Tuesday, June 22, 2010

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Fernand Braudel: The German manufacturing revolution of the 15th century

When exactly was the Islamic 'industrial revolution' ?

by Ferdinand III







The peasants are constantly told that Islam is peace, love and merriment. 300 million dead over 1400 years and endless Jihad makes that myth a brutal lie. Islam has been, and always will be a failure – witness the Muslim world today. Islam is a self-defeating, corrupted and racist theology of anti-modernity. Yet in a display of fascinating psychopathy, the really smart people including those mythical 'moderate' Muslims, who endlessly wail that Islam created the modern world offer no proof to support the claim.


Oh some weak and casual allusions are offered up of course. Architecture which is not Islamic is forwarded [It is Persian, Byzantine, Greek, Visigothic etc]; as is math or algebra [Euclid, Pythagoras and Hindu mathematicians pre-date Islamic by 600-900 years, Algebra was a Hindu creation]; medicine as well [the first modern hospitals were Nestorian Christian, the first 'doctors' Greek]; Cordoba Spain [which witnessed an unending series of persecutions, violence and destruction of non-Muslims]; and sometimes 'culture', though a death cult, which is based on slavery, misogyny, Koranic adjurations to war, violence, and racism, is hardly a 'culture' – but more likely a pathology.


Those who support Islamic 'contributions' to mankind deal only in platitudes. There are no facts, no data, no archeological evidence, no accounts, no manufacturing blueprints, no creations which can be hauled out of the Muslim historical warehouse for the modern peasant to view and to be amazed by. Not a damn thing. So where is the proof?


So very smart people, answer these questions.

Where is the Muslim creation of capitalism, machinery, innovation, invention, including the antecedents of the modern world ?
Answer: None, not a single creation, can be listed.


Where is Islamic higher art and can you please list all the great artifacts, artists and paintings ?
Answer: There is no Muslim art, in large part because iconography is a sin.


Where do we locate the Muslim defence of the individual, tolerance for the other and the ending of slavery ?
Answer: Islam is the sublimation of the individual into the state and cult.  It is a slave-obsessed ideology.


List the Islamic geniuses of science, economy, botany, biology, medicine, chemistry, accounting, finance, banking, industry and trade.
No more than a handful – almost of all whom were not Muslims – can be listed.


No proof exists of Islam's contribution to the improvement of mankind or the development of the modern world. None. The oft-recited claim that Arab and African-dominated Spain was a multi-cultural paradise is a vicious, anti-Christian and anti-European slur. Spain was a Jihadic disaster from 720 AD until 1250 AD; when the entire country was raped, pillaged for slaves, and devastated by the usual Islamic violence one would expect from a fascist inspired war. Pre-Muslim Visigothic Spain was immeasurably richer than Islamic Africa, which was the main reason of course that the Muslims invaded the peninsula. It was denuded and depopulated thanks to Arab and Muslim predations. Islam was a squatting empire. It simply decamped on richer territories and states and managed through high taxation and the control of trade to acquire money and wealth. But so what. It invented nothing.


If you read a real history of the medieval world, one aspect which is obvious is the clear advantage that Europe enjoyed over the Islamic world in all matters, even as early the 7th century which witnessed the irruption of the moon cult devotees out of the dry, barren wastelands of Arabia. The Muslims had the weight of numbers and the fanaticism of deluded moon-cult worshippers inspired by war, women, booty, gold and paradise on their side. But the Europeans had the advantages of culture, inspiration, spiritual faith, and resolve, on their side. In the long view of history, to use Braudel's term, there was no possibility that Islam would ever surpass Europe in the power of political-economy. Even as early as 750 AD the attributes of European superiority were self-evident to neutral observers. By 1500 the variance was so wide, you might as well compare Neolithic Europe to 18th century England.


Take Germany circa 1500 for example. Braudel relates that Germany was the world leader in mining. Was this accomplished by slaves, serfs or knaves? Was it luck or imperialist expansion which allowed Germany to develop a 'capitalist' mining sector? Or were other factors at work, including those of the cultural, political, and capitalist? Modern methods and technologies were being used in German mines as long ago as 1450 as Braudel relates:


“And it was Germany, a secondary zone for trade, which led the way in industrial development....But it was above all the development of mining. The early revival of the Germany economy in the 1470s, ahead of the rest of Europe, was not the only result. The extraction of metallic ores – gold, silver, copper, tin, cobalt and iron – stimulated a whole series of innovations...as well as the creation of machinery on a gigantic scale for the time, to pump out water from the mines and to bring up the ore.” [p. 549]


Germany by 1500 had developed a modern industrial complex around raw material extraction and processing. Huge machines to dig, pump out water, provide ventilating shafts, shift the earth for ores, and store them, were all innovated. These mined products had to be moved to various cities for industrial processing. Trade systems, roads and waterways were all improved with modern machines and development:


“Transport was improved and modernized; large firms began to specialize in carrying goods. And Venice, the queen of the Levant trade, established close trading relations with High Germany, since she needed silver.” [p. 549]


Venetian capital flowed into Germany industry, just like Florentine, Genoese and Milanese capital was finding its way into Holland and England to develop the industrialization of the wool industry – and the creation of large profits in textile manufacturing and retail. Capital was generating a series of German industrial improvements which were harbingers of the industrial 'revolution' or more appropriately, 'evolution', which would take England from the medieval stage, to the modern. Germany by 1500 was the most advanced manufacturing state on the planet.


So where was the Islamic 'mining revolution'? Did the Muslims invent anything of note in mining manufacturing? Big machines, mills, pipes, sifting combines, ventilation shafts, earth movers? Of course not. Not a damn thing occurred in the Muslim world in industry or mining innovation. They were slave states. These pre-modern creations had mines which were scratched from the earth by a long retinue of White and Black slaves. Some 11-15 million Blacks were slave-traded into the Muslim empires – many into unsophisticated mines and salt extraction sites. 5 million Whites were also taken into North Africa and the Islamic empires over 1200 years – more than a few ended up digging holes for their Muslim masters, sourcing gold, silver, and salt.


Within Islam no machines were needed. Slave empires eschew technology. Slave trading was too profitable [for the trader]; and slave usage simply too easy. Like ancient Rome, or the US South, slavery in the Islamic world precluded the rise of technology, and the Koran which mandates slave-trading and slave-ownership, provided a cultural and 'spiritual' excuse to perpetuate the immoral and ultimately unproductive [at the societal level], use of human labor.


The nexus of German mining expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries has many salient points. This explosion in production was supposedly during the dark, stupid and witless 'dark ages'. According to academics and Islamophiles, the European period from 500 AD to 1500 AD was utter hell. Half-naked religious fanatics, burning each other at the stake, engaged in the inquisition, or eating grass when they were not self-flagellating to commend themselves to Jesus; are the only pictures and references taught to children and the general public. How then to explain the German mining 'revolution' of the 15th century – an era deep inside the so-called 'dark ages'? How do you then excuse the contemporaneous poverty of Islamic industry and manufacture embedded in the failure of a slave-system?


When comparing 15th century Germany to Islam, a deeper question emerges. Why would you demonize the former and applaud the latter? Doesn't that say alot about the ignorance, the bias, the theological racism of the person holding such views? Islam created nothing. No one who says it did can defend the claim with any proof. Germany invented the modern complex of mining and the industrialization of ores, which led in a tortured route, to the modern energy systems of today.


And what did Islam produce exactly?