March 28, 2022

WASP cultural imperialism over Mediterranean / Catholic sphere, in wake of WWII / NATO

Aimee Terese: please tell these WASP Twitter "Catholics" that they should de-convert if they can't handle Mediterranean norms of male-female relations. Re Aimee saying that it's easier to repair a relationship if the man cheats, than if the woman cheats. Something that all Meds and MENAs and Muslims would instantly agree with. Descriptive, not normative. Relative comparison, not absolute.

However, what seems obvious and even sacrosanct to one group of people may seem flabbergasting and even heretical to another group.

This all goes back to the ethnic composition of the anti-woke left, and therefore, the ethnic composition of the woke left (WASPs, Ashkenazi Jews, Mandarins, Brahmins). The elite stratum in American ethnicity has always been WASP, and more recently mixed with Ashkenazi. See the original posts here and here.

Anglo and Nordic societies have always been way more gender-egalitarian than Mediterranean societies. That's the understatement of the millennium. But the point is: this is an ethnic schism between Meds and elite Americans (primarily WASP, it seems, with some Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmins enlisting in this round of discourse policing against the no-good, very-bad Med woman).

WASPs are trying to police Meds like Aimee out of the discourse, even if their whole brand is being Catholic, and Aimee's people (Lebanese) have been Christian and Catholic since 2000 years ago, while the WASPs just converted last year (literally in most cases), and if they're not British, their people may have only been Christian for 1000 years or less.

Multinational religions like Christianity always syncretize to adapt to local norms when they are spread outside the original source. Hence the Protestant Reformation -- remaking Christianity to adapt to Anglo-Germanic norms, especially for people (like the non-British Germanics) who did not participate in the construction of Christianity throughout the seven ecumenical councils of the 1st millennium.

And that's all well and good. But then these WASPs and Nords should not invade the Catholic church and start ordering them around. In this case, there are larger forces at work -- a broader attempt to impose elite imperial norms on subject peoples, after the American empire swallowed up much of the Mediterranean in the wake of WWII, from Spain to Turkey.

They never did subject those pesky Lebanese, though, who kept the Yankees out of their country by blowing up the Marines barracks in the early '80s, and Uncle Sam figured their tiny country was not worth the hassle (no oil). WASPs, or any other group of imperial elites, can never get over such a humiliating failure.

They would only welcome and go easy on the Lebanese if they genuflected themselves and begged to be part of the Anglo-American elite stratum. But they largely have not, even when they hold professional-class jobs and run for political office (like Green Party fixture Ralph Nader, my only other vote for president aside from Trump -- triggering libtards for 20 years and counting). They are not reliable clients of the imperial hegemon, and are kept at arm's length.

Contrast that with the WASPs' treatment of the Turks and Turkey -- way more favorable and enthusiastic toward their culture and people. It's not the exotic appeal of a vowel-harmony language, or the novelty of Muslim babes who don't cover their long luscious locks. Nope: it's that Turkey has been a NATO member, and a reliable client, since the early days. Whatever suspicions the Anglo elites may have about the Turks, they have far deeper suspicions of the Lebanese, based on the history of imperial incorporation (or failure to do so).

It's irrelevant if any particular Anglo elite person is not consciously aware of this incentive or motivation driving their behavior -- material forces often do not rise to the level of overtly articulated reasons. But they remain powerful forces nonetheless.

Unlike Lebanon, though, Italy *was* defeated militarily (WWII), after which Rome and the Vatican itself (de facto if not de jure) became vassals of NATO and the cultural institutions of the Anglo-American empire. Cultural imperialism stems from political-military expansion. This Anglo imperial transformation of Rome and the Catholic church was formalized soon after Italy's defeat and incorporation into NATO, during the Vatican II councils of the 1960s. The Mid-20th C. was a latter-day war of religion, where the Anglo Protestants came out on top of the Med Catholics.

The good news for Meds and Catholics is that this was a rather late development in the American empire, as we reached our peak of expansion during / right after WWII. So it will be the weakest piece of the whole, and the most likely to break off from our sphere of influence -- unlike the American Southwest.

Once Italy, and therefore the Vatican, are no longer political-military vassals of a Protestant empire, as we Americans continue our ongoing disintegration, they will reclaim their traditional roles and norms and institutions. Not that they'll LARP as Early Modern Counter-Reformation hardliners exactly, but it would be surprising also if they didn't reconquer their church with a lot of pent-up frustration from having it Protestantized for perhaps a century or more by the time these changes come.

Aimee, you may not believe in "collapse" for ideological reasons -- but for your people to seize back control of their institutions from these Puritan interlopers, you may have to! :)

(And no, I'm neither Med nor Catholic. Born & raised Methodist, 1/4 French, but unclear if they were Cath or Prot since they settled in New England at first, not Louisiana. Just cannot stand seeing wondrous, millennia-old human cultural institutions getting gutted by fleeting imperial finger-waggers, whether Puritans or Salafists.)

8 comments:

  1. Most people don't know Rome has rarely been part of a foreign empire, after the fall of the Romans back in the Crisis of the 3rd Century. The Papal States in general, and Rome in particular, were never part of the various empires that swallowed up parts of Northern Italy, Southern Italy, nearby islands like Sicily or Malta, etc.

    This means that the Catholic church, centered in Rome, has been a pretty consistent and continuous entity, without foreign meddling to mold it in the image of conquerors with a different religion.

    The only empire that ever absorbed Rome, or the region of Latium in general, was the Byzantines. And not surprisingly, their political-military leader (the Emperor) intervened heavily in the Roman church's structure, appointments, architectural style, and so on. During the so-called Byzantine Papacy from the 6th to 8th centuries:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Papacy

    And as mentioned in the OP, this was still during the active construction of Christianity, the first seven ecumenical councils. And although ecumenical, the meeting places and main sponsorship was in the expanding Byzantine East, not the contracting Roman West.

    So it's a stretch to say the Byzantines were re-shaping Roman religion -- there was no homogeneous dyed-in-the-wool Christianity anywhere in the 6th C. when Byzantium conquered Rome and influenced their religious institutions.

    That's very different from the American empire conquering Italy and absorbing them into NATO in the late 1940s, over a millennium after Christianity's construction had been completed. By that time, the foreigners' cultural influence was fundamentally altering something that had been hardened in place for a very long time.

    Of all Italian cities, I've only ever visited Rome, but I suspect it felt like the most Italian city for the same reason -- the least swallowed-up and meddled-in by foreign empires, of which there were many carving up the Italian peninsula and islands since the Roman Empire collapsed.

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  2. "Cuius regio, eius religio" is a descriptive fact, sometimes a normative law. After defeat in WWII and incorporation into NATO, Italy -- and therefore Rome and the Vatican -- were clearly part of the regio of the American empire. It's only natural that they should fall under the religio of the conquerors as well.

    If the Anglos had been religious zealots, maybe they would have tried to impose Protestantism by force. But by the 1950s, they weren't that zealous, not crusaders in an overt war of religion.

    So they decided to go through the back door, mellow-like, and Protestantize the Roman church as much as possible.

    If the Roman church had wanted to do any of that Vatican II stuff before the 1960s, they had centuries to do so. If they had wanted to imitate Protestant trends, they had centuries to do so.

    If anything, the church went the other direction, sponsoring the Counter-Reformation, then adopting the "fortress" mentality during the 19th C., when Italy was politically & militarily unifying, against various Early Modern empires. They were determined to avoid getting swallowed up politically / militarily, but also religiously and culturally.

    What changed in the years before the early '60s, where suddenly the Roman church turned on a dime and said, "Yeah, why don't we Protestantize and embrace a "modern" world?" The only major change was political / military membership within a foreign empire, namely the American one as implemented there by NATO.

    They did not adopt the Soviet / Russian / Eastern vision of "modernity". They specifically adopted the Anglo-American empire's vision, and practice, of modernity.

    Way too many people on the left & right, secular and devout, treat "modernity" like some homogeneous thing, springing out of nowhere, affecting so many places at once. Nope: it came in different flavors, depending on where it was, and these differences stemmed from which empire's or state's elites were re-fashioning society.

    There's nothing about "modernity" that required Vatican II. There was already plenty of modernity, of other sorts, in the Early Modern and Industrial eras. But only one era's modernity ended up re-shaping the Roman church -- the era during which Rome was conquered and absorbed into a foreign empire, namely the Mid-20th C.

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  3. Imperial expansion played a huge role in the Protestant Reformation, and is the reason why it only exploded when it did. German speakers outside of Bavaria or right on the Rhine River were not part of the Roman Empire, were absent in the construction / standardization of Christianity during the 4th-8th centuries, and only began to be forcibly converted circa 800 when the Carolingian empire crossed the Rhine in a way that the Romans could not manage. Swedes weren't converted until well into the 2nd millennium.

    That's the background that allowed for the radical re-shaping of the religion. But it needed a catalyst as well, to kick off ethnogenesis. That is the rising cohesion or asabiyah of a group that is feeling the pressure of expanding empires, and ultimately allows them to begin expanding in their turn.

    The Germans were not expanding empires until the Early Modern era, crucially beginning in Prussia with Protestants, who then moved westward into Northern / Eastern Germany. As well as Nords who were vying for their own small-scale empires, like Sweden becoming a major power (if not a sustained expanding empire) in the Early Modern era.

    These newly emerging collectives needed a new religion, to mark themselves as a new and different group of people from who their ancient ancestors were. Maybe they could create a whole new religion, or at least radically re-shape the one they had passively inherited.

    And that's the Protestant Reformation -- allowing the newly expanding empires of Prussia / Germany and Britain to signal their new collective identity as big-boy expanders. They were reacting primarily to the long-time expanding empire of Western Europe -- France -- which had been a bastion of Catholicism and Christianity since the early days.

    And that's why France remained, even somewhat intensified, their Catholicism.

    The expanding Spanish empire was reacting to the expansion of the Moors -- not of the French -- so they could rely on the inherited Roman church, to distinguish themselves from their Muslim overlords, rather than radically re-shape it or create a new religion.

    The Lithuanian empire (including their Polish junior partner), and the Austrian empire, were reacting to, at various times, Orthodox Russia (and even earlier, Bulgarians), Muslim Ottomans, and other Turko-Mongol invaders who were not any variety of Christian, all coming from the East. So Lithuania, Poland, and the members of the Austrian empire, could remain Catholic instead of joining the Reformation or creating a new religion, to mark themselves as different from their adversaries.

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  4. Back to Vatican II, that's why the Poles were less modernizing in the spirit of the councils -- Poland belonged to the Soviet empire, formalized by the Warsaw Pact, until the Russian collapse of the 1990s. Ditto for other Catholics in Eastern Bloc countries -- none of them were conquered by America, and were not part of the Anglo empire.

    Even during the '90s, everything there was still in flux. Not until 1999-2004 did the former Warsaw Pact countries switch their vassalage from Russian to American, judging America to have been a more promising patron as Russia collapsed for the entire decade of the '90s.

    So for awhile after Vatican II, there was a tension between two camps of Catholics, and this mainly fell on political / military alliance lines, with the NATO members Italy and France being more modernizing, and Warsaw Pact members like Poland being more conservative. Soviet clients did not have to implement the specifically American vision of modernity.

    I don't think the Catholic church sex abuse scandals of the early 2000s explain the backlash against the conservative strain of post-Vatican II Catholicism. It happened in all other religious groups, and civic ones like the Boy Scouts, as well as schools both private and public.

    Rather, it was the shifting political-military alliances of the early 2000s, as the former Warsaw Pact members switched to the regio of the American empire (NATO). Accordingly, they had to adapt to the American religio.

    Even Vatican II took a little over a decade from when Italy joined NATO, these sweeping changes are not literally overnight. But by now, over 20 years after Poland joined NATO, the stereotype and reality of ultra-conservative anti-modernizing based Polish Catholics is already fading. Ditto for the other former Soviet Catholic states.

    They're discovering that now that they belong to regio of NATO and the EU, they must adhere to its religio as well, or else suffer the consequences.

    Fortunately for them, as with Italy, the American empire has begun disintegrating, and the recently added clients in the Eastern bloc will be some of the first to break off. Even more reason for the old Warsaw Pact nations to do so, since Russia is prepared to go to war with them if they fuck around and find out, whereas Italy is not going to risk nuclear annihilation to poke the Russian bear.

    And as the Ukraine example shows, the old core of NATO is not going to risk annihilation to beat back Russian expansion. To defend Italy against the Soviets in the 1960s? Sure. To defend Poland against Russia in the 2020s? Hahahaha. It doesn't matter if you got their promises in writing, they can't deliver on them these days, for problems that are minor to the American empire.

    After Italy and Poland are no longer under American vassalage, then we'll see a return of historical Catholicism, with the Vatican II era being viewed as an aberration caused by Protestant America's conquest of Italy in the mid-20th C.

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  5. Phew, lot to say here. I've been writing about these topics off and on for about 10 years, but might as well summarize and update my views all in one convenient place. I started thinking again about these issues after the recent Red Scare episode on Vatican II.

    But as in so many instances, the real spark of inspiration came from my long-time muse, if no longer imaginary gf -- the Phoenician of Unleashin', Aimee Terese.

    Seeing these annoying Puritans LARP-ing as Catholics and trying to bully one of the original Christian groups, will never not set off my white knight crusader instinct.

    'Twas a pleasure to defend thine honor once more, m'lady...

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  6. Special fren, the reason these leftist feminist "males" are getting all amped up to cancel you and brigade you again is because spring has begun here in the northern hemisphere.

    Mating season means they're gonna simp super-hard for their parasocial Madonna waifus, but sadly it also means they're popping hate-boners for who they see as their parasocial Whore pick-me's. I know -- barf!!!

    Exactly like Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame lusting after the renegade Gypsy babe.

    Joke's on them, though -- no babe, of any character type, gets hot and bothered over a discourse cop!

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  7. Returning to Ukraine vs. Russia, the CIA / State Dept recently tried to exert its imperial influence to fuck with the local religious institutions, for purposes of political-military expansion. Namely creating a meme church, the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine, to break away from the longstanding historical Russian Orthodox Church:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_of_Ukraine

    Ukraine is Russian, always has been, and that includes culturally, not just politically or militarily. So, the Russian Orthodox Church had jurisdiction over Eastern Orthodox Christians residing in Ukraine.

    But during the Trump admin, Mike Pompeo (head of the CIA, and then of the State Dept), a Reaganite Cold Warrior dinosaur, tried to break off Ukraine religiously from Russia, to destabilize Russia's political-military influence over Ukraine.

    Well, we see how well that's working -- meme magic is not real IRL. You can't meme a new national church into existence, and rely on that spurring an intense rise in national cohesion against foreign nations. It has to be organic, like the Church of England splitting off from Rome, while Britain is expanding into a proper empire, and not just an insular backwater.

    Ukraine has zero asabiyah, which is why half the nation already wants to join Russia formally, and a good chunk of the rest may just throw up their hands and ask to join Poland instead. Very weak national cohesion -- also shown by their complete inability to resist Russia, despite being armed and trained to the teeth for nearly a decade by NATO. They're just puppets of the Anglo empire, not a cohesive nascent empire that we are merely allying with due to shared enemies.

    Recognition of this meme church also falls along military-alliance lines, with Russia and Serbia rejecting the move (NATO never did absorb the most powerful of the Balkan nations, despite the bombing campaigns). NATO members Greece and Turkey (Constantinople) are OK with it, and the other Balkan NATO members are supportive or mealy-mouthed, but not sharply rejecting it like Russia and Serbia. If you belong to the Anglo imperial regio, you must adhere to its policies regarding religio.

    But just because Uncle Sam is failing in this endeavor doesn't mean it hasn't tried, and at least produced meme-tier results. Most other nations couldn't do that, because they're not political-military expanders at this time. Cultural imperialism always follows political-military imperialism, and these WASPs who think they're just benignly "joining" rather than attempting to re-shape and subjugate the Catholic church, are only the latest in a long line of this tradition.

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  8. This might explain why Sohrab Ahmari is an anti-Vatican II anti-liberal Catholic, as he is originally from Iran, which is not in the American imperial regime.

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