"That is the center of America’s security relationship with Israel – the notion that our two countries have the same founding principles, the same respect for the social contract and for the social covenant. I have taken more than 400 American security professionals – primarily retired American Admirals and Generals – to Israel in more than 30 trips. And at the other end of their careers, I have sent more than 500 cadets and midshipmen of our service academies to Israel before they received their commissions. And I can say that they all understood the fundamental and profound principles that guide both the United States and Israel.
They don’t always agree with Israel’s politics – or Israel’s defense choices – or any other single aspect of Israeli political, military and social life, but I never found one that didn’t believe in the relationship between Jews and the land of Israel.
The United States military, then, is a Zionist institution." Shoshana Bryen
————
It's an open question but I think the answer is probably yes. The US military now seems to be totally focused on Israeli policy goals in Iran, Syria and Iraq. Israel is not much interested in Afghanistan or Korea and in those ares the US is not slavishly following the Israeli lead.
Israel wants Iran neutered and eliminated as a power rival in the Middle East. The putative Iranian nuclear weapons program is just one target of Israeli policy toward Iran. To reach the goal of Morgenthau-style comfort with regard to Iran, Israel wants to destroy Syria and Hizbullah as allies of Iran. The Russians are an obstacle to those aims and I am sure that is causing a lot of heartburn for Bibi when he is not fretting over his approaching likely familial imprisonment. Saudi Arabia? Nobody likes the Saudis. They don't like each other. That is being demonstrated at present. The Israelis don't like the Saudis. The US military has never liked the Saudis but they are now regarded by Israel as allies of convenience against Iran and for this reason there is a new show of chumminess between the US military and SA.
The process of conditioning American officers to make them Zionists has been ongoing for a long time. when I came in the Army in 1962, there was little interest in Israel in the officer corps. "Exodus," the Otto Preminger extravaganza with its glorious music was a couple of years in the past. It had made a good impression on a great many Americans even though the main plot feature was the terrorist attack on the British billet at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The 1956 War in Egypt had been a messy business involving the US, Britain, France, Israel, Egypt and the USSR. It was a confusing occurrence that had occurred concurrently with the revolt against the Communists in Hungary. The 1956 War did not make a big impression on the US military. We were focused on Europe and the Cold War. The 1967 war was a watershed. Israel's total victory had been unexpected by most. Americans are mentally driven by aggressive sports analogies and Israel was a winner. That made a big difference in spite of the repeated day long attacks by the Israeli air force and navy against USS Liberty, an American SIGINT collector positioned off the Egyptian coast. LBJ suppressed an armed reaction by a US carrier battle group in the area and a subsequent naval investigation. His policy then became one of relatively complete support of Israel.
The indoctrination and conditioning program described by Shoshana Bryen began in earnest after that and has carried through to the present under the umbrella of AIPAC and its galaxy of linked organizations especially the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). This program has been wildly, incredibly successful. As a result there is an unthinking willingness among senior, and not so senior American officers to support Israeli policy in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and now Saudi Arabia.
The handful of ME trained and educated US officers are ignored, treated as technical experts or shoved out the door when they speak up. pl
https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2017/11/20/u-s-military-zionist-organization/
Apparently, from the pen of NYT’ Thomas Friedman and supposedly from intellect of MbN, the new competition to Mr. Putin as the new Hitler president is none other than Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran.
Never mind that Hitler was a product of Western Europeans wars and greeds,and had nothing to do with orthodox Russia or a Shia Muslim Iran, which were greatly harmed due to this same wars, nevertheless it was the poor Palestinians who lost their land and territory due to this inter-European wars of colonialist greed.
You will note that the same sort of conditioning was started with protestant ministers in the 1980s: free trips to the “Holy Land,” propaganda about the Palestinians, etc. This is in part how the GOP was turned into an Israeli puppet.
It is helpful to simply assume that the entire US government, the banking cartel, media, academia and protestant churches has been mentally colonized by Zionism, Cultural Marxism, or both. Try this for six months and all those policies you have been scratching your head about begin to make a lot more sense.
If you reflexively say this sounds like the delusions of a paranoid anti-Semite, you may want to consider that YOU have been gaslit.
Great documentation, Col Lang. These all-expense-paid junkets that Shoshanna Bryen boasts of, which are actually intelligence recruitment operations, should be outlawed in IMO for young soon-to-be officers. Something for Congress to take up. Meanwhile, some US private institutions would do well to publicize the dissidents inside the Israeli military and intelligence community. They aren’t perfect, but frequently more outspoken and truthful than American commentators.
This article by Friedman is the most amazing piece of propaganda I have yet to see in the NYT, and that is saying something. It is required reading.
It contains statements such as the following, MBS describing Donald Trump, “the right person at the right time”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab-spring.html
So Colonel, what do you imagine/extrapolate/intuit the repercussions of this blind support of Israeli objectives within our Congress, the Executive and Military will be?
We can see the immediate results in Syria, but what do you imagine will transpire based on the stated goals of the US military and the vague goals of the US government?
Korea is unimportant to Israel, and military efforts there would be catastrophic for US internationally, unless there was a very convincing false flag executed.
Israel cares not a bit about NATO, the EU and Russia, nor do they care about Ukraine – so are those just going to remain in limbo until they fall apart on their own?
Where does Yemen fit into this mix?
Do you believe the tiny enclave of mercs and SOF remaining in the immediate area of Syria will be strengthened?
And NO – I am not going to barbecue you for just thinking out possibilities – but what else can we civilians do? At least you have the background sufficient to imagine, and know some of the principals – invaluable in estimating what might happen.
oilman2
I am here to teach you to think about these things, not to be a fortune teller. Work it out for your self. pl
decameron
IMO what they are recruiting are agents of influence. pl
Col. Lang:
Has the US soldiery, officers and the enlisted men, become – per chance – more religious? On the whole?
Babak
There are a lot more evangelical Christians than there used to be. pl
james
Why didn’t I think of that? pl
They all become Zioconned with life membership in the Kosher-Nostra…..
So the secular American Creed has weakened ?
Babak
MO, even as the coastal elites have grown ever more materialistic and self-centered, the population of ordinary Americans from whom the military are recruited has either become more devout or have not turned away from religion. Israel is a politico religious phenomenon that skillfully develops gentile guilt over the Shoah. This is a potent weapon. I have known a lot of Israeli officers. Most were not religious at all and quite cynical about the evangelicals. These officers were Jewish/Israeli nationalists. That was a bond between us but this process of narrative shaping and domination of American policy has gone very far. pl
Like Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven, Friedman “Sometimes he even amazes himself”. Throughout the years, I have read many super optimistic predictions of Mr. Friedman printed in NYT as an expert’ analysis. Frankly never before, I had read one as overtly and embarrassingly ridicules about an absolute dictatorial monarchy that has been proven instrumental for current extremist Sunni Muslim terrorism including 9/11 in the world. Whichever US PR firm hired by Saudis for this write up in NYT, deserves a refund.
Shoah guilt seems to play well with the Coastal elites. I’m acquainted with a lot of evangelicals and never heard an evangelical speak of it. For them it is all about the bible being the literal word of God, God’s covenant with Israel, and the various End Times prophecies as interpreted by various Church leaders over the years and the role Israel plays in God’s plans. I still remember some of that stuff from the Plain Truth magazine that showed up at our house once in awhile 50 years back. Support for Israel is really a matter of faith for them.
In a slim volume titled “Expanding Historical Consciousness: The Development of the Holocaust Educational Foundation,” author Anita Weiner traces — make that celebrates — the efforts of Zev Weiss to insert ‘holocaust consciousness/education’ in, first, American universities, then military academies, then globally.
Weiss’s first triumph was the recruitment of Peter Hayes at Northwestern University in 1987. Weiss identified Hayes as “an Irish Catholic who taught German history;” Hayes describes himself as a specialist in economics. To bring him up to speed, Weiss paid $3000 to someone to cover Hayes’s class load while Hayes traveled to Israel & visited Yad Vashem.
Notre Dame and then Christopher Browning were Weiss’s next two acquisitions; by 1992, “65 colleges and universities had courses on the Holocaust . . . that had been introduced by The Foundation.”
It took Weiss over a year to get The Air Force Academy on board with the “Expanding Historical Consciousness”/ Holocaust education project. Next in line was West Point, where European studies professor Dewey Browder was tapped to take on the program. He, too, initially resisted on the basis that he knew little about the topic, but Weiss
Browder’s an interesting character. He moved from West Point to Austin Peay University, where ROTC students were in his classes in European history. In addition,
Now retired, Browder recently endowed a scholarship to promote European studies,
I wonder, though, about the dual-emphasis of those tours Browder leads, and if he questions whether giving “Holocaust” equal weight with 2000+ years of “European culture” has contributed to young Americans “losing sight of their origins.”
And I question, especially, if the airmen, cadets, and midshipmen who are learning to assess the morality of military orders are fully grounded if the context of that instruction is a Holocaust narrative that is purveyed by a group with a self-interested agenda, and which is loaded with misconstructions and omissions, but which is forbidden to be critically analyzed or challenged.
Col. Lang
If even the military leadership has become zioconned then the situation is hopeless. It would seem that only a catastrophic loss can provide the impetus for change. Even there it may be that they double down.
The ME clearly has no national benefit. There’s nothing of strategic value there. It seems purely an ideological pursuit. Do you see any similarity to the anti-communist mindset that was pervasive post-war?
One can only imagine the horrified reaction of media and politicians if Russia was to ever stage that kind of paid propaganda stages and visits for US military. Horror soon followed by a witch-hunt of Stalinist proportion.
Kooshy
Check this thread on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/anhistorian/status/934080718816399361
In honor of Thomas Friedman’s latest love letter to Saudi here is 70 years of the NY Times describing #Saudi royals in the language of #reform.
The parasitoid has taken the host by its head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovo_T0KqdYg
“The parasitoid Jewel Wasp (Ampulex compressa) uses cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) as a live fresh food supply for its offspring. The wasp injects venom directly into the cockroach brain to control its behavior. In this movie, we show the life cycle of this amazing predator, which ends in a slow horrifying death of the cockroach.”
If they did this, they would be crushed into oblivion
Yes, strongly agree. I encountered then repeat lay up thru my last assignment (2012).
Not ideological, but religious.
Friedman: “Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive.” Ho ho, ha ha.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was set up by 1970s US Air Force Academy grad Michael Weinstein 10+ years ago in response to the harassment his sons received at that same institution a generation later by evangelical Christian proselytes. The elder Weinstein had experienced similar harassment in his time there. The foundation pushes back on all forms of religious proselytization that is reported to them. The perpetrators are usually evangelicals of some flavor or other, and the targets the MRFF assists include Moslems, Roman and Orthodox Catholics and mainstream Protestants as well as Jews. Weinstein’s book about his and his sons’ experiences that led to the MRFF’s founding are a worthwhile read, as is the Wikipedia page on the organization. This issue appears to border on being a similar misuse of religious influence and it will be interesting to see how the MRFF responds when it is brought to their attention.
May have told this story before here: About five years ago my wife and I were on a tour of Israel. Our hardbitten cynical tour guide was a former Israeli Air Force officer who recently had lived in the Palo Alto area while his wife, a scientist (gene therapy IIRC), was teaching at Stanford. While in Palo Alto he ran a “security firm.”
When we got to the area where the battle of Armageddon was supposed to take place, he mentioned that when he was serving as a guide for tours of American Evangelicals, they were understandably quite excited by this. I asked him whether they asked what the Israelis would do when the Messiah arrived. He said, “We’ll ask him if he’s been here before. If he says ‘yes,” you win. If he says ‘no,’ we win.” “How do the Evangelicals react when you say that?” I asked. “The same way you did,” he said. “They laugh.”
Everyone knows that Isa Masih will appear in Mecca – accompanying the Twelfth Imam.
Babak
If I understand Shia thinking, this Mesih will be the Mahdi as well and he will come with Jesus. pl
larry Kart
They left Palo Alto? Why? The Middle East sucks. pl
Colonel,
For those who are not as familiar with American history as I am I may be able to explain Mrs Bryen’s final statement in her speech linked to in your article:-
“For the British, rights came from the earthly King or Queen, and only those rights the sovereign choses to give – which is why we had a Revolution.”
On the face of it this statement looks puzzling. But Mrs Bryen has clearly been studying Constitutional Theory and here displays a true analyst’s grasp of the underlying principles. I would guess she has also been studying the relevant history, which I set out here.
From early times the Continental Monarchies had been tending towards ever greater absolutism, a tendency that reached its high point in the early 21st century but which was marked enough before that for Continental Constitutional theory to be described by some specialists as L’etat c’est moi squared.
The Stuart Kings of England liked the idea of absolutism and had a go at it in England. Influential and widely read theorists such as Sir Robert Filmer propounded the Divine Right of Kings in support – I’ve no doubt it’s his works that Mrs Bryen studied in preparing her thesis. But the Stuarts ran into a snag. The awkward squad – the Puritans and such like – took against the enterprise. They were more attached to the idea of “We the People” running the show.
The awkward squad won. The English rejected the idea of absolutism and the subservience to the continental monarchies that went with it. The historians call this victory Brexit 1. Then the Stuarts came back for a return match. We the people told them to push off again. There was a Glorious Revolution (Brexit 2) in 1688 that led to the famous English Constitutional Settlement: we would no longer settle our differences with swords and muskets, which were becoming outdated anyway. We’d settle them by bribing the respective sets of politicians. This compromise worked reasonably well until the early 21st Century, at which point the cronies got fed up with messing around and took over the whole shooting match.
As you will know, at an early stage in the proceedings many of the awkward squad decamped to the new American Colonies, where they invented some very interesting ways of cooking Turkey that I mean to try at Christmas if my IT skills run to retrieving your recipe from the SST archives. In addition to taking their cutlery with them – that bit’s assumption on my part but there’s no evidence of the cutlery getting there before the Puritans and you can’t eat turkey without it, so it’s fair assumption – they took with them a well-justified suspicion of the English Monarchy.
They also took their teapots with them. And used them enthusiastically, to judge from their reluctance to pay any more for their tea than they had to. That reluctance led to the Boston incident and to subsequent events that further strengthened their well justified suspicion of the English Monarchy. It is that well justified suspicion of the English Monarchy that Mrs Bryen summons up so effectively in the peroration at the end of her speech that I have quoted above.
Tea, incidentally, was to remain close to the heart of the American people and there are recorded instances of Tea Parties being held as late as the early 21st Century, at which point the cronies got fed up with messing around and took over the whole shooting match there too.
But that’s by the way. I can confirm that the account of our respective histories that Mrs Bryen’s working from is reasonably accurate, except that Mrs Merkel’s French isn’t very good so she says L’etat c’est moi in German instead. Apart from that I’d say that Mrs Bryen’s grasp of the English Constitution is fully as secure as her grasp of history.
I seem to remember reading that a lot of these junkets include “honey-traps”. It would explain a lot.
Recall that the church supported slavery in the South. Visit France to find a country that believes in the separation of church and state. The U.S. certainly today has become more theocratic than ever. Roy Moore? God’s law above human law? Trump supports him and has as a Secretary of Education an avowed evangelist?
Never read or heard anyone refer to Mahdi as Masih. There is only one Masih and he has been Jesus, who, it is hoped, will intercede on behalf of evil doers and enemies of True Religion, so as Mahdi’s armies won’t have to shed that much of their nlood.
I think it’s worth hypothesizing, I believe correctly, that the Israeli/Saudi rapprochement, absolutely unequivocally signaled by Friedman’s piece, directly comments on Israel’s dissatisfaction with the results of the programs Colonel Lang describes.
The United States has about as much military presence in the ME as can be imagined. It has fought at least two wars there in the past few decades. Russia comes in, and in an extraordinarily brief stretch of time, completely overturns what the U.S. has been trying to do, certainly in Syria and perhaps throughout the ME, including Lebanon.
Can Israel’s leaders be happy with this turn of events? Can it be happy with the results of what it has patiently bought throughout the decades?
What Russia has done in Syria is to, as effectively as it can, protect the Syrian population. And probably the Lebanese population and the Iraqi population as well. And we should throw in Iran. The Russian idea of a victory celebration is a concert in Palmyra, not Putin posing in a flightsuit on the deck of an aircraft carrier moored a few hundred yards off shore.
This is strong stuff from Russia and it will take quite a lot of articles by Friedman to overcome it. Embracing the genocidal Saudi’s is a desperation move.
Trump has succeeded in slipping an additional 40,000 troops into Afghanistan to try to track down the Taliban. Let’s see him go to war in Lebanon/Iran/etc. And let’s see how convincing his threats against NK become if he is in a hot war in the ME.
imo zionism is more deeply embedded in the American (Anglo) psyche than Evangelicalism (which is, I’ve been led to believe, a deliberately distorting implant on biblical faith, by way of Scofield & Oxford press).
Heinrich Graetz wrote the first ‘modern’ history of the Jews ~1860. The earliest (modern) zionists were raised on Graetz; Rabbi Stephen Wise, right-hand man to both Louis Brandeis & Henry Morgenthau, wrote to his wife about his delight in reading Graetz.
Vol. V is astonishing. Graetz expresses profound disgust with Polish Jews and their “Talmudic” trickery and deceptions. He dedicates several pages to describing in gory detail the battles with Cossacks, which, says Graetz, Polish Jews brought upon themselves.
Then he turns to Manasseh ben Israel and the numerous stratagems he used to gain re-admittance of Jews to England as a preliminary step to the fulfillment of Jewish return to the Holy Land — first, Jews had to be scattered to all the ends of the Earth.
In response to Manasseh’s visions and pleadings. Cromwell gladly sent a passport to Manasseh. He was far from alone in laying out the welcome mat.
I like that, instead of the ‘Grand Old Party’, it’s now the ‘Giant Israel Puppet’. Question is, are they stick figure marionettes, or are they stuffed sock puppets? When we see the GOP figures on TV, are we really seeing the Monkees part deau? Controlled with wires from above by Israeli handlers, or a bunch of stuffed monkeys, either way is bad for U.S. policy and U.S. interests.
With (just to name one Pastor among many) all the trips and freely provided Lear Jets at Pastor John Hagee’s disposal provided by the Israeli Government, Hagee and many Pastors like him IMO needs to be hammered by DOJ to register as a Foreign Agents, and the IRS needs to jerk their 501C status. After all it’s American Taxpayer money that the Israeli Government is using to pay their puppets like Hagee, with Taxpayer funded Israeli Government money laundering operation.
The Israeli government propaganda mantra is hammered into the American psyche each and every Sunday service. Just think, an I/O operation with little to no overhead, I’m sure that the Kremlin and Beijing are green with envy.
Colonel Lang, according to late British professor of History of Zoroastrianism, Professor Mary Boyce of university of London, the bases for this belief in return of Mahdi/Messiah in Abrahamic religions originated in Zoroastrianism.
Not long ago, Trump did not certify that Iran was in compliance with the nuke agreement. It is now up to congress as to what to do about it.
MBS now has total control of Saudi purse strings and I would guess continued “sponsorship” and donations to “foundations” will be dependent on US going to war with Iran.
Team Trump is handpicked for their hatred of Iran. Nutty wants the US to destroy Iran.
Reading this article, it seems that the US going to war against Iran may now be inevitable.
Bill Herschel
Not a Christian? the various churches tolerated slavery. they did not support it. “Theocratic?” No. More religious among some people does not equal “more theocratic.” pl
No Babak,IMO the secular American Creed is stronger than ever and gaining strength.There are a few pockets in parts of the US where Evangelicals are strong.These are mostly in the South……………….ie Southern Baptist etc…………….There is a strong overlap of Trump supporters,Evangelcal Christians and the Tea Baggers…………..Your Northern Roman Catholics and your mostly non southern Protestants ie Methodists,Episcopalians are on the wane……………..I’m not in favor of this but the country is becoming less religious by the hour.
Mr Friedman?? try this for your Thanksgiving amusement. It’s better than the real thing.
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php
‘The ME clearly has no national benefit’
US interest is making money. Asia not the ME is where the US must go to do that. Iran, Saudi, Israel know it and are doing so themselves. The US dalliance in the ME and the Gulf in particular may be of use if it enables economic leverage over PRC oil and gas supply. The recent changes in Saudi, if they last, will change Islam in Asia and the US as a Saudi ally stands to gain.
Is it ok for me to like cultural Marxism but not Zioism?
It is interesting to recount the experience of the post WWI officer corps, Marshall, Wedemeyer, Patton etc. and the attitudes they held and how they were effectively neutered.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/benderskyrev.htm
In the 20s and early 30s they freely spoke their minds and were given a platform in the media to do so. The Military Intelligence Department investigated Jacob Schiff’s involvement in funding the Bolshevik revolution, whilst individuals like Felix Frankfurter were of deep concern. Ultimately though the access to the media was cut off and political pressure from the Roosevelt administration meant their opinions came to be expressed only privately. Indeed General Moseley was one of the few who continued to speak his mind publicly and was forced in to retirement in ’38. Steadily this generation died out and were replaced by those brought up in the new ideology. As with now people are shaped by the ruling ideology of the time and the environment they operate in.
Massachusetts and Connecticut had established churches up in to the 19th century. The New Hampshire constitution required members of the legislature to be Protestant until 1877 with state funding of Protestant classrooms continuing to 1968. The idea of the US being a strictly secular country was a fringe far left opinion in the early 20th century, through political and legalistic manoeuvring this vision was imposed against the wishes of the majority of Americans.
because this asseveratio [fake rhetorical term + pun]
sounds a lot like Auntie Sadie (everybody knows one) warming up for a tirade, perhaps Ms. Bryen should be 1. encouraged to speak, and 2. widely quoted.
Anybody know … did she go to Harvard??
In reply to Bill Herschel 24 November 2017 at 12:45 PM
Autosycophancy has always been one of Friedmans’s traits.
“Judeo-Christian values”
It would more sense to speak of ‘Islamo-Christian values’ than those of the Jews. The Muslim literary material describes Jesus as a prophet, not boiling in excrement in hell. And it would make actual sense to speak of Zoroastrian-Christian values. Christianity was developed as a theological system using Greek thought (itself influenced by Zoroastrian Persia) and culturally ‘Germanized’ (see the Germanization of Late Medieval Christianity). I remember reading a whole article over at the (Jewish) Tablet Magazine describing how whenever Jews or Judaism was brought up by Christian Europe, it was as an antithesis or adversary. “Judeo-Christian” is an ahistorical projection back onto the past constructed for political ends in the 20th century.
At the core of the Christian idea is that the divine took human form. Thus Christ’s Jewish origin is irrelevant. The only thing that Christianity takes from Judaism is the idea of the ‘seed of Abraham’, which is interpreted as the church in both the Old and New Testament.
None of the so-called ‘Abrahamic Religions’ share a coherent philosophical or moral system. Thus it always funny when this “Judaeo-Christian’ phrase is trotted out.
It’s tempting to blame evangelicals but this article places their role in the American-Israeli relationship in context.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2005/12/01/the-protestant-deformation/
tl;dr – jews, neocons, liberal globalists engineered the background conditions for America’s Middle East adventures, and generated and promulgated the specific policies involved. Evangelicals played a peripheral role, shoehorned into Republican coalitions because the GOP paid lip-service to family values. If Israel thought the evangelicals were the golden ticket, they wouldn’t spend all that money lobbying in DC. Also, you have to explain why Democrats Presidents cater to Israel too…they don’t answer to the religious right.
“Cultural Marxism” is the term discursively confused term normie conservatives apply to the liberal project. It’s a fancy way of saying ‘civilizational AIDS, or more academically, ‘left-wing oligarchy.’ Currently world-historic forces beyond the remit of the global managerial elite are turning with a vengeance on this virus, so now may be a good time to sell off your ideological stocks before the big crash.
i think you made some good points but at the same time i got the impression i was reading an all too neatly packaged whig account of history
I think I love you!
Agree 66%, and so pleased to see inclusion of Zoroaster.
The “Judeo-Christian” formula is historically, theologically, mythologically inappropriate.
I was tempted to edit the quote, but Browder’s use of the formula indicates how the concepts he was convinced to teach and propagate are politically – ideologically driven.
I consider “Abrahamism” and “Zoroaster- Greek thought” to be antithetical. The core of Zoroastrianism is “Good thoughts, Good words, Good deeds;” each person is accountable for his own behavior. Zoroastrians tend not to involve themselves in converting others..
In contrast, Maimonides wrote of Abraham:
Excuse me for sounding “snoopy,” but what are the names of those who have been primed by Israel-firsters to become a Fifth Column in the US?
Do the primed have any shame?
Larry Kart,
From an article entitled ‘Is Israel Good for the Jews?’ published by the sociologist Norman Birnbaum in the ‘Nation’ back in 2006:
‘Domestically, the chief allies of American Jewry were once the liberal Protestants; the modern Catholics, whose great achievement was the Second Vatican Council; and progressive secularists. Now organized Jewry has an alliance with those who were not so long ago embittered anti-Semites. The Protestant fundamentalists think the founding of the Jewish state means that the conversion of the Jews is imminent. Suppose the fundamentalists demand that US Jewry anticipate the end of time by beginning their conversion now? Some have welcomed the Lebanon crisis as the initiation of Armageddon. In the meantime, they combat the pluralism of the public sphere, which is indispensable to enduring rights for Jews in the United States. America is in serious danger of becoming a nation defined not by citizenship but by bargains among struggling ethnic and religious communities, united in an impossible project of global domination. Will Nobel prizes and business acumen, and seventeenth-century biblical imagery of America as a New Israel, protect the Jewish minority as our imperial project disintegrates? Its end could generate the domestic deprivation and tension conducive to renewed anti-Semitism.’
(See https://www.thenation.com/article/israel-good-jews/ .)
Pirouz Bahram.
Lemur – yes, you’ve ID’d it with remorseless accuracy. Whiggish as hell. More or less straight Macaulay, or as much of it as I could remember, with the odd bit of customisation.
Wiki quotes Lord Acton on Macaulay:-
“[T]he Essays are really flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism; his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous reviews, on Bacon and Ranke, show his incompetence. The essays are only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It is the History (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of diplomatic affairs, by Klopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely unfair.”
Again according to Wiki, Karl Marx put the boot in too: Marx says of Macaulay that he was “a ‘systematic falsifier of history’.[37]”
An ideal model, therefore, for a Rovian re-writing of English history that conforms to Mrs Bryen’s equally extraordinary re-writing of American history.
I’m pretty sure I got the cutlery bit right though.
This is absolutely true. Literal word of God. The Christian dispensationalists and most of the evangelicals don’t need convincing. They support Israel 100% without getting into the muck of politics. End times, Messiah returns, etc… They give Israel support because it has to exist in order for Christ to return.
Part of this prophecy is that once Jesus returns to Earth, the Jews must convert or be cast into the pit of fire. That the Israelis go along with the support of this insane theology says more about their political cynicism than anything else.
The Beaver,
Thanks for that, which I found instructive and enjoyable.
There are however critical ways in which the world has changed, which I think are not appreciated by Friedman, JINSA, and their like.
A fundamental premise of British, and American, policy has been that we could co-operate with the Saudis against those deemed our common enemies, without risking serious ‘blowback.’
We have had now had repeated terrorist attacks in the West from jihadists – and it has not escaped people’s attention that those responsible are not Alawites from Syria, Hibzullah, or Iranians.
So the emptiness of the endless charade of promises that the Saudis will suddenly become part of Friedman’s ‘flat world’ is now increasingly noticed and regarded as important, in a way it was not in the past.
Also relevant is the fact that the Israelis appear to be able to imagine no solution to any of their security problems other than bombing people and inveigling others in doing this. The fact that this has quite patently done much to exacerbate the jihadist problem, and the migration crisis, both of which pose very major threats to European countries, does not appear to worry them.
Historical ‘narratives’ can mutate in strange ways – and do so rapidly.
The King David Hotel bombing, to which Colonel Lang referred in his post, is no more forgotten in Britain than is the attempt to sink the USS Liberty in the United States.
On a site called ‘British Forces in Palestine’ you will find, among much other material, a page entitled ‘Kidnap, Torture and Murder of Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice.’
Ironically, according to ‘Haaretz’, the former was ‘the circumcised, Hebrew-speaking son of a Jewish mother.’
(See http://www.britishforcesinpalestine.org/attacks/sergeants.html ; https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/the-cruel-revenge-that-helped-drive-the-british-out-of-palestine-1.456440?block=true&trailingPath=2.169%2C2.216%2C2.218%2C ,)
If they go on the way they are going, people like Shoshana Bryen could wake up one morning to discover that, far from being ‘our other best friend in the world’, the British are a people with very decidedly mixed feelings about Zionists – and indeed, that many here are inclined to write Israelis off as little more than a bunch of thugs.
Anna, tell me why this “cultural Marxist” and post-Zionist isn’t really surprised about your association?
This sounds consistent with the Poetry of William Blake; when the project of building a new Jerusalem on England’s green and verdant shores proved impractical, it was conveniently moved to America. And we suffer these Delusions thanks to our civilization’s weakness in opposing alien peoples’ fantasies.
The “good speech, …” was only a spiritual exercise for fortifying oneself for the on-going and relentless war against the Evil Essence that permeates the Universe.
The semitic religions of Western Asia are confused interpretations of the Din Behi.
Zoroaster did send emissaries, he himself was martyred in Jihad against Turanians.
EO,
Good god man – are you really an enthusiast for the rule of the Major-Generals?
And this history really does matter, given that people like Rabbi Sacks and Soshana Bryen are trying to suggest a fundamental harmony between Israel and the United States on the basis of common origin of their political ideas in the Hebrew Bible. So Sacks writes: ‘Covenant is central to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. It is central to the speech of John Winthrop aboard the Arbela in 1630.’
A less sympathetic view, from the time, of the mentality of the kind of people who, at the time to which Sacks is going back, ‘internalized the Hebrew Bible’ in the way he appears to find congenial was brilliantly itemised in the great doggerel poem ‘Hudibras’ by the – very drunk – royalist poet Samuel Butler. His description of the religion of his protagonist, a colonel in the Parliamentary Army, begins:
‘For his Religion, it was fit/ To match his learning and his wit;/ ‘Twas Presbyterian true blue;/ For he was of that stubborn crew/ Of errant saints, whom all men grant/ To be the true Church Militant …’
It concludes:
‘All piety consists therein/ In them, in other men all sin’.
(See http://www.exclassics.com/hudibras/hudibras.pdf )
Clearly, Butler’s view is not the whole truth, by any means. But to see that it has substance – and was in tune with the feelings of very many of his fellow-countrymen, both then and later – one needs only to read a review by Ronald Hutton of the 2001 study ‘Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution’ by Christopher Durston. An excerpt:
‘One of the biggest factors in the failure of the Major-Generals consists of their lack of popularity, manifested in their own reports concerning their reception and their decisive rejection by the electorate, despite all their efforts to pack a Parliament. Dr Durston considers two traditional explanations, that they were hated either as soldiers or as agents of a legally dubious governmental centralisation, and while admitting some force to them rejects them in favour of a third. This is to emphasise their status as the allies and patrons of local cadres of godly Protestant fundamentalists; in common parlance radical puritans. In this reading, it was the inherent anti-puritanism of the English and Welsh, as powerful at times if less celebrated than their anti-Catholicism, which made the generals most obnoxious to them. There is nothing that can be faulted in such a suggestion; but nor is it actually demonstrated, and it probably cannot be. The great problem in evaluating public responses to the Major-Generals is that the latter possessed so many qualities likely to give widespread offence, consisting of all those mentioned above, that together they made up a package of irredeemable unacceptability.’
(See http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/232 )
What Bryen, channelling Sacks, have accurately described are the ideological roots of a self-image of ‘exceptionalism’ which is actually the fundamental problem with American foreign policy today. And indeed, the spirit of ‘neoconservative’ Middle East policies seem very close indeed that of those Puritans who, to quote Butler again:
‘Call fire and sword and desolation,/ A godly thorough reformation,/ Which always must be carried on, And still be doing, never done’.
Anna, I think your names question refers to a comment I did not make. Don’t know enough to make such a statement.
Do the primed have any shame?
That usually only comes after things turn out badly.
David Habakkuk
As a matter of boring self-referential pride three of my ancestors; John Alden, William Mullins and Richard Warren signed the Mayflower Compact. I am pleased to say that Winthrop was not among my grandfathers but Major John Mason is a grandfather. He carried out Winthrop’s policy toward the Pequots. pl
Butler’s last 2 words were also asked about Napoleon, “Will he ever be satisfied?”
That is what I thought too, once again for the Jew to die in order for the Christian to be saved.
That we are discussing all of this 200 years after Voltaire attests to the depth of religious sentiment and its hold on human mind.
And England maintains destroyers in the Persian Gulf against Iran.
Babak Makkinejad,
That was precisely what ultimately did for him.
For a considerable time, Tsar Alexander I attempted to find a place for Russia within the European order that Napoleon had created. It was also relevant here that some very intelligent people in his country’s élite were inclined to think that British sea power posed a much greater long-term danger to their country than French land power. (A view with which I have a great deal of sympathy.)
When it became clear that Napoleon was not prepared to accept anything other than something close to unconditional subordination, Alexander and his advisors prepared seriously for war. As part of the process, the Minister of Defence, Barclay de Tolly, created Russian military intelligence – and with its aid, he and others worked out what kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight, and how to make sure he was not able to fight it.
Doing this may sound easy in retrospect, but it was not at the time. In 1812, it involved making an army whose whole culture was offensive avoid taking offensive action, and retreat without breaking. For Barclay – the Baltic German bourgeois – it also meant that his determined pursuit of the one strategy that held out prospects of victory led to accusations of disloyalty.
After he was replaced by the old Russian noble Kutuzov, Barclay commanded the right flank at Borodino. I do not know whether the claim on the RT site ‘Russapedia’ that he had four horses shot under him is accurate, but he was clearly in the thick of the fighting, and it is good to see one of Russia’s greatest commanders given the honour he deserves, after his shabby treatment by Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace.’
(See http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/military/mikhail-barklay-de-tolly-michael-andreas-barclay-de-tolly/ .)
When it became clear clear that Napoleon had been decisively repulsed, the old division resurfaced. So Kutuzov, and the former Foreign Minister Rumyantsev, were inclined to think it made better sense to let a weakened Napoleon survive – on the basis that his total destruction would play into the hands of the British.
The view taken by Alexander was, quite precisely, that Napoleon would never be ‘satisfied’ – that, of his nature, he was an ‘overreacher’, and that no stable peace was possible in Europe until he had been completely destroyed.
The 2009 study ‘Russia Against Napoleon’ by Dominic Lieven, a descendant of a Baltic German family who served Alexander and his successors with distinction, is an exposition of the strategy which the Tsar and Barclay de Tolly developed, and a defence of the decision to destroy Napoleon, even at the risk of empowering the British. (Among other things, it is a kind of ‘settling of scores’ with Tolstoy.)
Its conclusions were summarised in a lecture Lieven gave at the London School of Economics following the book’s publication, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=433 .
At this year’s Valdai Group meeting, Lieven presented the conclusions of his subsequent study of the origins of the First World War and the 1917 Revolution.
Also on the Valdai website is an encomium by a contemporary Russian scholar, Alexei Miller, who clearly concludes that Lieven had put Tolstoy in his place: his title is ‘Dominic Lieven Outmatched Leo Tolstoy.’
(See http://valdaiclub.com/multimedia/video/alexei-miller-dominic-lieven/ ; http://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/revolution-war-and-empire/ )
Thank you for your mention and links to the MRFF. I’m a long-time supporter of Mr. Weinstein’s organization, which does not, IMO, get enough ink. His descriptions of, and battles with, Christian Dominionists who have captured the USAF Academy are scary indeed, not to mention his wider struggles against the ubiquitous proselyzation referenced in your post.
I’m not sure why they left Palo Alto, but perhaps the funding for his wife’s research was going to dry up, and/or she might have progressed at Stanford to the academic level she had been aiming for. Also, family ties might well have played a role.
It’s a really bizarre thing to behold. The entire relationship/understanding is an antithetical one. Theologically their positions are predicated on the other side being dead wrong at the end of the day (end of days). But presently? Marriage made in Heaven.
Thank you for your post. I just ordered the book as a Christmas present to me.
I am not familiar with the entire corpus of Browder’s work, so this comment is based only on the brief portrait supplied by Croesus above.
There are truths, and there are half-truths. To argue–and especially to teach, which I believe carries with it the responsibility to be as truthful as possible–that “America’s roots” are entirely European is a half-truth. Just as important as what the USA founders incorporated from Europe, is what they rejected.
For example, one of the most overlooked facts of America’s founding is that among the most important legislation first adopted by virtually all the states was the end of British common law regarding primogeniture. This of course was an important attempt to prohibit the creation and perpetuation of the fortunes, power, and rule of oligarchical families, whether local or national. Happily, it the abolition of primogeniture had its intended effect, though today conservatives/libertarians/Republicans are going to practically bring back most of the ill effects of primogeniture with their attempts to abolish the estate tax, and also, imo, the lowering of top marginal income tax rates. When you consider that modern corporations operate much the same as old European oligarchical fondo (funds) you can also see that lowering corporate tax rates will have similarly pernicious effects on the republic.
USA was founded as a republic at a point in world history when all other countries were governed by monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, or despotisms. The European states had developed these forms of government to a relatively high level. The founders rejected them all, but tried to blend the the best of each type in their design. Thus we get a very strong executive with many of the powers found in European monarchies, yet (supposedly) subject to the checks and balances of an independent legislature and an independent judiciary. Moreover, the federal structure of independent states subject to a national government was taken directly from the Iroquois confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations.
In economics, the USA founders again adopted the best of Europe, while rejecting the worst. The creation the American republic and its Constitution must be understood in the context of the global shift from the economic and political systems of feudalism, to mercantilism and modern nationalism. The Framers were entirely familiar with mercantilist policies, and the debates in the Constitutional convention make very clear that they had no intent of creating laissez faire and unregulated market capitalism, but a careful and deliberate plan to ensure that all economic activity was channeled and directed to the promotion of the general welfare and national development.
The words “mercantilist” and “mercantilism” are generally used whenever government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers. By specifying in the Constitution that government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers in promotion of the general welfare, the American republic made a sharp break from European mercantilism, in which the welfare of a sole monarch or small group of oligarchs was often conflated with the general welfare of a state or nation. Once you understand this history, it becomes clear that the idea that the general welfare is the slippery slope to tyranny, or The Road to Serfdom as Friedrich von Hayek titled his book, is a direct and insidious attack on the founding principles of the American republic.
This fascinating mix of economic policies was carried into effect by first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who is today understood by almost no one, no matter where on the political spectrum they claim to be. Contrary to the mythology peddled by conservatives and libertarians, the USA economy was NOT based on the ideas of Adam Smith–Hamilton thoroughly repudiated Smith, free trade, and laissez faire. For example, In his Report on Manufactures, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791, Hamilton wrote:
“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.” And: “Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practise, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations…. To produce the desirable changes as early as may be expedient may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government… it is of importance that the confidence of cautious, sagacious capitalists, both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential that they should be made to see in any project which is new—and for that reason alone, if for no other, precarious—the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles inseparable from first experiments.”
And liberals and leftists are wrong in their belief that Hamilton favored the wealthy and powerful over the people. One of Hamilton’s great insights was that economic development depended entirely on improving the productive powers of labor. This meant the development of science and technology, and the spread of machinery to replace muscle power, both animal and human. (Read Section II, Subsection 2, “As to an extension of the use of Machinery…” in Hamilton’s December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures.) The correct view of Hamilton must be precise: it was not that Hamilton sought to encourage and protect wealth, but to encourage and protect the CREATION of wealth.
Chroniclers of American history have pretty much agreed that George Washington was “the indispensable man.” I think the exact same must be said of Washington’s closest aid and adviser, Hamilton.
David Habakkuk – Thank you for a very useful summary indeed. I shall buy the book. Your final quote from Butler hits the mark just so. I have a feeling it hits more marks than just the neocons.
Do I like the Major-Generals? From what little I know of them, no. Proto-Commissars, set to enforce a consensus rather than find one.
It was no reign of terror – there was neither bureaucratic apparatus nor general fanaticism enough for that, and they were perhaps by that stage more worried about keeping the show on the road than forcing through a New Jerusalem, but they did some damage here and there. As for the spirit they exemplify, I find those times thoroughly modern if one allows for the change from God to Dawkins.
That is no far-fetched comparison. We see there the sequence we see today. An earnest enquiry after the truth leading to a doctrinaire conviction that one has found it. That leading to an insistence on forcing the doctrine found on others. When that spills over into politics, as it did then and as it does now, when it becomes a political force and interacts with other political forces, then dysfunction can be the only result. That and an enforced conformity that kills enquiry and thus kills new solutions. The “rule of the Major Generals”, had it been successful and prolonged, must have been as deadening and as sterile as the current doctrinal rule of the Progressives.
Thanks to Colonel Lang and the other commentators for
some really great insights on this topic.
Thank you again!
As to my thoughts on the topic,
I’m no expert on the upper ranks of the military,
but I think I do have some insight into the motivations of ambitious people.
I’ve observed how the military has changed in many ways from my ROTC and early career days in the 1960s and 70s.
For example from the strenuously homophobic Jody calls we cadets belted out on our PT runs,
to the welcoming, seemingly anything goes, attitude of our military leaders today.
I have my own theory on two things that caused that change.
First, the military brass surely observes how the general culture has changed (for the worse, IMO),
and worries about being too far out of step with the country they serve.
Second, there is the “Peter Pace” (remember him?) effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pace
Remember, when he was JCS Chairman, he was described by some of his peers as “Perfect Pete”,
so well did he exemplify the military ideal.
He had VN combat experience which educated him more than a thousand books would,
and felt deeply about the consequences of unnecessary wars.
But then he made a big booboo, at least so far as his career was concerned.
He spoke openly about his views towards homosexuality.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031300185.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/14/AR2007031400303.html
OMG! Kiss your career goodbye.
The son of a bitches in the U.S. Senate let it be known that there was no way they could anger the homosexual lobby
and confirm Pace for a second term as JCS Chairman.
So instead we got a fat slob of a Navy supply officer as JCS Chair
to kill “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.
(Colonel: Feel free to edit the above sentence if it might be too offensive to some.)
Anyhow, if I were an ambitious military officer,
the message I would get from that is:
Don’t deviate from the liberal or mainstream party line
if you want to rise to the top.
And I can see that applying to rev up support for
the Zionist/Likudnik/neocon “party line” on Iran and elsewhere.
EO,
Thanks for that response. In an earlier discussion I mentioned an historian called Patrick Wormald. More years ago than I care to remember, in the course of an irreverent and undistinguished student career, I heard his father, Brian Wormald, lecture on the Commonwealth and Protectorate.
Ironically, the Cambridge college of which he was a fellow – Peterhouse – was also home to a very different historian, Maurice Cowling, whose disciples have played a key role in creating the ‘Henry Jackson Society’, a central institution of the British version of ‘neoconservatism.’ I thought he was a Gollum dreaming of being a Grima Wormtongue – an ambition in which he has been, vicariously, extraordinarily successful.
Although both men could have been classed as ‘High Tories’, Wormald was quite different from Cowling. While his own instinctive sympathies were clearly royalist, what he set out to show were the ways in an unfolding chain of events were perceived by the different protagonists. In particular, he argued that, to understand the key role of millenarian ideas in the 1650s, you had to, as it were, dismantle a lot of intellectual baggage about the Civil War.
In particular, you had to get rid of the notion that there was anything predetermined about the Parliamentary victory. It was in substantial measure because Cromwell had not thought this that he was so convinced that he could see the hand of God in what was happening.
As to the notion that the Civil War was in some way inevitable, Wormald argued that this was simply wrong. When Charles was forced to recall Parliament, there was actually a very large element of consensus in the ‘political nation’ that he had violated the unwritten understandings on which the political system depended.
What changed the situation was that the radicals in the Parliamentary leadership had got themselves into negotiations with the Scots which could have been deemed treasonable – so they were pushed into radicalising their demands. At that point, enough of the ‘political nation’ rallied to Charles to make it possible for him to mount a military challenge.
On Filmer, incidentally, an interesting American perspective came in an essay by a famous historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward, on the maverick Confederate political theorist George Fitzhugh. As he notes, the society of the Kent gentry, in which Filmer’s ‘patriarchalism’ was rooted, was in essence reproduced in the area of the James River in Virginia.
(See http://www.ditext.com/woodward/fitzhugh.html .)
What interested Fitzhugh in Filmer was not the ‘absolutist’ element – and indeed, seen in a broader context, it may distract attention from more interesting issues raised by his thought. As regards a basic premise of the ‘social contract’ tradition – that people were born as individuals, and government was formed by some kind of contractual agreement – it is far from clear that Locke’s polemic against him can be defended.
Whether one can provide good grounds why people should obey political authorities on this basis remains a moot point, and as regards history Filmer’s instincts have turned out closer to the mark than those of his critics.
It is here important that ‘absolutism’ is a resurrection of classical ideas in the context of the dilemmas of the Renaissance and Reformation periods. In her study of ‘Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300’, the revised edition of which was published in 1997, the Oxford medievalist Susan Reynolds pointed to the contrast between the generally accepted hierarchical conceptions of society in the period she was studying, and ‘absolutism.’
Also, she pointed to the origins of later ‘nationalisms’ in notions of ‘regnal solidarity’ in medieval Europe, linked to myths of common descent. In concluding remarks summarising where her comparative studies of different nations had led, she argued that, up until 1300, what is striking is how similar patterns in different parts of Europe were:
‘What happened thereafter is another story, but in so far as it starts from the beginning of the fourteenth century it must start from the values and ideas that were then current. In most of Western Europe lay people then believed that government depended on consultation and consent, and that the object was to achieve a harmonious consensus in accordance with the custom and law of the whole community.’
Against this background, it is unsurprising that, in the Civil War, divisions were not simply between people but within them. So Sir Thomas Fairfax, who became Lord General of the New Model Army, had learnt soldiering under Sir Horace Vere, a noted commander on the Protestant side in the Netherlands and Palatinate, and married Vere’s daughter Anne.
It was she who, when the court called to try the King called the her husband, is said to have exclaimed that ‘he had more wit than to be there; and when the court said they were acting for ‘all the good people of England’, shouted ‘No, nor the hundredth part of them!’
After Fairfax retired to his Yorkshire estates, his and Anne’s daughter Mary would be tutored by the poet Andrew Marvell who, shortly before taking up the post, had written ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.’ (This was after the successful ‘COIN’ operation against the Irish, and prior to the ‘preventive war’ against the Scots.)
It is a deeply ambivalent poem, in that the portrayal of Cromwell is in the shadow of Horace’s portrait of Augustus – bringer of civil peace at home and the defeat of foreign enemies, but also in that of the portrait of Julius Caesar in the great ‘republican’ poem, Lucan’s ‘Pharsalia’.
Decades before, this terrifying figure had been transmuted into English literature in the portrayals of ‘overreachers’ like Tamburlaine in the plays of Christopher Marlowe – and has frequently been seen as a kind of prototype of the ‘totalitarian’ ruler. In the event’, of course, the English ‘republican’ experiment petered out, and Fairfax would collaborate with another estwhile pupil of his father-in-law’s George Monck, in facilitating the Restoration.
The arguments however echo onwards, on both sides of the Atlantic. For one thing, precisely because Soshana Bryen has patently not followed recent discussions about British and European history, she cannot grasp that there was no need whatsoever to defend the American Revolution on the basis of the abstract universalism that Jefferson introduced into the Declaration of Independence. It could perfectly well be justified in terms of a specific English tradition of the mutual obligations of ruler and ruled.
Unsurprisingly, one now finds a revival of ‘Southern’ traditions which were shaped by the concern that the abstract universalism introduced by Jefferson could very easily justify both a radical assault on their whole way of life – and also reckless adventures abroad.
So if you look at the ‘Occidental Dissent’ site, you see Hunter Wallace discussing Fitzhugh – and also one ‘Palmetto Patriot’ quoting from an 1852 address by William Porcher Miles, whose design became part of the basis for the Confederate flag:
‘Miles stressed that “Political Liberty… is not an Inalienable Right, but an Acquired Privilege” and condemned Thomas Jefferson’s assertion to the contrary as a “monstrous and dangerous fallacy” that “has, even among us, by thinking men been long detected and abandoned.”’
(See http://www.occidentaldissent.com/tag/george-fitzhugh/ ; http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2017/03/19/alt-south-what-is-conservative-government/
Ironically, this is very close to fundamental tenets of the Russian ‘liberal conservative’ tradition with which Putin has identified himself. Contrary to what imbeciles like David Brooks contend, figures like Berdyaev and Ivan Ilyin were not ‘messianic nationalists’ – they were anti-universalists.
Moreover, the very visible turn in parts of the ‘alt right’ towards anti-semitism, very visible on ‘Occidental Dissent’, simply cannot be dismissed as no more than the revival of some kind of irrational atavistic prejudice, or scapegoating. It is quite clearly related to the way that Jewish identity has been tied to Zionism, and, increasingly, to the ‘invade the world, invite the world’ agenda.
The simple historical fact that, prior to the Holocaust, Jews never constituted any kind of ‘people’ has been consigned to a kind of ‘memory hole.’
It then becomes bitterly ironic to recall that a key text of Russian ‘liberal conservatism’, the 1909 symposium ‘Vekhi’, was the brainchild of the Jewish literary scholar Mikhail Gershenzohn – who accurately predicted that an attempt to introduce ‘political liberty’ overnight into Russia would be a catastrophe.
Back in 2014, on his ‘Mondoweiss’ site, Philip Weiss discussed a letter from the historian Trevor-Roper – whose election as Master of Peterhouse Cowling, in a characteristically Grima-Wormtongue style intrigue – had helped engineer, to the distinguished scientist Max Perutz, a Jewish refugee from Vienna (baptised a Catholic.)
In it, Trevor-Roper said that he thought that similar circumstances were leading Israeli nationalism to assume some of the least desirable features of Prussian. In a comment, Stephen Shenfield – who I recall as the conduit through which the ideas which became Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ were first publicised in Britain – noted that Gershenzon had anticipated that this would be the case.
(See http://mondoweiss.net/2014/02/israel-germany-trevor/ .)
Reverting to American complexities, the Secretary of War and then Secretary of State of the Confederacy was the lawyer Judah Benjamin.
There is a vivid portrayal of him close to the start of the first volume of Colonel Lang’s civil war trilogy, which deals with the Confederate secret service, which he supervised. Unfortunately, Benjamin burnt all the records before escaping to London – perhaps if someone looked, they would find revealing material in British records. Over here, he resurrected his legal career, and wrote a classic text, ‘Benjamin on Sales’, which, having been successively amended over the years, is still a basic reference text for the case law and legislation relating sale of goods in the UK and globally.
David Habakkuk
Benjamin was indeed supervisor of the civilian Confederate secret service but General Samuel Cooper, the Adjutant General, ran a parallel military service centered on the Signal Corps. Cooper surrendered the War Department records at the end of the war but evidently kept the intelligence records. His family told me twenty years ago that the head of the family in the 1920s burned two leather bound trunks of papers in the back garden of Cooper’s home on Quaker Lane here in Alexandria and would not discuss the contents. pl
Not for long.
The new ships’ engines cannot stand the heat. 😉
Philip Giraldi has written an article which cites Colonel Lang’s post:
“Fighting Israel’s Wars”
How the United States military has become Zionized
by Philip Giraldi, 2017-11-28
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/fighting-israels-wars/