For the dear naive folks of his home town, Holland, MI, the swaggering & unrepentant Erik Prince of Blackwater ill-repute is an upstanding & "fine Christian" & a "true blue American patriot."
Prince's recent appearance, the honored guest & kick-off speaker for Holland’s internationally known Tulip Time, was just one facet of a concerted effort to resuscitate his tarnished/bloody image & do "damage control" for his mother, Elsa, & extended families of both late Edgar Prince & Richard M. DeVos Sr.(Co-founder of Amway) which have been badly tarnished by Erik’s reputation & actions as a free wheeling Neo-Con man of blood & guts. How bad is it? View this video: http://www.youtube.com/...
Eric Prince's a rank war profiteer/dangerous "rugged individual" whose daddy’s fortune & his sister Betsy’s marriage into the Amway billions has created a monster combination of hard-right religious fanaticism and uber-nationalism-all spray painted with red, white & blue. An ardent claim tops this off: Erik's an exemplary and benevolent "Christian."
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This audience-of-the-willing hold Prince as a "Christian hero" and an sterling example of what they feel could have saved or will save America from the blowback of the tragic and far-reaching consequences of the Great World-wide Finance collapse and the ill-begotten warmongering of George W.Bush with whom the nation is bound in shame and disrepute.
Eric Prince was cajoled and weaned away from his life-long Dutch Calvinism by his mother’s culturing and bankrolling of a former self-confessed Marxist, Robert Sirico who proselytized Erik Prince into mythical and dangerously kinky ultra-conservative Roman Catholicism for his own purposes. The gold digging Sirico (whose brother starred in the series, The Sopranos) beguiled Prince's fawning billionaire mother while "humbly" performing special duties as an apologist for the Amway wealth, fundamentalistic unfettered capitalism and for-profit war profiteering--in a manner strongly evocative of a Uriah Heep.
To go to the founding father of modern capitalism, stern morals and high Christian practices, John Calvin, looking for support for the "Christian" accolade given Eric Prince—such an attempt is totally futile. Calvin minced no nuances on the topic of soldiers of fortune, mercenaries such as Eric Prince:
Calvin rejected outright mercenary soldiering—a popular profession among the Swiss of Calvin’s time—since it encourages soldiers to fight merely out of love of money and not out of love for their neighbors. For Calvin, soldiering loses its Christian function and legitimacy when it becomes a commodity. --Darrell Cole, "Good Wars."
If irreverence for and neglect of religion is the source of every evil, religion is entirely swept away by the storm of war. --Erasmus
Erasmus is clear on Christian Values and the disastrous role of mercenaries: "...war has most need of those whom in time of peace you would nail to the cross."
You judge it a serious thing to introduce the criminal dregs of hired mercenaries into your country, to feed them on your people’s misery, to submit to them, fawn on them, indeed, to entrust yourself and your safety to their will, you must realize that this is a condition of war.
If you abominate robbery, this is what war teaches; if you abhor murder, this is the lesson of war. For who will shrink from killing one man in hot blood when he has been hired for a pittance to slaughter so many?
If neglect of the law is the most imminent threat to civil authority, why, ‘the law says nothing when arms hold sway’ (Cicero, Pro Milone 4.11).
If you believe that fornication , incest, and worse are loathsome evils, war is the school where these are taught.
If irreverence for and neglect of religion is the source of every evil, religion is entirely swept away by the storm of war.
If you judge the state of your country to be worst when the worst people in it have the most power, in time of war the lowest kinds of criminal are the rulers; war has most need of those whom in time of peace you would nail to the cross.
For who will be better at leading troops through hidden tracks than a trained brigand? Who will be bolder at plundering houses and despoiling churches than a housebreaker or bomb –robber? Who will be so eager to strike down and disembowel a foe as a gladiator or murderer? Or so suitable for setting fire to cities and engines of war as an incendiary?
Who will defy the waves and hazards at sea like a pirate trained by a lifetime of plundering? If you want to see clearly how immoral a thing is war, you have only got to look at the agents it employs.
Can the Mercenary Eric Prince be a true Christian?
If this moral attribute indicates what's is most central to the West Michigan ethnic Dutch/Calvinists expressed in their apparent enthusiasm (standing ovation) for the "heroics" of the swaggering mercenary capitalist, Eric Prince (self-proclaimed at the Tulip Time Luncheon), then these fawning locals are on thin ethics ice--the core of their principles and tradition are clearly on the wane.
Holland had a real war hero, his name was Matt Urban. Urban was a real, genuine war hero, a man the Holland community should hold up as a local notable exemplifying the highest example of courage, integrity, and honor, not the bloody-handed, for-profit raconteur and darkside operative--Eric Prince.
According to award winning investigative author Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater, Prince made $70 million in profits from his foray into New Orleans after Katrina, just one example of disaster capitalism, greed, and disregard for the Posse Comitatus Act. Something even arch-conservative critic and historian Victor Davis Hanson found "pernicious" in nature.