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Letter from the President
John Hathaway-Bates Please Note: The "Letter from the President" evolved in 2001 from the "Tomorrow's News" that we had previously published in The Business Forum Calendar & Update since 1984. It started out as a simple way for me to convey the benefits from conversations I have with leaders in Government, Academia and Business and potential problems that I learn about during my occupation as a Moderator of Think Groups for The Business Forum. However, since we began publishing on-line it has over the years become a personal "Bantering" from someone (me) surrounded day by day in the endeavor of Change. Usually it is whimsical in nature, and nothing more than my viewpoints on what I see happening around me on a daily basis. The "Letter from the President" therefore, has little or nothing to do anymore with The Business Forum, it is just me sharing my thoughts, concerns and ideas with anyone who cares to read them. It fascinates me how certain cultures seem destined to always succeed, no matter what calamities befall them, while others seem just as destined to fail, no matter what natural advantages are given to them by Fate. Bearing in mind the old adage that "statistics" usually have less truth in them than “damned lies”, it can still be very interesting to banter based upon such “facts”, understanding that one should always be willing to hear counter-arguments when such are put forward. Put another way, when Galileo put forward the “bantering” that he thought that "statistics" seemed to indicate that the Earth went round the Sun, rather than the other way around, he was in fact just challenging the Political Correctness of the day. (He got thrown in jail for that)! Just as when Columbus stated that he thought it might be possible to sail far enough to the West to circumnavigate the globe and end up in the East Indies – for which logic most people of the time immediately wrote him off as an idiot and refused to invest or participate in his proposed venture, which of course everyone then knew was based upon his illogical belief in the "statistics" of the day. (I seem to remember he also got thrown in jail for proving it)! Note: The Ancient Greeks knew a thousand years beforehand what the Vatican refused to even consider in the 17th Century. Eratosthenes proved by scientific experiment the statement of Aristotle regarding the spherical shape of earth in the following way: During the summer solstice at Aswan and at Alexandria of Egypt, he at the same time had measured the shadow of two sticks vertically placed in the earth. At Aswan there was no shadow from the stick, but at Alexandria the shadow had a length equal to the 1/5 of the stick. Knowing the two sides of the right angle triangle and the angle of 7 1/5 degrees, he calculated the result 1/50 of the 3600. So, if we multiply the distance from Aswan to Alexandria by 50 we get the perimeter of earth as being 25,000 miles. Of course in the 20th Century using satellites we were able to prove that Eratosthenes was off by about 50 miles! What this preamble is leading up to, is that the present grouping of “statistics” seems to predict something I would very much like to see proved wrong. This worry of mine is very simple, and is as follows: What if civilization as we know it, is based upon the concepts, morals and beliefs of a particular and singular culture that is fast disappearing from a position of power in our civilization, which it seems to be doing according to all the prevailing “statistics and predictions” of our time? Projected Population Growth or Decline and Quality of Life Factors by the Year 2050
Countries
Listed by Majority Religion
Countries Listed by
Continent or Region AFRICA MAP ASIA MAP CARIBBEAN MAP EUROPE MAP NORTH AMERICA MAP OCEANIA MAP SOUTH AMERICA MAP The End of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Civilization as we know it? In the United States of America most people talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were some group of divinely inspired creators of a Renaissance in Political thought – that just manifested itself to them without any previous cultural conditioning, like a flash of immaculate inspiration. (I personally read at least one History book a week, it has been my dedication for more than fifty years, and I suggest you take the time to read "Founding Brothers" by Joseph J. Ellis, which I believe will prove the point I am trying to make here). Most people in the United States and other diverse places like Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the countries of Scandinavia and a few countries in Northern Europe, also seem to think that they were somehow gifted with civilization as a God given right one Thursday afternoon in Ancient Times! So my question is this, my friends: What if that Renaissance in Political thought that led to the creation of the United States of America in the 18th Century, actually descended upon those Protestant men who created it, only because of the cultural controls imposed upon them by the world they came from in the West of England? Note: Records from 1790 show that 50 percent of the American colonists could trace their heritage back to England, 19 percent to Africa, 15 percent to Scotland or Ireland, 7 percent to Germany and a conglomerate 9 percent to Wales, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Spain or Portugal. It should also be pointed out that many members of the population and their living descendants (African and European) were unwilling residents of America at that time, having been transported to the New World against their will and in chains, either from the jungles of West Africa or the prisons of Great Britain. So in fact the "ruling class" from which all of the Founding Fathers came was very small and almost exclusively English, Protestant (Anglican) males and owners of property. What the culture of the west of England especially had produced, that the Founding Fathers all suffered from, was the concept that women and children were NOT just property, but were in fact equal to men as human beings, with feelings and perhaps even intelligence – and therefore deserved "Rights". Even if not voting rights immediately - but at the very least far more "Rights" than their feminine child bearing contemporaries in other cultures could even dream of at that time. The Founding Fathers also had Real Estate Property Rights built into their cultural thinking. For that they could thank the Vikings - who had raped, looted and pillaged, and then intermarried with, (in that order one needs to understand) their ancestors. No culture or religion, before the Vikings invaded Britain, could ever claim that their King, tribal chieftain, Sultan, Emperor, Caesar, or even their church (or cult) leaders had ever proposed such a “revolutionary” idea before. The Vikings had decided one wet Wodin's day afternoon (Wednesday for Americans) that it might be a good idea to allow worthy individuals (men and women) to own property in their own right, with inheritance rights, and then in a moment of renaissance thought promptly made it a Law that even the King could not overrule. (The fact that the Vikings who invented Property Law did it with land that they had just taken from the original inhabitants of Ireland bears no never mind. So was it that the descendants of those Irishmen (a.k.a. Vikings) did so well in the Real Estate business when they left the Old Country.) Name me a culture in Africa, Asia or the New World that had any vestige of Real Estate Property Rights for ordinary citizens (i.e.; thee and me) prior to having it introduced to them (or forced upon them) by Europeans. What few people in the world know today is that the English were always independent and eccentric individuals and that they had refused the rule of the Pope in Rome almost as soon as the Roman Catholic Church ventured back into Britain in the 5th Century, several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. In the Severn Valley region of England for example, the Hwicce nation (pronounced: hih-witch-ee) like most Baltic-Germanic peoples, gave their women very similar rights to men in such matters as inheritance, divorce and property ownership. This obviously so perturbed the Holy Fathers who had come to "save" them that they promptly declared the Hwicce women must have placed the men under some form of an evil spell for them to accept such ridiculous ideas – which is why the most evil women in the world in the Catholic Church's eyes are still to this day called “witches”! Somewhere in this piece I have to insert a possible "twister" to the logic being developed here. In my experience it is the culture that you live in for a long period of time that conditions you into the adult person you become, and not necessarily the culture that you were born into and think you belong to. Take a European youth of the 18th Century and put him on a Pacific island to live with cannibals and he would probably have become one; or take a refugee child from some undeveloped nation today and send him to the best schools and an Ivy League College in America and he will become indistinguishable from his peers that graduate alongside him. For example: one of the most "British" people I know is a Hindu woman who was born in India but educated in England; and one of my first partners in America was a Roman Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, and yet proclaimed agreement with the most Protestant of views on women and birth control and then up and married a Jewish woman. To add to the "twister", I know someone from just about every race, nationality and religion that have adopted many of the very "Protestant" views of the Founding Fathers; not as a "coat they wear in public", but as an overlying belief system that can countermand almost all of their other "cultural views" in everyday life. And, of course, I also know a lot of English Protestants I would not want dating my daughters, or mentoring my sons. Proving the old adage that one cannot judge a book by its cover. My grandfather once gave me some great advice; (it went something like this); "It is not a good idea to credit other people with your experience, knowledge or morality - they probably do not have it!" Every school child over twelve in the English speaking world has “heard” about the Magna Carta – but they probably have never been encouraged to read it, and so they do not know that it demands independence for the English Church from the Pope in Rome and also pointed out a "Constitutional Right" of Englishmen to the due process of Law and the rights of "Life, Liberty, et al". All of which found their way into the writings of the descendants of those same Englishmen in the Americas, when they got tired of the actions of the Hanoverian (a.k.a. German) King George III. Similarly, most college graduates have heard of Martin Luther and his rebuke of the representatives of the Pope in Germany in 1517 (although today many schoolchildren in America know more about Martin Luther King, than the man he was named for). But how many of our children are taught that King Henry VIII of Merry Olde England (of the many wives fame) first attacked the teaching of Martin Luther (and was given the title of "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope for it); but then went on to change the development of Western Civilization when he actually took a whole Country away from the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church with the Act of Supremacy in 1534, and incidentally made England the first Protestant nation at the same time; and thereby, although you will read it in few American history books, actually paved the way for the United States of America to exist? For without arrogant, gluttonous, lecherous, old King Hal there would have probably never been a United States of America or a flag composed of Stars and Stripes! My children are quite often taught such a politically correct version of History that at times it leaves me either absolutely horrified, completely amazed, or just laughing out loud, proving that no Country in the world is above embellishing its own History. For example: my youngest son thinks that the defeat of General Custer was the greatest Native American victory ever - because he has never been taught about Little Turtle and the Miami and how the Founding Fathers immediately set out to build their own Empire after they had got rid of the British Empire ruling them by promoting genocide. Obviously, pointing out that the Father of your country was happy to commit genocide is not something most people would willingly teach young children. But then, both of my sons have also been separately informed by their teachers that New England was a "Region" and not a Colony! That one I like - as my blood relatives must then have settled in the early part of the 17th Century in a Colony that did not exist, if we are to believe the people who are teaching my sons today in the 21st Century. Keeping it fair however; there are also very few Protestant Priests, Preachers or Pastors in America today who honestly will tell their followers that the Pilgrims and the Puritans often left England to escape being jailed for merely refusing to read the King James Bible (which is actually an Anglican Bible for a Church led by a Monarch, rather than a "truly" Protestant Bible). The original immigrants to the English colonies in the Americas actually used the Geneva Bible which is a Protestant Bible; (as did William Shakespeare (yet another of me blood relatives) - who despite much academic conjecture of late on American Public Television, was definitely no Catholic). I guess that means that all the Preachers we see on television, who claim to be Protestants, Baptists, Methodists, etc. should immediately give up the King James Bible, which they obviously know by heart, and start learning the Geneva Bible - or they could, if they wished, announce to their flocks that they have decided to convert to being High Anglicans? If you are interested by the way, Americans are allowed today (as they were not allowed in the 18th Century) to buy and read a Reproduction Copy of the Geneva Bible; which had the Puritans and Pilgrims been so allowed to do, their descendants might have died in the Indian Mutiny, at the Battle of the Somme, or in the London Blitz, rather than in the American Civil War (which legally was the first real War for Independence in the New World, just as the War for Independence was in fact a Civil War). In fact many English Protestants (despite Hollywood epic movies stating otherwise) considered the Old Testament to have actually been replaced by God with the New Testament. In fact some Protestants in England in the 17th and 18th Centuries accepted only one version of the New Testament, claiming that the others had been written by the Vatican to change the way they could govern members of the Catholic Church; (my lot only believed in Saint John's Gospel back then). This is of course the sort of background that the Founding Fathers came of age with. Truth be told, they were really only concerned with the "Rights" of "Englishmen", (and for the great part, righteous Protestant English Gentlemen at that, which is what most of them saw themselves as) - and I believe that it is to my mind a fallacy to believe that by using the word "men" in general in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 meant that the signers actually believed that all human beings had indisputable "Rights" - it was merely the ultimate arrogance of self-righteous superiority.
There is a statement in the
I would guess about as many American college graduates know the "facts" that I refer to in the above paragraphs, as would also know that one of the main reasons for the Declaration of Independence was the fact that King George III had just established Roman Catholicism as the State Religion in the British Colony of Quebec and had imposed a French version of a Civil Legal Code there; which terrified the property owning Protestant English colonists living next door, as they stated in their Declaration of Independence. (“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies”) Quebec of course was not the only one of the British Colonies in North America that did not join the “United Colonies of America" in rebellion (civil war) against the British Crown. In fact it could well have been that the actions of George III in Quebec, was one of the main reasons for the concept taken up by the leaders of the revolution in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Declaration of Independence - 1776 King George also refused (probably as a matter of Honor in his mind) to go back on existing Treaties Britain had with some of the friendly Native Americans, in what is today the States of Indiana and Ohio, who had fought with the British (Americans) to drive the French Crown out of North America - in fact he sent Officers to help these Native Americans defend themselves. That is probably what led to the clause: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Declaration of Independence - 1776 But the real point of this bantering is actually the following: What if only a group of old Protestant men could have come up with the concept of: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Bearing in mind that they probably thought and meant "all Englishmen" - for example, the Declaration is written in English-English, not American-English - which has to mean something!) As far as I can see no other Country, Colony, Religion or culture was even playing with this concept at that time outside of Northern Europe and North America (British Section only). Obviously the French, a few years after the American Revolution, could not pull it off (French Revolution 1789-1815). Instead, they took to murdering every aristocrat and priest, and almost anyone who could read and write, they could lay their hands on as soon as they gained power. It was said in the rest of Europe back then that any Frenchman with a horse, or a boat, moved out and most likely changed his nationality between the years of 1789-1795. Napoleon, himself a product of the French Revolution, even went so far as to actually imprison two Popes and then crown himself Emperor – in direct contrast to the English Protestant General Oliver Cromwell (English Civil War 1642-1646) or the American Protestant General George Washington, who both had the opportunity to take the Crown but chose not to be King, Emperor, Sultan, Fuehrer, or anything else dictatorial. In fact, strange as it seems, "statistics" would seem to suggest that there never has been a Protestant Dictator - anywhere! Therefore, accepting (or not) that only a Nation with a Protestant majority of English descent would be able to ensure the continuance of the concepts of the American (or English, Australian, New Zealand, etc.) Founding Fathers; what can we expect to happen in these countries which today lead the world in everything civilized, when during the next 50 years the Protestant majorities of these countries disappear? Largest Religious Groups in the United States - Religious Majorities by State in the United States The United States is the only "Protestant majority of European descent" country left in the New World (at just over a 56% Protestant population) - what happens when it loses another 7 percentage points? Or Australia, where they now have only a 51% WASP majority? Even England, which started it all, is down to a 64% WASP majority! So what happens? Do we finish up with less of what the Founding Fathers fought for – or will we get more - when Protestants become the minority? Or will New World Protestants all have to move to New Zealand? For example: When one talks about civilization and standard of life, one great measure is how do countries value their own people? As a wise man once said "Do not judge a nation by the grandeur of it's buildings or it's obvious wealth - for you can only judge a society by how it cares for the least fortunate of it's citizens." Comparing countries according to what the US State Department 2004 Report reports upon whether or not they “comply fully with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking of human beings?” or the percentage of their people living below the Poverty Line, sort of says it all when you are considering buying real estate and raising children!
My old “whimsy piece” - The Viking Effect upon World Freedom is starting to move from being just silly bantering, where I was playing with some "statistics" (like Economic Freedom Ratings and GDP, Transparency International's Perceptions of Corruption Index, FATF Money Laundering Index, etc.), to the point where it has moved into the realms of dark humor, (even fact), which is not at all what I intended when I wrote it. So what if Religion and Culture actually do play a major and very important part in the survival of Western Democracy as we know it? What happens to countries that lose the balance that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture has enforced upon them for the last five centuries? Looking at some of the places where that has already happened does not exactly give one confidence. What if a little more discipline than you would normally volunteer for is not always a bad thing? Do we go back to a world as it was in 1500 (or like it is still in some parts of the world today where the Vikings never raped, pillaged and looted)? Imagine it: the Middle Ages with electricity, fast food, global warming and video games? As for the United States of America, well the religious factors of American life are "statistics" that are well worth playing with, if only for “what if” predictions and whimsical conjecture that will cure insomnia in anyone.
The Original Thirteen Colonies As my justification for this piece: One tries to be Politically Correct, but occasionally one just has to drop the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons – and then one cannot help but wonder just how the neighbor who actually owns the pigeons will react.
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On February 14th, 1982, John Hathaway-Bates founded The Business Forum in Beverly Hills, California. At the time of establishing The Business Forum John was recognized as a Commercial Tactician with wide experience on four continents having served as President, or Corporate Vice President, for several multi-national Corporations. He was elected a Fellow of the British Society of Commerce, the Institute of Buyers, the British Institute of Directors, the British Institute of Administrative Accountants, the Institute of Purchasing and Supply; and was elected to be a member of the Institute of Marketing, the Institute of Management and the Institute of Journalists. He has written many articles and several books, including :"Tactics". "How to Promote Your Business", "How to Organize Your Marketing" and "Fast Track Marketing in a Global Economy", he also wrote the "Contract Procedure and Specification Advice" sections of the Architect's and Specifier's Guide Series for A4 Publications, Ltd. and innovated and wrote for The Office Planner published by Benn Brothers of London; he has also had published several articles on "Color, Texture & Design", and he wrote the "Executive Guide to Office Space Planning & Design" for the American Management Association. He has had published many other works in Europe and America and has lectured in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, at Universities and to professional audiences on subjects that have ranged from multi-national accounting practices, to business development, to office management, industrial, interior, product and commercial design to tactical and strategic international marketing and management. He has also written and lectured on etiquette and business ethics. Previous Letters from the President April
2001 January
2002
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