21st Century Progressivism

Category: Mythology and Religion

Tracing mythological meanings of events and ideologies in the United States and the World

  • Atheism Is Not the Opposite of Mormonism

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    I. The Controlled Alternative Filter: The Illusion of Reform

    Since I first mentioned Mormonism on my bog, I have watched on YouTube the strategies of others who have quit the Church. I would like to talk about my impression of those strategies.

    To be clear, I would not have chosen to talk about the Church on my blog if not for Kate Kelly. She appeared one day on YouTube selling her organization’s project to ordain women to the Mormon Church. I was dismayed, both at her attempt to railroad the conversation into a hopeless cause, and also at her lack of understanding about the structure of her church. Male supremacy is in every fiber of Mormon doctrine. If the Church were to ordain women, it would not be the same religion.

    I believe Kelly was associated with John Dehlin of the YouTube channel, Mormon Stories, or possibly they were both in a larger progressive movement. Dehlin’s focus, aside from inviting Mormons and former Mormons to share their grievances, was trans and gay rights in the Church. Both Kelly and Dehlin claim to be loyal members trying to help the Church; they were both excommunicated.

    II. Strategies of Former Members: The Franchise Traps

    I have observed that there are three main ways of leaving the Church while hanging on to some kind of community: joining another denomination; becoming an atheist; or joining the ‘ex-Mormon community.’

    Joining Another Denomination 

    I can only comment on the scenarios I have seen on YouTube; there are probably congregations out there that are more accepting than the examples I have seen.

    I was particularly sensitive to the videos in which the new member, either alone or with a spouse, was seated in a large circle and being quizzed by the membership of the church they were trying to join. The most consistent questions had to do with why the applicant wanted to join the new church and why they decided to leave Mormonism. The questioners never said whether the applicant’s answers were acceptable to them, but they obviously weighed the responses. Maybe those interviewees made a home in those congregations, but I’m sure it was a struggle.

    I will share one especially heartbreaking answer. A young father answered that he and his spouse wanted to find a community where they could be religious together and serve others. There was no outpouring of love and sympathy in response, which would have been the appropriate Christian response.

    From my own experience with Evangelicals, I suspect they are coached to assume ulterior motives or dishonesty in former Mormons. This tendency is too persistent to be random; I think it must come from the leadership.

    III. The Inquisition of the Corporate Shell

    There are many things I could say about this, but when I was confronted by this mindset myself, I knew it didn’t fit my experience. I left the Mormons because I had an experience that made me realize they were teaching the gospel wrong. I didn’t quit right away; it took some time before I realized that the leaders of the Church and my ward were not interested in what I had learned. That was the issue. I knew they were wrong and I knew what they needed to change if their goal was what they claimed.

    What I’m saying is that the very act of leaving one’s church and exploring other beliefs is profound. At this level, there is no room or inclination for tricks. The belief that the petitioners are going through this for the wrong reasons is embarrassingly presumptuous, not to mention ignorant.

    But that’s not the only problem with these inquisitionists, there are at least two more. The belief of these supposed Christians that they can ask probing questions and judge other people is wrong by Christian standards of humility, compassion and basic human respect. It’s also a misunderstanding of the central problem.

    Knowing what someone’s beliefs are does not mean you understand how the spirit works in them. That is the most ignorant, shocking, uncharitable and un-Christian part of this entire thing. Someone who is trying to reach God in a system that is not willing or able to show them the way deserves guidance and understanding. If the inquisitionists can’t perceive that, they don’t know the spirit. If they don’t know the spirit, they and their teachers are truly blind.

    Joining the Ex-Mormon Community

    I can’t speak to this option; all I know about the ex-Mormon community is that it exists. But when I try to imagine it, it’s not pretty. I know from watching ex-Mormons on YouTube that they usually begin their life story with how devoted they were and how much they love the members. That might be because the Church denigrates people who leave in various ways, the primary tactic is to say they were never really devout believers. There is an unspoken accusation as well; the suspicion that they were outsiders, sinners, or losers. Hence the ex-Mormon claim that they love the Church and its people. This is one way ex-Mormons rank themselves and their experience.

    Of course they are sinners—we all are. But there is a myriad of sins that never come up in Bishops’ interviews. These include gossip, judgementalism, a belief in one’s own superiority, dishonesty in all its forms, and the love of money. When thinking of the seven deadly sins, I imagine that some of them wouldn’t apply to active Mormons, but no mortal is exempt from them. So as not to leave any out, the seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

    I am aware that Latter Day Saints may not be familiar with the term, seven deadly sins, or for that matter, stations of the cross. This is not a reason for judgement or banishment from other denominations; it’s typical for that system.

    I say this next bit for the benefit of Evangelical inquisitionists; faking one’s interest in a church is not in the list of deadly sins. The inquisitonists’ approach only proves they too are trapped in their own belief system.

    IV. Becoming an Atheist: The Logical Void

    This is probably the trickiest concept to talk about. I admit I don’t know the thought processes of an ex-Mormon who choses atheism. I also don’t want to rattle anyone’s delicate balancing act while they are navigating the process. But I would like to pose what I think are relevant questions.

    Evangelicals might like to ask the same questions, but frankly, I don’t think they are qualified to ask them when someone is humbly asking for admittance. They are disqualified also because they are operating from within a belief system that is hostile to Mormonism.

    Here are my questions for ex-Mormon atheists:

    1. What were you worshiping when you were in the Church?
    2. Why did you choose to leave?
    3. How did it happen that you had to choose between the Church and nothing?

    From what I have gathered, the main motivation for resigning comes from finding out one was lied to. The dam broke and they were finally confronted by the information in books, the Internet, and the Church’s own documents. At that point, all the Church’s teachings became suspect. That is a good reason. As for choosing between the Church and nothing, there’s the specter of the people in other congregations not knowing what to do with ex-Mormons. Perhaps atheism includes not believing in other believers.

    When I state it this way, atheism is a logical choice. But we still haven’t examined the question of what you worshiped when you were in the Church. I think I can guess, it’s completely understandable in my opinion.

    1. Mormonism is a solid American culture with a long history.
    2. It was the religion of many generations of ancestors.
    3. It promises exaltation to godhood and that believers will have the ability to create their own worlds.
    4. One is so busy working, raising a family, teaching and leading others that there’s no time to think. And frankly, success and the admiration of others is seductive. When one suddenly has to bear the world’s criticism for those beliefs, the confidence disappears along with the sense of being admired.

    V. The Un-Enclosed Alternative: Reclaiming the Spirit

    I won’t discuss the alternative as if it’s the way everyone should think about this process. I’ll just explain that I’m aware of another alternative. I know there is a real guiding spirit in the world. And the disrespect and suspicion of other congregations has not weakened my conviction. I’m not telling you to go out and get that spirit. I’m just saying it is present.

    Let’s start by looking more closely at the Mormon Church. At its most basic level, the Church is a corporation. And as a corporation, it has a business plan. You could even argue that its business plan is a priority. To be clear, the Mormon Church is a corporation with believers, and its believers have always been part of its business plan. Since believers are so important, the doctrine is non-negotiable. Therefore, beliefs are fiercely enforced. But there is a qualification. The Church is more comfortable with atheists than ‘heretical’ members and religious critics.

    Worshiping any business plan dressed up as a religion, regardless of how fierce one’s beliefs are, is not the opposite of atheism. To put in another say, choosing atheism is not a rebuke to the Mormon Church.

    I would say something similar about the Evangelicals who sharpen their claws at the thought of converting a Mormon. The way they think is every bit as corporate as the Mormon Church. They live in a castle of proper beliefs and judge others, who they don’t know, based on those beliefs.

    Another Reason for Quitting the Church

    I discovered that the Church either doesn’t know how to guide its members to God, or it purposely choses not to. Perhaps the CEOs know the members would not be so useful to the corporation if they had their spiritual senses about them. I used to think they were just mistaken, but it’s been 30 years and it’s increasingly clear that they actively fight against any change in direction, both religious and political.

    I suppose John Dehlin and Kate Kelly also learned that, but their progressive agenda is rejected by many religions. What I’m saying is worse. The Mormon Church is determined to reject the spirit. On the other hand, there is a positive side of this accusation; there is a true spirit in the world.

    I had been vaguely aware for some time of the Church’s strange beliefs, but I thought the leaders were trying to take everyone to heaven. Now I know they are only interested in corporate heaven. Whatever that might be, it’s a cheat.

  • Rome: Archetype of the Imperial Machine (Part 2)

    Reading Time: 10 minutes

    Every empire is founded on human pathology. Ambition and hubris are at the core of it. But there is another ingredient that remains invisible at first: addiction. The addiction of constant expansion cements the machine’s control over conquered and conqueror alike. But like any addiction, it only makes itself known after the machine has established itself. Rome was the archetype of the imperial machine, and many grand histories have attempted to capture her essence. Unfortunately, Rome is not merely a lesson from history. As we have detailed inside our Master Directory, The Corporate Enclosure of Reality: The Thousand-Year Pipeline of the State Spreadsheet, the Empire is still with us.

    In this article we will consider the kinship networks that were its victims. Thanks to this focus, another context for analysis has been revealed: morality. The key idea is expressed in a quote from the Bible. “By their fruits you shall know them.”

    By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

    Rome was a global leviathan in 63 BCE. It was at the apex of its ambition, and the addiction was firmly in control. As a result, private warlords, like Pompey, found it necessary to keep conquering new borders just to feed the massive overhead. Perhaps the empire had started by amassing wealth, but debt had become the primal need gnawing at General Pompey. This Rome was not a peaceful civilization by any definition. It was a global, predatory, militant, bureaucratic machine. Rome was thoroughly amoral; that was her essential nature.

    The Grand Warning: the Hasmoneans

    In 63 BCE, the Hasmonean brothers had achieved Israel’s dream of religious freedom and national independence. It is always distressing to contemplate what happened to them; instead of celebrating, they invited the wolf into their house.

    In the bloody battles of the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmoneans had successfully thrown off the yoke of foreign tyrants and established the last sovereign Jewish kingdom in the Levant for over two thousand years. Yet, the moment they secured the throne room, they became embroiled in internal corruption, hubris, and a bitter civil war for supreme dynastic monopoly.

    The Invitation

    The brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II were trapped in their own short-sighted family panic. Neither brother looked to their native, horizontal covenant baseline to find resolution. Instead, they each sent elite delegations with massive bribes of gold and silver to Pompey’s military camp in Syria. They literally begged a Roman general to step in and legally arbitrate their private family dispute.

    The brothers may have managed to hold on to the dream of their people, but they completely internalized the ungodly systems of the world. Their kinship baseline was coopted.

    Pompey was not just happy to oblige them. The combination of the arrogance of Roman Dominium and his own constant anxiety decided Israel’s fate in a heartbeat. He laid siege to the Temple and then walked right into the Holy of Holies. Once he was in complete control, he wired Israel’s former sovereignty directly into the imperial tax ledger.

    The Human Pattern

    This unforced error establishes the tragic human pattern that runs all through our history. When a kinship network panics, it enters a psychological blindness where it chooses to legitimize the very state ledger that is waiting to devour it. Of course, the case of the Hasmonean brothers was something new in this progression. When the elders of Israel begged Samuel for a king, they thought they were establishing a defense against outsiders. Whereas the Hasmoneans invited Rome to intervene in a family dispute.

    Sadly, this is the exact same ancestral blindness that would later cause division in the premier clans of Clan Chattan. This drama will be explained in detail in another article. Here it will be briefly introduced.

    In 1672, Duncan Macpherson of Cluny marched into a cold Lowland courtroom and used a foreign Anglo-Norman legal dagger to sue his own kin. His hubris had been manipulated by the machine for centuries of loyal service to the clan. Finally, in this one episode, he unwittingly validated the machine to claim a piece-of-paper monopoly over his clan. To be clear, this is not meant as a condemnation. It’s meant as a warning. Ultimately, the Macpherson’s remained loyal to the kinship baseline.

    The Invisible Reach: The Corruption of Scandinavia

    Very few places in the world were fortunate enough to remain untouched by the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Scandinavia was well outside the machine’s physical borders, but its tribal baseline was corrupted just the same. Rome was almost methodical in the way it brought the Scandinavian people into the Empire’s orbit.

    🪙 1. The Weaponization of Luxury Trade

    Rome did not need to conquer a people to destabilize them; they used their merchant ledger. Roman traders traveled deep into Scandinavia to extract raw northern wealth—specifically amber, furs, and blond hair (highly prized by the elite in Italy).

    • The Currency Trap: In exchange, the Romans pumped massive amounts of silver coins (denarii), glass beads, and Roman wine into the north.
    • The Structural Split: This injection of luxury goods completely corrupted the traditional, horizontal tribal baseline. Suddenly, a few local chieftains became hyper-wealthy by monopolizing Roman trade. They used Roman silver to hire permanent private warrior retinues, breaking away from the traditional kinship assemblies and establishing the first top-down, hereditary aristocratic hierarchies in Scandinavia.

    ⚔️ 2. The Mercenary Software Export

    The Roman army was constantly starving for manpower, so they routinely recruited elite Scandinavian and Germanic warriors into their auxiliary legions.

    • These young men spent decades serving inside the Roman military machine. They learned its vertical chain of command, its engineering tactics, and its cold, mechanical approach to warfare.
    • When these veterans finally returned home to Scandinavia, they brought that imperial software with them. They stopped acting like traditional tribal elders and began acting like mini-Emperors. They built fortified hill forts, centralized local weapons manufacturing, and used Roman-style martial discipline to dominate neighboring clans.

    🪓 3. The Runes: Copying the Ledger

    • The Contagion: The very script of the Vikings—the Elder Futhark Runes—developed in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE as a direct result of contact with the Roman Empire. Scandinavian elites saw how the Romans used written Latin characters to issue laws, count taxes, and project power across vast distances. The northern tribes customized these alphabetic concepts to carve their own runes into stone and wood. It was an indigenous adaptation, but the initial spark was inspired by watching the power of the empire’s written ledger.
    • The Altered Baseline: Rome’s silver and military software corrupted Scandinavia’s horizontal tribal baseline long before the empire fell. It structurally primed the northern tribes to become the hyper-militarized pressure cooker that would eventually explode across the sea.

    The Global Crouch: The 536 CE Detonation

    When the Empire fell, the Scandinavian chiefs still had not turned into raiders. It was the 536 CE volcanic winter that finished off any kin-centered reserve that remained. In that year, a series of massive volcanic eruptions blanketed the Northern Hemisphere in a thick, atmospheric ash cloud. This triggered what scientists call the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The sun’s rays grew weak and blue, summer temperatures plummeted up to 4°C, and parts of the world experienced a decade of continuous, jumbled winters without heat.

    The Combined Effects of Planetary and Political Disaster

    The Empire’s fall and the effects of the volcanic winter together shattered the highly centralized trade grid and forced the entire world into a feudal crouch. The effects were apocalyptic for the world, but they were especially harsh for Scandinavia.

    • The sudden drop in temperature caused massive, systemic crop failures and famine. Archaeological records reveal that up to 50% of the population in Sweden and Norway perished or abandoned their settlements in the 6th century. This real-world climate horror directly birthed the Norse mythological memory of Fimbulwinter—the three continuous years of winter that precedes Ragnarök (the end of civilization).
    • The shattered Scandinavian tribes spent the next two centuries reorganizing. They divided their fields into tiny production units, turned away from fragile crops toward frost-resistant rye, and began hyper-militarizing their society. In this way, they hoped to compete for the drastically diminished local resources.
    • By the time the weather normalized and the population began to rebound in the late 700s, Scandinavia was an overcrowded, hyper-militarized pressure cooker. Primogeniture rules meant younger sons had zero inheritance, and there was a brutal domestic scarcity of farmable land.
    • They built the perfect maritime escape weapon—the shallow-draft longship—and burst out into the North Sea, desperate for wealth and space.

    The Pictish Golden Age

    The Picts did not feel the post-Roman vacuum as a loss because they had never been enclosed by Rome in the first place. For them, the 5th and 6th centuries were not a “Dark Age” of collapse, but a glorious, un-enclosed Golden Age of independent crystallization.1

    When the Roman legions evacuated southern Britain in 410 CE, the Lowlands and the south fell into an absolute structural panic. Those societies had become addicted to the vertical infrastructure, the coin-based markets, and the military protection of the Roman ledger. When that grid vanished, their society fractured. However, Pictish society did not fracture; the Picts felt an absolute release of pressure because their greatest external threats had collapsed. In this period, the Pictish horizontal kinship baseline operated at its peak.

    Recent cutting-edge archaeology (like the discoveries at Tap o’ Noth and Fortriu) show that in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Picts built massive, highly organized hillfort settlements containing hundreds of homes. These settlements were supported by advanced agrarian farming and sophisticated, decentralized regional alliances. It was during these years that the Picts carved their magnificent, iconic Class I and Class II Symbol Stones into the landscape.

    Whenever outside forces tried to bring a new vertical ledger into the north, the unified Pictish kinship vanguard utterly crushed them. When the Anglo-Saxon Kings of Northumbria marched north with their heavy armies—the Picts crushed them at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (685 CE) and permanently secured their borders against enclosure.

    Innocent Bystanders in the Apocalypse

    But in 839 AD, a massive Viking fleet sailed into the Northern Heartland of Fortriu and annihilated the Pictish royal family. This disaster opened the way for a warlord from Dál Riata, Kenneth MacAlpin, to invade Pictish lands and seize control.

    Dál Riata had a long, adversarial history with the Picts. This Irish colony had been trying to subvert the northern indigenous baseline for over two centuries. In response, Onuist, the Pictish king, had marched his elite northern armies west a hundred years earlier, and laid siege to the Gaelic capital of Dunadd. He burned their strongholds, and put the royal princes in chains. It was a counter-offensive to protect his people from a predatory, foreign nuisance, but it demonstrates how the Picts maintained their independence for so many centuries.

    It’s true that the Vikings had also pressured Dál Riata leading up to MacAlpin’s invasion, but the motive of breaking free from the Viking threat was in addition to the foundational nature and purpose of the colony of Dál Riata.

    St. Andrews: From Pictish Sanctuary to State

    Mainstream history books claim St. Andrews was founded by a miraculous arrival of the relics of St. Andrew from Greece. This was a myth invented centuries later to overwrite the local, indigenous reality. King Onuist had established this great monastery. Its original name was Cennrígmonaid (Kilrymont).

    The entire organic organization of Pictish culture was centered around such monasteries. They were horizontal sanctuaries of hospitality, kinship registries, and regional security. And they operated independently; they were not part of the top-down corporate hierarchy of Rome. However, MacAlpin soon overwrote this old, decentralized Pictish world by replacing it with the rigid Céli Dé registries. Changes in the succession of kings were more gradual.

    MacAlpin’s direct male line of succession eventually fractured, but his eventual impact on the future kings of Scotland resulted in the transition to a rigid dynastic monopoly. For nearly two centuries, the dynasty managed succession through the horizontal Gaelic law of Tanistry. This was a system in which the royal kindred selected the strongest adult cousin to prevent immediate structural collapse. However, the pull toward centralization was irresistible.

    By 1034 CE, Malcolm II systematically assassinated his own male-line cousins. This forced the crown into a singular, narrow dynastic loop. It also paved the track for his anglicized grandsons to permanently replace horizontal Celtic assemblies. Future kings would adhere to top-down, document-obsessed Anglo-Norman law.

    The Ghost of Rome and the Return of Dominium

    Centuries after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, its cold, legal definitions of Dominium were dragged out of the Church archives by ambitious medieval kings like David I. In this way, they were able to declare the unwritten, oral kinship baseline of the Celtic world (dùthchas) legally invisible.

    While an empire is birthed by the arrogant ambition of individual warlords, it very quickly crosses a threshold where it becomes a self-perpetuating, automated resource-extraction machine. At that point, it doesn’t expand because it wants to; it expands because it has to. It’s the only way it can keep from collapsing under the weight of its own internal debt, population pressures, and resource depletion.

    Primary Motivations for the Imperial Pattern

    If we look closely at Rome in 63 BCE and the Viking explosion after 536 CE, we see two entirely different primary motivations, but they both resulted in the exact same imperial pattern:

    🏛️ 1. The Roman Machine

    Driven by Debt and Bureaucratic Overhead: For Rome, expansion was driven by a vicious, structural feedback loop.

    • The Problem: To maintain their massive standing armies, pay off the urban populations, and fund the escalating political battles of private warlords like Pompey, the state required an astronomical influx of wealth.
    • The Dynamic: If the empire stopped expanding, it ran out of new wealth to pump into its system. It would face immediate economic stagnation, military mutinies, and domestic collapse. Therefore, extinction or expansion became the machine’s primary directive. It was an insatiable beast that had to keep devouring new borders—like Judea—just to generate the tax revenue needed to pay for the conquests of the previous generation.

    🌊 2. The Viking Crisis: Driven by Ecological Compression and Survival

    On the flip side, when you look at Scandinavia after the 536 CE volcanic winter, the primary motivation wasn’t luxury-loving hubris or imperial debt. It was pure, raw survival against nature.

    • The Problem: The sudden, catastrophic drop in planetary temperatures wiped out half their population and left them with a severe domestic scarcity of farmable land.
    • The Dynamic: As the population rebounded centuries later, the younger generations found themselves locked in a hyper-militarized pressure cooker with zero inheritance or dirt to stand on. They built the longships and launched their maritime land-grabs out of a desperate, primal need for security, food, and space.

    📐 The Universal Attribute: Total Centralization

    So, the spark can be different—Rome was driven by financial overhead and debt, while the Norsemen were driven by ecological compression and survival. But they both share the exact same foremost attribute: they solve their internal crises by centralizing power and violently exporting their trauma outward to enclose someone else’s home.

    Whether it is an ambitious Roman general walking his boots into the Holy of Holies, or a desperate Norse longboat crew decapitating the native Pictish elite in 839 AD, the result for the indigenous kinship baseline is identical. Their unwritten, horizontal sanctuary is crushed and forced into a top-down extraction ledger.

    Today, we are not even capable of mourning this loss. This article is an attempt to remind us of what has been lost.

    Alternatives to the Machine

    If we are going to call the mistakes of ancient people who were dealing with the machine ‘unforced errors’, alternatives must be available. Alternatives do exist, but a full accounting will require a separate article. This is what we know so far:

    Israel’s covenant enforced order through personal, local accountability to a shared spiritual baseline. If your neighbor was oppressed, the community stepped in. A state police force did not order this. They stepped in because the unwritten covenant demanded it. The society was based on relational intimacy, not corporate compliance. 

      • Under this radical alternative law, all land boundaries were wiped clean every fifty years.
      • Even if a family fell into poverty and was forced to lease or mortgage their ancestral plot to a wealthy neighbor, the debt was automatically canceled and the dirt must return to the original family network.
      • It made permanent corporate real-estate monopolies completely impossible. The machine couldn’t own the valleys permanently.
      • The ancient Hebrew baseline had a built-in, systemic software weapon designed specifically to stop the land-hungry intruders. The “Gordons” and “Davids (King David I)” of the ancient world could not enclose the landscape. (We will also discuss these examples later.)  This ‘software’ was the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25).
      • The alternative to a king was a network of local, independent sanctuaries and tribal assemblies where authority was temporary. Kings were merit-based, and defensive—exactly like the Gaelic Tosach, or the Judges of Israel. When a threat arose, leaders stepped up out of allegiance to the family network. When the threat disappeared, they went right back to the dirt and the plow. There was no permanent political palace to hide behind.

     

     

    1. Sally M. Foster, Picts, Gaels and Scots. B T Batsford, Historic Scotland. 2004. p. 107 [↩]

  • Desperados

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    A desperado is a desperate or reckless person, especially a bold criminal or outlaw. The term is most commonly associated with dangerous characters from the American Old West who were pushed by desperation to commit violent acts. That word now describes the government and political system of the United States of America. In this and subsequent articles I will address the desperados directly.

    Rational Versus Irrational Empires

    If responsible leaders of an empire want to protect the well-being of citizens, it is to their credit. Citizens depend on the world’s domestic and international economies and they contribute to the Empire. Rational leaders operate accordingly.

    By this standard, you are irrational. You act as if everyone but you is expendable. In reality, the end of empire is not your calamity alone. It affects all of us. You are trying to come out on top with a worldview that is not even real. This is the behavior of desperados.

    The Example of Cain

    Consider the story of Cain. In the book of Genesis, Cain killed his brother Abel in a fit of jealous rage. Banishment was the punishment for murder in those days, and Cain’s punishment for spilling his brother’s blood was to be sent away by himself. The spilling of another’s blood on the ground was an offense against the land, and such a person could not remain among his people. It would put them all in danger. But who exactly sent Cain away?

    Cain Was Not Banished by a Race or Class of People. He Was Banished By God.

    Some of you think God was unfair when he chose Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. So, because you sympathize with Cain’s state of mind, you excuse his crime. It has come to the point that you identify as a race or even a nationality in competition with the descendents of Abel. This too is madness. The Bible says it was God who banished Cain, not a race or class of people. You might be able to defeat entire groups of people, but you are no match for God.

  • The Invisible Theology: Ritual and the Enclosure of the Soul

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I’ve recently become aware of a theological error that enables unrighteous dominion in this life, and endangers the eternal salvation of millions of people. Because it is acted out in ritual it is an invisible theology. It’s purpose is to serve the enclosure of the soul.

    Unmasking the Egyptian Mechanics of Unrighteous Dominion

    I only understood the danger fully after I compared Egyptian burial practices with Pictish cross slabs. It is strange that I didn’t see it sooner, but I will argue I’m not the only one who doesn’t see it. In this article I will set out the main issues as plainly as I can.

    In this article I will call out the Mormon Church for its use of ritual to construct a metaphysical closed loop for its members. While the resulting theology may not be formally defined in the written record, it’s there in the background at all times. It is merely acted out in ritual in the Church’s temple ceremony. For this reason, you could say it’s an invisible theology. I would argue this ritual traps women in particular but not only women. It endangers the eternal life of all members.

    The Church’s Critics Might Overlook This

    I understood before I left the Church that the Mormons have a different approach to God. The Evangelicals would say the Mormons don’t depend  on Christ, to which the Mormons counter that they do believe in Christ. I don’t know if either side understands how literal the Mormon error is.

    The Christian View of the Afterlife

    From the 7th to the 9th century AD, many Picts converted to Christianity. In this period, Christian crosses were carved on the back of stone grave markers which had already been carved with Pictish symbols. This clearly indicates an understanding of Jesus’s function as psychopomp. It also tells us the purpose of the Pictish symbols.

    Jesus promised to act as a guide for the dead. Thus, Pictish converts included a cross on their grave markers. In this context, the Pictish symbols can also be understood as instructions for the dead.

    This also implies that Pictish symbols had the same function as Egyptian hieroglyphs.

    The Mormon Temple Ceremony

    The Mormon Church also focuses on the next life but it departs from the Christian understanding. The ritual in the temple ceremony presents male priesthood holders as judges and saviors for their wives. This spiritual hierarchy is not Christian.

    There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.

    (Galatians 3:28)

    This Type of Dependence Could Lead to Abuse

    It’s not hard to imagine that this could lead to abuse in this life. Theoretically, a man could revoke his wife’s salvation on a whim. However, it is more serious in its implications for the next life. This scheme in which human men are able to find the way alone for themselves and their loved ones is not backed up by the practices of ancient people or by Christian theology. Church leaders must correct this error.

     

  • Project 2025, Opus Dei & the Mormons?

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    I’ve been re-reading an article from my files about the Mormon Mafia and the JFK assassination by John F. Sweeney. I haven’t written about Sweeney’s paper and I don’t intend to write about it today. It is quite damning and I don’t want more trouble in my life than I’ve already had. Another reason I haven’t written about it is the hundreds of JFK assassination theories that already exist. No, instead this article is about a book cited by Sweeney, The Cleansing of America1 by Willard Cleon Skousen. My question: Is it true what some are saying that we should be connecting Project 2025, Opus Dei & and Mormons?

    Project 2025, Opus Dei & the Mormons
    Conspiracies

    If you like to research the books you read, as I do, I should warn you that Cleon Skousen’s book is on another level of believability. It does not depend on sources. In fact, it doesn’t depend on reality at all. Skousen claims to know God’s plan for the United States and the World. And as we all know too well, such beliefs are the political currency of our time.

    Cleon Skousen Left Instructions For Future Publication of His Book

    According to the preface, this book represents years of writing and speaking about prophecy and the latter days relative to the United States. Skousen told his family that he wrote it for them, but he didn’t feel comfortable going public with it until the time was right. He left instructions for future publication and assured his family that they would know when the time was right. It would be a chaotic time with many horrors. For example, people would abandon the constitution. (Apparently the time was right in 2010.)

    Skousen: “The Restoration of the Gospel is What Peter Had in Mind When He Talked About ‘The Restitution of All Things”

    According to the Introduction, this book is a sequel to The Majesty of God’s Law. Skousen relied ‘almost entirely on the Bible and standard secular sources’ for that first book. However, for this prophecy concerning the last days in America he had to use the marvelous works of the Restoration (The Book of Mormon). Skousen believed the restoration of the Mormon Church fulfilled the Apostle Peter’s vision of the ‘restitution of all things’.

    Summary of the Introduction

    The central theme of The Cleansing of America is the preparation of America for six major purposes:

    • The restoration of the Constitution
    • The adoption of God’s law
    • The introduction of a Zion society under the Law of Consecration with individual stewardships.
    • The great last gathering of Israel
    • The coming of the ten tribes
    • The building of the New Jerusalem
    Chapter 1: The Divine Destiny of America

    In chapter one we learn that the end goal is the ‘divine destiny of America’. But first, nine things must happen:

    America Must Be Cleansed so that the Restored Gospel can Flood the Earth and Prepare Israel for the Last Gathering

    • The message of the restored gospel must flood the earth in order to search out the remnants of Israel and prepare them for the great last gathering. This has increased since 1989 because the world has opened up.
    • But first we must cleanse America. The near future will see the fulfillment of the time of the gentiles in America. At that time, the wickedness of the gentiles will have so thoroughly sinned against the gospel and desecrated the land that it will go beyond the further endurance of God.

    The Earth Will be Cleansed by a Scourge. The scourge Will Eliminate Wickedness among the Gentiles and Church Members.

    • The Lord says the means of this cleansing will be a desolating scourge, which will eliminate the elements of wickedness among the gentiles as well as the members of the church.

    Church Members Will Be Called to Flee to America Before it is Sealed Off

    • After America is cleansed, the members of the church worldwide will be called to flee to America before it is too late. Also, those who do not want to be drafted into the military world dictatorship will be called to flee to America before it is sealed off.
    • The Western hemisphere will then be sealed off so that it cannot be attacked. The roaring seas will prevent anyone from reaching America either by sea or by air.

    America Will Be the Only Peaceful Place on Earth, Allowing the People to be Organized According to God’s Law.

    • The scripture says at that time America will be the only place on the face of the earth where there will be peace. This will allow the people to be organized according to God’s law. Zion’s cities will be built up to provide freedom, peace and prosperity for the inhabitants of all faiths and the new Jerusalem will be set up as the capitol to govern the entire land.

    Jesus Will Appear to the Jews and Leaders of the Military Dictatorship After the Battle of Armageddon

    • After the Battle of Armageddon, Jesus will appear to the Jews and the leaders of the military dictatorship will be wiped out. With only a sixth of the army surviving, the battered remnants will flee back to their homes. America will no longer need to be sealed off. Thereafter, the New Jerusalem in America will be the Zion from which shall go forth the law with the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

    After the Fall of Gog and Magog, the Remaining Nations Will Fight Among Themselves. The Ten Tribes Will Journey To America and Then Go Out Again to Warn the Nations.

    • After the fall of Gog and Magog, following the Battle of Armageddon, the remnants of the remaining nations will be fighting and quarreling among themselves. Meanwhile, the ten tribes will make their miraculous journey to the temples in America. Twelve thousand will be chosen from each of the tribes. These 144,000 will go out among the nations to warn them for the last time. Those who reject their message will be sealed up to destruction at the time of Christ’s second coming.

    Before the Second Coming Gigantic Changes Will Take Place on the Surface of the Earth.

    • And just before the second coming there will be many gigantic changes on the surface of the earth. The continents and island will become one land. The mountains will be lowered, the seas will be forced back to the poles, and the earth will be restored to its paradisiacle glory just as it was before the Fall.

    According to Skousen, the Lord has said that all of these things must occur before the ushering in of the millennium. If that’s the agenda, where we are now on this continuum?

    The Signs of the Times (According to Skousen)

    “The hedonistic disintegration of the culture in recent years is virtually unbelievable. All the elements of rot and corruption which have destroyed three previous civilizations on this continent are now spreading the same poisonous decadence on every level of American society.

    Who would ever have guessed that America would outlaw Bible reading, prayer, or the ten commandments in public schools? Or legalize the abortion of 40 million American babies in a single generation…or tolerate a flood of murders, robberies, violent assaults and rapes exceeding that of any other nation in the world? …[W]ho would have thought that with the hundreds of millions spent to build prisons, the most dangerous types of criminals would be turned loose on the streets because officials claimed they had no room to hold them? Or… the filth pouring out in books, magazines, television and motion pictures? [Who woud have believed] the thousands of children being sexually abused, even by their own parents? Or the legalizing of sodomy as an optionally judicially protected lifestyle and calling it part of the new morality?” (Skousen, Chapter 1)

    Skousen then informs the reader that many prophets have predicted doom for this nation. They have said the only way to avoid destruction is for the entire people to repent. However, not one of the prophets believed repentance would take place. Not even Maroni, the last prophet of the Nephites.

    The Importance of Civilizational Decline in Right-Wing Scenarios

    I explained in a previous article the importance of civilizational decline in right-wing scenarios. In this book, Skousen spins his own version of certain doom for the United States. His warns the gentiles who are strangers to the law of God that the sword of the justice of God will come upon them if they fail to repent.

    Don’t Give Goodness a Bad Name

    It’s a terrible thing to hold someone’s religious beliefs up to ridicule. But if those beliefs result in judging and physically destroying entire nations, they mock the patience and good will given to the Mormons by the American people.

    No doubt as members of the human race we all have much to repent for, the Mormons Church included. I’m not thinking so much of church members who have strayed. I’m thinking of the church’s leadership.

    Was Skousen’s prophecy of a scourge behind Donald Trump’s failure to act during the Covid crisis? Are South African refugees members of the church fleeing to America before it is sealed off. Could the imprisoning of immigrants have something to do with building a Zion society?

    This may sound farfetched, but what else can explain the unflinching cruelty of the current administration?

    1. The Cleansing of America, W. Cleon Skousen, Valor Publishing Group, April 2, 2010. ↩︎

  • Misogyny is Part of a Complex Ideology

    Reading Time: 7 minutes

    Often misogyny is part of a complex ideology. But it’s not clear which came first–the misogyny or the supporting ideology. For committed misogynists, hatred is a preference. Francis Parker Yockey and Baron Julius Evola were both misogynists. Kevin Coogan attributes this in large part to occult influences. The most prominent source of far right occult beliefs in the postwar period was Theosophy.

    Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

    Among Yockey’s possessions when the FBI arrested him was a citation for the June 1937 issue of The Theosophical Forum, an American journal of the Theosophy Society. The Russian-born mystic, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical society in New York City in 1875. In 1888, she published her book, The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky’s doctrine basically turned the evolutionary worldview on its head. However, she had no intention of replacing evolution with biblical creationism. Her work resulted in countless forms and expressions of mischief.

    Root Races

    According to Blavatsky, the world has seen the rise and fall of seven “Root Races”. This rise and fall has taken place many times over. Now (in Blavatsky’s time) the Aryan, or fifth Root Race, dominates the world. However, the Aryans are at the end of a karmic cycle.

    Blavatsky taught that the Kali-Yuga was a time of great destruction. But its end was coming. This meant the beginning of the new Sixth Root Race. And the Sixth Root Race would begin the ascendancy of man toward the highest, Seventh Root Race of god-men.

    Curiously, Blavatsky’s Root Races were not biological entities. They were psychic entities. But in spite of this, her arguments were very influential for the racist right in both Germany and Austria. They ‘proved’ the Aryans were distant spiritual descendants of the highest root race, descended from the degenerate Atlantean tribes who themselves descended from the original god-men.

    Traditionalism vs Evolutionism

    The subterranean world of the high occult enveloped Yockey. Thanks to his occult interests, he saw himself as part of an underground elite, a secret new race of god-men. He wrote extensively about polarity and he developed sado-masochistic inclinations. To understand him, it is necessary to examine the writings of Julius Evola, the most important and most influential fascist high-occultist in postwar Europe.

    In his book, Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola argued that every epoch has its own myth. Democratic evolutionism is the Kali-Yuga’s myth. The myth of the new age, however, will be the Traditional worldview.

    Tradition teaches that mankind did not come from lower forms. It has higher origins. The lower represents a degeneration from the higher. Like Blavatsky, Evola claimed that today’s Aryans are the spiritual descendants of the highest root race. This highest root race was a ‘divine’ race. But it mixed its seed with the inferior human race, and so it is no longer with us.1

    Tradition, in more recent eras, developed a variety of myths referring to races as bearers of civilization and to the struggles between divine races and animal, cyclopic, or demonic races. They are the Aesir against the Elementarwesen; the Olympians and the heroes against giants and monsters of the darkness, the water, and the earth. They are the Aryan deva fighting against the asura, the enemies of the divine heroes; they are the Incas, the dominators who impose their solar laws on the aborigines who worshipped ‘Mother Earth’.

    Julius Evola, as quoted by Kevin Coogan p. 304

    As mentioned in a previous article, Evola was an early critic of Yockey’s Imperium. However, he merely thought Yockey was unrealistic about the timeframe of the fascist takeover. Evola and Yockey agreed on their basic ideology.

    René Guénon

    René Guénon was also an important figure in the European occult underground. Evola and Guénon had a disagreement about man’s relationship to the gods, however Guénon’s Traditionalism remained important within the European far right. And although Guénon eventually converted to Islam, he remained close to ‘traditionalist’ elements of the Catholic Church.

    Guénon taught that the modern age’s interest in democracy, mass culture, and materialism are all manifestations of the Kali-Yuga. The Kali-Yuga has infected thinking to the point where Western philosophy is purely human in character. Now philosophy is merely part of the rational order, which is inferior.

    The ideal order is a sort of genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom. Humans can’t achieve this kind of wisdom because ‘Truth’ is not a product of the human mind. It exists independently of ourselves. All we can do is apprehend it (Coogan, p. 294).

    Evola embraced this argument completely. He shared Guénon’s hatred of ‘mere human logos’. He believed that all the Renaissance had accomplished was to usher in the exaltation of the individual. Greece’s true zenith was not in the time of Socrates. It was during the mythical Heroic Age of Heracles.

    Traditionalism and the Un-human Ideal

    A human-like ‘personal God’ did not rule Evola’s universe. It was ruled by a numen. He defined a numen as an immutable naked force, an essence free of passion and change, one which creates distance with regard to everything which is merely human, a solar realm of Olympic peace and light, of divine regality. Borrowing from Guénon, he claimed this vision of pure being, the Hindu Satya-Yuga, corresponded in the West to Hesiod’s Golden Age.

    Like Spengler, he believed fascism was valuable only because it would bring on the dissolution of the old world in the Kali-Yuga. The old world’s destruction was necessary in order for the new age to arise. For Evola, fascism was merely a political form of Dada.

    Coogan on The Hermetic Tradition

    To help his readers understand Evola’s argument about God, Coogan examines Evola’s 1931 book The Hermetic Tradition. He reports that when Avaloka, a journal devoted to Hermetic thought, published a review from a section of Evola’s book, The Tree, the Serpent, and the Titan, the journal’s editor, Arthur Versluis, warned his readers that there is something Promethean, if not Luciferian, in Evola’s perspective. Coogan agrees (Coogan p. 296).

    The World Tree

    According to Evola’s ideology, the tree is an axis mundi joining two worlds: the solar world of immortality and timeless knowledge (Being) and the telluric world of Mother Earth (Becoming). This view associates Becoming with women, earth, and chaos symbols like dragons.

    In his book, Evola examines the dual symbolism of the Tree, namely its identification with notions of immortality and supernatural knowledge as well as its association with fatal and destructive forces like dragons, serpents, and demons. But of course Evola is talking about the World Tree. Coogan identifies three famous trees representing universal force. They are the Tree of the World, and the two biblical trees: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. Each of them symbolizes the universal force linked to supernatural knowledge, immortality, and the power of domination. This universal force has a feminine nature.

    Misogyny is based on a complex ideology
    The Idea of a Danger. Credit: George Cotayo
    A Danger or a Promise?

    These trees also contain the idea of a danger. On the one hand, the tree symbolizes a temptation which brings ruin and damnation upon the one who succumbs to it. But it is also the object of conquest which transforms he who dares to undertake it into a God. It might even transfer the attributes of divinity and immortality from one race of beings to another.

    Adam tried to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and become godlike. He failed. But according to some legends, others have succeeded. These include the Hindu god Indra, Odin, Mithras, and Heracles. The legends tell us

    …of an undertaking which involved risk and a fundamental uncertainty. In Hesiod’s Theogony, and typically in the legend of the king of the Woods, Gods or exceptional men are seen as taking possession of power which can pass, along with the attributes of divinity, to whoever knows how to seize it…But among those who make the attempt, some force a way and triumph, and others fall, paying for their daring, experiencing the fatal effects of that same [primordial female] power.

    Julius Evola, as quoted by Coogan, p. 297

    Coogan objects to Evola’s presentation of this drama. He thinks the real question is whether man should even attempt to rival the gods. In mythology there are only two answers to this question, and they are in opposition to each other. They are the ‘magico-heroic’ answer and the religious answer.

    According to the magico-heroic view, he who attempts to become one with the gods but fails, is simply a being whose fortitude and good fortune were not equal to his daring. In the religious interpretation, however, such misfortune is changed to guilt, the heroic attempt [is changed] to a sacrilegious and cursed act not because of its failure, but in itself.

    Coogan, p. 297

    Adam

    Misogyny is Part of a Complex Ideology
    What happened to Adam is the only thing that could have happened to him. Credit: Grafissimo

    Coogan argues that what happens to Adam is the only thing that could have happened to him. Adam becomes one who has sinned. He has no alternative, therefore, but to seek expiation, and above all to renounce the wish which led him to that undertaking. The idea that the conquered can still think of reconquest, or intend to hold firm to the dignity which his act has earned him, appears from the religious perspective as ‘the most reprehensible Luciferism’ (Coogan p. 298). Yet, the heroic viewpoint persists.

    Hermes

    The Hermetic tradition represents the heroic viewpoint. Hermes is not only the messenger of the Gods; he is also one who succeeds. He takes from Zeus his scepter, from Venus her belt, and from Vulcan, the tools of his allegorical craft. In Egyptian tradition, Hermes became Hermes Trismegistus. He is the figure of one of the Kings and masters of the primordial age who gave man the principles of a higher civilization.

    The Fallen Angels

    Fallen Angels
    From Their Union Sprang the Nephilim or Watchers. Credit: francescoch

    We also have the account of fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. Coogan argues that it wasn’t merely their desire for the women that caused their downfall. There is power in woman’s relationship with the Tree, and power is what the angels were really after. When the angels became united to power, they fell and came to earth. They alighted on a high place of the earth (Mount Hermon), and from their union with the women sprang the Nephilim or Watchers. The Watchers teach the Royal Hermetic Art by which man can control the Gods.

    Evola updated and reissued The Hermetic Tradition in 1948. This was three years after the defeat of the ‘Heroes’ in World War II. For Evola, losing the war was not a metaphysical punishment. It was a simple defeat. He never stopped pursuing the quest for power/knowledge, for immortality, for domination over the Tree/Female. The Hermetic Tradition is a vision of a new race of men/gods.

    What Guénon and Evola Had in Common

    According to Coogan, Guénon was different than Evola. He thought Catholicism was the only tradition that could provide the ruling mythos for Europe (p. 300). But I think Coogan gives Guénon too much credit. In Guenon’s scheme, the elite will rule the world using primordial teachings found in several distinct traditions. But that is a discussion for another time.

    1. Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, pp. 291-292 ↩︎

  • European and American Fascism Are Connected

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    Where did Christian nationalism come from? What’s so special about Carthage? Both of these concepts have echoes in the European Right. In other words, European and American Fascism are Connected.

    The Christian Nationalist Party

    Francis Parker Yockey and two associates launched the European Liberation Front (ELF) sometime in late 1948 or early spring 1949. His associates were John Anthony Gannon and Guy Chesham. ELF’s manifesto was The Proclamation of London. ‘Even at its height, the ELF only had about 150 supporters. Its main task seems to have been the production of anti-American neutralist propaganda.’1 (p. 175)

    In either late 1949 or early 1950 Yockey returned to America hoping to find poitical and financial supprt for the ELF from the Christian Nationalist Crusade (CNC), the largest American far-right group in the immediate postwar period. The group’s founder, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, was a flamboyant demogogue and fanatical anti-Semite who began his career as an advisor to Louisiana Govrnor Huey Long, After Long’s assassintation, Smith helped co-found the Union Party with Father Coughlin and Doctor Francis Townsend. Smith lived in Detroit during World War II and enjoyed the patronage of Henry Ford. In 1947 he created the Christian Nationalist Crusade/Christian Nationalist Party as the postwar continuation of his America First Party.

    Kevin Coogan p. 220

    The St. Louis Police Department gave the FBI a memorandum about this meeting. Yockey gave a speech under his pen name of Ulick Varange. The subject was the underground working of the party in France, Germany, England, and Belgium.

    All remarks at meeting were directed against the Communitst, Jews, Negroes, and Republican and Democratic Parties…VARANGE stated that he attended the trials at Nuremberg and other places and spoke of the unfairness of the trials and the importance of the testimony of the Jews. He also stated that we will have a Nuremberg trial in this country some day…

    St Louis Police Department memorandum, as reported by Coogan, p. 221

    Beyond Right and Left

    In the last article, Marco Tarchi said Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga, had made a ‘group-mind’ possible. This quote is from his programmatic Beyond Right and Left. (By beyond, he means the conventional definitions of these two positions.)

    There is a recent American book arguing the same thing. It’s author, Verlan Lewis is currently making the rounds in the United States. Several YouTube channels have interviewed him. In this one, the hosts seem a little uncomfortable with Verlan’s arguments. They may not have been aware of its echo in the European Ultra Right.

    Richard Mellon Scaife and The League to Save Carthage

    In the foyer of Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburg mansion stood a brass elephant on a mahogany stand. Visitors might have thought it was the mascot of the Republican Party. This would have made sense because Mellon’s forbearers had been a financial mainstay of the Republican Party for a century. They were founders of Mellon banking, Alcoa Aluminum and the Gulf Oil Empire. But this elephant was actually paying homage to Hannibal, the fabled military strategist. Hannibal had scaled the Alps on elephant back to launch a surprise attack on the Roman Empire. This homage to Hannibal served as inspiration for a private organization that Scaife founded in 1964.

    In his 2009 unpublished memoire, Scaife claimed to describe a ‘richly conservative life’. He likened his secret organization of wealthy men to the Romans who failed to prevent the fall of Carthage. He called them the League to Save Carthage. They waged a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics. According to Jane Mayer, Scaife’s memoire serves as a secret tell-all about the building of the modern conservative movement.2

    In his memoire, Scaife estimated that in a period of fifty years he had spent a billion dollars on philanthropy. Over $600 million of that had gone into influencing American public affairs.

    Bachofen Claimed Rome’s Destruction of Dido’s Carthage was a Spiritual Struggle

    Chapter 32 of Coogan’s book covers Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. In this chapter, Evola describes a strong emphasis on the masculine, as opposed to the feminine. Coogan cites Evola’s use of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s justification for this view in The Myth of Tanaquil (Die Sage von Tanaquil).

    Rome’s central idea…the idea underlying its historical state and its law, is wholly independent of matter, it is an eminently ethical achievement, the most spiritual of antiquity’s bequests to the ensuing age. And here again it is clear that our Western life truly begins with Rome. Rome is the idea through which European mankind prepared to set its own imprint on the entire globe, namely the idea that no material law but only the free activity of the spirit determines the destinies of peoples.

    Campbell, introduction to Myth, Religion and Mother Right p. 1, (as quoted by Coogan p. 307)

    Bachofen has had a covert influence on both the Left and the Right. He was a great influence on Julius Evola. Thanks to Bachofen, Carthage has become a central idea for the Ultra Right.

    ‘Marx and Engels praised Bachofen’s concept of primitive communism in early societies. Evola, however, emphasized the Bachofen who believed that the transition of human society from matriarchy to patriarchy was the crucial moment in the evolution of human freedom.’3

    ‘Bachofen believed that Rome’s destruction of Dido’s Carthage was a spiritual struggle. It was a clash primarily of Grundanschauungen, spiritual ideals, and not of merely economic and political interests’ (Coogan p. 308). Integral to this argument was Bachofen’s claim about Christianity and other Oriental cults of late Imperial Rome. He claimed they were not merely foreign incursions:

    ‘On the contrary, [they] marked the re-emergence of an attitude to nature, history, and the state that had always been there but that Rome had tried to suppress’– namely its underlying matriarchy.

    Grossman, Basle and Bachofen, p. 175 (As quoted by Coogan, p. 308)

    Along the same lines, Evola argued that Heracles was the West’s first great mythic hero. Heracles dominated the Tree/Female life force principle by obtaining ‘Hebe, everlasting youth. By contrast, Dionysus stood for a ‘Chthonic-Poseidon from of manhood (Coogan, p. 306).

    Ultra Right Influence All Over the World

    In 1951, Francis Parker Yockey attended the MIF’s Naples meeting. (MIF, was the MSI’s women’s division, the Movimento Italiano Femminile. MSI was the largest and best-organized fascist movement in postwar Europe.) Yockey joined the MSI hardliners. This faction was opposed to turning the group into a purely parliamentary organization. This was part of the war between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of Italian fascism.

    During this time, an anti-Semitic group published a weekly called Asso di Bastoni (The Ace of Spades) (Coogan p.211). According to Coogan, Asso Di Bastoni was an excellent example of Italian ‘universal fascism’. On June 1, 1951 it boasted of Ultra Right Influence all over the world:

    ‘There is no place in the world where a fascist movement has not developed..From the ices of the island of Olafur Thors, head of the ‘National Front’, to the Tierra del Fuego, where Peron commanded, to the islands of the Persian Gulf where a section of the MSI exists…to the rice plantations of nationalist Thailand of the ex-collaborationist Luang Pibul Songgram, from the land of the Pharaohs and of the Pyramids where the dictator Nasser is developing his doctrine of the nationalist and authoritarian corporatism to the state of Azerbaijan where the memory of the deeds of Fatalibayli Dudanginsky are still remembered, to the Balkans with the Ustaches and the Iron Guards, and to the Mountains of the Phalange, from the English castles of Sir Oswald Mosley to the Russian steppes of Vlassov and to the Black Forest of the steel Helmets’ and of the Werewolves, from Budapest on the Danube with the ‘Croci Frecciate’  to the islands of Indonesia of the ex-collaborationist Sockharno, from the slopes of Fujiama, the sacred mountain of the Japanese, where the nationalist sect of the Black Dragon of Ichiro Midori is working, to the Indies where the faithful followers of Chandra Bose meet, from the Ireland of the Blue Shirts to Tunis of ex-collaborationists Habib Burghiba, from the Parisian Montmartre with the young cohorts of Doriot and the journalists of Rivarol to the fertile plains of Wang-Ching-Wei’s China, from the deserts of the Middle East of Daoud Monchi Zadegh and of the grand Mufti to the quiet and limpid waters of the Swiss lakes of Amaudruz, from the Norwegian fjords of Hamsun and Per Enghdal and Sven Hedin’s Stockholm to the Lisbon of the ‘Portuguese Legion’ the Slovakia of Tiso and Cernak and the Bolivia of Paz Estenssoro, from Mannerheim’s Finland to the islands of the West Indies where nationalist and phalangist movements are active in black shirts to Israel and the extreme rightist party ‘Herut’, everywhere, in every place and country of the world, the fascist approach has found and finds fanatic supporters.

    Coogan p. 217
    1. Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY 1999 ↩︎
    2. Jane Mayer. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Narrated by Laurel Lefkow, Audible, Chapter 2. ↩︎
    3. Coogan. p 307) ↩︎

  • The Foundation of American Civil Religion

    Reading Time: 6 minutes

    Richard J. Bishirjain has argued that a deformation of history has the ability to destroy historical consciousness and replace it with a derivative, pseudo-interpretation. Unfortunately, a deformation of history has already occurred in the United States. This deformed historical consciousness is the foundation of American civil religion.

    Introduction

    When I first read Bishirjain’s article I accepted everything uncritically. I agree that American Civil Religion causes more problems than it solves. But unfortunately, it is impossible to ignore Bishirjain’s partisan attempts to absolve conservatives from any responsibility. For example, he makes Woodrow Wilson into an intemperate war-monger in World War I, even though Wilson tried to keep the United States out of the War.

    Then why did I choose to present this summary? If nothing else, it’s an example of bygone Conservative rationality. (Bishirjain’s article was published in 1979.) This moral approach would just confuse conservatives in Congress today. But unfortunately, Bishirjain seems to have predicted what has actually happened to conservatism.

    One wonders what the left was doing while conservatism was losing its mind. Progressives would have to be in denial to argue that nothing is wrong with America’s national mythos. My hope is that readers of this article will be able to sift through Bishirjain’s critique of American Civil Religion and formulate critiques of their own–whether of Bishirjain’s views, or Civil Religion itself.

    The Western Experience of History

    Apocalyptic prophets are prominent in American civil religion. But they are nothing new. They were a common feature of the early Christian world as well. However, St. Augustine rejected the claim that the prophecy of the imminence of the millennium would be an actual period of a thousand years in which the saints would rule the kingdom of this world with Christ. He did not believe there was a meaningful theological and philosophical course to the rise and fall of nations. We could use a St. Augustine today.

    If historical consciousness were not such a solid part of Western civilization, the claims of modern-day prophets would not merit a comment. But historical consciousness does shape our understanding of ourselves, our fellow citizens, and the world. In the West, the experience of history involves the mystery of being in which the political community shares. The community’s public myths articulate this mystery. They tell us that the origins of historical political communities are providential; that the community exists under the sovereignty of God and serves some purpose. This shapes our identity as persons, as citizens and as a nation.

    Bishirjain calls this the eschatological dimension of history, and argues that it can’t be avoided or denied. After all, it is found in sacred scripture but also in Greek philosophy. The problem is that if it becomes deformed, it will have personal and civilizational consequences.

    Bishirjian describes the problem as follows:

    If salvation is thought to be intramundane, political life takes on new historical importance as it becomes enveloped in the history of salvation; and politics becomes the field of prophecy.

    Bishirjian p. 33

    To understand how it all went wrong, it’s necessary to talk about what politics is supposed to be. Politics is a science requiring rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances. Politicians must be able to identify the limits of government and potential abuses of state power. And decision makers must have knowledge of the common good and the ability to protect institutions which limit power. (This concern about limited government is clearly a conservative emphasis. This is unfortunate because his concerns are too important for partisan point-making.)

    Civil Religion Represents a Revolutionary Change in Attitude

    America did not start out as a project of global salvation. This came about because Civil religion in the United States has imposed a revolutionary change in attitude. Before Civil Religion, expectations were of a final end beyond time at the end of history. After Civil Religion, expectations changed into some immanent, this-worldly end, and the hope for the future has become dependent on human action. But not just any humans.

    According to Robert Nisbet, our intellectual class has become a ‘clerisy of power’ imbued with a sense of redemptive passion. Other conservatives have warned about this as well. They include Irving Kristol and Michael Novak. According to Kristol, a special section or class within Western democratic society carries this attitude of mind. Michael Novak speaks of the ‘superculture’ and its commitments to the values of modernity–science, technology, industry. We find an all-encompassing politicization of the mind in place of Pragmatic politics.

    Civil Religion is Blamed on Progressives

    Bishirjian identifies Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson as the source of this extreme in American politics. Croly, a progressive, was the first to initiate this superculture. He did this by influencing Teddy Roosevelt and then Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, Croly himself, or at least his first 40 years, is a mystery.

    Herbert Croly

    Croly believed secular saints were both possible and necessary. Furthermore, he thought they would be led by a messiah who will reveal the true path. He published his ideas in The Promise of American Life in 1909, and later, a journal, The New Republic.

    Croly believed these secular saints would realize a national purpose in public affairs, embody the nation’s democratic ideal, and bring about a transfiguration. But, so that ‘the American people may believe once again in the promise of American life‘, these saints must formulate and articulate the democratic ideal.

    According to Bishirjain:

    …Croly’s call for secular saints who will conduct us into a condition of reconstituted and tranfigured reality, has less to do with political science than with prophecy, enthusiasm, and magic.

    Bishirjian p. 36

    The concept of a national idea is important to Bishirjain too. But it does not exist independently nor is it working its way in human events towards a logical fulfillment. The national life can expire, change its form, become something altogether different, not by means of the twists and turns of a world spirit, but the the weakening or collapse of civic virtue and political judgement.

    Woodrow Wilson

    Woodrow Wilson’s version of a political religion was that history moves according to a plan in which America plays a major role. And in his view, God shaped and directed America’s role from the beginning. Apparently, Wilson believed himself to be the messiah.

    The politics of Wilson were not ‘mere politics, they were a special capacity to announce the immanence of a new age certified by the political leader who experienced a special revelation…

    Wilson was an idealist in the sense that T. H. Green defined an idealist as one who seeks to ‘enact God in the world’ by the pursuit of ideals not fgiven in experience. Wilson was committed to the ideal of a world absent of war, a world he believed to bwe within the grasp of a civilized world. And America’s entry into World War I was largely motivated by the desire to attain such an ideal. That it was to be accomplished by violence did not dismay Wilson It is important to understand that Wilson’s desire to involve us in World War I was grounded in his will to destroy the system of balance-of-power-politics.

    Bishir]ian pp. 36, 37

    But was Wilson’s entire desire to enter World War I grounded in his will to destroy the system of balance-of-power-politics? This a deduction on Bishirjain’s part. He bases it entirely on Wilson’s lack of selfish interests in the War.

    On the other hand, it seems that Wilson is on record saying that he wanted to destroy the old order of international politics.

    Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, as whatever cost of independent action every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom would lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics.

    As quoted by Bishirjian p. 37

    Bishirjian argues that Wilson especially aimed to destroy the government of Kaiser Wilhelm. But this speech was given in 1919, so it couldn’t have been Wilson’s reason for entering the War.

    Another mark against Wilson was his efforts to get the Senate to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations. Wilson’s ideal was not realistic in Bishirjain’s view. And unfortunately, Wilson’s ‘visionary politics’ has become the ‘hallmark of American politics.

    • Wilson wants to defend liberty in general. Bishirjain would prefer that he defend the liberty of the American political community.
    • Our relationship with our friends will be based not on mutual interest, but on their willingness to impose uniquely Anglo-American concepts of civil liberty upon their own societies.
    • It overestimates the capacity of Americans to pay ‘any’ price, ‘any’ hardship, and bear ‘any’ burden. This can foster cynicism and skepticism.
    • The failure of the symbolism of such policies leads to a general revulsion against all politics, and the search for the non-politician, the outsider, the uncorrupted one, to lead the national life. He in turn will reassert the idealism of the ‘true’ American tradition, the pursuit of policies because they are right (to the exclusion of ones in our national interest). And the cycle of ideolgical rejection of political reality begins anew.

    Conclusion

    We have seen some of Bishirjain’s predictions come true, especially the last one. We currently have a non-politician who reasserts the idealism of the ‘true’ American tradition. But it may be a stretch to say it all stems from the Progressive era, especially when you consider subsequent Republican maneuvers. It is possible that the partisan approach limits the effectiveness of his arguments.

    For example, I agree that politics is a science requiring rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances. The most recent example of that kind of politics was the Progressive platform in the 2016 presidential election. But then Bishirjain also wants limited government and limited state power. These requirements have the ability to completely override rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances.

    I also appreciate his claim that the national life can expire, change its form, become something altogether different, not by means of the twists and turns of a world spirit, but the the weakening or collapse of civic virtue and political judgement. But when he speaks of defending the liberty of the political community, I wonder which political community he is talking about. Based on actual history, he means the business community, and currently the Democrats are right behind him. Business interests can include weapons manufacturers, and agribusiness. So, whose civic virtue and political judgement are we talking about?

    A clerisy of power is a regrettable development for both parties. And not only because it’s progressive.

  • Is This What Armageddon Looks Like?

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    In the Bible, Armageddon is the place where a final battle will be fought between the forces of good and evil. Up until now we have not taken the rantings of the Christian Zionists seriously, but we have been aware of their lust for the final battle. Now they have us questioning ourselves. Are they mad? Or will they be allowed to demonstrate the righteousness of their cause by force? Is this what Armageddon looks like?

    The brutality of the assault on Gaza is something to behold. We’ve all experienced it in one way or another. The entire offensive has been a message to the people of Palestine. But it has been a message to the global population as well.

    This week, Israeli tanks entered the refugee camp at Rafah after the IDF set a large number of refugees on fire. It can be argued that the intentional, public cruelty of this act was meant to taunt the rest of the world. If so, Israel’s message is destructive of human organization on every level. It demands a response.

    A Response to Israel’s Latest Outrage

    Israel’s behavior represents a double threat to humanity. The Israelis’ willingness and ability to ignore public opinion is a threat for global politics. To trample on public opinion in this way signals the death of peaceful settlements everywhere, and it will have unforeseen consequences. But this pales in comparison to the second threat. When a state calmly broadcasts God’s approval for destruction of life and property, and when its powerful secular allies assist in the carnage, it makes a mockery of religion. The fact that Israel has turned democratic politics into a joke is serious enough; Israel’s religious claims threaten religion itself. This is more serious by far because religion anchors a benign, universal human reality.

    Again we question ourselves: do the stories of Old Testament violence represent ancient history, or are they are a recurring part of human reality? Is this drama somehow necessary?

    Personally, I don’t think so. Let’s continue with this line of thought.

    The Discordant Element in Israel’s Campaign

    It is encouraging that there is a major discordant element in Israel’s campaign. The discordant element is that the Israelis and their allies act as if they have nothing to fear, yet they are compelled to broadcast their excuses to the world. Apparently public opinion is democratic. It demands to be assuaged. How strange.

    You could say the strangeness of it demonstrates that political and military might have no relation to religious power. In fact, they contradict one another. For example, why bother with propaganda if God is on your side? Does God need human approval? And if the Israelis and their allies are able to depend on military superiority to prevail over their ‘enemies’, what do they need God for?

    Where is God in This?

    Perhaps God represents permission for military conquest. If so, it’s not exactly God who gives permission, is it? They argue that the Bible, or history, ‘proves’ the Jews have a right to Palestine. And the Holocaust somehow proves it as well. But military superiority is always there in the background. However, leaving aside the biblical and historical claims, military superiority does not really belong to Israel. It is a function of her allies. Her secular allies.

    The Christian Zionists deal with this unfortunate fact as follows. The secular nature of Israel’s western allies is actually important part of the story. They point to King Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple in 538 BC. And they imagine this history will be repeated in our time, with their help. The fact that Cyrus was not Jewish allows Cyrus to be compared to Israel’s secular allies and specifically, to Donald Trump, who is not religious.

    One could ask why Israel needs Trump to be president when anyone in Washington would support Israel just as well. Apparently, it’s the Christian Zionists who ‘need’ Trump. Perhaps they think Trump will bring our secular experiment to an end.

    Question: if this is what Armageddon looks like, why bother?

  • From Lahaina to Biblical Madness in Palestine

    Reading Time: < 1 minute

    The fire in Lahaina on the Island of Maui was similar in some ways to what we have seen in Gaza, but on a much smaller scale. Was Lahaina a buildup to the genocide in Gaza? In this article I compare the fire in Lahaina to biblical madness in Palestine.

    We’ve almost forgotten Lahaina today because of the carnage taking place in Palestine. But Lahaina’s tragedy is ongoing. I will argue that there are similarities between Lahaina and Gaza.

    After the Lahaina fire, the coyness of city leaders was suspicious. Those who took part in subsequent press conferences seemed almost proud of the insulting and incomplete answers they gave to the press. Housing for the survivors of the Lahaina fire is still in short supply. And many residents are being evicted from the housing they have. Others have already relocated to other states. The callousness of those responsible and the preventable deaths of family members are also comparable to Gaza. Last but not least is the high dollar value of the land involved in the fire. But Gaza has an additional characteristic.

    Likewise, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been flippant and callous in his statements to the press. However, his use of Old Testament references to justify his cruelty sets Gaza apart from Lahaina. Netanyahu’s attitude has been even more smug, conceited, high-handed and pitiless than the leaders of Lahaina.

    Humor and restraint are nowhere to be found in Palestine. The behavior of Israel is heavy-handed, cruel, and ugly. And the suffering and death levied on Gaza’s people is ghastly and final. If those responsible are waiting for congratulations, they’ll wait for eternity.

    Netanyahu’s behavior does not translate as power. Nor is his behavior compatible with religious belief. It merely demonstrates childish, ignorant pride, and delusions of invincibility.