Kontextmaschine

3rd October 2018

Post reblogged from Baconmancer with 74 notes

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.
Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.
And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain foreign sovereigns through internal political pressure.
That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.
Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.
The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

Tagged: rerun