Post by Clovis Merovingian on Mar 10, 2021 6:42:46 GMT
(I use some language from Michael Lind's book "Made in Texas George W. Bush and the Southern takeover of American Politics" in his chapter "the Confederate Century" pages 40-50 so I am crediting him here to avoid plagiarism. It's a whiny screed by a politically ignorant progressive but there's solid historical content in the book.)
To the keen observer of America, defined here as the continent of North and South America not the Union of States who's people arrogantly refer to themselves with that name, a curious fact stands out. There seems to be a cultural and economic dichotomy on the continent that follows climatological patterns. The rich parts of the American continent, the Northern United States, Canada, the West Coast which seem to be wealthy, historically industrial, democratic, left wing, more educated, middle class, multicultural, boring, and hubs of commerce, are all in cold or temperate climates while the poorer parts of the American continent, the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America, places known to be historically more conservative, religious, agrarian, hierarchical, oligarchical, filled with racial strife, culturally rich, less industrial, less educated, and with a wider gap between rich and poor are all in tropical or subtropical areas of the continent.
Why does this cultural rift exist? It has everything to do with who settled the continent first and where. The first thing you must understand about colonial societies is that they are specific fragments of the country they came from. Colonial societies as a rule are far more conservative culturally than the societies that created them in the sense that they retain the cultural characteristics of the mother country at the time of their settlement long after things have changed in the mother country. Iceland is a colony of Norway during the Viking Age and their language is basically but for a few differences Old Norse preserved to the point where they don't have to learn another language to read the saga of the Icelanders. They can read it in their native language. On top of that the Icelanders still have a quaint belief in elves even in the 21st century where they build roads around rocks because the elves supposedly live there and they don't want to tick off the elves. In Latin American countries the Spanish they speak is an older more linguistically conservative form of Spanish and the same is true of the English in the United States and Canada. The United States also conserves old English traditions long lost in England such as the Sheriff to name one example.
So who settled tropical America and temperate America and what was the difference between them? The answer is, a lot of different groups settled in different parts of the American continent but these groups can be broadly divided into two main categories. The two categories are from two distinct classes in the European Middle Ages and they are the merchants or bourgeoisie in the temperate and cold areas, and the knights or warrior aristocracy in the tropical areas. First, a little history on the Middle Ages. Medieval Europe was a feudal system based on land ownership. At the the top of the hierarchy was the king and under him was the rural aristocracy. The rural aristocracy lived in great castles and ruled their own territory of land as a king would and most of the people who lived in Medieval Europe were peasants which were essentially unfree forced labor bonded to the lord's land who's main purpose in life was to farm the great swaths of land in mass agriculture to feed the rural aristocrat living in the castle overlooking their village. Medieval Europe was essentially a rural society where aristocrats in castles lorded over vast farmlands worked by slaves who were the majority of the population. I know that some people wouldn't put it that way and would say that peasants are not comparable to slaves but what else do you call forced laborers that are basically owned by their lords and are thought of as lesser beings by their owner?
But Medieval Europe was more than just aristocrats lording over a mass of peasants. There were people who were free from the lord's control and had the right to control their own destiny. These people founded free cities called bourgs (hence the name bourgeoisie). Within these cities were merchants, craftsmen, and other men of skill who earned their living by their own skill and thrift. The people who were the elite in these cities were the great rich merchants, people who traded goods for a profit often in far away places. These people were the first capitalists. The difference between the merchants and the rural aristocracy which shall henceforth be called the knights in this discourse was more than a difference between social classes but a difference in values and outlooks on life between the two. The Knights were primarily a warrior aristocracy with martial and military values of honor codified in a code of chivalry. The ideal of the medieval society was to separate people into three classes, those who fight, those who work, and those who pray. The knights were those who fight and they distained hard and honest labor as the domain of the lowly peasants who existed to sustain them. Their domain and their purpose of life was to wage war on behalf of the God, the king, or themselves. They ruled over vast lands but they very rarely left them except to conquer or go on crusade or fight a foreign enemy. If they met a foreigner their first instinct was to subjugate them as they did the peasants. They themselves distained profit and the grubby mercantile craft of trading that the bourgeoisie specialized in which they saw a dishonorable. In ancient societies merchants were seen as the lowest of the low because they were thought to get their wealth through trickery and deceit while the knightly way of taking someone's' wealth through war was seen as honorable because you risked your life took it by skill in honorable battle. This was partly why Jews were hated by so many people throughout history. Jews were often the mercantile middlemen of society. Finally the knight was not skilled in accumulating wealth but was known to spend it lavishly in a reckless fashion to entertain guests and on other aristocratic pursuits. The values of the knight have historically been the traditional value system of most societies throughout history. It is a pre modern aristocratic mindset common to mankind.
The bourgeoisie were a different animal. The bourgeoisie went far beyond their lands to the edges of the known world to trade spices, silks, slaves, and other goods with foreigners. Their first thought was to trade with people and not to subjugate them. They valued thrift, hard work, and cunning and valued profit over labor and instead of spending their wealth lavishly they accumulated it. They are the type that characterizes the modern elite and their rise to dominance created the modern industrial capitalist world as mercantile capitalism evolved into industrial capitalism.
This difference between knights and merchants goes a long way to explain the difference between tropical and temperate America. The identification of the American continent with freedom and democracy is a relatively new thing in world history. Until the American Revolution America was known as "the plantations" and from Virginia down to Argentina it was known as a terrifying primitive place characterized by slavery and forced labor. The Spanish American colonies were founded by conquistadors from a Spain that was at the time, coming off of the Reconquista, still stuck in the Medieval crusading mindset as mocked in the novel Don Quixote by Cervantes. The Conquistadors were gentleman adventurers to the New World who came to conquer the great Aztec, Inca, Mayan, and other native empires and tribes to take their gold and silver and enslave them to grow cash crops. When the Spanish conquered the Americas in their knightly plate armor they installed a barbaric feudal system where Indians were enslaved in Encomiendas to Spanish lords to grow crops for the purposes of their and their empires wealth. They set up a racial caste system as well with pure whites from Spain at the top of the hierarchy and black slaves at the bottom with various racial mixtures in between.
Brazil was founded by the Portuguese and quickly became a plantation slave society where the Portuguese enslaved imported Africans on plantations and worked them to death to grow their sugar and coffee. Far more slaves went to Brazil from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade than ever went to the American South at the height of its power. The Caribbean was perfectly suitable for sugar which was called white gold back then and was as valuable then as oil is today and the French, Spanish, and British Empires promptly took advantage of this by creating semi feudal plantation societies where they worked African slaves to death on plantations to grow sugar cane. The colony of Virginia on the North American continent was founded by a bunch of aristocrats who wanted to repeat the success of the Spanish Conquistadors and subjugate Indians and take their gold and silver but that led to a disaster until it was found out that tobacco grew greatly in Virginia so a bunch of Cavaliers (English aristocrats) fled England after the ascension of Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and set up a feudal system in Virginia, first manned by poor English indentured servants but the manned by black slaves, where they grew tobacco for export. My home state of South Carolina was first settled as a colony of a colony from the English slave society of Barbados and the Deep Southern culture that resulted from that spread through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Louisiana, East Texas, up the Mississippi, and everywhere cotton would grow to create the slave society immortalized in films like Gone With the Wind.
The people who founded these civilizations were often of aristocratic and knightly blood. The flag of the state of South Carolina for instance has a crescent moon with the horns tilted to the left which is the symbol in England for the second sons of English gentry. These knightly societies which I would argue are a part of a single multinational civilization were a civilization that was like Europe of the time, feudal societies ran by genuine aristocrats. The elites of this civilization whether Spanish, French, Portuguese, or British were run by people who were a rural hereditary ruling class with a pre modern mindset who lived in a manor, owned vast tracts of land, were waited on by servants from birth till death, fought duels, rode horses, held to a code of chivalry, held to martial values, dominated politics, and were highly mannered, cultured, and educated. Each of these societies had other things in common as well. For one thing because they couldn't find Europeans who were willing to be their peasants in the New World they enslaved people of other races and created racial caste systems. They also practiced high church Christianity with the Spanish, Portuguese, and French being Catholics, and the British slave societies being high church Anglican as opposed to the New England and the Mid Atlantic colonies' dissenting Protestantism (the myth that all of America was founded by Puritans is just that, a myth).
In the modern day the American societies that were founded by the knights had similar problems with both the South and Latin America known for having a political order where a small white oligarchy controls an export based economy where certain resource commodities are taken from the ground by poor peasants and exported to industrial countries in a colonial type situation with a term coined to describe this system, "Banana Republic." The American South was such an economy until World War 2 where most people, white and black picked, cotton as sharecroppers for the plantation elite to sell to the industrial North. This oligarchic system is a holdover from these areas feudal past.
In the temperate and cold areas starting with New England and the Mid Atlantic colonies, the merchant class were the ones who settled these areas. New England was settled by Puritans trying to create a Calvinist utopia on earth and they were drawn mostly from the merchant classes. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers and Germans also mostly from merchant classes and New York was settled by the Dutch for the sole purpose of being a merchant trading hub. Ontario in Canada was settled by loyalists from the Mid Atlantic colonies and the West Coast of the United States and Canada were settled as part of a New England missionary effort to create, "a New England on the Pacific," which is why there is a Portland Oregon as well as a Portland Maine. These people created the wealthy capitalist society you see in America today.
Now you may think that I'm knocking my own culture and praising the culture of the North here but I'm not, I'm just stating historical fact. The fact is that today the North is the issue. They were settled by crazy religious cults and greedy money grubbing slave traders. They may have helped give our society success once upon a time but they've lost their religion and their utopian impulse has secularized into the SJW movement and the cancerous people in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League Universities, and the mainstream media. I'm glad that my area of the world was settled by people who were inherently conservative and traditional in in their values and are resistant to the disgusting stuff coming from the North and West Coast today.
To the keen observer of America, defined here as the continent of North and South America not the Union of States who's people arrogantly refer to themselves with that name, a curious fact stands out. There seems to be a cultural and economic dichotomy on the continent that follows climatological patterns. The rich parts of the American continent, the Northern United States, Canada, the West Coast which seem to be wealthy, historically industrial, democratic, left wing, more educated, middle class, multicultural, boring, and hubs of commerce, are all in cold or temperate climates while the poorer parts of the American continent, the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America, places known to be historically more conservative, religious, agrarian, hierarchical, oligarchical, filled with racial strife, culturally rich, less industrial, less educated, and with a wider gap between rich and poor are all in tropical or subtropical areas of the continent.
Why does this cultural rift exist? It has everything to do with who settled the continent first and where. The first thing you must understand about colonial societies is that they are specific fragments of the country they came from. Colonial societies as a rule are far more conservative culturally than the societies that created them in the sense that they retain the cultural characteristics of the mother country at the time of their settlement long after things have changed in the mother country. Iceland is a colony of Norway during the Viking Age and their language is basically but for a few differences Old Norse preserved to the point where they don't have to learn another language to read the saga of the Icelanders. They can read it in their native language. On top of that the Icelanders still have a quaint belief in elves even in the 21st century where they build roads around rocks because the elves supposedly live there and they don't want to tick off the elves. In Latin American countries the Spanish they speak is an older more linguistically conservative form of Spanish and the same is true of the English in the United States and Canada. The United States also conserves old English traditions long lost in England such as the Sheriff to name one example.
So who settled tropical America and temperate America and what was the difference between them? The answer is, a lot of different groups settled in different parts of the American continent but these groups can be broadly divided into two main categories. The two categories are from two distinct classes in the European Middle Ages and they are the merchants or bourgeoisie in the temperate and cold areas, and the knights or warrior aristocracy in the tropical areas. First, a little history on the Middle Ages. Medieval Europe was a feudal system based on land ownership. At the the top of the hierarchy was the king and under him was the rural aristocracy. The rural aristocracy lived in great castles and ruled their own territory of land as a king would and most of the people who lived in Medieval Europe were peasants which were essentially unfree forced labor bonded to the lord's land who's main purpose in life was to farm the great swaths of land in mass agriculture to feed the rural aristocrat living in the castle overlooking their village. Medieval Europe was essentially a rural society where aristocrats in castles lorded over vast farmlands worked by slaves who were the majority of the population. I know that some people wouldn't put it that way and would say that peasants are not comparable to slaves but what else do you call forced laborers that are basically owned by their lords and are thought of as lesser beings by their owner?
But Medieval Europe was more than just aristocrats lording over a mass of peasants. There were people who were free from the lord's control and had the right to control their own destiny. These people founded free cities called bourgs (hence the name bourgeoisie). Within these cities were merchants, craftsmen, and other men of skill who earned their living by their own skill and thrift. The people who were the elite in these cities were the great rich merchants, people who traded goods for a profit often in far away places. These people were the first capitalists. The difference between the merchants and the rural aristocracy which shall henceforth be called the knights in this discourse was more than a difference between social classes but a difference in values and outlooks on life between the two. The Knights were primarily a warrior aristocracy with martial and military values of honor codified in a code of chivalry. The ideal of the medieval society was to separate people into three classes, those who fight, those who work, and those who pray. The knights were those who fight and they distained hard and honest labor as the domain of the lowly peasants who existed to sustain them. Their domain and their purpose of life was to wage war on behalf of the God, the king, or themselves. They ruled over vast lands but they very rarely left them except to conquer or go on crusade or fight a foreign enemy. If they met a foreigner their first instinct was to subjugate them as they did the peasants. They themselves distained profit and the grubby mercantile craft of trading that the bourgeoisie specialized in which they saw a dishonorable. In ancient societies merchants were seen as the lowest of the low because they were thought to get their wealth through trickery and deceit while the knightly way of taking someone's' wealth through war was seen as honorable because you risked your life took it by skill in honorable battle. This was partly why Jews were hated by so many people throughout history. Jews were often the mercantile middlemen of society. Finally the knight was not skilled in accumulating wealth but was known to spend it lavishly in a reckless fashion to entertain guests and on other aristocratic pursuits. The values of the knight have historically been the traditional value system of most societies throughout history. It is a pre modern aristocratic mindset common to mankind.
The bourgeoisie were a different animal. The bourgeoisie went far beyond their lands to the edges of the known world to trade spices, silks, slaves, and other goods with foreigners. Their first thought was to trade with people and not to subjugate them. They valued thrift, hard work, and cunning and valued profit over labor and instead of spending their wealth lavishly they accumulated it. They are the type that characterizes the modern elite and their rise to dominance created the modern industrial capitalist world as mercantile capitalism evolved into industrial capitalism.
This difference between knights and merchants goes a long way to explain the difference between tropical and temperate America. The identification of the American continent with freedom and democracy is a relatively new thing in world history. Until the American Revolution America was known as "the plantations" and from Virginia down to Argentina it was known as a terrifying primitive place characterized by slavery and forced labor. The Spanish American colonies were founded by conquistadors from a Spain that was at the time, coming off of the Reconquista, still stuck in the Medieval crusading mindset as mocked in the novel Don Quixote by Cervantes. The Conquistadors were gentleman adventurers to the New World who came to conquer the great Aztec, Inca, Mayan, and other native empires and tribes to take their gold and silver and enslave them to grow cash crops. When the Spanish conquered the Americas in their knightly plate armor they installed a barbaric feudal system where Indians were enslaved in Encomiendas to Spanish lords to grow crops for the purposes of their and their empires wealth. They set up a racial caste system as well with pure whites from Spain at the top of the hierarchy and black slaves at the bottom with various racial mixtures in between.
Brazil was founded by the Portuguese and quickly became a plantation slave society where the Portuguese enslaved imported Africans on plantations and worked them to death to grow their sugar and coffee. Far more slaves went to Brazil from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade than ever went to the American South at the height of its power. The Caribbean was perfectly suitable for sugar which was called white gold back then and was as valuable then as oil is today and the French, Spanish, and British Empires promptly took advantage of this by creating semi feudal plantation societies where they worked African slaves to death on plantations to grow sugar cane. The colony of Virginia on the North American continent was founded by a bunch of aristocrats who wanted to repeat the success of the Spanish Conquistadors and subjugate Indians and take their gold and silver but that led to a disaster until it was found out that tobacco grew greatly in Virginia so a bunch of Cavaliers (English aristocrats) fled England after the ascension of Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and set up a feudal system in Virginia, first manned by poor English indentured servants but the manned by black slaves, where they grew tobacco for export. My home state of South Carolina was first settled as a colony of a colony from the English slave society of Barbados and the Deep Southern culture that resulted from that spread through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Louisiana, East Texas, up the Mississippi, and everywhere cotton would grow to create the slave society immortalized in films like Gone With the Wind.
The people who founded these civilizations were often of aristocratic and knightly blood. The flag of the state of South Carolina for instance has a crescent moon with the horns tilted to the left which is the symbol in England for the second sons of English gentry. These knightly societies which I would argue are a part of a single multinational civilization were a civilization that was like Europe of the time, feudal societies ran by genuine aristocrats. The elites of this civilization whether Spanish, French, Portuguese, or British were run by people who were a rural hereditary ruling class with a pre modern mindset who lived in a manor, owned vast tracts of land, were waited on by servants from birth till death, fought duels, rode horses, held to a code of chivalry, held to martial values, dominated politics, and were highly mannered, cultured, and educated. Each of these societies had other things in common as well. For one thing because they couldn't find Europeans who were willing to be their peasants in the New World they enslaved people of other races and created racial caste systems. They also practiced high church Christianity with the Spanish, Portuguese, and French being Catholics, and the British slave societies being high church Anglican as opposed to the New England and the Mid Atlantic colonies' dissenting Protestantism (the myth that all of America was founded by Puritans is just that, a myth).
In the modern day the American societies that were founded by the knights had similar problems with both the South and Latin America known for having a political order where a small white oligarchy controls an export based economy where certain resource commodities are taken from the ground by poor peasants and exported to industrial countries in a colonial type situation with a term coined to describe this system, "Banana Republic." The American South was such an economy until World War 2 where most people, white and black picked, cotton as sharecroppers for the plantation elite to sell to the industrial North. This oligarchic system is a holdover from these areas feudal past.
In the temperate and cold areas starting with New England and the Mid Atlantic colonies, the merchant class were the ones who settled these areas. New England was settled by Puritans trying to create a Calvinist utopia on earth and they were drawn mostly from the merchant classes. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers and Germans also mostly from merchant classes and New York was settled by the Dutch for the sole purpose of being a merchant trading hub. Ontario in Canada was settled by loyalists from the Mid Atlantic colonies and the West Coast of the United States and Canada were settled as part of a New England missionary effort to create, "a New England on the Pacific," which is why there is a Portland Oregon as well as a Portland Maine. These people created the wealthy capitalist society you see in America today.
Now you may think that I'm knocking my own culture and praising the culture of the North here but I'm not, I'm just stating historical fact. The fact is that today the North is the issue. They were settled by crazy religious cults and greedy money grubbing slave traders. They may have helped give our society success once upon a time but they've lost their religion and their utopian impulse has secularized into the SJW movement and the cancerous people in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League Universities, and the mainstream media. I'm glad that my area of the world was settled by people who were inherently conservative and traditional in in their values and are resistant to the disgusting stuff coming from the North and West Coast today.
