Jan 8, 2005
Of Puritanism, Socialists, Today’s Liberals, Conservatives and Other True Believers
H.L. Mencken didn’t tell us all we needed to know about Puritans, but he offered a couple of key insights:
“A Puritan is someone who, in a Bear Baiting Contest, always bets on the bear.”
“The Puritans fell, first upon their knees, and then upon the Aborigines.”
I note today at lew rockwell.com that Anthony Gregory, of the Independent Institute, has taken up the Rockwellian notion that libertarians ought to build bridges with those on the Left, citing, among other things, a Maoist friend who admires Congressman Ron Paul.
I recall, based on a common opposition to the war in Vietnam, Murray Rothbard and William Appleman Williams editing a book together on the subject. But what came of that, other than perhaps David Horowitz moving over to become a hard-core Conservative?
I should perhaps mention that my own anarchism is genetic — probably more from my Spanish side (Celtic, Sephardic from the mountains of northern Spain, where they still wear the skirt and dance to the bagpipes) than from my American Celtic, Scot-Irish, side in Alabama.
I began reading the Fabians in high school, and was a friend of William Appleman Williams, based on some common ideas about Imperialism, long before I read, and came to know, Murray Rothbard.
The fundamental methodological assumption I have accepted is taken from Taoism, as also articulated by the historian Carroll Quigley; that virtually everything in nature, science, politics, etc., is best observed as a continuum, rather than some sort of Aristotelian, or Manichean, dualism.
That is certainly true when it comes to notions of Political-Economy within a given State, State System, Empire or Universal Empire.
Thus, one can share some ideas with those across a spectrum of positions; joining those from the left, right or whatever, in criticizing the “globaloney” of the Bushian Neocons, without harboring any illusions that a coalition with our fellow critics, to obtain power, could ever be possible.
That, as Mencken understood, was the problem with the Puritans!
The Puritans were excellent as a minority, out of power, opposing the growing authoritarian, absolute monarchy ideas of the Stuarts, but in power, whether in England, or Massachusetts, they brooked no dissidents to their True Believer views. Just ask Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, the Quakers, or the Salem “witches,” among others!
Oliver Cromwell once said, “Consider, in the bowels of Christ, that you might be mistaken.” A noble statement, much better than that my old high school home room teacher (thank God, I never in 5 years, had her for a class), who used to tell us she “might be mistaken, but I am never wrong!”
But that didn’t stop Cromwell from a genocide in Ireland that was much more thorough, although obviously on a smaller scale, than that of Herr Hitler against the Gypsies, Slavs and Jews. In the 1960s (pre-DNA) the great British geneticist, Cyril D. Darlington, estimated there were few, if any, real Celts left in Ireland; most of what were later thought of as Irish, were the off-spring of British soldiers in the service of Cromwellian imperialism. Ah well, so much for any Celtic notion of “limpieza de sangre!”
The enormous deaths from Mother Nature’s recent Tsunami remind us, of the sheer numbers of such genocides, some of which boggle the imagination, along with what imperial butchery has done in the last centuries. American historians, for example, have settled on the estimate of 200-220,000 Filipinos killed a century ago, but no one has done any study, such as has been done in some cases of recent plagiarism and falsification in History, to really refute the work of the Anti-Imperialist League, that closer to 600,000 were killed. The American Army’s figures sound “better,” or more “reasonable,” just as they do today in Iraq.
When Charles II was restored to the Throne, and this was pre-Salem witch trials, he marveled that the Puritans had “killed more people in that God forsaken wilderness (New England), than ever I did to avenge the death of my Father.”
It is worth recalling that Adam Smith’s liberalism grew out of his boyhood experience of seeing witches burned in Scotland, the last country to stop it, and he later noted that his short obituary defense of his friend David Hume brought down more wrath on his head than did his two volume critique of Mercantilism, The Wealth of Nations.
Fanatics throughout history, like George Bush today, have always been people who redouble their efforts, even as they lose sight of their original goal. Apparently Americans admire such determination!
The favorite torture of the Puritans, especially for Quakers, apart from burning people at the stake, was the hot iron pushed through the tongue. Now, that will really shut someone up! Historians are always blathering on about our great heritage from New England, but few — shades of Abu Ghraib — mention some of the seedier history aspects of American history as noted by Mencken above. Borrowing from our relations with the American Indians, the Philippines, the Germans during WWII, Vietnam, and our own extensive domestic prison system, etc., the US is one of the few, perhaps only, nations where the military has written books on the subject of torture and conducts “how-to” Schools in teaching its “practical” application.
William Lind, a Cultural Conservative, and regular columnist for LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, has been writing for several years about the mistake, for example, in Iraq, of the US military not adopting methods of what he calls “Fourth Generation Warfare (FGW),” and, who, if I understand him correctly, is now conducting a seminar on same, which when the results are published, and urged on the American military, will also be available on-line at lewrockwell.com. Will that be required reading, on-line, for places like, the now renamed, but formerly School of the Americas, for which we will need a Spanish version?
Now, I challenge Mr. Lind, and his sponsor Lew Rockwell, who has recently challenged us to break free of old assumptions in order to achieve “a new liberty,” to educate me about their emerging vision of FGW, which is really, after all, Lind’s “high falutin” terminology for counter-insurgency warfare., which does not end up with internment camps, torture, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians both by ground forces, and especially from the air, as it sets out to “win the hearts and minds” of the natives. I do not believe that anything short of the above will achieve"Victory,"as the military defines it.
In the case of bombing, I especially like the anonymous observation that “a terrorist is someone with a bomb, but without an air force.”
The British, led by our old friend, Winnie, were among the first to use such bombing on the Iraqis in the 1920s. From there, it was only a natural progression to the Italians in Ethiopia, the Wehrmacht over Guernica and London, “Bomber Harris” over Germany, Curtis LeMay and Robert MacNamara over Japan and Vietnam, the US in Iraq, and now, in particular, Fallujah
That Mr. Lind, the advocate of FGW, as a more efficient version of counter-insurgency warfare, is listed as a columnist for antiwar.com is enough to make one rethink his monthly contribution to that web site.
In Rockwell’s case, and the Mises Institute, this has gone so far as to admire the writings of the Israeli military advisor-historian, Martin “Bulldozer” Van Crevald, who has been an advisor on Iraq, but is now a critic of the emerging quagmire there. I agree with the comments over the years of the Israeli, Ran HaCohen, whose column at antiwar.com has been an on-going indictment of Van Crevald’s notions of FGW as applied to the Palestinians.
If Courts of International Justice had any meaning, then such advisors ought to be in the dock, along with those underlings who have carried out the dirty work.
And, so, Anthony and Lew, while I have no problem in joining in critiques with those across a continuum from the extreme left to the extreme right about what is going on in America and abroad, I just don’t think I want to climb into bed with True Believers with the goal of some kind of misguided, military, FGW, Futile Crusade to make the world safe for American ideas of Liberty.
“A Puritan is someone who, in a Bear Baiting Contest, always bets on the bear.”
“The Puritans fell, first upon their knees, and then upon the Aborigines.”
I note today at lew rockwell.com that Anthony Gregory, of the Independent Institute, has taken up the Rockwellian notion that libertarians ought to build bridges with those on the Left, citing, among other things, a Maoist friend who admires Congressman Ron Paul.
I recall, based on a common opposition to the war in Vietnam, Murray Rothbard and William Appleman Williams editing a book together on the subject. But what came of that, other than perhaps David Horowitz moving over to become a hard-core Conservative?
I should perhaps mention that my own anarchism is genetic — probably more from my Spanish side (Celtic, Sephardic from the mountains of northern Spain, where they still wear the skirt and dance to the bagpipes) than from my American Celtic, Scot-Irish, side in Alabama.
I began reading the Fabians in high school, and was a friend of William Appleman Williams, based on some common ideas about Imperialism, long before I read, and came to know, Murray Rothbard.
The fundamental methodological assumption I have accepted is taken from Taoism, as also articulated by the historian Carroll Quigley; that virtually everything in nature, science, politics, etc., is best observed as a continuum, rather than some sort of Aristotelian, or Manichean, dualism.
That is certainly true when it comes to notions of Political-Economy within a given State, State System, Empire or Universal Empire.
Thus, one can share some ideas with those across a spectrum of positions; joining those from the left, right or whatever, in criticizing the “globaloney” of the Bushian Neocons, without harboring any illusions that a coalition with our fellow critics, to obtain power, could ever be possible.
That, as Mencken understood, was the problem with the Puritans!
The Puritans were excellent as a minority, out of power, opposing the growing authoritarian, absolute monarchy ideas of the Stuarts, but in power, whether in England, or Massachusetts, they brooked no dissidents to their True Believer views. Just ask Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, the Quakers, or the Salem “witches,” among others!
Oliver Cromwell once said, “Consider, in the bowels of Christ, that you might be mistaken.” A noble statement, much better than that my old high school home room teacher (thank God, I never in 5 years, had her for a class), who used to tell us she “might be mistaken, but I am never wrong!”
But that didn’t stop Cromwell from a genocide in Ireland that was much more thorough, although obviously on a smaller scale, than that of Herr Hitler against the Gypsies, Slavs and Jews. In the 1960s (pre-DNA) the great British geneticist, Cyril D. Darlington, estimated there were few, if any, real Celts left in Ireland; most of what were later thought of as Irish, were the off-spring of British soldiers in the service of Cromwellian imperialism. Ah well, so much for any Celtic notion of “limpieza de sangre!”
The enormous deaths from Mother Nature’s recent Tsunami remind us, of the sheer numbers of such genocides, some of which boggle the imagination, along with what imperial butchery has done in the last centuries. American historians, for example, have settled on the estimate of 200-220,000 Filipinos killed a century ago, but no one has done any study, such as has been done in some cases of recent plagiarism and falsification in History, to really refute the work of the Anti-Imperialist League, that closer to 600,000 were killed. The American Army’s figures sound “better,” or more “reasonable,” just as they do today in Iraq.
When Charles II was restored to the Throne, and this was pre-Salem witch trials, he marveled that the Puritans had “killed more people in that God forsaken wilderness (New England), than ever I did to avenge the death of my Father.”
It is worth recalling that Adam Smith’s liberalism grew out of his boyhood experience of seeing witches burned in Scotland, the last country to stop it, and he later noted that his short obituary defense of his friend David Hume brought down more wrath on his head than did his two volume critique of Mercantilism, The Wealth of Nations.
Fanatics throughout history, like George Bush today, have always been people who redouble their efforts, even as they lose sight of their original goal. Apparently Americans admire such determination!
The favorite torture of the Puritans, especially for Quakers, apart from burning people at the stake, was the hot iron pushed through the tongue. Now, that will really shut someone up! Historians are always blathering on about our great heritage from New England, but few — shades of Abu Ghraib — mention some of the seedier history aspects of American history as noted by Mencken above. Borrowing from our relations with the American Indians, the Philippines, the Germans during WWII, Vietnam, and our own extensive domestic prison system, etc., the US is one of the few, perhaps only, nations where the military has written books on the subject of torture and conducts “how-to” Schools in teaching its “practical” application.
William Lind, a Cultural Conservative, and regular columnist for LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, has been writing for several years about the mistake, for example, in Iraq, of the US military not adopting methods of what he calls “Fourth Generation Warfare (FGW),” and, who, if I understand him correctly, is now conducting a seminar on same, which when the results are published, and urged on the American military, will also be available on-line at lewrockwell.com. Will that be required reading, on-line, for places like, the now renamed, but formerly School of the Americas, for which we will need a Spanish version?
Now, I challenge Mr. Lind, and his sponsor Lew Rockwell, who has recently challenged us to break free of old assumptions in order to achieve “a new liberty,” to educate me about their emerging vision of FGW, which is really, after all, Lind’s “high falutin” terminology for counter-insurgency warfare., which does not end up with internment camps, torture, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians both by ground forces, and especially from the air, as it sets out to “win the hearts and minds” of the natives. I do not believe that anything short of the above will achieve"Victory,"as the military defines it.
In the case of bombing, I especially like the anonymous observation that “a terrorist is someone with a bomb, but without an air force.”
The British, led by our old friend, Winnie, were among the first to use such bombing on the Iraqis in the 1920s. From there, it was only a natural progression to the Italians in Ethiopia, the Wehrmacht over Guernica and London, “Bomber Harris” over Germany, Curtis LeMay and Robert MacNamara over Japan and Vietnam, the US in Iraq, and now, in particular, Fallujah
That Mr. Lind, the advocate of FGW, as a more efficient version of counter-insurgency warfare, is listed as a columnist for antiwar.com is enough to make one rethink his monthly contribution to that web site.
In Rockwell’s case, and the Mises Institute, this has gone so far as to admire the writings of the Israeli military advisor-historian, Martin “Bulldozer” Van Crevald, who has been an advisor on Iraq, but is now a critic of the emerging quagmire there. I agree with the comments over the years of the Israeli, Ran HaCohen, whose column at antiwar.com has been an on-going indictment of Van Crevald’s notions of FGW as applied to the Palestinians.
If Courts of International Justice had any meaning, then such advisors ought to be in the dock, along with those underlings who have carried out the dirty work.
And, so, Anthony and Lew, while I have no problem in joining in critiques with those across a continuum from the extreme left to the extreme right about what is going on in America and abroad, I just don’t think I want to climb into bed with True Believers with the goal of some kind of misguided, military, FGW, Futile Crusade to make the world safe for American ideas of Liberty.