Just a follow up to my previous post. Back in the comments thread over at Ferdinand's, I made this reply to commentator Thursday;
- @Thursday
"There is this myth that formerly Catholic countries are somehow more immune to liberalism than those that were Protestant."
Catholic countries aren’t immune to liberalism, it’s just that when they succumb to liberalism it assumes a different form to that of Protestantism. When Catholics go liberal, their liberalism is much more openly hostile, there’s no “niceness” about it at all. It tends to be an all or nothing phenomenon with Catholics.
The largest communist parties in Europe were not in the Anglosphere, rather in Italy and France.
It must be borne in mind that democratism and leftism in Europe have two distinct branches, one in Catholic countries and one in Protestant countries. This is the reason why communistic tendencies in the Protestant world are a direct outcome of mammonistic democratism with the background of a terrorizing society, while in Catholic and schismatic countries they are largely a reaction of anarchical liberalism. In the latter countries they smack often of undiluted and undisguised satanism. In Russia they may also be a reaction against the Manichaean tradition of the Eastern Church.* The frequency of parlor pinks in the large democratic domains of the Protestant world indicates the origins of communism from an ultramammonistic and ultramaterialistic mentalityNow, from what I've read of Von Keunhelt-Leddihn he does seem to overplay the pro-Catholic anti-Protestant thing. His analysis doesn't really account for the fact that, the U.S., a culturally Protestant nation, was the perhaps the most staunchly anti-communist nation of them all, still I think his analysis has some validity.
This is also no doubt the reason why socialism and the more violent forms of ochlocracy and superdemocracy — Fascism — have to blaze their trails into the Catholic world by revolts, revolutions, and assassinations. The deep antagonism between "backward" Catholicism and these new "progressive" philosophies make a compromise impossible.
This can be easily illustrated and demonstrated by the manifold examples of revolutionary socialism in Spain and Portugal, from the socalled "Communists" of Andalusia and Catalonia in 1835 to the FAI, CGT, UGT, and POUM, the revolutionary socialism of Italy which reached its zenith in 1921, the revolutionary social democracy of Vienna with its two risings in 1927 and 1934, the sanguinary revolutions in Budapest (1919), in Munich (1919 and 1923), Paris (1792, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1934), and Baden (1848). We also find strongly revolutionary forms of socialism in the domains of the Eastern Church (Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greek Macedonia, and Thrace) as well as in Catholic Poland and Lithuania. In the Protestant countries on the other side we find socialism usually tame, bourgeois, and parlor pinkish. Only Berlin and Hamburg knew, apart from the central German industrial area, the meaning of revolutionary socialism, whereas the tributary parties of the II International in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Latvia, the United States, and Canada were all imbued by a nice sedentary bourgeois spirit. In Catholic Mexico on the other hand we see socialism closely connected with violence and terror.
It's my contention that Protestantism's weakness is it's legitimisation of the Rationalisation Hamster, and it is this what makes "compromise" with the devil possible. However, the more scriptural a Protestant is, then it's much much harder to make the compromise. This would explain why the Anglicans are lefty while the Baptists push more to the right.
(Note to my Protestant readers. I'm not having a dig at you. I'm trying to be fair here. Catholicism, in its corruption, has its faults. It tends to deny empirical evidence, placing faith above reason, drifts towards superstition and tends towards authoritarianism. I think von Keunhelt-Leddihn tends to gloss over these points.)
