My disquiet comes from the book's second chapter where Winchester describes the history of the Balkans and specifically how the Muslim Ottomans happened to be in Europe in the first place. Here's the quote:
And given that the story of the Balkans is, in essence, the story of the ebbing and flowing of the two great empires, Hapsburg and Ottoman, that vied for sovereignty over the lands between them, so it seemed to me at the start of this journey that our tour of Balkan history, as well as our venture into the Balkan landscape, should most properly begin in the Hapsburg's once great capital city, Vienna.'Ebbing and flowing?' How benign. Doesn't that imply that the two empires are morally equivalent and that their goals were essentially the same? Doesn't that imply that Hapsburg armies besieged the Ottoman capital just as Ottoman armies besieged the Hapsburg capital?
Let's, first, take a look at the map. The Hapsburg empire never even reached Greece, much less Asia Minor. If you go back to the Holy Roman Empire, the borders are even more restricted. The real ruler of the Balkans was the Byzantine Empire which existed for more than a thousand years, from the 4th century to 1453. Wikipedia explains what happened next:
Successive civil wars in the 14th century further sapped the Empire's strength, and most of its remaining territories were lost in the Byzantine-Ottoman Wars, which culminated in the Fall of Constantinople and the conquest of remaining territories by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century.So really the so-called "ebbing and flowing" wasn't between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, it was between the Byzantines and the Ottomans and far from going both ways it went one way from Byzantine control to Ottoman control. In short, the expansion of Islam by the sword succeeded right up to the old border between the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern.
What happened next was an assault on the neighbouring Hapsburg empire by the advancing Turks, much like the assault on Belgium by Germany in WWI and on the Soviet Union in WWII.
The Siege of Vienna in 1529 was the first attempt by the Ottoman Empire, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, to capture the city of Vienna, Austria. The siege signaled the pinnacle of the Ottoman Empire's power, the maximum extent of Ottoman expansion in central Europe, and was the result of a long-lasting rivalry with Europe.'Rivalry?' Since when is descending on someone else's country and raping and killing the inhabitants a 'rivalry?' This was war, brutal and aggressive, waged by Islam against Christendom. Let's call a spade a spade. Wikipedia tries to get it right but still misses the point.
Thereafter, 150 years of bitter military tension and reciprocal attacks ensued, culminating in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which marked the start of the Great Turkish War by European powers to remove the Ottoman presence.So to put all this into context, Islam attempted to conquer Eastern Europe (it made a previous attempt in Western Europe through Spain to France) starting in the 14 Century and was only finally evicted in 1828 when a combined western fleet destroyed an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet and the Greeks drove the Turks out of the Peloponnese.
Five centuries of occupation; five centuries of killing, murdering, population transfers, subjugation, indoctrination and religious propaganda. That's a lot.
And now Islam is at it again through immigration, 'refugee claims,' monster families and refusal to assimilate.
Here we go again and Winchester somehow manages to miss the Elephant in the room. The reason the Balkans are a mess is because Islam made it a mess.
We need to do a better job explaining what happened in Europe and what is happening again. Because after Europe comes America and after America, Canada.
If Islam keeps advancing at its current rate the point of the sword is eventually going to be in you, your wife, and your daughter.



