Conquered, Not Stolen | (Ep. 419)

In this episode, Douglas Wilson reflects on the domestic political fallout of the Iran war and argues that what voters reject is not war itself so much as “forever war.” He then turns to the New Testament word miasmos to describe the “lust of uncleanness” as a deepening pattern of moral slavery, and closes with a review of Not Stolen by Jeff Fynn-Paul, a historical response to the claim that America is simply “stolen land.”

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What is Plodcast?

In the Plodcast, pastor Douglas Wilson covers anything related to theology and culture with his usual entertaining style. Whether it involves talking about Chestertonian Calvinism (not an oxymoron), the benefits of a Classical Christian education (not in that order), or the latest pomosexuality farce, the plodcast aims to apply all of Christ to all of life, for all the world. Douglas Wilson is an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian (pretty much in that order) and is politically to the right of Jeb Stuart.

Welcome to the Plodcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 419. 419. The Plodcast. I am Doug Wilson. You are you. Thanks for being here. I wanted to talk about the Iran War. A lot of discussion has been turned up about this. I want to talk about the domestic impact of the war. By all reports, the war has gone very well militarily. There has been a lot of churn, consternation in some quarters. The basic issue here is the forever war part, not the war part, but the forever war part. There were a lot of dire predictions that were made about the strike on Iran's nuclear research facilities. People thought that World War III was going to start as a result. The Middle East was going to disintegrate. None of that happened. I think a lot of this has to do with the big dog, little dog dynamic. So if we had any kind of nation building exercise, like we didn't have in Venezuela, for example. We used the military, captured the President, brought him back to the States, and we don't have boots on the ground. We don't have boots on the ground to date in Iran. I think as long as that doesn't happen, people are not looking at another Vietnam. We're not looking at another Iraq. We're not looking at another Afghanistan. So in Afghanistan, where we spent billions of dollars lost thousands of American lives, and we did this over the course of 20 years in order to take the Afghanistan away from the Taliban and turn it over to the Taliban. It's that kind of thing that has people exasperated. If basically the Ayatollah regime, if the Iranian regime is reduced to rubble and then is removed, and then there is any kind of assemblons of ordinary government that replaces it. And all that is in place six months after the shooting started. Then I don't think that there will be any political price domestically that will be paid by Donald Trump at all. There will be some people who want to get NGOs and other outfits in there to make a lot of money. Because, for example, Ukraine is an ongoing cash cow, depending on what business you're in. So if Donald Trump sticks with his instincts, which would be to go for total victory, have the war be over and done, done and dusted, short and sweet. And if that actually happens, and there's no attempt to install Jeffersonian democracy in Iran under the leadership of a bunch of state department, Johnny's. I don't do any of that. I don't think that there's going to be any angst in the magma movement at all. People on the right, sort of the redneck magarite, the redneck conservative right are oriented to the military military. They like being proud of the military military. They like it when the military performs well. They like victory. They don't like stalemates. They don't like a board of evacuations of Afghanistan like what we had. They hate that sort of thing. And they hate the expenditure of money and lives and all of that to accomplish precisely nothing. I was talking to a young man the other day. And he was talking at the time he was talking about five, five bodies were brought home, five, five Americans were brought home from this Iran conflict. And it's well, you know, I grew up in the Vietnam era came of age in the Vietnam era. And that was a war where we lost 50,000 American lives. And it was a true quagmire. And it was fought from Washington and set it by the generals. And there were there were all kinds of all kinds of problems with it. So the issue is has the executive as the commander in chief learned the lesson and learned down in the bones of no nation building, no ventures in that sort of thing. And we are going to fight wars when we fight them quickly and and then out. And we're going to do it to serve American interests. That is not going to hurt him. But I don't want to leave this question of the war without mentioning this one, at least once. And that is if this results in a change in the regime, a regime change war. And the Iranian revolution comes to an end and some other form of government takes its place. That will be the result of American military action. And I'll just want to say on the record that I really like our constitutional system where Congress declares war and the president prosecutes it. There are gray area situations where there has to be military action taken against a flotilla of pirates and you don't don't want or need a declaration of war for that. But there's some there's a deeply diseased reason why we quit declaring war. The last war we declared was the second world war. And I would like this. I would really like us to get back to that. I think that the constitutional protections legal protections against overreach are not strong enough. I'd like to see them stronger. And adult, but it's not just holding the president accountable. It's also a way of holding congressmen and senators accountable. Right now they can be critical of the war all they want because yeah, he may be the president is authorized to do this. But we don't want him doing it that way. Everybody becomes an armchair critic. So I would I would encourage us to think about getting back to the old system. So continuing on with episode 419 of the podcast. We've been diligent in our study from our theology and we are now well up into the muse. That's the Greek M into the muse of the Greek army. Our word this week is me asmos m I a S m O S me asmos, which means uncleanness uncleanness. The apostle Peter is speaking of false teachers in the course of which he says this. This is a hot box. This is the only time in the New Testament this word is used. And it is used here. Second Peter 2 verse 10. But chiefly them that walk after the flesh and the lust of uncleanness there it is. But chiefly them that walk after the lust of uncleanness and despise government presumptuous are they self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dig of dig to tease. So this there is an interesting authority structure here. These teachers walk about after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness. They walk about after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness. The uncleanness is the baseline and the lust gravitates to that place. The lust wants to go there. The lust wants to be unclean. The seat of this mess is the flesh which is the sin principle within man. The sinner in the grip of all this walks after this pattern. It is a way of life. It is a curriculum. It is a course of study. The law of diminishing returns then sets in. And so it becomes necessary for the slave to seek out darker kings and the slavery just deepens. The lust of uncleanness can always get a little bit more unclean. The lust of uncleanness can always get dirtier. So as we continue with podcast 419, my book review section is a book called Not Stolen by Jeff Finn Poo Poo. Jeff Finn Poo. F-Y-N-N-P-O-U. In the immigration debates, one of the things that the progressive left has started has taken the saying is that no one is illegal on stolen land. No one is illegal on stolen land. Well, okay, this is complicated. But it's not complicated. If we recognize the way in which it's complicated, how it's complicated, it ironically simplifies things. We have reduced everything in a simplistic way and consequently have complicated everything. So complicated up front, simplify it at the back end or you do it the opposite way. So for example, as we are considering our country, the place where we live, we have been trained to think of Indians, Native Americans, First Peoples, First Nations, and on the one hand, and whites on the other. So white people landed and they pushed the Indians out of their ancestral homelands and they robbed and stole and took the land, took the territory and all of that. And so look at how evil or bad the white people were. But here's the problem. There were not two groups of people. It wasn't Native Americans and newly arrived Americans. It wasn't that simple. It was people gathered in tribes. White people congregate in tribes. We had the Iroquois, we had the Comanche, we had the Navajo, we had the Apache, we had the Sue. These are all different tribes, many of which hated one another and were constantly at war with one another. And when the whites landed, we have to realize that they were congregated in different tribes. There were the Spanish and there were the French and there were the English and there were the Dutch and different colonies landed. So in the French and Indian war, some of the Indians fought alongside alongside the French and some of the Indians fought alongside the English. It was nothing so simple as all you brown people go over there and all you white people come over here and we're going to have a mass huge battle based on the solidarity of skin tint. That's not the way it happened. Now this book, not stolen, is a detailed historical description of all the particular situations. So were there were there instances where white people ripped off a where the governmental authorities ripped off a particular tribe. Yeah, I think that happened with the Nez purse, which is the tribe just south of us where I live is where the Nez purse used to be Nez purse territory and the Nez purse reservation is just south of us here. And I think that the Nez purse got the raw end of the deal, that particular deal. But you can't render general by induction and say that that was the case for every Indian tribe. That was not the case for every tribe. There were times when the Indians were the ones who broke the treaty. There were times when the Indians were the ones who did the awful thing. There were times when the when the whites did the awful thing the wars with the Sue Indians on the Great Plains Indians were a lot of the people who were fighting in that war had just a short time before been fighting the Confederates. There was a great war between two great white tribes and then the victorious Union Army headed out west and began fighting for example the Sue. I'll just finish with this book is a great book if you want to walk through all the particular horror stories that are that are thrown against Europeans generally and say okay there's more to the more to the story this is a proverb 1817 thing there's more to the story than this. This is a great book to get not stolen by Jeff thin who I'll finish with this there's a there's a clip a YouTube clip and I am not sure how this ever got made by anybody connected to the the movie industry not sure at all but if you can look it up on YouTube it's a clip of four or five minute clip of a army officer union officer having a. Negotiated confrontation with chief sitting bull if you search for it you go to YouTube and search for sitting bull wounded me sitting bull wound me and it'll probably come up in the first few. And basically that you know sitting bull represents you whites have come and taken our ancestral and and the union officer does a little mini history of all the things that the Sue Indians did to other Indian drives you conquered these lands from other Indians and we conquered you so the conservative retort is not stolen conquered not stolen. Yeah it's got God don't never change it's got.