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Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Englishman and the King

In our age of hyper-democracy, it is good to meditate on why the English have not jettisoned their king and queen completely.  The conclusions will apply also to us in the several States, being much the same in blood, history, and customs as the Brits and Celts of the Isles.  Dr Vladimir Moss's thoughts on the matter follow (Autocracy, Despotism and Democracy, Part 2: The Age of Reason (1453 to 1789), 2012: pgs. 60-1):

It is worth pondering why the monarchy continued to exert such a mystical attraction in a nation that was well on the way to ejecting all mysticism from its political and ecclesiastical life. Part of the answer must lie in the upsurge of patriotism that accompanied the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, whose focus became the virgin Queen Elizabeth. Another part must lie in the continuing nostalgia for the past that was being destroyed, a past in which the figure of the anointed king played such an important role.

Even today, when democratism appears to have finally triumphed, the monarchy remains popular in England. And at the heart of the democracy, Westminster Abbey, there still lies the body of the most holy of the Orthodox kings of England, Edward the Confessor, like a rose among thorns. It is as if the English people, even while leading the way into the new democratic age, subconsciously feel that they have lost something vitally important, and cling to the holy corpse with despairing tenacity, refusing to believe that the soul has finally departed. Thus even such a convinced democrat as C.S. Lewis could write of the monarchy as “the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft". And even today, hysteria can seize a whole nation on the death of a princess, for little other reason than that she was a princess. Thus monarchism is something deeply rooted with the human psyche which we attempt to uproot at our peril…

Roger Scruton has spoken of the English monarchy as “the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood as representing the views only of the present generation. He or she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. The monarch is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very accidental [sic] way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of the monarch’s legitimacy, in the history of a place and a culture. This is not to say that kings and queens cannot be mad, irrational, self-interested or unwise. It is to say, rather, that they owe their authority and their influence precisely to the fact that they speak for something other than the present desires of present voters, something vital to the continuity and community which the act of voting assumes. Hence, if they are heard at all, they are head as limiting the democratic process, in just the way that it must be limited if it is to issue in reasonable legislation. It was in such a way that the English conceived their Queen, in the sunset days of Queen Victoria. The sovereign was an ordinary person, transfigured by a peculiar enchantment which represented not political power but the mysterious authority of an ancient ‘law of the land’. When the monarch betrays that law – as, in the opinion of many, the Stuarts betrayed it – a great social and spiritual unrest seizes the common conscience, unrest of a kind that could never attend the misdemeanours of an elected president, or even the betrayal of trust by a political party.”
Chadwick writes: “Something about an English king distinguished him from the godly prince of Germany or Sweden. While everyone agreed that a lawful ruler was called of God, and that obedience was a Christian duty, it would not have been so natural for a Lutheran to write that a divinity doth hedge a king. Offspring of an ancient line, crowned with the anointing of medieval ritual, he retained an aura of mystique which neither Renaissance nor Reformation at once dispelled. It is curious to find the Catholic king of France touching the scrofulous to heal them until a few years before the French Revolution. It is much more curious to find the Protestant sovereigns of England, from Elizabeth to James II, continuing to perform the same ritual cures, and to note that the last reigning sovereign to touch was Queen Anne in 1714… The supernatural aura of the anointed head was long in dying, and must be reckoned with when judging the unusual English forms of the divine right.”

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Toxicity of GM 'Food' Revealed in New Study

'Tis unnatural,/Even like the deed that's done (Macbeth, Act II, Scene IV, ll. 10, 11).


Eating genetically modified corn (GM corn) and consuming trace levels of Monsanto's Roundup chemical fertilizer caused rats to develop horrifying tumors, widespread organ damage, and premature death. That's the conclusion of a shocking new study that looked at the long-term effects of consuming Monsanto's genetically modified corn.

The study has been deemed "the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats." News of the horrifying findings is spreading like wildfire across the internet, with even the mainstream media seemingly in shock over the photos of rats with multiple grotesque tumors... tumors so large the rats even had difficulty breathing in some cases. GMOs may be the new thalidomide.

...

It goes on to say: "The animals on the GM diet suffered mammary tumors, as well as severe liver and kidney damage. The researchers said 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group."
We may say definitively that GMO food is a danger to human health and to other living creatures, but now comes the difficult part:  opposing this life-in-death vision that the agri-business corporations of the world have in mind for us with an alternative vision for man and the creation that has life-giving, creative content.  This is Father Sergius Bulgakov's challenge to us, perhaps more relevant today than when he wrote it in 1939:
Our epoch is characterized by a broad development of creativity "in its own name," by a deluge of anthropotheism, in the form of a luciferian creative intoxication, and by an immersion in dull sensual paganism.  These developments cannot be overcome by mere rejection; they can be overcome only by the unfolding of a positive Christian doctrine of the world and creative activity, and by manifestation of its power (The Bride of the Lamb, tr. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans: 2002, p. 332).


Saturday, September 15, 2012

The Islamic World Aflame

This rosy view of things tells us that the French Revolution…happened because of broad forces and trends of history, and really was for the good of mankind….

More insightful historians…have understood that the French Revolution was not and could not have been a spontaneous event.  It happened because men, some of them evil, some of them deluded, planned it on a grand scale and carried out their designs.

(John Remington Graham, Blood Money: The Civil War and the Federal Reserve, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006, p. 24)
  
…Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not check thee; wear thou thy wrongs,
The title is affeer'd!

(William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III, ll. 31-34)
Most would not hesitate to admit the presence of evil in the world.  But at the same time they would probably be quick to locate it some distance from themselves, whether physically or spiritually:  physically, in a savage tribe of South America or Africa, or spiritually, in the hearts of kidnappers or murderers here in our own country.  Even though the light of Christianity is weak and dim in the United States today, we remain so accustomed to the kindness and charity that flow from it that we do not imagine evil could be present in very many that our eyes fall upon, especially in the more sophisticated types of people.  It is there, however -- and it is particularly strong in some of the most sophisticated, refined and highly admired of our society at that.

For an excellent illustration of this point, the reader is encouraged to pick up a copy of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.  In the historical world we inhabit, just as in the fictional world of Mr Lewis’s novel, we see their influence made manifest in their efforts to build the Kingdom of Man, to borrow Father Seraphim Rose’s name for it.  This is the utopia man tries to build without God:  a remaking of the world and humanity by the wealthy Elite of the banks and other large corporations, think tanks, government agencies, and so forth. 

It is from this angle we ought to view the events unfolding in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  These are probably not spontaneous events, but rather a work set in motion by the Elite to further their agenda:  extending the control of the British/Western European-American Empire over more of the peoples and resources of the world while at the same time reducing through war or other methods the number of those they deem unfit to live.

A recent report on the ongoing efforts to extract Afghanistan’s mineral wealth provides a timely, concrete example of their agenda in actu:


Have the Elite soured on Pres Obama?  Is this their way of setting up Gov Romney for a win in November?  Are they behind the iconoclastic movie on Islam (whose origins remain obscure) that we are told has sparked the street violence in many Islamic countries? 

Perhaps, but of more import is remembering Richard Weaver’s warning that totalitarian governments must continually place a new enemy before the eyes of their citizens to keep them distracted from their servitude and the to keep the wheels of the war machine whirring.  That is probably closer to the true reason for starting these riots:  to keep the masses docile, from questioning the benefit of continued military engagements around the world, and to clear the way for still more invasions or occupations of other countries.

Already we hear the analysts on news and opinion shows telling us we can’t disengage from the Muslim world lest things become even more ‘unstable’.  Already we see more U.S. soldiers and arms moving into that region.  We are too naïve if we do not at least consider the possibility that this is the unfolding of a plan drawn up by the Elite to further their own ends.

Most Holy Mother of God, save us.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

A Sonnet to Lee

By Rev Robert Lewis Dabney

Israel one David, Athens one Pericles,
Thebes one Epaminondas could produce.
Thy State, O, Lee, of greatness more profuse,
Nurtured two Washingtons upon her knees;
The first to crown on earth his God did please;
But thy reward was set thee in the skies.
Sterner thy fate than Jackson's; him to rise
And feel no fall, appointed Heaven's decrees.
From thy high noon thou turnedst to the west,
By clouds infolded, thunderous and dark,
Which yet, reluctant, spread around thy rest,
Purple and golden glories, prescient mark
Of that eternal radiance which hath blest
Thy soul, beyond our sun's inferior arc.