Posted on 10/08/2001 1:57:12 PM PDT by Zviadist
Zviadist, Tell it to the Pope.
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A fundamental law of the Holy Roman Empire; probably the best known of all the many ordinances of the imperial diet. It takes its name from the golden case in which the seal attached to the document proclaiming the decree was placed.
The law was signed by the Emperor Charles IV, January, 1356, during the Diet of Nuremberg, and was revised at the Diet of Metz in November of the same year. The contents of the Bulla Aurea were of constitutional importance for the empire. It ordained that each emperor should be chosen by election, the right of voting being vested in electoral princes, the number of whom was fixed at seven. As electors the edict appointed, on the one side, the three ecclesiastical princes most closely connected with the history of the empire i.e. the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. On the other side, the law settled the question, as far as it was still in dispute, as to whether the electoral vote pertained to certain secular principalities or to certain ruling families. It ordained that the right belonged to Bohemia, the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony (Sachsen-Wittenberg), and the Mark of Brandenburg; this made the secular electors the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Saxony, and Margrave of Brandenburg.
The Bull also defined the powers given by the imperial constitution to the electors, taken as a body, and to certain individual electors separately, both during a vacancy of the throne and during an imperial reign. Thus the document granted to the electors in their character as rulers of principalities certain privileges which had been originally reserved to the German king and emperor and were the signs of his sovereignty. The transfer of these rights to subordinate rulers would, necessarily, gradually make them independent of the head of the empire. The Bull also provided for the preservation of peace in the empire and enacted measures for holding in check the increasing political importance of the rising free cities. In the main the law was intended to confirm rights which had already had a historical development and to settle disputed details of these rights. Constitutional law in the Holy Roman Empire reached its full growth between the years 1220 and 1555. As to the position of the "Golden Bull" in connection with this development, see GERMANY.
MARTIN SPAHN
Transcribed by Joseph P. Thomas.
Source: New Advent; Catholic Encyclopedia
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My point is that, with the Golden Bull, Hungary had a kind of representative democracy 550 years BEFORE the United States even existed. End of story.
Now just what in your feverish imagination can you find in the Golden Bull that is remotely related to representative Democracy? Here’s a link to the actual text Fordham University Medieval Source Book See if you can find me one word in there about the unalienable rights of man. It gave rights to Princes --- seven of them! I especially loved the part about the princes get to own every gold, silver, tin and salt mine and they get to tax Jews all they want. A real piece of enlightened thinking here.
It's not bad enough that you spout revisionist history on recent events, but to go back 7 centuries -------------
Only if they tried to cross the Atlantic. Wile we were surely capable, I really don't think the US would have sent troops to invade Europe if Britain were not threatened. If Britian had done the logical and reasonable thing in 1940 after Dunkurk --- that is reached a peace deal with Hitler --- Russia, IMHO, would have been crushed and Hitler would have had his 1000 year Reich. The US would have smashed him if he tried to cross the Atlantic, but other than that, we would have let him have Europe. If you want to give credit to anyone for preventing that, I nominate Winston Churchill. That tough old bastard simply would not give up and he rallied his people around him when they had virtually no hope. He bought time for civilization. He was the number 1 hero of the 20th Century in my book.
You make a good point about Western European political and economic traditions that would have made it hard for them to be fully drawn into the Soviet orbit. But Germany, East and West, is the example that I think weakens your argument. After only one generation under different systems what was one people became and remain 10 years after reunification, two entirely different peoples. Cultural and economic traditions can only survive for so long and they can only withstand so much stress. It will take a generation to truly reunify Germany. (Then, the French better watch out. ;~))
As to East and West germany: communism is a doctrine that aims to destroy any allegiance among the population to anything other than the party-state. Impose it on any country, religion, or whatever and you get very similar results. After all, you find hardly any muslim in Albanie nowadays; they are all materialist atheists (and a lot more that can't be said in polite conversation). Yet, even the East-German commies had a hard time eradicating all 'old, christian, bourgeois traditions' of the population, so quite some of it survived. Still, it is true that the gap between the two parts is still huge. It is, in fact, one nation separated by a common language.
And that took only one generation. It is amazing. As an American I have an in-born trust for the inherent strengths and basic goodness my culture, warts and all. But I do realize how fragile it is and how easily it can be lost. That is what has drawn me more than anything to the conservative side of politics and strong opposition to the various new age intellectuals and historical revisionists (see above with Zavatist) that infest so much of the Western world's media and academia. They are truly dangerous people. I recommend a recently published biography to you: John Adams by David McCullough. Adams, more than anyone I can think of, represents the intellectual spirit of both America and the Western world. He is well worth studying to understand what we are fighting for and against today.
I have to sign off now. I’m making a run to my local Pub to make sure there are no terrorists there. Talk to you later.
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