Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! Chapter 23 (the Last Leviathan, invasion of Great Lakes, Renegades, Merry Mount, Puritans/Quakers, gift/theft)

23.

I'm impatient to end the story of the artificial beast with human entrails. In a different work I will tell some of the details of the resistance to Americanization on the part of some of the world's last communities. I cannot tell all, either there or here, because the struggle against His-story, against Leviathan, is synonymous with Life; it is part of the Biosphere's self-defense against the monster rending her asunder. And the struggle is by no means over; it goes on as long as the beast is animated by living beings. It will conclude with His-story by summarizing, ever so briefly, the moments leading to its end.

By carrying Leviathan acrss the Ocean, Europeans stretch the beastly integument over the expanse of the entire globe. In the brief span of a few generations, all of Earth falls into the entrails of a single artificial beast. But by encasing all of Earth within one Leviathan, the Europeans do Civilization a disfavor, for they put a term on its further existence.

We've seen that earlier Leviathans were always in a state of decomposition. When one decompsed, others swallowed its remains. But when there are no others, when Leviathan is One, the tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, is almost at an end.

Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World, called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is Leviathan's end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the cadences of a long-forgtten music or to the eternal silence of death without a morrow.

It will be said of the Europeans who carry the beast to the world's last places of refuge and who thereby put a term on the beast's existence that they know not what they do. Their ignorance of themselves, of others and of Earth is proverbial, but it does not altogether account for their behavior. The Europeans are zeks, administrative zeks and menial zeks, children and grandchildren of zeks. If some of them remember ancestors who were no zeks, none of them can imagine the world of those ancestors, a world that was not a labor camp, and what they cannot imagine they cannot see, even while looking at it. In this sense they are ignorant. But they know that they are incomplete, that something inside them is stunted or dead, and they resent the slightest suggestion that others possess what they lack. The resentment makes them strike fiercely at any who pretend to be more, for Europeans are great equalizers--Democrats thay will call themselves--and they are determined to universalize their own condition. In this sense they are not ignorant for they know perfectly well what they do and also why.

The last Leviathan's zeks are not conscripts but volunteers. They are not an altogether new phenomenon. Volunteer zeks existed in earlier Leviathans, but only on the margins or at the interstices where Roman Equites made themselves indispensable to their beast's continued functioning. The volunteer zeks of expanding Europe are not on the margins but constitute the beast's body as well as its head.

Tasks imposed by force on earlier zeks are taken up as Callings by the volunteers. With a gun and powder, the successor of a conscript serving military corvee is a virtual Nero. The killing power of his gunpowder is equal to the Emperor's. And with a continent emptying before his every advance, the descendant of serfs faces the prospect of becoming a Habsburg, an Emperor with uncontested dominion over a realm of dead souls.

America is a land of promise for the self-conscripted zeks who help turn it into an empty continent.

The bonds of servitude are not cut or even weakened, but these bonds undergo a subtle transformation which renders them invisible to the pioneering zek. Tithes and dues are no longer paid to the visible and odious agents of parish and manor. The dues become costs which are paid at exchanges or markets, and at such markets what counts is not the buyer's blood or station but only his money. At such markets, all of which are local manifestations of an interconnected world market, every buyer's coin is equal to the Emperor's, so that every buyer is not only the Emperor's equal but is also just as free.

For the sake of such freedom, tasks considered onerous by serfs are self-imposed by the volunteer zeks. The clearing of stony or forested land, the digging and burrowing, the lifting and the hauling are all taken up with unprecedented conviction.

If after all the sweat and toil the emancipated zek finds himself in debt to sellers and lenders, his plight is no worse than the Emperor's. If lenders drive him to ruin, he can move further west, join with pioneers emptying new lands of promise, and renew his freedom.

The volunteer zek does not resent the sellers who ruined him, for he is himself one of them. He does resent fellow-zeks who relegate their most onerous tasks to imported slaves, but he does not feel threatened by them for he knows that the slaves labor without conviction, for which he dispises them. He resents even more those whom he calls Renegades, namely fellow zeks who make themselves at home in communities of the continents's survivors. He resents the Renegades not only because they are as lazy as the slave-owners, but because they dispense with the amenities that brand them as Human (he means Civilized).

His bitterest passion is reserved for the decimated communities in which the Renegades find refuge. The beings in those communities are not human to him. They are Cannibals. They will also be called Savages, Primitives, Natives, always with the same meaning. The pioneering zek spends his living days doing god's calling, sweating and laboring, frustrated by stubborn Earth, beset by lenders. Yet the good-for-nothings, the Cannibals, pretend that food simply offers itself to them on its own, they hunt and fish like Nabobs or ancient noblemen, they spend their days as well as their nights howling and jumping like demented wolves.

Were the pioneer to admit their humanity, however briefly, however grudgingly, his innards would explode, his armor melt, his mask fall, for he would in that flash of light see himself as a zek, his freedom as self-enslavement, his market-Civilization as a forced-labor camp. The devil would try to tempt him to become a Renegade and, irony of ironies, he would fall, unlike Eve, out of blessed labor into cursed Eden.

Until Enlighteners provide him with a new language for the same enterprise, the pioneer's humanity hangs on his exorcism of the devil, on his removal of the Tempter from his path. The pioneer is self-defined as a converter of heathen, a civilizer of the wilderness. Translated into meaningful language, the pioneer is self-defined as a zek committed to the extermination of the world's free beings.

* * *

The old language, the language of salvation and damnation, of sin and the fall, becomes increasingly archaic in the land of endless frontiers, and it is more often an obstacle than a guide to enterprising invaders. Spanish- and French-speaking marauders are more committed to the old language than English-speaking ones, and the consequences are fatal for the archaic-minded.

The Spanish invaders of the southlands save all the gold and all the souls they can reach, damn the rest, and then freeze, literally freeze, stand still on a thin ledge, afraid of falling into the abyss in front or the one behind them. While Catholicism in Europe shrinks from attacks by Reformers and Enlighteners, priests multiply and churches rise in Spanish America, where congregations of the continent's last survivors pay their respects to emaciated Toltec, Maya and Inca deities converted into Catholic saints. Becoming ever more marginal to the world-Leviathan's great accomplishments, the descendants of the Conquistadores themselves become Natives, namely objects of plunder, for enterprising invaders who speak a newer language.

French invaders of the northlands fare even less well than the Spaniards.

French priests and treasure-seekers sail up the river through which the Great Lakes leave the land, a river they name Saint Lawrence. The French "discoverer" of the Saint Lawrence discovers Basque and Biscayan fishermen who give him a tour of the river's mouth and environs and introduce him to the river's permanent and hospitable inhabitants. The armored uninvited guests kidnap several of their hosts, leave Smallpox and Plague-infested rats among the rest, and return home with less than the expected gold from a northern Tenochtitlan.

Disappointed by their initial haul, French-speaking scavengers do not return in mass until three generations later, and on this voyage they find the treasure they seek. They find gold as well as souls.

The gold they find is not mineral but animal gold: marten, muskrat and beaver gold. They find a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fur coats, and the further up the river they sail, the more coats they find.

The coats were once winter garments of the numerous inhabitants whose villages dotted both sides of the river now called Saint Lawrence. The village sites are still visible, but the inhabitants have vanished, inexplicably.

The disappearance of the inhabitants is inexplicable only in the annals of the invaders' scribes. The spreading of plagues is neither honorable nor brave in the eyes of the descendants of Franks, nor is such a deed Christian in the eyes of the French priests. Furthermore, French theologians are not anxious to weigh the sin of infestation against the sin of cannibalism, nor are French inquisitors anxious to identify the perpetrators of one or the other sin. French mirrors are not made for such uses.

The French see large communities shrink before their very eyes, and still their annalists make no sound; they tiptoe through the depopulated villages as if they were walking on eggs. The annalists even invent European-style wars between fictitious "tribes" to explain away the large empty villages.

The French cannot without embarrassment broadcast the sources of their windfall, for the greatness of their accomplishment would diminish.

The seemingly inexhaustible fur coats come from three generations of Plague-victims.

The epidemics themselves were not all brought by the French Dis-coverers of the Saint Lawrence. Some of the diseases undoubtedly came with the Dis-coverers' Basque and Biscayan predecessors, others traveled northward from the coast, carried either by animals or by Dutch or English adventurers.

The Saint Lawrence French reap the Plague's harvest. The ships of the royal company of adventurers return home laden with fur coats which are sold to waiting hatters at windfall profits. Out of the skins of the dead animals that once protected the Plague-victims from the winter's cold rise cities, fortresses and missions.

While the skins travel toward hatters, French missionaries reap a harvest of souls. They go among kinless men, homeless women, orphaned children, among survivors of once-numerous communities.

The priests go to great efforts to learn the languages of the survivors, for they have an urgent message to impart: The Savior came among the displaced and disoriented and the poor in order to raise them out of their misery and turn them into subjects of King Louis' realm.

Adult cousins of the Potawatomi recognize Wiske under the missionary's black robe, but the children become French Catholics. Converted women find employment as fur dressers, converted men as hunters of new furs, but few of them become prosperous French Catholics because the overseas hatters continue to prefer the soft furs oiled by years of wear to the rough and unworkable new furs.

French America prospers, but not for long. The fur ships glut the European market and the windfall profits end. This is temporary. It recurs, but again only temporarily. The King orders several shiploads of furs burned, and the prices rise again.

A far greater disorder strikes French America. Young Frenchmen defect from the centers of Civilization. They become Renegades. Leviathan loses its hold on its human entrails. In the language of the frightened chroniclers, Civilized Frenchmen turn into Savages, yet no Savages become Civilized; even Catholic converts return to the Wilderness whenever the gates are left ajar.

The phenomenon is something like a counter-plague: the centers of Civilization become depopulated while the plague-decimated villages repopulate themselves with bearded adoptees. The question "Who would aband the amenities, etc." is answered by decisions and by acts which cannot be kept secret by the French court or clergy because the defection is so vast it causes a scandal. The answer is: everyone who can. Centuries later, the last descendants of Winnebago, Ottawa, Potawatomi and other peopels herded to concentration camps by President Jackson's armies will still retain the French names of the renegades.

This is not the first withdrawal of human beings from the entrails of Leviathan. I've mentioned many earlier instances of this phenomenon. Examples also exist in Spanish, English and Dutch America, some less and some more scandalous to the guardians of Civilization's gates.

What is almost unprecedented in these escapes to the pre-American world is that the refugees or Renegades actually become members of functioning communities. Those communities are fragmented remnants compared to what they once were, in Dream Time. But even in their decimated condition they give the adopted invaders a wealth of freedom, kinship and community not available to Europeans for a very long time. Descendants of French Renegades will turn up later as storytellers, healers, keepers of songs and arrangers of ceremonies, as upholders and defenders of their hosts' cultures.

The initial French Renegades are not closet-Adamites, Eden-seeking radicals. On the contrary, they are scions of French colonial Civilization, some are even sons of aristocrats. Their ability to compare the relative attractiveness of the two modes of existence comes to them as an unintended consequence of the organization of the fur trade. The Company dispatches travelers, voyageurs, to gather the fur coats of all villages accessible by water, for large quantities of fur cannot easily be transported overland. The voyagueurs travel singly or at most in twos, since the point is to return with a boatful of furs, not riders.

A single individual--sometimes even two--is free of the censorious pressure that represses a member of a group, the pressure to keep the armor tight and the mask from falling. Consequently the individual is able to respond to offered hospitality, friendship and love. And as soon as he responds, his stiffness starts to dissolve. He arrived as a scavenger. If his hosts offer to turn him into a kinsman, he will, slowly or quickly, realize that he can be more than a zek in a labor-camp.

French priests rail against the Renegades and threaten them with excommunication. French governors import the latest Paris fashions for the young ladies of Quebec and Montreal, and they send punitive expeditions against the Renegades, but members of the punitive expeditions also defect.

In fact, the governors’ only reliable soldiers are those who have just arrived from France, and New France defends itself from New England by giving large presents and larger promises to people who are still called Les Sauvages but are treated with ever-greater respect, for they are cousins now, kinsman, not figuratively but really.

The armies of New France are Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Wendat warriors, and these warriors, although European in their weapons, have their own strategies as well as their own aims. These strategies and aims probably do not encompass a reconstitution of the communities of Dream Time with help from plague-rimmune bearded kinsmen, but we will never know what they do encompass. The existence of French America is cut short by greedy English-speaking racists.

* * *

The English-speaking invaders who eventually swallow the entire northland do not allow themselves to fall into kinship relations with the continent’s former inhabitants. They, too, are scandalized by Renegades who walk out of their labor camps and never return to the life-style of zeks. But they are not merely scandalized. They raise impassable fences between themselves and the continent’s surviving inhabitants, fences which are forerunners of the electric barbed wire fences of our time.

These English Christians guide themselves with a terminology that comes to them, not from their Christianity, but from their practices of breeding sheep, horses and dogs. Terms like Mescegenation, Hybridization and Mongrelization become the guidelines for dehumanizations that have no precedent. Human beings are permanently branded, stigmatized, classified, in terms of their heredity, their so-called blood. No religious conversion, no services rendered, no dues paid can ever remove the stigma. The branded and all their progeny are marked for all eternity. In the face of such a barrier, English Renegades must be fortified by a determination and courage their French and Spanish counterparts do not need.

The invaders who set the tone of the whole English enterprise, the progressive spearheads of Leviathan, the Pioneers tout court, are the New Englanders who consider themselves purists or Puritans.

Next-door neighbors of the Saint Lawrence French, the New Englanders are beset by Renegades a few short seasons after their arrival. Alongside the purists who establish themselves at Plague-emptied Plymouth, non-purists establish themselves among the shoreland’s surviving inhabitants, at a place the Renegades call Mare Mount or Merry Mount.

The non-purists of Merry Mount let their eyes feast on the continent’s beauty and their ears to the villagers’ music. They let themselves be possessed by their hosts, with whom they dance around a maypole, a symbol of fertility. They let their masks and armors fall. And they laugh at the small-minded stiff-necked zeks who escaped from one labor-camp only to imprison themselves in another of their own making in a land inhospitable to labor camps.

The Puritans are not merely scandalized, they are driven to burning rage by the merry Renegades who expose the repressive fangs behind the purity. They dispatch a Puritan police led by the renowned murderer Miles Standish to raze Merry Mount to the Ground and to cut down the maypole, the symbol of fertility. They purify America of maypoles.

One of the survivors of the Puritan purge, a Thomas Morton, will continue to expose his victimizers with laughter in a satiric poem he will call the New England Canaan.

Puritans and their successors will speak much of Fate and Predestination and will think themselves as holders of Destiny’s interest-bearing certificates. But the path of these profiteers is paved with as many freakish quirks and cruel ironies as the paths of any of their Leviathanic predecessors.

I can only mention some of the grossest ironies. The Puritans are not, first of all, spiritual heirs of Catholic Crusaders who stormed the lands of Unbelievers. They are spiritual heirs of the Crusaders’ victims, heirs of Albigensians, Beguines and Beghards, of Wyclif and John Ball, of radical Lollards and insurgent peasants. Their burning rage does not come to them from Ahriman’s fire, the fire that consumes light in order to plunge the world into darkness, but from Ahura Mazda’s fire, the fire that expels darkness. Their project comes, not from the heritage of Leviathan’s builders and keepers, but from the heritage of withdrawers, of rebels against Leviathan. And their feat resides, not in the realization of this project, but in its complete inversion. This feat can be called great, for it surely has not equal since the day when the anti-Roman crisis cult emerged as Rome’s Church.

The inversion of Europe’s radical heritage is not all the work of the Puritans who plant themselves on the New World’s shores.

When Vikingized Europeans began to expropriate Jews and Muslims and occupy themselves with profits from trade and interests from moneylending, they incurred a loss which they could never quite compensate with their monetary gains. The Burghers lost Paradise, both in this life and in the afterlife. European noblemen could reach Paradise by killing infidels, European peasants by killing priests and noblemen, but the Burghers could reach nothing but more money. Having expropriated Muslims of their enterprises and ways but not of their merciful god, European merchants could not even look forward to the Earthly paradise promised by Allah.

Good Christians all, Europe’s usurers could not but suspect that they were Satan’s tools, sinners in this world, irremediably damned in the next. The bleakness of such reflections led most Burghers to confine their thoughts to the sums on their ledgers, and to leave thinking to clerics.

But some of the merchants were determined to find a substitute for the merciful Allah, so determined that they didn’t shrink from placing Mammon himself at Heaven’s gate. If a poor man could freely cross the heavenly threshold, surely a rich man could buy his way in.

The Swiss Burgher Calvin would even deny the poor free access to Paradise. Poverty, according to Calvin, confers no such privilege. The elect are chosen ahead of time, or rather out of Time, and the fortunes, or lack of fortunes, of sinful men affect their final destiny not a jot.

Calvin opens the gates of Paradise to merchants, but he gives them no tangible safe-conducts. The passports are issued by the Puritans, to themselves. And the passports of these Christians are, believe it or not, the very profits and interests from trade and usury.

The Puritans do not bend Calvin’s teachings, they do not read between the lines. The accuracy of their ledgers depends on their literal-mindedness. The Elite, the Damned, along with the rest of Creation are predestined. Signs of this predestination are in fact an open book, visible to anyone who can read them. Unmistakable signs of Salvation can also be seen, read, sensed. The Elite know themselves to be saved. Their savings in this world are the signs of their salvation in the next.

The profits and interests of the pure replace the miseries of the poor as passports to Heaven, investments in Paradise. The poor, with nothing to invest, are in fact excluded, predestined to damnation and poverty. And the impure, the profligates and libertines with all their pomp and circumstance, are ovciously out of the running from the start, they are Satan’s own brood. The gates of Heaven do not only open to Puritan merchants: they open to noone else.

Persecuted by the beast’s agents for their very righteousness, the Puritans withdraw from the beast just as the Israelites withdrew from Egypt. The analogy is not mine but theirs. It is they who find their predecessors in the armored Moses and the sons of Levi. The Puritans withdraw from the fleshpots of Egypt and sail to the Promised Land, which they name Canaan.

Others, among them English radicals, French Beghards, Moravian Taborites and Adamites, dreamt of just such a promised land, of just such an earthly Paradise complete with communities of human beings who knew how to enjoy and celebrate the gorgeous bounty surrounding them.

But to the pure English Israelites who actually reach the Promised Land, the promise is neither in the land nor in its surviving communities, but in the Puritans themselves, irrevocably, irredmediably and predeterminedly in themselves, and nothing they see, hear or touch can budge the rock of Puritan knowledge.

The Puritans are the first Americans, and henceforth wherever Manifest Destiny takes them, there is America, for it is not a place but a condition, a manifestation of the self-recognized predetermined Elect. The Puritans call it Canaan, and with very good reasons. Canaan is indeed the land of promise. What it promises to the Israelites is

dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The English Israelites have come to denude the land of promise. Their intent is to make deserts bloom, for they are themselves the deserts.

The actual inhabitants of the lush New Canaan are marked for extermination already before the Puritans meet them. For the English Israelites know that they

will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite…
And thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver
unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them…

Ill-equipped for their arrival in a Canaan not located between Egypt and the Fertile Crescent but in colder climes, the new Israelites do not refuse the gifts offered to them by people who remain hospitable after three painful generations of plague. The Puritans accept from their hosts the winter coats that will launch New England’s fur trade and they accept, as gifts, the forerunners of all-American sweet corn on the cob, Thanksgiving squash, Halloween pumpkin and Boston beans, free gifts which America’s food merchants will sell to the world.

To fulfill their destiny, the Puritans brace themselves for the attack, an attack they’ve known all along unavoidable, predetermined, since it is already consummated in the holiest of books. But they are embarrassed by all the gifts. They suppose that no Canaanite, Amorite or Hittite could have welcomed the first Israelites so generously, so disarmingly. Surely the Canaanites gave the Israelites a sign, a pretext, a provocation.

In the absence of any pretext, the Puritans have to invent one, and this is no problem for the pure. The New World’s inhabitants are not Puritans. Every one of their ways, and particularly their aversion to labor, marks them as Satan’s tools, as cursed heathen bound toward damnation. This is provocation enough for the first attack as well as all the later ones, it is provocation enough for total war against all the continent’s surviving inhabitants.

The first Canaanites to fall to these scourges of the Leviathanic god are seaboard cousins of the Great Lakes Potawatomi, called Pequots. The Puritans attack while the Pequots sleep. In the words of a participant in the massacre, one of the Elect sets powder on fire while another

Brought out a firebrand, and putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire.
[Both fires] meeting in the centre of the fort [as the Puitan chooses to call the Pequot village], blazed most
terribly, and burnt all in the space of an hour. Many courageous fellows were unwilling to come out, and
fought most desparately through the palisades, so as they were scorched and burnt with
the very flame and were deprived of their arms…

The courage of those fellows will not be forgotten. The foe vanquished in this first American military victory will be painted as formidable, as a Goliath confronting David. Such stout, brave fellows can be kept in their place only by means of the sternest measures, such as the killing of women and children, unprecedented in the New World, introduced to this continent by God’s own Elect. The god of Israel, and of the new Israel,

hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most
terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their
parents. Sometimes the case alters, but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient
light from the word of God for our proceedings.

The Puritans do not dispute it now or later; they establish the precedent. Henceforth women and children perish as a matter of course.

Apologists for the Puritans will pretend, for purposes of military but not of economic explanation, that the Empty Continent teems with warlike tribes, all full of inhumanly courageous fellows.

Courageous they surely are, unflinchingly brave, sometimes stretching the limits of human endurance, none of which can be said of the rifle-armed incendiaries waiting to shoot enemies who are not completely burned.

David indeed! The story of this continent’s Goliaths is constructed out of a deliberate and malicious inversion of the term “warrior,” a term borrowed by the invaders from the people of this continent’s woodlands. Clashes comparable to the so-called wars of this continent’s warriors have been known in Eurasia as raids and feuds since the days of Sumerian military machines. Such raids and feuds required forms of bravery which were not needed by soldiers in Lugalzaggizi’s imperial army, and which become superfluous and even undesirable in the days of guns and powder.

By using the word “war” to cover the exploits of Braves as well as Puritans, apologists magnify the raids and feuds of the Braves while belittling the exploits of the Puritans, exploits which are already fully Modern wars of mass extermination, exploits which will in our time be given the name Genocide. Apologists who will shudder at the thought of raids and feuds while taking genocide for granted will not exhibit some new and progressive morality; they will exhibit the oldest and rankest hypocrisy.

The massacre of the Pequots is not an aberration in an otherwise peaceful story of God’s Elect in the promised land. The Pequot massacre is the model for all that follow, and the Puritans are every getting ready for the next. They deal the same way with all those who bring them food and clothing, guide them along forest paths, showm them how to harvest syrup from maple trees. All are Canaanites, Amalekites and Amorites, all are placed in Canaan merely to test the Puritans’ ability to carry out their destiny.

David is out of the picture altogether. Goliath is the Puritan himself, and Goliath’s god is none other than Optimus Maximus, who will receive His final incarnation in America as the Dollar.

The seaboard’s inhabitants are reduced to place-names in New England. The various peoples of the east, the totems, clans and federations of Pequots, Narragansetts, Massachusets, Wampanoags, all called Tribes by Bible-readers, will not be considered human beings but things, obstacles in the way of American progress.

The humanity of the Puritans’ victims will not be recognized until our time. The recognition will wait until Nazi emulators of America’s Pioneers perpetrate similar deeds on eminent Doctors, Lawyers, Merchants and Scientists. Only then will appear the numerous light-bringing books which talk with sympathy and deep imagination of the vanished communities of free human beings who were decimated but not broken, massacred but not defeated, displaced but not domesticated.

This is not to say that there cease to be radicals or renegades in English America. Radicals there are, and in such numbers that New England’s predetermined Elite is not done massacring Narragansetts before it has to turn to hanging nonconformists, jailing or deporting radicals, selling dissenters into slavery or burning them as witches.

God’s Chosen effectively silence the radicals, and with such energy that one wonders when the Saved find time to do their Saving. For save they do, and they invest their savings in fleets of ships. The ships carry products grown on Pequot and Narrangansett lands to Africa. There the ships fill their holds with human beings “predestined” to slavery in Virginia. The ships return home with Virginia cotton and tobacco. If radicalism could be exorcised once and for all, the whole enterprise would run like clockwork.

Canaan becomes a little England, an artificial octopus that sends its tentacles to every part of the glove. The New World becomes just like the Old. Or rather, the New World is consumed by the Old, it ceases to be a separate entity, it is all part of a single commercial empire.

Within this empire, which in reality is a network of exchanges and markets, States compete for privileged positions, and England outdistances all the other contenders. The reason for this is not as complicated as His-storians will sometimes make it seem.

We’ve seen that in commercial matters, octopus-like Leviathans have a distinct advantage over worm-like artifices, because the worm-like entities tend to eat up the contents of their ships and thus send the sources of their wealth, namely their own commercial fleets, to the seabottom. Holland is too small to remain a contender for very long. Spain as well as France are land-oriented monsters which cannot, like insular England, keep their fleets ever circulating from places where some things are plentiful to places where those things are scarce. Thus England becomes the metropolis of a Leviathan that soon embraces the entire world, and English America is not an outpost or a fringe, but an integral part of the metropolis.

* * *

English radicals, nevertheless, continue to think that by leaving England and sailing to America they can abandon the Old World and reach the New.

This is true only for those who become Renegades, who abandon not only England but America as well, who let themselves be adopted and possessed by the continent’s remaining communities. Such Renegades continue to be numerous, and few of them choose to return to Civilization even if only to tell their stories. In fact, it is said that Raleigh’s “lost colony” on the continent’s sandy outer banks moved inland and survived by hunting, fishing, singing, dancing, and neither Virginia Dare nor any of her relatives or descendants chose to reveal so much as their identity to Raleigh’s slave-owning successors.

The silence of Renegades is not self-imposed. The silence is imposed by the armored, the Civilized, who understand or even hear a Renegade no better than they understand or hear other people who are not zeks and do not spend their lives in labor camps.

Dissenters or Radicals who move from England or Europe to English America do not have to travel as far as the Renegades, and can in fact cover the same distance by staying home. The famous Quakers and the less well-known Unitas Fratrum, called simply Moravians in America, are among the European radicals who undertake such a voyage.

The first Quakers are part of a movement that tries to turn the world upside-down, at least in England. The radicalism of this movement will be described in our time by Christopher Hill. This is a movement that has its roots in the earlier uprisings of English radicals and peasants, roots that go back, by way of Beguines, Beghards, Free Spirits and Albigensians, to anti-Leviathanic currents that preceded the anti-Roman crisis cult. These radical currents erupt once again during the so-called English revolution.

While people with money who consider themselves God’s Elect remove the King and Archbishop in order to install themselves in the offices of English power, the radicals, who constitute the army that does the overthrowing, aim to remove the power of Aristocracy, Church as well as Money, and reconstitute on earth the Adamite Eden. People called Familists, Diggers, Ranters and the first Quakers are among the radicals who try to topple hierarchy, law and privilege.

The Protestant gentry establish what they, prevaricating like practiced Catholics, call their Commonwealth, and they promptly silence the “peasants, clowns and base people” who would “follow our example” by overthrowing the Protestant gentry as well as the Protestant Church.

Quakers who survive the repression, but emaciated and spiritless. They still long for an earthly Eden, but they become extremely patient. They renounce armed resistance, recognizing that the victory of the radical army led to a tyranny by its generals. They continue to reject the Leviathanic hierarchies of wealth and power, but in practice they limit their radicalism to denouncing the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the hierarchs.

Even this mild practice makes Quakers a bane to American Puritans, who hound, deport and execute the pale radicals with the viciousness of Catholic inquisitors and heresy hunters.

The first Quakers in America oppose the extermination of the continents original inhabitants, but few Quakers become Renegades, and the rest gradually acquire the dishonesty and hypocrisy they once denounced. Whether they were peasants or artisans in England, they all become businessmen in America, and like other invaders, they get their first windfalls from the expropriation of the original inhabitants. Renouncing arms as well as the incendiary methods of the Puritans, the Quakers resort to legal maneuvering and outright cheating, and they empty the Quakerland called Pennsylvania of its original inhabitants as thoroughly as the violent invaders of the Empty Continent. Like Moses, they intended to find a new world only while they were inside the old one; when they leave, they carry the old world with them.

The United Brethren, known in America as The Moravians, bring to America a radical heritage as old as that of the Quakers. The roots of this heritage are in Central Europe, specifically in Tabor.

We’ve seen that the heritage of Tabor reaches back to Waldensians, Free Spirits, Albigensians, and further back to Bulgarian Bogomils, Persian Manicheans and ancient Zarathustrians.

After the last Taborites were repressed, first by their Hussite allies and then by their Catholic enemies, isolated and secretive groups of Taborites preserved, if not the commitment, at least the memory of the attempt to reconstitute Paradise on the outskirts of Prague. Many of them took part in extensive peasant rebellions viciously repressed by German military aristocrats with Luther’s blessings and urgings.

Broken and intimidated by a persecution that never ends, Taborites who still survive become intent on showing the world they are not the fanatics they are taken to be, they do not come to set fire to the Leviathanic world. One of the most famous of these Taborites, Jan Amos Komensky, reduces the fire of the revolutionary to the light of the educator.

Hounded even as educators, reduced latter-day Taborites at last abandon Europe and scatter to every part of the world. Some of them try to establish new Tabors in America. Most of them succeed only in founding a Moravian Church. But some of them venture to the fringes of America and acquaint themselves with the people being persecuted as remorselessly in the New World as the Taborites were in the Old.

These Moravians cannot help but recognize that the communities outside the fringes of America have affinities with the dimly remembered Adamites. They take the plunge so dangerous in racist America and let themselves be adopted by surviving communities of Mahicans, Lenni Lenapes, Shawanos.

Unable to rid themselves of Komensky’s gift to their Church, the Moravians outside the fringes do not let themselves become brothers and insist on being teachers, although it is their souls and not those of their hosts that are dimly lit. Thus instead of partaking in the Shawano love feasts, the teachers from abroad prevail on Shawanos to attend a poorly preserved Adamite love feast which is disfigured to the point of looking for all the world like a Christian mass.

These Moravians preserved enough of the ancient heritage to guide them to the threshold of the communities, but not enough to help them cross it. These spiritual heirs of Tabor are English America’s first missionaries.

Unlike later missionaries, the Moravians respect and admire their hosts, for despite their unremovable pedagogical masks and armors, the teachers cannot keep themselves from suspecting that Tabor is on the other side of the threshold. Their numerous books and journals are unique in the sympathy and understanding with which the authors describe their hosts’ ways. These teachers’ books and stories will in fact inspire much of the meager literature in which American racists such as James Fenimore Cooper grant a shred of humanity to the vanquished Other.

Although they are no more than missionaries, the Moravians are hated by American Pioneers as only Renegades are hated. The sight of Moravian teachers living in mutual respect with “Savage Injuns” dements the Pioneers, drives them into the murderous rage characteristic of American lynch mobs. The continent’s inhabitants are vermin to the impatient Pioneers, who cannot wait to exterminate the inhabitants so as to appropriate and rape their fields, forests and streams.

In two of the most vicious massacres ever perpetrated, the Paxton Massacre and the Gnadenhutten Massacre, frontiersmen of American Progress and Civilization attack Mahican, Lenni Lenape and Shawano villagers who lodged and befriended Moravian teachers. Although there is not a single warrior among the villagers, the enraged Pioneers cut them to pieces.

Thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity
them…

Neither pity nor respect nor understand them. America means the extinction of freedom, kinship and community, and also of their memory.

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