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Feral Finster's avatar

"Schmitt argued that, after the period he identified in the nineteenth century, the First World War had been different, because the Allies had attempted to moralise everything, while really pursuing the economic objective of destroying Germany. He argued more generally (but clearly by reference to that War) that it was possible to hijack and monopolise the concept of “humanity”, such that you deny “the enemy the quality of being human” and declare him to be “an outlaw of humanity .” Thus, paradoxically, “war can be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” The concept of humanity, he argued “is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.” So the “ideological structure” of the Versailles Treaty “corresponds precisely to this polarity of ethical pathos and economic calculation.”"

This is likely one of the real reasons that the Saudi government today decided to rethink its continuing support of Credit Suisse. MBS would have to be insane to put cash or marketable securities in jurisdictions such as the US and EU, lawless jurisdictions without respect for property rights, the moment you do something that Washington doesn't like.

MBS would have more leverage, sending his money to a Nigerian prince.

This moralization of everything also makes the war harder to stop. If Putin really is a hundred Hitlers and Russia is in fact guilty of every one of Lord Posonby's Ten Commandments of War Propaganda, then there is no way to negotiate, everything is permitted other than moderation.

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Pandastic's avatar

I would argue it’s not so much that liberalism domesticated Christianity as that liberalism is a heresy or even a decay-product of Christianity; something like an unstable isotope. All its originators were vaguely Christian deists and assumed a society full of people like themselves.

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