Dear Friends,                                                Do we really need another Crusade?

At last, with much trouble and immense loss, more regular armies attained the desired

object; they beheld themselves in possession of all the Holy Places of note — Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Golgotha, and even the Holy Sepulchre. In the whole expedition — in all

the acts of the Christians — appeared that enormous contrast (a feature characteristic

of the age) — the transition on the part of the Crusading host from the greatest

excesses and outrages to the profoundest contrition and humiliation. Still

dripping with the blood of the slaughtered inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Christians

fell down on their faces at the tomb of the Redeemer, and directed their fervent

supplications to him.

                                                               G.W.F. Hegel

Who knows – who cares – whether Trump has even heard of the Crusades. Oddly enough though his flunky at the Department of whatever it is, Pentagon Pete, even though he’s well known not to be the brightest sandwich in the deck, has a large tattoo on his chest of the Cross of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, largest and longest lasting of the Crusader Kingdoms. That’s a big investment in pain. And he does seem to be realizing the profit in stirring Christian Nationalist speeches, bringing in his pastor who has even an even weirder idea of the Word of Christ than he does: God is a god of war and destruction, forget all the woke, namby-pamby love stuff.

Christian Nationalism is a direct, lineal descendant of the Crusades. It may be that the First new Crusade, perhaps even the Second, will be directed against the threat within, all the heretics and unbelievers, children of Satan, just as the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). But the Crusade against the infidel abroad must be most important, the real deal.

And look (behold! we might even say), God has brought us back to the true terrain, the Holy Land. And he’s telling us that this time it’s not a test, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Beast with – I can’t remember how many heads, or is it tails? Big scary Beast in any case – Armageddon, the End of Days, or, in one word, the Apocalypse itself. Now is the time for rejoicing!

At least, many of the Christian Nationalist followers of Trump are. They just can’t wait to get over to the other side once and for all. Poor old Trump, I doubt if he’s rejoicing: there are no Big Macs in Hell, and even if he squeaks into the other place, it’s much more haute cuisine, even, horrors, cuisine minceur! Talk about Hell in Heaven!

Anyway, the vision of a last glorious Crusade is alive in the minds of quite a lot of people, including the Secretary of whatever, he with the big cross on his chest. And you can go for the Crusade even if you hold back from the End of Days.

The language of Crusade is the language of good against evil in the purest form, and it has been so since Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, leading to the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem on 22 July 1099. It decrees that every one of our enemies is evil, and every one of them must be killed. Crusader States are founded on the principle that their normal state is the state of war. They rule by right of conquest. Their rule lasts for as long as they can hold what they have conquered against their enemies. The rule of the Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted until 18 May 1291, with the fall of the city of Acre.

Christianity is the original spiritual home of good against evil. But by a strange instance of history’s infinite ability to play off determinacy with contingency, Christianity, or, perhaps, the Christian peoples, never had to face the nightmare of theocracy. Christianity became a state religion as the junior partner in a very powerful, well organized, huge and already existing entity, the Roman Empire. The Imperial state called the shots.

The founding experience of Christianity as state religion therefore was of a division between spiritual and temporal in which the temporal had the final say. The endless jockeying for power between kings and popes throughout the Middle Ages was an extension of this framed by the universal desire to restore the Empire in all its glory.

The Church had to temper not only its ambitions but also its principles. The vagaries, ambiguities, machinations of the temporal order, of the state, only allowed an intermittent enforcement of good against evil. The Crusades were advertised as the purest expression of good against evil. The godless Saracens hold the Holy Land, all the holiest places. This cannot stand. Anyone who goes out to fight for the Holy Land is blessed, and should they die is guaranteed a special place in Heaven.

There was something else though. The point of the feudal order is to generate large numbers of armed men, Vassals of Lords to whom they owe allegiance. These men, under the command of their lord, must be ready to come out and stand with the King against his enemies. Two small problems: first, the Lord might, and often did, bring his men out against the king; second, having all these armed men around, especially when they didn’t have much to do, was a continual threat to public order.

But if you can summon up as many of them as possible for a great Crusade against the infidel … problem solved, or at least partly solved. The Christian opposition of good against evil, the problem of too many armed men hanging around, and the tendency to murderous violence of said armed men was the formula that unleashed the Crusades.

The Crusader ethos, merciless and eternal war of good against evil, has been making a comeback, first in its domestic Christian Nationalist form (the Albigensian Crusade side); and now right back on its old stomping ground, the “Holy Land”. And look at the crowd who’ve suddenly got religion: cabinet members, “legislators”, reactionary “hosts” of big deal media outfits, former hosts of such outfits, the fired and the elevated to the cabinet. And then the weirdest of all, not because anyone believes anything he says about religion or anything else, but the hugest leap of faith by the faithful that Trump is one of theirs.

And what a religion it is! Christ! Huge tattooed crosses on chests! Christ the killer – all he needed was more AR-15s – who directs every bullet to kill the unworthy, who blesses the destruction of entire civilizations because they obstruct the life-giving flow of oil. There’s lots more: minorities, women, the LGBTQ+ community, you’d better watch out, won’t take much for us to kill you too.

Meanness, contempt, cruelty, death lust, stupidity. I don’t know what kind of a guy Pope  Urban II was, I doubt that he’d be someone to go out for a beer with (my daughter’s great test, though she doesn’t like beer). It’s a mistake to assume that these ancient sons of bitches were somehow if not better at least grander than the ones we’re faced with. The ancient ones certainly are the forefathers of the current crop.

And we do have a problem of armed men with nothing to do, numbers of cabinet members and reactionary members of Congress, and then all the members and potential members of reactionary militias – and they’re armed. But where to send them? We can’t just dump them like toxic waste on less developed countries. Maybe they could go with Elon on the first ship to Mars, I’m sure he’d appreciate the company. But that’s a bit hard on Mars – we imposed the martial name on it.

In the meantime we have an incantation earlier peoples lacked:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

Merely uttering these words is not enough. I’ve mentioned Géza Róheim’s friend from Normanby Island before, who told him a very powerful incantation for killing crocodiles, and then described how he killed the crocodile with an axe. We need that incantation so that we know that we are able to stop another Crusade.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

The Federal government no longer exists.