NOVAE MILITIAE

Traditionalist conservative attorney and blogger Jim Kalb, whom I have quoted before in this blog, has written a book entitled The Tyranny of Liberalism.  I'll be buying this book.  The Vital Remnants blog has a short review:

Here is Kalb's description of the general problem with what he calls the "politically correct managerial liberal regime" :

In a society that claims to be based on free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions--for example, those between the sexes--seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible.

What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, sometimes public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance.

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. "Discrimination and intolerance" are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties--sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings--on which independent, informal, traditional, and non-market institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.

Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses.

Vital interests writes, "Pay attention you conservatives out there who don't even realize you're liberals but really are."  Amen to that.

The Rebellion blog comments on the Vital Remnants piece:

Of course, when given the chance to implement their policies, leftists fail miserably. Communism is the ultimate example. The reason communism failed is that the complex network of interactions among people simply cannot be reduced to a formula that central planners can manipulate. There's just too much information being generated to gather and index.

Sadly, the left never learns from its mistakes. It continues to insist that its ideals are so noble and pure that they MUST be best for everyone. Any perceived failure MUST be attributed to a lack of proper enforcement and inadequate implementation.

"If we had only killed a few million more holdouts ..."

That last link goes to an article there at Rebellion that quotes Barry Obama's friend, the lefty terrorist Bill Ayers (who is widely reported to be the ghost writer of Dreams of My Father), as recounted by an FBI agent who interviewed him:

"The most bone-chilling thing Bill Ayers said to me was that after the revolution succeeded and the government was overthrown, they believed they would have to eliminate 25 million Americans who would not conform to the new order."

Which brings us back around to the work of Jim Kalb, who has written articulately about the inherent connections between the managerial liberal regime of today and the fascist regimes of the 1930s.  Liberal-lefties mean to control you, guys and gals, and to remake all of creation in their own warped image.  So stay tuned.  (And "keep your powder dry", as it were.)

For once he says something praiseworthy:

"I'm going to go hard left on you here, I'm going ACLU," syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said in opposition to the use of drones on the U.S. homeland. "I don't want regulations, I don't want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn't like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country."

"A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, we've got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but that's not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you're always under -- being watched by the government. This is not what we want," Krauthammer said on the panel portion of FOX News' "Special Report."

"I would say that you ban it under all circumstances and I would predict, I'm not encouraging, but I an predicting that the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country," Krauthammer said tonight.

"I would say the price of liberty. You can hear a helicopter, you can't hear a drone. You know, if you hear a helicopter you hide under a bush. Well, you can't with this which is why it's effective in Pakistan and elsewhere. It's deft and it's silent. I don't think we want a society where if there are the objects, hovering over streaming, real-time information about you, your family, your car, your location," Krauthammer said later in the segment.

"It's not worth it," he said.

"The Founders we're deeply opposed to the militarization of civil society. There is all kinds of aversions to it and this is importing it because, as you say, it's cheap, it's easy, it's silent. It's something that you can easily deploy. It's going to be, I think the bane of our existence. Stop it here, stop it now," Krauthammer said at the end of the panel segment. "Strong letter to follow."

And you can be sure that folks with "Second Amendment weapons" are going to start shooting at these things.

H/T Dormitantius for alerting me to the pending release of a movie about the Cristero War in Mexico, which was waged in 1926-1929 by Catholic rebels against the secularist Mexican government because of its oppressive policies against the Catholic Church.  Though the trailers give me a bit of pause about the quality of acting in this movie, I intend to see it nevertheless.  This uprising of Catholic men constitutes one example of what I mean by "Muscular Christianity", though in this instance there were also some female Christan rebels who exhibited a lot of muscle against the so-called government.  Sic Semper Tyrannos.

Trailers:

against the depredations and violence of the ungodly, the insane and the jihadists (if you'll excuse that redundancy) with Blackwatch Threat Management Services, whose principals are two Anglican priests in California.

As secular society proceeds apace from bad to worse, Christian churches are increasingly at risk for various types of attacks, including violent ones.  One needed only to stay tuned to the internet today in order to observe the rhetorical violence coming from the left wing, and the corresponding potential for physical violence, in the wake of the passage of Amendment One in North Carolina and the defeat of the same-sex civil union bill in Colorado.  It may not be long before these violent firebreathers move from rhetoric to action.  The Church needs to be prepared, if it becomes necessary, to fight back like it did against murderous Spanish leftists in 1936.  Many liberal-lefties today are just that unhinged.

Many American churches (well, conservative ones anyway) have hired armed security guards, and others have a cadre of male congregants who are licensed to who carry concealed weapons and who do so in church just in case an insane or antiChristian gunman walks through the door.  Elsewhere in the world, churches are arming against radical Muslim foes.   (Click here to see a photo of the Rt. Rev. Brian Iverach, Episcopal Visitor to the Anglican Catholic Church's Diocese of Lahore, saluting a Pakistani Christian militiaman who is protecting the church from violent jihadists.  To read a blog entry by an Anglican Catholic priest about another Pakistani Christian militiaman guarding that church, click here.)

But I am especially thrilled to find out about Blackwatch, and I highly recommend this organization to the Church for protection training.

But of course they did.

Having read EKL's magisterial work Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time, I can say that Gairdner's summary is accurate:

Meanwhile, the whole fabric of our civilization is politically, and socially inextricable from monarchy, the fundamental purpose of which is plain. A European statesman explained it best when, in reply to Theodore Roosevelt's question: "What is the role of a Monarch?" he answered: "to protect nations from their governments." If we fail to see this, we see nothing.

For a monarchy can save democracy from what Austrian scholar Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn calls the "collective self-worship" that tends to blind us to truth, making democracy ripe for tyranny and eventually dictatorship. I am indebted to E.K.L. for his many observations. As he warns, any number of nations in history, starting with Greece itself - a democracy so alien to liberty it executed Socrates and exiled Aristotle - have swung wildly from democracy to tyranny, to monarchy, and back again.

And the first modern expression of democracy - the French Revolution - included the beheading of King Louis XVI, and ended with the massacre of a quarter million innocent French citizens, by then described by their own government as the "internal enemy." Louis was put to death - democratically, in the name of the General Will of the people - by an extremely divided assembly that voted 387 to 334 in favour of beheading him. There was nothing general about it.

Part of the difficulty is that we have learned to equate democracy with liberty. We should not. Democracy is merely a technique for allocating power, and as such it has often been used to impose oppressive regulatory regimes (our own), or even elect despots. Hitler was an example. While no system is perfect, defenders of monarchy argue it has much to recommend it as a method for containing just such excesses.

Unlike a democracy, which is based on divisive struggles for supremacy, and at every election becomes what E.K.L. calls "a solemn manifestation of division," (often producing "leaders" with only minority support), monarchy is above party rule. It is a unifying social as well as political principle for the whole nation, its people, and all political parties. Hence the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition." After all, one cannot be loyal to Parliament itself, which is inherently fractious.

The primordial model for monarchy, of course, is the natural family, the basic hierarchical social unit of all civilizations, and (despite the musings of the United Nations this year) the farthest thing from a democracy. This model forms a triad for all Christian societies of Holy Family, Royal family, secular family. And it is no happenstance that a coronation is a religious sacrament, for the most important forgotten truth about the divine right of kings is that monarchs were guided by publicly acknowledged duties to God and the natural law, and were severely limited by church and people to those duties. The reasoning here was that God cannot be fooled - but the people can.

But democracy is the reverse. Democracy derives its authority not from publicly acknowledged transcendent ideals, but from shifting ideals and anonymous, secretly voting masses, on a purely numerical basis; on the quantity of decicions, not their quality. Thus we arrive at history's first mass cult of irresponsibility, in which elected officials can easily blame the people for their failed mandates. And so - EKL again - for the first time in history, we get "the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, whether they had majority support, or not."

Hence the spectacle of self-righteous leaders plunging nation’s like Canada into bankruptcy and then receiving, not a jail term, but gold-plated pensions.

Perhaps we should think twice before we nuke the Duke.

Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison - C.S. Lewis

James Ramsey, correspondent to Virtue Online writing from London, concludes probably so, barring a radical program of re-evangelization in England.  "The Church of England is now a very short step from following precisely the same agenda as The Episcopal Church."

Those of us in churches that actually continue the Catholic faith of historic, orthodox Anglicanism are tempted to say, "good riddance."

("Canterbury Tales": A Continuing Anglican's continued commentary on the Anglican Communion.)

No more "blacklist" for the UK's finest.

Lawrence Auster comments: "It used to be a joke that the way PC was going, any term that used the word “black” in a negative sense, no matter how long the term had been a part of our language and no matter that it had nothing to do with black people, would be banned. Well, it’s happening."

My dear brethren in the UK: how long will it be before all of us realize just how crazy our PC elite handlers are?

"Obviously there's a lot of genuine non-racist criticism but... I think it's slightly alarming. . . . New Zealand's dark side is coming out, our discomfort with foreigners and Asian investors in particular. It's not something I've seen in my lifetime. Normally it's been about how much goods and services we're buying from Asia, now it's moved on to a different level."  (University of Otago politics lecturer Bryce Edwards)

It "borders on racism." (Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson)

Thus says New Zealand's politically correct elite.

But I suspect your average Kiwi knows better; that he's slowly but surely coming to a realization about the suicidal policies of New Zealand's PC elite --  in Labour AND National Party; that, despite the somewhat isolated and paradisiacal existence he enjoys there on those beautiful islands, "something is rotten in Denmark", and that he is involved in a greater existential struggle for the life of the West.

And that it's now time to do something.

Liberal-lefties and centre-righties and "The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia" yelling "racism" can just keep on yelling until they're blue in the face.  It doesn't work anymore.

"Ah yes, France.  Wonderful country.  Pity about the French."  (English saying)

As you might have seen from previous posts, I lean heavily Augustinian.  This is mainly because I think Augustine's theology more accurately reflects the soteriology of the New Testament, and especially Pauline soteriology.  In a nutshell, that soteriology is this:  we do not become Christians, or stay Christians, due to our own power.  God must graciously make us Christians, which is to say that faith is a gift, not something we exercise naturally.  Our coming to faith in Christ is quite supernatural, actually.  Some representative texts from St. Paul (bolded emphases mine): 

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; herein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.  But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:  That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.  For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:1-10, KJV)

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13, KJV)

And St. Augustine's favorite text:

. . . and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?  (I Cor. 4:7, KJV)

However, I am unwilling to draw certain of the same conclusions Augustine and some of his followers (especially the Calvinists) did.  It is quite clear from the New Testament, against the Calvinists and against certain things that even Augustine seemed to say concering the limited scope of the atonement, that Christ died for all men and that God therefore wills the salvation of all men.  But that does not commit me to a Pelagian, Semipelagian or Semipelgian-like conclusion that God has given all men free will and nervously looks down from heaven to see who among these "all" will take Him up on his offer and who will not.  There are other theological options.

But it's a difficult theological area, to be sure.  Trying to boil down either the Augustinian or the  Pelagian/Semipelagian/Semipelgian-like legacy rationally tends to land us in trouble.  But that doesn't mean we don't have a clear choice to make.  Augustine scholar Gerald Bonner summarizes the argument of the Anglo-Catholic scholar J.B. Mozley (bolded emphasis mine): 

In a study of Augustinian predestination first published in 1855, J.B Mozley, brother-in-law of John Henry Newman and later Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and Regius Professor of Divinity, theologically orthodox but fair-minded and aware of the limitations of the human intellect, noted the ideas of Divine Power and human free will, while sufficiently clear for the purposes of practical religion, are, in this world, truths from which we cannot derive definite and absolute systems. "All that we build upon either of them must partake of the imperfect nature of the premise which supports it, and be held under a reserve of consistency with a counter conclusion from the opposite truth." The Pelagian and Augustinian systems both arise upon partial and exclusive bases. Mozley held that while both systems were at fault, the Augustinian offends in carrying certain religious ideas to an excess, whereas the Pelagian offends against the first principles of religion: "Pelagianism . . . offends against the first principles of piety, and opposes the great religious instincts and ideas of mankind. It. . . tampers with the sense of sin. . . . (Augustine's) doctrine of the Fall, the doctrine of Grace, and the doctrine of the Atonement are grounded in the instincts of mankind."

In other words, to paraphrase Mozley, better to err in the direction of St. Augustine than Pelagius.  Augustine is a saint and doctor of the Church, and widely regarded to be the greatest of all the Church Fathers; Pelagius and the Semipelagians have been more or less judged by the Church to be the bearers of errant doctrine.  Augustine points us to the hope of grace, Pelagius to the hopelessness of free will and works salvation.  Augustine, following St. Paul, taught that the will was not free without grace, and even then needed the constant assistance of God's grace to choose daily to live the Christian life.  Salvation is not by works, but grace.  If anything is clear from the New Testament, it is that.

Long live Auggie.

Got to attend Mass today, which was good.  As always.

One of the reasons I love Touchstone is that gems like this one regularly appear in its pages:

A couple of years ago I was roused from my gardening by whoops and hollers across the street. Two boys were playing with a doll. They had laid a plank across a cinderblock, with the doll on one end of the plank; then they dropped another cinderblock on the other end of the plank, to see if they could catapult the doll over an eight-foot-high fence about thirty feet away. They called it High Flying Barbie. I roared with laughter, and advised them to shorten the front end of the plank so as to decrease Barbie's elevation but increase her distance.

Those boys give me hope. Truth will prevail, indeed has prevailed, though the world comprehendeth it not. And I know that the day is coming, and is at hand, when I shall see the Feminist Barbie, like all the other nature-denying, Creator-correcting experimenters against reality, sailing end over end through a cloudless sky, beyond the pale and into oblivion.  (October 2004, pp. 9-10)

(Walt Whitman)

Some of you may have detected what appears to be a contradiction in Bradwardine's political philosophy, namely, that I support monarchy and the American Revolution.  How is it that I can post this, but then also this?  Why the apparent disconnect?

Quite simple, actually.  While I hold that the American Revolution was probably unnecessary, as the depradations of George III and his Parliament look absolutely libertarian by today's liberal statist standards, part of what resulted from the Revolution might just turn out to be what we'll need to re-secure liberty in the future.  And what is that?  Simply this:  the resolve to remain an armed people and to resist tyranny.  And that's not a radical notion.  It wasn't radical in 1776, and it isn't radical today.  It is simply medieval Christian resistance theory, with roots as early and as venerable as St. Augustine, brought into the modern age.  Its manifestation in the American Revolution and in American libertarianism and conservatism today just might be what Albion's Seed, and Europeans at large, will need to draw upon in the future if they are to be free. 

Yes, the American rebels did throw off legitimate authority.  I believe they should have negotiated with England to come back under the monarchy whilst holding to their earned independence and constitutional principles, or at least created a monarchy here in the States rather than a republic. But little did anyone know, even then, that legitimate monarchical authority was being slowly but surely overthrown everywhere in Europe by an even worse foe, the radical humanist spawn of the "Enlightenment" that would everywhere supplant monarchy and republic, that execrable centralist monster the "liberal state."  It was then supplanting monarchy (even if it left it standing as something of a museum piece), and it would soon supplant America's conservative republic.  But though America's republic was thus undermined, the fighting republican spirit that was informed by Christian resistance theory still lives here in these States, like it lives nowhere else.  There are literally millions upon millions upon millions of Americans who are armed to the teeth, and who will not go down without a fight.  Our liberal statists know this.  They know as well that they can never disarm these many millions of gun owners, and that an armed populace is their worst enemy.  They are therefore seeking the upper hand via technology:  new crowd control weaponry, drones, internet surveillance, and who knows what else.  But as analysts such as John Robb have shown, an increasingly technological state is an increasingly brittle state.  "Global guerrillas" around the world are showing just how easy it is to monkeywrench this technology, and thus "hollow out" states that wield it.

If England, Canada, the States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe are to be free, they must catch America's rebel republican spirit - which shows signs of being a somewhat chastened republican spirit and may morph back into the old medieval anarcho-monarchical spirit one of these days - and simply resolve to no longer be governed by people who are not competent to govern, namely the ne'er-do-wells at the helm of our respective liberal states.  And that means a wllingness to fight if necessary, as did the American rebels of 1776, and as did the American rebels of 1861 after them, who fought the "Yankees", the soldiers of America's fledgling liberal state.

So what will it be, lads?  "Who's with us?"

Look what those New Yorkers have been up to. They have a brand new skyscraper and they’ve named their building ‘Freedom Tower’ – in a city that is home to the Federal Reserve, the United Nations and Wall Street. It’s a city that regulates how much salt can be put in your food and pretty much every other aspect of your life. Hardly a beacon of liberty. The Empire State Building was named more honestly.  (Southern Nationalist Network)

Eat the dogs: Lil Prez shows signs of going off the deep end.

Here.

I'd say he's more like Richard III, going down in flames like the king here, but that's just me.

Two hours, three movies.  In keeping with my longstanding promise to bring you only the BEST music videos.  Good background music for any long project on the old 'puter.  The other night I listened to it while I put together a cheat sheet for our church's acolytes from Ritual Notes and Abp. Haverland's Anglican Catholic Faith and Practice.

I have to say that Howard Shore, the composer of the LOTR scores, has out-Wagnered Wagner with this music.  Enjoy.

some of us pay homage to Old Europe and the Catholic imagination it spawned.  Here we have the poetry of Tolkien set to Howard Shore's enchanting score for The Hobbit.  Compare and contrast to "Children of the Rainbow" set to ukulele (see post below):