Quite a while back we ran this:
Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?: A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun. He never did. He died following drinking too ...
Which essentially raises and addresses the same topic.
When I first went to post this topic, I was going to limit it to the war, and the war will be principally what this addresses. But in thinking about it, the question is a bit broader than that.
Much broader.
Going to war, however, war is one of the worst evils that nations impose upon each other. They invoke the worst of human suffering and bring about the worst human behavior. The worst human abuse, or at least one of the very worst, homicide, is the very essence of war. Wars inflict death. Death upon combatants, but death upon the wholly innocent. And not only death by armed military violence, but also by accident and starvation. That alone makes war a horror.
But the horrors of war are not limited to death. No war has ever been fought that did not visit rape upon women. Not one single one. Wars are fought mostly by men, and mostly by young men. Men are taught to hate the enemy and dehumanize them. Sooner or later, some of them become wartime rapist. This is true in every single war, some wars more than others, and in every single army. Logic holds that if you can teach men to kill, you will have some break the bounds of any decency.
Wars also involve theft on an epic scale. Western armies have, for many years, banned looting by soldiers but it happens anyhow . Beyond that, wars sanction state theft to at least some degree.
Indeed, war simply visits mass immorality on the cultures that fight, and the location of the fighting. I was listening to We Have Ways, the excellent British podcast on World War Two, the other day (I'm still in the early episodes of the podcast) when a general question episode came up, and one of the topics that was addressed was the wide scale licensing of prostitution. Both the Germans and the British not only tolerated prostitution, but they basically organized and licensed it on a the basis that they needed to in order to address the health concerns it gave rise to. In Amsterdam there were enormous lines to brothels after it was liberated. We've already touched on this in regard to the Japanese government, post occupation, creating brothels specifically for U.S. servicemen. We've often touched upon the post 1953 decay of American morality in this area which gave rise to porongoraphy and the Sexual Revolution and wondered if it was tied to World War Two. Well, here's more evidence that it very much was.
The Trump interregnum likes to pretend that this war started 47 years ago, which is a complete fable But the precursor to it, the Hamas attack on Israel, brought rise to it directly. And that attack featured murder and rape right from the onset, by Hamas. The Israeli response brought about mass homicide. Now we're fighting Iran, for Israel, with Iran having been involved in the Hamas Israeli War. There's no reason at all to sympathize with Iran. That doesn't amount to, however, sympathizing with everything Israel did, including what amounted to genocide in Gaza, and getting the United States into a regional war with Iran.
We don't really know where this will all end, but we can predict a lot of it with some certainty. One certainty is that a war launched with an erroneous belief that it would start an internal revolution badly miscalculated that, and it won't result in one. Iran may have lost what little air force it had and what pathetic navy it had, but it's not defeated. It's a land power to start with. The US is going to have to go into Iran on the ground, which Israel will not do. So we're going to fight a ground war in Iran for Israel. Moreover, that war will not be a series of raids. It'll be a real ground war and it will last, first as a conventional war and then as a guerilla war, for years.
Wars change everything.
And that's not all this incredibly corrupt administration is visiting upon us.
This summer provides plenty of proof, as if it was needed, that we're in a climate emergency, and yet Donald Trump grins and smiles as he guts alternative energy projects, and people like Harriet Hageman watch their family homestead burn and still refuse to acknowledge reality. Money is flying into the pockets of the Trump family and his associates with nobody really questioning it yet. The status of women as coequals in humanity is retreating as a creepy octogenarian comments on them openly in press meetings while keeping the perpetrators of rape at Epstein Island potentially secret.
Things are bad.
Catholic theology addresses the problem of evil with the partial answer that we know that God will not allow an evil to occur unless a greater good can come out of it. That does not mean that God sanctions the war, but rather that when humans cause such evils, God doesn't arrest our behavior if a greater good can come out of it.
Can a greater good come out of this?
I think a series of them can.
First and foremost, this war is achieving right now an acceleration of something generations of environmentalist have striven for By boosting the price of petroleum to epic levels, which stands to get worse, it will reduce the consumption of it, and it will accelerate the conversion of energy generation to renewable green sources. The US was a leader in this until troglodytes and reactionaries insisted that global warming was a fib and longed for the giant car era of the 1950s. Well, Trump has killed that, and probably forever.
Nations that were going to renewable energy are nearly gloating about it now Those that trailed behind, save for the United States where the MAGA troglodytes are in control, are now rushing towards it, knowing that something Trump has said, that the prices will go right back down, is either a lie or amazingly ignorant.
Petroleum prices will not go back down for a generation. An oil and gas infrastructure that took three generations to build cannot and will not be rebuilt overnight. Moreover, the destruction of it, which is already disastrous, will get worse as the war goes on. It took all the way into the mid 1960s to rebuilt Europe after World War Two. This will be no different.
Moreover, the US doesn't have the money to do it. A good that may come out of this war is that the drunk sailor/roaring 20s level of spending the US has engaged in will now come crashing to an end. Nations like China that have funded it are stopping. By 2027 the US will be forced into a financial reconciliation that Trump pretended he was going to bring, but which he lied about, along with everything else We will have to get our financial house in order.
As part of that, this war is very likely to be the end of a bloated military that has become partially rogue. Before Trump II Americans could always depend on the loyalty of the military to its laws. It can't now . The military has engaged in two fully illegal wars with far right Evangelicalism being prominent in the military in the current one
This war is going to be so big that the nation will have to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight it. We've had to do that for every war since Vietnam. After the Vietnam War the military was held in contempt, even though it had done nothing to deserve it. This time, it will be again, but it will deserve it. The contempt will go right into the Guard and Reserves. The nation's ability to engage in these foreign "adventures" will be reduced because the nation will have a very low ability to fill the ranks of the forces necessary to do it, and on top of it, we just won't have the money. Our military will start fitting in with those of our European allies, smaller, professional, and regional. We'll need to depend on our Allies just to defend ourselves, and all of that will be a good thing.
The Trump interregnum has seen the nation, moreover, completely betrayed by the capitalist class. Donald; Trump, Elon Musk, and a host of the rich and powerful have not been there for you and that's finally obvious. Indeled, we learned, as we should have known, that the avarice of greed would turn, in many instances, to avaricious lust, with some of the rich and powerful flying offshore to fuck teenage girls. Rather than bring them to justice, Trump has hid their names. And, frankly, at this point, in spite of what Trump's supporters claim,there's plenty of evidence that he may have fucked teenage girls himself, and its pretty hard to believe he didn't know about that going on even if he didn't. So we learned that not only are the rich and powerful detrimental to our economic welfare, they're detrimental to our environmental welfare, and even detrimental to the security of our daughters. With the bloom off the rose of the worship of the rich, and after watching the nation fast forward into economic ruin, there's some rational hope that the rich will be brought to heel by having their wealth significantly reduced.
And then there's the weirdness of the far right Evangelicals. The Trump Administration is likely to bring that to an end, and it needs to end.
Various members of the Administration, most notably J. D. Vance but also including Marco Rubio, have lectured Europe on it losing its culture, by which they mean, if they will not openly state it, it's Christian culture. There's some reason to make that criticism, but it cannot really be made by a country governed by an authoritarian serial polygamist assisted by a Speaker of the House whose sympathetic to the New Apostolic Reformation and in which Paula White is a spiritual advisor. The crash of the Trump administration, and it will crash, will bring the NAR down with, and most likely damage the Evangelical Right beyond repair.
Every time the world in general has faced an existential threat since the dawn of Christianity, if not before, there have been those who concluded that the world itself was ending. There are those who have concluded that right now. There are those who seriously wonder if Donald Trump is the Antichrist. Peter Theil, the billionaire Evangelical (and homosexual) had oddly found a voice in First Things expressing the view that the Apocalypse is here citing much of what I just did.
Is it?
Well, who knows. But what we do know is that every age that featured such crises brought that view about. Christians during Attila's day though the end had arrived, and for some, on a very persona level, it had. When the Vikings started raiding European coastlines many presumed the same thing. By the 1970s Hal Lindsey was scaring people with The Late Great Planet Earth.
What we also know is that true moments of crisis can be transformative. Europe, once it became the center of Christianity, has wandered away from the Church repeatedly, with the Protestant Reformation being only one such example.
Already a huge portion of Americans are disillusioned and disgusted. This can be seen socially, culturally and politically. Most Sundays now I can hardly find a seat at Mass and confession lines are like what I used to only see at Easter. Here in "Red" Wyoming, there's a significant movement to take the Wyoming Freedom Caucus out of office. The Democrats appear slated to regain the House, and maybe the Senate, in November, to no doubt be followed by a Custer like last stand by Trump in the Oval Office in which he refused to recognize the game is up. Republicans, and some Democrats, are fretting about the small-scale rise of Social Democrats, but capitalism is being allowed to run roughshod over average people and needs to be restrained, and certain "social" policies present everywhere else on Earth are long overdue here, such as "socialized" medicine. And fascism always gives rise to the opponent of socialism, and the GOP has turned largely fascist.
All of this is to suggest maybe some good will come out of this.
Tragic Prelude, a mural in the Kansas State Capitol. Brown carries in one hand a Bible and a rifle in the other. Union and Confederate troops are fighting and dying in the background and foreground. Tornadoes and a prairie fire approach. An era, really, not unlike our own.
In some ways, the first Trump administration was the opening campaign of a second Civil War, this one a Cold Civil War, by the same forces that brought about the first in 1860-65. The nation's great failure after winning that war was to pass on extremely severely punishing those who brought it about, the slave owning oligarchs of the South. That opportunity is going to present itself here a second time, in very short order.
The first time caused legal reforms to the Constitution. This one needs to as well.
The first one, perhaps ironically, also caused a major religious shift in the county and brought about the downfall of the southern Episcopal Church. This one needs to bring about the downfall of far right Evangelicalism, and probably will. The Episcopal Church in the South fell of its own accord for supporting the Confederacy. The NAR will fall for helping bring about and advancing Trump.
The United States is a conservative nation, mixed with classical liberal aspirations. That will reflect what comes next, and we need to return to that.
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