Why Do You Have A Golden Plate?
Fancy Muslims Slaughtered by Mongolians, aka, Why America is Over
Muslims in and around Iraq tell their children a story. One that they heard from their parents, who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, and so forth and so on back until shortly after the reign of Genghis Khan, specifically, 1258 A.D. Today, when people in “The West” think of Islam, the general image that pops into their heads is one of a poor bearded fellow in the desert in sandals, looking sort of forlorn but also somehow smiling and holding an AK-47. This image really isn’t accurate of course, as there are lots of extremely wealthy Muslims who don’t carry rifles around, but it’s even more of a mismatch with the Islam of 800 years ago.
In the early 1250s, Islam was still in its “golden age”, and the Islamic empire spanned a significant chunk of the world and its people excelled in mathematics, literature, the arts, architecture and were, as a rule, extremely well-to-do. Dirty faces wearing turbans and sandals is hardly the correct picture for this time. Silk robes, golden chains, diamond rings, and long evenings spent on soft pillows smoking and getting fat on dates and fine meats. To put it simply, if the Muslims of our day are “hard”, hard in the sense that they can win wars against the U.S. Military and the U.S.S.R. despite living in caves and often barely having shoes, the Muslims of yesteryear were “soft”. Extremely so. The meme that good times create weak men is iron clad, and your religion does not make you exempt from that. By 1250 the Muslims of the empire had grown fat, happy, stupid, and weak.
And then came the hordes.
The Islamic military was no match for them. The Mongol horse archers are a thing of legend, and rightly so as no other military force in history has been so dominate over its rivals. The military the Muslims mustered against the Mongolians was out maneuvered, out shot, and out smarted. It didn’t help that a lot of that military was made of slaves, who had no real love for the empire they were supposed to be protecting. Just as today, the weak men of that era had outsourced everything to foreigners, even their own defense. Long story short, one day, on January 29th, 1258, the Mongols attacked the heart of the empire, Baghdad, and, by February 10th, had taken it completely. The Abbasid Caliphate was over, and with it the golden age of Islam, a blow from which it might be argued the religion never recovered.
The story the Muslims of the region pass down to their children now might be historically true or legendary and apocryphal but in either case it gets the point across. After the invasion had ended, it is said that one of the Mongolian leaders sacked a palace and had all manner of the empire’s gold and jewelry stacked upon his horse.
"Why do you have a golden plate!?” The barbarian shouted to the people, laughing as he held one of their treasures high.
“Does your food nourish you better when it costs more!? How many warriors could this plate have purchased? How many arrows? How many spears? Did you not love to be comfortable more than you loved to be strong?”
So it goes. There are many variations of the story but that’s the gist. Americans aren’t what they once were. The hardy pilgrim surviving a freezing winter by eating the leather of his shoe. Where is he? The yeoman farmer fighting off the British Empire after nearly starving in Valley Forge? He’s gone too. The cowboy taming the west, and fording the river to get to Colorado. Same.
Look around.
Why do you have a golden plate?