Coup d'état in the U.S.A.? – Part II Civilization and the Traditional Latin Mass

Amici,

After reading my essay Coup d'état in the U.S.A.?, a friend wrote to me, in part:

There is no longer any enforcement of laws in this country. Apparently we are subscribing to the George Soros method of prosecution - I will enforce only those laws that I want to. Uncle Joe continues to break the law at the southern border - surprisingly no one seems to care. Instead he lies that the border is closed, when clearly it is not. Prosecutors in New York, Chicago, San Francisco (all Soros funded), continue to release violent criminals. Illinois just eliminate all of its bail laws. The police are completely demoralized by defunding and lack of support from city governments. Criminals, see no consequences for their crimes - so they keep offending. Shoplifting is becoming the national pastime.

I thought about it and wrote:

They are trying – working assiduously – to turn the country into an insane asylum for unrestrained, berserk criminals. People are frantic! Even in California, where businesses are going on strike: Over 200 Oakland Businesses to Strike on Tuesday Over Crime as City Reports Over 10,000 Stolen Cars So Far This Year. Or how about this, the trial and verdict of those who killed teen Ethan Liming in Ohio. It makes you sick to read it.

And consider this bit of educational news (pun intended) about no children from 13 schools, zero, passing state math exams in Baltimore, Maryland.

A complete breakdown of education exists in the major cities, all Democrat controlled. This is intentional. (Or mostly so; I mean, there do exist the ontologically stupid and they do seem to tend to go into education, don't they?)

Of course, all this is intentional, a program that began running a long time ago, designed by the Frankfurter Schule, the German Communist program from back in the 1920s. When the Nazis put pressure on them, they came over there to the U.S.A. and were given top jobs in the big universities. Brilliant, that. Thanks to them and John Dewey, another Communist, U.S. schools have been teaching Marxism for decades now. Madness.

TLM

And in a larger context, all this has everything to do with the Traditional Latin Mass. Why? Am I just being crazy? No. Because "culture" is founded on "cult". We can't escape that. The Supreme Court can't escape that; the American Constiution can't escape that. A culture founded on the worship of Kali or Badhbh (but I repeat myself; one is the avatar of the other) is going to be quite different from one founded on the Buddha, which is different than one founded on Shinto, which is different from one founded on nothing at all (the U.S.A.), which is different from one founded on Christ. And the central institution of Western Christianity is, and has been since before Constantine, the Traditional Latin Mass. One could say, in all seriousness, that therefore Catholics built up Western Civilization around that Traditional Latin Mass: just as the great Romanesque cathedrals were built to stage it, or the Gothic cathedrals in their varied splendor, the Baroque, all that, were all created for that Mass. (I never thought I liked Baroque till I started attending the TLM in one; now I know why they were built the way they were.) Our civilization is just as much a product of that Mass as those church styles were.

And what the Greeks knew, and what the Medievals knew, and what we seem to have completely forgotten or never understood (thank you John Locke and Adam Smith and consumer culture), is that culture has to be built up, either from scratch or from the ruins of previous cultures – all via some new cult, as Western Civilization was via Christianity or the Middle Eastern was from Islam, or India from Hinduism. And cult remains essential in this, especially if one wants to build a civilization. 

1. A civilization is bequeathed us by our ancestors but we have to reinforce/restore it each generation. We have to train children into it. That's what EDUCATION, the "calling out" exists for. It doesn't exist to make people a lot of money to feed the consumer culture.
   
2. Like a taste for Classical Music or Fine Arts, great literature (epic poetry and high drama) and philosophy, we have to carefully cultivate this civilizational aspect of culture in each generation. It's truly another echo of Adam's task, to "tend and keep" the Garden.
   
3. We can't just "let it slide" and assume people are somehow by an undirected Darwinian osmosis 'civilized' into the civilized culture of their birth. A general culture, a traditional farming or hunting culture can do that, perhaps, indeed, but not a civilization. Civilizations take WORK.
   

I get most of this from reflecting on this excellent article here. An excerpt:

According to this conception, civilization, in its highest form, is made up of components that are the product of a conscious and deliberate effort to reach the highest level of human attainment, and that for the most part substantially succeed in reaching this level. Individual geniuses such as Homer may reach this level of achievement without belonging to a civilization; what makes a civilization is a collective resolve to reach this level as far as is possible, and to preserve what has reached it.

The Greeks knew, and various Romans too, over time, and what the late Medievals learned to their cost, as we ought to be learning now, is that one has to fight not for something abstract like Jeffersonian or French Revolution "Liberty", but for our actual inheritance, and that consists of Western Civilization. Because various forces try to destroy civilization one way or another (as did the French Revolution itself did), either trying to disintegrate it from within or be conquered from without, we must "keep and tend it". As for "Liberty", it seems basically to mean ignoring our civilizational roots, which are (shudder) religious, and allowing Islam to try to conquer us today from both outside and inside. Islam or hedonism, that's the choice. The moral degeneracy engulfing the Western World perhaps comes from Communism of a sort, or from Liberty gone libertine, but moral degeneracy in itself lies at the heart of the human race and Satan easily accesses it, all the time, screeching, "Liberty!" 

• Notice how Islam's civilization, which never separated from its religion, is strong although materially and intellectually weak (i.e. poor and backward), whereas we, who are materially bloated and choking to death on "education", are utterly morally weak and demented. Same with secularized Japan, Communist China, much of Europe, etc.

The Greeks fought off the Persians to preserve their cult/culture while their philosophers fought off moral degeneration from within. In that endeavor, they failed. Christianity came, however, and created a new Eastern Empire, the Byzantine, although, alas, the Muslims finally – after centuries of ceaseless warfare – brought it down. They tried the same in the European heartland. The late Medievals/early Renaissance version of Western Christian Civilization had to fight off the Turk in the East and the Moors in the West, and one day starting in 1519 suddenly they found themselves fighting off a new threat to their civilization, the Protestants, at their backs. Emperor Karl V couldn't deal with the Lutheran princes who supported Luther because the emperor had to fight off the Sultan, as well. Suleiman the Magnificent it was who crushed the Hungarians in August 1526, killing King Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, and bounding onward into Austria, besieged Vienna in 1529. for two weeks. Failing this, and after 150 years of constant war (that left much of Central Europe and certainly Hungary a  depopulated wasteland), the Turks tried again in 1683, with a two-month siege of Vienna. (In 1565, the Turks besieged Malta for almost four months.) Obviously, this was a life and death struggle for the West. This was a CIVILIZATIONAL life and death struggle.

• If the Turk was fought off back then, at least until modern Islamic immigration into the West that of itself will destroy Western Civ, Protestantism wrought a destruction of a different type, resulting eventually in a desacralization of the West, secularizing it, removing the cult at its root by privatizing religion. Vatican II is the eventual fruit, a "Protestantization" of the Catholic Church, secularizing it, as we know only too well.
• Benighted Western intellectuals and "opinion makers" consider this secularization of the West a strength to boast about in comparison to Islam, an advance, not the stake through the cultural heart of Western Civilization that it is.
• But without its heart, what organism can survive? 

So, here we are in the Western world today, still besieged by Islam and still fighting off forces within our own civilization that seek to slaughter it. Now, however, the official Church has laid the axe of 'cult-ural' destruction at the root of the Tree of the Faith. "Pope Francis" and Company ceaselessly try to remove the very root, the Traditional Latin Mass that the entire civilization was built up around. That's what the suppression of the TLM truly signifies. If you didn't know that before, now you do. 

This will NOT turn out well, my friends.

           AnP

  

Christianity, Freedom, the American government and our current free-fall

Friends,

America is a mess, and the American Republic is just about dead. Why? I think it is, to an essential decree, because the anti-God or simply "No God Need Apply" embodied in the 1787 U.S. Constitution has finally born the fruits its policy was always destined to bear.

In any political discussion à la the U.S., "freedom" or "liberty" is central. It is said whereas English literature is about honor and French literature is about love, American literature is about freedom. The Declaration of Independence is famous for this line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Yet the right to life American courts have denied for over half a century. It has been denied because Americans, both citizens and supposedly the government, worship not the God of Christianity, but "Liberty". 

Yet what is liberty? Are we at liberty to murder unborn children? Or are we at liberty to molest born children, or castrate and spade children? Or for that matter, run wild in the streets? Flash mob rob stores? Parade naked down streets or as in San Francisco, stand on sidewalks openly doing the most obscene things with our private parts? (Not to mention filling those streets with manure and urine.) If homosexuals are allowed to legally marry under the U.S. 1787 Constitution, something so absolutely NOT in that document that nothing could be more obvious, then why not? "Liberty" triumphs over everything else, including Truth. And this is because we think of liberty as the no-holds-barred, purely narcissistic "Pursuit of Happiness". The worship not of God but of Self. Actually, Jefferson's use of that latter "Pursuit" phrase actually means the pursuit of virtue, for traditionally, to be virtuous is to achieve true happiness. But very, very few seem to know this today. Today, the "Pursuit of Happiness" means doing whatever one damn (literally) well please it means, regardless of the consequences. 

Now, I should mention that the Catholic idea of "freedom" is not the big box store model. A big box store might offer 20 or 30 choices of canned peas, for example, and one is supposed to have greater liberty of choice in such an environment than one would have in a mom and pop store with two or three pea choices. But Christian Freedom means we are free to choose what God wants for us, what He made us for, the why of our existence. Instead of being forced to do what He wants, God wants us to chose it freely, of our own will, conforming His will to ours. It is like a gasoline engine being said to be "free" to run on gasoline, and not kerosene, or diesel, or airplane fuel or whiskey. A gas engine running on any of the latter is not "free". It will destroy itself. A human being choosing against God is not "free", but enslaved, and will destroy himself. Clearly, this is different in its essentials from the 18th century ideals of the Founders about "Liberty", and definitely not what modern narcissistic people mean by being "free" and pursuing their self-centered" happiness".

And Christianity in the U.S.? Today, Christian "freedom" sounds like how Christians survive in Muslim countries: i.e. underground, hidden away, being Christian out of sight. One might argue that the Faith starts in the home, and on a personal level, it does. Yet then too, Christianity has always been, or tried to be, a public religion, proclaiming Christ and Him Crucified "in season and out of season". Whenever they could, Christians became very much influencers on secular government, monarchical or democratic, imperial or republican, and acted as the conscience of the secular state, establishing what are called concordats with states demanding the right of public worship and the right to influence law, culture, and government decisions. There's been a separation of Church and State since the religion's Founder said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but to God what is God's." The Byzantine Empire and the Reformation German princes and Henry VIII did the Church no favor by making it a department of state. But God's portion has always included public worship and (dare I say it?) freedom to influence the secular state. 

Since the U.S. Constitution of 1787 didn't mention God at all, however, and formally stated the U.S. would have no "religious test" (Article VI, Clause 3*), slowly but surely, God has been driven from the American public square, until post WWII, when God got removed from pretty much all things governmental, much to the strengthening of the godless, and thus lawless, "Deep State". Jack Kennedy in 1960 actually publicly affirmed his religion (he really didn't have any) would not affect his governing. But just what IS that, actually? Hell demanding its influence be not challenged, is what.

Unfortunately, God is not allowed to illuminate anything in DC, the federal government "state". Especially in the "Ape of the Church" that is the official Vatican II Church in DC. Totally lawless, on many levels. President Trump is finding that out, and through him we can all recognize how insane things have become. Actually, NO courts should exist in DC, or any trials, because it is a one-party "statelet", fully "woke" and Communist. It's the nightmarish model of what Democrats and RINOs and all the innumerable narcissists want to turn the whole country into. No one in Washington, D.C. is "free" at all. And that's the reality planned for all of us.

* Most Americans, or the Remnant possessing some rudimentary education, think of the First Amendment to the Constitution about "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". This prohibited a national Church, such as the European countries had at that time. It also "freed" or gave "liberty" to people about religion, thus allowing the U.S. to be a "religious country". But actually, it served to remove the new Government from religious "checks and balances". There would be no moral counterweight to the government, except the easily manipulated or ignored "will of the people". It really existed to prohibit the government from being influenced in any official way by any Church whatsoever, atomizing the religion to each individual as a private, personal thing, only. None of the citizens had thereafter a collective moral outlet, except via voting. This clause in the Amendment was especially needed to preserve American chattel slavery, but also saved the government from being challenged legally by Churches over how it treated American Indians (breaking treaties with them at will, forcing them off their land, denying them the old English Common Law "Castle doctrine"), and so on. In short, it made "the Church" utterly irrelevant to the State. And, eventually, to most Christians.

        AnP

"George III was but a boy stealing a peach from your lunch..."

"...by comparison with our plumed and puffed liberty-thieves and governors."

So writes Anthony Esolen in an article here at American Greatness. Good article, and a lot of quotes from ol' Herman Melville. But of course the doom for the U.S. was written on the wall at the beginning. "Liberty" was a false god, a sort of pied piper leading its adherents along the famous "primrose path" until boom, disaster befell them. Esolen writes eloquently (when does he not?) :

"We need not confine ourselves to the legal. There is also the customary. Free men honor the good and wise, the benefactors of their nation. Slaves toady to the famous. Free men make their own entertainment. Servile men are content to consume it ready-made. Free men seek out the dangerous space, as Melville sought out the sea. Servile men demand the safe space, where they may suck their thumbs. Free men fight in the open. Servile men sneak about, bear tales, attack the weak like a pack of jackals, and couch their enmity in soft and seductive slogans. Free men raise their own children. Servile men submit their children to be raised by others. Free men take their pedigrees from almighty God. Servile men seek out means of establishing a factitious superiority over their peers or their betters: a diploma, a bank account, a big house, a title, a special status as favored victim."

Reads like a description Cicero could have written. So we are replaying the drama the Romans lived through. What recreated Rome in the East, in Byzantium, and in the West, ultimately as the High Middle Ages, was Christianity, and not imputed-grace Protestantism but rather the Theosis-Faith of the True Church, that God became Man not merely to save us from our sins, but to elevate us as new creations in Christ (as St. Paul wrote so often and in so many ways, as did St. John). For a fascinating discussion on Theosis, the forgotten teaching of the Church, see this podcast at (rather absurdly named) "Pints with Aquinas". The theologian being interviewed is Fr. James Brent, O.P.

But America, the United States, never had that, a secure foundation on the profound teachings of Historical Christianity. Instead, the country was founded by Puritan fanatics in New England and Capitalists in Virginia, and then given a national government by the godless (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton) via a Constitutional Convention they themselves created in Philadelphia (after a failed attempt a year before – 1786 – in Annapolis). The new U. S. Constitution intentinoally left God totally out of the picture and if God is out of the picture, no "rights" of any sort can be guaranteed, and even the nature of man and the point and bounds of his life are all "up for grabs". Which, need I point out, are precisely what plague the poor country today, what with its Gay marriage imposed from above, and Tranny rights, and absolutely shocking political malfeasance.

"Liberty" is the false god, "freedom" the true one – if one understands by "freedom" the freedom to be what God intended you to be. As I have written many times, and as have others before me, we're like gasoline engines, we humans; i.e. we're like engines meant to run on gasoline, and gasoline only. Not kerosene, not diesel, not propane, not natural gas or whiskey or aviation fuel. "Liberty," that pied piper, would have one believe one can run on anything one wants. The more choices the more "liberty". Simple enough, except that it doesn't work. And when you of course, necessarily break down, when you "crash and burn", well, too bad. 

With most everyone in the U.S. now wanting to run on everything from unicorn urine to sea water, it's no wonder the country exhibits the morals that even the pagan Cicero would lament. 

An P