Steven Dundas > Steven's Quotes

“The twenty- third century is an odd place to begin a book about events that were set in motion in the early seventeenth century. I am a historian, retired career military officer, and priest. As a historian I believe the truth, even when uncomfortable or damning, should be told. I take as inspiration a statement by Sir Patrick Stewart, in his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The First Duty.” In the story Picard tells Cadet Wesley Crusher, “The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based.”
― Steven Dundas

“The distinguished history professor Timothy Snyder wrote, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”1 Truth matters, but it is human nature to take solace in myths and believe they are true. However, many myths are deadly. The deadliest include American Slavery’s “positive good,” the “Noble South,” the “Lost Cause,” the evils of Reconstruction, the good of Jim Crow, and the nonexistence of institutional racism in the United States.”
― Steven Dundas

“When I put what I read into the context of the era, the authors, and their motivations, I ask three questions: Why this? Why me? Why now? This helps to identify myths and falsehoods embedded in prior histories. The proper academic term for this is “historiography,” which I believe should be a required subject in all disciplines.”
― Steven Dundas

“Much of what we regard as history is based on the twin myths of the “Noble South” and the “Lost Cause,” which, in addition to being crude but effective revisionist history and propaganda, act in a similar manner to religious texts. Facts are ignored, and biography becomes hagiography, pervaded by racist narratives. So, it is important for those who read them to use historiography and hermeneutics to differentiate truth from fiction.”
― Steven Dundas

“Likewise, historical ignorance and the belief of myth becomes a problem when leaders who are indifferent history and immersed in rapidly changing situations, flaunt their ignorance. This is not new; previous world leaders were human beings, too, and humanity is the one constant in human history. In the words of Barbara Tuchman, “Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.”
― Steven Dundas

“But to understand the American Civil War, one has to tackle the elephant in the room that many people want to ignore: American slavery and racism. Slavery ended, but racism did not, and the lingering effects of both are alive and well in the United States.”
― Steven Dundas

“The propaganda mill of Noble South and Lost Cause proponents are a major problem, much like Holocaust deniers. Therefore, they must be confronted in ways that may seem impolitic. Nevertheless, their falsehoods must be exposed. Systemic institutional racism and discrimination has impacted almost every aspect of American life, religion, and culture since the first Blacks landed at Jamestown in 1619. It was true then and is true now, for the past is not always past— or, as Mark Twain reportedly quipped, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
― Steven Dundas

“The Lost Cause was historic revisionism at its best. It became “history” because most Northerners wanted to leave the war behind and stopped caring about what happened to Blacks. Northern business interests exploited the situation for profit by working with former slave owners and Southern state governments to reenslave Blacks by other means.”
― Steven Dundas

“The war was about how Americans’ views of liberty and slavery influenced their racial attitudes. To slavery supporters Blacks were an inferior or subhuman race, who could never be the equal of whites— not even human, but property. White supremacy and its web of systemic cultural, political, economic, and religious racism remains a powerful part of American life. This makes it difficult to confront racism without pushback by politicians, pundits, preachers, and militants, who, despite their denials, are as racist as any Klansman, Red Shirt, or White Liner.”
― Steven Dundas

“Plantation owners were at the top of the social pyramid. Their “semi feudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs on whose toil the entire system depended.”12 When the number of white indentured servants dried up in the 1680s, slave traders offered a solution: an abundant supply of African slaves. Since slavery was not yet legalized, the colonies enacted laws limiting the rights of Blacks. Among the first was a 1639 decree that “‘all persons except Negroes’ were to get arms and ammunition— probably to fight off Indians.”13 Before the legalization of slavery, indentured whites and Blacks had similar rights, although Blacks tended to be punished more harshly.”
― Steven Dundas

“Laws were adjusted to serve plantation owners. The Virginia House of Burgesses and Governor had every reason strengthen them, as did the founders of South Carolina and other colonies in the Deep South. South Carolina’s plantation oligarchs created a caste system that so disenfranchised poor whites, they controlled all aspects of government. They imported “shipload after shipload of enslaved Africans whom they treated as f ixed possessions, like their tools or cattle, thereby introducing chattel slavery to the English world.”
― Steven Dundas

“The form of slavery in the English plantation system was unlike any other in history. Because it supplied low- cost workers for labor- intensive industries such as tobacco, forestry, land clearance, sugarcane, rice, cotton, iron ore, and milling, slavery was essential to the colonies. In the beginning the Tidewater was the center of colonial slavery, but, “by the mid- eighteenth century, slaves accounted for nearly half of Virginia’s population. Virginia had changed from a ‘society with slaves’ in which slavery was one system of labor among others to a ‘slave society where the institution stood at the center of the economic process. Slavery formed the basis of the economy, and the foundation of a powerful local ruling class, in the entire region from Maryland south to Georgia.”
― Steven Dundas

“South Carolina’s rulers did not “seek to replicate rural English manor life” like their Tidewater neighbors, “or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness,” as settlers in New England attempted; “instead it was a near- carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place even then notorious for its inhumanity.”43 They brought their slaves to South Carolina and pushed them to the limits of human endurance. Slavery was South Carolina’s foundation, not an afterthought or later development: “No other Southern regime was as committed to eighteenth- century elitist principles or so resistant to nineteenth- century egalitarian republicanism. South Carolina’s balance of despotism and democracy, tipping unusually far toward old- fashioned imperiousness, gave its masters strong confidence in contained, hierarchical dominance, and special contempt for sprawling, leveling, ‘mobocracies.”
― Steven Dundas

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
― Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

“I don’t understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, “I am getting the hell out of here!”. There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don’t want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, “Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life!" A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The American Civil War was a portent of modern war. Technology increased destructiveness, and opponents moved from limited to near- total warfare. Divided by conflicting concepts of liberty and interpretations of their shared religion, Northerners and Southerners waged a brutal ideological battle undergirded. J .F. C. Fuller rightly called it a struggle to the death.”
― Steven Dundas

“Yet, for another century, defeated Southerners continued the war by other means. A growing white nationalist movement continues to champion the racist goals of the Confederacy even to the point of launching an armed assault on the Capitol. Understanding how racist ideology and religion impact domestic politics and foreign affairs matters. The Civil War era demonstrates how religiously based racism can influence policy, economics, military strategy, and paramilitary terrorism. By studying it lead ers can begin to understand how seemingly innocuous conflicts become cataclysmic events with disastrous consequences.”
― Steven Dundas

“The power of nationalistic, racist, and religious mass movements to capture the hopes of discontented people is underestimated. The 2016 election showed how Donald Trump, a sociopathic and racist candidate who demonstrated none of the moral values traditionally sought after by Conservative Christians played on their fears and hate to win the election. Over 80 percent of Conservative Christians voted for Trump because he exploited their fantasy of establishing a Christian theocracy.”
― Steven Dundas

“Many Americans are unaware of how our ancestors used Christianity to justify subjugating other peoples. Christianity was the heart of the Puritan ideal of a city on a hill, a concept that undergirded the later belief in manifest destiny,which led to genocidal wars against the peoples of our First Nations, the Mexican- American War, and the romantic myths of the Noble South and the Lost Cause. The combination of toxic political ideology, religious fervor, and a belief that one’s views mirror God’s can be used by the faithful to fuel fires of extremism and to blind followers to the evils they commit in the name of their God.”
― Steven Dundas

“Manifest destiny is still seen in the pronouncements of American politicians, pundits, and preachers who believe that that Christianity and Americanism, religious or not, is essential to American exceptionalism. This was used to justify American foreign policy for over a century, including the factions of former president George W. Bush, as Bush referenced in his 2003 State of the Union address: “Freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.”
― Steven Dundas

“Americans seldom see the interconnectedness of religion and resistance; in this we err. Even if the religious cause is built upon mythology, it is often— in the words of baseball legend Reggie Jackson— the “straw that stirs the drink.” To ignore, minimize, or misunderstand that fact dooms our efforts. This is not simply an Islamic problem. It a part of our history from colonial times to now, and it is true around the world. Such policies will continue because people hate looking in the mirror. It is uncomfortable to admit that the face that we see is like that of our opponents, especially those who are willing to commit genocide in the name of their God.”
― Steven Dundas

“To understand the motivations of people motivated by barbaric religious beliefs, we need only examine our not- too- distant past. This must include the ideas of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, and “America First,” as well as our religious justifications for imperialism, genocide, unjust wars, slavery, and the religious and pseudoscientific beliefs that justified the black codes and Jim Crow.”
― Steven Dundas

“P olitical ideology founded upon religion has motivated of some of the most brutal wars in history. The belief that God sanctions the killing of his enemies is nothing new; as the Psalmist wrote, “I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them mine enemies” (Ps. 139:22). As such enemies of God are deserving of His wrath. Thus, any sense of moderation is lost as the executors of God’s vengeance commit unimaginable atrocities.”
― Steven Dundas

“The American Civil War was the first modern war, a revolution in military affairs, and more. It tapped the primal urges of humanity, including deep- rooted expressions of religiously based justifications for violence leveled at Blacks before, during, and after. Many Americans accepted racism and white supremacy backed by pseudoscience and buttressed by the Bible, which allowed people, even opponents of slavery, to believe that whites were racially superior to Blacks.”
― Steven Dundas

“Protestant Christianity had a major influence on developing American nationalism, and “secular and religious motifs were woven into the belief that America had a unique role in bringing the Kingdom of God to this world.”6 This was pervasive throughout the country. Northerners tended to apply it to the nation, but for Southerners it became an article of faith in themselves. The South was the New Israel, with the North, corrupted by foreigners, industrialists, and abolitionists— apostates who had abandoned the faith.”
― Steven Dundas

“Protestant Christianity had a major influence on the nation, but it took on different characteristics in the North and the South. In the North it brought a greater sense of social consciousness, and believers worked for causes that required political solutions, such as abolition and women’s and workers’ rights. In the South personal piety, rugged individualism, and the defense of slavery took precedence. Northern and Southern clergy tended to agree on doctrinal matters. At the country’s founding the “major denominations in the South— Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian— differed little in their approach to such sectional issues as slavery, abolition, or the protection of Southern rights.”10 But as the North and South drifted apart over sectional issues Southern evangelicalism provided a “transcendent framework for southern nationalism.”
― Steven Dundas

“Southerners’ claims that slavery was ordained by God “represented not just a deeply held conviction, but a sound ideological strategy for an evangelical age, a posture designed to win support both at home and abroad.”20 Proslavery clergymen bestowed “divine sanction on the South’s peculiar institution,” using the Bible and natural law to marry slavery to Christianity. Southern intransigence regarding its slave- based economy encompassed government, economics, and human rights.21 It brought the South into conflict with Northern ideas of free labor and capitalism. But the conflicts were based on a common religion, the same God, Bible, and understanding of America’s role in the world, being chosen by God to spread the Christian faith”
― Steven Dundas

“During the Civil War, racism, religion and ideology combined with differing conceptions of humanity and human rights created a perfect maelstrom for the terror of total war. British military historian and strategist J. F. C. Fuller might have described it the best: “Like the total wars of the twentieth century, it was preceded by years of violent propaganda, which, long before the war, had obliterated all sense of moderation and awakened in the contending parties the primitive spirit of tribal fanaticism.”24 Thus, when war came, “soldiers from both North and South marched off to fight sure that their cause was God’s cause.”
― Steven Dundas

“Religious beliefs were instrumental in forming a distinctive Southern sectional identity in the decades preceding the war. This “invested the political conflict between the North and South with a profound religious significance, helping create a culture that made secession possible. It established a moral consensus on slavery that could encompass differing political views and unite a disharmonious South behind the ban ner of disunion.” Slavery was an intractable moral cause for both abolitionists and proslavery partisans. To many people these positions became as much of an unalterable article of faith as the godhead; thus “religious faith itself became a key part of the war’s unfolding story for countless Americans.”29 As Fuller writes of the war’s religious undergirding, “As a moral issue, the dispute acquired a religious significance, state rights becoming wrapped up in a politico- mysticism, which defying definition, could be argued for ever without any hope of a final conclusion being reached.”
― Steven Dundas