Posted on 09/29/2021 9:02:27 AM PDT by Saint Athanasius
The world outside or before the U.S. was and is not a pretty thing. Even in rare consensual societies, factions and inequality under the law persisted—whether the plebs and populares of early Republican Rome, the greens and blues of Justinian’s Constantinople, or the Guelphs and Ghibellines of thirteenth-century Florence. Belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion or political clique translated into a diminished political existence—or often far worse. Institutionalized persecution required the use of mass violence, in the way that governments today have systematically oppressed Chinese Uyghurs and Tibetans, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, or Serbian Bosnians.
https://victorhanson.com/what-made-us-go-crazy-part-two/
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
This paragraph is so true:
What we see in unfree societies past and present outside the West is mostly a landscape of repression—and, to a lesser degree, for many centuries for some inside the West, especially women and slaves. Yet it has always been an odd but characteristic habit in the West that it damns itself as inferior to other civilizations that are wholly unfree. Apparently, its own notions of citizenship are so exalted, that anything short of perfection is considered not good enough.
The wages of spin is death.......................
I love me some VDH!
BFL...will come back and read later.
That man is a giant.
Some very brilliant people tried to fix it but it seems human nature will not be changed.
I’lL be honest, I often see our “problem” as taking Christianity to “extremes”.
While liberal commies deride Christianity, they insist on applying relentlessly the principles of same to all. Problem is that “turning the other cheek” and constantly forgiving and handing out goodies can get many people killed or impoverished or devastated.
Think about it.
Nietzsche’s comment on that is apt. Most fear masquerades as a virtue.
I believe that is modern Christianity - sympathy for the mugger not the mugged. The Crusaders of the 11th Century didn’t think like that.
I wouldn’t necessarily go with the Crusades as emblematic.
Early church Christianity definitely went with much of this. Christ seemed to, although He also got mad and showed his displeasure at times.
Not so much mob or monarchy as what Eric Hoffer described brilliantly: “Every cause begins as a movement, evolves into a business, and ends up as a racket.”
In these waning days of the Republic, the ideal of representative government has become a racket.
I copied and was going to post the exact, same excerpt.
And the ones running the racket against the mob become, effectively, monarchs.
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