The word ‘freedom’ has a powerful hold on the hearts of folks in the States. Invoking it has caused very intense and sometimes contradictory reactions over the years. A former Louisiana State Senator gives us a contemporary example of this when he writes,
‘In 1789 the French people rose up against a millennium of tyrannical rule and demanded their freedom. It took them almost 100 years after that to completely unburden themselves from autocratic rule in its many forms, but today they stand proudly in the Pantheon of free peoples.
‘ . . .
‘In French history there was an expression that was used to arouse an abused people against the tyranny arrayed against them. It was a call to the people to defend their freedom with their own lives. “Aux barricades” – to the barricades. Repeatedly the French people literally stood behind rough barricades to bar the way against crushing oppression. And time and again they prevailed. Modern France is a testament to the power that resides within the breast of the free French people.’
In his effusive praise of liberty and her defenders, he overlooks just who these supposed French freedom fighters were who were manning the barricades: They are the same kind of atheistic socialists/communists that he later attacks in his article for causing so much trouble here in the States (Engels confirms this.). In the senator’s own words:
‘America today is the one nation that people are willing to risk all to literally break into. Yet American citizens are assailed by far-Left radicals whose message of hate is amplified by a corrupt media. Theirs is a constant reciting of a “Big Lie,” a barrage of hate-filled innuendo of systemic racism. America is the country who twice elected a black man as President and today has a black woman as Vice President. And yet the people are assaulted with vicious attacks by the radicals and the media as being irredeemably racist and therefore evil.’
But if he is going to praise the French Marxists for overturning the ancien regime of France, he can no longer criticize the Marxist social justice warriors who are carrying on the same kind of violent, nihilistic nonsense here in Louisiana and elsewhere.
By his own logic he would likewise have to approve of the bloodletting in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, and other southeast Asian countries by Marxist agitators who carried out the same program in those places as in France.
In all these places it is the same method being used: A little clique of radicals with the help of a lying media tries to smear and discredit the established authorities in order to concentrate power in their own hands. They manipulate the lower classes, exaggerating the evils of the present rulers, and promising them extravagant gifts if they would join their revolution: more rights, freedoms, money, etc.
But what kind of freedom is this that is being offered? The crucial point to remember is that freedom, rights, life, property, and so on do not exist for themselves; they are not ends in and of themselves. For men and women, they are means to an end, the same end that all created things were brought into being to participate in: Union with the God who created them from nothing.
Why did God give the Israelites the land of the Canaanites? So they could wallow in an abstract freedom? No. But rather, ‘That they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws’ (Psalm 105:45).
The Feast Day of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul having been celebrated recently, it is also fitting to remember their words to Christian folk on this subject: . . .
The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2021/07/garlington-some-other-lessons-from-the-french/ .
A slightly different version of this essay also appeared at the following sites:
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/how-not-interpret-french-revolution
https://katehon.com/en/article/how-not-interpret-french-revolution
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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