Was it the imagination or
did John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, cross himself before a a bank of
flowers for the dead a couple of times, only for the BBC News to cut out that
bit for later screenings? This was the
Roman Cross.
Recalling old Soviet
propaganda films about the Middle Ages memory says that a point was made in
them about the baddies, The Christian Teutonic Knights being blessed with that
one as opposed to the different Orthodox Cross of the Russians, the good guys. Old prejudices die hard.
In the late 14th Century
going off to the Lithuanian Crusades was the summer break for some of the
Western equestrian classes. They would
join the Teutonic Knights to go East for God, or at least their version of The
Word. Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV
of England and Wales was one. He was
joined by his sidekick, a Yorkshire lad named Sir Robert Waterton who held
lands in mid Yorkshire.
These lands are now
represented at the highest levels by the elite of the non-equestrian class
namely Ed Balls, who did so much to cause the recent Great Crash and Yvette
Cooper his Lady who crusades for her version of Human Rights that has so
encouraged the compensation culture wrecking much of the economy in its own
way.
With impeccable timing the
Metropolitan Opera in New York had scheduled in the last few days its new production
of the Alexander Borodin masterpiece "Prince Igor" which was relayed
live by BBC Radio 3 and the Irish RTE Lyric FM on Saturday and may turn up on Sky Arts.
This splendid, colourful
and very tuneful piece of historical tosh is all about the conflicts of a
thousand years ago involving the Russians, based on Moscow and their
neighbours and invaders of the lands to the South, the Polovstians of that
time.
You will all have heard some
of the tunes. The piece has been
quarried by very many song writers and composers of the last few decades. They have not only made the Hit Parade in the
past, almost a whole musical "Kismet" made use of them. They still crop up in the occasional
advertisements.
The historical background
is complex. Wikipedia has
entries on Prince Igor the opera, Polovstian Dances, and Polovstians; the listing has an article under the historically more correct Cumans. This Wikipedia on the Cumans is long, densely
worded and very complicated, even if you know the geography and some of the
history.
What has happened in that
region since the end of the 14th up to the 19th Century is no less complicated
and it really hasn't become much easier in the 20th Century and into the 21st. It is a region that is the crossroads of
continents where tribes and peoples have come and gone, fought and lost, lived
and scattered.
As one commentator put it,
if Moscow does not control the region it is just another nation, if it does
then it is an Empire. This is the region
where our representatives, elected and unelected are galloping around peddling
their late 19th and early 20th Century notions and prejudices of what is right
and what is not.
All they will come down to
is some strange version of tribal dances which may entertain and divert us but
do have little to do with the brutal realities of power. John Kerry is about to find this out.
If the world is about to
go through another age of great change with the reshaping of nations and peoples
then many other aspects of life, government, rules, laws and religions, either
with or without gods, are going to be radically different.
Would you really have put
the equivalent of a medieval monk in charge of a large Empire in the 20th
Century? Think of the disasters that
this might have caused the world. But
wait,
Wasn't Stalin once
destined for the monastery?
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