As you have probably heard, Donald Trump’s chief advisor is a fellow named Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon’s true beliefs are a bit of an enigma. We all know now about Breitbart, the outspoken voice of oppressed Confederate soldiers everywhere, but he has given very few interviews with the media. It has always been an open question to me whether Breitbart’s editorial direction is merely to drive clickbait cashflow (hahah, made you look!) or if anything there represents the true belief of the multimillionaire former investment banker.
A bit of the curtain was lifted when the website Buzzfeed released a transcript of a Skype conversation that Bannon had held with a conference of conservative Catholics at the Vatican in 2014. There is a lot to mull over in that transcript, but what jumped out at me as one of those “militant” atheists is that to Bannon, Muslims and immigrants are not the problem facing America — we are.
He begins with a history lesson, telling us that the era before World War I was a utopia, especially because Europe was Christian. (He is apparently either unaware of or unconcerned with the rise of antisemitism in Austria during this time period.)
It’s ironic, I think, that we’re talking today at exactly, tomorrow, 100 years ago, at the exact moment we’re talking, the assassination took place in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the bloodiest century in mankind’s history. Just to put it in perspective, with the assassination that took place 100 years ago tomorrow in Sarajevo, the world was at total peace. There was trade, there was globalization, there was technological transfer, the High Church of England and the Catholic Church and the Christian faith was predominant throughout Europe of practicing Christians. Seven weeks later, I think there were 5 million men in uniform and within 30 days there were over a million casualties….
It might be worth noting that in World War I, all of the combatants were “Judeo-Christian nations”. Germany (which was formerly part of the Holy Roman Empire) is where the monk Martin Luther broke with the Church.
But the thing that got us out of it, the organizing principle that met this, was not just the heroism of our people — whether it was French resistance fighters, whether it was the Polish resistance fighters, or it’s the young men from Kansas City or the Midwest who stormed the beaches of Normandy, commandos in England that fought with the Royal Air Force, that fought this great war, really the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists, right?
Jumping from 1914 to 1930 and skipping over that guy with the funny mustache, Bannon seems to be making the argument that World War II was between the Christian West and the atheists. This is a bit alarming on many levels and completely ahistorical. (The “godless communists” were our allies in World War II, and had a lot to do with the actual military victory by destroying the German army at Stalingrad.) It is very hard to explain these two paragraphs unless you believe that only Catholics and Anglicans (who have held talks about reunifying) are Christians. Although it is a common Christian trope that the Nazis were atheist (to show that Christian antisemitism had absolutely nothing to do with the Nazi atrocities towards the Jews), nobody has ever argued that Germany in World War I was anything but a Christian nation. It was predominantly Protestant, though.
This guy might be taking Holy War even further than we thought.
I could let this slide as poor wording or a bad understanding of history, except now we get into his thoughts about the present day:
I certainly think secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals, right?
If you go back to your home countries and your proponent of the defense of the Judeo-Christian West and its tenets, often times, particularly when you deal with the elites, you’re looked at as someone who is quite odd. So it has kind of sapped the strength.
This is a bit chilling, since the idea of “sapping the strength” of the nation has parallels elsewhere. Nazi paranoia about the Jews frequently spoke of plots to “sap the strength” of the Aryan race or state. So apparently if you refuse to buy into Christian dogma, you are sapping the strength that our great Judeo-Christian West is going to need to fight the horrible menace of people who believe in the Muslim dogma. This could be amusing if the historical precedent for those who allegedly “sap the strength” of nations was not so grim.
The other tendency is an immense secularization of the West. And I know we’ve talked about secularization for a long time, but if you look at younger people, especially millennials under 30, the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising iteration.
Now that call converges with something we have to face, and it’s a very unpleasant topic, but we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.
Now I believe that he means that somehow popular culture is secularizing the current (rising?) generation, and this is bad because it saps our will to fight the real menace that we all face, which is global warming Islam.
Anyway, if you are feeling secure because you are a white male so nothing bad is going to happen to you, think again. You might be one of those atheists who are “sapping the strength” of the nation — even if you think you are a Christian. That is the way it works with sects.
This is going to be interesting.