THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

In 1250, AD:

1) Every literate person knew the world was round;

2) Medical texts recommended taking fruits with Vitamin C, though of course it wasn't specified, on board for long sea voyages. The Vikings never had scurvy;

3) Medical texts also routinely insisted that wounds be soaked in wine to avoid infection;

4) There was not, and never had been, a witch-burning hysteria. The Hammer of Witches was a RENAISSANCE document. The real Medieval Church, including the Inquisition, had viewed most witches as demented women;

5) Many castles had showers, only mechanically different from the ones we have today. Bathing was popular, but expensive and difficult for most. Saturday was bath day for the wealthy, as it had been for the "barbarians." In one case before 1000 AD, an attack was launched on Saturday precisely because it was "bath day." History records this and blithely goes on with the myth that barbarians did not bathe;

6) Higher math, Western math, the Calculus and the math of CHANGING relationships, was developed ENTIRELY in the Middle Ages. It was seriously retarded when the Renaissance brought in "Classical" math and tried to show how advanced math was a product of "The Ancients." One mathematician took care of that by saying the Classical mathematicians were the real giants, and Medievals were only more advanced because "They stood on the shoulders of giants."

Pure crap.

The examples are endless.

7) In my youth, textbooks had a poor, crippled "map of the world" that was supposed to represent the Dark Ages, pre-Columbus, worldview. As a matter of fact, it was the world map of the Classical Age, discovered by the Renaissance. The world which had discovered Greenland and which was trying to find a NEW way to reach the Far East was far, far beyond that poor, crippled thing.

That map was only used by Renaissance "scholars."

The Renaissance caused Luther and his followers to assume that only Hebrew Scriptures were true Old Testament. This was nonsense. The New Testament was written by HELLENIC Jews whose entire Bible was in GREEK.

On and on it goes.

The Renaissance was an intellectual DISASTER.

Right after World War II, an American was telling a European refugee in New York about what was wrong with America. The immigrant replied, "Yes, but you just don't appreciate what America AIN'T."

It is very, very important for us to take this point seriously. Everybody wants to take credit for "what America is all about."

In my opinion, what makes America great is that we got a fresh start in 1790.

But that great start consisted mostly of NOT doing things. Our Founding Fathers were determined not to make the same mistakes Europe had, and they did a great job of it.

But I never see anybody, liberal or conservative, ever mention that what America is about is dropping the European nonsense. Today, the official historian of respectable conservatism, Michael Jaffe, says that about the only thing that America was founded on was five words in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal."

A liberal will tell you that what America is all about is multiculturalism and multiracialism. Back here in the real world, there was not a single Founding Father who did not take it for granted that America was white and Northern European.

A conservative will tell you America Is All About Religion. We have the healthiest churches on earth, but we also have the first churches on earth that were built and maintained PRIVATELY. Every European state pays for its churches and sponsors its churches. And in every European country religion is dying.

While a lot of people are for Clinton and a lot are against him, I doubt anyone now doubts that he is a sociopath. A sociopath is a person who is incapable of feeling honest guilt. He is also incapable of feeling any obligation to another person or to society in general.

This is a shockingly common phenomenon. Once we thought it was very rare. We now know that sociopaths probably constitute one to five percent of the population.

To be acceptable today, a politician must be a sociopath. Every move, every smile, every emotion is used to get what he is after. By definition, the more conscience you have, the less perfect a modern politician you will be.

Democracy is a system of government where people get what they deserve. We ASK for sociopaths to rule us. We want someone who will say the right thing. We label anyone who loses his temper or says anything that is purely an individual opinion, as over the edge. So we vote for people who say the right thing.

All the time.

Nobody who is not a sociopath can have acceptable opinions all the time.

In "The Bead Buyers"(below) I explain that we have become a society where sociopaths who learn the formulas for "handling" us, the right "spin", are allowed to rule us.

Dale Carnegie's book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, was a handbook for sociopaths. Not coincidentally, his methods worked like a charm. Nothing could be more inevitable in a country where Carnegie's advice works than that we get presidents like Nixon and Clinton.

The best book I ever read about success with women was written by a woman. It's title was The Inept Seducer. At the end, it had a piece called "How to be Ept," which gave men ten steps by which they could get what they wanted just about every time.

It worked like a charm.

The Inept Seducer worked beautifully, just as Carnegie's stuff worked beautifully. And the one tactic that was never discussed in The Inept Seducer at all was HONESTY. With American women, according to this lady, honesty is absurd. My experience says she was dead right.

We are ruled by sociopaths because we ASK to be ruled by sociopaths.

In 1865, Republicans knew exactly what the war had been about.

In 1865 the President of the United States was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. Republicans pointed out that Johnson was "a foreigner." They denied any Southerners the right to sit in congress. They declared that the Yankee Nation had conquered the Southern Nation.

They were right. From that day forward, the South was a colony of the Yankee Nation in a much more genuine sense than American was ever British colony. The federal government ran huge surpluses because of the high tariffs the North imposed.

Southerners paid those tariffs twice. If they bought foreign goods, Southerners paid tariffs on them to such an extent that it not only financed the entire Federal budget, it caused embarrassing surpluses. In order to avoid paying the huge tariffs, Southerners had to buy much more expensive industrial products from New England. New England pocketed all of it, and that is why tariffs were kept so high.

That has been forgotten. And that was not the worst of it.

New England protected its industrial monopoly in America because New Englanders also owned the railroads. Any Southern company that wanted to ship industrial products north had to pay up to ten times as much as New England had to pay to send products south. It was impossible for the South to develop any major industries in the age when the only key to prosperity was industrialization. By the time of World War II tariffs had faded in importance.

With the New Deal, the federal government ceased to rely on tariffs for its main income. It was now supported by corporate taxes, excise taxes, and corporate income taxes.

If you ever wonder why so many conservative Southerners supported those new taxes, now you know the reason.