The Crusades in Christian perspective

The Crusades were one of the most important events in our history – and one of the most glorious. They saved civilisation. There is little doubt about this. Islam or Mohammedanism as it should be called [or the cult of Mohammed], is a militant barbarous paganism. Why wouldn't you fight it?

In the great wide world of Western 'intelligentsia' and popular-culture, the Crusades to the Holy Land are portrayed as the expressions of a 'Dark Age' society, full of Christ-loving rabble, malcontents, thieves, morons, and hair-shirt wearing tonsured hypocrites. Only an illiterate, barbarous society would launch attacks against the lands of Christ and engage in the violent racial extermination of peaceful, non-White and entirely sophisticated and nuanced Moslems. Or so we are told. The reality is of course the opposite. The Crusades from 1099 to roughly 1291, were actions which saved Europe and civilisation. There can be little serious doubt about that. The Moslems brought the idea of intolerant Holy War or Jihad, into the heart of Europe enslaving and killing literally millions of people in Italy, Spain, Southern France conquering even the southern cantons of Switzerland in their lust for booty, women, land and power. 

Cleansing the spiritual and material world in the name of the thing Allah, meant the fusing of church and state and the development of a robust intolerance and program of racist-supremacism which was already firmly embedded in Islamic theology. Europe was richer, more educated and more sophisticated in all matters of the political-economy when the Moslems attacked it in the early 8th century. We know this from Arab sources and from the obvious fact that marauders don't plunder poverty stricken areas. Vikings plundered England for its wealth. Moslems pillaged Europe for its treasures, its women and its civilisation.

When true barbarians – the Moslems –attack what should you do? Turn the other cheek? Sell your possessions and imitate St. Francis? Hide? Organize an international conference and create 'legal' statutes of international approval for either self-defense or projected-warring? Or do you simply get on with the business of defending yourself, training your military, fortifying your towns, educating your populace about the need to fight back; and making war on the enemy, 'until they have had enough' to quote Churchill? Only a demented self-loathing personality would accept any but the last option. Yet many in our society will reject the obvious – even those Christians who if they knew any history whatsoever, should know better.

“However, history bears me out. Not a single significant voice was raised against the Byzantines when they fought Islamic conquests. There are no records of Christian pacifists in Egypt or Syria urging a Gandhi-style non-violent response to the advances of Muslim armies. The new, pre-emptive dhimmitude being urged on us by certain clerics is not the fruit of Christian orthodoxy but contemporary liberalism, which acts as a kind of civilizational AIDS, finding excuses to undermine and render impossible every healthy measure of self-defense. Just as a retro-virus infiltrates and corrupts the existing DNA of human cells, so liberalism twists the tenets of Christian humanism, the Western insistence on tolerance and equality, our decent instinct of respect for other's cultures and beliefs, and turns them into toxic heresies by negating the countervailing values that made these values viable.”

Christianity is not by its theological nature naturally pacific. Neither is it defeatist.

The Crusades in the end did fail of course. There was never enough money, unity, leadership skill, men or to use the in-vogue Marxism, 'neo colonial' purpose, to make them permanent. Their eventual failure makes the claim of 'colonialism' a lie. There were no population transfers from Europe to the East. Most Crusaders left immediately after their tour of duty was over. Few Europeans even considered leaving the relatively prosperity of 'Dark Age' Europe [a myth] to settle in a dusty, barren, hot place beset by Moslems. Of the 7 main Crusades outlined by most historians [though there were really 3 phases to the 'First' Crusade]; only 2 were military victories. The first under the Knights of France; and the Third 100 years later under Richard the Lionheart [portrayed by Hollywood in yet another pathetically bad movie 'Robin Hood', starring Russell Crowe, as a raving mad dog who did nothing else other than murder innocent Muslims and bankrupt his state]. 

This is factual nonsense to anyone who has studied the Crusades. Also an idiocy is the idea that Richard's foe Saladin – a man Richard defeated in battle many times, never losing – was a Victorian gentleman. Saladin like any Muslim medieval leader murdered and butchered his way to power, annihilated cities and villages, killed the innocent and killed prisoners. The only reason he did not eradicate the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1188 when he took the city, was because the Christians remaining in the city send an envoy to Saladin and plainly stated that all the Muslims remaining in Jerusalem would be killed unless Saladin guaranteed the Christians and Jews their freedom through ransom. The deal was made – and so was a lot of money for Saladin. Many thousands who could not be ransomed were shackled into slavery to work on Moslem projects including fortification building and agriculture. So much for the Hollywood myth that this man was the idealized saint. He was brutal self-interested murdering narcissist as any real history will show.

In any event the charges against the Crusades, perpetuated by the media and the base stupidity that is pop-culture, maintains that they were assaults by illiterate idiots, hungry, dirty and thirsting for land and gold is the precise opposite of what occurred. The Crusades were ruinously expensive, largely French and family-based in the supply of leaders and men, drawn almost exclusively from the elite with some exceptions; and extremely pious in their objective that the Holy Land was Christian land, and that the Moslem slaughter of Christians, pilgrims and the destruction of Christian holy places had to be avenged. Add to this the virulent Moslem destruction of Spain, the Moslem occupation of once Christian territory in Sicily and Spain; and the endless slave trading of Christians including their alliance with the Vikings in this regard; and the pillaging of the European littoral by Muslims, and the only surprise is the fact that it took 400 years for France and Catholic Europe to organize themselves and meet this threat.

The Crusades could only have emanated from a rich, confident and realistic culture, one which understood the existential threat posed by Mohammedanism and once which had first defeated the Moslem attempt to take all of Europe in 732 and 737 AD in France. The Christian King Charles Martel, victor against the Moslem infidel was as much of a true Crusader as Richard, Bohemond, or Phillip Augustus.

We should give thanks that these men existed. Men whose type cannot be found in today's Western world.