Analysis: The warped history that fuels right-wing terrorism
By Ishaan Tharoor Ishaan Tharoor Reporter covering foreign affairs, geopolitics and history Email Bio Follow March 22 at 12:59 AM Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday, along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today’s WorldView newsletter.
There’s nothing particularly original about Tarrant’s obsession with a long history of Europeans killing Muslims. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in a shocking string of attacks in 2011, styled himself as a crusading Templar knight and issued a manifesto that contained hundreds of references to conflicts in the Balkans — a region he and Tarrant both clearly viewed as a fault line between Islam and the West.
Of course, no particular brand of extremism has a monopoly on crude, vainglorious readings of history. The Islamist militants of the Islamic State also ostensibly believed they were fighting an epochal holy war, embracing an apocalyptic prophecy that the armies of Islam would vanquish the forces of “Rome” in a decisive battle that would prefigure the greater glory of the caliphate.
And while these white supremacists cling to their idea of the past, medievalists and historians are at pains to stress that no such past ever existed. “The idea that [medieval societies] are this paragon of unblemished whiteness is just ridiculous,” Paul Sturtevant, author of “The Middle Ages in the Popular Imagination,” told The Washington Post. “It would be hilarious if it weren’t so awful.”
The Ottoman Empire — itself a vast, multiethnic political entity — was in league with the Catholic French king, and its troops’ advance on the Austrian city was sped by the legendary Hungarian Protestant noble Imre Thokoly, who marched under the Ottoman banner with an ax to grind against the Catholic Hapsburgs in Vienna. The Ottomans were also boosted by Cossacks from what is now central Ukraine, who at the time saw them as useful allies against rival Poles and Russians.
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