Offsite Post: ‘School Board Protests and Southern Autonomy’

 

The latest act to provoke the outrage of the faux conservative punditry is the National School Board Association’s letter to President Biden, requesting that he use the massive weight of the federal security apparatus – DOJ, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security, Secret Service, and others – to squash the frightening terror that threatens the well-being of Americans everywhere:  informed, caring parents who want a proper, moral education for their children.

On one hand, this is a serious matter.  Any moves in this direction by the federal government would be yet more evidence of the brazen totalitarianism it has embraced as its guiding philosophy in recent months.

On the other hand, this shouldn’t be shock to anyone.  During the misnamed Civil War, President Lincoln set the precedent for just this sort of unrestrained, unlawful federal activity.  Professor Thomas DiLorenzo gives a helpful summary of Honest Abe’s virtuous acts while in the office of president (‘The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War between the States’, p. 263):

 

Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham—a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff— protested the imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers (Randall 1951). Lincoln’s Republican Party associates in Congress created three new states—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada—which helped them rig the 1864 election (Donald 1956, 79).

 

Voters were routinely intimidated and compelled to vote Republican by federal soldiers. “Under the protection of Federal bayonets, New York went Republican by seven thousand votes” in 1864 (Donald 1961, 81).

 

In Maryland, federal troops arrested and imprisoned without trial thirty-one state legislators, the mayor of Baltimore, a congressman, and dozens of newspaper editors who opposed the war. Even the grandson of Francis Scott Key was thrown into prison at Fort McHenry (Talbert 1995; Hummel 1996). All these actions were taken in the name of preserving constitutional government.

The problem for many of the professional conservative commentator class is that they revere Pres Lincoln and honor him as one of the greatest leaders of the united States.  They have trapped themselves in a contradiction:  They laud one dictator (Pres Lincoln), but then turn right around and decry another (Pres Biden). 

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/school-board-protests-and-southern-autonomy.

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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!

‘Recapitation’

 

‘All rulers are corrupt!’

France shrieked in a rage,

And lopped off her head.

Now she blunders about

Blind in the dark

And weak from the gushing

Of blood from the wound

On her neck.

 

                                    For exalting

The deranged passions

Of the body

Above the calm reason

Of the head, the cruelties

Of idolatry

Have returned to torment you.

In preferring the darkness

Of the lower bowels

To the light of the eyes,

You remain imprisoned

In an endless night

Of terrors and confusion.

 

But there is one

In Paris who can change

The fatal state,

One in Paris

Who is worthy

Of headship; one who makes

That city rightly

A capital –

The holy bishop

Germanus.  The eye

Of the nous was cleansed

And purified in him

Through his continual

Fasts, prayers, and alms;

His presence at the Church’s

Services; and his sharing

His table with the poor.

 

Thus opened, the Grace

Of God flooded

Through the nous, filling

Soul and body

With uncreated Light,

Making him more than man –

A god by Grace –

Divine and human,

Like his Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Having conquered

The fallen nature,

Participating

In the Life of

The Trinity,

Becoming a noble,

New creation,

A clear glass through which

Men see God and not himself,

He was made well worthy

To lead men.  His presence

And words and example

Swayed and transformed many:

Idolatry was abandoned;

Corrupting hedonism

Forsaken; kings renounced

Ruthless violence

And injustice

And honored Saints,

Built churches, and cared

For the outcasts instead.

 

The church bearing his name

And his relics has been

A reservoir of Grace

In the midst of Paris

For hundreds of years,

Where many have found

Healing.  But if you are

Willing, O France, let his

Greatest act of restoration

Be the recapitation

Of your head to your body,

Your humble repentance

And unfeigned obedience

To God-ordained

Authorities,

To Orthodox bishops and kings,

Guides and guardians

For men.  In their God-given

Light, you will have light

To walk by, and the fears

Of darkness will dissipate.

Safety and dignity

Will be bestowed

Upon you.  And France will be

Honored in the world

Again, no more a byword,

No more a thing

Of ridicule,

Secure there in the arms

Of your fathers,

In the hands of your papas.

***

A life of St Germanus of Paris may be read here:

https://www.bartleby.com/210/5/281.html

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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 Golden Age of America’

 

Mr Paul Gottfried gives us a standard line about the need to return to the Golden Age of the American republic at the end of a short book review he penned:

 

Since Janowski leaves his heuristic queries open, this reviewer feels free to note that the egalitarian democracy he so graphically describes represents a falling away from something much better. It is a denaturing of the constitutional republic upholding federalism and ordered liberty that marked America’s earlier phase. The United States was not always the quasi-tyranny it is now becoming. It started with a well-conceived political order, one that some Americans wish to return to.

But is this still really a tenable ideal and goal?  What did the former English colonies gain from independence in 1776?  Is it not the truth that the colonies lost nearly everything a traditional people would consider worth living for and exchanged it for never-ending political feuds and money-grabbing after that fateful year?

There is hardly anything of cultural value to speak of in the United States today.  What lover of beauty 500 years from now will have any desire to watch Saturday Night Live or play Grand Theft Auto or own a Ford F-150 pickup truck?  But the usual farming village or small city of artisans in Christian Europe was filled with cultural treasures, however externally poor those people may appear to modern eyes.  Their life revolved firstly around the parish church:  the Divine Liturgy – the union of Heaven with earth, morning and evening prayers, the feasts and fasts of the Church calendar, the holy days dedicated to our Lord and His Most Pure Mother, the patron saint of the parish church, the patron saint of each person in the parish, baptisms, etc. 

Then there was the life of each family, whose members included those who lived long ago by virtue of their graves in the parish churchyard and by virtue of remembering those same members and others often in prayers for the departed.  The family home was also a major part of the family itself, more often than not being the same place in which their forebears had lived for many generations, with the furniture, tools, etc., also being handed down from many years before.  Entertainment too was handed down from many old hands:  ballads and folk songs, communal dances and games, and so on.

Related to family life was the vocation of each person, for the children usually followed in the profession of one of their close kinsmen.  And the members of these professions themselves often formed communities of their own, each with its own traditions.

For this peaceful and stable way of life, the English colonies in North America substituted something truly atrocious.  They called it ‘liberty’, but it is nothing of the sort.  It was an unleashing of the passions, which is slavery of the lowest and most degraded form, and manifests itself in the constant re-creation of the methods of production and the grasping after money and material goods.  This kind of life undermines the well-being of society, breaks all the traditional bonds between people – within families and outside them, dissipates the societal virtues accumulated by the previous generations, and causes anxiety to abound.  What occupation should I pursue?  What college should I go to?  Where should I live afterwards?  Where can I go to make the most money?  Such questions were largely unknown to our ancestors.

Compounding these problems, we now have a never-ending political drama that further erodes the influence of the Church, families, and other healthy traditions.  In order to protect the ‘liberty’ we won through independence from Great Britain, we placed ourselves within an unending cycle of political elections and battles.  There is hardly ever any rest from it.  ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, we are taught here in the exceptional nation.  Vicious, lengthy campaigns are waged to gain elected offices, and no sooner are these watchmen of our freedoms chosen than we turn our jealous Argus-eyes upon them to make sure they don’t encroach upon anything that is ours.

Politics in the old countries, and in the colonies before 1776, was much less volatile and imposed itself much less in daily life.  Most officials held their positions by heredity, meaning little jostling and wrangling to obtain them.  Likewise, many modern government functions were handled by kin-groups or churches:  education of children, care for the poor, sick, and elderly, etc.  When there was interaction with the government, it was usually not with a nameless bureaucrat but with the count or lord who lived in the village manor and whom they knew well – a man with whom the villagers received Holy Communion, who supplied their festivals with foodstuffs, in whose fields they worked at harvest-time.

The federalism and ordered liberty of the American constitutional republic hailed by Mr Gottfried above were merely the vestiges of a healthy pre-Modern Christian society.  As the States began to fulfil the telos of their new republican creation, however, those forms faded away.  Now we have no true communities, whether villages or cities, only atomized urban apartments and rural suburbs.  . . .

The rest is at https://thesaker.is/the-golden-age-of-america/.

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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!