By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog
(This is the first chapter in a new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. Please click here for the article which announces this book and explains its goals.)
It would be boring to defend the French Revolution by showing the moral and intellectual worth of its left spectrum – of Danton and Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. What’s far more interesting is to examine the right’s assessment and criticisms of 1789. If we do so we will be exceptionally rewarded – after all, we unearth the very foundation of Western conservatism.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is the Bible of modern conservatism, with Burke regarded as that ideology’s indisputable philosophical founder. It is no exaggeration to call him the “Marx of conservatism”. For those who don’t believe that – simply read this first section.
It’s not only Burke’s political philosophy which has become dominant in the West, but his economic philosophy prevails today as well. Read Adam Smith’s evaluation of Burke: “…the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.”
Additionally, just as conservatives today despise the “fake money” of Bitcoin – which is creating a new class (both a class of monied persons and a class of investment type) – so Burke railed against the French Revolution’s creation of paper “fake money”. The assignats were paper bonds created by the projected bonanza which would be reaped from the sales of the newly confiscated estates of the Roman Catholic Church in France. Burke’s condemnation of this – and his promotion of wealth only based in land, gold and commerce – has become adored by stingy conservatives who distrust going off the gold standard in 1971, Quantitative Easting, Modern Monetary Policy and cryptocurrency. Burke was a member of the Whig Party, which established the Bank of England – the first central bank – giving him even more economic relevance to our era of banker domination.
As Burke fears a newly monied class will reduce the power of the established upper class, Reflections is full of apparently tolerant concerns (Burke was a Protestant) for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Burke’s concerns are nothing but false piety masking his class interests, but Reflections is considered by today’s conservatives to be a righteous and modern call to defend your true church. Burke defends Christian monarchy as being free from despotism, it being Christian, after all. As for the aristocracy beneath the holy autocrat, Burke simultaneously insists that aristocrats in Christendom have always practiced the true faith… but they have been converted to atheism en masse in France over the last century. This mix of multicultural tolerance (as long as that culture is Christian) and loyalty to an unchanging establishment religion (no matter how infested with nobility and disregard for the poor) is quite similar to the religious stance of modern Western conservatives.
Burke also rails against calls for subverting the aristocratic world – a world full of hard-won merit, he insists – by a new media-political-intellectual class which has become divorced from the longtime forces of traditional wealth and the church. In the 21st century technocrats and meritocracy’s allegedly-deserving victors denounce a new intelligentsia: that of the masses, which is found on Facebook, social media, blogs, etc., which dare to contradict the mainstream media of sacred Western Liberal Democracy, which is – in fact – actually being run ever so well by the establishment’s elite.
Burke writes little about 1789’s abolition of seigneurial rights, mainly because it’s such an indefensible position – in typical English fashion it was certainly bad “manners” to talk of such things openly. Or rather, it had just become bad manners. Burke insisted that a truly noble nobility justifiably rules and oppresses because of the English triumph of social “manners” over ancient, individualistic and barbarous Greek “virtue”. This idea translated into the alliance between culture and aristocracy which so dramatically moulded the art of the subsequent Victorian Era. Again, Burke’s importance resonates with Marxian reach. The Western condemnation of “deplorable” Yellow Vests, Trumpers and Brexiteers for their lack of respect and awe is above all a continuation of Victorian repugnance for the “ill-mannered” and certainly ill-bred masses.
But wait, there’s more!
It’s said that much of Burke’s modern appeal is that he allegedly discovered the roots of modern totalitarianism: He was first intellectual to be spooked by the “spectre of 1789”, which is synonymous with the spectre of socialism, which modern conservatives falsely conflate with totalitarianism. What’s obvious to all is that the accusations against socialism as “totalitarian” from a class of hyper-privileged persons who fear losing their privileges – even if these privileges are abused and then revoked by popular, democratic revolution – are intellectually invalid barring extraordinary proofs of intellectual objectivity. Burke fails that test all over. Therefore the true base of Burke’s appeal here to modern conservatism is so hard to categorise that we can only call it psychological. It is easy to define, however: A desire to privilege illogic and inefficiency – the role of an “invisible hand” – in both economic and social affairs, something rejected by socialism’s central planning and demands for equality. Logic, science and mathematical reasoning must always appear terribly totalitarian to those, like Burke, who invariably resort to using an “invisible hand” in their equations which explain and order societal affairs. Burke does not use an “invisible hand” that is truly Godly, because it is not all-embracing and all-levelling, but instead the unplanned order found in hereditary right, unregulated markets, slavishly following an unchangeable tradition/past, and the unplanned order of the unpredictable eccentricities produced by a totally unchecked individuality/autocracy/libertarianism. Modern conservatives agree: an “invisible hand” ultimately rules, somehow, and all humans can do is work around it. Planning against the “invisible hand” is personally anathema to modern conservatives, especially rich ones.
Therefore, in economics, religion, intellectualism, culture and psychology you should see why I am starting off this book with Burke – he combines to become the absolute cornerstone of Western conservatism. Reflections on the Revolution in France distills what reasoning is used, and which is used still, to oppose every modern, progressive revolution.
Burke is the man who stood up to the Yellow Vests of 1789 and shouted them down as people who were trashing and upending the economy, who were godless demons that respected nothing, who were too stupid to be listened to much less govern, who were unmannered berserkers, who failed to comprehend that incomprehensibility in human affairs must be endured, and who must stop their critiques of monarchism on pain of being sent to the Bastille, which must be retaken.
Marx had Burke’s number: In a single word – “sycophant”.
Yellow Vest: “Our recent governments serve only the rich class, instead of serving the people – that’s the problem. France has enough money and produces many goods, but these are not distributed fairly. At the same time, our government is taking away the social rights we fought decades to win.”
(Note: this book intersperses over 100 quotations taken from actual, marching Yellow Vests which were originally published in news reports on PressTV.)
Burke hated 1789, but few realise he wrote just as poorly of nascent Western Liberal Democracy
However, it would be unfair and incorrect to say that conservatism in Western Liberal Democracy can be reduced to encouragements to become a slavish sycophant to the status quo because “conservatism” has universal values like family cohesion, respect for religion, thrift, hard work and modest pride in a modest amount of property. Such traditional concepts are easily also found in Confucianism, Hinduism, the Islamic World and even nomadic life. Therefore, to pin all the West’s faults on “conservatism” is illogical, foolish and doomed to failure.
Of course, many Western fake-leftists do exactly that – in the US, for example, the constant claim is that the Republican Party is the sole party responsible for all the evils at home and abroad. This totally ignores the failures of the Democratic Party and of Western Liberal Democracy itself. It’s easier to blame conservatism than to refine and enlighten one’s own leftism.
But read Burke’s masterwork and it’s truly impossible not to be struck by what a tremendous toady this Irishman was to English royalty! If the noble class were one-tenth as noble, blameless and competent as he repeatedly claims then nobody would have ever had the slightest notion to overthrow them. If the revolutionary class in France – which is to say, millions of people – were as vile, clueless and without merit as he claimed then they could not even have had the intelligence to tie their shoes much less envision an unprecedentedly democratic and egalitarian type of society.
Examples of his toadying are legion – his fairy-tale account of meeting Marie Antoinette produced eye-rolling even in Burke’s own day – so I will not waste time listing giving examples. Simply open Reflections on the Revolution in France to any page, stick your finger on a sentence and it will likely be describing the noble class as nothing but people who make Marcus Aurelius look unwise, every small-town cleric as improvers upon the philosophy of Jesus son of Mary, and the king as being an entity of – per the writing of one similar Hindu toady (whose name I forget) – such cosmic goodness that lighting bolts of pure enlightenment shoot out of his big toenail.
Burke’s book has become a manifesto because Western conservatives want to be affirmed in the idea that slow reformism of the status quo is the only sociopolitical solution, universally. “Keep calm and carry on”, universally, as opposed to discussing and implementing revolutionary changes which aim to improve equality immediately. He’s wrong: oligarchy disguised as ineffectual parliamentarianism (with a monarch or a prime minister or a president) is a less democratic and egalitarian system than those proposed by Socialist Democracy, and this was precisely the cry and proposed solution from the French Revolution up to the Yellow Vests.
But few read Burke for this: His book is also the ultimate takedown of modern Western Liberal Democracy at its very conception.
Therefore, we can read him and – undiscussed by modern conservatives – find some very just and salient criticisms of Western Liberal Democracy precisely when the child has first been placed in the cradle. This is the opposites of what modern conservatives usually mine Reflections on the Revolution in France for – to find criticisms of Socialist Democracy, which was also born in 1789.
What’s vital to realise is that Burke’s critique of Socialist (and Liberal) Democracy was not written after “the Terror” or after the rise of Napoleon or – shockingly – even after capital punishment was pronounced for Louis XVI. It was written at the very start of the revolution, in 1790: Burke is writing merely after the fall of the Bastille and the declaration of the end of feudalism! The king lives, but the god has been defiled by the hands of commoners, and Burke pauses in his sucking-up to write a very long letter, in a very protracted style, to a fellow aristocrat in France.
This change in the nature of medieval society is enough to shock Burke the Whig, who is a proto-Western Liberal Democrat because of his acceptance of monarchical oligarchy. He’s an aristocrat shocked at losing his privileges over the life and property of his workers. He can’t imagine that society doesn’t openly declare that his DNA is a cut above the “swinish multitude”. Burke’s shock helps explain why, as I will discuss in the next chapter, the 1688 Glorious Revolution – the birth of English parliamentarianism – is not the birth of modern democracy. It was merely the first limitation on European absolute autocracy, which is not modern.
This shock at the very start of the French Revolution form the completely counter-revolutionary basis of his passionate reflections, which are sent in letter form to a fellow aristocrat in France. The letter becomes history’s best example of intellectual opposition to the French Revolution from the point of view of both monarchy and modern Anglophone conservatism, and thus early Western Liberal Democracy. By examining the text which first criticised the actions of the obvious forebears of the Yellow Vests, we can see how the criticism of the Yellow Vests’ demands is not recent, but goes back over 230 years.
Yellow Vest: “For us it was not the ‘Great Debate’ but the ‘Great Smokescreen’. This is why many Yellow Vests quickly refused to participate. We know that nothing concrete will come from those one-way debates. It will ultimately make people even more disappointed in the government, and turn to the Yellow Vests with even more support.”
The notion of ending aristocratic rule: As shocking to the elite of yesterday as it is for today’s Western elite
The opposition to monarchy/autocracy and a demand for an equitable redistribution of wealth and political power – this is the battle of modern politics. Whether or not the autocrat is Emmanuel Macron, ruling by executive order and smashing the Yellow Vest demonstrations, or Louis XVI makes no difference in 2022: both their means and their ends are the same – political autocracy. From the time of Reflections publication to the Yellow Vests the demands have always been the same: More grassroots rights to political power and wealth for the masses than Western Liberal Democracy is willing to offer its citizens.
The great, galvanising crime for Burke was threefold, and I think only the last would be seriously debatable today, and even then only by a few: making the king finally answerable to a single parliament (no House of Lords) composed mainly of non-nobility, the abolition of feudal titles and rights and France’s nationalising of the Roman Catholic church.
Beginning with the last: It should be reminded that what we can call the “nationalisation” of the Roman Catholic church and the dissolution of the Roman Catholic monasteries occurred in England – via the creation of the Church of England – under Henry VIII, more than 250 years earlier than in France. The Whig Burke decried this for France even though the Whig Party’s early members came to economic prominence in a large part from royal land grants of former Roman Catholic Church lands in England! This book will not debate the merits of Europe’s Protestant Revolution – I will simply take that revolution as a grassroots, honest desire for greater emancipation from the Vatican in many ways, economics included. Therefore, England had already profited from their spiritual independence for centuries, yet France should be faulted for doing the same so very much later? Cui bono – not monied Whigs invested in France, but a French nouveau riche and the French peasant, and thus Burke’s opposition.
What 1789 demanded was not a complete separation between republic and church, but a pledge of allegiance of the Roman Catholic Church to the new republic in order to create a better, more progressive and more locally-devoted clergy. Fifty-five percent of French clergy would accept to take this new Constitutional Oath, which (again, I am not entering into religious discussions here) can be fairly viewed as a modern and progressive demand to serve your local laypeople well and firstly. Contrarily, the Church of England in 1789 was precisely the same as their aristocratic parliament: a hierarchy headed by sycophants, largely limited to fellow nobles, who were engaged in maintaining the deeply embedded socioeconomic class disparities created by English feudalism. Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 will make peace with the Vatican regarding these changes, and also cement a new and more progressive clergy for France. A complete separation between church and state would not occur until the passage of the “1905 French Law on the Separation of the Churches and State”. This pledge from a clergy towards a national democratic revolution was frightening to Burke because it exposed the alleged progressivism of England – which in 1788 had a claim to be perhaps the most progressive country in Europe – for what the nation remains today: an unmodern oligarchy with a rich, landowning church that refuses to engage in a serious questions of redistribution of wealth or political power.
Nationalising the church, attacking the social and economic privilege of the nobility via ending feudalism and constraining the king’s power with a parliament which doesn’t aim to collude in preserving an aristocratic oligarchy – these three crimes alone joined together to galvanise Burke into warning how the French Revolution heralded the slow death of the autocratic order of the oligarchy.
So the French Revolution has just begun and barely a drop of royal blood has been shed but Burke simply can’t believe his eyes – he thought that the era of aristocratic autocracy, supported by a clergy which looked the other way and an intelligentsia restricted to sanctioning the first two estates (as Burke did) would go on for ever.
Yellow Vest: ”France has turned into a system of oligarchy which is run by high finance, and we cannot take it anymore. This is why the Yellow Vests are demanding citizen referendums, especially regarding France’s banks and our economic policy. That’s the only way we can create jobs, schools, hospitals and peace in our country.”
The Western Liberal Democrats who oppose the Yellow Vests are precisely the same: they are modern day aristocrats who support the autocracy of the French executive, the elite-only justice of the judicial branch, care not that the legislative branch is just for show, who are unhindered by any appeals from a politically-active clergy, and who either decide to join or bow down to the dictates of the 21st media mainstream media intelligentsia.
Why do you think like this, Burke?!
This is why reading Reflections is so important – to find the initial but enduring justifications for autocracy, faux-meritocracy, technocracy of the inept, spiritual guidance from the unrighteous righteous and minds bent on subservience, i.e. a modern Western conservative whose conservatism exceeds just limits.
Natural law: We can do nothing about that which justifies every inequality
Burke’s ultimate rejoinder to attack the ideals of 1789 is that – and here we see the same justifications of Western Liberal Democratic leaders from the slave-trading time, to the start of imperialism in the Western hemisphere, to the eugenics movement, to today’s false “the rich deserve to stay rich because of ‘meritocracy’”: caste is “natural”.
Indeed, it’s that simple to Burke.
Don’t kill the messenger – I can’t be faulted for relating the faults of modern conservatism: logic, nor a study of history which aims to be as scientific as the subject will allow, nor humanity’s finest emotions and desires are a basis for society, but only an invisible hand of “natural” laws which dictate that a high and a low must be created and perpetually preserved.
This “natural” law is the basis of “conservatism” from England, to the caste of India, to the very rigid hierarchical view of Confucius, to the frightened and xenophobic worldview of tribes and nomads, etc. It’s a “bad” conservatism, as it refuses to be compatible with equality and modern, not medieval, justice.
Over and over in Reflections Burke justifies the privileges of the aristocracy based on some sort of “natural” superiority and the “natural” need for a subservient class in society in order to prevent proto-socialist “anarchy”, which a modern reader sees Burke confusing with the barest “equality”.
Absolutely crucially, he backs their theocratic right to rule – divinity is God-given via birth and bloodline. Burke believes that the highness is real and natural of “His and Her Royal Highness”. It’s so astoundingly forgotten that until the bloodletting of World War I nearly all of Europe was not just feudal police states but also theocracies: kings were kings by “divine right” and were often the heads of churches. England still is this way!
This is something which appears staggeringly obvious to Muslim readers of modern European history, but this incredibly awful theocratic rule in Europe seems to be totally unrecognised in Western descriptions of their political history and situation? It is totally unrecognised how this legacy affects Europeans of today? Europeans act as if they are as many millennia removed from caveman-ism as they are from being ardent supporters of the most irreligious type of theocracy?
Burke is not from the final era of total scoffers at the French Revolution’s Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but the very first. Again, it is glossed over in the West how even Liberal Democratic rights are so very new in Europe – the upcoming chapters will remind how the entire 19th century was a victory of Anglo-Germanic monarchical repression 1789. The wilful historical blindness of the Western mainstream – in order to promote ideas of Western exceptionalism and superiority – has lead to total ignorance regarding how monarchy is the cardinal sin of domestic culture.
Beyond this “natural law”, it’s clear that to Burke and conservatives that money matters, and it matters so much because the presence of money, to conservatives, bestows merit; papers over hypocrisies; make criticism easy to luxuriously ignore. Beyond the ending of harvest taxes, church tithes and other redistributions of wealth from the bottom upwards, the confiscations of the church estates in France began the rise of a revolutionary new “paper” assignat money, and as Burke scholar J.G.A. Peacock wrote: “This is the key to all his analyses of the Revolution, and is bound to remind us of earlier Tories who, in the reign of Queen Anne (reign: 1665-1714) had attacked the Whig ‘monied interest’ and declared that ‘the Church was in danger’.” I see his point, but beyond just the arrival of a paper money which went beyond the crux of the English economy at this time – an unparalleled extension of credit (also the crux of the United States in our time), the key to Burke’s analyses of the Revolution is more accurately: that of a typical modern conservative to any socialist redistribution of wealth or political influence.
Yellow Vest: “We will be marching every Saturday to demand our human rights and our human dignity. We are here because there is no economic justice in France. France is an oligarchy composed of political elite, union leaders and high finance. They suck the life and riches out of the real producers of our nation’s wealth – the workers.”
The Whigs were modern conservatives in their view that all money – whether landed, trade gained from imperialism or industrial wealth – were in harmony, unity and striving towards progress. As Marx would put it decades later – all wealth to the rich eventually “becomes bourgeois”. Burke opposed the paper assignat – his class would soon relent and profit from this type of financial instrument. Modern conservatism will, eventually, accept Bitcoin wealth because they eventually sanction any and all wealth. This is why Burke is a proto-Western Liberal Democrat despite his opposition to the end of absolute monarchy. Both Burke and the modern conservative believe the class war is wrong – the only just war is to fight your way up in class.
Conclusion: A Whiggish clerisy to sanction monied nobility until Judgment Day, which doesn’t exist
Many Whigs of the 21st century are attached to their own religion, but there, too, has been a reconciliation; an accommodation just as significant as between monarch and president/prime minister in Western Liberal Democracy – that of secularism, the new Western state religion, which is also a new religion founded on the state itself. In France it is called laïcité, and it has been employed as a major cultural distraction since the start of the Great Recession. The spate of terror attacks – in which France’s foreign policy in Syria, Mali, Afghanistan and elsewhere was seemingly always cited – gave laïcité even more media space.
In modern conservatism secularism is the iron law. Secularism necessarily promotes the production of a spiritually-indifferent, neutered, class-unconscious clerisy; secularism doesn’t make every citizen this way, but it necessarily produces a class dedicated to preserving secularism. This new clerisy can be attached to an established religion, or public agnosticism, or outright atheism, or even a bizarre new polytheism – as long as said new cleric does not promote mixing religion and politics/economics.
Yellow Vest: “The fire at Notre Dame touched everybody, but there is a big controversy over how we could raise a billion euros for a church so quickly, and why we can’t raise such an amount for poor people. There is a lot of anger, and a fire at Notre Dame is not going to change this mental reality.”
Western society considers itself to be the apex of progress because it has deposed the clergy but not nobility. The basis of this society is shaky: while it declares humans radically equal irrespective of religion it also declares humans radically unequal as regards to class.
Modern conservatism is Whiggish in that it conflates not just love of the nobility, or the neo-nobility, with patriotism, but religion with mere property: property is sacred, even though it is merely property, and to attack property is heresy in Western Liberal Democracy. (Except, of course, when that property is of those who choose a path different from Western Liberal Democracy, like Iranians, Cubans, Russians, etc. To such persons and nations religious feeling is not extended.)
Burkean conservatism is not modern but ancient. As applicable to modern society as Marx is Burke is as inapplicable, despite Burke’s present-day proponents. He is not modern because he writes not to defend the average person’s home, goods and religion but only those of a hereditary aristocracy, which any modern person must disavow. I am speaking of the vital difference between the right to personal conservatism and a political, social and economic conservatism which combats society’s efforts to introduce modern, humane equality.
Therefore it is vital that the modern leftist wrests justified conservatism from the elitists like Burke in favor of a conservatism which also supports revolutionary political ideals – and egalitarianism has always been revolutionary in Europe.
Conservative types of values are what help anchor society, and that includes revolutionary societies – the difference is in the political-economic bedrock on which your society is founded.
The next chapter, Glorious Revolution of 1688: England declares ‘death to all other revolutions’, examines Burke’s primary thesis: That one is not permitted to remake society into something new because to wipe out the historical context which shaped that society would be immoral. It’s a nice, stable, conservative point of view – but only if you are currently on the top of the pyramid!
Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value! Publication date: June 1, 2022.
Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.
Pre-orders of the Kindle version may be made here.
Pre-orders of the French paperback version will be available immediately.
Pre-orders of the French Kindle version may be made here.
Chapter List of the new content
- New book announcement – ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s best values’ – March 15, 2022
- Introduction: A Yellow Vests’ history must rewrite both recent & past French history – May 20, 2022
- The UK’s endless reaction: 1789 & feudalism’s end creates modern conservatism
- Glorious Revolution of 1688: England declares ‘death to all other revolutions’
- Modern political history makes no sense if Napoleon is not a leftist revolutionary
- The Revolutions of 1848: Because Liberalism can’t say the ‘Counter-Revolutions of 1848’
- Louis-Napoleon: The revolutionary differences between Bonapartism & Western Liberal Democracy
- The Paris Commune: The true birth of neoliberalism and EU neo-imperialism
- Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s
- On ‘Leon Trotsky on France’ in order to reclaim Trotsky from Trotskyists
- The Yellow Vests’ childhood: Seeing French elites, only, swayed by neoliberalism
- No one here is actually in charge: How the EU empire forced the Yellow Vests
- The radicalisation by Europe’s ongoing Lost Decade: the Great Recession changes France
- To Yellow Vests he’s the radical: Macron and ‘Neither Right nor Left but the Bourgeois Bloc’
- Yellow Vests: At worst, the most important French movement for a century
- Who are they, really? Ask a reporter whose seen a million Yellow Vest faces
- Yellow Vest Win: Ending the West’s slandering of all popular movements as far-right xenophobes
- Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western anarcho-syndicalism & unions as leftism’s hereditary kings
- Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western parliamentarianism as the most progressive government
- Yellow Vest Win: Reminding us of the link between fascist violence & Western democracy
- What the Yellow Vests can be: a group which can protect liberalism’s rights, at least
- The 2022 vote: The approach needed for ‘Before’- what came ‘After’ polls closed
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
I feel shamed that chapters from such a puerile book accompany the mainstay sane Russia analysis on this site. Yes, Burke was an important conservative, but he could also be viewed as the forefather of “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me”, johnny-come-lately converts who embraced conservatism because he was the consequences of left-liberalism in action, not because he rejected left-liberalism root and branch. The author even notes above that he supported laissez faire economics (what liberalism refers to in France) without taking pause. Why not highlight conservatives who were much more consistent and uncompromising, like Veuillot or de Bonald?
Chaz,
Burke as the “forefather of ‘I didn’t leave the left, the left left me’? Wow, that’s an unusual analysis. There’s a pro-absolute monarchy left, LOL?
Wiki in Burke’s intro summary: “Subsequently, in the 20th century, he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of conservatism.” Nothing about the forefather of the left anything. There never will be, either, but enjoy the rest of the book.
Am I wrong or won’t the author of this article support all kinds of government Covid mandates as long as he’s told it’s all “for the common good”? If there is something we definitely don’t need is more centralisation, as the past two years have shown to us…
This is just a little bit of gaslighting. You have no idea what the author would have said, could have said, will say, if indeed anything.
I think that it was Adam Smith who coined the term ‘Invisible Hand’ rather than Burke (who was Irish not English). Moreover, there was a strong reaction which came from David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and mirabile dictu Marx and Engels. But it was Thomas Paine who was the most important and cogent critique of Burke. As follows.
”As for Mr Burke, he is a stickler for the monarchy … he has taken up a contemptible opinion of mankind, who, in their turn, are taken up the same as him. He considers them a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy and show … Can Mr Burke produce a constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that though it has been so much talked about, that no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist and that consequently the people have yet a constitution to form …The two modes of government which prevail in the world, are, ‘Government by election and representation; secondly, by hereditary succession . The former is generally known by the name of Republic; the latter by that of monarchy and aristocracy.” Thomas Paine – writings
“As Burke fears a newly monied class will reduce the power of the established upper class”.
Yes, that was indeed true, but for France and not for Britain. We have to go back into history to understand present day Britain.
In 1066 Duke William of Normandy invades England, with historians failing to explain how a duke could fight a king and how Duke William managed to finance an army of mercenaries and build a fleet. The answer lies with the Rouen Khazars, who offered Duke William a deal: they would finance his invasion on condition he appointed them tax collectors in England. Duke William agrees, and the Khazarian ambition of grabbing the island of Britain was being fulfilled, something they always wanted, turning Britain into an island fortress for imperial plundering.
The Khazars remained in Britain right until the rule of Edward I’st, known as Longshanks, who was fighting two wars simultaneously, against the French and against the Scot’s. He runs out of money, and the Khazars move in. offering Edward the needed money on condition he obeyed their every dictatorial command. The furious Edward sends the Khazar leaders to the Tower of London, where he has them decapitated. He deports the rest to the Continent. England was free of Khazarian influence until the 17th century English Civil War, when Khazars from Holland used their agent Oliver Cromwell to start an insurrection. King Charles is decapitated in revenge for the execution of Khazarian leaders during the reign of Edward I’st. The Khazars are permitted to return to England, where they assumed control of English finances. Today the City of London is a sovereign country ruled by the Rothschild’s, it being outside the jurisdiction of the British parliament.
The English Civil War of the 17th century is one of the most important events in world history, as it was used as a blueprint for future subversion of countries, as witnessed in Ukraine in 2014.
The modus operandi was simple. A hidden minority is used to start a political, social and military insurrection. This happened in 1776 in the North American colonies, where Freemason George Washington starts a “revolution”, creating the American nation, even though a mere 3 %, or at the most 7 % of “Americans” supported him. The Rothschild’s financed both sides, just in case Washington lost, something they often repeated. The colonies pass from Crown control to that of the Rothschild’s. This modus operandi continues in 1789, when the Rothschilds financed French Freemasons to start a revolution, executing the king (sound familiar ?), and continues in 1917 with the Russian “revolution”, when Illuminati Lenin was given 20 million dollars in gold by Wall Street bankers to start an uprising. The Tsar and the entire Royal Family are butchered. These methods were repeated numerous times in the 20th century, as exemplified by Soros, who uses a minority to “represent” the majority and start political and social trouble. By the way, who financed Hitler in the 1930’s ? Any guesses ?
As for Burke, I don’t think he fully comprehended what happened in 1789. The Rothschild’s butchered much of the French nobility, creating a new ruling class, the aim being to place French finances in private, Rothschild banks. Who financed Napoleons invasion of Russia in 1812 ? Any guesses ? Who controls Macron in France ? For which bank did he work ?
As for Britain, calling it conservative ruled would be a compliment. The ultimate power, political and financial, lies with the Queen and the Rothschild’s, both being unelected. The country is still a feudal entity, with plenty of cosmetic touches to conceal this fact.
Hi B.F.
The reason I included Burke and the next chapter on the Glorious Revolution is because I agree with you – the English Civil War is so very important.
I had to confront and re-confront and re-re-confront my opinion that the France 1789 is the start of modern politics and not the Glorious Revolution/English Civil War. In a book about the Yellow Vests I can easily be accused of bias towards France, after all.
But I think 1789 is considered the start of modern politics by so many for good reason: the English Civil War has religious components and imperialist (Ireland) components which make it the end of the medieval era and not the start of the modern era. Burke and the UK’s endless opposition to 1789 (and every other revolution) show the proof is in the pudding – Anglo-inspired politics are just not modern.
But the English Civil War, Cromwell – hugely important stuff, indeed. There’s good stuff on this subject in the next chapter – how the French (including Napoleon) first admired England and then they realised, “waitaminut… this is just an oligarchy!”
I would recommend reading Augustin Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme for a certain particular view on this entire era, to gain a perspective on the gradual transformation from feudalism to industrial capitalism to contemporary liberal capitalism, or as Karl Polyani termed it, the “great transformation”. There is no one individual current in this process that can be said to be the dominant tendency, but if I were to simplify matters, I would say the manner in which the British & Dutch empires established plantation colonies, maritime domination over global trade, not to mention the trans-Atlantic chattel slave trade, set the stage for first phase capital formation & capital accumulation leading to the replacement of the feudal order with so-called liberal democracy. Essentially, a coup d’état by finance capital to establish a weak political system over a strong state, that they (banking aristocracy or cabal) controlled. That is a gross over simplification, but that is a generalised picture of what was going on in western Europe & north America between 1700 – 1900. Barruel emphasises the role of British masonic orders in the French Revolution, which was a return favour for French support for the American revolution. These were imperial power plays taking place while internal socio-political transformations were also taking place, a very complex affair, to say the least. To gain a good grasp of this period, one needs to read a wealth of literature, from the period, & more contemporary analysis as well.
B.F., thanks for your great, tightly-packed comment. Your last paragraph is right on the money (heh) and bears repeating …………… time and time again, at the start of every day, in elementary schools and universities around the world.
“As for Britain, calling it conservative ruled would be a compliment. The ultimate power, political and financial, lies with the Queen and the Rothschild’s, both being unelected. The country is still a feudal entity, with plenty of cosmetic touches to conceal this fact.”
Napoleon was sent off from France to invade Egypt with a mighty naval flotilla, that was an unmitigated disaster, especially when Nelson sank the French fleet at anchor in Abu Quir Bay near Alexandria, losing a total of 40,000 French troops and many were marooned there, while Napoleon fled back to France to a hero’s welcome.
According Walter Scheidel “The Only Thing, Historically, That’s Curbed Inequality Is Catastrophe”.
First: The War
“Earlier wars had produced mixed results, as victors profited and losers paid. The Civil War is another example: It launched the careers of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and other Northern plutocrats, but ruined Southern slave-owners. Not since the times of the ancient Greeks had intense popular military mobilization (paired with egalitarian norms and institutions) helped curb economic inequality.*
The Second: Revolutions
“Second are revolutions that truly transformed societies—the sort that were born of the two world wars. From 1917 on, communists in Russia, China, and elsewhere confiscated, redistributed and collectivized private wealth, and set wages, leveling inequality on an unprecedented scale. Revolutions before these, by contrast, were rarely extreme enough to have the same effect: The French Revolution, by comparison a far less bloody affair, made more modest headway.”
The Third: Violent Turmoil
” Violent turmoil sometimes destroyed states altogether, taking the rich and powerful down with them. While everyone stood to suffer in times of collapse, the richest simply had more to lose. Records of equalizing misery reach back thousands of years: The last Roman aristocrats lined up for handouts from the Pope, and Mayan nobility had to make do with the same diet as commoners. More recently, Somalia’s anarchy reduced the inequalities of the brutal kleptocracy that had preceded it.
The Fourth: Pandemic
“Humans have long faced competition in inflicting damage serious enough to rebalance the scales, which brings up the fourth leveling force. The first pandemic of bubonic plague at the end of antiquity, the Black Death in the late Middle Ages, and the merciless onslaught of smallpox and measles that ravaged the New World after 1492 claimed so many lives that the price of labor soared and the value of land and other capital plummeted. Workers ate and dressed better, while landlords were reduced to complaints that, as one English chronicler put it, “such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Surviving tax registers from late medieval Italy also bear witness to the sweeping erosion of elite fortunes.”
But what of less murderous mechanisms of combating inequality? History offers little comfort. Land reform often foundered or was subverted by the propertied. Successful programs that managed to parcel out land to the poor and made sure they kept it owed much to the threat or exercise of violence, from Mexico during its revolution to postwar Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Just as with the financial crisis of 2008, macroeconomic downturns rarely hurt the rich for more than a few years. Democracy on its own does not consistently lower inequality. And while improving access to education can indeed narrow income gaps, it is striking to see that American wage premiums for the credentialed collapsed precisely during both world wars.
In the 1950s, the economist Simon Kuznets famously hypothesized that economic growth would be accompanied by a fairer distribution of resources, but this has mostly happened in the countries where such growth was shaped by the fallout from the world wars or fear of revolution. By contrast, Latin America, which sat out the 20th century’s largest conflicts in relative isolation, duly did not see inequality drop until the early 2000s—and by then it had scaled such heights that it could hardly have risen much further. Brazil and other countries targeted progressive policies toward the lowest-hanging fruit, but economic headwinds and political backlash cast doubt on the prospects of further peaceful leveling. ”
STALEMATE – Inequality Is here to stay. It’s alternative is unpredictive total Catastrophe.
” If history is any indication, then, the resurgence of inequality since the 1980s should not have come as a surprise. The effects of violent leveling invariably abate over time: Populations recover when plagues subside, failed states are replaced by newcomers. By now the aftershocks of the 20th century’s great wars have faded. Top tax rates and union membership are down, communism is defunct, and globalization, however reviled, is (still) in full swing. The four levelling forces will not return any time soon: Technology has made mass warfare obsolete; violent, redistributive revolution has lost its appeal; most states are more resilient than they used to be; and advances in genetics will help humanity ward off novel germs.
Even the most progressive welfare states of continental Europe are now struggling to compensate for the widening income disparities that exist before taxes and transfers. In the coming decades, the dramatic aging of rich countries and the pressures of immigration on social solidarity will make it ever harder to ensure a fairly equitable distribution of net incomes. And on top of everything else, ongoing technological change might boost inequality in unpredictable ways, from more sophisticated automation that hollows out labor markets to genetic and cybernetic enhancements of the privileged human body.”
MAKING USA (and the world?) EQUAL AGAIN ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE
” Greatness remains in the eye of the beholder: making America more equal again will prove the more daunting challenge. Whereas incremental policy measures to shore up the fortunes of the middle class are both desirable and feasible, the past suggests there is no plausible way to vote, regulate, or teach society back to the levels of equality enjoyed by the postwar generation. History cannot predict the future, but its message is as unpalatable as it is clear: With the rarest of exceptions, great reductions in inequality were only ever brought forth in sorrow.”
The author has a stance of infinite wisdom that is so authoritative that it should be obvious to the most ignorant reader before he venrures into this article. Sadly, I am not privy to that, so I had to give up, despairing of ever finding out why everyone but the author is so despicable. I wish he had put his cards on the table.
Hi Sarz,
One thing I feel I can say with total authority is this:
Reading Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ is just awful. It’s one total insult to the common man after another, and then with the most pathetic, toadying justifications. I wanted to give a different angle to view 1789 in this book, but trust me – it was painful.
So maybe his style rubbed off on me for this chapter?
Some writers like Burke, Voltaire, Kant … are so toxic one needs a PP2 mask – LOL!
Then you should read Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Y Cortes.
Burke is a flaming Anarchist rebel by comparison.
However, Burke clearly but only implicitly espouses the worldview of de Maistre, Donoso, Bonald, etc…
The author makes so many fundamental errors as to make his thesis questionable. Bank of England was formed by William of Orange in 1694 to fund wars for the English and the Dutch Republic. It is Not the oldest Central Bank – Bank of Sweden is older.
Assignats were hyper inflationary.
The Gold Standard existed until 1931. It had been suspended by the British Empire during WW1 and Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer stupidly returned to it at $4.8675 in 1925 creating huge deflation and poverty in interwar Britain. By 1931 it was unsustainable – especially with Invergordon Mutiny.
The US so-called Gold Standard was a partial Gold Standard with Bretton Woods Convertibility being into US dollars and only notionally into gold at $35/troy oz. which was unsustainable once US ran huge trade deficits from Vietnam War and excessively high spending relative to taxation.
US only held 16% global reserves and ran deficits which is required for any Reserve Currency issuer – it cannot be a reserve currency without trade deficits so foreigners acquire reserves.
Love the Yellow Vest quotes! Really brings the past back to life.
No idea why “natural” laws are so adored by so many. They seem totally inhuman to me.
socialism, which modern conservatives falsely conflate with totalitarianism
Falsely? Read Robert Tressell’s 1914 classic, The Ragged-trousered Philanthropists. Socialism is described and defined in detail in chapter 45. No private ownership of land; the state owns it all. No private trading of any kind; whatever you produce, you must sell to the state, and whatever you need, you must buy from the state. No saving up for your old age; the state will pay you a pension. Your very children are not your own; they belong to the state. No, thank you!
Traducteur: You offer such a distorted understanding of socialism I can only conclude that you have been schooled in the American capitalist caricature of socialism. You posit the State as some alien institution standing over and above the people. Some sort of separate entity all of its own. That is not socialism at all but a caricature.
In socialism the state is not alienated from the people but lives colorfully as its organic living representative. The state is responsive to and representative of the spontaneous and natural social creativity of the people. In socialism the state and the people are a functioning and creative organic unity. In socialism one finds the joy of engaged social participation. It is the creativity of democratic social connectedness. Socialism is “social.” In socialism the people feel the well being and happiness of sharing in their own self creativity at all levels of being.
Now this must include balancing individual rights and spirituality – the key as always is building a culture that knows how to hold individual and social liberty in balance. And that culture can only arise from an authentic spiritual core.
Any 1914 “classic” can only have an infantile vision of socialism as at that time socialism itself was still in its infancy. The reactionary drive is to strangle socialism in its cradle, and then once it is bleeding and half dead to then criticize its deformation. It is a deliberate reactionary strategy to place socialist states under so much external terroristic pressure that it forces them into a defensive posture – and then they can be accused of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. It is the Alice in Wonderland game of who decides what the words mean. That is Burke’s job for the English.
It appears your perspective is vulnerable to this reactionary distortion. Perhaps you could ask why are the Chinese so generally happy and trusting of their Govt. Because they do not feel alienated from it perhaps.
The whole purpose of socialism is to remove the alienation that exists between the Government and the people. Not to codify it.
Ramin is to be respected because in his poetic Persian intellect he takes much of this for granted and perhaps feels it to be too obvious to need explaining.
Wrongthink! Twenty years in a political re-education camp for you, mate.
There’s nothing more characteristically socialist than that.
The author is too smart by half.
” In the 21st century technocrats and meritocracy’s allegedly-deserving victors denounce a new intelligentsia: that of the masses, which is found on Facebook, social media, blogs, etc., which dare to contradict the mainstream media of sacred Western Liberal Democracy, which is – in fact – actually being run ever so well by the establishment’s elite.”
What a bunch of hogwash and crap! This site was interesting primarily because it wasn’t full of BS. Wrong or right, nobody was intentionally gaslighting anyone.
But this dude wants us to think Facebook and social media are heroic voices contradicting the mainstream? LOL!
What a moron! If you believe that, you’d believe Zelensky is a freedom fighter.
Get real. How did this guy’s liberal/progressive BS get onto this site?
You seem to think he meant all social media platforms, when in fact it only has to be first one to contradict, and secondly, the msm are very good at speedily directing the sheep to the desired mind frame, which unbeknownst to the msm, happens to be a steep cliff rather than the eternal gold mine.
Unbeknownst to the MSM?!
Surely you jest.
Wow, thats a lot of words to say nothing.
All you need to understand is that “conservatism”, or the right, views the smallest unit of society as the family, while the left views it as the individual.
If you cant see the problems inherent in the latter, you will forever be buying long winded novellas and lyrically verbose explainations while everything just keeps getting worse.
And even then the left effectively erases the individual so they can make the “new man.”
https://russian.rt.com/business/news/981035-cb-ogranichenie-sredstva-nedruzhestvennye-strany
So Russia has frozen the same amount of foreign money from unfriendly countries. 300 bilions of dollars.
1:1
Those sanctions are so stupid, it is beyond my comperhension.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this author squares his anti-conservatism with his calling Napoleon a leftist revolutionary. I thought the leftist stance was that Napoleon killed the French revolution.
Quite a takedown of Burke, but Burke is hard to get through. He’s like Marx in that they’re two hard to read guys who nobody really reads.
I tried reading Burke once. Never got passed that first chapter. I’d attempted to read it along with Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” But, very quickly decided that I was in no mood to give equal weight to both sides because Paine was obviously right and the evil English conservatives were, as usual, very, very wrong.
So, I read the beginning of Burke’s tome, but quickly put it down for the far superior ideas of Paine.
There are so many conservatives on this site from the English-speaking world – is anyone going to offer a rebuttal of this assessment?
I’m not a conservative, and I know Burke is huge with them. I’d like to hear it. It doesn’t look good for him, per Mazaheri.
Never seen Burke mentioned in this context in America. That’s my rebuttal. But cuckservatism sucks anyway. Need more rollbackism.
People overlook the fact that absolutist, “theocratic” monarchies centralise power as much as their financier-dominated successors.
In fact, during the medieval ages monarchs were merely the first among equal sovereigns, the nation-state itself being unknown in an age of feudal landowners and tribal nomads.
The rise of mercantilism and capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages led to the rise of centralised kingdoms and empires that eventually gave way to fascist, nationalistic, and eventually globalist dictatorships dominated by capital (Mammon).
The Czarist Russian despotism since Ivan IV on was no exception to this, and apologists for the Romanovs and their ilk fail to acknowledge that the Tsars were merely parasites who enslaved the formerly free nobility, the original Christians (and Muslims, Jews, …) who were truly free.
It was those very unChristian emperors, kings, autocrats, et al. who at the end of feudalism (medievalism) set up state churches, state banks, standing armies, salaried police, rational bureaucracies, tariffs, stock exchanges, shares, joint stocks, bourgeois “marriage,” modern entertainment, and so on in order to enslave the multicultural humans (free men), the true believers, under the guise of capitalism.
These criminals banned polygamy, enforced prohibition, replaced the divine Law (natural law) with phoney “constitutions,” so-called “divine right,” state-sponsored terrorism, murder of “heretics,” criminalisation of nomadism, replacement of gold, silver, and barter with “national” currencies, wars on drugs, disarmament of the masses, worship of the police and standing army, blasphemous notions such as triune gods, feminism, women’s “liberation,” sodomy, racism, chauvinism, Jew-baiting, Red-baiting, and so on.
The real enemy of mankind is the state, and the foundation of the state lies on capital (capitalism).
Only statist ideologues enamoured of various idols fixate on imagined foreign and domestic “threats” such as migrants in an age in which the family unit is being destroyed and birth rates are plummeting even among the most fecund and “savage” peoples such as Somalis, Afghans, and so on.
The vicious rightwing propaganda campaign against so-called Jewish Bolshevism is just a final rearguard attempt by the New World Order to distract the masses before sending them off, microchipped, to concentration camps.
The White Guards of the Russian Civil War were NOT the heroes, but the very puppets of foreign forces.
The notion that the Bolsheviks were Illuminati puppets fails to explain the fact that the Anglo-French interventionists continued blockading Russia’s ports on the Black Sea until the very end of 1920 and were providing the Whites extensive armaments, munitions, etc. up until Wrangel’s forces were forced out of Crimea.
The Entente + global capitalism bankrolled EVERY anti-Red conspiracy from the very first days of the October Revolution until the assassinations of Stalin and Beria in 1953.
These forces killed off the actual Reds and turned the USSR/Russia into a fascist state that remains fascist since Stalin’s death.
By fascist, I mean “ruled by capital” (oligarchs) rather than the masses.
This is systemic and goes beyond single individuals such as Putin, however well-meaning.
The same goes for the West and the globalised South.
I’ve never heard of Burke in reference to American “conservatism.” However, I have heard cucksevatives decry the violence of the French revolution and never understood why they thought it was so horrible for a few elites to lose their heads. I’ve always looked at it as every nation has the right to their own business so if that’s how the French decided to do it, that’s their business. Decrying how bloody the French revolution was as if the American revolution or war for independence shed no blood is laughable; and then the only reason that it didn’t end with the king’s head on a chopping block I imagine is that he was separated from the colonies by an ocean. Had ole king George or whatever his name was been reigning in New York or Philadelphia then I have no doubt he would have been indignantly marched to a guilotine or a gallows. Such is war, isn’t it?
Russell Kirk, the 20th century father of American conservatism, quotes Burke extensively.
Kirk is pure Burke – very influential among genuine American conservatives who actually love America and don’t just listen to talk radio. You can see from this article how much Kirk took from Burke, but he did put it into modern terms at least.
Kirk developed six “canons” of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:
A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
An affection for the “variety and mystery” of human existence;
A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize “natural” distinctions;
A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
James,
Neither Burke nor Kirk applies to the average, vulgar, media-consuming America “conservative” who listens to prepackaged, prefabricated, “rightwing” (Zionist) talk radio and FOX presentations and as a result issues forth blanket condemnations of intellectualism and elitism merely because the “woke” globalists have sullied American institutions such as higher education, the military, etc.
In turn the faithful fools advocate bombastic, neocon-style, flag-waving bigotry toward foreign and domestic “foes,” especially foreign, Zionist-targeted scapegoats such as “Communist” China and Iran/(Shia) Islam, both of which are despised by the evangelical Establishment; just look at how many Trump supporters blamed China rather than Gates and Fauci for the COVID-19 scam.
The average American “conservative” vulgarian is just as hostile toward natural hierarchy as the “woke” liberal fascist, because America has always lacked the stabilising rôle that monarchy and aristocracy traditionally played in Europe, even though the American revolutionaries were indebted to the legacy of England and her organic order. Evangelicalism levelled the old, “high” order.
One can thank evangelicalism for social experiments such as Prohibition, abolitionism, and feminism (on the “liberal” side) as well as Zionist PSYOPs and scams such as the Prosperity Gospel and Israel-first “end-times” prophecy (on the “conservative” side) in the Anglo-Saxon world, while introducing a low, debasing eschatology that equates the will of the market with Divine Will.
Moreover, if the foundation itself is unsound, then a system whose soteriology is based on a lie (i.e., a wrong notion about the nature of the Divine) in effect makes fools of the faithful, that is, of its members, however much the illusion conforms to the organic pattern of society and its hierarchies. Look at the wars between Christendom and Islam that centred on the nature of the Deity.
A society that produces paid actors on the “right” such as Rush Limbaugh (“Muslims bad, Joe Plummer Redneck good”), Phyllis Schlafly (that paragon of “conservative” motherhood who gets involved in politics while donning a Mao jacket and posing as a “conservative”), and Ronald Reagan (was he a man or a synthetic PR image?)—to not mention tenured “liberal” shills in academia…
…well, it is very clear that such a society is clearly not the America envisaged by Burke or Kirk!
Such a society is based solely on marketing and transience, not permanence. It is entirely fake. Nothing is more fraudulent and shallow than the rise of “conservative” women and token GOP “minorities” to engage in virtue-signalling politicking “owning the libs” rather than submitting to their duties as housewives and shoeshiners! It is entirely inconsistent and inconsonant.
It is like the fake “white nationalist” appealing to Martin Luther King Jr. as a role model for civic activism.
Anyway, the whole appeal to mysterious “natural hierarchies” is entirely alien to a capitalist culture that is based solely on quantification and empiricism. “Conservative” attempts to meld “innovation” with “tradition and custom” inevitably lead to the distortion and reconfiguration of the latter while aggrandising the rôle of the former. “Tradition and custom” does not mix with capitalism.
Capitalism is based on rationalism, to the detriment of the sacred order. Capitalism engenders modern science, which undermines religion, the wellspring and offspring of “tradition and custom.” The forces that led to the rise of capitalism also led to the heliocentric theory, which undermined the entire Abrahamic, medieval worldview that posited a flat, still, domed Earth at the cosmic centre.
The wealthy Jewish merchants buttressed figures such as Maimonides, who in turn developed a mechanistic view of the universe that posited “natural laws,” which the traditional Jewish medievalists found to be detrimental to the supernatural worldview, that of a universe infused with the Divine presence and numerous invisible agencies such as spirits, angels, and so on. Mechanism is capitalistic.
The oxymoron “Intellectual takeout” is only possible under capitalist degradation.
I think that you suffer from ” Jew on the brain” Daniel, and that you are a reactionary, what with your hints of the ” stabilizing” nature of monarchy and aristocracy. I used to think as you do: I know it when I see it.
That’s not to say on other issues than those that you aren’t correct, and I don’t mean the muslim ones, but rather on Capitalism and the pre modern view.
Hi Daniel,
saying “Neither Burke nor Kirk applies to the average, vulgar, media-consuming America ‘conservative'” is like saying Marx doesn’t apply to the average American “liberal” fake-leftist. Both these thinkers matter and have enormous repercussions today – it’s rather historical nihilism to suggest two such huge figures don’t.
Look at that list of Kirk: it’s the exact same things I quoted from Burke’s book! I mean, it is practically plagiarism, that’s how much Burke has endured today with conservatives.
The essence of Burke is still there with the average American, period, whether “conservative ” or ” liberal “. Nothing more than superficial camouflage is allowed to disturb the workings of the system at large.
Hi Vladimir,
Thanks for the good discussions. I agree – Burke has persisted because Anglo-American culture is so pro-monarchy, pro-elitist and still anti-1789. They assume because they defend the very end of feudalism that they are the leaders of progressive thought – they are like a runner in a race who has been almost lapped and thinks he’s leading.
The autocracy of the Macron era has been so flaming that I hope this book reminds people that the West’s collusion with autocracy is not some harmless anachronism but still destroys their own communities… again!
Pointing out the still-existing link between the two – Burke does still matter, LOL – justly brings to the fore the great pro-democratic (thus pro-socialist) revolutions of 1789, 1917, 1979, etc. and the Yellow Vests.
You’re most welcome Mr. Maziheri, I have always read your articles with great interest. Not least reason, because of your insight that the West is still essentially Fuedal in interior belief. I would say also- still essentially pagan, with a pagan way of life untouched by any Monotheistic religion whether consciously regarded by the Western individuals as true or false or not. Religious belief demands a total way of life, and Monotheism tends toward Socialism and Democracy, whether the Iranian Shia experience, the Orthodox Christian Cossack hetmanate and Old Believer community, and so forth, from what I’ve seen. I’ll be interested for sure in further chapters, especially for me with Cromwell and Napoleon. Thanks again
Burke is basically a pussycat compared to the arch-conservatives of his contemporary Europe. He is relatively liberal which is why Anglos like him.
Burke can present the same content without the outcry that the others can produce.