Incenjucar said:
In regards to absolutism, it was -extremely- present after WWI, considering that one of the big reasons for the NAZI movement was a nasty version of Christian absolutist views (the same the Passion plays are meant to push -- Read Chaucer to see how the mindset was in the near 1400s as a result), not at all unlike the excuse we Americans (and, frankly, all conquering peoples) have been using when dabbling in genocide -- divine right. The methods change, but the excuses don't change, to this very day, considering our own president claims to be doing holy work when bombing overseas. Absolutism has lost some power, sure but it's still very very strong. Relativism was almost a fad.
Totally wrong, aside from saying that relativism was almost a fad.
National Socialism is an intensely secular ideology based in ethnic nationalism (a concept whose modern form basically owes its beginnings to pre-WW1 Serbia), the eugenics movement (popular all over Europe and the US prior to WW1), and, at least in its public form, Wagnerian neo-paganism (a 19th-century German development). It's equally hostile to practicing Jews, secular Jews, Jews converted to Christianity, etc. It's also hostile to practicing members of any other religion, as are all virulently secular ideologies (communism, secular humanism, etc.).
Anti-Jewish sentiment in the middle ages and persisting in some regions up through the 20th century was almost completely religious. Jews who converted were, by and large, embraced and welcomed into mainstream society; in Czarist Russia, the last major country to maintain popular religiously-grounded hostility to the Jews, Jewish converts to Christianity sometimes held high positions and no one thought twice of it.
The only connections between ethnic anti-Semitism (the sole element of statist, modernist secular Nazism that could be linked in any way to the 14th century) and religious anti-Judaism is that they both negatively impact Jews, and they both have an undercurrent of class warfare.
The present US position has nothing to do with either. It has everything to do with Wilsionian evangelical democracy, which, in the Christian Progressive tradition of which Wilson was a peripheral part, makes extensive use of religious imagery while, in actuality, promoting Enlightenment political thought through diplomacy and force of arms. Essentially, it's a function of rhetoric. That's not to say that Presidents Bush and Wilson are/were not truly religious men - only that their use of religious imagery in public speaking is more Progressive than Christian.
Most conquering peoples, an oft-honorable title for which neither medieval Europeans nor modern Americans qualify, did not use the kind of ideological justifications seen in the 20th century. Conquest was not seen as evil prior to the 19th century at the earliest, when, in opposing the conquering Napoleon, the major powers found it prudent to decry conquest itself. When, Napoleon defeated, they wanted to return to their own conquests (19th-century England being itself a successful conquering nation), they found ideological justification more comforting than taking back what they'd said of the French Emperor. The presumption against conflict almost universally shared by modern 1st-world peoples is also a fad and an aberration - neither Saladin nor Richard would understand it, Caesar and Nobunaga certainly wouldn't, and Alexander would laugh in your face if you presented it to him.
