Thomas_More
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https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2025/10/on-eve-of-destruction.html?m=1
Evident now that total war, and soon, is now the agenda.
The Humanists, like More and Erasmus, saw the Henrician Supremacy (which was not Protestant) and Luther’s revolt as signs of the disintegration of Christendom, and thus opposed it, whilst pursuing their own Humanist reforms under the aegis of Rome.
Nation-states were emerging and an English nationalism supported the Elizabethan war against Spain. But this nationalism was still tied to religion and was really anti-papist. The rural population, subject to enclosures, was still predominantly Catholic and had supported Mary’s march on London in 1553.
Of course, the British school system mispresents history in modern nationalist terms.Spain, England’s main enemy at the time, had become the first nation-state with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and yet nationalism was absent. Like Reformation England, religion was foremost. The rise of nation-states which remained Catholic was expressed by the Counter Reformation, which was not a counter reformation but was the Reformation in the Catholic countries. It produced ecclesiastical, but Catholic, independence in Spain, with episcopal loyalty going to the monarch rather than the Pope, and Gallicanism in the Church of France, promoting monarchical and ecclesiastical centrism.
In the German states battling the Emperor, the Lutheran revolt was in fact reactionary, championing the feudal princes against Imperial centrism. It delayed the rise of Germany as a unified state until the late 19th century and kept the princes in control and the bourgeoisie in subjection.
I never said nationalism caused the world wars. I said Germany’s late arrival on the scene of capitalism and of colonial aspirations created the conditions which produced the German wars in Europe (WW1 & 2).
The first nation-state was Spain. But nationalism originated in Britain.
I would actually place the birth of popular nationalism in late 18th century England among the Church and King mob and the prizefight craze. Nationalism crystallised round the prizefight heroes, especially Daniel Mendoza, as a recent book explains.
But the nationalist mob co-existed with the very different English Jacobin movement which looked to revolutionary France for misplaced inspiration.
Come Napoleon, British nationalism came to the fore, but it remained a lumpen phenomenon, as it largely does today. The most patriotic and jingoistic of the proletariat are the lumpenproletariat, in the popular sense if not necessarily the economic.
(Have not socialists always used the word ‘lumpen’ to mean ruffian and proudly ignorant, and not strictly for its economic definition?)And my experience (face to face) of the ignorant is that they are proud of their ignorance and make fun of knowledge.
I do not mind the gentle and compassionate who are uninformed. It’s the ignorant who are arrogant and proud that I despise.
One can only try to address those who want to know things, and it’s a long haul; and with never time enough or opportunity enough. So, convincing a majority?
And with Moldova’s stance, Russia will be compelled to invade it as well, which will legitimise the western warmongers further, maybe finally provoke a European war.
Confucianism is about behaviour and material matters. Hierarchical matters, yes, but material ones, not idealism.
Confucianism isn’t really concerned with metaphysics. The Confucian rites are similar to the definition of rites in ancient Rome: about performance and the cementing of social cohesion.
Real tyranny came with the Imperial absolutism of Mao’s hero Ch’in Shih-huang, who burned the books of Confucius and his disciples.
Similarly, Mao set out to destroy Chinese literature, art and all history. Anything which did not glorify Mao. Libraries were emptied and all books failing to name Mao at least once on every page – in a footnote at the very least – were burned.I wouldn’t equate Maoism with Confucius under any circumstances. Mao doesn’t even count when it comes to centuries of Chinese history and civilisation. Like the ancient Legalists he admired, he was a destroyer first and foremost and an enemy to literature and art and to anything progressive in human society.
And the close of the 1950s saw the biggest deliberately inflicted famine, combined with kill quotas, aimed at decimating the rural population.
