Tag Archives: Arcadia

America after the Fort Hood Shooting: Real Change?

Posted on November 9, 2009 | 2 comments
I think that in the context of the economic crisis of recent months, the huge undocumented population, the high level of the  corruption in the current regimes and the lack of leadership as many people see these things. My question is, “If we were to somehow move towards radical change what changes should we consider?’ I think that the Confederate and the Revolutionary periods are both important founts of inspiration for many discontented people. However, I suppose I want to broaden the dialog to include some influences which are the least likely to be seriously considered. I want to address the royalist tradition.  
I am drawn to including this Facebook  Note for a variety of reasons. I am drawn to it because of my feeble attempts to promote the recognition of heroism on the part of Kimberly Munson.  I am drawn to the subject because one of the networks had a  presentation of the Prince and Me trilogy of movies.   Further, I have been commenting on the relationship of the UK and other members to the European Union and the way that shapes other complex and diverse relationships across the planet ands the future of all things human.  The note I am including in this blog post is about royalism and royalty.
In the Facebook context it was posted after many other posts that did a better job of leading up to the message and measure of this note because those posts had more to say about the royalty of Jesus and about both ancient Arcadian and modern Acadian royalty than I have posted so far on this WordPress blog. But this is a time in my life when I am not as concerned with a perfectly coherent presentation as I have been at times in the past.  So I am including this post without all due preparation of ye few, ye brave, ye readers of my little blog. Another reason I may be writing this post now is that the New Orleans Saints have just won their eighth game in a row and they hold up the banner of the Fleur de Lis which has been a symbol of all French Royalty, of Bourbon Royalty and of the Acadian Royal Line as well. So read ahead if you wish, My Facebook Note. 
 Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 9:02pm |
My brother graduated on May 17, 2009. He was my last sibling who could earn a degree ( I have a different brother who is mentally handicapped and cannot earn any college degree ). John Paul graduated. Next month he will marry the young woman he loves. We took a picture of John Paul, myself, my mother, my brother Joseph, my sister Mary and her husband Chris who all graduated from (USL) UL-L. I was the first, then Mom, then Mary & Chris close in time, then Joseph and then John Paul. My sister Sarah and took the picture. She and I each have a degree from LSU, she got her bachelors there and I got my masters degree there. I think of all the young people pouring out into the economy. According to a huge variety of people who claim to know something we are in an economic crisis. I think that more and more people are acknowledging that we also have long-term economic problems related to wasting the earth. This year’s university and college graduates in America nad many other countries have done what they could to get where they are and did not choose the time of their birth. They hope for the best and yet perhaps are entering one of the worst job markets to exist in a very, very long time.

What a challenge that is for all of them. I also listened to Barack Obama’s speech at the Notre Dame Commencement. I listened to it on delayed broadcast on one of the C-SPAN networks, C-SPAN 2 I think. It was a good speech if I had not already hardened into an adversarial position and point of view towards President Obama then I think it would have gotten him substantial good will from me. However, it at least did not do anything to increase ill-will or hostility on my part. He seemed to offer the kind of olive branch to pro-lifers which actually has some value when it comes from a president. The abolition of the conscience clause by the FOCA bill had it been passed would have morally justified civil war and revolution ( that would not have happened but it would have been morally justified). Obama said words which if he were not lawyer and politician speaking in public would fairly be taken as an assurance not to abolish the clause which allows health care workers not to perform abortions for reasons of conscience and pro-life institutions not to provide them as one of their scheduled services. Whatever happens in the future in itself it seemed a speech aimed at not providing occasion and justification for new hates and new rage.

Since I do not feel compelled to use this Facebook Note in venting new and justified hateful criticism against President Obama I will use it to discuss briefly an economic point of view which is a fundamental attack on the idea that the Market and the State itself are the only arbiters of economic life and exchange. I am going to explain true and pure royalism as it defines its ideals of that ideology’s most vital institutions — the Court and the House. Explaining them I will not get to the advocacy of a specific plan to make them real. In this case I am reminded of what many capitalist leaders quoted from a financial sage when Russia began to move into post Soviet reality. The rather articulate money man expressed his view of the problem this way “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium”. But of course fish populations can produce several soups and soup once consumed is simply shit and used up energy. The capitalist world is also dead from a royalist point of view. But it is also possible to resurrect it just as the post-Soviet money man was trying to resurrect capitalism. A king or royal sovereign need not and usually does not in any meaningful way own everything in the realm. Discussing the property of a royal sovereign is too much for this note but I will merely insist that it is a complex subject admitting of much variety from realm to realm. However in a very non capitalist way the King or royal sovereign does dominate the economic life of the court and less so but still the royal house. It is remarkable how maintaining a court tends to increase a variety of forms of economic flow and exchange. It is amazing how it tends to strengthen family fortunes and family small businesses. It is amazing how cheap even the finer courts are when one considers competing ways of maintaining a national symbol and making a global impression. It is amazing how they can appeal to the Few and the Many.

I personally should state clearly that I perceive my own economic failures as and lacks as being more massive than I can easily describe or believe sometimes. Yet despite that I am willing to write about economics for a variety of reasons. I think I have spent a lot of effort because evolution requires more energy than entropy.

The time we live in is a time of economics. It is an age of economics. The last twenty years perhaps have seen a resurgence of other issues and ways of being. However, capitalism, communism, socialism, National Socialism, most of fascism and other American political oddities like “Silverism” and “Free Soilism” are defined and define themselves mostly in economic terms. In the Philippines the Federation of Free Farmers, The Grange in the USA, the Priest-Worker Movement in France, the (original not the current) Green Revolution and a variety of population related movements have had broad social agendas like the macroeconomic systems listed above. But they viewed the road to social transformation was and is seen in economic terms by most in such groups. Writing of roads is especially evocative for me today because I live out in the country and the significant highway between my home and my hometown is currently closed while they work on the small bridge nearby. So I am taking a much longer route real country back roads. It costs me quite a bit in time and money. However, it is not philosophically troubling for me to endorse the idea that people and governments should repair and maintain bridges. I just have to put up with any inconveniences that are necessary for that to occur in a reasonable way and with reasonable dispatch.

So in a similar way we all can develop enough civic virtue to accept some of those activities which we see as necessary in an economy even when there is a present inconvenience to us. When the relationship between selfishness and civic virtue is such that people no longer accept the necessary real and metaphorical bridge repairs in their economy then a society is doomed to some very bad and relatively immediate trouble. That is perhaps a difficult to evaluate but very certain social litmus test.

I think that for me there is always a range of demands for which long-term investment, plain old gambling and paying off old debts is appropriate. However, there is always a balance with one’s own immediate needs and the immediate needs of one’s dependents. Society must recognize that individuals and families are well positioned to perceive their needs and to meet them. Society must also see that family and individual interests are very important because a starving, poorly housed, uneducated and ill transported mass of individuals and families form a weak and pathetic society. Such people may have great moral capital after losing a just war or after some unforeseeable catastrophe but one cannot applaud the continuance such a state of affairs from many morally viable point of view. The great strength of some economic systems we have abandoned is that they maintained certain foci of continuous economic stimulus through good times and bad. Enduring spark plugs and repair shops existed not affected much by quarterly earnings.

One of my great interests in life is ancient Greek political science. This science is based on the idea of the role and characters of the One, the Few and the Many. In a very much less significant way they also studied the role of the All and the None. These would be basic components of society. I want to discuss these components and their functions a bit in economic terms in this Facebook Note. The One or monarch had the role in the ideal state of preserving those parts of the economy which were most needed and useful to the Few for the Few and likewise what was useful for the Many for the Many. There were tides and changing balances but not as frequent catastrophe as in an unmixed democracy.

Monarchy and royalism are two different things but they are somewhat related things. In popular culture in America a king is most understood as a man with a pointy metal hat who lives with his queen in a big house with guards and has something to do with a country. No understanding much deeper than that can be taken for granted. I want to lay out in this Note a realistic view of what royalism at its very center is meant to be like and what its economic costs and benefits might be. I want to discuss and analyze the court and royal house from an institutional point of view.

One thing about the” Few” is that while the word translates to about the same thing as “a minority” the implications are distinct and the associate ideas are different. Yet on the other hand there are certain facts about being an identifiable group that is a minority which cannot be changed regardless of how society develops or interprets power. In a perfectly Royalist USA there would be some black and more nonblack African-American Titled Aristocrats but more who were from the white majority and higher ranks abounding in a few ethnicities with none excluded. These titled persons, high-ranking courtiers and military officers as well as US Senators would be the Few. They would have some preserved rights and would be in a different position than either ethnic or political minorities in our current political and economic system.

The Royal Court and House is a powerful economic institution which I wish to discuss in some detail from a historic point of view. In my most recent note I mentioned or repeated the idea or claim that the King of the Arcadians is the First and Father of all Earthly Kings. While that may be difficult to believe, since I do believe it is logical for me to speak and write on the basis of that belief. So here are some thoughts about the nature, origins and function of Royal Houses and Courts. There is also the issue of the monarchy as we have discussed it above in the passages on the political science of the ancient Greeks. The royal courts and houses are and are meant to be a special place in which a portion of the few and the many are joined to and made to clearly orbit around the one when that one has assumed a royal character. That character in turn is tied to family and house of a royal character.

It should surprise nobody who is actually thinking that there is what the Motion Picture Association of America would classify as an R rated or NC-17 rated quality to the royal establishment in its own rights and own ideals because there is a real sense in which the royal court and house function best as the juncture of human capacity for the forbidden with the ideals honored by the realm which produce the prohibitions. A perfect King of Sweden even today would at least find the idea of drinking a toast from his enemy’s skull lined with gold to make a cup interesting. This would be a part of his heritage which would add richness to his celebration of the Eucharist, his toasting on state occasions and his conflict with his foes wether he does the cup thing or not. If he is great souled enough to be a great king then he can be such a man and in context make life less obscene and not more so than it would have been. With sexual morality this is even more the case.

In its ancient essence the royal family and house joins into one thing a number of traits, qualities and institutions which are not likely to exist otherwise. This is really one of the great purposes of a royal house. The way I see this and would encourage my readers to see it is that in terms of royal houses and courts there is a rather narrow range of ideals which are the ideals of the Royalist tradition. These are not the exact ideals of Christianity or any other official or popular religion. They are not the ideals of any particular nation or economic system. They are the ideals that are intrinsic to royal monarchies on Earth. As the royal house and royal court is adapted to any particular set of ideals specific to a religion country, time and people then the institution undergoes a transformation which is similar to a market process. Investments, sales and purchases are made in which values and rights are transformed into a state in which the institution can exist and thrive. But for the start of this part of our discussion let us consider what the values or disparate elements are in their pure form:
1. Executive and Judical policy and Politics especially.
2. Family name, brand and tradition.
3. Religion and Especially sense of Duty to the Most High
4. Monument Preservation
5. War and a special role for old, wounded and crippled warriors
6. Hunting and wildlife management
7. High Marriage
8. Polygamy
9. Prostitution
10. Licensed and Localized Deviance.
11. Gardening
12. Ethnic Traditionalism
13. Internationalism and Diplomacy
14. Production of Royal children, support of families and Dynastic Ambition.

1. The legislative functions in the royalist ideal will come from a variety of processes which involve principally three sources. First, tradition and Constitutional law as one thing possible to modify but in a category deserving respect. Second the will of the Many in the legislative process. Thi.rd the will of the Few in the legislative process. The One who is royal should have some limited legislative prerogatives but should be the clearly defined last resort in the Judiciary and supreme authority in the Executive. Royal protocol is meant to make all these portions of the system work well together. around all the tables and hearths where likely future kings are growing up these political processes should be in the air, in at least occasional conversation, notes and schedules. These influences form the future monarch. Succession politics are especially important. However, if we get to that discussion at all then we will touch on it under part 14.

2.Genealogies, family histories, coats of arms, parties, rolls of guests and invitees are all part of the experience of royal family. They train all the royals to see property in title as a major portion of any property they can have or aspire to and form a context for the rest of their lives together.

3. “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord”, the Lord’s Anointed, King or Queen by the Grace of God and other phrases and titles can abound. It is possible on the fallen and confused earth for a pantheist or polytheist in the fullest sense to be a legitimate monarch and royal sovereign. However, it is an imperfection in the claim. Even if the realm is pantheist or polytheist the royal monarch is meant to represent the Most High sovereign whom the Hebrew Psalms call the “Great King over all the Gods” — in both worship and study the royal house should be a place where the honor and claims of the ultimate King are recognized and honored. An atheist king is really a Tyrant although he may benefit himself and his realm by drawing on what element s he can of the royalist tradition into his tyranny.

4. In a royalist society when a great building or place is in danger of becoming a ruin it is presumed that it becomes the property of or falls to the use of the royal house and court. The royal house and court also are preservers of monuments which are not architectural or spatial. The King and Queen especially should have a variety of roles in awarding honors, keeping an archive and overseeing but not merely creating lesser lines of succession. Military honors and monuments, religious ones, industrial and agricultural honors and the records associated with all of this have a special relationship to the court.

5. In many cases the king should be a very skilled and accomplished warrior who has some notable physical limitation. He should gather around himself those injured and limited in past wars who are still able to do some fighting and can still understand much about the nature of war.

6. “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord” is a phrase that describes the ideal king and many of his retainers. Hunting provides an excuse to preserve wild lands in quantity which is a vital role of royals. It should allow royals to help bring in food without competing with as many workers as with most occupations in their kingdoms. Hunting provides occasion for the practice of warlike skills and the rearing of princelings and others who will have some basic warrior skills outside of military formalities.

7. The ideal royal monarch is a male a king. However, in the ideal royalist civilization there will always be a small minority of female monarchs who are Queens, Princesses or other such in their own right and hold their own sway over their realms with their husbands as consorts. One of the reasons for these few exceptions is to strengthen the status of those relatively many High Wives of Kings who are Queens by Marriage. These Queens must know that when times are bad their roles will contract relative to the King’s powers and court. But the ideal and norm should always be:
I. The Queen has her own chambers and court within a court which is composed of two parts. The inner one of women only and the outer one of men and women.
II. At least some titles and holdings which are hers separate from her husband.
III. A guard which is of high quality and composed of warriors loyal to her directly.
IV. An allowance which is just hers and is fixed from the royal treasury.
V. She is the King’s senior most adviser and courtier and sits beside him on the highest occasions of state.
VI. Her highest honors and greatest protocol obligations go in a particular order. The King,the Queen Mother – mother of the King, her oldest Son who is heir to the king, the highest ranking members of her maiden family. Within her inner court this is the one aspect where her protocol is not that of the family or realm at large.
VII. Ideally the King should have no mistress or other lovers for the first two or three years of his marriage to the Queen. He should provide for earlier mistresses a suitable position but not be intimate with them during that time.

8. Polygamy is basically essential to maintaining a royalist system. It can be restricted and minimized but that is not a good thing for the royalist monarchy it is simply possible. All marriages other than the High marriage ought to be overseen by a wife who is not the queen but is of high rank. The harem will always have ritual tributes and protocol acknowledgements of both the Queen Mother and the Queen. Ideally, these women will have specified legislative and diplomatic responsibilities and portfolios which are not negligible. They should have their own places but also a space for them and their women guests only and there they should entertain the Queen and Queen Mother separately on scheduled occasions. A small harem of less than ten women can struggle along with little institutional organization. The large harem is fully an institution of vast importance performing many roles that cannot be well described in this note.

9. Prostitution interfaces with the royal house and family in a range of ways and at a range of levels. It is vital that many of the other elements in this composite be quite strong in order for this not to overcome and destroy all the rest and the sum and whole of all. However, prostitution is strongly connected to the idea and practice of royalty as an institution. Among the elements that function to keep royal prostitution working as it must are the following.
I. Relatively easy forgiveness for almost any sexual past offenses or injuries sustained by royal women. However, it is forgiveness because the penalties which go all the way to death are still possible.
A special note is that the ideal queen and king will have been exclusive and affectionate lovers for a few years after marriage and they will retain some sexual congress thereafter. thus the firstborn will be the king’s biological son. But in ancient times and the ideal there is no heir apparent and as the king turns to his mistresses the queen will spend time with the most accomplished and stylish men in the realm and elsewhere. There should be a lot more dreaming than doing but it is absurd to think that queen is really and truly expected never to have sex with any of them.
II. Royal immunities and a king who really will kill men who turn palaces into brothels. Only that will work well.
III. Polygamy in which the mistresses or plural wives of the king generally have no sexual relations with any other men during the years when they are really active with the king.
IV. Women of varied degrees including courtesans who are open and well-regulated prostitutes.
V. Non-prostitution of almost all newlyweds and both class and ethnic endogamy which allow a maintenance of blood filiation by multiple lines within the royal community despite new bloodlines unacknowledged.
VI.By most traditions and all non-murderous ones both merit and election as well as birth must enter into the succession of the highest royal titles.

10. The court and the royal house are places where others who are not average or normal per se can earn a place of freedom and some peace by offsetting usefulness and excellence. This is also a very important function of the royal court or house. Sex is also an issue here. In the ideal royal court there are all the sexual types I have already mentioned but there are also places and roles for the truly temporarily, permanently and sporadically celibate people. Officers and soldiers from genteel families have the opportunity to move to court and have their wives function as extraordinary mistresses or harem members of the king or princes with children being reared as their own. Women who are unacceptable as acknowledged mistresses or plural wives can marry homosexual men who are willing to assist in discretion and family duties. These and some monastic and semi monastic types who are discreet homosexuals rather than true celibates can form part of a community within a community that engages in homosexual relations at their own risk and with understanding of their unique roles and limits at court. There should be acknowledgement that homosexuality goes on but not open relationships between particular men. On the other hand the court is the ideal place for the mistress of high-ranking clerics in any religious tradition to keep their mistresses. For reasons that are hard to explain here a Catholic monarch would have supreme policy reasons to reward a heterosexual bishop who had been a devoted celibate pastor with a fine mistress and a house to keep her in near court. All children are taught that a husband and wife belong to each other sexually and are the parents of the wife’s children. That is in fact the truth and the language evolves over time.  Religious and ethnic minorities and diplomats are also expected to be able to live at court within a different set of rules and tolerances.

11.Gardening is very important at court and in royal families.  ideally a good amount of food is grown by royals retainers and domestics not working ver hard at it but working with the help of a few professional gardeners. This food helps with feasts in the good times, charity and survival in the bad times.  Exotic herbs, narcotic and alcoholic plants of very high quality should ideally be produced, refined and both sold and provided to guests at court. Princes and princesses should do a little labor in the garden because it is run by the family and their work can be consistent with their personalities not geared to drudgery. An ideal king would prune plats are something a few hours each month and actually enjoy it.
Preservation of rare plants and birds, herbal medicine, flowers for interior decoration and green spaces for sport and recreation ought all to exist as part of the master plan of gardening.

12. Because of some leisure and the availability of people to assist them in various ways the royal courts and houses should be able do agreat deal to honor and preserve various ethnic traditions of the realm. They will especially honor their own but they will also find the proper ways to acknowledge those of ethnicities larger and smaller than their own.

13. Internationalism and diplomacy ought to be part of the air of court. Map rooms, gifts from foreign royals and teachers and some marriages should reinforce the presence of diplomats and the foreign service. People having lived at court should have absorbed a certain amount of education in diplomacy and international affairs.

14. It is in this total context that succession and the production of heirs for the preservation of dynasties is to be best understood. There is no way to estimate the total value to a political system of maintaining a royal house and court when it is all that it should be.

My sister Sarah celebrated her birthday on May 18. She has that sort of royalist sensibility that pervades all she does though as for as I know she has never been political about it in the way that I am and have long been. But in Mexico and America I have often seen her do things that help sustain the royalist heritage in North America. Her baptismal name Sarah Anthea can be translated from Hebrew and Greek as “Princess of Flowers” and I often called her that when she was small. I like the fact that she is descended from Joseph Broussard, Severin Leblanc and that the line of the Basileus Arkadios is evident in her. She is 33 and I hope she lives long and prospers as we move from this Star Trek year towards the future. I wonder what her economic potential might be in an aquarium instead of fish soup.

Most of the royal sovereigns left in the world are in Europe. While all of them have some qualities of the ideal court I describe above none of them are exact duplicates of it. None of them are really very close to it. That is not all that surprising. But Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands Monaco and few other places seem to be struggling along in Modern Europe with some version of the royalist ideal. Because I basically have a royalist point of view I tend to see possible royalist solutions to American problems. I see things royalism and royalist institutions could possibly contribute to ongoing problems of race, class, labor, religion and growth. I do not think we will see those solutions applied in my lifetime but it is not technically and formally impossible. So while I am not planning any violent demonstrations nor suggesting that American Royalism will become politically viable I am suggesting that it is not the same kind of impossibility as burning water in your lawnmower tomorrow.

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The Nobel Prize and Western Civilization

Posted on October 20, 2009 | 3 comments
Barak Obama’s recent winning of the Nobel Prize has captured world attention. For many people living in Western Europe and of European descent in the former colonies of Western European followers the Scandinavian countries are just part of the same Union as Italy and have little to distinguish them but the weather. However, I do not feel that way.
However, Scandinavians almost never complain directly and openly themselves. Hitler’s whole career was a long complaint about the corruption of the Nordic Race by southerners but he was not the head of a Norse state nor a Norseman. It is more likely that the Jews, Brits, Americans and Africans of whom I am much less critical in this essay will be the ones who complain.
 
In addition, there are those outside for whom all of these things are even. more obscure. However, I am not going to address the Prize itself. I am reprinting here a post from my Facebook profile written quite a bit before the awarding of the Nobel Prize. For more about the prize itself look up my entry from the day Obama received the prize. 
 
I am not a person who is excessively happy or excessively generous in my high regard for any current society but if this provokes any Scandinavian I can hardly blame them and it is not unintentional really.
To the post:
 
 
 
 Monday, May 4, 2009 at 3:36pm | Edit Note | Delete
I may go to Mexico ( I have tried many times lately) and want to do all I can to get to 52 notes by the time I reach June 15. So I thought a quick and easy subject that I could knock out in a few days would be Western Civilization. So in this note I will cover what 10,000 or so scholars have been writing about for the last 2000 odd years or so. Hopefully when you have finished reading it you will really know a lot.
I suppose that prior to really discussing Western Civilization one ought to define the terms “Western” and “Civilization”. That is certainly how Socrates would have gone about it and he is certainly one of the major fountains of whatever Western Civilization turns out to be. However, there is no group of people here to stand in for the young Athenian aristocrats I would speak with if I were him. Socrates is a major literary figure but was not a writer. His talent was for leading discussions. From his example of course we get the term Socratic method. The Socratic method whether written of in upper or lower case letters is still the principal technique in American law schools. I of course attended one such twice.

I have a fondness for Western Civilization. It strikes me as a thing worth learning about and keeping in perspective as one of the biggest and best things humans have done. However, it also strikes me as a flawed thing with many acts of wrongdoing which can be laid at its door. I also think that more than any other people the Chinese have reason to be a little paranoid as to why we have developed such an obsession with the study of Western Civilization under just that exact title. This note will not only deal with Western Civilization.

I think that all of human greatness is a subject and a reality far broader than Western Civilization. In fact I find that Humanity is far more rich and complex a topic than Civilization itself. Civilization is a mode of being  which is not an unmitigated good in fact. Civilization is many things but it is always a gamble there is a great deal of gambling in the structure of a real and honest civilization.Civilization causes us to all give up many things we want and could want more. Civilization causes us to feel a need for and consume things we might not otherwise consume. These dissatisfactions are very costly and there must be off-setting good results to justify them. Many patterns of life are determined by the civilization itself or its large corporate and collective organs. A vital and basically good civilization has an element of institutional preservationism, an element of planning some structured sharing. Civilizations without those things soon cease to deserve the designation. These are elements combined with a structure of optimism and gambling that is essential to the civilized stance and point of view.

Those civilizations which do not have an element of gambling in their structure have much greater evil making things go and are in fact not really civilizations they are to real civilizations what the creature described by modern writers following Stoker’s fictional vampire Dracula is to an average human. They keep up the appearances of life but without many of its most vital processes. Dracula is all about death and in the sun he is ashes but he claims to be immortal and does go in a sort of life for a very long time.

Unless a society is renewed continuously and in a way which is authentic then there is no way it can remain a real civilization indefinitely. I am fully certain that many civilizations are almost entirely dead before the force which actually destroys them appears on site.I have had a feeling much of my life that the civilization into which I was born had huge problems in its inner resources and workings. I have often felt that my life was really a profound hell in many ways. I still often feel that way.

I have written a lot about Jesus in these notes. I have also dealt a great deal with other forms and leaders who were Jews, as he was. Jews have played a large role in Western civilization however (though oddly Jew has come to mean someone who does not follow Jesus and is sure about it ) Jesus is their greatest flowering out into the world and is one of the very tiny number of people born before 1500 who truly envisaged his legacy as bringing something to all peoples and cultures of which he knew or did not know during his lifetime. He was an outgrowth of Jewishness and its highest expression in that regard. We may turn to this subject again in this note. But to sum up the Jewish thing is too much about just Jews on the one hand and about all humans on the other hand to be the direct foundation and centerpiece of Western Civilization. If one wants to make a silly and ethnocentric error which is the least incorrect then this would be it,”Western Civilization is spelled  “>-G-R-E-E-K”. If one wants to speak of Eastern civilization one should know lots about Japan, India and the Eastern part of Arab tradition. But if one wants to make the ethnocentric silly error which is least incorrect then it would be, “Eastern Civilization is spelled -C-H-I-N-A”. Greece and China aren’t even close to the whole story but nonetheless one could never exhaust either of their contributions to Western and Eastern Civilization respectively. They are of course very different countries.

I am proud to say that I speak truly deplorably horrid Greek and surpass it with almost superhuman butchering and botching of Mandarin Chinese. I think when one speaks these languages as badly as I do there is a sort of automatic respect which is born within one. I do not write at length in either of these languages. I do write badly at length in quite a few languages. However not in ‘Ellada or Putong Hua.

I think that reading Homer, Plato and Aristotle are essential to being well educated in the lore of Western Civilization I certainly openly advocate such readings. I have occasion to teach a few young boys whatever I wished for a few months full-time on several different occasions and I have always set up a schedule of a number of subjects rotating through each week. typically there have been five or so of these subjects but usually on has been the Bible and another has been what I call the Classics which always starts with Homer, Plato and Aristotle and not necessarily in chronological order.

Much like the Bible, Greek thought has been co-opted and sometimes hi-jacked by a variety of people with agendas which were intensely important to them and which were formed largely by reactions to the points of view held and expressed by other people trying to control the discussion of these same writers and ideas. However, the Greek world is truly very vast and very diverse.The Greece of Lycos the Wolf-man king of Arcadia and of Alexander the great are very clearly connected but are vastly different from one another. The Greek civilization of Septuagint and the Ptolemy dynasty are profoundly different again.

I could read and teach only Greek ideas and culture all my life and only that and scarcely make a good start. However, Homer, Plato and Aristotle are the things I have repeatedly chosen to teach when offered choices. They bring a person into the experience of the great Greek phenomenon of experience.

The New Testament is also written in Greek of course. it is drawn from sources written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic but all of those ancient books are lost and the texts closest to the best of them are the Gospels in Koine Greek. Christianity is certainly vital to the history of Western Civilization. But Christianity has universal obligations. A good Pope must be especially loyal to the city of Rome and also have a love for Jerusalem. However, a good Pope must also have some real space in his heart for the good of Beijing, Delhi and Lesotho not only the people who live there but even the pre-Christian cultures that flourished there. To be Vicar of Christ and not a great scandal is to be the vicar of the one who sent the Good News to the ends of the Earth.

The pre- latin people and other Italians, the Celts, The non Hellenic Egyptians, The Ethiopians, the Germans and the Norse each have a substantial history with Greater Greece that predates their own written history outside of Greek history. All of these groups who made a substantial contribution to Western Civilization from the inside were at least a bit Hellenized before they emerged as there own sort of thing. On could describe modern Western Civilization as that cultural system which emerged from:
1.The Hellenization of Ancient Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
2.The Romanization of the Hellenic World.
3.The Christianization of the Roman Empire.
4. The Barbarization of the Christian Roman Empire.
5. The Fashioning of Christendom from the Teuton lands and the crumbling Empire’s pieces.
6.The survival and change of Christendom under the assault of Islam and the Norse raids and settlements.
7. The Renaissance process of remaking Christendom mostly with ancient Hellenic ideas.

The many important things that have happened in Western Civilization since about 1600 AD depend on all of these foundational transformations are react intensely to them. These 4000 years from 2400 BC to 1600 made Western Civilization a definite and real thing which still remains identifiable. Things have gotten better and worse since 1600 in all kinds of ways but much has stayed the same. I do think however that we are in a place where we could lose all that is left of this civilization.

I think that Western Civilization is in serious trouble. Things have gotten bad in ways sufficiently broad and mysterious to be difficult to detect, analyze or appreciate. However, our civilization will have to play some very fine poker or lose it all in my view. I am doing what I am currently able to get done to address that crisis but it certainly is not nearly enough. I know that for me society has always been flunking some test of what would be “good enough”. I see this tiny planet in a vast abundance of worlds and cannot help but believe we are very far short of making the grade. But in this pessimistic worldview  and yet I see the trend as downward towards worse and worse performance on the scales I am using to measure with in these matters.

One quality of Western Civilization is what some friends of mine and I used to call “the unbearable whiteness of being” that was a pun because of a movie called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. White Racism, White Supremacy, White Identity Preference and Snow on All Mountains are actually all distinct politico-social views of whiteness in the history of Western Civilization. There at least two and a half people left alive who can rationally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and the differences each has with each other position. I personally believe that thought will probably disappear completely as what I could identify as thought within 5000 years if humanity lasts that long. I also think we are already missing huge areas where thought once operated in our species. Whiteness and race is one of the areas where thought has almost entirely disappeared. I find being ruled by a race into total imbecility distressing but have already acknowledged that my life has not been a happy one. I can pretty much guarantee you that whether or not the people you may think tower over me intellectually do tower over me intellectually or not — I am not nearly as impressed with their thought as I have been told I should be. However, I am impressed with thought and am not anti-intellectual.

When discussing whiteness there is something that needs ot be said. I don’t think a driveling snot nosed idiot of any color has the right after his own odor wakes him up to define whiteness. When I was in China I saw huge numbers of faces beneath the wintry skies who bright red blood flushed cheeks showed the cold as the epicanthic folds around their eyes shielded them from the dust particles on the huge winds across that vast plain. These dark-haired non Caucasians were white people though they did not refer to themselves that way. The three people I have had the most emotional affection for in recent years are named two nieces and a nephew Alyse, Anika and Soren with a German last name and two of them are about as Norse-Teutonic in color as one can get. All my nephews and nieces at this time have last names that sound German to me though one brother in law says his name is a Dutch one and not Deutsche one. However, I do not believe in a German master race and don’t plan on forgiving the German peoples living in Europe for the Holocaust at any time while I am alive. Nor do I forgive the US for not exacting more revenge.I do not advocate dictatorship but if I had been the US dictator I would have enslaved lower ranking Nazis and shipped them to fields in America with promise of serfdom for kids and freedom for grandkids. I would given half of the land holdings & fortunes of Germany to Germans from the colonies who left the country generations before it became a murderous insane asylum and I would have sold the other half to buy Sinai from Egypt and develope it as a second Jewish state in federation with Israel. If I had done that I would have thought I behaved too mercifully but would have applauded my forgiving Christian upbringing.

Maybe I would have had a couple different Teutonic type concubines and if any of the good looking German slaves had made passes at my wife I would have my free Creole overseer and a black African-American serf beat some sense into them. That sounds horrible I know. What it really is rather is Greek chauvinism. In fact it is Greek chauvinism already tempered by both Christianity and a sense of respect for Europe which no ancient Greek ever had. There is no path to my real goodwill available from here. I know many Germans and they may be fine people as is our Pope but they are all socio-moral bankrupts in my view. All who use the heritage and the nationality of Germany and Austria are morally broke. For many it is not their fault in the sense of sin. It is not all my fault that I do not have 5 billion dollars but I cannot require you to give it to me. To treat these people as my moral equals would be obscene. But Western Civilization was mostly dead by the time theat World War II came.

Having said this do I think the Hapsburg’s empire for so long was one of humanity’s great achievements?
YES, I do.

Do I think Charlemagne was deserving to be called at least a Father of Europe?
Yes, I do.

Do I think that Goethe, Saint Boniface, Meister Eckhart, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven made stellar contributions to Western Civilization?
Yes, I do.

Do I think the Germanic English despite murderous scandals, silliness and stealing credit from other Celtic Brits or socio-morally solvent?
Yes, not rich but solvent.

Do I think that the right wing Teuton chauvinistic Austrian Patriot Prince Metternich was a colossus in modern times and a fine Christian?
Yes I do.

So how can I justify my point view? Well, if for ten generations one has mixed feeling about hardworking neighbors of moderate talent who have gotten rich partly through hard-work and thrift then one says they are rich. But if one sees two generations sell all the furniture for drugs, burn down the house, beat and chain their daughters as naked prostitutes and paper the town in hot checks then one is entitled to give them a distinct credit rating than before. Money in this metaphor stands for morality. The neighbors stand for Germany and Austria. I refuse, knowing I offend some fine Germans on this list of friends to say I regard those countries as legitimate or their people as having face in Western civilization. They are the very, very poor relations of the family for at least as long as I am likely to live. The whites of the South are known for prejudice and holding a dim view of their neighbors both justly and unjustly. I know there are music groups and artists and others who call themselves ” niggers” without offense and I think policing language is doable but very tricky work. But I assure you that on occasion I have all the contempt any white southerner ever put in any word into my greetings of Germans and Austrians. How they can show their faces in the world and do nothing to deserve it as a country makes me sick. These countries are not alone among the guilty but they disgust me. I believe we live in an insane and evil world and perhaps they will be able to take legal action against me for saying things that hurt their feelings. I want my feelings to be understood abroad about these black sheep and the world has given much attention to the capacity of white Southerners for prejudice and contempt.

I do think Germans had some grievances and there are real problems they needed to address and some of them involved a great people dispossessed of their homeland long ago and not by Germans. However, the behavior of the Third Reich is the essence of obscenity The stench of it still clogs up the breathing passages of the world. I can’t take seriously our international system founded on so little punishment of such great offenses. Jews, Poles, Russians and intellectuals have rivers of blood calling for vengeance. We are not a church and I don’t much want to hear about of absurd platitudes. The erasure of sane temporal politics from Christendom is only one of the aspects of the nightmare world in which I live. The world we live in today is a suicidal waste pit of evil and despair run through with lines of delusion and insanity to relieve the monotony.Having said that I would have enslaved Germans after World War two does not mean that I would not recognize the distinction between races in my do-whatever-the-hell I want social order. White slaves with white children by free masters would be in a somewhat different position than black slaves behaving in the same way. That was how Greece built the Western world 4000 years ago and I do not think that the way we behave today is better, I really do not. I think there have been better times in between but they are not these times which are better.

So we can tell from a document discussing the fact that Socrates was indeed a white man what race meant in ancient Greece. It continues to men about the same thing to me now. Christianity tempers my views perhaps. The issue of Greece brings us to the Nordic peoples. Western Civilization has two very distinct historic poles. The diffusion throughout the world has been important but now we are living in what is ultimately a world civilization. When for millenia Western Civilization really was autonomous it had a North Pole which was Scandinavia and a South Pole which was Ethiopia — culturally speaking. Stockholm is founded on a set of rhythms and patterns that really do not flow from Greece. Ethiopia is also. However, whether they know it or not both have long been inextricably in the orbit of the Hellenic and post-Hellenic world. This is the very real orbit and rim of culture that delineated the edges of Western Civilization when Eastern Civilization and this civilization had not really merged to create a world civilization.

I would like to spend more time writing about Ethiopia than I am going to spend. I would like to explore African, Arab and Greek confluence. I would like to talk of ancient mixed race peoples and of the Shebaitic House of Solomon’s role in Judaism and Christianity. However, I will not get to that in any detail in this note. A great deal has been thought and written about how black these people were or were not. But I will turn instead to some of the whitest people anywhere. I will instead speak of the Norse.

Hitler divided the Germanic people into Alpine, Nordic, Jewish-influenced and miscellaneous racial types. The ideal he was trying to move towards was the Nordic type. No group takes its hereditary appearance as seriously as the Norse and I have no doubt some of the really evil minds that will never appear in history’s account but which shaped the Third Reich were Norsemen. I truly do believe that they are the most genetically distinct people in the world all in all. In many ways they resemble the true Mongols of the East but they are also very different. The Scandinavian countries are Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland for people and groups who call it Sutherland. The Scandinavians have almost always been a great race and occasionally a mighty civilization. They have seldom been a good people all in al and never been a great civilization.

Scandinavians have visited every part of the world and burnt the records of their travels they reshaped the culture of Ireland, Sicily and Russia. There has never been a historic China or Japan that did not have Scandinavian pirates somewhere in the background. Scandinavians traded in maps and technology in very significant ways and helped many people break out of technological impasses with the help of technology taken from neighbors. The ninth and tenth centuries AD are known as the eras of their journeys. However I am aware of another tradition. Outside of history and archaeology there are tales with the ring of truth of widespread war between Acadians that went on for almost a thousand years. In Acadian lore Scandinavians come from a people in Westernmost China who were isolated and very advanced who traveled for completely unimaginable reasons to rejoin their ancient and primitive related tribes who were almost a forgotten myth and lived in the frozen North. In the travel they passed through ancient Arcadia as slaves, refugees, pirates, princes and wizards for a few generations. It was this reunion which really marks the start of Scandinavian culture. I do not think that Scandinavians share any belief in this tale but it is what I believe.

Without discussing the Celts of Vercingetorix’s brave fall, the letter to the Galatians, Brian Boru’s victory over Scandinavian kings and the beauty of their art how can one discuss this civilization. Ancient Greece was largely defined by trade with Celts and war with Persia. However neither St. Columba nor the Irish Republican army will make it into this note. The Celts were a high and splendid Barbarism which Rome broke because unlike the Greeks they made provinces in preference to colonies. Greeks learned to make provinces when Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. But they never really loved to do this. Colonies, polises and kingdoms stirred the Greek soul. Only in the Eastern Roman Empire did Greeks learn to love the system of Empires and provinces. So the Greeks warred with Celts but they always lived together and enriched each other. The Greek’s resented and opposed Roman influence but could adjust to it more easily than the Celts. That is why one thinks of Ireland and Wales when one says Celts although the culture extended from the British Isles to Turkey.

I have not discussed the United States, France, the United Kingdom or Spain as countries. I think that all of these countries have a great deal that can be seen as their contribution to Western Civilization. However, it troubles me how little many well educated people in great countries like Japan, China, Iran and Ghana understand about the formation of culture in these countries and others. I have mentioned in a recent Facebook Note about having Mel Gibson do a film on the Life of the Christ. I admire Mr. Gibson very much for his feel for Western Civilization. It is not that I trust him personally. I would never be sure he and I were pushing in the same direction if he made a movie from my notes about the life of Christ. But his polemic and corrosive film if he made one would probably satisfy me more than the efforts of many people who think that they share the values and views I might declare. He may or may not agree with anything I care about all though he claims to I think. However, he sees and can show how people and peoples are made and is not willing to just make things so cheap and easy that they are ridiculous to all.

Jesus Christ belongs to the Jews especially and to all humans and these are the big realities and to all Christians as a faith and that is the biggest reality. But Jesus is also the magic that makes Western Civilization. One who really understands Western Civilization can readily see huge amounts of data about the health and progress of our civilization from our civilization’s view of Christ. It is a test on which I do not think we have ever gotten an A+. It is somehow outside and beyond questions of religion and spirituality our destiny to be so judged. Jesus more than almost anyone who ever lived saw his own legacy in terms of periods. The Period of the Bridegroom from his Nativity to the Last Supper, the Hour of Darkness which is the period of Mr. Gibson’s first film, the Period of the Church and then the Eschaton or Fulfillment. From pagan kings on the borders of Constantine’s Rome or Armenians who declared the first Christian state many people in the West have struggled for a long time to understand how Jesus and the Pagan Hellenic political science or Teuton Kultur go together or in Saint Augustine’s terms how the City of God goes with the City of Man. Jesus himself left us vast wisdom and quite a bit of room to maneuver but it has always been the battleground of many determined and very different people. This has made a difficult task nearly impossible.

If Greece is ultimately our culture and Jesus is ultimately our conscience then what is missing. Neither Jesus nor Greece gave us a capital. Rome is the Capital of Western Civilization. That is actually Rome’s greatest achievement in my view. It is not insignificant. In Rome our center hold in some way none of us really understand but for reasons that fill libraries as well. Only in the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing China have I found anything which approaches the feel of Rome. They are very different. Rome is more our cultural capital even now when we are hardly existing as a unity than Beijing is China’s cultural capital.

I know that most people on my Facebook list have roots in Western Civilization. However, I have noticed that everyone seems to have settled for a version of our history I do not recognize. Most of all though I am writing a bit to provoke thought and reading in those people who are not from this background. There was a time when Western and Eastern civilization were really separate and while linked by the Silk Road, the lives of many individual people and many other ties they were nonetheless really able to be seen almost as two worlds on the same planet. I think there will be elements of that reality forever or as close to forever as we get. But it will not likely ever really be that way again and it should not be. In addition there are many cultures not really tied so closely to the distant roots in China or Greece and I think knowing something about the way our civilization was formed is vital for them as well.

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