(working draft-18,000 words)
The Eclipse of Empires: The Emergence of Nations
At the end of World War One in 1918, three empires were torn asunder. The Ottoman Empire had already been rent by Christian nationalist movements (Serbian 1815, Greek 1832, Bulgarian 1908) but after the Great War, religious Muslims declared a new Kingdom in Saudi Arabia under ibn Saud and nationalist Turks declared a secular republic in Turkey under Ataturk. The victorious French and British empires expanded through Africa, Asia and the Mideast. The American President Woodrow Wilson sounded an anti-empire trumpet for the self determination of colonial peoples. Eight of his Fourteen Points statement were about specific nations being restored as intact geographic independent nations including Serbia and Poland. Nationalism had a global spokesman and if his British and French allies paid him no heed then Korean, Vietnamese, Indian and Egyptian nationalists heard him loud and clear. The first international champion of national liberation was not a Communist. The Marxists were still unmasking the “false consciousness of nation and religion” to affirm that deeper bond, “the international solidarity of the working class”. The American President was well aware that the American nation was a former colony born in blood from the side of the British empire. His Fourteen Points were a beacon for colonized peoples but his dream of a League of Nations was stopped by his own countrymen. American nationalists saw the pledge of mutual security within the League of Nations as an entangling alliance threatening the sovereignty of the American people.
WWI began with an assassination of an Emperor-to-be by ethnic Serbians who wished to break from the Austria-Hungarian Empire to be joined with their brothers in the new nation of Serbia (1878). The fall of that Empire would lead to separate nations of Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia (dominated by Serbia) and a multi ethnic Czechoslovakia.
The third empire to fall was Czarist Russia. In the course of World War One, an atheist Soviet government was installed and a separate peace was made with Germany. Poland reappeared on the map in 1917 as an independent country once again after a century of being swallowed by the German and Russian empires. Finland and the Baltic States of Lithuania Latvia and Estonia were independent.
Three other nations owe the crystallization of their national identities to one battle in the Great War(1914-1918). The attempt of the British to bypass the stalemate of the western front by attacking the underbelly of the Axis powers at Gallipoli made the military reputation of Mustafa Ataturk who would become the father of Turkish secular nationalism. The soldiers of New Zealand and Australia who died in that campaign would be remembered on ANZAC day. This shed blood and that memorial liturgy would solidify the distinct national identities of those who were previously named the “White Dominions” of the British Empire.
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| Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 1881-1938 Father of Turkey |
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| Monument at Gallipoli to soldiers of Australia and New Zealand |
An Interlude about Spain, Portugal and the Nations of Latin America
In this discussion we will only briefly address the Iberian nations (Portugal and Spain) and the nations of South and Central America. They suffered less in the “world wars “ but became battle fields in the Cold War that emerged after WWII. Spain and Portugal had established themselves as national kingdoms in the centuries long wars of liberation expelling their Islamic invaders (1492). Portugal separated from the Iberian Union in 1640. Their national identities were shaped as Christian warriors like the old Teutonic Knights who shaped Prussia.
Portugal lived a unique kind of Catholic nationalism from the 1930’s until 1975. They stayed out of WWII. The Portuguese lost their African colonies in the Angola and Mozambique wars for independence when a 1975 left wing military coup in the “Carnation Revolution” overthrew the successor to Antonio Salazar who had ruled from 1932-1968. Portugal with 10 million people considered Angola and Mozambique (each with 30 million people) the African part of a Lusophonic language world including Brazil (300million) ,a free Catholic Portuguese nation in South America. Their corporatist Catholic notion of the nation awaits a resurrection while the Christian Portuguese speaking world is a very real force for cultural agreement among nations. The story of nations is always about language as much as religion and military organization.
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| By 1825, well established still agreed upon National identities emerged in all of Latin America |
The Spanish colonies in Latin America achieved nation status from 1800-1850 after the Spanish king was deposed by Napoleon in 1808. While governments and leaders have come and gone, the stability and depth of national identity in Catholic Latin America holds a great promise. The inability to stabilize and synchronize their religious practises with their stable national identities has cost these peoples much blood. Mexico and Spain had bloody civil wars in the inter World war periods. Catholic national forces in Spain and religious peasants in Mexico were pitted against virulent atheistic communists as well as masonic republicanism and anarcho-syndicalists. In the Spanish Civil war(1936-1939) Francisco Franco preserved the Mass and his Catholic nation against the atheist scourge which enslaved Orthodox Russia and decimated Catholic Mexico. In an opposite vein, Fidel Castro in Cuba(1959) imprinted Latin America with a Marxist model for national liberation. Interestingly enough, the nationalist caudillos Franco and Castro forged a long friendship that was deeper than just trading anecdotes. The United States 18th century declaration of national independence against the British Empire prefigured the Spanish speaking national liberations in the half century to follow. (As always in Latin America, the Brazilian Portuguese speaking nation is a somewhat different story.) But if the Americans from the north were beacons of liberty in the 19th century, they became the oppressor gringo in the 20th. The nation that expanded across the continent with 160 acre homesteads for farm families became the defender of much larger tracts of “private property “ for the United Fruit Company in Guatemala (US aided 1954 Coup against President Arbenz). The US opposed Castro’s Cuban revolution, the Sandinista of Nicaragua, and Allende in Chile. All over the continent US policy after WWII was driven by preventing Soviet and Marxist influence in political life. It was often military institutions that were most capable of restoring national order amidst revolutions. Thus the United States so dedicated to civilian control of the military at home became the financier and trainer of nationalist military leaders who would oppose leftist revolts and even elections when necessary to stop the Reds. The Catholic clergy was bifurcated by the Marxist vs Capitalist paradigm as well. In some national struggles, parish priests became desacralized Marxists. Almost everywhere, bishops became increasingly impotent or corrupt. Throughout Latin America there remains a religious populace and well established national identities often formed by anti-Catholic personalities. The religious-national landscape of Latin America is in major contrast with Africa, another continent we will treat too lightly in our empires vs the nations narrative. In Africa tribal loyalties are deeper, national identities are less compelling and an ominous Muslim Christian divide runs across the continent at about 10 degrees north of the Equator. In Latin America, the problem is how to couple Catholic religious culture with political nationalism, real economic reform, and friendship with the English speaking Protestant nation to the north. Any nation that elects a Catholic Bolivar or a Christian Castro who is a nationalist capable of leading armed men for communal protection (but not defined by anti Americanism ) will generate many similar men and national movements throughout the Americas. It will not be surprising if many nationalist Christian leaders come from the growing evangelical movements throughout Latin America. While there is a monarchal nationalist tradition in Catholic culture, the blending of nationhood and the republican tradition has been expressed much more forcefully by Protestant statesmen.
World War Two-the racial empires-GERMANY
The United States entered World War Two in December 1941 after the Japanese air attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. We declared war on Japan and several days later their allies, Nazi Germany and Italy, declared war on the US. Britain and France had been at war with the Germans since their 1939 invasion of Poland. France fell in June of 1940 and was governed by the collaboration Vichy government. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a nonaggression pact which shocked leftists everywhere. The Soviet controlled Communist Party in the US during the thirties pushed a party line to stay out of any war between Britain and Germany as two capitalist regimes in their death throes. Those powers “weren’t worth a drop of workers’ blood.” In June 1941, The Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Suddenly, a new slogan emerged among American leftists –The United Front against Fascism. American leftists were now engaged in a campaign against Germany. Poland which had regained national borders in 1918 after a century of being erased from the map by her neighbors had disappeared again with the 1939 Soviet- German non aggression pact. The Catholic nation was “ crucified between two thieves.” One year later Stalin reopened Russian churches and reestablished orthodox patriarchs to spiritually aid in the “Great Patriotic War”. After the Nazi invasion of Russia, Britain and Russia united in the Anglo-Russian invasion of neutral Iran (August 1941). They replaced the Shah of Iran who they thought had Nazi sympathies with his 18-yr. old son (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) who would rule Iran as an “ally of the West” until the Shiite revolution in 1979. In November 1943 Franklin Roosevelt of the US, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Winston Churchill of the British Empire met in Tehran, Iran, and declared Iran a fellow ally which would become an independent nation at the end of the war. The World War Two Alliance of the newborn Communist State, the dying British Empire ,and the American nationalists promoted national self determination as a shared war goal during the fighting. Neither the growing worldwide Communist movement nor the dying British Empire would remain defenders of the nations in the subsequent peace. The Soviets would subjugate the Christian nations on their western front and the Turkish-Muslim lands on their southern rim as Soviet Republics under the USSR. The British reclaimed lands in Africa, the Mideast and the Indian subcontinent. The French maintained control of French speaking Africa, the Mideast and reasserted themselves in French Indochina. But the nationalist genie was out of the bottle.
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| The Reich was no nation state declaring sacred borders. They were a racialist empire expanding to feed a breeding super race |
The Germans were defeated by three nations-two of whom functioned as empires. However in the last years of the war it was under the banner of Mother Russia and the Great Patriotic War that the Red Army slayed 3 of every 4 German soldiers killed in battle. In a very important way Russia disappeared under the Soviets in the 1920’s and would only reemerge in the midst of the WWII with Nazi Germany when Stalin adopted the rhetoric of the great Patriotic War for Mother Russia. He loosened restrictions on the Orthodox Church and left it to Trotsky in Mexico to inspire men to die for the international working class. The greatest Russian reformer before Gorbachev was the peasant patriot Khrushchev who had been steeled in the defense of Stalingrad and management of the Ukraine front against the Germans.
It was the tiny isle of England much more than the mighty British empire who withstood the onslaught of the German Luftwaffe in the 1940 Battle of Britain. Those decisive three months were “England’s finest hour” when “so many owed so much to so few”. It was an English fleet of civilian boats that evacuated the army out of Dunkirk. It was those boats that prevented a repeat of the continental slaughter that had taken so many British soldiers in WWI. The outposts of the British Empire were actually lost quite swiftly and forever discredited the authority of the British as the natural rulers of the Asian peoples. England won, the British empire is no more.
An English speaking Christian nation from across the sea contributed to the victory over the Racial Reich as well. FDR’s prayer on June 6, 1944, D-day for the Normandy Invasion, was read to the nation over the radio. He began, "Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."
For too many college students and professors today the notion of a leader invoking God's name to protect the armed sons of the nation conjures Hitler and goose stepping Storm Troopers. They have forgotten that armed nation men following the orders of a religious leader marched through liberated Paris and months later would rid the concentration camps of their guards and set the prisoners free. Armed men under God fighting as a nation with other nations defeated a racial empire for the good of humanity—let us give thanks and praise.
A New Empire Imprisons Nations
As World War Two ended in Europe ,the advancing militaries would divide control along their front lines. The nations east of Germany would become “the captive nations” of the Soviet Union with Communist Parties loyal to the Soviet Union installed to govern. Communists in all of these countries as well as western Europe had legitimate claims on political authority because of their military participation in the various resistance movements against German invaders. However in Russian zones many nationalists especially religious nationalists were kept from political leadership by murder. The most notorious Soviet killing was in the Katyn Forest of Poland in 1940. The Soviets in a prelude to their post war policies in the captured nations killed officers ,clerics and intellectuals they knew would never assent to a Soviet friendly atheist government in Poland.
In the French, British and American zones of occupation, Germany was cut up, its industries shared, and millions of Germans deported from neighboring lands back into a smaller but an ever more homogeneous country. For those who thought Versailles 1919 was tough on the Germans this was a new standard for reparations, national dismemberment, and racial cleansing from neighboring nations. The Western European nations like France and Britain would try to maintain and extend their overseas empires. In Europe they deemphasized nationhood in their evolving patterns of economic integration and governance which allied the German economy to the rebuilding project while deemphasizing their identities (and Germany’s) as sovereign nations.
The Western Empires are Challenged and Fall
Charles De Gaulle would be the first post war nationalist to protect his country by abandoning a colony. France which had lost its homeland quickly in the beginning of the war with Germany fought a lot harder and longer to reassert control in its African and Indochinese empire. They left Vietnam in 1954. The same year the FLN guerrilla group declared that Algeria would be independent—socialist, Muslim, nationalist. That bloody war ended in an independent Algeria in 1965 (pop 12million)(40 million 2018). 900,00 ethnic French fled to “metropolitan France.” 100,000 Muslim soldiers (the Harkis) who fought for France were left behind and slaughtered. 500,000 to a million Algerians were killed in the war. Religion, ethnicity and national liberation brewed a deadly stew.
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| The Japanese and Nazi racial empires were dead. The French and British racial empires were next to go. |
In 1956, the French joined with the British and Israelis in one more imperialist venture in the Mideast with a deceptive troika attack on Egypt to regain control for Britain of the Suez Canal. Eisenhower did not go along. In a striking display of how America did not see herself as a colonial western power against the Egyptians, Eisenhower sided with the home nation against the invaders. It was a very American moment and to this day many interventionists see it as “Eisenhower’s greatest error.”
But his affirmation of the territorial integrity of Egypt was really a continuation of a central theme of American foreign policy since our first declaration of national independence against Empire. Woodrow Wilson declared the self-determination principle in 1918 that the interests of colonized peoples be given equal weight to those governing them. In August 1941, the war aims Atlantic Charter of President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill affirmed the right of self government to all peoples. Churchill certainly did not believe in that principle but he was wooing the US which had not yet entered the war. The colonial soldiers who fought with the British empire against the Nazis and Japanese did not come back to continue that empire. Britain assembled fighting colonials to the music of "God save the King". She lost her colonies-territory by territory-- to the national anthems. Israel in 1948, India and Pakistan in 1947, Malaysia 1963 and Singapore 1965, Egypt 1952, Sudan 1956, Nigeria 1960---all became independent nations. The dissipation of the British empire and the rise of the Anglo influenced nations helped define the 20th century for Europeans and Asians, for the Mideast and for the Africans.
Consider The British losses over the century. When the century began they had just defeated the Republic of South Africa(Transvaal 1852-1899) and incorporated those German speaking local nationalists into the gold rich Union of South Africa. Half of the 50,000 Boers killed were women and children. The white Anglo empire was more than brutal in suppressing the white Germanic African nation to begin the century when empires would fall and the nations survive. The British government spanned the globe and ruled what would later become --free nations. The British ruled not as generic "whites' but as the English speaking Anglo civilization of law and liberty. As their military superiority was eclipsed the Brits would reappear as an Atlantic Alliance with their old English speaking White Dominions and the gigantic colony that got away-America. {The success of English speaking foreign white men to influence the American news media and political discourse as if "we are all fellow countrymen" remains a largely untold story. There is an overt/covert racialism in this tale that has not served our multiethnic nation well. }
An Israeli guerrilla war against the British Empire forced their withdrawal in 1947. As the British colors came down, Israel immediately declared independence. The new post WWII superpowers-the US and the Soviets recognized the free colony within hours of its Declaration of Independence. Six neighboring countries saw the birthday differently and tried to kill the baby in the crib with a multi national invasion. The first Palestine refugees fled their villages and homes in the cauldron of this initial conflict. They were not the only refugees created as new nations asserted themselves across battlelines and from within old empires. Across the sea, millions of Germans were being evicted from Polish and Czech lands to homogenize their territories. At almost the same time many more millions of Hindus and Muslims were trading places and exchanging mass slaughters in the Great Partition of newly liberated India. Pakistan and India, then Bangladesh would emerge. This central event in the making of South Asia’s national stories is barely present in the imagination of foreign policy experts who have almost institutionalized the much smaller and less deadly Palestinian exodus. The sundering of the Indian portion of the British empire into two Muslim nations and a Hindu one is a demographic and cultural reality that will mark the next century for good or ill even as the American and Swedish foreign policy think tanks ponder gender ideology. Through the 20th century the white colonies of the British empire (South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia and New Zealand, Free Ireland) were given Dominion status like Canada(1853). After two world wars defending an empire which had lost its moral authority as a protector, the countries became more fully independent in foreign policy. The Anglo sphere today with that first nation who left in 1776, forms a continuing entangling cultural, military, and intelligence alliance. Yet they are very different nations in very different neighborhoods starting with Asian Australia. The English speaking nations are still emerging from the queen mother.
World War Two: the racial empires JAPAN
In the East, the Japanese Shinto religious-racial identity buttressed by 50 years of technological learning from the West, spilled over onto the Chinese mainland at the turn of the century. The Japanese had taken Formosa (Taiwan) in 1895 and turned racial theory on its head with their victory over Russia in 1905. The Japanese established a protectorate with Korea in 1905 and went on to annexation/occupation in 1910. Korea has not been whole since. Almost all histories of nationalism in Asia emphasize two historical moments of inspiration: Woodrow Wilson’s post WWI call for self-determination for colonized peoples and Japan’s pre WWI military victory over “a white military” in 1905. The white Russians had lost a quick battle but it would be Asians who would feel decades of a brutal occupation by the new master race of the East. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1933. The Japanese never respected China as a nation state. They proposed to organize a Co Prosperity Sphere in Asia around the “five ethnic-nations of the mainland-Han, Manchu, Mongol, Uighur and Tibetan". Japan had joined the League of Nations in 1920 as a charter member and was one of the four permanent members of the League’s Council. At the Versailles Treaty ending WWI the Japanese were awarded the old German possessions in China-the Shandong Province. The Chinese responded to this betrayal of self determination with their nationalistic May Fourth Movement (1919) . The Chinese Communist party was founded in 1921. The Chinese had declared a Republic in 1911 overthrowing the Qing dynasty and ending 2000 years of Imperial rule but they were still not being treated by European nations as a full sovereign of their own territory. The Christian physician and Father of China as a republic was Sun Yat Sun. He is still revered by the followers of both Mao Tse Tung and Chiang Kai Shek. The Japanese racial empire’s war of aggression against China seemed to them a continuation of the 19th “century of humiliation” when the western nations commanded Chinese markets and municipalities in the name of free trade. That trade featured a prominent consumer good for the Chinese consumer-Opium. The Japanese brutal domination of the Chinese and Koreans is not a forgotten memory in either national psyche. To be dominated and brutalized by people “who looked like them” seemed to many an even more grievous humiliation than the white era. That bitter memory of Japanese rule is easily stoked in both countries.
For colonized people around the world, the Japanese Asian miracle proved the western(white) imperialism was not the inevitable way of nature. The Japanese attack on the United States Pacific fleet in Dec 1941 allowed the subsequent invasions and occupations of British possessions of Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong. The British Empire saw their world turn upside down just like at Yorktown 200 years before. The English isle stood against the Germans but the outposts of empire were lost and lost so quickly that the invincible veneer of British rule was lost forever. In Burma, the Japanese were aided by Burmese Buddhist nationalists who saw the beginning of the war as a fight against British occupation. Nobel Prize winner and present State Counselor of Burma, Aung san Suu Kyil is the daughter of Aung San, the father of Burma, who helped forge that Japanese-Burma (Myanmar) alliance. The Myanmar expulsion of Muslim Rohingya today is considered a final expulsion of British sponsored Muslims from the Indian subcontinent who invaded Burma 150 years ago. The ethnic nation has a long memory.
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| This map of racial empire is burnt in the Chinese mind. It explains their own "nine dashed line" of defense in the South China Sea |
The largest Muslim nation in the world is in Asia. Indonesia had been colonized by the Dutch for several hundred years but fell quickly to the Japanese in 1942. The Indonesians had welcomed their elder brother Asian liberators from the white Dutchmen. That soon changed as the brutality of Japanese rule and integration of the population into the work and fighting projects of the Japanese became more clear. Still in many places the Japanese fostered Indonesian local governance and Indonesia was lost to the Dutch after the Japanese surrender in 1945. The first Indonesian president Sukarno had fully collaborated with the Japanese who released him from a Dutch prison when they won control in 1942. When Japan lost the war, Communists had been a major part of the resistance to their rule. Sukarno put together a nationalist movement (including the very large Communist Party) that secured independence from the Dutch in 1949. The Dutch fought for several years before relinquishing control. The Dutch often pride themselves as the first national republic of modern times when their Calvinist republic defeated the Catholic Spanish Hapsburgs in 1581. They were not so ready to grant independence to the Asian oil rich archipelago nation. The Indonesians can be forgiven for feeling the Dutch fought the locals harder when they declared themselves an independent nation than they fought the Japanese invaders who took the islands from the white Dutch overlords in 3 months.
Japan offered itself as the spiritual racial leader of many ethnic groups of Asia. Imperial Japan broke China into five major competing ethnic nations (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Uighur, and Tibetan). They vied for dominance (Doak, 2001). China which had been carved up by western and Japanese invaders for “a century of shame” would lose the most soldiers and citizens in WWII. They killed the most Japanese soldiers. Their national resistance movement would be both Communist (led by Mao Tse Tung and Nationalist (led by a Christian nationalist Chiang Kai Shek). The Shinto racialists(a religious racism unlike Hitler's "scientific racism) had been defeated. The Asian nations were emerging.
World War Two Ends. The Scientific Materialism of Communism
vs
Religion and the Nations
In Europe, Communists and nationalists fought together against an invading racialist empire of Nazi Germany. In Asia, Communists and Nationalists fought against the racialist empire of Japan. Mainland China emerged under Communist leadership and the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan after a year-long civil war following the Japanese surrender (1945). Korea and Vietnam were in civil wars as well. The new nations divided their countrymen along an axis pitting Soviet Communism against the changing banners of American Democracy, Capitalism or Freedom. Whereas the Soviets took eastern European and central Asian nations as their buffer zone victory booty—the Chinese drew a line in the ocean hundreds of miles from their shore and claimed that territory within the “nine dashed line” as their new perimeter of defense. They had fished there before and they felt they paid for their new defense line with millions lost in a Japanese invasion that came from the sea. Both Taiwan and the mainland saw this national extension into the sea as China's rightful blood claim after WWII.
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| The Nine Dash Line Represented the Claims of China as a Victim and Victor in WWII. The incredible death sacrifice of the Chinese and the role of their nation in holding down Japanese soldiers by not surrendering is "the untold story of the forgotten ally." |
Soon after VE and VJ days, the alliance that won WWII was seared. The Communists of the Soviet Union and the eventual Communist winners of the Chinese Civil war along with Communist parties in countries around the world were aligned to reshape society without the oppressive economic and religious hierarchies that denied workers the just rewards of their labor. Communists were well organized. They had an ideology which they saw as scientific and modern. Atheistic communism denied the prior loyalties of religion, nation, and family against the ideology of economic class solidarity which would promise technological and scientific advance for all. The great irony is that this ideology of the atheistic West took deepest root in the two nascent giant nations of Eurasia and Asia. This was based on the role of the Communist parties in organizing successful war efforts against invading racial empires. The parties mobilized the very national civilizations they would later try to replace with a godless ideology born of the Enlightenment--the malformed Marxist fruit of the modern west.
Communists had paid their dues in the wars against the fascists. The Soviet has suffered the most and killed the most Nazis. The Chinese had suffered the most from the Japanese. It seemed to the Soviet and Chinese Communists that the imperialist capitalists-America, France and Britain were rebuilding the fascist countries of Japan and Germany to make a new cross national integrated ruling class. Communism presented itself as the scientific road to modernity for the colonized in their wars of national liberation. Americans presented themselves alternately as a religious people standing for the soul of the individual against the totalitarian state and free market advocates for the good life of capitalist consumerism. The battle in the post colonial world would be over who would speak for the new emerging nations in Africa and Asia.
North Korea and North Vietnam were led by strong Communists and nationalists Kim Il-sung and Ho Chi Minh. They had both fought against the Japanese. South Korea was led by American educated, English speaking, Christian convert Syngman Rhee. ( His wife was Austrian). South Vietnam was led by a serious Catholic whose Vietnamese family had been Catholic for centuries. Ngo Diem’s father was a Mandarin Confucian and a Catholic who started the National Academy in Hue attended by future leaders of both North and South Vietnam. One of his brothers became a Catholic Bishop. Ngo Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was a Catholic, nationalist-personalist political thinker and his chief advisor. In November, 1963, the Catholic brothers were assassinated in a US inspired coup instigated by upper crust Protestants Averell Harriman and Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy appointed the Republican Lodge as the new Ambassador so Vietnam would not become a partisan issue in the 1964 election. The tall Boston Brahmin never understand the combination of Catholicism and Confucianism which inspired the diminutive martyr of Vietnamese nationalism- Ngo Diem. The murder of Diem plucked the nationalist card from the US hand in Vietnam. The Catholic American John Kennedy was murdered by an atheist Communist Lee Harvey Oswald the same month Diem was betrayed by Kennedy’s State Department. The mandate from heaven was withdrawn from two eloquent Catholic national warriors that fateful month of November in 1963. Vietnam was reunified under the Communists as US helicopters evacuated a small portion of the endangered from Saigon April 30, 1975.
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| The greatest error of the Vietnamese War was the assassination of Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Ho Chi Minh always respected him. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge never did. |
North Korea had almost been unified by Kim Il-sun in 1953 but the Americans recaptured the Southern part of the country, drove back the Northerners to the Chinese border and then were repulsed by North Korean and Chinese troops to the present day 38th parallel. The continued division of the Korean people remains the most dramatic unfinished work of a century in which the nations of Asia emerged as principal military and economic corporate actors. Korea sees this 110 years of domination and division as primarily the work of Japan. Little wonder that just as Margaret Thatcher's England was set against the reunification of Germany, Shinzo Abe's Japan is more than wary about the possibility of a unified Korea. A unified Korea will be powerful and they may not be forgiving.
The smallest nation that rose out of the ashes of World War Two was Singapore founded by the greatest geopolitical thinker and statesman of his era, Lee Kuan Yew. Yew always explained the US fighting in Vietnam in terms of all the nations of southeast Asia especially Indonesia. In 1965 President Sukarno governed Indonesia with a coalition dominated by an increasing militant communist movement. They staged an unsuccessful coup that killed six generals. General Suharto staged a bloody reprisal after replacing the ineffectual Sukarno. A half a million people were killed, a disproportionate number of ethnic Chinese and almost all of the communist and left wing leadership. This nationalist(and overtly Muslim) success is remembered today by western journalists as a great killing (and surely it was). But the destruction of Asia’s second largest Communist Party is credited by many thinkers as the pivotal nationalist moment that insured an environment in which the Asian tigers would carry out the great market reforms that made their post war national economies. Again Muslim fighters were key in resisting the armed might of the disciplined and bloody Communist ideology. The United States fought in Vietnam for 20 years and eventually left that battlefield to the North Vietnamese victors. Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore however developed a certain way because the Communist movement was militarily contested for those two decades by a Christian nation from across the sea in the jungles of Vietnam. Yew maintains that the success of the Asian tigers as nationalist economic miracles as well as the free development of the world’s largest Muslim nation were the fruits of a fighting United States military presence in Vietnam throughout the 1960’s. The space was eventually lost but the time purchased with the blood of Americans and Vietnamese allowed the Indonesian government to stop a Communist revolution and decimate the region’s second largest Communist party. It allowed the Asian tigers to develop their "economic miracles." Soon after the North Vietnamese united their country, they were in a serious shooting war with Cambodia (1975-1991) and then a short bloody fight with China (1979). The nations were asserting themselves.
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| Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) Father of Singapore |
Ending the Cold War: American Presidents, Nikita Khrushchev
Mikhail Gorbachev and the Mujahideen
There is a cartoon history of the Cold War that portrays a tough President, a tough British Iron Lady and a new tough Polish Pope against their effete predecessors to “win the Cold War without a shot.” This Reagan-Thatcher- John Paul II cartoon leaves out the remarkable Russian leaders who made stunning political breakthroughs and the Muslim religious fighters who beat the never before defeated Red Army in the mountains of Afghanistan. It also leaves out a line of American presidents who unlike the baby—boomers played vital roles in an amazing story pulling humanity back from the nuclear precipice.
FDR picked Harry Truman instead of Henry Wallace to be his Vice President in 1944. It’s one of those moments in history which makes one think America really has been favored by the Lord. The steady hand of Dwight Eisenhower followed by JFK’s masculine fighting wing of the Democratic Party not giving way to Eleanor Roosevelt -Adlai Stevenson Unitarian faction set up the post Lyndon Johnson string of Presidents who won the Cold War. Each had a particular strength and made an important contribution. Hyper partisan histories are so much less interesting and not at all as explanatory as the real story of our nationalist leaders who avoided war and furthered peace.
Nixon/Kissinger
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| Mao tse Tung, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Chou en Lai meet in China 1972 |
The great insight of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was to treat China as an independent nation with interests very different than the Communists of the Soviet Union. Their triangulation of the Communist bloc and elimination of Vietnam as the unifying battlefield for worldwide Communism was ideologically opposed by Republican conservatives and conveniently ignored by Democrats trying to rid the country of President Nixon. Nixon and Kissinger understood China was a big nation engaged in border wars with the Russians. They knew Vietnam was a little nation which was once a world pivot but now was the wrong hill to die for. These two great power realists missed a lot of the spiritual significance of the Cold War but they understood nations and without their strategic initiative the victory of the Reagan years is inconceivable. Just as the captive nations as nations threatened the western front of the Soviets ( Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1967 and Poland 1985) so the Chinese nation would threaten the Soviet super state from the east.
Carter /Brzezinski
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| Brzezinski and Carter were not "wimps". They initiated support for the strategic military front that finally defeated the Red Army-- 1979 Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They also built the alliances and military structures that wedded America to Gulf Arabs initially against the Soviet Union and now Iran to protect the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. |
The great insight of President Jimmy Carter and Zbignew Brzezinski was the religious animosity of the Muslim world could be mobilized to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were born under the so called "wimp", Jimmy Carter. He actually did more to isolate and bloody the Soviets themselves than any President in the Cold War. His grain embargo of the Soviets in 1980 hurt him terribly with American farmers. It hurt the Russians as well. President Reagan lifted the embargo but was smart enough to continue the policy of giving money to Pakistan security agencies who supplied Islamic fighters waging jihad against the Soviets. Without that ten year war bleeding the Red Army into its first defeat in half a century, the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement is inconceivable.
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| One a deeply religious man; one a sincere Marxist Reformer-Their genius for diplomatic agreement was betrayed by the baby boomer Presidents who never understood the nature of the conflict or the paths to peace |
The great insight of Ronald Reagan was that the war against the Soviet Union was a religious struggle. He struck at the ideology of communism which he thought untenable just as American universities judged the Marxist view of history inevitable. Reagan emphasized building defensive measures like SDI rather than relying on mutual assured destruction which he thought immoral. He saw the Russian people as a religious people captured by an ideology and murderous party. But he saw his own life as saved from an assassination for a Divine purpose related to world peace. He talked very tough to the Soviets but his staff was worried he would give too much away in his discussions with Gorbachev. He appealed to Gorbachev to do something new for the world and so he did. Histories about ending the Cold War which paint Mikhail Gorbachev as a man who buckled to Reagan’s tough stand do not understand his own sincere desire to reform Communism in order to save it. Reagan in 1988 said “I was a supporting actor; it was Gorbachev who changed his country.” None of the three Soviet leaders (all over 80) who died during Reagan’s first five years in office (1982, 1984, 1985) would have ever allowed the sweeping reforms that Gorbachev initiated. Gorbachev did not foresee that with a loosening of Soviet control it would be the religious nationalism of Poland, Hungary and the eastern nations which would emerge over reformed Marxism. Gorbachev and his wife were sincere Marxists and reform minded intellectuals. They thought Marxism reformed would hold tremendous appeal to any thinking modern. But the great struggle was not between Capitalism and Communism nor individualism vs totalitarianism.
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| Chambers wrote Witness one of Reagan's favorite books. Chambers more eloquently than any other writer painted the conflict in spiritual colors |
Personalities emerged to act for the God they served or the nation they loved. Man’s tie to God in religion and his tie to neighbor in culture, language, and territory emerged in a religious revival and rebirth of nations. Polish Catholics in the West, Muslim warriors to their south and Chinese nationalists to their East were no longer interested in organizing their corporate lives in accordance with the Marxist ideology of the godless West (And let us never forget, Atheistic Marxism was the West’s great liberating ideology extending the idea of democracy to the economy as well as governmental elections.) The Russians in 1991 would assert their national identity as well. Boris Yeltsin was not close to Mikhail Gorbachev as a political thinker but he had the courage to stand as a nationalist against old line Russian Communists who were going to rid the government of the Gorbachev reformers. And 40 years before either of these men, there was the peasant World War II veteran Nikita Khrushchev who did so much himself to dismantle the Stalinist regime. Ending the Cold War came from a meeting of souls between the leaders of two countries that once were enemies. They came together because men before them worked for God and country. Peacemakers, soldiers, and serious political actors from both countries and their neighbors set the stage for the historic Gorbachev-Reagan encounter
Baker/Shevardnadze
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| The Unification of Germany and their incorporation into NATO--("Just don't expand NATO anymore to the East") Baker and Shevardnadze were statesmen who saw their offices in terms of statecraft not a stepping stone to the Presidency. |
All of these miracles were followed by the difficult task of knitting Germany back together as a nation. Margaret Thatcher despised this idea but German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, US Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in a remarkable act of diplomacy reunited the country and integrated her into NATO.
Actors Missed in telling the Narrative of the Defeat of Communism
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| Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) Peasant reformer gave anti Stalin "Secret Speech" heard around the world 1956 |
To replace the cartoon history of the Cold War, we should always be mindful of the forgotten actors. The brave soldiers who died in Korea and Vietnam secured the foothold in the East which gave a space in Korea and time throughout the region for the Asian nationalists to rise . We should also remember that before Gorbachev could have risen, Nikita Khrushchev had to tell the truth about Stalin. And finally all free men are indebted to the million holy warriors of Afghanistan who defeated the Red Army and in the name of God drove the atheist scourge from the battlefield in defeat.
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| Korean War 1950-1953. 34,000 American war dead |
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| Vietnam War(1955-1975) 55,000 American war dead |
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| Osama bin Laden and Afghan Mujahideen Soviet-Afghan War 1979-1989 |
Religion and Nations in the Mideast:
The Cold War is Over. The Clash of Civilizations Begins
THE END OF THE COLD WAR-WHAT THE BABY BOOMERS MISSED
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan, the votes of all the Eastern captive nations of the USSR for national independence, the reunification of Germany and Vietnam; the emergence of nations from decolonization in Africa, Asia, and the Mideast; the repudiation of the cultural revolution and market reform in China—all of these events created a new landscape for international relations when the first baby boomer president Bill Clinton took office in 1992.
Underneath the emergence of nations, even deeper currents of human accord were stirring. War brings men face to face with death and death brings man face to face with the question of eternity or oblivion. The three great monotheistic traditions answered the bloody 20th century with a religious awakening that still reverberates. The Muslim Brotherhood movement sought to reassert submission to God as the basis of public life among nations. The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb eloquently criticised the Islamic monarchies and secular party leaders who had substituted their own interests for their duties as rulers to carry out the Providence of God. Sayyid Qutb (b 1906) was executed in 1966 by the secularist-Arab nationalist-Gamel Nasser. In 1979 a century of Islamic revival manifested in the Shiite reclamation of Iran as a Muslim nation, the salafist takeover of the mosque in Mecca that reignited the Wahhabi dominance in Saudi Arabia and the united Muslim front in Afghanistan against the atheist Soviet superstate.
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| Ayatollah Khomeini(1902-1989) was no nationalist. He sought to reinvigorate the Islamic ummah including Shiites and Sunni but as Supreme Ruler of Iran his most lasting contribution would be forging a reconciliation of the nationalist form of governance with the religion of Islam. |
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| The 1979 Siege of Mecca by Wahhabi Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia. The men were all killed but the Salafist Wahhabi forces were strengthened in Saudi Arabian political life and foreign policy. |
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| Post Soviet Union Russian nationalist culture is grounded in a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church |
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| The phenomenal growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Global Christianity not Western Democracy and Gender Ideology is the true 20th century Movement of "the people" |
In the Christian world there was a great awakening at the turn of the century as the Spirit filled Pentecostal movement swept the Americas, then Asia and Africa adding a half million new Christians to the Body of Christ. Whole countries in Africa converted while there was a sharpening of the Muslim Christian divide along 10N in northern Africa. This dynamic Christian movement invigorated the civil rights movement in the United States and is causing an awakening of Christian nationhood in Latin America shedding the "anti Church Communists vs the military-clergy alliance" knot of yesterday. Three civilizations mired in the atheistic western modernism of Marxism recovered their religious roots. Orthodox Russia, Confucian China and Hindu India all found meaning and the keys to their respective national souls in the truths once jettisoned for the western scientific materialism of German intellectual atheists.
After 2000 years of diaspora the Jews returned to Israel. Their temple had been destroyed and the city leveled by the Roman empire in 70 AD. When they came back to their homeland it was in the name of Zionism-the necessity of becoming an armed nation to protect themselves as a people. The refounding was certainly by Divine Providence but it was not done in His name--but in the spirit of the nations--the armed covenants necessary for men to be free. 20 years after independence, the city of Jerusalem was once again returned as a whole to the nation. Confronting the wailing wall, this time the nationalist Israelites remembered the only reason for the Jews to be free is to give thanks and glory to G-d.
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| "This very councilor congress of ours so impressive in the diversity of races, nations, and languages—does it not bear witness to a community of brotherly love and shine as a visible sign of it? We are giving witness that all men are brothers whatever their race or nation." Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 |
In the same decade that the Jewish people resumed their territorial form with Jerusalem as their axis mundi, the global institutional form of Christianity asserted herself in Rome. While students in Europe and America and China were ravaging the old traditions and disparaging authority and adults, the Catholic Church was publicly meeting as a patriarchal fraternity to present the message of Christ in a new but authoritative way to humanity. 2000 male bishops welcomed Protestants as brothers in Christ, the Jews as elder brothers in the Covenant and the Muslims as fellow believers in God the Merciful. The Church called humanity back to brotherhood while the superpowers faced off in a nuclear showdown around Cuba and the whole world recalled the carnage of the past century.
A billion Christians had not been able to stop the bloody wars of the last century. Those wars starting in the heart of Christendom were a rebuke to the potency of the Gospel and a mocking of Christian love as a reality capable of ordering the public life of men in the real world. The Pope who had called the Council, John XXIII, had written an encyclical to mankind about Pacem in Terris-Peace on Earth. It was not about disarmament or pacifism... it was about establishing order.
The baby boomer presidents led a heavily armed Christian nation in the midst of these huge movements. But the baby boomers did not come to establish adult agreement and order. They were still of a protester mindset. They were not content to accept the work of their fathers and pass down improvements to their sons. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have strangely alluded to their moments in history as not quite pivotal enough. Instead of accepting their place on the transmission belt of tradition and public order, the baby boomers went to war with nature. They were going to right the greatest wrong ever-worse than racism, more significant than class struggle. They were going to reverse the inequality of the sexes and the rule of patriarchs. The Arabs have a word Ghaflah meaning inattention to the signs of God or spiritual blindness. That disastrous kind of inattention linked the baby boomer presidents one to another. It was a deficit they shared with the female careerists they worked and slept with. The ideal boomer guy was deeply attentive to his Eve. He did not take masculinity too seriously. He took feminism very seriously. Those modern power couples would miss a lot about the world of male groups, religious loyalties and nations. Everyone would pay for their blindness.
Franklin Roosevelt had led the nation in prayer on D Day 1944: “Almighty God, our sons, the Pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity.” A half century later it is impossible to imagine such words or sentiments from any of the three 2-term baby boomer presidents. All three Presidents brought their generation’s sensibilities to the office. Two had no fathers. All three had no sons.
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| No Father, No Sons |
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| No Father, No Sons |
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| Large Father, No Sons |
President Bush was as interested in “promoting women” in the name of justice and insisting foreign countries toe the feminist line as the two Democrats. None of them ever acknowledged in their own life or public policy that “the sons of the nation “ shared a male obligation and bond as the defenders of the nation. The generation they came from left 55,000 males in Vietnam fulfilling the masculine patriotic duty as FDR described it. Religion for all three was a necessary but private affair with recovering alcoholic Bush more personally devotional than the others. Clinton and Obama actually knew the cadence and rhythms of southern Christianity better than Bush’s 12 step voice. But both had accepted the mainline Protestant evolution of Christianity as an aggressively feminist and emotionally pacifist enterprise. None would ever talk about “our religion” as FDR did. Obama in one speech extolling freedom of religion in America included atheists. Individual autonomy not Divine Sovereignty was their motif about Religion in American history. Faith shaped individuals; a Living God did not move nations in history. Each of the baby boomers had a different idealistic vision of America-none had a protective shared masculine sense of duty to the territorial nation. None of them held the old progressive Social Gospel notion that Christianity was meant to shape the relations of nations to draw humanity into ever deeper bonds of love and civilization. None ever spoke of America in the world as a Christian nation. None ever spoke of the shared protective duties of the nation's sons. They all spoke of the universal rights and claims of all. They asked not what they could do for their country but what could the country do for them. When Bush spoke of America he spoke of freedom, when Obama spoke of America, he spoke of inclusion, when Clinton spoke he talked economic progress and opportunity. None of them understood the Cold War as a religious battle between Christian nations and an atheist super state. Thus when post Cold war policies coalesced on democracy, free markets and human rights, the winners of the religious cold war became the advocates of abortion and homosexuality against newly revived religious cultures in Russia, Hungary, Iran and Nigeria. The emerging religious nations saw these newly sanctioned western practices not as human rights but as the same old vices of decadent cultures of the past. The white rich westerners thought the old cultures were backward. The morally cultured and civilizational nations saw the celebration of autonomy and license as repugnant to the sacral order. They saw such behavior as a sure recipe for Divine sanction.
Shocked by Murder: The Assassinations that Shaped a Generation
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| Robert Kennedy 1925-1968 |
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| John F Kennedy 1917-1963 |
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| Malcolm X 1925-1965 |
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| Martin Luther King 1929-1968 |
The baby boomer presidents who have held the Presidency for the last quarter century were shaped by certain common American memories. The four greatest public orators in American life in the 1960's were all assassinated. John Kennedy was killed in November of 1963; Malcolm X was killed in February 1965; Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, and Robert Kennedy was killed in June 1968. John Kennedy was the first Catholic President of a Protestant nation. He had convinced his countrymen he would be the best commander in chief in the American war against atheist communism. He had argued for an end to civic racism which violated morality "as old as Scripture and clear as the Constitution." Three weeks after he had allowed the murder/coup of Catholic nationalist Ngo Diem in Vietnam, Kennedy lost his mandate from heaven. He was murdered by an atheist communist in Texas. He was not killed by a southern racist. He was not killed because America is a violent country. He was killed by a soldier in the atheist movement who thought murdering the charismatic warrior-leader of the free nations would help the cause of Communism. So it did.
Malcolm X was killed by members of the Black Racialist Nation of Islam. Malcolm X had gone to Mecca and seen that Islam was not the color bound religion preached in the American sect under Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm resigned from the Black Muslims, and exposed the leader of the organization as a serial abuser of young women. He repudiated the racist theory of separate black origins. He was killed by black racists covering up sexual abuse and protecting racial huckstering.
Robert Kennedy was a strong supporter of a racially integrated America and a free Israel. Israel had gained control of Jerusalem and a defensible eastern border in the Six Day War one year earlier in June, 1967. A Palestinian nationalist from a Christian family shot him in retaliation for his support of that now viable Israeli nation. His killer was not a Muslim but a nationalist of a nation that did not exist in rebellion against a nation that did.
Martin Luther King was killed by a failed pornographic movie maker who had more success as a racist assassin. The assassin aimed to derail a Christian America animated by interracial brotherhood. He eliminated the most dynamic Christian preacher for that movement.The garbage workers who had rallied with King carried signs with their unified simple message. "I am a man". Imagine such a sign at a resistance rally today.
The assassins of that decade were a white racist, a black racist, an atheist Communist and a Palestinian nationalist. A body needs its head who can speak its soul. Men who can shape civic community with the transcendent word well spoken are not easily replaced. The assassins left their mark. In a certain way, their actions still rule. The best leaders of the baby boomers were killed. The political orphans of that cohort are strangely much more ready than their elders to impeach the president, change a regime and even demand that a pope resign. When in doubt, blame the father. Whenever, question authority.
The baby boomer generation felt these deaths in their late teens and early twenties. Since then, their revolutionary cultural achievement has been the destruction of religious and political patriarchy. They have buried the corpse of national politics and patriotism as a protective interracial Christian brotherhood. That horrible half decade left the baby boomers a fatherless cohort deeply confused and disoriented. Four political fathers--all men of a former generation-- were cut down performing their public duties before their trusting eyes. The baby boomer Presidents were a very different lot.
Baby boomer Presidents: Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton (b1946) understood Americans-black and white- and he knew the language of our deepest political bond—the New Covenant. There was no white man in public life who could talk to black Americans with authority and empathy like Clinton. He balanced the long-haired war protester who went to Oxford with his identity as a white Southern male who knew the back counties of Arkansas. He did not mute his Southern white male identity by picking a black female for VP. He doubled down with Al Gore, another large ambitious Southern white male who brought pedigree to the ticket. A new generation had arrived to replace the East Coast patrician patriot (George H Bush) while the exodus of manufacturing jobs and the escalation of national debt were issues carried by a peculiar personality named Ross Perot who could flourish in America but would never lead her.
Clinton mastered the new world economic moment. He put American welfare mothers and Asian manufacturing laborers to work while balancing the budget. He fostered black identity inside a new coalition that featured educated white women replacing white industrial and construction men. The ingenious American laborers were losing political representation at the same time they were becoming more efficient and fewer in number. They reduced their political heft by their ever increasing productivity and ingenious development of workplace and farming technology. Middle class females taking over the education bureaucracy and human resource departments of large corporations were joined by their sisters entering the health and legal professions. These "suburban women" did not speak for their territorial identities. They came from well organized safe municipalities. They organized and spoke as middle management careerists seeking governing status. A new day was dawning-actually a revolutionary era was dawning and a lady was waiting in the wings for a "Closing Act of Smashing the Glass Ceiling." This was the world Bill Clinton understood and shaped. Leading the soldier sons of the nation which could unite classes and races was not his style.
But the world did not go away and history did not end to make way for the power couple. There were still armed men and bands of thugs. There were nations rising and collapsing, tribes hating and murdering. There were men seeking God and peoples seeking their restored honor. And there was rape and torture and depravity—wherever men did not establish authority and law.
By the time, President Clinton left office in 2000, NATO had moved east incorporating Poland Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Russia’s economy had collapsed and its natural resources were being looted in a parody of privatization. Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin who was better at standing up to the benign reformer Gorbachev than protecting his country from rapacious oligarchs. Clinton praised Yeltsin, “Boris you’ve got democracy in your heart … You’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that.”
When President Clinton exercised the killing powers of the President, it was almost always from the air. He inherited the food protection mission in Somalia from George W Bush and withdrew after 18 men on the ground were killed in the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993. No troops were injected in the Summer of 94 during the 100 day machete massacre of 1,000,000 Rwandans (70% of Tutsi population was killed). Clinton apologized. While US ground troops were not sent to fight Serbia in the Kosovo War, NATO forces bombed a European capital (Belgrade, Serbia) for 50 days in 1999 without US Senate or UN Security Resolutions. America’s first female Secretary of State Madeline Albright had chided military leader Colin Powell for not using forces earlier in Bosnia when she was the UN ambassador. The Serbian military in Bosnia had been bombed 4 years earlier by NATO forces after a request from the UN. American and NATO peacekeepers were sent in on the ground after the Dayton accords were signed. With Bosnia fractured into Serbian, Croatian and Muslim territories, the Muslim population in Kosovo planned to break from Serbia. The goals of the liberation movement(KLM) were violent liberation and independence. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic treated Kosovo (population < 2million) as an integral part of his nation--the cultural birthplace of Serbia. He treated the uprising not as a war of a new state but an insurrection against the established order. He killed combatants which in one lexicon are all males over 14. Genocide is when women and children are killed as well.
Kosovo is now an independent Muslim country with a statue to Bill Clinton ad an enclave for Serbians. Milosevic died in prison in the middle of an international trial for war crimes.
The other nation that preoccupied President Clinton during his Presidency was Palestine. No state leader visited the Clinton White House more often than Yasar Arafat. Palestine remains an imagined community. When Clinton left office the US had been hit at the World Trade Center in 1993, in Saudi Arabian Khobar Towers in 1996, in African embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and the USS Cole ship in 2000. Clinton was on the trail of Osama bin Laden and ready to kill him. He was the first baby boomer president to have no clue about men willing to sacrifice, die and kill in a religious brotherhood for a world historical religious tradition. He treated terrorists as individual criminals not as soldiers in a civilizational war. His intelligence agencies and the Presidents who followed him would suffer the same spiritual blindness.
Clinton did take bin Laden very seriously as a criminal threat. The transition did not go well in communicating the gravity of the threat to the Bush administration. Many thought Clinton “obsessed” with terrorists. He knew the fire burned hot; he didn’t understand the volcanic religion below. President Clinton had certainly taken a hardline on Saddam Hussein signing a bill approved by both the Senate and the House to liberate Iraq from the Hussein regime. Continuing his preference for air war and sanctions over troops, Clinton ordered a four day bombing of Iraq in December 1998 specifically to degrade their ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.
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| President Clinton and Senator Clinton swearing in as US Senator from New York Jan 3,2001 |
Just before Clinton left office, his wife was sworn in as a New York Senator. Two years later Elizabeth Dole, the wife of his opponent in the Presidential race was also sworn in as a senator replacing the most conservative Republican from North Carolina with a liberal second wife of an establishment Republican. A weeping Clinton had also appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. He promised a female Attorney General to ensure women were seen in hard policing functions and not just education or health. His first two female appointees had children and illegal nanny problems. He finally found a woman with no children. Her most stunning police action left 80 dead at Waco including 20 children. Like Madeline Albright, Janet Reno showed she could make the tough calls and wield a bloody civic sword. The charismatic Clinton laid out the vision of the baby boomers and both Republican and Democrats emulated his modernist combination of American freedom, tough female leadership, power couple careerism and international expansion of Western globalism. Traditional religion, overt nationalism, the distinct protective duties of sexual maturation and blue collar labor were out. The new Democrats had delivered on Act One and planned to return in a dramatic sex role switch. But first VP Al Gore would lose the next election.
Baby boomer Presidents: George W Bush
He too was born in the first year of the baby-boomers. He was the eldest son of a Vice President, CIA chief, President. He was not the good son but he is the one who made good in the currency of public service which still counts among patrician patriots. He flew a plane and took personal risks for low stakes but he did not join his generational brothers in the field of battle. Religion and abstaining from alcohol were forever mixed in his blood. God frees us from addictions and all men seek to be free—that seemed very religious in a land losing all sense of God. But that pinched tale of Christianity wasn’t big enough for a nation among nations in the unfolding of world history.
He was reading books to schoolchildren when the American metropolis was struck. He was being the compassionate conservative—the education president-- that his election guru Karl Rove said would win him a second term. He responded with controlled anger-just what the country needed. He consolidated our security agencies and streamlined information sharing. He broke up the Taliban camp where Osama bin Laden launched his attack . Bin Laden would find refuge with "our ally" in Pakistan. Bin Laden was from a rich and favored family too but he went to the front lines of his generation’s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He thanked the US for sending aid through the Pakistan Intelligence Services to help in their war against “the Soviets-the atheists.” But when Saudi Arabia allowed American troops to protect the holy land against Saddam Hussein who after a bloody costly war with Iran(1980-88) had just seized neighboring Kuwait (1990), the native son was deeply insulted. By 1992 the son of Saudi Arabia’s richest non royal family was exiled from the Kingdom. He set up shop in Africa’s Sudan and then was chased out to the Afghan-Pakistan border in South Asia. The community of Islam—the nation of Monotheism- and its fighting base(Al Qaeda) easily crossed the national borders they did not recognize as demarcations of loyalty. From Afghanistan where the men of Islam had defeated the Red Army (1979-1989) they established their base to aim their controlled anger at the “friends of Satan” in America. 9-11-2001 was the date when the men of Islam got the attention of baby boomer led America. In one sense there was no president who should have been more cognizant of Salafist Saudis who were allowed to spread jihad abroad as long as they left the royal family intact at home. The Bush family and Saud family had personal ties and they knew much more about the world of oil than the Clintons, Obamas, or McCains. George Bush was also more overtly religious than the others. But Wahhabi Islam and “one day at a time” Evangelical Christianity are very different ways to worship God. They shape different personalities in their prayer and worship. One fosters personal testimonies and families sitting in a pew with fine and respectable dress. One is a hundred to a thousand men prostate on a common plain surface before the One True God. President Bush and Robert Mueller his FBI chief from 2002-2013 would display a spiritual blindness and historical ignorance in investigating the religious roots of the hijacker ideology. They ran away from associating the attack with a particular strain of Islam and thus gave plenty of fuel to those who would blame all Muslims. They turned an especially blind (some would say criminally negligent) eye to the central role of Saudi religious culture in the attack. As more expressions of Salafist Sunni Islam in the form of ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab appeared in peripheral battlefields, their fundamental error from the beginning has reaped its bitter fruit. Bush and Mueller established a barrier to discussion and intelligence gathering which President Obama would embrace religiously. More and more battlefields arose while the mother house of the ideology of death became a safe space and no fly zone for Christian America. The CIA chief( George Tenet) also completely missed the new goals of the Salafist Muslims who had helped us win the war against the atheist Soviets. He missed the Shiite significance of democracy in Iraq. He did militarize the CIA though as a mobile fighting force and made predator drones a new part of the lexicon. He revamped the intelligence agency that “didn’t do religion very well” into a fighting agency engaging what he called the Worldwide Attack Matrix to combat Terror. It was an intelligence failure that required stronger men than thirty years of baby boomer careerism, crony capitalism, religious degradation and sexual confusion had produced. President Bush did not understand his close personal friend Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud was deeply involved in balancing the Wahhabi clerical forces and royal family intrigues that constitute rule in Saudi Arabia. His elders at Defense and in the Vice Presidency had agendas of their own. He was much more comfortable with Condoleezza Rice than General Colin Powell and thus picked the female careerist over the Vietnam veteran as his confidant and strategist. The horrible fruit of careerism is that almost every level of higher command gets filled with an ambitious credentialed incompetent. When we add the preference for females to this toxic culture of advancement, we insure layers of incompetence in leadership. There are competent people throughout but everywhere they are subordinate. In Bill Clinton’s foreign policy team Richard Holbrooke was bypassed by Madeline Albright in the way Colin Powell was superseded by Condi Rice under George Bush. When things were tough the men were often called in for heroics—sometimes they delivered. Often, it was too late.
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| President George Bush as Karen Hughes is sworn in by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Mrs Hughes would be sent to Mideast on Public Diplomacy Tour in 2005 to change perceptions of US by Mideast countries. |
From the beginning intelligence agencies did not detect nor pursue the deep Saudi footprint left in the aftermath of the 911 attack. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were pursued for sure but it was as if after Pearl Harbor we built our response strategy around hunting down a list of the individual pilots who bombed Hawaii. Those pilots came out of Shinto Japan and the 911 hijackers came out of Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia. By the time we got to targeting countries, the Cheney agenda kicked in and the first of a series of Arab regimes was targeted for regime change. It helped our case that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had tried to strangle the new Islamic republic of Iran in the 1980-89 war and then took the oilfields of Kuwait in 1990. Hussein was a monster against the Iranians but it was his attack on Kuwait that brought George Bush’s dad to the rescue of our WWII allies--the Saudis. During the Clinton presidency that separated the Bush generations, the policy of regime change against Iraq had been made a law and Bill Clinton used the 1998 Christmas season to bomb Iraq because of WMD potential. Getting Saddam was a bipartisan project. Sanctions were strangling Iraq citizens. A humanitarian could say- take out the head, don’t starve the kids. Bush and Rice were both humanitarians. All of this enmity against Saddam Hussein was in place before 911. In the best blood feud traditions, President Bush added to the logic by reminding an audience-Saddam is “the guy who tried to kill my dad.” Israel would have preferred that Bush had attacked Iran but got on board with the Iraq attack knowing there was more to come. Suddenly the US had military skin in the Mideast game. Israel had decided that established governments with chemical and biological weapons ability had become a greater threat to their existence than Palestinian uprisings. Neoconservative war intellectuals (almost all atheist, Jewish, and academic) broke with the majority of Jews in the Democratic Party by supporting the Likud Party in Israel and the strategic vision of Benjamin Netanyahu. The black Christians of the Democratic Party and the white evangelical Christians of the Republicans were foot soldiers in elections with their own issues. Foreign policy would be left to experts, think tanks, lobbyists and the foreign governments who cared. With the fall of the Soviet Union, an American century of “Regime Change” (toppling governments) had become a much more viable option with no bipolar power turning every dispute into a risk of world war. With less risk of world war the initiation of local wars to change governments seemed less risky. The Saudis were always against the younger Bush’s adventure in Iraq. They didn’t want Saddam in Kuwait but they loved him close to Iran and strong enough to do damage. Their Eastern oilfields and Bahrain were Shiite majority areas that they kept in control with a Sunni sword just like Saddam held his majority Shiite country under the gun. The Saudis were not spiritually blind like their American allies. They knew overthrowing Saddam and having a real election would produce another Shiite country standing against Salafist Sunni dominance. But Bush the son was not the father. In his war against Iraq, he was not trying to help Saudi Arabia. He was trying to kill a bad guy and let people be free as God had made us all. Hussein was overthrown in a mismatch but not a slaughter. The US democracy-feminist cadres established a constitution with a mandated number of female office holders. They kept criticizing the Shiites for being "sectarian." Individual freedom, universal suffrage and female equality were assumed as the religious tenets of democracy. The religion of Islam, the practices of Shiites, the schools of law among Sunnis---these all seemed sectarian distractions to the more universalist mission. The Shiites starting consolidating power—they were really going to run their own country. The Iranians were ecstatic as the murderer of their people was killed by the Great Satan. Sunni Salafists from all over the region established a resistance to oppose the new Shiite rulers of Iraq. So much for democracy and self determination. Not when it's Shiites.
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| Al Askari Shiite Mosque Bombed in 2006. The rise of ISIS was not anti American but the refusal of Saudi funded Salafist Sunnis to allow a Shiite government to rule in Iraq. |
Serious Saudi money funded anti government Sunni forces from the beginning. Our “allies” were never into “Iraqi freedom.” The insurgent Sunni coalition would get out bid in the Petraeus led Sons of Iraq Sunni surge that reestablished government and American rule in Iraq.
When George Bush left office he was hated and reviled. He had become a cultural prisoner in the White House. He was a hero in Africa where he directed a creative and Christian response to poverty and disease among our far away neighbors. He added seven countries to an expanding NATO and made no headway toward a new relation with Russia. His first instinct after meeting Putin was he was a soul trying to better his nation. Unlike Ronald Reagan who thought the same of Gorbachev, President Bush accepted the correction of his advisers that he had gone off script. The evangelical Christian never explored the Christian awakening in Russia. Bush's Christianity was real but it was personal not global. He did not see Christinaty as the building of a Kingdom but as the saving of his soul. Bush expanded Medicare with a drug benefit that rivalled the expansion of Obamacare except it singled out the elderly. He was faithful to his wife and prayed seriously. He left America with North Korea and Iran as evil enemies and Russia and China as powers to be contained. He never understood who attacked us on 911. It was as if FDR tried to figure out exactly which individual bombers hit our ships in Pearl Harbor. In 1941, we did not aim first at those squadrons. We declared war against Shinto Japan in whose name they fought(this analogy is being repeated for emphasis). Salafist Sunni Islam based in Mecca and Medina has escaped such a pointed declaration of war.
When her husband established the George Bush Library in Texas, Laura Bush started an initiative for first ladies and working women in the Mideast and North Africa. Bringing the sexual revolution to the Mideast was not just for Democratic women. In retirement Laura Bush led the power couple. The feminist idols of her generation would be appeased. She would fix the Mideast her husband had so inflamed and she would do it one empowered woman at a time. Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice and Madeline Albright encouraged her profound historical and cultural insights. Michelle Obama became a family friend. Mrs. Bush didn’t have to be embarrassed anymore.
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| Shiite-Sunni. Sunni-Shiite. Who cares? We're talking Woman Empowerment |
Baby-boomer Presidents: Barack Obama
President Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white mother and black Kenyan father. His parents never lived together after his birth and divorced in 1964. His dad died in Kenya in 1982. They had one Christmas visit in 1971. His mother then married an Indonesian student she had met at an East West Intercultural Center-- Lolo Soetoro. He was called back to Indonesia in 1966 as the government affirmed the loyalty of students abroad after the mass blood shedding of the Communist/ethnic Chinese purge. That definitive statement of Muslim nationalism was a pivotal event in the Cold War. Soetoro’s father had been killed in the Indonesian war for independence against the Dutch. Almost every colonized country had to decide after Independence if the Communists who had fought in the wars for national recognition would now rule. In Indonesia they would not. Soetoro worked for the army as a geographer charting New Guinea which had been incorporated into Indonesia. Obama lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather from 1967-1971(ages 6-10). He would return to Hawaii at age ten to be raised by his white grandparents. Obama never had an ideological(or religious) view of Islam. He had a lived experience in the largest Islamic country in the world and knew that being a Muslim did not mean being a Wahhabi Salafist. Both of his fathers were Muslim. He spoke and dreamt a lot about his African blood father but his Asian experience and what he learned from an Indonesian father who ended up working for an American oil company would also serve him as a true globalist.
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| Lolo Soetoro and his American wife S. Ann Soetero. Barack Obama was 9 |
Obama has always said the dominant formative personality in his life was his mother-a secular humanist anthropologist feminist. In the one drop rule of American politics, he was called our first black president. He said his dad was black as pitch and mother white as milk. He presented himself as chocolate milk with manners and amiability that went down very smooth. A tincture of Asian propriety served him as well. The truth culturally though is the youngest baby-boomer was the perfect agent of the ultimate baby boomer project. Spending the moral capital of the Christian interracial civil rights movement, he enshrined in law and practice the secular humanist dream of the sexual revolution. Females formed large public political coalitions. Males formed couples and adopted children. The sovereignty of God and the demands of the sacral order were replaced by the anything goes autonomy masquerading as liberty. As President Obama often said, “It is who we are as a people.” On the 50th anniversary of Selma he joined feminist Seneca Falls and homosexual Stonewall to that sacred Christian place. No sheriff on a horse with a whip could ever morally degrade the memory of that bridge but the cool husband and father of two made the Christians cringe . He looked like a hip brown skinned American male but he thought and governed like a secular white feminist. He is the Prince of the Sexual Revolution and his Queen mother really did get to rule the world by rocking his cradle.
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| Anthropologist Ann Dunham and her son Barack Obama |
In American foreign policy, Obama continued the Clinton preference for fighting from the air. The expanded use of unmanned drones made it an even more attractive option. The targeting of adult male groups in the countryside of Pakistan and Yemen as “signature strikes” of combatants might have reminded people of how male death targeting in the Balkans was once called genocide. But historical memory is not the strong suit of women and homosexuals serving in offices “for the first time.” The sexually integrated military was led by civilians who thought it better to kill from the skies then die on the ground. Feminists called it smart power. The men in the deserts shook their fists and spat upon the ground.
President Obama like all the baby boomer presidents and globalists worldwide was more attached to the imagined nation of Palestine than a defensible geographic Israel on the ground. Robert Kennedy had been slain in 1968 by a Palestinian for his very different emphasis. It is hard to become a nation in the Mideast. The real nations of Iraq and Israel and Iran were all violently opposed by their Sunni neighbors at the times of their modern births. Bringing these nations to peace is much more important in the Mideast than resurrecting the Palestinian cause. Palestinians were expelled from Israel in 1948, incorporated in 1967, expelled from Jordan in the Black September of 1970-71 and exiled from Lebanon in 1982. Imagining a separate state for them which makes Israel 9 miles wide on a downward slope while losing 30% of their water and the high ground advantage on their land border to the East is unimaginable. The fantasy of a Palestinian nation bifurcating Israel is an obstacle to Mideast peace that can only be overcome with the realism of existing nationalists. President Obama never saw that but he actually saw a lot his predecessors missed.
President Obama saved America from a foreign policy disaster that would have ensued if either Hillary Clinton or John McCain would had been elected. He really was the first baby-boomer to go against the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment. Just as initiatives of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter were essential for the Reagan-Gorbachev breakthrough so President Obama’s refusal to demonize Iran and go to war with Syria saved thousands of lives and made possible dramatic new initiatives by Donald Trump. Even pulling out of Iraq which led to the rise of ISIS clarified the forces of disruption(largely Sunni extremists often funded by Saudis) from the forces of order—the Shiite led governments of Iraq and Iran. Donald Trump took the Republican Party away from the foreign policy of the uber interventionist John McCain and he defeated the “tough” woman interventionist Hillary Clinton. But when they both were younger and harder to beat, Barack Obama deprived each of them of US military command first. President Obama began his Presidency with a desire to reset with Russia, pull back from automatic US support of tyrants and kings against the Arab Spring, and tilt toward Asia to reconfigure relations there. His decision to base hiring on affirmative action for women and homosexuals (much more than racial considerations) deprived him of the men who could have helped him chart his new and very necessary foreign policy. His decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State subordinated his long term goals for American diplomacy to her one term goal of resume building for a higher office. Obama tried to imitate Lincoln’s choice of primary rival William Henry Seward to make his cabinet stronger as a team of rivals. Seward was a national treasure as he helped the nation keep other nations from recognizing the Confederacy. Mrs. Clinton was no William Henry Seward. Nor was Susan Rice a Henry Kissinger.
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| Women in High Positions-Jarret, Rice, Clinton, Power |
It turned out though that Obama eventually did most of his strategic thinking with his 30 something speechwriter turned National Security advisor Ben Rhodes. Despite the elevation of females in the highest of offices, Obama’s deepest affinity in strategic thinking was with white males-Donilon, McDonough and Rhodes. It was McDonough who was most influential in President Obama's most difficult act of statesmanship-declining to escalate the war with Syria. It was John Kerry as Secretary of State who negotiated the greatest diplomatic achievement of the Obama Presidency--the much maligned Iran nuclear deal. This paradox of influence is counter mirrored in George W Bush who had most simpatico with his female advisers-Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice.
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| Ben Rhodes and Denis McDonough--they listened to President Obama and understood how he thought. He listened to them as well. |
President Obama broke with the foreign policy establishment in three important areas. He accepted the street and electoral power of the Muslim Brotherhood in deposing Hosni Mubarek in Egypt in 2011. Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian military, the Coptic Christians, Israel and most of Obama’s foreign policy experts disagreed. President Obama really believed in the will of the people and the Arab street. Like Eisenhower supporting Nasser against the French/British/ Israeli Suez attack, Obama wanted the Arab countries to know there was a new sheriff in America and he respected national self determination even if it meant deposing an old ally. Obama’s opponents won the day when a military coup overthrew Mohamed Morsi the elected leader of the Muslim brotherhood in 2013. Today (2018) Morsi is in prison, as are many other Brotherhood leaders who were not killed. President el- Sisi rules a country in which a large electorate feels betrayed and significant populations feel their lives were saved by his coup. The Muslim Brotherhood did take the electoral route in Egypt. Their victory is not disputed. Sometimes fitness to rule and election winner are not the same.
The second area in which Obama broke with the Saudi-UAE -Israeli think tanks was his bold initiative to bring Iran into the conversation of Mideast countries. The Saudis and Israelis did not agree and that fueled an almost unanimous Republican opposition to his policy with Iran. The President of Israel was invited to the US Congress to speak against our President and his foreign policy initiative. It was a new low in fracturing "bipartisan unity beyond our shores". It was a spectacular episode of real foreign collusion in shaping American political conversation and decision making. Saudi Arabia opposes Iran because they are a Shiite state and Saudi Arabia’s religious leaders see Shiites as apostates. Israel has been at war with Shiite Iran since they overthrew one of Israel’s most reliable allies-- the Shah of Iran . The only cooperation between Iran and Israel since the 1979 revolution were short lived back door deals to weaken their common foe--Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Obama’s attempt to ground Mideast policy in the recognition of Iran as a legitimate state not a rogue nation was a huge step forward. While counter to present Saudi and Israeli interests , it would have been very much to our benefit for Iran to act as a break on Salafist Sunni forces like ISIS. Iran is also a necessary participant as the near neighbor of Afghanistan in a war that will only be stopped by a coalition of neighbors.
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| The Obama-Kerry initiative to Iran like the Nixon-Kissinger initiative to China was Diplomacy and Statesmanship in a town of pretend warriors and hardliners. The Vietnam Veteran who did the negotiating had learned a different lesson from his generation's War than Senator McCain, candidate Trump and the Republican party who so viciously opposed his work. |
The third act of President Obama's strategic independence and courage was withstanding tremendous pressure to engage the US in a fuller war with Assad of Syria. His most influential confidant in that decision was McDonough. To Obama's credit and President Trump’s benefit, he never expanded that American front. Ronald Reagan had opposed Richard Nixon’s initiative to China but he greatly benefited from it in his own presidency. President Trump has not taken the same approach to the Iran opening which was Obama’s gift he keeps trying to give back. President Obama was the youngest of the baby boomer Presidents. He was the most ready to envision a different alignment of nations in a post Cold War world. He was pulling the US away from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Once he got a real Secretary of State, he made an agreement with Iran. His initiative with Russia and pivot to Asia showed very good instincts but he didn't have a deep enough support cast to rearrange "the three encirclement" strategy that so dominates national security policy. He was surrounded by ambitious females who needed war pelts for their own future careers as "serious women". He brought the XX chromosome pattern deep into decision making process and almost invariably the females were a force for war (especially bombing air wars) rather than diplomacy. Who knows what he might have done with a band of brothers. But bands of brothers were out, power couples and credentialed female careerists were in. That was the baby boomer bubble in America. The significant accomplishments of President Obama in rethinking post Cold war foreign policy would lose out to the deeper goal of ending the era with a female President. In the world outside, religion and the nations persisted and were being toughened and renewed by new men who carried these deep communal identities deep within their souls.
The Persistence of Nations-Four Vignettes
The world presents itself as it is. We cannot alter that we are on a rotating planet revolving around the Sun some 93 million miles away. There are 7 billion human beings on this earth and the land has been divided over the last several thousand years into about 200 distinct nations. This is how men defined territories to defend and provide for their group. We may live in a culture that says maleness and femaleness is a choice and the reality of God is determined by individual belief. But this is not reality. We live in a largely predetermined world. No matter what you think or say, the earth is spinning on its axis and revolving around the Sun. You may be oblivious, but it is really happening. Around the world males and females are binding to mate. And around the world men have formed religious communities and territorial nations that their fathers died for. They are teaching their sons to do the same. Marxists, feminists and radical libertarians object to these masculine religious and territorial forms of bonding. But they are here and often they go together. One helpful way to understand the world is to learn the different communal stories of religions and nations. Here are brief scenarios of four nations making their troubled ways through the 20th century.
Nations at the boundaries of large religious and civilizational conflicts are often special victims of long term violence when conflicts “run along the fault lines.” Remember the famous description of Poland after the coordinated invasion by Soviets and Nazis in 1939: “ a nation hung on a cross between two thieves”
IRAN
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| A Religious Nation: from the Persian Past and the Shiite Exception |
In the Mideast the people of Iran in 1979 finally overthrew Mohammad Shah Pahlavi's who maintained his Peacock kingdom with his increasingly brutal SAVAK police force, his national oil wealth and assistance of Britain, the USA, and Israel. The Shah had been forcibly inserted as the nation leader in 1941 when Russians and British invaded the country and forced the abdication of his father (Reza Shah Pahlavi). Reza wanted to maintain neutrality in the war but was considered pro German by the allies. More than his son he was a bold and courageous leader. Like his son he could be a brute. 10 years later the Shah's popular secular Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh would also be overthrown in a coup supported by the British, the Americans, and many Shiite mullahs. With the country in an uproar the Shah fled. When the dust settled, the Americans escorted him back to be put in power until 1979. The Shah was considered a personal coward to the American CIA but a brutal tyrant to his people. Like Ataturk in Turkey, the Shah saw religion as an obstacle to modernity. He was despised by the religious. He despised right back outlawing the hijab for women and seizing considerable property from Shiite clerics.
Immediately after the Shiite led revolution, Iran withstood an eight year war initiated by their neighbor-Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hussein was trying to pick off a small section of land with a considerable amount of oil and developed wells. He thought the fledgling Islamic republic would be easy prey. Hussein’s open and sustained use of chemical weapons was not effectively opposed by the very nations now that are so troubled by Iranian centrifuges. Salafist Sunnis from Saudi Arabia supported the more secular Sunni Hussein in his land grab. They have been against the Persian Shiite nation since birth. The successful overthrow of an entrenched secular regime gave Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) great status among all Muslims hoping for a new formulation of public life based on neither capitalist license nor atheist communism. There is little knowledge in the US of the terrible war from Saddam Hussein that greeted the birth of Iran just after the hostages were released. There is even less knowledge of how surprised and thrilled Iranians were when America attacked and unseated their thuggish neighbor in Iraq. They knew, even if we didn’t, that honest elections would give them for the first time a friendly Shiite neighbor.
ISRAEL
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| Israeli Paratroopers at the Western Wall 1967 |
KOREA
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| At the Border of North and South Korea |
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| Korean teams march under a single flag at 2018 Olympics |
Korea a great and old civilization was the nation that suffered the longest from the 20th century wars of empire and ideology. They were occupied by Japan from 1910-1945. At the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 they were split into North(26million) and South (51million) until today(2018). They are a real nation and reunification is their deepest drive. Their quest to be one people again is even more fundamental than the important discussions about nuclear weapons. South Korea has become one of the most Christian countries in Asia.
SERBIA
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| NATO bombs European city of Belgrade-1999. No UN needed when it's Serbia |
Serbia (2018 pop: 9million) is the Orthodox Slavic outer land between Orthodox Russians to the East, Catholic Austria to the West and Ottoman Muslims to the South. The Serbs were among the first Christians to revolt from Ottoman bondage in 1815. They established formal nationality in 1848 but many ethnic Serbs remained under the Austrian Hungarian empire. Just such an ethnic Serb assassinated the Archduke of the Empire in Sarajevo (not in Serbia). They were attacked and brutalized to begin WWI by the Austrians. They were punished by the Germans in the beginning of WWII for not rolling over like so many of their neighbors. They put up a fight and were punished with extended reprisals. Some say there was a crucial delay in Hitler’s invasion of Russia to wreak vengeance on the Serbs. The Serbs delayed him, the Russians fought him, the Winter finished him. In 1992 Serbia became the first European capital to taste the bombs of NATO as the American Secretary of State showed her military bravado by shouting down wary American generals and bombing the Slavic country that reminded her of Hitler. Eventually it was a victory for the Kosovo Liberation Army and the historic battleground birthplace of Serbia was turned over to a new construct-- a Muslim city-state.
Serbia, Israel, Iran, Korea—all nations--real nations in dangerous neighborhoods who seek to be treated as intact corporate peoples. They are not going away. Like the rotating earth, it is best to get used to it. Like learning the teams of the NFL and their player needs on draft day, it would be good if there was an active group of men who kept up with the nations and their interplay. Such knowledgeable groups of patriotic men used to be called the US Senate or the State Department.
The Trampled Africans of the Cold War
It was a bitter fruit of the Cold War that many colonial nations seeking to establish their independence were caught in the Communist-capitalist trap. Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) of the Congo, Julius Nyerere(1922-1999) of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah(1909-1972) of Ghana -were all national leaders whose nationalistic, African and Christian communal aspirations became trapped in the Soviet-West struggle. “When the bull elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” In South America the decision of Castro to play the Soviet card cast every attempt of a people to nationalize resources as a possible extension of communism into the hemisphere. Today we call it resource nationalism. But every nation claims its land and resources for itself as a people. That started with the United States and its most valuable resource right after the revolution-the verdant lands of the Ohio valley.
Religion, Masculinity, and Nations—Deeper Ties than the Elite could Know
The movement of men to gather with other men over a shared territory and establish themselves as a community of shared duty and possession is as fundamental a biological drive as the desire of man and woman to become a couple and make new life. The baby-boomers never saw the relationship of Christianity and the drive in history to form nations. They never saw Russia emerging as an old nation with an Orthodox soul. They did not understand that it was as Christians and as men driven by gender duty and often their religion that our soldiers won WWII and the Cold War. How binary of those soldiers! Guys, Guns, and God--that's what got the baby boomer elites the powerful offices and nation they were bequeathed. They did not know the Cold War was between Christianity and Atheism. It was pretty confusing for them-- the first generation who saw politics as couples and beliefs not as groups of men competing to protect and lead the bigger group of men as a nation.
As Communism collapsed, the elites of the new generation had fallen away from the loyalty structure that had beaten the Soviets, Nazis and Japanese. The victorious West turned more atheist, less masculine, more individualistic, less nationalistic. The educated elite brashly extended their democracy, free markets, gender ideology under the armed guard of NATO. In the Mideast, US-Saudi and US -Israel alliances directed our actions in absence of strong nationalist objectives of our own statesmen. Most of our politicians were careerists but in the think tanks and lobby groups there were nation men of other nations who had their own serious national goals in mind. They paid lobbyists, supported friendly hawkish Congressmen and purchased with grant money University Departments for hire and influence.
The neoconservative “intellectuals “ who relished the unipolar moment of America as a superpower had no religious mooring but a deep commitment to a breakthrough for Israel in a hostile Mideast. They became the architects of a Republican interventionist policy in the Mideast. Unfortunately the Democrats were stymied in articulating a full throated anti-war movement because Hillary Clinton’s future candidacy as President called for a warlike persona to match the worst of the Republicans. {There were no two individuals of this passing era who for very different reasons were more willing to risk American blood to buttress their posing as war leaders than Hillary Clinton and John McCain.}
Christian Realism: Proposing a Foreign Policy that takes
God, Men, and Nations Seriously
To this day, we have not faced the greatest intelligence failure of the nation’s history-the 911 attack. In its aftermath there was an even more stunning failure of political will and religious insight --the inability to name the Islamic Saudi origins of our enemy.
At the same time we failed to name our new enemy, we doubled down on demonizing the foes of our allies (Russia to the British and EU, Iran to the Israelis and Saudis. For some reason it is not considered foreign collision when white guys who speak English from British intelligence agencies succeed in changing our foreign policy. There are also many Jewish thinkers that do not believe any intelligence work for the Israeli government can be considered espionage. Nor do they find anything "foreign" about the Prime Minister of Israel speaking to the American Congress to undercut the diplomatic work of an American President. After all, we share "the same values").
Balance of Power Encirclements or Bandwagon with Regional Powers
Our foreign policy strategy has continued the three encirclements of Iran, Russia and China as potential regional hegemons. All three of these countries were our allies in WWII. All three are regional powers. Shall we encircle them or befriend them? Strategic Thinker Stephen Walt defined two alternate strategies in alliance formation.
“Alliances are most commonly viewed as a response to threats, yet there is sharp disagreement about what the response will be. When entering an alliance, states may either balance (ally in opposition to the principal source of danger) or bandwagon (ally with the state that poses the major threat).”
Winston Churchill explained the Balance of Power strategy of Great Britain in The Gathering Storm. “For four hundred years the policy of Great Britain has been to oppose the strongest most aggressive most dominating power on the Continent… It would have been easy… and tempting to join with the stronger and share the fruits of his conquest. However we always took the harder course , joined with the less strong Powers… and thus defeated the Continental military tyrant whoever he was…”
Three national security strategy documents (2006, 2010, 2017) from three different presidents have articulated a balance of power approach to alliances against three regional powers. Expanding NATO against Russia, allying with Sunni Gulf States and Israel against Shiite Iran and organizing Japan and regional smaller states against the claims of China in the South China Sea are all balance of power regional alliances. China and Russia were both allies in World War Two but became principal enemies in the Cold War because of their communist ideology. Iran was a regional stalwart as well but became an enemy to be surrounded after their Shiite revolution against the Shah of Iran. The Persian Shah had been a dependable ally to Israel in their various wars with Arab states . Since 1979, Israel and Iran have been in a virtual state of war. This has been a disaster for American foreign policy. The balance of power and three encirclement policy has been accepted by many baby-boomers as reality. It is a reality which was a strategy choice adults made years ago. Adults can choose again. God is permanently the Sovereign. Satan is forever our Enemy. But let us not forget the twin reminders of John Kennedy and George Washington: No nation must be our permanent enemy and each alliance can become entangling.
Restoring a Christian Nation after the Sexual Revolution
The baby-boomers have not understood that religion, nations and men were the principal actors in the winning of WWII and the fall of the Soviet Union. Those are the principal actors today. We must take our place among the nations. As a Christian nation, America has natural allies with the nations of Catholic Europe, Orthodox Russia and Catholic South America. We came from the Protestant nations of Scotland, England the Dutch. We were preached into existence in the little churches of Geneva, Switzerland.
We are not meant to be the bombing arm of the secular west extending the strange fruits of the sexual revolution abroad. We cannot make Afghanistan an orderly nation without talking to the Taliban and letting all their neighbors(including Iran) take our place as outside help.
The African nations (and the emerging Latin American nationalists) do not want Western imposed gender ideology but they do want to live as Christians in coherent nations. Let us help them as brothers. If they socialize their minerals, that doesn’t make them atheist Communists. It may be they are what many of us aspire to be—they are economic nationalists. That national communal approach to common resources is a paradigm in harmony with reality. It is in keeping with our Christian tradition.
As a Christian nation, we seek peace with other nations. Let us propose our outlandish Christian claims against the international anarchists, the University intellectuals, pompous think tank thinkers and social Darwinists. We propose all humanity comes from single parents and we have a common destiny as persons created by God with immortal souls. We live in nations defined by territorial boundaries and common languages and cultures. This is as God has ordained since biblical times were recorded. We can respect one another as nations. We can live in harmony. War is always a possibility and the ability to win a war is crucial to the Christian sword and shield. But we do not live by the sword. We live by the ordered loves of God, men, and nations.
From 1966-1976 China underwent a great cultural revolution. It was the last dying gasp of Communism as an ideology and Mao Tse Tung as a supreme leader. In the late 1970’s the adult men of China put an end to the farce that had almost ruined their country. The last group of revolutionaries were the “gang of four” who included the wildly ambitious wife of Mao tse Tung- Jiang Qing. She was imprisoned and the three men with her were executed. She eventually hung herself. China made a striking reversal under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and righted her ship. The grownups reestablished authority.
America is recovering from our own great cultural revolution in the 1960s. We had our own Jiang Qing. The adults of our nation must reverse the attempt of the sexual revolution to construct a gigantic inversion ritual as the norm for our culture. God is sovereign not the individual. Men form cities, states and nations to protect our Churches, workplaces and homes. Men and women form marriages to build families. These are the ties that bind. America can live under God and live with the other great nations of the world. China and Russia were our allies in WWII. They suffered overwhelmingly the greatest casualties from those wars. We have made peace with Germany and Japan and well we should have. Must we be at war with these other great countries who are overthrowing the atheist blinders of the Communist ideology-that poisoned gift from western intellectuals. Let us extend our hand in peace to these great civilizations. We have one permanent enemy. He is the Evil One who has come to set Cain against his brother Abel. He is the Leviathan who has come against the woman and her child. Let us reunite with our brothers who share our humanity. Let us rejoice in the diversity of our national cultures. The wars in which so many men gave their lives to do their duty are not over. But there can be many fewer, many smaller if we learn the lessons of religion, geography and history. Let us put our trust in God, give up the childish rebellion of the sexual revolution and make alliances with the nations who mean us no harm.
Afghanistan and Yemen are not our battlefields.
The Salafist Saudis not the Shiite Iranians killed our people on 911
Let us think clearly and speak truthfully to recount those murderous events of twenty years ago. Osama bin Laden carried the banner of Salafist Islam to evict the atheist Soviets from Afghanistan and the godless Americans from the soil of Saudi Arabia. He once had thanked the US for supplying arms through Pakistan to help the mujahideen fight the Soviets. That rich man who gave up his palace to live in caves, the man who actually did the fighting, became our enemy and we killed him after he had killed too many of our own. The mullahs behind his religious ideology are still being funded through our alliance with the Saudi royal family. As Lee Kuan Yew once said, "“In killing terrorists, you will only kill the worker bees. The queen bees are the preachers, who teach a deviant form of Islam in schools and Islamic centers, who capture and twist the minds of the young.” We killed the rich man who became a worker bee. The queen bees thrive because we do not have the religious maturity and coherence to name them. They now have their most enthusiastic front man in decades--Muhammad bin Salman. We can ally with other nations including Russia, China, Iraq, and Iran to destroy the religious fanatics who murdered our people in New York 17 years ago. They still terrorize innocents around the world today. Our still unpunished enemies are not Afghans nor are they Shiites from Yemen or Iran. It is good when leaders will say this attack came from radical Islamic terrorists but it is not enough. The terrorists had a launching pad in Afghanistan but that is not their home base. They have an address. We still have not given them a return call.
The Return of Religion and Civilizational Revival:
The New Nation Men
After the enmities of the world wars and the global struggle against Marxism, the communal loyalties of religion and the nations are reasserting themselves. Within these movements men are formed into characters that carry these communal identities. The failure of the old empires and the bloody destruction of the 20th century racial empires force men into protective communal identity and social organization. God is real and man’s spiritual and territorial identity cannot be obliterated by a notion as nebulous as modernity or plastic as The West. From Brazil to Korea, religious and civilizational cultures are reappearing in new nation states led by strong emerging leaders. Men will die for God and country... not so many for a direction.
Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as a Shiite leader hoping to establish a pan Islamic movement to unite the Muslim ummah. He had done what no other Muslim leader had done in modern times -replace a secular occupying power with a government based on God's Law. The abdication of the secular Shah of Iran in 1979 and replacement with a Shiite government was a seismic event reordering the religious political landscape. Khomeini's Friday sermons given in France (after his exile from Iran) became audio tapes spread around the country to build a unifying sentiment giving much more coherence among his followers than the modernist Iranians who were also out on the streets against the Shah. His sermons were a weekly digital inspiration as key to the revolution as Thomas Paine's pamphlets were in America 200 years earlier. After he assumed power, Khomeini met with Yasar Arafat of the PLO. He told him to build his movement on Islam not secular leftist ideology. They never met again. Iran was embroiled in conflict with the US because of the hostage crisis during their first year of independence. Shortly after that was resolved, Persian Iran was invaded by Arab Iraq led by Saddam Hussein in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Multiple Sunni governments aided Hussein against the upstart Shiites. Khomeini would never lead the ummah but He established a Shiite form of government to govern Iran. His initial ideology was pan Islamic to overcome the Arabic-Perisan fault line but he defended his revolution as a new nation. He originated a plan for governance combining religious supremacy and elections which rules Iran today.
In Japan Shinzo Abe once again honored the dead at Shinto shrines reestablishing the spiritual bond with those who died for the group. He asserted a new statement about an ancient duty- he would organize his government to militarily defend the motherland and her interests.
Xi Jinping became the new Supreme Leader of China while maintaining the Communist party apparatus as the substitute Mandarins for governance. He reopened Confucian centers of learning while strengthening Marxist education. He searches for the" China Dream" to under gird an aggressive worldwide approach to infrastructure building. He channels Lu Ban one of many honored historic infrastructure builders in Chinese history. He has made a historic agreement with the most organized and ritualistic of Christian communities. China builds alliances and infrastructure projects to last. The great nation rises slowly.
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines shot his way to the Presidency by cleaning up a violent drug infested city and promising the same for his nation. He has made peace with his large Asian neighbor China and charts a path for the Catholic Philippines. He is “for God but not for priests” who abused him in his youth.
Narenda Modi leads one billion strong Hindu India with the second largest Muslim population in the world. Modi and his BJP party embrace the "India defining" Hindu culture while living at the interface of the Sino-Islamic-Hindu-Buddhist cultures.
Vladimir Putin declares a revitalized Russia as a bridging Eurasian civilization and a leading force in global Christianity . The Orthodox Christians reject the abominations of the West propagated as human rights for sexual license.
In Turkey, Recep Erdogan building on the nationalism of Kemal Ataturk rejects Ataturk's anti Islamic modernism and establishes his country as an alternative center for Islamic thought not so crippled by Arabic political confusion. He turns his people from seeking the approval of the West to exerting leadership among Muslims. The Turks are not ethnic Arabs but they are overwhelmingly Sunni.
In Hungary Victor Orban (b 1963) unashamedly says there is no Hungary without Christianity. In 1956, the Hungarians were the first of the captive nations to rise against the Soviet ideology. Now they are proudly European while denouncing the hyper globalism, hyper individualism that has set the bureaucratic EU against the religious nations that constitute the marvel of Europe.
Fidel Castro(1926-2016) died as the first and last of the Communist revolutionaries who lead his Latin nation by becoming a client of the far away Soviets. He became a poisoned model for a fatal paradigm but the romance of a caudillo and his island nation left its mark on the Latin soul. There have been plenty of “wanna be Fidels”. There have been no Catholic Bolivars. But Lopez Obradar (b 1953) has been elected as an “atypical leftist” president of Mexico in 2018. He bears no hostility to religion and says politics is about the well being of the soul. He promises to tighten the southern border from a new flood of Central American immigrants. He says, “It is indispensable that we start a new current of thought based on a moral paradigm, love for one's family, neighbor, nature and nation." "The highest goal of politics is to achieve love." In Brazil, the leading candidate for the Presidency in September 2018 (until he was stabbed) was Jair Bolsonaro. He combined populist demands of the left with free markets and a strong nationalist identity with anti abortion, anti homosexual cultural stands. His campaign slogan was "Above all, God." Evangelical Christians and former leftists comprised his initial base.(ed note:Bolsonaro won the election.)
New men are carrying the cultural and religious identities of their nations and regions.
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| A Catholic from Spain, A Jew from Israel A Marxist from Cuba-all Nation Men |
The American Mission:
God, Global Christianity, Interracial Brotherhood.
Peace among Nations Comes when
Each Nation Protects Its Own Nation First and respects
that every other nation will do the same
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| Religion and Nations are forms of Public Order. Can the Orthodox, the Catholics and the Protestants understand how the great Christian cultural agreement can bring peace among the nations. |
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| Huntington's map of civilizations never understood the underlying Christian Unity of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christianity. The largest Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic countries are all led by strong male nationalists with overwhelming support from Christian nationalists. |
The first three baby-boomer Presidents were not ready to carry out our Christian national destiny to make peace with the great powers of China and Russia; to make common Christian accord with Orthodox Russia and Catholic Latin America, to help the Muslim world be rid of Salafist Wahhabi Islam and the Saudi masquerade. They were entranced by an imaginary nation in the Mideast and failed to seek and defend the claims of real nations-Iran, Serbia, Korea and Israel to be whole and free as intact nations under God. They didn’t understand that the racial empire of Germany and the Scientific Materialism of Communism were fruits of the Enlightenment’s rejection of God. After military national brotherhoods had swept the room clean of the demon of Marxism, the Evil One twisted the hearts of the victors toward an even worse set of demons from the "Enlightenment." The sexual revolution aimed at the Patriarchy of God, the armed brotherhoods of the nations, the sacral love of marriage, the protective duty of motherhood and the purity of virgins. The intellectuals drank the poison. Our first three baby boomer Presidents fought for “the West” and the Enlightenment and a new bizarre set of human rights. It got very dark. We were entangled in a hundred false fronts. Older men polluted younger men. We killed our own babies. We started to hate our fellow citizens.
Let us return to God.
The American dream of civic brotherhood has been carried before in great conflicts by Lincoln, by FDR, by John Kennedy. The Lord sent them to lead us as a people through strife. Could it be the Lord sent the last baby boomer—a sometimes embarrassing son of the sexual revolution-- to reverse the inversion ritual of his cohort? He may not lead us to moral renewal. A Christian masculine interracial movement must do that. But will he be the Samson who tears down the Temple of the Philistines? Clearly it took an extraordinary personality to challenge the Leviathan. Sadly, shamefully, our comfortable then corrupted religious cultures were not producing the masculine heroic personalities we needed.
Who will rebuild? What shall we build? We know unless we build in the name of the Lord, the workmen toil in vain. Let us not build the Modern West. Let us build America. Let us build Global Christianity. Let us not be recruited in the white upper class globalist death cult of abominations posturing as human rights.
The 20th century was a bloody time of war and chaos but it was also a great era of religious revival among Christians. The Pentecostal movement has soaked Africa and Asia with the Christian message and new Christian personalities. The Second Vatican Council of the Catholics turned the Catholics from a fortress shooting at Protestant error to a brotherly priestly template of ordered love for the nations. America’s Jews and Protestants and Catholics must return to God so our nation under God can take our place among the nations. We are the meeting hall of the great religions in a civic brotherhood. We are the meeting grounds for the world’s intermingling races. We too are a template (but not a blueprint) for the nations.
The baby boomers did not take the torch from our fathers. How we have confused our children! How we have failed our sons! The Jews who carried monotheism to the world have become atheists. The Protestants who gave us the covenantal nations have become liturgical cross dressing feminists. The Catholic priesthood which ordained the sons of Adam into an ecclesial brotherhood has become a thousand twisted “gay” cabals. Our nation will never be restored if men do not return to religion and Our Father. That must be first. Religious Restoration is the only way we will reverse the anarchy of the sexual revolution.
God has ordained the men of different nations to exercise authority in their respective territories. As nations under God we can build an enduring peace. Let that noble masculine work of politics inspire us as we renew man’s dependence on a single Sovereign and rejoice in the brotherhood of all men and the blossoming of the nations. America is a continent meant for interracial brotherhood as the basis of the nation and the driving force toward international fraternity. The Latinos call it the Cosmic Race-La Raza. Gringos called it BOMFOG --the Brotherhood of Men under the Fatherhood of God. May the Protestants from the North and the Catholics from the South meet in strengthening our nation to join with other nations in our common work of building God’s Kingdom on earth. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.
DMPence, 9-11-2018
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