new resource
Just discovered the blog of British journalist George Monbiot…remarkable stuff.
Take this, for example:
…this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don’t understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America.
But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation…Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God.
January 29th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
In your piece I was quoted as saying “if Bush wins the election America might turn fascist.” This presumed quote of mine came from a piece in Madrid’s “El Mundo”. As, in answer to their journalists query, I said just the opposite, El Mundo had to publish a retraction. Anyone one who knows me knows I don’t use fascist as a general descriptive term; and in my many El Pais columns, though I supported Kerry, I always have been a defender of the United States. I consider myself a moderate with, in the old fashioned good sense of the word, liberal leanings. I hope that this corrective can be published. Barbara Probst Solomon