It's been the King's birthday and a long weekend and I have been away from the computer so had no time to post. Instead, I'd like to highlight a post on one of my feeds, this one.
On the surface, it deals with the current war, but it really goes much deeper than that and delves deeply into theology. Your thoughts are welcome, as usual:)
I agree with him about the Yankee Calvinist Puritans. Everything bad about the left and do gooder intentions descends from that group. It's sad that the Confederacy did not win the War of Northern Aggression.
ReplyDeleteI understand the issue, but he leaves out that Iran is not exactly a kind actor in all of this but neither is Israel. We are dealing with Muslims here who have a different world view on some things.
I agree with him about WWII and the atomic bomb on Japan. Even some American generals were not happy about it and expressed those thoughts after the war. As for the European side, America should have stayed out of that one to.
Since Puritans lived mostly in the North, I wonder what was the religious composition of the Confederate States. And how would your country look like if the Confederacy won. I think slavery would be abolished soon in any case, since it happened in all the other countries like Brazil without a civil war.
ReplyDeleteI apologize in advance for such a long reply.
ReplyDeleteMr. Neal at Throne, Altar, Liberty makes a good argument about the moral hubris that stems from belief that "we are the elect," set aside especially by God, and that everyone else is something less. Sounds like "God's chosen people" with their own "manifest destiny."
This attitude prevailed in the northeastern USA, and it continues to echo there and in areas where these "Yankees" predominantly settled, such as the Pacific Northwest. Over time, Calvinism devolved into congregationalism and then into secular unitarianism/egalitarian leftism.
The Southern elites were mainly Anglicans---a more catholic variant of Protestantism---with less of the self-righteous zeal of the Puritans or the liberal pacifism of the Pennsylvania Quakers. In the rest of the South, the Baptists largely took over in the early decades of the 19th century, with Methodists and Scottish Presbyterians maintaining significant numbers in the Appalachians.
Until the US Civil War, the southern states tended to dominate US foreign policy. Until about 1850, the South had a larger population and greater voting power. The northern abolitionist movement---which was just as shrill and fanatical as any American Leftist activism today---ignited the Civil War and ultimately destroyed the South.
These northeastern fanatics have largely served as the American moral compass ever since, allied with the financial interests of the Mid-Atlantic cities. The Jewish ethnic interests that started to dominate in the US since World War II have played both of these sides (the puritanical and the financial) against the industrial, agricultural, and fundamentalist Christian interests ever since.
We could speculate that if the South had won the Civil War, that the puritanical spirit of the North, which Neal described as Calvinistic, would have continued to agitate against other targets, and that Leftism would have grown more radical more quickly than it did in our history. And they would likely try to launch ideological wars against the world's evils (or those convenient to the financial and industrial classes, probably against the South but maybe meddling in international affairs.) The South would have likely continued on a path much like the first 80 years of American history: expansionist, militaristic, and more agrarian. Maybe something like Brazil. I think you're right, Sanne, that Southern slavery would have eventually become abolished (technically) in favor of a kind of segregation.
To summarize, this Yankee zeal combined with Mid-Atlantic financialization and ethnic Jewish culture has proved to be a disastrous hybrid of forces in the world, spreading like a kind of religion of its own (frankly, Satanism.) The Calvinistic part of this formula is what Neal was rightly condemning.
One further point: it's interesting to observe how the financial/Zionist elites sell their military aggression to the rural and evangelical Christian types (and hardly anyone else.) Those groups are their primary audiences for these wars, rather than the puritanical "Yankee" types, because the ruralites and evangelical Christians tend to actually fight in the wars.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Janus, this was very interesting:)
ReplyDelete