Posted on 11/26/2001 9:07:31 PM PST by ouroboros
Five days after declaring war on terrorism, the president urged Americans to be patient: "This crusade ... is going to take awhile." Immediately, the cry arose, "How could he be so cruelly insensitive!"
Bush was scourged and admonished that he had insulted the Islamic world. Did he not know the Crusades were wars of criminal Christian aggression marked by pillage and massacre? The president apologized, and no one has since embraced the dreaded term.
At Georgetown, Bill Clinton suggested Sept. 11 may even be payback. "Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless," said the paragon of the Woodstock generation. "In the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the temple mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the temple mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it."
But why Americans, whose first president was a Mason who did not take office until 1789, should be slaughtered in 2001 because of a crusade preached by a pope in 1095, Clinton left unexplained.
A little history. In 600 A.D., the Mediterranean basin was largely Christian. But within a century of the death of Mohammed in 632, armies of Islam had conquered Syria and Palestine, swept over North Africa, and overrun Spain, only to be defeated at Poitiers by Charles Martel. Had they triumphed, Christianity might have died in Europe, as it would in the cities of Augustine and Athanasius.
"The common assumption that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked Christian aggression" is false, writes Warren Carroll, the historian of Christendom. Before 1095, "all the aggression had been Muslim. The Muslims were the original and continuing attackers and conquerors of Christian territory." Only after centuries living in fear of the hosts of Islam did Urban II preach the First Crusade.
The goal that animated the Crusaders was Jerusalem. "Those who deride this as a Christian objective have lived too long in books and under lamps," writes Carroll. "Real men and women, as distinct from scholarly abstractions, have homes which they love. Jesus Christ was a real man. He had a home. He loved it. His followers [and] worshipers who came after Him loved the land and places He had loved and trod, simply because He had loved and trodden them. Utterly convinced that He is God, they could not believe it right that any people not recognizing Him as God should rule His homeland."
A majority in Palestine was probably still Christian in 1095, writes Carroll, "They had ... as much right to their land as the Muslim conquerors." If Mecca were overrun by heathen armies, would not Muslim peoples be justified in launching a "jihad" to liberate their holy city? Would they apologize or be ashamed of having done so?
The Crusader armies, led by Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse, captured Jerusalem in 1099, where a massacre did occur. But that same evil befell the knights, and their wives and children, when the last Crusader castle, Acre, fell to the Mameluks in 1291. Have we heard any apologies for the slaughter at Acre?
Offered the title King of Jerusalem, Raymond and Godfrey both refused to wear a crown of gold in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. It was an age of faith. The First Crusade, writes Carroll, was "a just war conducted for a deeply spiritual purpose, though often seriously flawed in its execution." As was World War II.
After that Good War in which British Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris incinerated thousands of refugee women and children in Dresden, Dwight Eisenhower titled his memoir "Crusade in Europe." If he was not ashamed of the term, why are we?
Because this generation has been indoctrinated in a pack of lies by the moral sappers of the 1960s nesting in our schools. To them, Western Civilization is an abomination. The greatest explorers, like Columbus, are genocidal racists. Our founding fathers were slave-owning hypocrites. The soldier-statesmen of Western empires were brutal imperialists. Now, we must also be ashamed of crusades launched to recapture, in the name of our Lord, the Holy Land seized from Christendom by the armies of Islam.
The great enemies of the West today are its over-privileged children who are undermining this greatest civilization the world has ever seen. If we should be ashamed of anything, it is for having twice elected one of them as president. Bill Clinton could not carry the sandals, let alone the sword, of Godfrey of Bouillon.
Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. Now a commentator and columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national televison shows, and is the author of six books. His current position is chairman of The American Cause. His newest book, "Death of the West," will be published in January.
Doesn't anyone remember Tom Paine
by Robert L. Williams
Many years ago, before I came to my senses and left public education for good, I was teaching on a college campus when one of the administrators approached me and asked the topic of my lecture that day.
"Tom Paine and the Rights of Man," I told him.
The administrator sneered, managed a look of utter contempt, and asked, "Do you mean to tell me that you are still defiling the minds of our students with the lightweight works of that filthy little atheist?"
Thinking of Rousseau's comment that the Holy Roman Empire was an appropriate title except that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, I responded, "Your description of Paine is correct except that he was not lightweight, little, filthy, nor an atheist."
I went on to add that Tom Paine was, according to no less an authority than George Washington, the man who single- handedly did more to help win the American Revolution than any other person on this continent.
"He was also," I said, "for better or worse, the man who started the Bank of North America, invented the metal suspension bridge, gave us the idea for a selective service draft system, suggested medicare and social security and pension retirement plans. He urged the establishment of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, campaigned vigorously for international copyright laws, and donated to the cause of the American Revolution the money that was earned by The Crisis, America's first genuine best-seller in literature."
Before my prey could escape, I added, "And, incidentally, he was the man who named this country. He was the first person to use, so far as anyone knows, the phrase, "The United States of America."
"He was still an atheist," the administrator added, walking away with the smug assurance of all authoritarian leaders who remain convinced that whatever they say or do has the blessings of God and the approval of the Congress.
And today, two hundred years after the appearance of the Rights of Man, on February 17, 1992, most Americans have never even heard of Tom Paine, and the few who have cannot tell you anything about him except that he was "a filthy little atheist" and enemy of Christianity whose writings defile the minds of all who read him.
To clear the air, Paine was not an atheist in any sense of the word, and it would have been perfectly all right if he had been one in every sense of the word. In point of fact, he wrote in The Age of Reason, "I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, living mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creature happy."
Strange words, indeed, from a man who allegedly hated Christianity and harbored no beliefs in God!
What Tom Pain did hate, and passionately, was Big Government. He wrote, "Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
He hated the idea of an uncontrolled welfare state and stated his feelings, clearly when he wrote, "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." When American troops were being soundly defeated on nearly all fronts during the American Revolution, Paine, who was serving without pay as aid-de-camp to Nathanael Greene, became impatient with the complaints of the soldiers who did not win the war as easily as they had hoped.
And Tom Paine then wrote some of the most memorable lines in the history of the English language: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands is now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet, we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly....Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its good; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated."
Paine describes a prosperous American businessman who held a child by the hand and, after expounding on his reasons not to fight for this nation and its freedom, concluded by saying, "Give me peace in my day."
Paine fairly bristled with anger as he retaliated. "Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation (of American from England) must some time or other take place, and a generous parent should have said, "'If there must be war, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.'"
Amen, and amen!
On the topic of religion, he insisted that he did not believe in the creed espoused by any church that he knew of. "My own mind is my own church," he wrote, and later he established a brick and mortar church of his own, the Theophilanthropic Church, whose major creed was that the greatest religious faith is that of good works to our fellow creatures. He disliked organized religion and held firmly to the faith that the right not to embrace an organized church is at least as sacred as the right to attend the church of one's choice.
"All national institutions of churches," he wrote, "appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.
Jim Bakker should be thankful that Paine is not alive today. Tom would attack the televangelists in their own pulpits.
At the same time he denounced national religious organizations, he modified his position by saying that he did not condemn those who disagreed with him: "They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing or disbelieving; it consists in profession to believe what he does not believe."
In his Rights of Man Paine set forth the arguments that civil rights are merely an extension of the natural rights of man as they existed in pre-governmental status. He argued that these natural rights include the maximum freedom compatible with the rights of others and that civil government should not interfere with the freedom of man except to insure and protect the happiness of the majority of the people. Not long after his declarations of human rights, Paine was arrested and sentenced to die for his role in the French Revolution. In a bizarre turn of events, he was spared because of chronic diarrhea.
His jail cell door was marked with a charcoal X so the executioner would know whom to behead the following day, and Paine's cell smelled so bad that the door was left open and the X was turned to the wall and Paine was spared until Jefferson and other friends could help him escape to America.
Then, in the land he named and helped to free, he was denounced by ministers as an atheist (and still is denounced by college administrators who would do their jobs if they knew how) and died in disgrace. He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York, but enemies continued to denounce him until finally he was exhumed and his bones were taken to England. A friend at the exhumation snapped off the final joint of the little finger of Paine's right hand and slipped the bone back in the grave so that some part of Paine would remain on American soil. The remainder of his remains were sold as souvenirs, made into pipe bowls and paperweights, and eventually lost.
And today, exactly two hundred years after Paine published his Rights of Man, he is among the most neglected writers and thinkers of the Revolutionary period. High school history books, if they mention Paine at all, award him a vague mention of a propagandist. Preachers continue to vilify him, and everyone else neglects him totally.
Only a few hack writers (like me) who admire and appreciate Paine's mastery of the English language and his dedication to the cause of individual freedom of thought and actions scribble articles like this to remind others that if it had not been for Tom Paine, America as we know her today might never have existed.
So, thanks, Tom, two hundred years late but from the bottoms of our hearts and the depths of our souls, for making us free and inspiring us to try to stay that way.
© Copyright 1998 Backwoods Home Magazine
In my opinion, Christendom is in desperate need of an Inquisition right now. What are the chances tha Il Papa will institute one, I wonder?
Sorry, Il Papa is indisposed at present: he is kissing the Koran at a topless hula mass -- er, "nondenominational service" -- in the shadow of a life-sized reproduction of the Wailing Wall, accompanyed by "Youth for Wicca" and "Lesbians for Christ," and assisted in the "service" by "Rappin' Rabbi" Levin and "Bob" the Baptist from the primitive church of the snakehandling antipapists.
He should be done shortly -- just a few hundred more apologies to sign off on and a few more excommunications of those evil so-called "traditionalists" -- and then may consider your proposal. Of course it will have to be first read and considered by the Very Super-duper High Reverend Father Hans Kung, Special Papal envoy to the sweeping new reform movement "Womyn for Priesthood, Condoms, and an End to the Patriarchy of the Penis."
Isn't it fascinating--this miraculous rehabilitation of contemporaneous accounts??
The first thing I learned in Medieval history class was that all medieval contemporaneous account babies must be thrown out with the bath water. They were all the work of the fevered imaginations of sex-starved monks toiling on behalf of one Royal House or another.
What can it all mean? Perhaps that contemporaneous accountsare gospel (to coin a phrase) if recorded by some special class of scribes? But who shall be annointed the Believable Ones? And whose accounts shall be disregarded?
For example, all the Best and Brightest People in the US Government--in fact, the entire Humanitarian World (formerly known as "Christendom")--assured us that 100,000 Albanian men had been slaughtered by the rampaging Serbs in Kosovo. And yet I see these men strutting about on my TV screen planning the annexation of Macedonia--hale and hearty to my untrained eye.
Are we to believe the contemporaneous accounts of the Oral Sex crisis? The smartest and most powerful woman in the world--at that time--attested to Clinton's innocence even as she painted a naughty word on the side of a tomahawk missile bound for Belgrade.
My brain grows weary at trying to untangle these mysteries. Apparently some accounts are reliable. Others are to be ignored and discarded.
The contemporaneous accounts of the...uhmm..strikeagainst terrorism describes a President firm in his resolve to vanquish Terrorism and Evil in the wake of the attacks of September 11th. And yet, all I see are some Stone Aged, turbanned men being bombed and their women being elevated to our lofty level so that they too can attend dorm-room beer busts without fear of getting their burkhas wet.
And I also notice that the Federal Government has increased its power exponentially to spy upon and criminalize ME in the past few weeks!!! Am I a part of the Terrorism and Evil cabal without even knowing it? I'm so glad this administration is willing to go to the mat to protect me from me.
And, as if I didn't have enough to confuse me, I am also quite mystified by the continued use of the prefix "Clinton" to describe everything that is going on in George W. Bush's Administration. It's "Clinton's FBI", "Clinton's CIA", the "Clintonized Justice Department, the "Clintonized Military".
I notice that even Mr. Buchanan engages in a bit of Clinton-itis in this essay. Does he really believe that George W. Bush views the Crusaders in any different light than his predecessor?
After the election many of the Buchanan supporters swallowed their pride and immediately went out and protested in support of Bush. Recently many have in support of his war efforts too. Over a year later you still can't even bring yourself to verbally admit that Buchanan has been right on a single issue, let alone support him when he is right.
His devotion to the illegal alien and immigration issues have been unparalleled for the last decade. Since men on student visas hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into the WTC, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, it has never dawned on you that Buchanan might have been right all along. It still doesn't.
Last year Buchanan supporters took a lot of heat for standing on principle. I'm thinking they've shown quite a bit of loyalty to this nation backing Bush on a number of issues since then, when he was right. What principle have you shown when Buchanan was right?
This has never been about Buchanan's issues. It has always been about preconcieved misguided perceptions that don't hold up under scrutiny. Well, they don't hold up over time either.
Continue to despise Buchanan. I never expected anything different from you.
May God bless America.
Bang*. Right in the 10 ring.
I love that. You must have a very amusing boss.
But I have stated more than once [prior to 9-11] that I agree with Pat Buchanan on immigration more than I agree with President Bush.
But I also believe that Pat Buchanan is the wrong man to champion that issue.
At minimum, Pat has a public image problem, and a lack of political deftness that shows itself in his article above. He critizes President Bush for abandoning the word 'crusade' and not taking the time and energy to challenge the world's preceptions on the mid-evil crusades.
This is a good example of focusing on the minor things, not the major tasks at hand. Personally, I like how Bush is handling the war and am glad he didn't waste any time, energy or political clout to "prove" to the world that Christians continue to be maligned in the history-telling of the Crusades.
You bet he is. It seems just about every time he speaks or writes I hear this statement.
I have always thought Pat was honest and had always spoke truth, even when it wasn't popular. I am confident that is the reason why he is so disliked and there is so much hatred for him.
To hell with public image. Half the people are so f-ing stupid they put a immoral criminal in office twice. Its about time people heard some freaking truth no matter what the damn image is or what politically correct rules are broken.
I doubt that fervent particularist zeal will be helpful to America at this time.
But ...a bump for Western Civilization! ;^)
He was not criticizing Bush for abandoning the word 'crusade', he was criticizing the fact that "Bush was scourged and admonished that he had insulted the Islamic world. Did he not know the Crusades were wars of criminal Christian aggression marked by pillage and massacre? The president apologized, and no one has since embraced the dreaded term. Bush's apology was purely a political one; I am sure he had no regrets about the term and may feel that the current war is a crusade...and Bush is right in this regard.
Buchanan used the example of the term 'crusade' to illustrate his point, not to criticize Bush.
Buchanan also is criticizing the modern-day elitist leftists...
The great enemies of the West today are its over-privileged children who are undermining this greatest civilization the world has ever seen. If we should be ashamed of anything, it is for having twice elected one of them as president.
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