POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

A sub-title for this post might be: Student Debt, DACA, and the Ottoman Defeat at the Gates of Vienna.

These items have been culled from Pro Publica’s Capitol Words:

Granted, Gohmert and King are not only on the Far Right end of the political spectrum, but even among those at that end of the spectrum, they have expressed some very eccentric and extreme views.

Nonetheless, Gohmert won re-election by a 72% to 26% margin. Likewise, despite some deplorable public comments in the months ahead of the election, King won re-election by a 50% to 47% margin; in fact, he was the only Republican elected to one of Iowa’s four House seats, only one of which had been held by a Democratic incumbent.

The Far-Right media has gone into overdrive attempting to demonize Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but she has a very, very long way to go before she becomes anything close to the equivalent of these two legislators.

Here is an excerpt from an article for the Daily Kos that catalogues Gohmert’s more memorably strange remarks. I quote this one becuas eit includes King, too:

July 14th, 2017: Rep. Gohmert joins Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Congressman Steve King to take turns running to the microphone on the floor of the House to turn a discussion of the renewal of the National Defense Authorization Act into a rant against the transgendered, rambling about the seventeenth century battles between Austria and the Ottoman Empire, the latter of whom would castrate their troops to their disadvantage:

”Some people, they think we exaggerate, but my very good friend from Iowa and I have stood there on the mountaintop in Vienna where western civilization stood there in the gap and it was all at risk . . . If Vienna fell, then the rest of Europe would fall…and there’s a good chance we’re not even here in this fashion today . . . Perhaps we are headed into a new period of the dark ages and that Polish prince comes down and puts cannons in those mountains and nobody in two years seeking a sex-change operation and change reassignment, as they call it, could possibly help it . . . I can assure my friends here in the House that there was nobody who was out there defending western civilization who had undergone a sex-change operation in the previous two years. When it’s advertised that the United States Congress is in favor of taking men and surgically making them into women with the money that they would use to protect the nation otherwise, or taking women and doing surgery to make them men, the United States Congress would rather spend that money on that surgery than defeating radical Islam, then it is an advertising bonanza for the radical Islamists because my Muslim friends tell me, the recruits, you’re right, if that’s how stupid they are, this society has no right to remain on the earth. We need to take them out. They are too stupid.” 

I am sure that some of Gohmert’s constituents would take this reference to a somewhat arcane historical event as evidence of his broad learnedness. I am not at all an expert on the Ottoman Empire, but I have done some reading on the Turkic peoples (I have done a general-education course on Central Asian history, cultures and literatures)–and like anyone else, I can read Wikipedia, which in this case is basically enough to understand what Gohmert gets wrong. The rambling nature of Gohmert’s assertions should in itself signal that he is grossly distorting history to serve a political purpose. His most fundamental fallacy is, of course, his failure to differentiate between eunuchs and transgender individuals. But he also gets a great deal wrong about the basic history. Although Gohmert seems to be referring to the Janissaries, the elite corps of non-Muslim troops selected from enslaved boys, he seems to be confusing them with the eunuchs who had a great deal of power in the Ottoman imperial court but had no formal, historically prominent military role. The Janissaries were forced to submit to circumcision, but they were not castrated. They were, however, closely supervised by eunuchs during their extended training. The Janissaries were allowed to marry, and their children were give preference if they, too, wished to serve as Janissaries, service which had increasing advantages within Ottoman society. Beyond these basic errors, Gohmert completely ignores the fact that for three centuries the Ottomans had steadily expanded their hold over territories in southeastern Europe; moreover, although they lost some territories in what are now Hungary, Romania, and Serbia in the aftermath of their defeat at Vienna, they then held their own against the European states for another century before their empire began to become a shell of its former self (the so-called “sick man of Europe”) in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, some historians have pointed to the changes in the composition and the function of the Janissaries–specifically, the eventual inclusion of free Muslims and the Janissaries’ gradual absorption into the Ottoman bureaucracy and their less exclusively military role as symptoms, if not causes, of the Ottoman decline.

If it is being used as a basis for defining public policy, a little bit of historical knowledge can be as dangerous as a little bit of very selective scientific knowledge.

The complete article for the Daily Kos is available at: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/26/1791130/-Crazy-Stupid-Republican-of-the-Day-Louie-Gohmert-2018-Update.

P.S. If I have made any fundamental errors in my discussion of the Janissaries, I will fall back on this defense: I have surely made a more cogent argument than Gohmert has, and I am just writing for a blog, not making public policy that significantly affects other Americans. Furthermore, I will be very happy to be corrected, and given all of his strange pronouncements and the scathing media attention that they have received, I don’t think that Louie Gohmert is especially receptive to correction, at least not in any meaningful way.