Christopher Chantrill presents an interesting thesis regarding “Ghost Shirt” time — he writes:
Since the educated ruling class is the ruling class, it means that everything that goes wrong in this country is their fault.
Here is the opening of his article:
Here we go again. Two mass shootings in 13 hours. Who is to blame? How many gun bans should we enact? How much is President Trump to blame for it all?
Here’s another thought. When the young men in a culture feel hopeless they expend themselves in a suicide cult.
Example One: the Ghost Dance movement among native American tribes in the Great Plains in 1890 after the white man had overrun their homelands. La Wik:
[P]roper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
The idea was that wearing a Ghost Shirt would make you invulnerable to the bullets of the white man.
That wasn’t the only desperate response to the Century of the White Man. In China, they had the Boxer Rebellion in 1899. La Wik:
After several months of growing violence in Shandong and the North China plain against the foreign and Christian presence in June 1900, Boxer fighters, convinced they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, converged on Beijing with the slogan Support the Qing government and exterminate the foreigners.
You could make a good argument that the Islamic terrorism of the Middle East is the consequence of the demoralization of Muslim men in an age of western cultural and economic hegemony.
The common denominator is the experience of imminent cultural annihilation: for the Plains Indians the utter demolition of their way of life; for the Chinese the collapse of the Qin dynasty. And for the Muslims of the Middle East? Well, I’d say that they have had a whole century of nightmare, ever since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. I suspect there is something in the genes of young men that provokes them into a cornered rat syndrome when all hope is lost.
Read more: American Thinker
