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<\/h4>\n<\/h6>\nIn 2014, Russia occupied Crimea, and that unexpected usurpation revealed a great deal of most baffling challenges for international law. Their long list includes the policy of praising a blatant land-grab as \u2018the restoration of historical fairness\u2019. In the shadow of such rhetoric, we may wonder how the existing system of multilateral diplomacy is to withstand this peculiar style of legitimization.<\/p>\n
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While searching for the desired answer, one mustn’t disremember that the idea of \u2018correcting the wrongs\u2019 or \u2018making the country great again\u2019 has been around for quite a while. The agenda of restorative justice brought about war, destruction, and someone\u2019s subjugation since earliest antiquity.<\/p>\n
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The mythological tradition of Ancient Greece, to take one instance, labeled the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese as the \u2018Return of the Heracleidae\u2019. The descendants of legendary Heracles, according to the story, took possession of the peninsula on the pretext that their glorious progenitor had ruled there in his time.<\/p>\n
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Painting on a Spartan vase (Image source: Wikimedia Commons). The Spartans were descended from the Dorians, who, as the \u2018grand-children\u2019 of Heracles, reduced the local inhabitants of Laconia to serfdom.<\/em><\/p>\n In 1066, the Normans produced a very similar argument to justify the Conquest of England. The kingdom\u2019s crown, they claimed, had been promised to William, ducal sovereign of Normandy, because he, along with his barons and knights, had every right to rule the invaded land. Such entitlement, in addition to other notions, was explained by the duke\u2019s and his people\u2019s descent from the ancient Trojans. The legends of the medieval epoch heralded that the monarchical polity of Britain had been founded by a band of Trojan drifters. Their leader and the first king of the Britons, as this fabula tells us, was a noble prince by the name of Brutus \u2013 the grandson of famous Aeneas. At the end of the 10th century, Normandy\u2019s court historians concocted a genealogy that was to represent the dukedom\u2019s population as the progeny of Antenor \u2013 another prince of the Trojan House. The dynasty of William the Conqueror and its Plantagenet successors (1154-1485) used the said lineage to portray the 1066\u00a0debellatio<\/em>\u00a0as the Trojans\u2019 return to the Trojan country.<\/p>\n The Bayeux Tapestry. Scenes depicting the Battle of Hastings (Image source: Wikimedia Commons). Commissioned after the Conquest of 1066, this very long piece of decorative cloth is known as one of the brightest products of medieval propaganda. Using the magnificent artistic imagery in a comics-like or a documentary style, it represents William\u2019s enthronement in England as a fully legitimate and historically inevitable act.<\/em><\/p>\n England\u2019s Edward I (1239-1307) referred to the same patrimonial roots in order to vindicate his Scottish affair. The king\u2019s \u2018wise men\u2019 composed large volumes of documents \u2018showing\u2019 that Scotland had been nothing more than a province of Brutus\u2019s original kingdom. The latter\u2019s central territory, as this \u2018historical\u2019 doctrine emphasized, was an exact geographical and political match of medieval Anglia<\/em>. From Edward\u2019s perspective, such \u2018strong evidence\u2019 clearly meant that the entire Scottish realm was to be subjected to him and to his offshoots.<\/p>\n King Edward I of England, \u2018the Hammer of the Scots\u2019. Line engraving, mid 17th century (Image source: Wikimedia Commons). Edward\u2019s ambition to rule Scotland as the \u2018true heir\u2019 of the Isle\u2019s Trojan scepter resulted in the Anglo-Scottish wars of 1286-1371.<\/em><\/p>\n In 1453, the Ottoman Turks, eager to legitimize the capture of Constantinople, proclaimed their Trojan ancestry as well. According to the happy victors, the \u2018Greeks\u2019 of the Byzantine Empire were merely driven off the lands that the Greeks of pre-Homeric times had brutally stolen from the rightful owners.<\/p>\n Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, 1432-1481 (Image source: Wikimedia Commons). In his letters to the rulers of Europe, Mehmed referred to the \u2018history\u2019 of Troy and, in particular, to the \u2018fact\u2019 that the Turks descended from one of the brunches of the Trojan people. That \u2018meant\u2019 that the Ottomans were related to the French, the English, and the Italians \u2013 the nations, which had been proudly associating themselves with the Trojans since the Early Middle Ages.<\/em><\/p>\n About three hundred years earlier, an almost identical idea inspired the crusaders \u2013 the other claimants to Trojan bloodline. The surviving defenders of Troy, as many texts of the era pontificated, had been forced to leave the ancient Middle East for Europe. The crusading Christians, based on this logic, simply set out to reclaim the old homeland in the name of their god.<\/p>\n A 14th-century depiction of the crusaders\u2019 capture of Antioch from a manuscript in the care of the National Library of the Netherlands (image source: Wikimedia Commons).<\/em><\/p>\n Either tacitly or ostentatiously, the concept of \u2018historical justice\u2019 was implanted into the ideologies of medieval and early modern elites. The members of privileged groups explained their social and political dominance by the \u2018primeval order of things\u2019. The nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ad exemplum, regarded itself as a race of Sarmatian origin. The Sarmatians, as the official story went, had conquered the local Slavs whose children, grand children, and further offspring were to obey the breed of the bellicose vanquishers. The nobles in France, in a parallel fashion, saw themselves as the scions of the Franks who, after the downfall of the Roman Empire, had supposedly subdued the Romanized Gauls. The latter were thought to have been the ancestors of the \u2018non-noble\u2019 or \u2018servile\u2019 classes \u2013 in other words, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n The 17th century depiction of a Polish noble of allegedly Sarmatian descent (image source: www.budujemydwor.pl)<\/em><\/p>\n In the same early modern period, Western Europeans tried to exonerate the enslavement of Africans by pointing to one of the Old Testament\u2019s most popular story. The Book of Genesis, with which both Catholic and Protestant audiences were broadly familiar, spoke of the curse imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah upon his second son Ham. The descendants of this unlucky character were doomed to serve the descendants of the other two sons, Shem and Japheth. The then Europeans insisted that they had sprung from Japheth\u2019s loins, whereas the peoples of Africa had originated from Ham.<\/p>\n Noah\u2019s Curse. Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493 (image source: Wikimedia Commons). Although no racial differences were mentioned in the story, Europeans regarded Ham as the progenitor of the enslaved Africans.<\/em><\/p>\n In the 19th and the 20th centuries, the governments and other political players learned to allude to \u2018historical truth\u2019 on a much larger (truly massive) scale. Hitler and his propaganda machine seem to enjoy absolute leadership in this dimension, while Putin\u2019s Russia, in the domain of history-focused disinformation, may have already surpassed the sinister achievemnets of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n Discourses on \u2018History\u2019, politicized and inevitably pompous, constituted a commonplace pathology of all pushy regimes. States with seemingly good reputation, more often than not, weren\u2019t immune to it either. As the case of Crimea (and subsequent Russian aggression) has proven, the situation in our own time is no different at all, and it will be up to us to deal with it in one way or another. To disaccustom every country\u2019s political class from abusing the stories of \u2018Glorious Past\u2019 or \u2018Great Forefathers\u2019 could be a good remedy \u2013 the one which the present-day international community must consider in a most thorough and comprehensive manner.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/h6>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/diplomatic-arts.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Normans-1.jpg\")
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