are the ones, through their ISI, their infamous and deadly secret service (whose official emblem is a rather diabolical-looking goat's head), who created the Taliban to begin with; while on the other side of Afghanistan is Iran, and I hardly need to mention how dangerous they are. To the north is Russia or former Central Asian states.

Meanwhile, the real, never-ending trouble is Islam itself. And no, I'm won't debate that with anyone who hasn't read Robert Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist by Robert R. Reilly (2010).

So, Gorka was quite correct to resign. Napoleon said, "If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna." Why would you invade Kathmandu?

Final note: Sorry for being so long-winded, but it is unbelievably frustrating. I would say if you're going to fight "radical" Islam, you need to take on the culture that creates it, and not invade Afghanistan. If some very nasty terrorists use part of it as a hideout, we have weapons that can deal with that. If you don't have the courage to do that, hire Klingons. But honestly, if a Byzantine emperor or a "prudent and sagacious" Tisroc of Tashban was going to do it, he'd just pay one or two of the endlessly warring factions to fight the others to exhaustion. Something like what the infamous Cardinal Richelieu did to the Germans in the Thirty Years War. Otherwise, it's just pointless.

No wonder Gorka resigned. What we're doing there now is nuts.

An Préachán