Combat deuxi%C3%A8me croisade.
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Part One: The European Origin of Christian White Supremacy Before its Invasion of the Americas
Although convicted felon Donald Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to defeat a decent and far better qualified Kamala Harris on November 5, 2024, his popular vote count ultimately fell below a 50% majority and, as Peter Baker of The New York Times reported on November 22nd, "he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century." Nevertheless, his Electoral College victory undoubtedly involved more than the widespread feral embrace of his lies, deviance, ignorance, lawlessness, grievances, braggadocio, grifting, vulgarity, and boorishness by his reveling White supremacist MAGA supporters. Although anger over inflation and immigration certainly expanded his base, it now seems clear that racism and misogyny best explain the stunning reduction - compared with voter turnout for Joe Biden in 2020 -- in the number of Democrats who even bothered to cast votes.
Although Black and Hispanic turnout seems to have both fallen and shifted in the big cities of the swing states, Kamala Harris still won more than 50% of the votes cast nationally by Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. In fact, she won 92% of the votes cast by Black women. As usual, however, White voters were decisive. An analysis published by NPR on November 22, 2024, summed it up: "White voters were a higher share of the electorate and voted in large numbers for Trump."
This decisive White vote for an ignorant and worthless scoundrel like Trump validates H. L. Mencken's famous warning: "As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron" (Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920).
Having read much of Mencken's work, I suspect he would not have been surprised to learn that White Boobus Americanus would not only vote for a moron, but also a serial liar, convicted felon, and insurrectionist who has been found legally liable for massive fraud, sexual assault, and defamation. Simply remember that Mencken also wrote: (1) "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance," and (2) "Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses" (AEI, Mark Perry, November 08, 2016).
Better yet, for a full-throated, searing critique of "the gross weaknesses and knaveries of the common people - in their inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors - in brief in their congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state," I recommend Mencken's book, Notes on Democracy, (Knopf, 1926). It's a hoot! There, for example, you will find the perfect characterization of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers: "The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots" (p. 89).
How has the condition of White American democracy become so degraded? Historically, blame must be placed on the cultural degeneration of a smug, but illusory, Christian White male supremacy, which was brought to the Americas from Europe. The degeneration was the byproduct of centuries spent on the frontier and the brutality inflicted by Anglo-American men against Indians and slaves -- which resulted in their own self-dehumanization.
Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson suspected that slavery would cause the moral and cultural degradation of slave owners. But the self-dehumanization went beyond them and appears to have afflicted virtually everyone facing the rigors of the American frontier.
Although other civilizations, notably the Russian and Chinese, have touted their unique superiority, my concern here is with the European origins of Christian White supremacy, its penetration of the Americas, its rise and expansion in Colonial America and the United States, its relentless brutalization of the "other" and the resulting self-dehumanization and degeneration into a coarse, low information, common White trash possessing sufficiently large enough numbers to secure an electoral victory for a felon and scoundrel like Trump.
It all began with the "superiority complex" that arose in Ancient Greece. Noting that the Greeks exhibited no "superiority complex" prior to the Persian Wars, Norman Davies tells us in, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996), that Aeschylus, who fought at Marathon (490 BCE), created "a lasting stereotype whereby the civilized Persians are reduced to cringing, ostentatious, arrogant, cruel, effeminate, and lawless aliens.
Henceforth, all outsiders stood to be denigrated as barbarous" (p. 103). Professor Davies adds that this "superiority complex" subsequently was adopted by the Romans (Ibid.). Most significantly and fatefully, the superiority complex was adopted and propagated by the Medieval Church.
Early on, Medieval Christians began to think of themselves as a race. "[W]hen the Saxons were forcibly converted to Christianity by Frankish arms in the decades around 800, adoption of the new religion made them 'one race,' as it were (quasi una gens), with the Franks" (The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350, Robert Bartlett, Princeton, 1993, p. 251). Pope Gregory (1073-1085) "referred to "the Christian race," (christiana gens), and the phrase 'the holy race of Christians," (gens sancta, videlicet Christianorum) can be found in the German chronicler Arnold of Lubeck" (Ibid., p. 252).
As Professor Robert Bartlett concludes: "These examples show Latin Christians, as they encountered alien peoples in the course of their high medieval expansion, adopting the terms of race and blood to describe their group identity." (Ibid.).
The race-conscious Church dehumanized itself and its followers during the Crusades. First, in 1095, "The council of Clermont decreed that whoever joined the army 'for devotion alone, not to gain honor or money " can substitute this journey for all penance'" (The Crusades: A History, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, p. 33). Imagine, total forgiveness of sins in exchange for the murdering of heretics.
"The crusade opened nightmarishly. There were outbreaks of violent anti-Judaism in France shortly after the council of Clermont. These spread to Germany and central Europe, where they were associated with the first wave of crusaders leaving for the East." (Ibid., p. 43).
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