Offsite Post: ‘Some Other Lessons from the French’

 

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!

Offsite Post: ‘A New July 4th Resolution’

 

The solution offered by Mr Vivek Ramaswamy to the destructive ideology of the Woke Social Justice Warriors could not be stranger:

The antidote isn’t to fight wokeness directly. It can’t be, because that’s a losing battle. The true solution is to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism to irrelevance, one that no longer leaves us susceptible to being divided by corporate elites for their own gain.

The problem with this is that there is not and cannot be a ‘shared American identity’ that is ‘deep and powerful’ because the modern American creed (itself an updated form of the Pilgrim-Yankee worldview of yesteryear) is predicated on exactly the opposite principle:  To be an ‘American’ today means precisely to be baptized into the cult of individualism; to cut off one’s roots in order to begin a new life here in the ‘promised land’; to forget the past, with its customs and other burdens, all of which are hindrances to personal self-fulfilment; to focus solely on creating a future full of material comforts.

Such a belief and its attendant way of living, full of centripetal forces, is unable to oppose the forward march of Woke revolutionaries.  They will easily shatter whatever weak resistance these Hillsdale College/National Review-type ‘American nationalists’ offer up:  A collection of rootless, atomized, self-interested individuals is no match for an ideologically united collective full of fire for their utopian vision. 

One may go a step further and say that the SJWs are merely the latest iteration of New England progressives, beginning with the Pilgrim Gnostics and on to the more secularized and/or apostate Yankees with their many isms – abolitionism, communism, feminism, prohibitionism, Shakerism, Mormonism, etc.  Thus, what we are seeing is the Yankee ideology devouring itself:  Those who hold to the earlier, mid-19^th century Lincolnian version (Hillsdale, talk radio, Victor Davis Hanson, Fox News, etc.) are at war with the current Woke iteration.

The South stands aloof from deracinated Yankee Americanism.  She began not as a project to build something ‘new’ (the infamous New England City on a Hill) but as an effort of Englishmen to continue the rural life they knew, the only difference being their ability to advance a little financially.  This is why so many ‘old’ things have survived here at the South:  the architecture of the English manor house and the Celtic cabin, as well as classical Greek and Roman architecture; classical literature; the African banjo; the Bible and Saints’ Days; quilting and basket-weaving; and so forth.

But Dixie cannot at all afford to be complacent while the infighting between the elder and younger branches of the Yankee family tree continues on.  The South is still at risk from them in many ways:  . . .

The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/a-new-4th-of-july-resolution/ .

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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!

New Companion Blog: Just the Links

 

Confiteri has generally focused more on longer essays and other types of literature.  Just the Links, on the other hand, will present links to articles of interest that we would not be able to give much time to otherwise – hence the minimal commentary – but that seem important to the ongoing cultural conversation going on around us.  We hope you will have a look from time to time:

https://justthelinks.wordpress.com/

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘The Age of Liberation’

 

Not so long ago,

In the miserable

Ages of slavery,

Our wills and passions were

Restrained by obedience

To parents and the care

Of the bodies of aging

Grandsires.  But the forward

March of Progress has freed us

From the dungeon-home.

 

Alone in our apartments,

Unencumbered

With the care of others,

Our personalities

Are free to develop

With the help of Paxil

And a dose of Xanax.

 

Liberated

From garden, cow, and kitchen

We let McDonald’s

Mass-produce our daily meals.

 

The repetition

Of elders’ ancient tales

Oppresses us no more.

. . .

The rest is at https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190743&sec_id=190743 .

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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!