The Ottoman Counterfactual

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

1 Response

  1. Roque Nuevo says:

    A more interesting counter factual is: what would have happened if Europeans weren’t ingrained Jew haters? For sure, they would never have gone to Palestine—what would have been pushing them out? They wouldn’t have gone to the States in such great numbers either, so Europe would still be benefiting from their excellence in the arts, finance, business, the professions, etc etc. and we wouldn’t be. But then, what? Jews would be just citizen-Jews in Europe, like they are in the States. But there would be no Middle East crisis to blame on them. There would have been no Holocaust that Europeans could accuse Jews of exploiting for financial gain. But this is where my counterfactual imagination hits a wall. The rest of it—wars, colonizing and decolonizing etc etc—would have happened anyway. The Middle East today would be home to much the same ancestral violence—except that there would be no Israel. Jews would still be in Europe. I can’t see any reason that the depressing progression of remedies for the decline of the Islamic world wouldn’t wouldn’t have happened even without a Jewish state in the Middle East or that Islamists would not have attacked us.Report