17 February 2025
By no means would I hold myself up as a model for anyone else. Yet, over the years of my life, I have often found a substantial number of people consciously emulating some portion of my behavior.
I am not eager to lead, but I'm willing. It's a chore, and the first thing I do is try to delegate as much as possible to those who follow. I have an instinct to look for people who seem to know how to do this or that and put them in charge of what they seem to do best. When I was in training for church leadership, I was often dismayed by the underlying assumptions that leadership meant total command of way too many details.
I noticed a series by L. Reichard White that showed up on Lew Rockwell's site: "How Do You Explain This?" So far, we have Part 1 and Part 2. Of course, there is a thesis and an agenda behind this series. In the end, I rather like some parts of it, wherein the author exposes the unspoken assumptions of American culture in contrast with other cultures. I don't particularly care for how the author still promotes an unconscious value system that is unbiblical.
Intentional or not, White offers a western materialistic sense of what matters. We can't use that value system in the Covenant.
For example, he mentions with horror the nuclear weapons the US dropped on Japan as an example of people blindly following orders. Oddly enough, that trait of zealous obedience of leadership as a Japanese trait may well have been the real problem with making war against Japan in the first place. While Japan did have large industrial facilities, a substantial part of their manufacturing was small home shops. In effect, the whole country was regimented in favor of imperial conquest and fanatical combat. There was no useful distinction between military and civilian facilities. But White still refers to the whole thing in terms of civilian losses.
The disgust at children and aged folks being roasted in the heat and then dying slowly from radiation poisoning is a western thing. Japan would have used nukes if they had them. Westerners never understood, much less accepted, the doctrine of the Fall. Children are socially innocent, but not morally pure by any means. In the Bible, if you intend subjecting the enemy people, then of course you'll target the military and spare the civilians. However, if God says the people themselves are defiled, then there's no one who is innocent.
There's a whole branch of philosophy/theology arising from moral assumptions. It's mostly ignored in the West because western thinkers are so highly biased about it in the first place. They read their biases back into the Bible and pervert Christian religion.
The US government would not have sought a word from God on their enemies at any time, so that was out the question. That's the real horror. Too much of the US entry into the war in the Pacific is shrouded in secrecy and there are hints the whole thing was fraudulent. We have very good reason to believe the government frankly permitted the attack on Pearl Harbor, and intentionally made it an easy target. However, it wasn't inherently evil to use such a destructive weapon as nukes that took out famous landmarks and civilian people. My point is that White chose a very bad example to support his thesis.
White is trying to restore the western myth of individuality, as if raising it back up from the dead and giving it a life it never had before. This mythology persists despite having been a lie from the start. It was promoted in Northern European mythology as way to make people think they were free when they never were. And over time, westerners have gotten increasingly less free simply because that veil of lies has been removed. What we see with increasing centralization is exactly what was always a core element of western philosophical assumptions about reality. It is not a significant change of orientation; it is not a loss of some treasure we once had.
Furthermore, the idealizing of Native American pagan culture is not helpful. White's efforts are not pulling out some hidden moral truths that we have forgotten. It's just another effort to build something that never was, never could be.
This document is public domain; spread the message.