The angry reaction of the American Empire’s loyal servants (Sean Hannity, Sen McCain, and so on) towards Russia in the wake of the downing of a passenger jet in the Ukraine Washington City
Laurence Vance has coined the word “warvangelical” to describe so-called evangelical Christians who are obsessed with supporting all of the state’s wars and all of the death, destruction, and mayhem that they entail. They ignore the ancient just war tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, and simply support all war and all military aggression – as long as the U.S.
These are the people who booed at Ron Paul when he reminded them at one of their conventions that Jesus is known as “the Prince of Peace.” These are the people who became quite hysterical (and hateful) when Ron Paul quoted the Biblical admonition, “live by the sword, die by the sword” in response to a question about a U.S. Army sniper who had written a book boasting of murdering hundreds of Iraqis after he was murdered after returning to civilian life.
These are the people whose churches are littered with gigantic American flags that dwarf any Christian icons; who routinely ask anyone who owns a military uniform to wear it to church; who sing the state’s war anthems at their services; who divert their Sunday offerings away from the poor and needy in their communities so that the money can be sent to grossly-overpaid military bureaucrats; and who can never stop thanking, thanking, thanking, and thanking “soldiers” for their “service” in murdering foreigners and bombing and destroying their cities – if not their entire societies – in the state’s aggressive, non-defensive, foreign wars.
Where did this very un-Christian “religion” of violence come from? The answer to this question is that it first developed as a part of New England ’s neo-Puritanical “Yankees” in the early and mid-nineteenth century. It reached its zenith in the 1860s when, finally in control of the entire federal government, the New England Yankees waged total war on the civilian population of a large part of their own country, mass murdering fellow Americans by the hundreds of thousands, and then singing a “religious” song that described it all as “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
As Murray Rothbard described them in his essay, “Just War”:
The North’s driving force, the ‘Yankees’ – that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois – had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent ‘postmillenialism’ which held that as a precondition of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year-Kingdom of God on Earth. The Kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin . . . . If you didn’t stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved.
This is why “the Northern war against slavery partook of a fanatical millenialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle,” wrote Rothbard. They were “humanitarians with the guillotine,” the “Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.”
. . .
Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/07/thomas-dilorenzo/the-american-religion-of-violence/, accessed 18 July 2014
Also, as we pray for the living who have been affected by the airliner’s crashing, so let us remember to do the same for those who have died. The departed benefit from our prayers just as do those still here in the world. A short explanation:
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