America’s secret mission unveiled
Secret architecture of Washington DC revealed:
Book Review:
Jacob Bressman
 Combined with that background and studying and teaching at Columbia,
Yale and Harvard universities, Dr Mendis recently unveiled the
highly-guarded founding vision and commercial mission of the Founding
Fathers of the United States in his latest book.
Endorsing his book, Commercial Providence: The Secret Destiny of the
American Empire (2010), Senator Thomas Daschle, former US Senate
Majority Leader, writes: “Inspired by the Founding Fathers and their
vision, Patrick Mendis, an adopted Minnesotan, narrates America’s
ancient hope, promise, and performance ... which is ingrained in the
Constitution’s commerce clause and in symbols in the nation’s capital.
Mendis’ own history resonates globally: similar to the Kenyan father of
President Barack Obama, this former AFS exchange student from Sri Lanka
married a white Minnesotan at the University of Minnesota over two
decades ago... I recommend this book to you very enthusiastically.”
America’s secret, no more
Professor Mendis wrote this highly acclaimed book while serving as a
visiting foreign policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s School of
Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He puts forward a novel “Theory
of Commercial Providence” and reveals the anatomy of America’s Special
Providence and explains the commercial meaning expressed in the ancient
symbols and the secret architectural design of Washington, DC. In the
fictional narrative of The Lost Symbol, the best-seller author Dan Brown
links both of these to Freemasons but Professor Mendis has an important
scholarly reasoning with lesser-known American history.
In his foreword to the book, Professor Stephen Trachtenberg, former
president of the George Washington University, notes: “By carefully
examining the influence of Freemasonry on the Founding Fathers,
Commercial Providence provides valuable insights for the student of
history and the modern political leader alike... Unlike Dan Brown in the
Lost Symbol, Patrick Mendis has a serious scholarly purpose.. and
visitors (to Washington, DC) will find Commercial Providence an
intriguing look at the origins of our American identity, seen through
the eyes of the Founding Fathers and the Masonic Architect of the
Universe.”
As a result of his far-reaching message, this book has gained a wider
attention beyond political and academic leaders in America alone. After
his lecture tour at major universities in China last year, Professor
Mendis is known around the world as an expert on American foreign
relations with unique perspectives.
Professor Shen Dingli, dean of Fudan University’s Institute of
International Studies and the American Center, writes: His unique
insight remains meaningful for contemporary America and the world.” As
such, Akram Elias, past Masonic grandmaster of Washington, DC, and
co-producer (with Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss) of Mr. Dreyfuss
Goes to Washington, characterizes that “Professor Patrick Mendis is a
mind-reader of the Founding Fathers, a judge of ancient symbols, a lover
of his adopted country, and a seer of America’s secret destiny.”
Origin of the Theory
The Theory of Commercial Providence is directly linked to the
Founding Fathers, especially George Washington and Benjamin Franklin-two
of the most famous Freemasons. They collectively held an ancient belief
that America’s Special Providence was associated with a more secular
idea of God, i.e., what they called “Nature’s God.”
At the birth of the new nation, the founding generation maintained
that “God (Providence) had favoured their undertakings,” or Annuit
Coeptis, as shown on the Great Seal of the United States. These founding
architects were building a monument to “Nature’s God” as they understood
it when they designed the nation’s capital to correspond with three
stars that form a celestial triangle in the sky above Washington, DC.
Within this triangle lies the Virgo constellation, which had a great
deal of symbolic importance to Masonic leaders like Washington,
Franklin, Paul Revere, and others who had intimate knowledge of
Freemasonry and esoteric symbolism.
In astrology, Virgo is ruled by Mercury, the Roman god of commerce,
innovation and communication. The hope of these Founding Fathers,
expressed in this symbolism, was that America would also be led by
commerce, innovation and communication. Not only did the architects
incorporate this astrological and esoteric knowledge into the
architecture of the capital, but they also embedded this ideology within
the U.S. Constitution by designing our nation as a “Commercial Republic”
in which the Union was joined together through trade and commerce-not
religion, as is frequently debated today.
This is where Professor Mendis’ integrative knowledge from Sri Lanka
and the United States becomes more interesting and constructive. While
he explored American ideas in his previous book, TRADE for PEACE, which
had a greater impact on the American foreign policy community, his new
book elaborates on these ideas and shows their greater relevance to
understanding America’s founding vision and national identity - thereby
broadening its appeal to various scholarly disciplines.
Professor Brian Atwood, former USAID administration under President
Bill Clinton and current dean of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs, writes in his foreword to the book:
“Patrick Mendis is an award-winning alumnus of the Humphrey Institute
and a protégé of the late NATO ambassador and president of the
University of Hawaii Harlan Cleveland during his tenure as dean ...
Mendis’ journey is a relevant one, from a mud house with water buffalos
in Sri Lanka to working with the United Nations, the World Bank, and the
US Government. Mendis’ personal experiences give him a unique
perspective on America’s mission in the world.”
Dean Atwood further elaborates that “we share the experience of
having been exchange students as part of the AFS Intercultural Program.
I now chair the Board of Trustees of this organization started by
World War I ambulance drivers. Today, it is a partnership of some 60
countries with over 13,000 student participants.
More than 325,000 individuals and an equal number of host families
have had the AFS experience. I was an exchange student in Luxembourg,
while Mendis came to Minnesota to attend high school in 1978. He met his
American wife, a former AFS exchange student from Minnesota to Japan, at
a Humphrey Institute workshop taught by Harlan Cleveland.”
Global nation in action
Like President Barack Obama, Professor Patrick Mendis exemplifies the
very nature of the United States as a global nation, which is manifested
through Commercial Providence and E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.”
To that end, the Theory of Commercial Providence is a masterful
deciphering of the founding ideas and ideals shared by the Freemasons
and their notion of Universal Brotherhood and symbolism, which has
indelibly marked both the capital architecture and American national
governance.
The book essentially decodes the secret architecture of our nation’s
capital masterminded by the first president of the United States, and
recognizes Washington, DC, as a “Masonic City” in which Egyptian and
Greco-Roman symbols were used to signify America’s global mission.
While many secular symbols were incorporated into Washington, DC’s
architecture, one interesting aspect of note is that there are no icons
that sanctify Christianity - a glaring omission that has certainly led
to a heyday for conspiracy theorists and Christian fundamentalists-where
this exclusion further illustrates that the founding vision of America’s
first leaders was to bind this nation together through symbols denoting
commerce, not religion.
Professor Mendis, who once taught at the George Washington University
and is an affiliate professor of public and international affairs at
George Mason University, explains “the invisible attraction of commerce”
over religion.
He then uncovers the “public secret” of Freemasonry in achieving
Thomas Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty through Alexander Hamilton’s global
strategy of trade, commerce and finance.
The Theory of Commercial Providence is an evidence-based exposition
of historical and present-day symbolism that points to America’s secret
destiny, as James Madison called the Universal Empire.
In my opinion, the originator of this Theory - and his journey “from
a mud house with water buffalos” which ended in serving two American
presidents - is a clear testament to the founding vision of the United
States.
With much negativism and criticism within and outside the United
States and Sri Lanka, America still inspires the world over as the
beacon of hope - even for those who grew up in rice-fields in the far
corners of the globe.
If you have any doubt about America, read this Sri Lankan-born
American diplomat’s highly acclaimed book, Commercial Providence, for a
taste of optimism that lacks within all of us as freedom-loving global
citizens.
The writer majors in Asian Studies and minors in Religion and History
at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA
Dr. Patrick Mendis
 In his early childhood, Dr Patrick Mendis, took care of his
water-buffaloes in a three-acre rice field, attended a Buddhist school,
and served as an altar-boy at his Roman Catholic Church, built by his
grandfather, in Polonnaruwa, the medieval capital of Sri Lanka.
All of this changed when he won one of the nine AFS (American Field
Service) scholarships out of over 100,000 national applicants in Sri
Lanka to study in the United States in 1978.
That summer the Sri Lankan village boy arrived at his AFS host family
on a dairy farm with 500-acre cornfields in northern Minnesota.
A year later he earned his American diploma at Perham High School,
became the fastest runner, and learned to ski on frozen lakes in Perham,
the “City of 1000 Lakes.” After graduating with a first class honours
degree from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in the new capital, he
returned to study at the University of Minnesota where he later taught
for seven years. While at the university, he became involved in American
politics.
Dr. Patrick Mendis also represented the Government of Sri Lanka at
the United Nations as a “Youth Ambassador” before becoming an American
citizen.
Dr Mendis began as a campaign volunteer in the Walter
Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro presidential race and later in other
congressional elections.
He also worked at the Minnesota House of Representatives and the US
Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, DC, before joining the
US State Department to serve under the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Senator George Allen, Ronald Reagan presidential scholar and former
governor of Virginia, describes his former foreign policy advisor this
way: “When Patrick Mendis grew up in Sri Lanka, he dreamt about America
and was inspired by great Virginians: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson,
George Washington, and Patrick Henry. Patrick Mendis - now himself a
proud Virginian - and former American diplomat and military professor,
writes about ... the American destiny. Get to know this patriotic
citizen.” |
