The Way We Are Now Yet Again
"The situation we face today is not gloom and doom; it is the beginning of the end of the Yankee Empire." —James E. Layden, Chairman of the South Carolina League of the South
Maybe it is a good thing, as Will Rogers said, that we don’t get all the government we pay for.
I never worried about my privacy being violated until the federal government got into the business of "protecting" my privacy. Now that the feds have taken over "privacy," you can be sure any protection you may have had from government is gone.
Most Americans are the hopeless victims of politicians because they want to be seen as respectable middle class people. To believe that the purpose of government is doing good and feeling good is respectable and middle class. Farmers and workers know what politics is really about: chicanery for grabbing unearned wealth.
Do you think Bush Minor, a specialist in self-delusion and tangential thinking, has realised how bad he will look in history?
It was a truism to the Founding generation of Americans that liberty belongs only to those who are worthy of it. Indeed, this is a fact known to all republicans throughout history. The truth has two salient applications to the U.S. 1) Liberty cannot be bestowed on any people from outside; it must be earned by them. 2) To be free, a people must be worthy of freedom. To be worthy of freedom meant being willing to make the efforts and sacrifices necessary for eternal vigilance against freedom's enemies, whether invaders or usurpers. By contrast, contemporary Americans seem to believe that liberty is a product of saying approved platitudes.
Kissinger. Brezinski. Albright. Earlier generations of Americans would have found it to be strange and unseemly to appoint foreigners to be Secretary of State and formulate policy toward foreigners. Indeed, such a practice is anathema to republicans but characteristic of imperialists.
Don't send your kids to college. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
"Native Americans" don't like having sports teams named after them. I suppose I understand, but simple me, I always thought it was a tribute to their courage.
Would there be a war of choice in Iraq if some well-placed people had not expected to get richer? What if the well-placed rich people had expected the war to bring them sacrifice and loss rather than opportunity for profit? Would there be a war in that case? Think about it.
Could it be that fear is good for Wall Street, much healthier than euphoria?
I had just as soon not be a member of a "superpower," not a "rising" one and certainly not a declining one.
"The States are the true guardians of our freedom and our rights, and when their power is gone, the master at the federal capital is the ruler over subject millions—an emperor, elected or self-appointed, as the times determine." —Southern newspaper editorial, 19 April 1861.
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This will probably be misinterpreted as trolling, but it is a serious question to which I am genuinely curious to hear your answer:
The original Confederate cabinet contained three foreign-born indviduals, including one who (although originally Attorney General) became Secretary of State for the majority of the CSA's brief history. It is true that two of the three were born in the Western Hemisphere and all three came to the U.S. when their ages were in single digits. (In contrast, Albright was eleven, Kissinger was fifteen, and Brezinski, who actually never became more than National Security adviser, was an adult.) Nonetheless, they were all undoubtedly foreign-born. Was these appointments, particularly Benjamin's service as Secretary of State, mistakes on Davis's part, and if not, how do you make a distinction?
Obviously last-minute rewording of the final sentence created an embarrassing solecism of "Was these appointments?" My apologies.
I was actually thinking of Hamilton and Gallatin though I am not much of a fan of either....
Mr. Kabala. I know of Mr. Mallory and Mr. Benjamin. Who was the third?
Duh...Memminger....
A good question. The Lincolnites made great mileage out of this and of the fact that Benjamin was Jewish and Mallory Catholic, both of which were unthinkable to the Republicans.
It was a different age, of course. Benjamin and Mallory were both born in the New World and had been elected U.S. Senators. Memminger had been a Charlestonian since childhood. None of them had any of the mentality of Old World politics. K., B., and A., I suggest, were never rooted Americans, but products of the elite bureaucracy.
How about a citizenship ammendment to the constitution that requires a person to be a third generation American, without dual citizenship, to be an employee of any part of the federal government?
Brzezinski certainly has a Pole's understandable antipathy to Russia, and Kissinger an attachment to "stability," also understandable given his biography. Albright was no great shakes, but her English is unaccented, suggesting she was schooled here from early in life.
Memminger's policies led to a ruinous inflation for the Confederacy and he was thrown out of the Cabinet by Pres. Davis (competence is more important than origin for a statesman). Prof Wilson's slap at Lincoln was gratuitous - at a time when most Americans were ferocious bigots, he was notably tolerant of Catholics and the foreign-born. His Springfield law partner Billy Herndon noted with disgust that Lincoln even looked kindly on the Irish (whom Herndon loathed). The Irish of the time were the bete noires of nativists - not only foreign-born but also Catholics and mostly poor working class living in Northern slums. In the South they were used as poorly-paid contract labor to do the dangerous jobs for which slave-owners would not risk their valuable chattels. Of course, Lincoln's attitudes well preceded the Civil War when such friendliness could have been merely self-serving (no use alienating potential recruits).
My problem with Dr. Kissinger et al is not their origin but their ideology. Prof. Wilson has correctly noted that they are standard representatives of our elite, more interested in furthering the standard New World Order ideology of our lords and masters than working for the broad interests of the American people. Unfortunately, one does not need to be born abroad to be infected with this disease.
The 'Native American' types that whine about sport teams
nicknames are pathetic wretches that have nothing like
the physical skill and courage of their predecessors.
Tecumseh, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo-all would
find suicide more honorable than being associated with
such losers.
Maybe I just don't get it.I was born south of Mason-Dixon.I lived in Virginia,Kentucky,Tennessee,and Maryland.My wife is born Southern and my surviving son was born in Nashville.I have made a small fortune on Wall Street and I am a small businessman.Some of my employees make more money than I do because I am a "river to my people."The Yankees that you despise-Hamilton,et al. were actually often brilliant patriotic men and I have and will always admire traditional Yankee thrift.What's the program here,gentlemen?Perhaps the South would have been better off it had "imitated the arts and despised the manners"of the North instead of just despising the manners.If you don't get the reference,ask TJF.
Leo (#9) "Thrift" is the opposite of what we're witnessing now. The system of political patronage is beginning to collapse on itself.
But I'll stand aside and let better minds elaborate on this.
Once again, Theodore Van Oosbree is engaging in a bit of rose-colored Whig view of history. While it is true that Lincoln was not as hard line on the 'Catholic question' as Fremont and some of the earlier Republicans were, he seems to be implying Lincoln was some kind of egalitarian.
"In the South they were used as poorly-paid contract labor to do the dangerous jobs..."
And they werent used as such in the North? If one views local censuses of the era, you'll see the majority of the Irish population lived in the north.
I quote a Dublin newspaper commenting in 1861 on the war in America:
"We cannot but recollect that in the South our countrymen were safe from insult and persecution, while Nativism and Know-Nothingism assailed them in the North."
It is true that Lincoln was a shrewd politician who did not like to offend any potential voting bloc. It is also true that the core of his supporters were strongly anti-immigrant (except they liked German militarists), anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. Their documents are full of assertions and assumptions that as pure Anglo-Saxons they are a superior race, superior even to "mongrel
Southerners."
Mr. Van O. you have absorbed every bit of false abolitionist propaganda ever put forward.
My objection to Hamiltonianism is that it is not free enterprise---it is state capitalist. It is based upon some people profiting from a special relationship with government. Such it was and ever has been. What better illustration is needed than this moment?
"If one views local censuses of the era, you’ll see the majority of the Irish population lived in the north."
I've often wondered about what might be called the Yankee Paradox. No one would deny that the Puritan/Yankee tradition was the most anti-Catholic of the original American settler traditions. I would estimate (not based on hard data, but a "guesstimate" from my reading) that probably 90% of antebellum anti-Catholic atrocities took place in the North and probably 75% in Yankee areas. Yet wherever the Yankee went - New England itself, upstate New York, Long Island, northern New Jersey, northeastern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, northern Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa - the Catholic, especially the Irish Catholic, was only a few steps behind, a demographic impact that persists to the present day (even if many of their descendants are nominal rather than orthodox Catholics).
In contrast, in the South, where (at least in the nineteenth century) anti-Catholicism was less strong, very few Catholics settled. Someone like John England of Charleston, arguably the most intelligent and talented bishop of the early republic, was unable to build on the foundations he laid. Even New Orleans, with its pre-existing large Catholic population, attracted relatively few immigrants. Why was this? Did the Irish just go where the jobs were? Did they (despite their general anti-abolitionism and support for the Democratic party) nonetheless prefer a free labor to a slave society? These are questions worthy of study.
As for Lincoln, it's worth noting that his famous condemnation of Know-Nothingism (in which he hyperbolically said that it would be better to live in Russia than in an increasingly hypocritical U.S.A.) was in a private letter to his close friend Joshua Speed. This cuts both ways - on the one hand, presumably a private letter to a close friend contains his actual opinions, but on the other hand it was only a private letter, and David Herbert Donald admits that Lincoln was coy about his anti-Know-Nothingism in public until the movement had blown over.
"would estimate (not based on hard data, but a “guesstimate” from my reading) that probably 90% of antebellum anti-Catholic atrocities took place in the North and probably 75% in Yankee areas."
True, but to be fair, there was Know-Nothing riots in New Orleans I believe in the 1850s (Dr. Wilson, know the details on this one?). It may have been connecting with the Wide-Awakes, probably mostly recent northern settlers.
I have personally never seen much of an explanation for the lack of anti-Catholicism in the South. Perhaps just better manners than the Yankees. I have always found President Davis' correspondence with Pius IX quite touching. When Lincoln found out about it, I believe he made some nasty anti-Catholic remarks.
@15 "I have personally never seen much of an explanation for the lack of anti-Catholicism in the South. "
The simple explanantion is that Southerners had a real life. Wherever men till in the soil, work with their hands, mind and imagination in real craftsmanship, or care for livestock, plant a garden and tend to flowers because they are brief and beautiful like life itself; they develop a natural respect and admiration for things divine and human. Divorced from this reality of the soil and from the participation in the Divine by good craftsmanship and honest work, men creat images of themselves to worship. Which is why there was as much similarity between Irish peasants, french trappers, southern yeomen, American cowboys and practicing catholics in 1860, as there is today between "post moderns" living in Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Or perhaps I should have said Newt Gingrich, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. Or Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Billy Kristol. Sad but true and we are all living proof of that fact. All who have eyes to see, let them see.
"Yet wherever the Yankee went... the Catholic, especially the Irish Catholic, was only a few steps behind"
We actually discussed this topic at my Presbyterian church in Durham, NC. It was suggested that they were sent by God to replace the Yankees because of their apostasy.
Good commentary and sort of funny timing. Marcel Votlucka talks about the nice, don't rock the boat middle class in his essay " We are the neutered bourgoise" at Strike the Root. It is sad, that we have become a nation of wussies. We are turning into a totalitarian state, and yet we just sit on our collective butts afraid to do anything that will get us out of our comfort zones. Sad thing is, in todays watered down evangelical Christianity, blind obedience to the state, whether right or wrong is seen as a virtue. Sometimes, I think it might be better to just chuck it (Christianity) and go back to our old Euro pagan roots, where concepts like honor, freedom, family, and community were alive before the duo whammy of Christianity/statism took over. Christianity used to have the upper hand in the church/state relationship, but not for a long time, and thanks to modern day consumerism/ high tech, etc nobody truly believes anymore. Going to church for most poeple I think is just a way to meet people(community activism) and/or to look respectable. The actual faith has been destroyed, replaced with a severely feminized version that has Christians saying "Hail Caesar!" all the while being "neutered" as true citizens or more importantly free men.
Foreigners will always eyeball a "land of opportunity." That is why the United States is becoming a colony for Indian moteliers, musselman convenience store owners, Kurdish county employees, Korean dry cleaners, Mexican gangster church operators, Salvadoreno lawn mowers, Jamaican crack pushers, Nigerian smack salesmen, and Israeli kiosk operators flogging Dead Sea make-up and toy helicopters conveniently located in a shopping mall near you. Just don't let them get your credit cards!
A mere 25 years ago, such work was done by young people migrating from mountainous terrain with lousy television reception. What with the advent of the VCR/DVD and the dish antenna, the surplus population that those vast regions used to provide has dried up, hence the influx of foreigners, and the concomitant embracing of multiculturism, tolerance and diversity.
On the bright side, our culture of materialism and decadence will make them just like us in less than one generation.
"Kissinger. Brezinski. Albright. Earlier generations of Americans would have found it to be strange and unseemly to appoint foreigners to be Secretary of State and formulate policy toward foreigners. Indeed, such a practice is anathema to republicans but characteristic of imperialists."
They are not "foreigners", they are "International Jews" (I think Henry Ford once wrote something about these types) and they are running this country. A quick look at the current bank bailout basically sums up the situation.
I know many "foreign" non-American whites who would do a better job than 99% of our politicians at restoring something resembling a constitutional republic in this country. Each one of them would make an excellent Secretary of State. Coincidently, none of them are Jewish.
Why weren't the anti-Irish sentiments of the No-Nothings justified? Assimilation has always been a nasty affair.
I'm sorry. I meant Know Nothings.
Nineteenth Century first generation Irish Americans were fiercely opposed to immigration their parents immigrant background nothwithstanding. The really bad aspect of Irish immigration:The degenerate and treasonous Kennedy clan.
The late John F Kennedy wrote a book in the 1950s on immigration in which he called for a change in the national origins aspect of US policy. Later on the degenerate Kennedy clan from Boston joined forces with Emanuel Cellar and Jacob Javits(do I have to point out the obvious?) to destroy Euro-America. The passage of the 1965 immigration reform act was their gift-the gift that keeps on giving-to Euro-America.
Really good aspect of Irish immigation:the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the nineteenth century was the result of the very hard work of a legal Irish immigrant.
One last thing. If there isn't a Clyde Wilson archive on this web site their should be. It would make it a hell of lot easier to get his views out to the brainwashed. It help make the deprogramming process easier.
Mr. Maxwell, I don't think there were any anti-Catholic riots in the South, though there may have been Know-Nothing political riots, which were commonplace in big cities. By contrast, the "riots" in Boston and Philadelphia were convent-burnings orchestrated with connivance of local authorities. There were alo more immigrants and Catholics in the Old South than some of you think.
As Robert #16 points out, which I would stress even more strongly, the South had a real culture which could absorb immigrants. (Almost every Northerner and foreigner who had lived in the South for any length of time before the war was a loyal Confederate.) In the North, as the U.S. today, there was no extant genuine society to absorb and nativise the immigrant. Also, of course, Southerners, unlike Yankees, did not think it their duty and glory to dominate other people and force them into artificial patterns.
"Would there be a war of choice in Iraq if some well-placed people had not expected to get richer?"
Now that we have freed the people of Iraq and given them the fabulous gift of democracy without being asked, when will the Iraqis vote on whether they want the US in their country?
Dr Wilson: 'artificial patterns' is a good way of putting it. Just think of how some modern Southerners often try to imitate a Yankee accent in their speech. I'm not talking about those who take speech training for a job, but about those who have an inferiority complex because of their Southern origin and speech, and practice at changing their speech patterns on their own. That's truly artificial. I once had one worthless idiot tell me bluntly that he had done this and that I needed to do so as well. In the end, after several other, quite unrelated affronts over the course of several months, my last conversation with him was one in which I was quite naturally using a rabid dog growl in my speech, without having to practise at all. He never bothered me again.
Dr Wilson: As far as I know, my own personal knowledge confirms your statement above at #26.
I descend, through a great grandmother, from a Confederate soldier who is said to have spoken with an Irish accent, though I think he was born here of immigrant parents.
My grandmother's family moved from Philadelphia to Tennessee and then Arkansas in the 1840's, and as far as I know they were loyal to the South, even though they had a not-too-closely-related relative who fought on the wrong side of Pickett's charge.
As I said before in another discussion a few months ago, the first settler in my local area was from upstate New York, and his sons, who I think were born down here, all fought for the South.
Allen Wilson @ 28, your comment about accents brings up a question I have long had (and has nothing to do with the topics Dr. Wilson presented). I see foreign actors in the movies with flawless (Yankee/bland) American accents. But in all movies where the actor is supposed to be Southern, the accent is so bad as to be a joke. If it is that difficult to mimic, why, for goodness sake, don't they just use real Southerners? In some movies I get the impression that any dopey, uneducated speech is considered passable for Southern.
Dr. Wilson @26
That's probably it - a Know-Nothing riot I simply assumed had something to do with Catholicism. A quick search, and that was the only one that seem to come out of the South. I was not intending to say that the South was also anti-Catholic. I would hope not - my mother's side of the family are French Catholics ...and at that time living in Louisiana, where they loyally served in the Confederate Army.
Imagine that - all those unassimilated Germans and Irishmen living in Yankeeland - ludicrous! Has Prof. Wilson ever left South Carolina?
MAP@30: The people who make movies are generally ignorant of all regional differences in the English spoken in the United States. They think that there is a single "southern accent", as if there were no difference between the speech of an educated gentleman from Savannah and the speech of a man from the hill country of north Georgia. In the same way, I would bet that they don't know that the speech of an upper-class Bostonian of the nineteenth century differed considerably from that of a Maine fisherman of that period. Of course, these days the regional differences in speech are unfortunately disappearing.
MAP: Mr Fowler is right. Also, this bland 'American' speech you refer to seems to be the language of choice for Hollywood, though it seems to blend seamlessly with various Northern accents. Even when Southerners are portrayed as not evil in movies, they are often treated condescendingly. As for Southern accents, since Southerners are so often portrayed as evil or backwards or both and have been for so long, I guess it makes logical sense that villains would so often be portrayed with Southern accents.
It's like I heard someone say a long time ago, it's not a conspiracy, they just hate us. That's why they portray us the way they do in their movies.
Of course it's not just Southerners, but people all over fly-over country, especially rural people. Years ago, I read one of Stephen King's novels, and I could be wrong since it's been twenty years ago, but in his descriptions of rural New England people, he came of as condescending. Perhaps that was just part of the story line, perhaps not.
Remember the movie, 'Fargo'? Remember how people in that region got so mad at how they and their speech were portrayed? Perhaps they detected condescension in the way the movie makers treated them and their speech and ways. Southerners have put up with the same thing for way too long.
I like that final quotation in this piece, but, please, does anyone know which Southern newspaper it came from?
Mr Bruce (#19) I may be alone in this, but "respectable" status is something I have never earned after telling people I go to church on Sunday.
A lot of folks go to church to gain respectability and act like Christians!!!!! You are telling me you never belonged to a church with a faction that acted holier than thou or was overtly hypocritical? What do you think is behind the mega church trend of tremendously watered down Christianity? Does the term Pharisee mean anything? I am a far from perfect Christian to be sure, but then again I do not try to flout something I am not either. The point of my going back to good ole Europaganism was based on something Christ had said about it was better being hot or cold for him, for if you were lukewarm, he would spit you out. Modern day Christianity in America is rather superficial, with idiot TV evangelists called for assassinations, calling illegal wars "God's calling", and going along with the severe erosion of our freedom. Knowing this, it is better off just chucking Christianity if we are not going to truly live it. At least the euro barbarians fought for their freedom, families, etc. Modern day Christians are acting like a bunch of idiotic sheep about to get slaughtered because of their stupidity and non belief, not to mention total apathy.
@37 Robert
Please let the readers of this blog if you find any of Europe's tattooed set willing to fight for their freedom. From what I've seen they are totally given over to political correctness. Maybe in Northern Russia or Finland you might find something, but I'm not holding my breath. Check their birth rates.
Dr. Wilson,
Your title:
"The Way We Are Now Yet Again"
The title and the article which flows out of it are so true, so true; yet, a counter beat I would offer, an encounter which I had a mere forty-five minutes ago.
Earthy, familial and perhaps too sentimental for some; nevertheless, worth the rendering in these times as we need to focus on real things.
My wife and I went out for some forgotten grocery items. Actually, it was an excuse to ride the country roads between our farm and the little community store in the hope of seeing rabbits, raccoons, possums, etc. after sundown. My wife had an agenda, within an agenda, within an agenda: she wanted to find and feed a stray dog she had seen on the way home from work. (My mind has already counted it as the sixth dog in our pack of five!)
We saw only one rabbit, and the stray remained out of sight. I got some pickled jalapenos, and my wife purchased some "sweet" items.
As I was going into the store, I had noticed a very old fleet-lined pickup which gave every appearance that someone all but lived in it. Actually, my pickup is my most functional office. When we came out, a lady, likely in her forties but looking to be in her late fifties, came out with us and headed toward the truck. She said, half to herself and half to me, actually more than half to me, "I hope the mosquitoes ain't out and the snakes stay in." I knew that she intended to go squirrel hunting tomorrow, its being the first legal day of season in our climes. So, I said, "I guess you'll have a squirrel mulligan tomorrow night." She responded that she had not been squirrel hunting in ten or more years. She was going squirrel hunting for her son who had been killed in an automobile accident back in July. She said that he loved to hunt - could kill the limit every day. She added as we parted, "If I can kill just one, I'll take the tail and put it on my son's grave."
She is, for me, a wise woman. She weaves her grief into the very fabric of life, the life of her traditions: into hunting, into food and into the sacred place where he son is buried.
October, for many reasons, is my favorite month. My encounter with this woman on the solemn Eve of Acweorna has enhanced its favor.
With all due respect to Mr Layden, I can think of any number of other occasions that could be called "the death of the Yankee empire". How about the passage of the 16th Amendment? Or Massachusetts electors going for Al Smith in 1928? (Nothing against Smith, his party's best candidate of the century, but it wasn't a Yankee thing to do.) Or for Smith's party in the next five elections-- once more than South Carolina! Or the election and reelection of James Michael Curley? Or the passage of local gun-control laws which, though popular elsewhere, were never needed in the Northeast in earlier centuries?
But for death throes, you can't beat the fact that the Bay State's Class 1 US Senate seat has been held for 55 years by a disturbed family of an alien race bent on exacting revenge. (And quite successful at that.) What kind of empire doesn't control its own heartland? Austria-Hungary without Vienna? Cathay without Peiping?
As for imposing "artificial patterns" on other states, remember our experiment with Islam, the 18th Amendment. South Carolina was one of five states to ratify it in the first month, and the only state explicitly to reject its repeal-- after 15 years of federal raids.
@ 38 Etienne Gervaise
Well, if you don't give yourself over to political correctness, you get bombed by US Air Force.
Like Serbs 1995. and 1999.
As far as Finnish and northern Russians are considered, I suppose it's too cold for immigrants to go all the way up there. That's why they don't have problem with PC.
Has anybody had the misfortune of seeing the movie "An American Carol?" I agreed to go with several guys from my church. I got into an intense argument with one after I commented on the requisite Lincoln worship. He was rather militant on Lincoln's strong Christianity and his greatness as president. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh but I have a grandmother from Virginia and I am descendant of several Confederate veterans so I have Southern sympathies. This particular fellow is from Long Island. It is maddeningly ironic that those who believe so strongly in America being one nation created in 1776 (the great Lincolnian lie) yet people like him openly reveal how much they despise Southerners. Seems like its almost a contradiction to me. I spent some time worshiping at a church from our small conservative Presbyterian denomination in Durham. After coming back to my church in Pittsburgh of the same denomination I have become convinced of the stark reality of the difference in world views between Northerners and Southerners.
From my time in the South I saw that there were many who still knew the difference between patriotism and nationalism as each are defined in John J. Dwyer's excellent "War Between the States." "In contrast to national pride or patriotism, nationalism operates on the premise of a centralized state, a politically controlled economy, and a synthesized and amalgamated culture. Where the patriot says, "I love my country," the nationalist says. "My country is better than yours."
You might want to look into what happened to Italians in New Orleans in 1890, before you make generalizations.
Brendan,
"It is maddeningly ironic that those who believe so strongly in America being one nation created in 1776 (the great Lincolnian lie) yet people like him openly reveal how much they despise Southerners. Seems like its almost a contradiction to me."
It's a dislike of disunionists, not of all Southerners. Given some of the hostility towards Northerners or New Englanders that fans of the Confederacy express, there's nothing at all surprising in that.
"Where the patriot says, “I love my country,” the nationalist says. “My country is better than yours.”"
That is one way of looking at it. But it's also been said that superpatriots or hypernationalists despise the real or actual country they live in because it falls short of their ideal, and that real patriots can still love their country in spite of its failings. If that's the case, who's the patriot and who's the nationalist in these conflicts?
Peter #44. "hostility towards Northerners and New Englanders."
You miss an important point: we never had any desire to dominate them, only wanted to be let alone. Their bad, hateful, domineering character is the catalyst. John C. Calhoun: "When did the South ever lay its hand on the North?"
Yes, weren't not a few Sicilian Catholics lynched in New Orleans a century or so ago?
Just to clarify: I don't mean to come across the wrong way when referring to my fellow Northern and Southern Christian brethren as having different "world-views." It is to be accepted that we are brothers in Christ and share a Christian and Biblical worldview otherwise I could be generalizing to the point of slander. However, there are differences in political/historical outlooks region to region due to a number of reasons that move on a spectrum from differing experiences, errors in the official version of history, and all the way to possible beliefs that are possibly against Scripture (Such as the rampant state worship that has appeared in our churches. Even in those denominations which one would least expect it).
Mr. Gervaise, Justin Raimondo wrote an excellent piece for Chronicles
way back in 1992 on the very topic you mentioned (#42).
"Borrowing" might be the more generous term. So much for her claim to have inherited nothing; to have stood at the end of no tradition. Humbug!
Dr. Peters if I had a nickel for every time I breathe a silent "Amen" to your comments I could bail out those poor billionaires in N.Y. single-handed. October is my favorite month, too.
Mr. Bruce, pace, sir. I know nothing about mega churches since I live a very sheltered life in a foreign country. Pharisees don't come my way I suppose since I don't have the chance to fraternize outside of Mass, other than an obligatory bow and greeting. Sorry to have startled you.
There is no such thing as paganism today, and it is a waste of time to pretend there is. As a frank admirer of Greek and Roman pagans and as someone with interest in Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic paganism, I have to say I find nothing remotely related to his going on today in Europe or the US. Paganism today consists for the most part either of very silly people who like to dress up and prance around Stonehenge or Tara or of anti-Christian/Nietzschean intellectuals who like paganism in the abstract but take part in no actual pagan rituals. I once asked a Croat Neopagan what god he worshipped and after thinking a bit, answered, "Sveti Elija--Saint Elijah, who has inherited many qualities from a Slavic weather god usually identified with Perun, though the truth is we know very little of Slavic paganism. I suppose there are still a few Neoplatonist/Neopagan types, spiritual descendants of Ficino and Bruno, but since they have almost completely won the battle against Christianity, there would seem to be hardly a point.
I think I am still listed as an advisor to the Nouvelle Ecole, though I have not checked in some time, but as I told the brilliant founder of that journal and movement, the only way to exercise the pagan impulse today is to be a traditional Catholic of the superstitious variety. We have more saints than the Romans had gods, which is saying a lot. Alas for would-be pagans, "the Great God Pan is dead," and there is no resuscitating him.