I wish I could find that article, but no luck. My fellow monarchists may be able to help me find it.
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Posted on 01/03/2005 6:44:43 AM PST by JFK_Lib
I know we have all heard about how bad religion is for starting wars. But when you read the details about the wars, it is not surprising to me any more to discover that the real cause was economic or political and the religious aspect was brought in merely to motivate the people to give the war higher priority in their daily lives.
Most often the so-called ware would have happened even if there were no religious differences of significance. Foir example Protestant England and Protestant Scotland propbably fought each other just as ferociously and violently as England has fought Ireland, and the Catholic Irish have not had a single war to my knowledge with Protestant Scotland despite the manifold wars with England.
Again, most often religion is used as a catalyst but is not the instigating factor. Had Ireland been as Calvinist as Geneva, the English still would have done exactly the same things they ever did to and in Ireland. So why is that conflict refered to as a war of religion?
The French and English wars also involved religious differences, even when both nations were Catholic. During the Great Schism, the English supported one Pope and the French the other they had caged in Avignon. So some say those were wars of religion also, but the English ahd plenty of reason to invade France (like the simple fact that they could) and the religious differences regarding which Pope they gave loyalty to was the product of the political/economic factors involved, so even the religious differences were, at root, political.
I think that there were very few wars where the rulers actually went to war primarily because of religious differences.
But we will never hear the end of secularists rants about it as it is a convenient polemical club, no matter how mythical.
I wish I could find that article, but no luck. My fellow monarchists may be able to help me find it.
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Interesting; I hope you find the article.
I still think that there is a qualitative difference in claiming that a war is religiously instigated on one hand and religion was used as a catalyst on the other. The former might be partly attributed to 'religious wars' but certainly not the latter. If such things could be so attributed, then how many wars of science or wars of secularism or wars of democracy could one claim?
As a monarchist it seems patently obvious to me that democratic idealogy has been at the root of all major conflicts in the last 300 years, perhaps longer. Democracies are inherently more aggressive and pit whole states against each other leading to the concept of "total" war of population on population. You can thank the French revolution for bringing this idea back to the West. This thesis is at the core of Hans Hermann-Hoppe's most recent work on the production of security. Summarized in The Myth of National Defense .
One of the essays from that compilation is Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Monarchy and War
A related essay (that I have not yet completely studied)called War is the Health of the State takes on the question of all states.
"No King but Christ" was not just a catchy slogan.
William Tyndale/French Huguenots/Chinese Christians/Foxe's Book of Martyrs BUMP.
If 'at the root' you mean democracy was a catalytic factor, then I agree and I think this helps explain some of the inclination to mass murder in the 20th century. But I dont think that anyone *started* a war for democracy, though they may have fought a war harder for it.
Democracies are inherently more aggressive and pit whole states against each other leading to the concept of "total" war of population on population.
I disagree that democracies are more aggressive. What five examples can you point to where actual popular, multiparty democracies have started a war without provocation? We declared war on Japan while they claimed to want peace because they attacked us at Pearl Harbor. So to disallow such cases I have to prefix my request to those wars started by democracies unprovoked.
Tell that to Kuwait.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Napoleonic France promised to "remove your tyrants and ensure they never come back"
America's entry into WWI was explicitly to further the idealogical goal of "making the world safe for democracy".
Daily we are told our mission in Iraq is to bring them democracy.
"What five examples can you point to where actual popular, multiparty democracies have started a war without provocation"
1) War of Northern aggression against the Confederacy.
2) Mexican-American war
3) Germany - World War II (Weimar republic was a multi-party democracy that elected Hitler)
4) US attack on Bosnia
5) France attack on Algeria
Those are just off the top of my head. Got a hard question? LOL
Ahh the intrepid Lord Acton.
The only absolute power is that of a democratically elected politican with a "mandate". The most heinous absolutist monarch would never have dared to relieve their population of 40%-50% + of their income or reach into the home and remove children from the family or tell employers who they could hire and what they could pay them or tell citizens how they could use their land much less dare to tax the citizen for living on his own property!
We live in a totalitarian society where virtually every act is influenced by laws passed in your "free democracy", and you don't even know it. That's managerial liberalism for you - bread and circuses too keep the population mollified.
De nile..... a river in Egypt.
KJ-"Ahh the intrepid Lord Acton."
Actually this isn't scriptural. I was quoting the theme of Shakespeare's play, Macbeth.
BTW-I would never claim this society to be free and the concept of freedom is becoming less and less.
Historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) issued epic warnings that political power is the most serious threat to liberty.
Born in Naples, he was educated in England, Scotland, France and Germany, developing an extraordinary knowledge of European political history.
While he never wrote the history of liberty he dreamed about, his essays and letters abound with memorable insights. For instance: "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, Lord Acton told students: "I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong."
The Acton Institute follows his work
" It is bad to be oppressed by a minority; but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist .But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason." (1877)
Or as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote "Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic. " ( Liberty or Equality, 1952
I’m not sure I would agree with Lord Acton’s statement you've provided. It is rather confusing with all due respect. Webster defines oppression as:
1 a : unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power b : something that oppresses especially in being an unjust or excessive exercise of power
Oppression is oppression whether it is done by a minority or a 51% majority. If 99% of the people feel one way and you don’t, that isn’t “cruel exercise of authority or power” in my mind. So if 51% of the people are in favor of something are they oppressing the other 49%? Not necessarily.
You made the claim “Democracies are inherently more aggressive”. I find nothing to support that claim.
INTREP - Politics - WORLDVIEW
Ah, kj, if those are examples of a democracy starting an unprovoked war, and I think they are not, then we are too far apart on the subject to really discuss it and accomplish much.
But, relating to monarchism, do you think that there is a possibility that this obsession with democratic selection has reached its apogee and might begin to recede? I think it may have in theory, though it is continuing on past momentum to displace authoritarian/totalitarian regimes.
I think some kind of traditional republic will become the focus in the near future, with a division of powers and permanent laws/institutions safeguarding the processes of the republic involved.
I suspect that Britains democracy, for example, has too much power concentrated in the House of Commons. To return the right of disapproving new laws to the House of Lords as well as removing from the HoC the right to make new peers, would be a positive change for Britain.
Also I think the monarchy could fill a role of sort of a permanent Inspector General who could appoint special investigators to look into scandals, corruption and intelligence failures. Why not, with the wealth of the monarchy, what monarch would allow themselves to become corrupted or swayed by gifts?
Do you think such plausible?
Mass democracy is unsustainable, as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote the goal of elections is to win the idealogical struggle and once it is won completely you have one party rule. We are approaching that here in America were the Democrat and Republicans represent really only two wings of the same liberal, statist idealogy.
This process results in plebescite dictatorship (or Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat) and always in tyranny.
Tyranny however can be legitimized by tradition, a hereditary dictatorship acquires prima facie legitimacy over time and may develop into an authentic, traditional monarchy which starts the cycle all over again .
(Plato's cycle is monarchy -> aristocracy -> oligarchy -> democracy -> tyranny) think some kind of traditional republic will become the focus in the near future, with a division of powers and permanent laws/institutions safeguarding the processes of the republic involved.
A republic is the ideal of democracy, it is probably unsustainable except under very rigorous conditions such as those that existed at the founding of America or in classical Athens- ethnically homogenous, agrarian societies with a highly educated land-owning aristocracy.
Plato had some good ideas, but I am not certain that we should give him more weight than the ideas he espoused themelves deserve. His model of the cosmos was a bit wanting and might suggest that he reached unsupported conclusions here and there. His take on the cycle of goevernments (which I was aware of, thanks tho) may be another such case of unwarranted assumption.
I like the idea of a republican form of government (meaning a government that has multiple institutions of significant power implying a division of power) that selects most of its top officers in the legislature and the top executive by democratic means. This division of power, central to the Founding Fathers concept of what you might call a sustainable republic, is what is lacking in most of the democracies established in the last century and ahalf, with Britain being the primary example of this.
So I wont defend Britains unicameral democracy as I think it abhorant, though lesser than say Stalinism or Fascism, though capable of as much abuse.
But I do think the principle of Democratic Republicanism is valid and sustainable as long as the people maintain their virtue.
History would dispute this conclusion but nonetheless your last point is the problem with secular (or in Plato's case pagan) democracy. When ultimate authority is vested "in the people" they will use it! As the explosion in positive law in the last 150 year attests. Relgiously based, monarchial governments were built on the idea they did not create law, law preceded the state. It is parliaments that "create" law (or Congress in the case of the US), monarchs acted as "judges of final appeal" in keeping with the state mission as a monopoly on final decision making. The law was eternal and could not be changed , this of course became the error of absolutist monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries but even with the abuses of the likes of George III and Louis XIV law never became a thing to be changed on a whim or based on popular opinion. It was to these absolutist monarchs the founding fathers of America were (over)reacting to, when they threw the baby out with the bathwater in 1776. Religiously pluralistic societies where the state is "neutral" or those where the monarch is the head of the state Church are inherently problematic. It was the expectations of the American founders that the generic piety of the populace would indirectly affect public policy while the government remained officially agnostic. As I consider 45 million murdered and innocent children, pornography as the norm in the media, 70% illegitmacy rates in some populations, 2 million citizens in prisons and rampant drug/alcohol abuse, often glamorized in the media - I doth solemnly proclaim that little theory a dismal failure . A failure that shouldn't suprise anyone since it is simply history repeating itself.
Monarchs have a long time-preference, to use the same language of economics that Hoppe uses. Monarchs look to create legacies and pass on their status to their heirs, whereas elected officals have a short time preference. They have a limited time as "caretakers" of something that does not belong to them. It is obvious that those who own something take better care of it than those who are only charged with its for a short time. There are exceptions in both directions, selfish and egotistical monarchs as well as virtuous legislators but it is far more likely to have a virtous King or even one that is a harmless dilitatte than to have a good man elected to high office. The political process of democracies makes it virtually impossible. Even in the American system where legistlators may remain in office for decades they do not own the office and cannot pass it on to their children.
Monarchies have the benefit of accountability (oddly enough, depite Jabocin rhetoric to the contrary) - in a monarchy everyone knows they are not the government and any act of the monarch is held to the highest suspicion as opposed to the illusion of participatory government in democracies. In 12 centuries of monarchism in Europe (dating from the cornation of Charlemange in 800 AD) tax rates never exceeded 10%, conscription for military service of the state didn't exist until after the Napoleonic wars and wars were fought as isolated squabbles between Kings using mercenary armies and rarely affecting the common populace at all.
In the last 80 years since the collapse of the remains of the ancien regime Europe has seen 2 devastating wars with tactics of mass destruction and genocide being the norm, as well as many small wars and America has virtually remained at state of perpetual war since 1941!
The 20th century was the century of democratization and the world has never seen a more bloody 100 years, the governments of "liberal" states killed more of their own people last century than were alive at the time of Christ! The agency that is supposed "provide for the common defense" and "secure these rights" has been responsible for incessant warfare and oppression. Why is this? Given that it is in the nature of the state to expand its scope and size and given the world has been completely parceled out (with the exception of Antartica, and who'd want it!) how do "publically-owned" democratic states grow? The answer is simple either thru consolidation, like the EU, or thru warfare.
On the other hand how do monarchial states grow? Marriage.
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