What does this have to do with this week’s G20 meeting in London and the mass demonstrations that are expected to accompany it?
There is a widespread sense within the British libertarian underground that the G20 demonstrations are actually being encouraged by the government. The police have announced that they expect huge crowds and violence, and that they are prepared for any kind of trouble. The BBC is pumping up the Leftist demos, making a thousand or so people waving Soviet flags look like an enormous popular uprising. The authorities seem to want trouble.
Why?
Given the state of public affairs in Britain today, any theory about what is happening must necessarily verge on paranoia.
But the general idea is this: the government already has the emergency powers laws that will allow it to crack down on the populace. These laws were passed — as so many repressive laws have been — as part of “anti-terrorism” legislation.
So the government needs a violent crisis in order to invoke these laws, thereby possibly avoiding the annoying requirement of holding a general election in 2010.
According to PJC Journal:
Just who is planning the violence in London next week?- - - - - - - - -
When Police Commanders are reported to have said of the over hyped expected violence at the G20 marches that they are ‘up for it’, I seriously begin to wonder whether our prediction that the Government, and the Police, are actually looking to provoke the expected clashes.
An article in the Guardian Friday evening tells us:Yesterday, the Metropolitan police was understood to have contacted a number of protest groups warning that the main day of protest, Wednesday, 1 April would be “very violent”, and senior commanders have insisted that they are “up for it, and up to it”, should there be any trouble.
Is this what you would call responsible policing?
Andrew Dismore MP, who chairs the joint common human rights, said police language in recent days had been “not very helpful”.
“The police have a duty under the Human Rights Act to facilitate protest and not frustrate it. If they act in a confrontational way and use confrontation language, they will start to provoke the kind of behaviour they are seeking to prevent. There may well be a fringe element that want to incite violence. But that doesn’t mean police should criminalise every protester.”
The Met police has refused to rule out the use of anti-terror legislation, and if the Guardian reports are correct, attempts by various groups to contact Senior Police figures to arrange liaison have gone unanswered and been ignored.
This blog has warned previously that the Government and Police were looking for this fight, and that the full weight of the plethora of legislation available to them will be brought to bear.
I do not believe that any Government enacts legislation unless they have an intention to use it at some stage, and it has always been my view that the intended targets for these laws are the ordinary people of Britain.
Armed with this latest knowledge, I would advise extreme caution and suggest that we heed the previous words of warning from Leg-Iron.If we don’t riot, Labour are likely to be obliterated in a general election.
If we do riot, there won’t be one.
This Government is looking for a fight. Don’t give it to them.
This trend needs to be discussed at the highest levels, the very idea that the Government is plotting against its own people is repugnant in the extreme.
Expect to see more than the average of hyped up high profile media coverage of ‘terror alerts’, mass evacuations of airports, railway stations and the like. Ahead of the G20 there will be a show of force, to be seen to be ‘doing something’.
I neither condemn nor condone these marches, I only wish that they remain peaceful, but will support and defend the right to hold them.
[…]
UPDATE Sunday March 29th. (borrowed from Snowolf)Amazing scenes in news rooms up and down the country today as editors wandered around with shell-shocked looks on their faces, as reporters emailed in copy and beamed in TV reports that showed today’s demonstrations in London which spectacularly failed to ‘kick-off’.
Brown must be crapping himself, if it doesn’t kick off during the G20 meeting, or at any point between now and May next year, he’ll have to go the polls, and won’t be able to postpone it with the Civil Contingencies Act.
Somewhere there’s a shabbily dressed, one-eyed Scot with a quivering a***hole. Why can’t the proles be trusted to rise up when provoked? Perhaps it was because the weather was so s****y today.
I’m too far away from the UK to know how much of this is paranoia, and how much is a true picture of the shape of things to come.
Hat tip: Gaia.
35 comments:
I know there are those in Britain who do not consider themselves a part of European civilization and think of Europe as "somewhere else." I have to disagree with that. The British are very much a part of European civilization, whether they want to admit that or not. But I will grant them an admission that they have formed an especially dynamic part of European civilization, and one that has traditionally in the modern age had a stronger emphasis on political liberty than, say, France.
It is interesting, and frankly rather sad, to notice that Britain, and England in particular, is now one of the worst countries in Europe, even though the rest of Western Europe is pretty bad, too. Britain is like Holland, only without Geert Wilders. Maybe Britain will be the first country to create political liberty and then the first country to leave it, too. I suppose there is some historical symmetry in that. Britain - from Constitutional Monarch to Multicultural Police State.
Sounds like the topic for another essay.
Who would pay attention to that pointless meeting in the absense of spectacular demonstrations?
It's so boring and politically correct - they even abstain from serving pork - that it hardly deserves much attention.
Daniel Hannah, on the other hand, who owns the skill of talking to ordinary citizens, is homing in on 2 million views on YouTube.
Agreed with Fjordman, Britain is at the core of European identity, but is currently being held down by the French tradition of regulation and centralized government, also known as the European Union.
But at least they have Melanie Phillips :)
It depends on how you define "european civilisation". From one perspective, we are European civilisation. We aren't "European", though. We aren't French is what it means, or German, or any of those places that are across the Channel.
If Brown did invoke the civil contingencies act, he'll be out on his ear. I've come to realise that the reason we've stayed so quiescent for so long is that there is still and always the illusion of democratic accountability, however tenuous it might have been. Even today, with all that goes on, there's that illusion that we can vote the buggers out and get someone who supports our ideas, even if they're a little hard to find. We believe it because we have that polling station to cast our ballots into. We believe it because we want to believe that we can symbolically execute the monarch in order to avoid an actual civil war. The consequent release of pressure means that it will take a lot longer for the people to react to a threatening situation. Take away that release valve and I guarantee you there will be blood shed.
Yup, it depends. When I dig, I like to dig deep. I've mentioned it before, but Rodney Stark's little book The Victory of Reason points to a common European identity that the scoundrels in Brussels simply fails to comprehend. Or they would at the very least have metioned Christianity in the Constitution Treaty.
It's interesting to ponder why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain. According to scholar John Gribbin, "It is probably not entirely a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution took place first in England (in round terms, during the period from 1740 to 1780) before spreading to the rest of Europe. There are many factors which contributed to this revolution occurring when and where it did, including the geographical and geological circumstances of Britain (an ‘island of coal’), the early flowering of what might be called democracy (while France was still ruled by the conservative, aristocratic ancien régime, and Germany was a fragmented cluster of statelets) and perhaps an element of pure chance. But one of the factors was that the Newtonian mechanistic world view became firmly established more quickly, naturally enough, in Newton’s homeland. Once the Industrial Revolution got under way, it gave a huge boost to science, both by stimulating interest in topics such as heat and thermodynamics (of great practical and commercial importance in the steam age), and in providing new tools for scientists to use in their investigations of the world."
The Scottish Enlightenment was different from the French Enlightenment, and in some ways significantly healthier. As scholar Bruce G. Trigger says, “In England and the Netherlands, where political power was already in the hands of the merchant middle class, intellectual activity was directed toward analyzing the practical political and economic significance of this change. The continuing political weakness of the French middle class in the face of Bourbon autocracy stimulated French intellectuals to use the idea of progress to reify change as a basis for challenging the legitimacy of an absolute monarch, who claimed to rule by divine will….By proclaiming change to be both desirable and inevitable, Enlightenment philosophers called into question the legitimacy of the existing political and religious order. Beginning as an intellectual expression of discontent, the French Enlightenment gradually developed into a movement with revolutionary potential….The Scottish interest in Enlightenment philosophy reflected the close cultural ties between Scotland and France but also was stimulated by the unprecedented power and prosperity acquired to the Scottish urban middle class as a result of Scotland’s union with England in 1707. Southern Scotland was experiencing rapid development but the highland areas to the north remained politically, economically, and culturally underdeveloped. This contrast aroused the interest of Scottish intellectuals in questions relating to the origin, development, and modernization of institutions.”
Sadly, it was the more radical French version of the Enlightenment that became most historically influential, all the way up to the European Union.
It's worth pondering on the point of view that the primary driving force of the "politically correct" form of socialism has been Anglosphere countries- the main organisers and dogmatisers have been intellectual elites in the USA and Britain. The dogma of racism for instance was born in the USA.
I would go so far as to define this "progressive" socialist form as "anglosocialism"- a socialism defined primarily by moralistic intentions as compared to germanic socialism and communism with their emphasis on economic planning and class struggle. So the question of why we have fallen so strongly into it is answered simply by the observation that we invented it.
Germanic socialism/communism was an industrial philosophy of workers, bosses and factories which concentrated on remodelling the nation as workplace. Anglosocialism's roots are in evangelical religious revivalism, social reform and the social gospel, and "enlightened" factory owners building model villages for their workers like Port Sunlight, clean and respectable, alchohol free comfortable prisons. Rather than communism's view of the workers as oppressed by capitalists, it sees the workers as sinful and responsible for their own misery and thus focusses on teaching the sinful idiots to become reformed decent citizens. This is what the Progressive Era- a largely anglosphere phenomenon- was all about. Later removed from the religious sphere into the secular one, with new sins to augment the old- racism and sexism for instance, with some degree of marxist economics thrown in and an organised Gramscianesque methodology, you get "PC". This is the Temperance Movement, applied to all aspects of life, in a sense.
We have led the world into this abyss. We can hardly complain at being the worst afflicted.
We can hardly complain at being the worst afflicted.
Nope. Time better spent on fixing da problems :)
Henrik,
Britain is at the core of European identity
Britain is at the core of the enlightenment version of European civilization. Quite as America holds the pivotal position in this now. But this is exactly the incarnation of European civilization that is now meeting its untergang. Quite as we are witnessing in Britain. There's really no surprise here. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is in itself good or bad, only appropriate or not given a context. The power of the Anglosphere is dying. This is necessary, and therefore good.
I'm sure someone without historical perspective will claim that France represents the enlightenment, and not Britain, or something of the kind. They would interpret events in the light of the current shadow theater (current here meaning the last few ceturies). The will miss the glaring similarities, and how the real difference is to societies that existed before. Quite as most people miss the glaring similarities between Wilson and Lenin, and how they were ideological friends (no not in light of the platonic cave-ish shadow theater, but for real, in relation to the civilization that had existed before).
The Western/Christian civilization is dying, the Anglosphere was the last bearer of this mark #2 of European civilization. It's all coming to an end. From these ashes mark #3 of European civilization will grow up. This one will be as different from mark #2 as mark #2 was from mark #1 (Greek/Roman).
Mark #3, being an incarnation of European civilization, will include all the things that has made us the best in the history of mankind. Naturally. And it will borrow the best of marks #1 and #2 respectively.
I have always spoken fondly of the British empire, but that was back then. And it belongs to the same mindset as what evolved into what is today killing us.
Fj,
Britain is like Holland, only without Geert Wilders
Quite literally without Geert Wilders :-)
The Enlightenment is like Islam in the way that it kills and utterly smothers everything that comes in its path. The British empire could be compared to the "golden age" of Islam. It was good mainly for not having had yet destroyed all that is vital and good in a civilization. Now today, with America (and Obama) at the lead of this Enlightenment civilization, everything good and vital *has* indeed been destroyed. The process takes some time, quite as it did for Islam. No other comparisons.
But I guess I'm speaking to deaf ears here. Even if there are those here who pay lip service to the idea of being anti-Enlightenment, they are at the same time unable to think outside of their Enlightenment box. And then it becomes impossible to understand what I write, and it will only look strange. I know this since before, and don't have any hopes that it would be changing; not by a discussion. History will change it however, and that's good enough for me. The people of the European civilization will all freed from their Enlightenment boxes. Congratulations!
Two more comments:
Britain is at the core of European identity
A important reason that reacted against this is the the British identity itself is so new in our history. Therefore it cannot possibly be at the core of our identity. The proposition can be immediately discarded. The core of our identity is instead found in the ancient Greeks, Romans and Germanic peoples.
You may say correctly, however, that the Britain is at the core of *Western* identity.
The Western/Christian civilization is dying
Which does not necessarily imply that Christianity must die (to the same degree). It's the civilization built on Christianity that is dying. Another incarnation of our civilization will take over, based on something different.
The book An Illustrated History of Britain by David McDowall is rather short, but nevertheless fascinating to read. The English Parliament dates back to the 1200s. King John had signed Magna Carta unwillingly, and the heavy spending and foreign advisers of his son Henry III upset the nobles who once again acted as a class under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. In 1258 they took over the government and elected a council of nobles which was called "parliament" or "parlement," a French word meaning a “discussion meeting.” This “parliament” took control of the treasury and forced Henry to get rid of his foreign advisers. Henry died in 1272 and his son Edward I took the throne. He brought together the first real parliament.
According to David McDowall, "Several kings had made arrangements for taxation before, but Edward I was the first to create a ‘representative institution’ which could provide the money he needed. This institution became the House of Commons. Unlike the House of Lords it contained a mixture of ‘gentry’ (knights and other wealthy freemen from the shires) and merchants from the towns. These were the two broad classes of people who produced and controlled England’s wealth. In 1275 Edward I commanded each shire and each town (or borough) to send two representatives to his parliament. These ‘commoners’ would have stayed away if they could, to avoid giving Edward money. But few dared risk Edward’s anger. They became unwilling representatives of their local community. This, rather than Magna Carta, was the beginning of the idea that there should be ‘no taxation without representation’, later claimed by the American colonists of the eighteenth century. In other parts of Europe, similar ‘parliaments’ kept all the gentry separate from the commoners. England was special because the House of Commons contained a mixture of gentry belonging to the feudal ruling class and merchants and freemen who did not."
Several other European countries had similar kinds of parliaments at this time, but in most cases these disappeared when feudalism died out. In England, however, the death of feudalism helped strengthen the House of Commons in Parliament.
And now guess, which was the first country to invent the idea of the 100% tax?
Was it France, Sweden, the Soviet Union, no? Kampuchea then? No.
It was America! FDR introduced in 1942 a 100% tax on income above $25,000.
Watch our forever beloved Glenn Beck on the topic.
So those of you who still think that Obama is exceptional to the general direction of America as a polity, think again. To the contrary! Surely there are millions of American people who think differently, e.g. in Lynchburg. But as we all know they have zero, zilch, nada influence on America as a polity and the general direction that it's been heading in during the last 1½ centuries, which has by now reached terminal station Obama. Some of these people, in Lynchburg and elsewhere, haven't understood yet, that they have absolutely zero influence over America as a polity (and never had), and might take it personally when I describe the true character of America as polity. And I can only regret that. However, these are the decent people that will eventually institute the counter-revolution and overthrown the destructive and rotten polity that America truly is.
Fj,
Several other European countries had similar kinds of parliaments at this time, but in most cases these disappeared when feudalism died out.
Germanic people had Things (like the Allthing) long before. But this was killed with the steamrolling introduction of Christianity. All our traditions, where power was very soundly and organically rooted locally -- this was killed by Christian centralism. People complain about the EU, but joining the European union of Christendom was many times worse for our people and the health of our nations. And quite as today's European Union (this deja vu), it was the same classes of people, for the same sorts of no good reasons, that pushed for the introduction such centralistic tyranny. Only, last time around it was actually much worse.
You're a little bit too harsh here. The oldest still functioning parliament in the world is the Althing on Iceland. This is a Norwegian, and thus northern Germanic, pre-Christian institution transplanted to Iceland, yes. The Germanic peoples had assemblies like this dating back to prehistoric times. It has nothing to do with either Christianity or with Greek democracy.
Nevertheless, the parliaments of the type we are talking about in this context developed in the Christian Europe of the High Middle Ages. Toby Huff describes in his excellent book The Rise of Early Modern Science how this is related to the development of the corporation and the principle of election by consent:
"In this procedure we can see the beginnings of a formalized process of representative government. In its very nature, the legal idea of a corporation is a major institutional location of the principle of constitutional limitations and governance. As [Gaines] Post puts it, from this idea of legal representation there 'developed in the 13th century the idea that English shires and towns could be represented in Parliament; and indeed modern representation of communities is based on this principle.' Likewise, Joseph Strayer stresses the point: 'The idea of political representation is one of the great discoveries of medieval governments.' While the Greeks and Romans took steps in that direction, they lacked fundamental legal and philosophical presuppositions. 'In medieval Europe, on the other hand, representative assemblies appeared everywhere: in Italy, Spain, and southern France early in the thirteenth century; in England, northern France and Germany anywhere from fifty to one hundred years later.'"
There's always been a battle within the church between what I suppose you could call the Pauline and Peterist styles of church governance. The pauline method is decentralised and missionary based, whereas the Peterist method, which seems to have dominated much of church history, is centralised and hierarchical. Neither of these systems is temporal or secular - the were concenred with the governmance of the church, not the state.
I wouldn't say that christianity steamrollered the alting and the wittan, personally. They happily co-existed with christianity for several centuries. It was the centralised hierarchical Roman church-state that did for them in the end. The roman church was undeniably a representative of christianity but it was not the faith, and in its form actually contradicted scripture, which generally pointed toward the distributed, missionary-based system favoured by Paul.
The key part of the Roman church is that it was Roman. it adopted the entire Roman system of government as its own and took on the functions of the state, contrary to the direction indicated by scripture. That's where its centralising tendency and its intolerance of non-roman forms of government came from, as no such centralising tendency survived long in the scriptural history of the early church. Peter and the disciples were scattered after the fall of Jerusalem and it wasn't until christianity became the official religion of Rome that it took on those Roman offices and customs that crushed so much of the early germanic heritage you've just mourned.
Without wishing to sound a little snippy, you can't eat your cake and have it too. You want Rome to be part of our heritage but you're hiding from the fact that it was Rome that destroyed the germanic style of government. Pretending that it was christianity that did so is unjust, I believe, as by that point the Roman church and state were inseparable, and largely indistinguishable from the prior pagan Roman state except in the form of a few rituals.
Actually, if one looks at how various estates were represented in medieval parliaments and town councils, there would be ample precedent in western civilization for a classic corporate state; democracy can be based upon almost any subdivision (or "nation") people can agree upon. Although the corporate state is certainly "fascist" on the philosophical ground that early Fascist ideologues promoted the idea, one could legitimately argue that the core essence of Fascism was a nationalistic totalitarian state with a cult of personality with all other political theory as window dressing.
Also, although there are excellent grounds on which to disagree with Voltaire, I certainly wouldn't equate his commentary with Islam! In his day, Voltaire was one of Islam's most strident critics, although his criticism of Islam was perceived by some people to be a veiled critique of the Catholic Church.
Fjordman,
My characterization of the introduction of Christianity and its steamrolling of ancient Germanic tradition involves much more than the Things. Our old structure of "nobility" (stormän) was brutally and cynically crushed by the Christian European Union and the Quislings at home that supported it. I put "nobility" in quotes since it was not really that, but traditional natural leadership locally and organically rooted. With Christianity this was all crushed and the nobility was centrally appointed, e.g. knights being dubbed by the church. The most essential social fabric and the organic foundation for real self-government was thereby flushed out.
So the late introduction of these parliaments in a society where the organic structure had been scattered into individuals under the Christian European Union, becomes a much weaker and devalued concept compared to the Things organically rooted in the many local parts of the country.
Graham,
The hierarchy and intolerance of Christianity is integral in its monotheism. The main problem with Christianity is how it deprived European ethnic groups of their traditional mythological narratives into the Christian one, where they where of no significance whatsoever. The only people that is guaranteed to exist to the end of times in Christianity are the Jews. The English, Swedes, Norwegians etc. are utterly insignificant, and completely expendable from the point of Christianity. There's no surprise that a Christian civilization degenerates into multiculturalism and civilizational suicide. The adoption of a foreign god, of universalist goodness, is a recipe for ethnic suicide and destruction. And unlike what you suggest there's nothing Roman about these things.
A Communist will always deny that any existing implementation of Communism is a true one. I guess it's the same with the Christians. The Catholic Church was not true Christianity, no more than the Soviet Union was true Communism. But I'm sorry, my friend, no matter the dreams, the Soviet Union *was* true Communism as it actually materialized. Quite the same with Christianity and the Catholic Church. But the dreamers will continue to dream on.
To claim like you that the Catholic Church was "largely indistinguishable from the prior pagan Roman state" is completely absurd. To start with, Ancient Rome was a real polity, and a very good one. The Catholic Church was just a super-national freak institution, just like the European Union today. The parallels between the two are omnious.
Graham,
You are indeed making a whole hen out of the feather that the Roman Catholic Church called itself Roman. We have of course also the Holy Roman Empire, which as Voltaire pointed out, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. It's has been very popular, throughout history, to call oneself Roman. The Catholic Church was only Roman in the sense of having its seat in Rome.
Ancient Rome was a strong and healthy polity, organically structured around a military class, and other significant classed of the society. To claim, like you, that the Catholic Church was virtually identical to that is beyond the absurd. The Catholic Church was just a collection of priestly types, spreading priestly values of meekness and weakness and universalism. Quite as the EU today. And with the same intolerance and tyrannical centralism.
But I guess you would claim that the EU is largely indistinguishable from the pagan Rome...
There's no surprise that a Christian civilization degenerates into multiculturalism and civilizational suicide.
I forgot to add atheism here. Given the nature of Christianity there no surprise that it eventually degenerates into atheism; which means cultural death of course.
You don't see other cultural spheres around the world degenerate into atheism. This is unique, and very typical of, the Christian world.
But I guess you'd blame Julius Caesar, or something like that, for how we ended up in atheism today.
The Christian god makes such impossible claims that it can only eventually lead the people to doubt in him. He supposed to be totally good in a way that is impossible; this is bound to end up in doubt. He's supposed to have created the world and that all truth and knowledge rests upon his shoulders. No traditional gods made such preposterous claims; indeed a recipe for doubt and subsequently atheism. And furthermore he's a foreign god, not our guy, and he don't give a damn about us as a people. So when the people are overwhelmed with doubt there's no longer any reason to keep him around. All this is integral in the seed of Christianity, and today it has become fully manifest. Christianity leads to atheism which leads to death. It's time to change to a real religion; a religion for us.
Your characterisation of christianity seems to be based on the modern interpretation of it, which does deny the place of pre-christian religious narratives and is prone to making the mistakes you lay at its feet. Mediaeval christianity fully incorporated existing mythologies and religious narratives within its structure. As I said, the existing political structures thrived alongside christianity for many years. You are intent on soley blaming christianity for things that should be laid at the feet of a wide variety of causes. Christianity is not blameless, but neither is it the sole cause of these things.
Brussel's Journal has an article up related to this matter right now. You might want to read it.
And, for the record, I would no more compare the EU to the roman empire than I would to the British. However, it is worth noting that every major war in Europe since Justinian got a boner for Italy has been caused by the desire to recreate Rome's strength and glory. It might be argued that the EU is an expression of the same sublimated urge to recreate the Empire. Possibly.
Christianity is the most anti-theistic religion the ever existed. There is no other religion that has engaged so fervently in godslaughter. And the step from anti-theism to atheism is rather small; as I have already illustrated.
Islam is a later anti-theistic cancer. More then anything else Christianity (and its degenerated priestly ethics) is paving the way for Islam. The second Vatican council is a clear illustration of this, but the Protestant organizations are acting in the very same way. But I guess Ancient Rome is all to blame for this...
Graham,
You are in denial of the essence of Christianity -- foreign god, universalism, priestly babbling, it's anti-theism etc. The traces of the older society was there before simply since it took some time for Christianity to destroy it (cf. Islam). The end result of Christianity is atheism and cultural suicide, and we have now reached the terminal station. It's the end both of our civilization as we know it and Christianity.
Your strawman is not my faith. Knock it down all you want.
Your strawman is not my faith.
So you don't believe in a foreign god? Is he English?
CS,
The English, Swedes, Norwegians etc. are utterly insignificant, and completely expendable from the point of Christianity.
What you are talking about here does bother some Christians.
I remember reading a thread on the Jerusalem Post web site a few years ago where an American commenter was attempting to argue that the U.S.A. is actually the Israel of the Bible. He wasn't very convincing.
Christians are supposed to view heaven as their future country. This doesn't necessarily lead to transnationalism. To my mind the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis warns against the arrogance of building multicultural societies.
islam o' phobe,
I remember reading a thread on the Jerusalem Post web site a few years ago where an American commenter was attempting to argue that the U.S.A. is actually the Israel of the Bible.
Well that illustrates my point very well. Since each of our countries are utterly insignificant in the eyes of Christianity, there are Christians, throughout history, making claims that they are Israel or Jerusalem to make them feel significant. We cannot be significant as we are, for who we are. Such is Christianity.
Christians are supposed to view heaven as their future country.
Christians enter heaven as individuals (atomistic individualism was dragged upon us by Christianity). We as a people are completely insignificant.
This doesn't necessarily lead to transnationalism.
Not immediately. Not even in a thousand years. But eventually; i.e. now.
To my mind the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis warns against the arrogance of building multicultural societies.
It's the story of the wrath of the vengeful god upon people with pride (such a natural thing as pride is considered evil in Christianity). The Christian god instead turned the place into the EU, where nobody understands each other's language.
"V for Vendetta" was just a movie, Baron. Get a life.
The Christian god instead turned the place into the EU, where nobody understands each other's language.
He didn't just muddle people's speech but divided peoples into separate nations - meaning no EU free-trael zone. There was a Newsweek cover last summer which portrayed the EU as a cartoon Tower of Babel.
but divided peoples into separate nations
Everything is appointed centrally in Christianity, nations, nobility, etc. This centralism is at the very core of its nature.
I guess Graham will claim now that Genesis was written by the Romans.
Everything is appointed centrally in Christianity, nations, nobility, etc. This centralism is at the very core of its nature.
Hah! To put it in purely political, worldly terms the destruction of the Tower of Babel was the first instance of decentralisation.
Would you rather there be no Swedes, no Norwegians, no English - just one country of people who all spoke the same language and lived together as one?
Keep kicking that straw, I'm sure it makes you feel better.
islam o' phobe,
Only to a Christian mind could centrally created/appointed national identities be seen as decentralism.
But long before the Christians started fantasizing in their centralist mind box, real decentralism took place in the real world. Real ethnic groups evolved and their societies developed organically. They did it themselves. No centralized power involved.
Graham,
It's one thing to run away from a discussion with the characteristic shout of surrender: "strawman!".
It's another thing to come back again with chat style comments.
Is it a strawman to say that your Christian god is a foreign god? Are you claiming that he's English? Or is it that you see England as the new Israel, maybe?
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