Pirate Utopias
Pirate Utopias

Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson

Publisher: Autonomedia

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1570271585

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'Peter Lamborn Wilson shows why we cherish pirates - and why, for the sake of the future, we must continue to do so. Interesting and compelling...a rollicking, adventurous book.'Marcus Rediker, author, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea'A chronicler, a historiographer, and a piratologist in the tradition of Defoe...with immense learning and interesting sympathies. His scholarship cuts through the seas of ignorance and prejudice with grace and power.'Peter Linebaugh, author, The London Hanged'One of those rare books which give historians new ideas to think about. It deals with 17th century European converts to Islam - usually but not always as pirates - whose numbers Wilson puts at thousands. His careful analysis of (the) renegadoes, their ideas, and political practice leads to a very tentative suggestion that some of them may have links with Rosicrucianism and the 18th-century Enlightenment...Historians will have to think about this book's novel theme and pursue its implications. Wilson really does turn the world upside down!'Christopher Hill, author, The World Turned Upside DownFrom the 16th to the 19th centuries, Muslim corsairs from the Barbary Coast ravaged European shipping and enslaved thousands of unlucky captives. During this same period, thousands more Europeans converted to Islam and joined the pirate holy war. Were these men (and women) the scum of the seas, apostates, traitors -- Renegadoes? Or did they abandon and betray Christendom as a praxis of social resistance?Peter Lamborn Wilson focuses on the corsairs' most impressive accomplishment, the independent Pirate Republic of Salé, in Morocco, in the 17th century. Corsairs, Sufis, pederasts, "irresistible" Moorish women, slaves, adventures, Irish rebels, heretical Jews, British spies, a Moorish pirate in old New York, and radical working-class heroes all populate a book which intends to entertain and to make a point about insurrectionary communities.

The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier
The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier

Author: Saint Francis Xavier

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13:

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Few letters have been so enthusiastically received & so widely diffused as those of the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary & Saint, Francis Xavier. Written from India, the Indonesian archipelago, Japan, & the island of Sancian off the coast of China, these letters were copied, recopied, translated into Latin, German, French, & other languages, & frequently printed for wider circulation. They are filled with information on newly discovered lands & cultures, & they are filled with the missionary spirit, the zeal for the honor & glory of God, which animated the whole of Xavier's life & work. They constitute a religious classic & an historical resource heretofore unavailable in English. Francis Xavier was one of the first companions & followers of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). In 1540, he set off as a missionary to southern Asia, where in the midst of ten years of ceaseless labor he produced the 138 letters & instructions that this book contains. The translator of this highly readable English version, M. Joseph Costelloe, S.J., is well known in scholarly circles for his masterful translation of the definitive four-volume biography, FRANCIS XAVIER, HIS LIFE, HIS TIMES by Georg Schurhammer, S.J., published by the Jesuit Historical Institute in Rome.

The Secrets Known Only To The Inner Elites
The Secrets Known Only To The Inner Elites

Author: Lyndon LaRouche

Publisher: Executive Intelligence Review

Published:

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13:

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“Through three millennia of recorded history to date, centered around the Mediterranean, the civilized world has been run by two, bitterly opposed elites, the one associated with the faction of Socrates and Plato, the other with the faction of Aristotle. During these thousands of years, until the developments of approximately 1784-1818 in Europe, both factions’ inner elites maintained in some fashion an unbroken continuity of organization and knowledge through all of the political catastrophes which afflicted each of them in various times and locales. “It was the elite associated with the Platonic (or, Neoplatonic) faction which organized the American Revolution and established the United States as a democratic constitutional republic. . . . “In the aftermath of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, the shattering of the power of the Platonic elite in Europe meant in large measure both a scattering of the main forces of that faction, and an associated, increasing loss of the “secret knowledge” through which the Platonic inner elite had formerly developed and exercised its factional power. From that time to the present period, the inner circles of the Aristotelian (or, more exactly, “neo-Aristotelian”) faction have been hegemonic increasingly in ordering world affairs. Although humanist (Platonic) factional forces have continued in existence and are represented among political and related elites today, the Platonic elite has lost connection to the body of knowledge upon which its former power depended . . . . “The principal function of this report is to summarily, but systematically identify the “secret knowledge” of the Platonic inner elite. That includes the Platonic’s knowledge of the secrets of the enemy, Aristotelian elite . . . .”