Posted on 09/04/2007 10:08:28 PM PDT by B-Chan
The sickness of the Great Revolution began an eternity ago, in that great realm outside of time and space, with Lucifer's haughty non serviam spat into the Face of God. 214 years ago today, on 5 September 1793, came the inevitable culmination of this sickness: the Reign of Terror. The Terror is an example of what happens when a nation's traditions — its hierarchy, its natural aristocracy, its culture, and its religion — are forcibly removed and replaced by an artificial power structure, a democratically-elected leadership, a synthetic culture, and a materialist belief system. Revolution is the cancer of nations. It is a disease that victimizes a nation.
In this case, the victim nation was France. Acting on behalf of Liberty and Reason, and in the name of the People, rogue cells composed of certain soi-disant freedom fighters appeared within the body politic of the French nation in the summer of 1793. Mutated by exposure to the ideas of the humanist "enlightement", these rogue cells invaded and killed the crowned head of the nation, made war on the guardian cells of the nobility, established a completely new metabolism via a "reformed" calendar and legal system, and attempted to destroy the very life blood of France — the practice of worshipping God. By the time the sickness had run its course, some twenty to forty thousand persons had been murdered by the new atheistic state — all in the defense of Democracy, Liberty and Reason.
It didn't last, but the damage was done. Just over one year later, the cancer of the Terror was surgically removed — by means of the guillotine. In the end, the rogue cells were themselves victims of the societal illness they had created, but by then it was too late to repair the damage. The nation had been shattered, and, despite his fevered successes, not even Napoleon could put France back together again. It remains today a spiritual cripple among the nations.
Our nation, too, was born from revolution — in fact, the American Revolution of 1776 was a tremendous inspiration for the French revolutionists of 1793. Although different in its execution, our revolution proceeded from the same intellectual bases that drove the reign of terror: the supremacy of the popular will in matters of government, the enshrinement of materialist Reason and individual Liberty as the twin deities of the nation; and a desire to overturn the world system and create a novus ordo seclorum, a "new order of the ages".
We Americans managed to overthrow our government without recourse to tumbrils and the guillotine. Our revolution survived by proceeding slowly; rather than chopping off the head of Tradition, our conspirators chose to administer the slow poison of legislated regicide instead. One by one, the traditional pillars of our American civilization have been worn away by the drip, drip, drip of legislative, judicial, and executive action, replaced by secular, artificial frameworks. The fact that the United States has remained a decent place to live for so long is a testament to the resistance of the body politic to the poison of Revolution. The fact that our traditions are now dying is testament to the fact that they have at last spread throughout its entire system. Today, from abortion clinics to battlefields, from divorce courts to suicide bombers, we again suffer under a reign of terror.
But the nation will not die. Despite its centuries of suffering under the Revolutionary sickness, Western Civilization (of which America is a part) still exists, and possesses powers of recuperation far more profound than the poisoners suspect: despite two hundred years and change of being told they Ought Not To, people still pray to God, instinctively look to natural leaders, reckon the days, months and years by the calendars of the Church, and believe in absolutes of Good and Evil.
And someday God will heal the West. A second renaissance is coming: sooner or later, despite every effort of the iconoclasts, the Gods of the Copybook Headings will limp up to explain it all again. When they do, Tradition will still be there, ready as always to serve as the basis of civilization. With prayer, and with the strong medicine of right reason and just authority, our civilization's natural defenses will rally, drive out the toxin, and return to life.
Revolutions always fail. A revolution is, after all, ultimately an attempt to impose a synthetic reality on the Universe, to impose one's Will upon God — but the Universe (and the God Who created it) always win in the end. When Jesus Christ said "It is finished", the cancer of Revolution was killed; what we see now are merely the death throes of the tumor as it succumbs to the Great Physician.
So have hope! In the world beyond space and time, the sickness has been conquered. The Great Revolution is already defeated.
It’s the culmination of class war and any kind of centralized government.
What is?
...violent revolution. Government power was also very centralized in the old monarchies.
Centralization per se isn’t the problem. The problem is the idea of “Man as god”.
I agree that the second part of your comment is most important. ...even more emphasized for me (see my tagline with a rather strict monotheism in mind).
But regarding what you wrote, many, if not most earthly emperors and kings gave in to temptations to present/believe themselves to be either gods or appointees of divinities. But yes, human weakness can affect one, a few, or nearly all to the point of idolatry (even self-idolatry).
The French may have claimed inspiration from the American "Revolution", but what the French did bore no resemblance to it.
“And someday God will heal the West.”
As G*d has been on the side of the heaviest battalions, so too has G*d helped those who helped themselves.
America is indeed on the path leading to a return to a Jeffersonian rather than a Hamiltonian government.
They most certainly did. The thirteen American colonies were each under the authority of a Governor, appointed in London and paid directly by the Crown. Each Colony had a council of leading citizens, the role of which was to advise the Governor, and an assembly of some kind, in which the interests of property-owners were advanced, but the real power in each Colony was the Governor and the Royal Magistrates and other officers beneath him. The overthrow of these authorities by the revolutionaries in each colony constituted an overthrow of the government.
I would point out that healthy societies don’t have revolutions. France, Russia and China were all rotted out long before they collapsed. Revolutions, like forest fires, serve a purpose: the destruction of the old to make way for the new.
Of course, neither are pleasant to be in the middle of, either.
Most of us don’t realize how much of our legal system and cultural norms are holdovers from once-Catholic England. It’s been their lingering influence that’s made the lion’s share of America’s material accomplishments possible (and has enabled us to withstand the effects of behaviorist schooling and utopian individualism for so long).
I have to disagree. Nearly every colony refused to pay the salaries of royal governors. And the assemblies were not overthrown. They were dissolved by the king and the members became the members of the reconstituted legislatures after the war. The whole war was an attempt to keep the manner of government they had and to prevent the imposition of outside authority. It cannot be stressed enough that the Americans did not consider the British Parliament to be their government. That is why in the declaration of Independence all of the grievances are addressed to the king - even though most of what they are complaining about were measures implemented by Parliament.
“America is indeed on the path leading to a return to a Jeffersonian rather than a Hamiltonian government.”
And considering Jefferson loved the French Revolution even while witnessing the excesses of it in person, even when his fellow founding fathers, including Hamilton, had enough sense to realize it was not good, I really don’t think a Jeffersonian government is good at all.
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