Thomas_More
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The fact that May Day has joined all the festival days, religious as well as labour, under the universal and bland capitalist term Bank Holiday, indicates what our masters today value.
Did he ever meet Arthur Cravan?
Written to the New Yorker in response to an article about America’s Christian nationalism. Letter not published.
Kelefa Sanneh’s “Under God” poses many interesting questions. I heard once someone exclaim that America’s Christian nationalism came about precisely because the United States does not have an established church. The fundamentalist zeal of so many Americans (which still includes, in the 21st century, the denial of Darwinian descent through modification) has few home-grown followers here in Britain, where we have a state church (serving, like the monarchy, as a badge of state with no actual power).
In the 17th century political struggle in England was expressed using biblical language, and that’s what it was – language. It is safe to say that the people of the time were largely less “religious” than those who identify as religious today. The English puritans, from whose ranks the Mayflower “pilgrims” came, were part of, and a product of, the massive social and economic revolution transforming the British Isles before, during and after the 17th century. English puritanism would continue to evolve. It would grow into 18th century deism, rationalism, and eventually 19th century socialism.
By contrast, those puritans who departed for the new world were thereby removed from the social environment which had created them and out of the revolution they had been a part of. They found themselves in a totally new environment and facing completely different conditions. The religious, for them, was divorced from its English social roots, and the nature of the American frontier reinforced the biblical in their thinking. What in England was to lead to rationalism and political radicalism, in America fossilized as Christian (protestant) fundamentalism.I wasn’t absolving the Catholic Church but simply pointing out its members are not obsessed with the end of the world, unlike those evangelical sects who talk about nothing else.
Clarendon, in his History, ridicules the evangelicals of his day for reading into the Bible events contemporary with their own time, which they still do.
I have seen books on medieval “end of time” beliefs. Of course, today’s evangelicals are the ones for all that now, and, disgustingly, many appear eager for “Armageddon”, since they have no love for life here and now on Earth. This is also true of Eastern Orthodox fanatics; but the Catholic Church today is not Armageddonist and instead more invested in charity work and aid projects.
Of course, unlike in the past, humans now have the capacity for global extermination, taking the rest of all life on Earth with them. They also, if only they would wake up to it, have the means to create a paradise on Earth; and that’s why we are socialists.
Many thanks for your kind words.
Then why do the capitalists spend trillions on such weapons they don’t intend using, and billions too on luxury furnished nuclear bunkers for themselves – not to mention radiation-proof aircraft for the Heads of state to use to survey a post-nuclear landscape?
I’ve gone through my Youtube history and deleted all doom and gloom channels. I’ve also deleted all doom and gloom Google searches, and am limiting my TV news to BBC red button.
I am in the same position, and believe me, I am not trying to instil pessimism. If I have, i’m sorry.
For me, cheering up is achieved with vintage movies and innocuous reading (from books, not screen), such as Raymond Chandler for now.Not really, because we’ll never need any paper again.
Today’s nuclear missiles EACH have multiple warheads: that’s EACH ONE multiple thermo-nuclear bombs, thousands of times more powerful than what struck Hiroshima.
Nor would only one or two of these missiles be fired, but hundreds.Safe to say, we would all, on these islands, be obliterated in seconds.
But, despite all this, the DPP president of Taiwan herself has NOT proclaimed independence, and the US will advise her not to.
The Kuomintang are also mounting anti-independence marches, and that should satisfy China, which will nonetheless continue flexing its military might, as it has always done whenever independence is hinted at.
