If you’ve read “The Wizened Old Prophet and The Three-Legged Stool”, then you know how I first came to learn about the Indo-European Caste System, and its waning influence on modern day America. 

This article examines the rise and fall of the top two castes in the 20th and 21ste Century United States: 

The Church as the Spiritual Caste, and our GIs and G-Men as our Warrior Caste. 

The tale is one long and sad…but one that must be told. 

For if we are ever to chart a course out of our present depression and despair that grip our world like a sick malaise of death, we must learn our history…

Or be doomed to repeat it!   

A VERY GOOD DEAL 

Since the Late Roman and Early Middle Ages, the Church and the Indo-European Warrior Caste have had a very good deal. 

The Warrior Caste converted to Christianity, while getting to keep its Heroic Confrontational ethos in service to the defense of the Church. 

Some trace this back to the days of Constantine. Others to the days of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great. 

Whenever it began, this Union has been the Foundation of the Warrior Caste Ethos of the modern Indo-European World. 

Whether fighting Sarcens in the South, Mongols in the East, or Indians in the West, those fighting descendents of the Northern Hyboreans knew that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob went before them into battle to scatter their foes. 

This has been true even into the 20th Century. 

In WWI, the British Empire forces believed they were Arthurian Knights slaying savage Huns in defense of Christendom, a role they were reprising from their Colonial Adventures in Africa and Asia. 

The American Doughboys sent to back them up were affectionately referred to as “Pershing Crusaders”, the sequel to their Cavalrymen and Cowboy fathers who tamed the Old Frontier in “Manifest Destiny” commanded by God. 

WHAT A HISTORIAN AND A PULP FICTION HERO KNEW

This imagery was carried on into WWII, and again into Cold War hotspots like Korea and Vietnam. As the best Counterinsurgency Historian in the business, Mark Moyer, writes in his book Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War 1965-1968 on the GIs going to War: 

“97 percent of Americans surveyed in 1965 believed in God, and 93 percent identified themselves as Christian, while only 2 percent did not identify with a religion. Three in four Americans believed in life after death, an especially important belief for Americans preparing for war.” 

And while our Postmodernist friends who only believe in tabula raisa will say this was all top-down brainwashing, this imagery tapped into thousands of years of Archetypes locked deep within the Indo-European Warrior Caste Soul. 

Combat veteran and Pulp Fiction writer George Macdonald Fraiser explains the banality of the Postmodern view very well in his war memoir on the Burma Campaign in WWII, Quartered Safe Out There: 

“Well, such a conclusion is false, and insulting. It fails to see that morale, far from being inspired by policy, comes from within, and is nourished by friends, family, and example. 

“Government and media may reflect that–as Churchill did–but they cannot create it. 

“Perhaps no one can understand that who was not alive and aware in Britain during the war, or experienced the Blitz, or was torpedoed, or confronted death and mortal peril at point-blank.” 

Within this system the Church and the Indo-European Warrior Caste functioned side by side quite well for thousands of years on up into living memory. 

But alas, Postmodernism’s waxing and the Church’s waning would lead this centuries’ long romance to a break up for the ages. 

GLORY DAYS 

But before the break up, there were the Glory Days. 

In the United States, it began in the 1960s during the Vietnam Era, where Postmodernism began to openly contend for Spiritual Caste supremacy with the Church on a whole host of cultural issues. 

While the Church and the GIs and the G-Men of the Warrior Caste closed ranks together, leading to the 1980s Ronald Reagan Glory Days the wizened old prophet spoke so fondly of, the post-Vietnam alliance was always uneasy, held together by the glue of a common enemy. 

You see, the threat of Communism, with its millions murdered and billions more kept captive in slave labor behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, held the Church and the GIs and the G-Men together. 

Ronald Reagan allowed the GIs and the G-Men to roll back the Communist menace instead of containing it as had every Administration since Truman, thereby wiping out its Vietnam shame. 

Likewise, Ronald Reagan tasked his Department of Education head, William J. Bennett, with keeping Postmodernism down and out of the High School and Collegiate curriculums as much as he legally could, thereby castrating the Church’s main competitor for Spiritual Caste supremacy. 

In their place would be Classics of Western Civilization…Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. The works. This was the Humanities curriculum enjoyed in this country by Generation X, as Ancient Greece and American Conservatism: Classical Influence on the Modern Right explains. 

Many of these Generation Xers were the first in their families to attend college, as both my parents were. 

THE LONG MARCH

The 1980s Postmodernists, many of them in their 30s and 40s, with new adherents trickling in in their teens and twenties, sat back and continued their work in quiet corners of Academia, knowing their time had not yet come. 

They called this period “The Long March Through the Institutions”. They named it after Mao Zedong’s famed 1930s “Long March” through the Chinese mountains, the launching pad of his improbable 1949 comeback to power over the most populous country on earth. 

And their time would come soon enough, for the Church and the Warrior Caste became victims of their own success…

When the Wall came down in 1989 and Communism fell into the dustbin of history, the common enemy was gone. The glue had begun to crack. 

And people began asking: 

Do we really even need the Church and the GIs and the G-Men anymore? 

CANON WARS AND CULTURE WARS

With the end of the Cold War, the stringent collegiate restrictions on Postmodernism were lifted, as the ostentatious cause for their restrictions were gone. 

They burst forth into academia and into the public alike like a dam long held back. For they had been productive in exile! 

These early 1990s battles in Academia became known as “The Canon Wars”, for the Postmodernists pushed aggressively to get rid of the Western Civilization Classics of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest from the University Literary Canons. 

Likewise, these early 1990s battles in the public culture would simply be called “The Culture Wars”, as the term “political correctness” came into vogue in the popular consciousness. 

To much of the public, these Culture Wars were treated like a shocking tabloid scandal of far-off elites, more fodder for circus-like entertainment than legitimate fear of cultural revolution. 

But in the Universities of the Canon Wars, the stakes were far higher, and the ramifications far more impactful. 

In 1993, Postmodern Scholar Richard Slotkin finished the final installment of his rabidly anti-Anglo-American Warrior Caste trilogy, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. His protege Tom Englehardt followed closely on his heels with an unofficial sequel, The End of Victory Culture.

With these scholarly works, Slotkin and Englehardt provided Postmodernism with the ultimate playbook to take down the Indo-European Warrior Caste in America…this would prove very useful in the coming decades.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time for the GIs and G-Men either, the GIs in particular. 

TWO DOMINOS 

With the end of the Cold War, the GIs were confused as to their identity…who was the enemy? Why were they around? 

These questions came with record budget cuts to the Department of Defense and massive peace-time demobilization of existing service members,  furthering the reality of the identity crisis. 

This was accomplished at the hands of President Bill Clinton, a Vietnam Era draft dodger.

At the same time, the Church’s aforementioned twin-track policy of internal tyranny and external appeasement was beginning to pick up steam fast. 

And then suddenly, a Domino fell down…two Dominos, in fact. 

And the Union between the Church and the Indo-European Warrior Caste would see its last great battle to date. 

NO DAYLIGHT BETWEEN

The Jihadist attacks on 9/11 galvanized the Church and the Warrior Caste together in Traditional Union once more for a brief shining moment. 

I distinctly remember these days well: the Church was 100% behind the Global War on Terror in both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

I’ll never forget Pastor Holland Lewis of West Valley Nazarene Church in Yakima, Washington leading the congregation in “God Bless America” in front of a giant, Patton-esque American Flag on the eve of the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

The spirit in that room was one of total unity, a belief in justice and righteousness and power and might. 

There was no daylight between the Church and the Indo-European Warrior Caste in those days. Those who were alive during this time will search their memories and see it all again vividly. 

For those who were not alive, it is difficult to capture the magnitude and intensity of those days, as these things would change so dramatically in the coming years as to be unrecognizable. 

Luckily, we have a record. 

PULP FICTION LEADS THE WAY

It can best be summed up in a wonderful article written by Thomas S. Engeman entitled “In Defense of Cowboy Culture”. 

Written immediately after the liberation of Baghdad in 2003, it traced the continuity between the GIs of the GWOT and a host of characters familiar to long time readers of Pulp Fiction Renaissance: 

Engeman explains that the Greek Hoplites, the Arthurian Knights, and the Frontier Cowboys were all the fountains from which the heroism of our fighting men in the sandbox had sprung! 

And as any clear-eyed observer would do, he traces it all back to Pulp Fiction and its modern-day media descendants: 

“​​Although high culture is a different story, in mainstream America, heroism is alive and well. It thrives in ‘action/adventure’ films, by far the largest movie genre, encompassing westerns, detective and police dramas, martial arts pix, science fiction, superheroes, natural disasters, and war stories. 

“Thousands of heroic movies (and television programs) are viewed by millions of Americans every month, though intellectuals of all stripes typically disdain them…

“The huge popularity of heroic movies shows that Americans are little troubled by such intellectual criticism. They believe that calling the United States a ‘cowboy culture’ pays it a compliment. 

“To the average ticket-buying Joe and Jane, the cowboy (in his many forms) is the idealization of democratic virtue, especially of its relentless pursuit of justice.” 

Engeman understood very well that these 20th and 21st Century incarnations of the Indo-European Warrior Mythology were critical to creating a world where the Knight slays the Dragon to save the Princess: 

“For the American hero,” Engeman foretold, “The Frontier never closes.” 

But lurking forces of Academic Postmodernism were set to make our sandbox battle for justice into a Spiritual Little Big Horn of nightmarish proportions. 

A CAREFULLY CRAFTED PROGRAM 

As I outlined in my book, All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War, poor operational and strategic choices in the days following our initial Iraq victory led to the explosion of a long pre-planned Jihadi insurgency. 

In his book, Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, Kenneth R. Timmerman convincingly lays out that these poor operational and strategic choices were not mere blunderings out of ignorance, but a carefully crafted program of intentional defeat by both the State Department and the CIA. 

Laurie Mylroie came to similar disturbing conclusions after discovering extensive evidence of this going back a decade before 9/11 in her book Bush vs. The Belway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. 

The goal of this intentional policy of step-by-step defeatism was not only to discredit the Bush Administration and its War Effort in Iraq, but more deeply to drive a wedge between the Traditional Union of the Church and Indo-European Warrior Caste in the American incarnation. 

And this discrediting of the War Effort was all the ammunition that an alliance of Postmodernists and Jihadists alike would need to fire the final kill shot into the Traditional Union’s soul. 

AGON AND JIHAD 

In both the Indo-European and Islamic Tradition, warfare is viewed upon a three-fold, Platonic plane, called Agon and Jihad respectively.  

It is composed of: 

1. Agon of Idea/Jihad of the Heart…Belief in the power and righteousness of the cause
2. Agon of Utterance/Jihad of the Tongue…Verbal persuasion to effect above belief
3. Agon of Action/Jihad of the Sword…Battlefield actions to kill the enemy 

The element of Tongue and Utterance is critical. Control that, and you control Idea and Heart. Control Idea and Heart, and you control Action. You control the Sword. 

And so the Academic Postmodernists and their Jihadist Allies went to work to control the Sword. 

NEVER MIND. NEVER MIND. 

As I have long documented, the Postmodernists hate the Indo-European Warrior Caste as much as the Church, and the poorly-going war was their chance to take it out once and for all.

Richard Slotkin’s anti-Anglo-American Warrior Caste playbook Gunfighter Nation, alongside Tom Englehardt’s unofficial sequel The End of Victory Culture, were dusted off and put into action. 

Its talking points were distributed in the American media using framing techniques outlined in Robert Entman’s Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy. 

The Jihadists weren’t slacking either. Radical Political Islamism has long been a prosperous branch of the Postmodern tree through the work of Edward W. Said’s Post-Orientalism Theory, under the rubric of “Post-Colonial Studies” within the Postmodern Framework. 

Consequently, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Al Jazeera media empire out of Qatar pushed the same talking points to the Arab World. 

And so the old Mythology of the Indo-European Warrior Culture, of the Knight Slaying the Dragon to save the Princess and her Oppressed Kingdoms, was turned on its head all over the world. 

It was spun that the Knights were not Confrontational and Righteous. They were Predatory and Evil. The Dragon was merely defending his Homeland, and the Princess and her oppressed citizens actually really wanted to live enchained in the Dragon’s lair. 

If the facts got in the way of this narrative, they were ignored. 

Never mind that Saddam’s WMDs were indeed found. Never mind that his relationship to Al Qaeda and Radical Islamism was far-more long standing than anyone previously thought. 

Never mind that American Forces overcame the vast cultural chasm plagued by wartime chaos and death, and won the hearts and minds of indigenous Iraqis to throw out the Jihadi insurgency that was beheading people daily. 

Never mind. Never mind. 

NIHILISM AND POWERLESSNESS 

In 2015, I meticulously documented all of these facts in my book, All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War. My hope was that in presenting them, the views of the American people would be changed. 

But sadly, the damage had been done: both sides of the American political electorate had bought the bill of goods the Postmodernists and the Jihadis had sold long ago. 

It was made official in 2007, when Muslim Brotherhood-linked scholar Juan Cole contradulated Tom Englehartd on the successful weaponization of his and Slotkin’s work, and urged him to write an updated edition of The End of Victory Culture celebrating their success influencing the Iraq War. He duly complied. 

In it, he celebrated how within the span of a few short years, children had stopped playing Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers, and how their work had stopped these games from becoming Delta Force vs. Taliban or GIs vs. Jihadis. 

Instead, he gloated over how they now played Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a host of other baseless bastardizations totally devoid of Indo-European Warrior Caste roots. 

It would bring world peace, he said…but it wouldn’t. 

No, it would only serve as the catalyst for the Dragons of the world to rampant, enslaving Princesses and her Oppressed peoples the world over.

And likewise, this catalyst would enslave the souls of would-be Indo-European Warrior Caste Heroes to lives of nihilism and powerlessness. 

THEY ALL PAID GREEN 

It was then that the break up for the ages began…the Church was reeling from its own failed two-track strategy of heavy internal oppression and spineless outward appeasement. 

It couldn’t have a politically toxic Indo-European Warrior Caste to cause it further trouble while it hemorrhaged parishioners as fast as it was losing its cultural capital. 

So instead of dropping its failed policy, it institutionally doubled down, hoping that by sacrificing its longstanding Union with the Indo-European Warrior Caste, it could win accolades from its new Postmodern masters. 

And so the Spiritual and Warrior Caste roots of this great country were ripped from the soil and turned asunder. 

The Merchant Caste didn’t care much: they could make money off Knights or Dragons, Church-goers or Postmodernists. At the end of the day, they all paid in green. 

And the Worker Caste, long-suffering and heroic, was led along like lambs to the slaughter, heartbroken and confused…their role models gone, their culture destitute and moreless. 

WHERE IT BEGINS AND ENDS

The sad tale told above makes it appear as if Thomas S. Engeman was wrong. 

Has the Frontier finally closed? 

No my friends, it has not. 

For no matter what may happen in this terrible, terrible world ours…no matter what devilry, no matter what chaos, no matter what deceit, no matter what confusion… 

Right is still right. 

Wrong is still wrong.

Cowboys and Indians, Knights and Dragons, Good Guys and Bad Guys…they all still exist. 

And we all have a choice about which one we’re gonna be. 

God still sits high upon his throne. 

We must shake off our depression and despair, and cast our eyes upon Him once more. 

The Frontier lives on in our hearts. 

It’s where the Agon and the Jihad begin and end. 

For the American Hero, the Frontier never closes!

Sincerely,

Richard Barrett

10-18-2023 

Written at 5:13 PM, somewhere in the USA…

Sources Cited

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