clipped words

the following critical comment, made by bruce and the steaming pile of minotaur shit, in reply to the slog post friedmanite capitalism has aimed low and missed. we need a new higher aim was summarily and shamefully edited out and nicked:

The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition were, shall we say, cases of serious copybook-blotting, but pretty much once Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France had been separated from their silly heads, Christian values in Europe – and later middle America – used the social principles of State-separated Christianity to produce communities, welfare and humane treatment on a scale never seen before.

leaving aside the fact that i entered this sentence and nearly never found my effing way out again (i was luckily saved by a ball of mental commas in my pocket)...and (given it's easter) gliding glibly over the astonishing new sociological evidence that in the nineteenth century 'christian values' and 'social principles' were busily working together in pefect mystical harmony to transform the face of europe without any human intervention whatsoever...i would respectfully request to enquire of ward whether he refers to a scale of size or rather one of quality...for if he can but bring himself to acknowledge that slavery was not abolished until 1833, and that even then the 'freed' slaves were by law compelled to work as 'apprentices' until as late as 1840, he might admit that any 'welfare and humane treatment' by governments in europe was at best cynical and more often the complete sham which it remains today...

...and as for:

Indeed, it has long been my theory that the Roman Empire crumbled in the end because early Christians in Rome offered a way of life so diametrically opposed to the cruel Imperial ethic, it was by definition bound to be seditious….and melt the iron hammer with which the Romans knocked their conquered peoples into shape.

well, it's probably worth noting that the emperor of rome, constantine, himself converted to christianity in 312 and yet oddly enough the western roman empire did not go up in smoke until 476, when it decamped to the middle east, put on an even more bizarre outfit and survived another funky 1000 years as the byzantine empire - so i humbly propose therefore that ward's decline-and-fall theory requires a little hammering-into-shape itself.

From around 1830 in Western Europe, and America after the Civil War and before McCarthyism, Christian values produced a level of caring social interaction and theory miles beyond that of any other continent. That this didn’t happen in Africa, India, and South America is, for me, a condemnation of the Church as an agent in league with a repressive State – be that Argentina or the British Empire. Conquistador priests and and early missionaries have a lot to answer for. But not only did the British Empire turn out to be far more constructive and benign than any predecessor, the Brits gave it away at the end of the Second World War because (the Labour Government at least) believed in self-determination.

gobsmacking stuff really - to think that ward really believes cultures in other continents could not look after their own without the 'benign' influence of a british empire which, incidentally, the establishment gave away (mainly in the 1960s) to its distinctly nefarious mates, who are effectively still ruling and exploiting ex-colonial lands and peoples by proxy for the british elite until this very day; how much land in south africa, kenya, and zimbabwe was 'given away' considering that much of it has remained under european ownership to the present? how many people in kenya or south africa (to name but a couple of former colonies) have been violently slaughtered and suppressed since the advent of independence? and did the lovely labour government dissolve the british empire because it 'believed in self-determination'? did it ffff - the empire dissolved because its subjects wanted out.

That Labour administration was largely based on Christian-inspired Fabian and Community Trade Union Socialism at the time. I’m not a member of any of those clubs, but the 1945-51 administration still stands out for me as easily the most productive of an otherwise ethically dim British century. Without the inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth, I doubt if it would ever have happened.

pardon me for assuming that fabianism and trade-unionism were inspired by the atheist doctrine of communism, but you learn something every day dontcha?

the 1945-51 labour administration...

didn't they eat well?