Yellowstone's Occupied Territories
Watching Yellowstone at last, I am reminded that above all else, it’s the Land, of course - it’s all about the land, its ownership, occupation and boundaries.
Yellowstone’s enforcer Rip Wheeler is my wild card Vice Presidential pick.
“One of the multitude said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?" He said to them, "Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man's life doesn't consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses." Luke 12:13–15
I follow Old West on Twitter, and he often features Yellowstone clips in his Twitter feed, so it has always been a TV series I wanted to check out. I have finally got around to working through the first season. It is early days, and I am still piecing together its premises, the underlying weltanschauung of the series, who the characters represent, and the obvious biblical and parabolic references and inversions. People being cursed by their own or their parent's transgressions is already a recurring theme—that and the occupation of land and those others who lust after it.
Suffering and its intergenerational symptoms arise from what orthodox Christians call the fall; I have previously referred to a contingent process - the cascade - as one person passes on to their progeny their light, darkness, or existential dilemmas. It may be a straightforward tragedy or the consequence of an evil act, the father’s sins, real or imagined. In the bible, we have the curse of Cain, descending in the blood. The fostering or adoptive experience is resonant with such often hidden legacies.
I have yet to determine whether the setting of the series may refer to the pre-flood, pre-the Noahic covenant, the age of Cain’s legacy of evil and depravity, and the unfolding of Lamech, but it is an inviting proposition.
“…Lamech's position in Cain's genealogy, [is] the seventh…Lamech is the first to practice polygamy (Gen. 4:19). In the minds of early interpreters, this ties him not merely to the appalling bloodshed of Cain (after whom he names one of his sons), but also to sexual sin… Lamech's sins are the same as his ancestor's but multiplied exponentially. The sons of Lamech, with their described occupations, represent various divisions of the evil and wickedness Cain brought into the world…at Genesis 4:26 […] the sons of Lamech were also associated with the origin of idolatry and thereby sexual immorality.”
God is a Man of War Stephen DeYoung
Or is Yellowstone’s valley the later post-flood, post-Babel, post-exodus, promised land of Canaan? And if so, which of the three tribes, the Dutton family, the Chief of the Broken Rock Indians on their impoverished reservation, or the real estate Paradise Valley developers – have the righteous claim? Superficially, John Dutton represents the old white expansionist settler, “land-grabbing” United States of America, “the rich fool” of Luke 12, erecting bigger barns for his excess produce only to die the next day and be called to judgment.
Or will the ranch get the “…from the river to the sea…” treatment from the Broken Rock native Americans who have the post-modern “first dibs” after all? Whilst the Paradise Valley billionaires, well, they are going to fund the far-left environmentalists and Federal government investigators to entangle the Dutton’s in endless lawfare and get into bed with Broken Rock to achieve this. I expect either party will screw over the other.
Yellowstone also has an ever-present sense of physical, mortal risk. The cowboys, the men who live and die by a code of bristling rural cattle ranching, are a caste that contains a society of second-chance men redeemed by a literal brand and oath of loyalty outside the law. Are they Nephilim or the giants of renown? Or are they the fallen angels' demon progeny? We will see.
The irrelevant urban effeminate men, the lawyers and office workers and political staffers and hotel barmen, are the sheep. They have no birthright and no leverage; they are wage-slaves. In essence, they are the “occupiers” of a society built by the real men, the original settlers and usurpers. These urbanites use feminine regulations to buttress their lack of physical strength.
For all and sundry, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, crossing some constantly moving line of ancestral visceral loyalty that ensures everyone must be armed and everyone prepared to die, means far too frequently the latter. The moral codes are rare. Everyone in whichever faction tries to take advantage of anyone else. It is no coincidence that the person with the biggest balls is a heartbroken, scheming, vicious young woman.
There is a theme of survival at all costs, where the law and policing are secondary political options. Indeed, the murders, manslaughters, righteous kills and acts of cold, vengeful calculation ensure dispatched bodies litter the landscape, many of which will go undiscovered; food for coyotes and wolves. But it is always shocking that they rack up with such regularity. Honour is in abeyance, but loyalty, blood oaths and branding initiations are the pillars of this world. A world and a series of characters that cannot escape their pasts, a congregation of Cain’s progeny.
“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of humans had become on the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was distraught. So, the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord.”
Genesis 5
But above all, it’s The Land, of course; it’s all about the land, its ownership, occupation and defendable boundaries. Previously, I explored beauty and the land as integral to nationhood:
“The ancestral mythos - that beauty, wisdom and grace cohabit in the anointing of a monarch - and the Arthurian legend: “the King and the land are one” - coalesces when the Lady of the Lake catches Excalibur and recedes beneath the waters into the ancient womb and lake of the Isles; until the next rightful King arises. This is a symbol, a narrative in which feminine beauty plays an archetypical part.”
In my early years after returning to the Christian faith, I read Webster and Cole’s The Virtue of War to clarify the Christian take on military combat in light of the Iraq War, and then Millard C. Lind’s Yahweh Is a Warrior. I have recently read George Kalantzis’ Ceasar and the Lamb and am working through Stephen De Young’s God is a Man of War, which I quote above.
I have also been reflecting on the pre-incarnate logos/Christ who rains down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah and speaks from the Burning bush. One of the richest features of Orthodoxy is its anti-Marcionite rigour.
I don’t like victim mentality, whether in individuals, groups, nations, or even empires. Even before I rediscovered Christ, I knew that life as a victim is a victory for whoever or whatever violated you – whether perceived or actual. That the cycle of violence and revenge is also dehumanising. We all need to heal to move on and fulfil our intention.
However, the protection of the vulnerable is not optional. There are times that we should step in, and it helps if you have the height, power, technique, family, comrades, or allies to pull that off. There is also the animal side of a man that, once unleashed, can go berserk in defence of faith, family, property, or personal integrity. A man who walks away is marked like Cain, even if only two witnesses exist.
Most of my life has been peaceable, and when I went out clubbing in my youth, I kept my wits about me partly because I could read the pecking order and avoid clubs and pubs where the apex predator that set the culture was filled with darkness. I learned this from attending a boy's school and working in a semi-secure unit with young offenders. The teachers or unit officers did not set the underlying culture; the dominant fighter amongst the senior boys did. A change of the top boy and he and his confidants could change the culture overnight.
Civilisation, by definition, is about civility, the creation of a society in which disputes can be settled without needless bloodshed, a place where the property can, therefore, be respected, and the peril of violence is the exception. Culture and arts and society enriched. The vulnerable are not accosted, and women and children are not abused. This, again, requires a pecking order. We have taken this for granted, and actual civility is fraying.
We are watching Western civilisation devour itself; its courts have always favoured the rich, but now they condemn the poor and the political opposition. Politicians used to know they had to fulfil the spirit and frequently the letter of their manifestos. Now they do exactly the opposite and then think we are stupid enough to vote for them again and again. Lawyers cash in on the covid non-inquiry…and so on. All this dark politics plays out in Yellowstone.
We are led by remote, transitioning, temporary careerists who will not be there or held to account for their lousy decisions even a year or two later. In the same way that in the playground, we did not trust a boy who tried to catch a ball like a girl or ran in such a way that showed he had no sporting coordination, we can see that our male leaders are moral cowards like Johnson or Biden, or effeminate embarrassing men like Sunak and Macron - men that embolden our enemies. And those women championed as a partial solution are not Thatcher-like: the Truss’, Badenoch, Braverman’s, or Meloni’s talk-the-talk but preside over the decline they condemn when they make it to the top careerist table.
We have forgotten the role of masculinity – the codes of manhood that I explored here. We no longer train our boys to become men. And we send those few real men that the nation has and those seeking second chances to redeem themselves to fight in wars abroad whilst we leave the door wide open for their enemies to enter our country.
In Yellowstone, the central characters do some awful things, but you can discern a code, a line beyond which even they would not cross. It’s a code based on the occupation of land and property, and we forget that the Middle East crisis - stripped of geopolitics, military-industrial complexes, psyops and whatever - is a land dispute.
“Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other, Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.” Judges 16: 28-30
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War begat the 1956 Arab–Israeli War, which begat the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, which begat the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, which begat the 1982 Lebanon War, which begat the First Intifada (1987–1993) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005). The “Palestinians” lost them all.
This is just a relatively minor footnote in a millennia of Islamic wars of conquest*, occupations, enslavement, forced conversion and male castrations, female rape and servitude, and the wholesale exploitation of black Africans and white slaves from as far afield as Cornwell and central Europe, Ghana and Zanzibar, India and central Asia. Wherever the Muslim battalions went, apartheid-like dhimmitude was imposed on non-believers, which is what Hamas, Boko Haram, ISlS, North Sudan, and so many Imams celebrate in mosques across the UK.
The Caliphate “entity” called forth the Christian crusades after 400 years of expansion and occupation of Christian North Africa, Spain, east Africa, parts of Anatolia and central Asia and well into central Europe, primarily Orthodox Christian Byzantine land saturated with bloodshed. Without the Crusades, I would be writing in اللغة العربية.
The last 300 years, until the discovery of oil, was an age of Muslim and Islamic decline. The Palestinians are losing now. It’s not about a peace deal; it never was. They want back the land that Saladin conquered and the Jews that are standing in their way eradicated. At its most shallow it's a mafia-like exhortation racket for Hamas, of course, but if Israel falters, Hamas and their enemies will tear them limb from limb.
Indecision and dementia in the White House and, behind the scenes, the Neo-Con foreign policy is still racking up failure after failure. It has squandered the post-Cold War peace dividend and, by its greed and desire to break up the Russian Federation, enabled the rise of a potential multipolar world - the coyotes smell weakness in Pax Americana as they cross its wide open southern border. Venezuela is eyeing Guyana, the Houthis the Red Sea Channel. And Hamas chanced their arm and are now finding out.
The Israelis retain the land and will not leave.
*It was ever thus.
630 Muhammad conquers Mecca from his base in Medina.
630-633 Wars of Apostasy, a series of military campaigns launched by the Caliph Abu Bakr against rebel Arabian tribes
632 Muhammad dies in Medina. Abu Bakr leads a series of purges in the peninsula to establish Islamic rule and crush deviations. Islam controls the Hijaz.
636 Muslim conquest of Syria, and the surrounding lands, all Christian – including Palestine and Iraq.
637 Muslim Crusaders conquer Iraq (some date it in 635 or 636).
638 Muslim Crusaders conquer and annex Jerusalem, taking it from the Byzantine Christians.
638 – 650 Muslim Crusaders conquer Iran, except along Caspian Sea.
639 – 642 Muslim Crusaders conquer Egypt.
641 Muslim Crusaders control Syria and Palestine.
643 – 707 Muslim Crusaders conquer North Africa.
644 – 650 Muslim Crusaders conquer Cyprus, Tripoli in North Africa, and establish Islamic rule in Iran, Afghanistan, and Sind.
673 – 678 Arabs besiege Constantinople, capital of Byzantine Christian Empire.
691 Dome of the Rock is completed in Jerusalem, only six decades after Muhammad’s death.
710 – 713 Muslim Crusaders conquer the lower Indus Valley.
711 – 713 Muslim Crusaders conquer Spain and impose the kingdom of Andalus. The Muslim conquest moves into Europe.
718 Conquest of Spain complete.
732 Muslim invasion of France is stopped at the Battle of Poitiers / Battle of Tours. The Franks, under their leader Charles Martel (the grandfather of Charlemagne), defeat the Muslims and turn them back out of France. A case can be made that if the Battle of Tours (October 732) had gone the other way we would all be communicating in Arabic.
762 Foundation of Baghdad.
785 Foundation of the Great Mosque of Cordova.
789 Rise of Idrisid amirs (Muslim Crusaders) in Morocco; Christoforos, a Muslim who converted to Christianity, is executed.
800 Autonomous Aghlabid dynasty (Muslim Crusaders) in Tunisia
807 Caliph Harun al—Rashid orders the destruction of non-Muslim prayer houses & of the church of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem.
809 Aghlabids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Sardinia, Italy.
813 Christians in Palestine are attacked; many flee the country.
831 Muslim Crusaders capture Palermo, Italy; raids in Southern Italy.
837 – 901 Aghlabids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Sicily, raid Corsica, Italy, France.
869 – 883 Revolt of black slaves in Iraq.
909 Rise of the Fatimid Caliphate in Tunisia; these Muslim Crusaders occupy Sicily, Sardinia.
928 – 969 Byzantine military revival, they retake old territories, such as Cyprus (964) and Tarsus (969).
937 The Church of the Resurrection (aka Church of Holy Sepulcher) is burned down by Muslims; more churches in Jerusalem are attacked.
960 Conversion of Qarakhanid Turks to Islam.
969 Fatimids (Muslim Crusaders) conquer Egypt and found Cairo.
973 Israel and southern Syria are again conquered by the Fatimids.
1003 First persecutions by al—Hakim; the Church of St. Mark in Fustat, Egypt, is destroyed.
1009 Destruction of the Church of the Resurrection by al—Hakim (see 937).
1012 Beginning of al—Hakim’s oppressive decrees against Jews and Christians.
1050 Creation of Almoravid (Muslim Crusaders) movement in Mauretania; Almoravids (aka Murabitun) are coalition of western Saharan Berbers; followers of Islam, focusing on the Quran, the hadith, and Maliki law.
1071 Battle of Manzikert, Seljuk Turks (Muslim Crusaders) defeat Byzantines and occupy much of Anatolia.
1071 Turks (Muslim Crusaders) invade Palestine.
1073 Conquest of Jerusalem by Turks (Muslim Crusaders).
1075 Seljuks (Muslim Crusaders) capture Nicea (Iznik) and make it their capital in Anatolia.
1076 Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) (see 1050) conquer western Ghana.
1086 Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) (see 1050) send help to Andalus, Battle of Zallaca.
1090 – 1091 Almoravids (Muslim Crusaders) occupy all of Andalus except Saragossa and Balearic Islands.