The abduction of Venezuela’s head of state (which cost eighty Venezuelan lives and was not preceded by a declaration of war) and his arraignment before a New York court epitomises how far secularist Western society has departed from the old Christian West.
In more Christian times, regardless of the moral caliber of a society’s leader, he was treated with respect by other states because of his position, no matter the ferocity of their differences.
Here are a couple of examples:
During the Hundred Years War, John II of France was captured at the Battle of Poitiers (1356): While surrounded, he continued fighting until a French exile in the service of England, Denis de Morbecque, offered him an honourable surrender: “Sire, I am a knight of Artois. Yield yourself to me and I will lead you to the Prince of Wales”.
That night he was waited upon at dinner by Edward, the “Black Prince”. Records show that, while in captivity in England, he lived in the Savoy Palace, purchased pets and clothes, and maintained a group of court musicians.
John II of France is taken hostage by Edward, the Black Prince, and treated well with a dinner. SOURCE
In the Battle of Pavia (1525), Francis I of France was separated from his retinue and then trapped under his dying horse. He refused to surrender to the soldiers who cornered him, or to nobles representing Charles de Bourbon (regarded by Francis as a renegade).
Finally, Francis surrendered to prince Charles de Lannoy (representing Emperor Charles V), who received Francis’ sword, but gave him his own sword as a sign of respect. One by one, the Spanish, Italian German and Flemish commanders of the victorious army “made their way into the king’s presence to kiss his hands and offer a few polite condolences”. That night, Bourbon and Lannoy took turns waiting on Francis. This magnanimity extended to others on the defeated side, with Bourbon arranging for Masses to be said for dead officers on the other side who had been his friends.
This contrasted greatly with the pagan world’s norms. The famous imperial triumphs in Rome ended with the ritual strangulation of defeated heads of state. Indeed, Cleopatra committed suicide rather than endure this parade through Rome and subsequent execution. Vercingetorix, the valiant leader of the Gaulish rebellion, was imprisoned for several years before being paraded in Julius Caesar’s Rome and beheaded at the Temple of Jupiter.
Worse than the pagans?
The self-congratulatory buccaneering of Nicolas Maduro’s capture has been followed by his parading in front of the world’s media. But there is no intention of waging honourable war or even of “improving” Venezuela.
Washington proposes using the left wing regime in Caracas as a subsidiary “mob” in a kind of forced gangland amalgamation: the “profits” of this “turf” will now go to Washington instead of the (fictional) “Cartel de los Soles”, the Venezuelan establishment. The Venezuelan regime will still get its “cut”, but is now forced to work for the “Washington cartel”.
The US invasions of Iraq look almost benign in comparison. Apparently, nobody in Washington even bothers to dissimulate. Amoral is the new cool:
Speaking with the The New York Times (8/1/26), Trump declared there was only one constraint to his power: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind” … “It’s the only thing that can stop me”.
This not only ignores the many things that can stop anybody; it rejects all submission of civil society to natural and divine law. A politician’s “morality” or “mind” counts for very little if it is not aligned with these. There isn’t much difference between this idolisation of an individual’s opinion and liberalism’s exaltation of that of the majority. It expresses the United States’s secularism, in conservative form.
Trump stated that if China does in Taiwan what he proposes doing in Venezuela or Greenland, “Xi will know he’s not happy”. But Trump’s state of mind is no real guarantee to Taiwan.
Already the most extreme Russian nationalists (like occultist Alexander Dugin) are jubilant, celebrating the “might is right” doctrine and advising their government to act the way Trump does. The picture of the world emerging from all this is not new. It’s a return to the Enlightenment hegemony of great powers dividing the world between them, and to the old pagan world before that.
Those with “no cards”
If the world is once again divided up into spheres of influence dominated by those with “cards” (to use Trump’s expression), the result will not be pretty: Washington wants to dominate the Catholic World of the Americas; Russia gets Europe; China gets Taiwan, the Philippines and the Western Pacific, perhaps Australia; India gets its area of influence, “Islam” gets most of Africa – the rest of the continent is dominated by extractive economic interests. Some imagine this represents the return of gutsy political “realism” after generations of spineless liberalism.
But this new global “order” would entail the dismemberment of the Catholic world, and its absorption by hostile powers. Catholic Europe, the Catholic countries of the Americas and the Philippines do not now profess the faith socially at the state level, of course. But being independent makes it possible for them (because they mostly remember what a Catholic society is) to one day reassert the social reign of Christ the King.
Within the proposed “empires” they will have little chance. The history of Catholics within the Russian empire, under Islam, and especially Catholic countries under the influence of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (a period Donald Trump idolises) does not augur well.
The list of those “without cards” is long and does not refer merely to the Ukraine and its millions of Catholics that Trump was referring to: the Christians of Palestine, the Christians of India; the Philippines; the Armenians. The list goes on.
The Christian alternative
In reality, if the Christian West regained consciousness it would be able to determine the global environment instead of being a victim of it. Thanks to the global expansion of the Church after Trent, the Pacific Ocean is a Christian lake of which the Philippines and eastern Indonesia are the western shore; the Catholic peoples of the Americas are culturally and geopolitically part of Europe (which the EU is beginning to recognise -for example, with its landmark free trade agreement with Mercosur). Some African countries are becoming more socially and religiously consolidated.
The US itself has been “invaded” by the regular and irregular migration of tens of millions of people from Catholic countries, who Trump’s deputy, Stephen Miller, won’t succeed in deporting however much he would like to.
All of this is the substrata for the geopolitical reappearance of the Christian West after two centuries. All that is needed is to think beyond what is on offer in the West today. This requires effort. But as was promised at Fatima, willingly, or unwillingly, humanity will see the return of the Reign of Christ the King and with it, international peace, decorum and respect.
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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