Posted on 06/23/2020 8:15:02 AM PDT by ebb tide
The order in any society depends on its morals, beliefs, traditions, laws, religion and values – in short, its culture. The revolution which is the subject of this essay is a movement which seeks to change or supplant the social order through the activities of an intending agency to change its culture.
Volumes have been written on political revolutions and their causes. A classic treatment of revolution can be found in Book 5 of Aristotle’s Politics. He treats revolutions as they occur in various types of governments. But these are external manifestations of revolution. Here I wish to focus my remarks below on basic features of revolution: its spirit, its lust for domination, and its use of deceit to achieve its goals.
What is at the heart of it is something spiritual. Let us see what the spirit of revolution has to say for itself:
I am not what you think I am. Many speak of me but few know me. I am not Freemasonry, nor rioting nor the changing of monarchy into a republic, nor the substitution of one dynasty for another, nor temporary disturbance of the public order. I am not the shouts of Jacobins, nor the fury of Montaigne, nor the fighting on the barricades, nor pillage, nor arson, nor the agricultural law, nor the guillotine, nor the drownings. I am neither Marat nor Robespierre, nor Babeuf nor Mazzini nor Kosuth. These men are my sons but they are not me. These things are my works but they are not me. These men and things are passing objects but I am a permanent state... I am the hatred of all order not established by man and in which he is not both king and god.
This is the spirit of revolution and the enemy of the Christian Order. It is the spirit of Antichrist and is as old as the Fall of the Angels. Indeed, it is a fallen angel so brilliant of intellect but dark of will that it has corrupted mankind from the beginning.
This spirit presents itself today as humanism. Now, humanism sounds like a good thing. After all, shouldn’t we be humane and considerate of our fellow humans and the environment? But we know that’s not how it works in a secularist society, especially one which encourages multiple religions except the one which makes claim to be the possessor of truth – the Catholic Faith.
We tend to think of religious liberty as a preeminent humanistic value. We insist upon it. I speak of religious liberty as the moral right of all religions for public expression of one’s beliefs. Everyone is expected to follow his own conscience. But before we sing its praises we should consider the downside of what comes with it. Henry Cardinal Manning observed as follows:
To legislate for a people divided in religion is impossible unless we exclude religion from legislation. Christianity must be shut out of the sphere of legislation before you can make laws applicable to those who are divided in religion. What is the effect of such legislation? Truth and error are put upon the same footing. Toleration becomes a duty, and under the cover of toleration it has come to pass that the civil society of the world has ceased to distinguish truth from error. Christianity is left to the individual conscience; it is no longer a matter of public law.
Religious freedom as touted by the post-Vatican II teachings is anything but Catholic. According to Catholic Tradition, error has no moral rights. To allow certain errors to propagate is to bury the truth in a cacophony of falsehood to the peril of individual souls and society. It stems from an anti-Catholic Enlightenment. See where it has taken us.
We have gone quite beyond what Cardinal Manning described. For example, starting from tolerance, the homosexual lobby went from tolerance to acceptance and affirmation of their lifestyle. We are now treated to Gay Pride marches in which we are all expected to applaud. Criticism opens one to charges of “hate crime” and public opprobrium. One can be fired from one’s employment or subjected to legal proceedings. The paganism we see today was also seen 100 years ago. In writing about the “New Paganism” in 1929, Hilaire Belloc saw it growing and predicted its future:
When it is mature we shall have not the present isolated, self conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.
One of the tactics of the revolution is to isolate individuals so that there is no buffer between the individual and the state. The Catholic social principle of subsidiarity is ignored. The state passes laws to undermine intermediary institutions like the family, church, friendships and community organizations. These institutions provide alternative sources of loyalty, responsibility, authority, devotion, and financial independence. But the revolutionary state needs people to be dependent on it and only it. This makes possible the most potent weapon of the revolutionary state: fear. That is, its power to deny you food, the ability to travel, the ability to speak and assemble with others, the ability to work and practice one’s religion. Yet how would the revolution fare if people were committed to stand up for their natural rights and do the right thing regardless of the consequences? Then, when under such a threat, a revolution will always resort to violence. It turns one’s neighbors into enemies. Or it makes one’s neighbors “disappear” overnight.
How does this spirit of revolution work? Spirits travel through society through lines of communication. The operations of the spirit attack the intellect, imagination, affections and memory of people.
The goal of the revolutionary spirit is the dematerialization of the world. It happened thus. Lucifer, the brightest of the angels, upon learning of the Incarnation rebelled against God. God’s plan of creating a race of sniveling, weak, half-spirit, half-animal creatures called Man, having His angels serve them, and what is more, God Himself becoming one of them, was simply too much for poor Lucifer to bear. Upon uttering his declaration of “I will not serve”, Michael the Archangel challenged him with the cry “Who is like unto God?! Certainly not you, proud spirit.” With that, Lucifer plunged into the material world of Earth which he so hated. But in deference to his nature he was given control over it as “Prince of This World.” Lucifer hated matter because it was God’s good creation and he sought to corrupt it to spite God. He had no power to uncreate what God created, but he could try to introduce into the minds of men a repudiation of matter.
From Lucifer we get Gnosticism, a belief that matter is evil. Spirit was trapped by matter and because matter had inequalities to be equal spirit had to free itself from matter. The gnostic salvation is through secret knowledge. Was this not the temptation given to Eve by the serpent? Eat of the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and you will be like a god.
The philosopher Descartes, influenced by a gnostic spirit, came up with the dictum “I think therefore I am.” By this he separated the world of thought from the world of things. He got it exactly wrong. The scholastic philosophy which preceded him taught that self-awareness can only be attained by first becoming conscious of the external world of things perceived by the senses. The Cartesian independence of thought from things was followed through by Kant, Hegel and other modern philosophers. It made possible the control of the natural world by the will, i.e., the Nietzschean will to power. This is most clearly seen in Communism for which truth is not the conformity of mind to reality but to whatever advances the revolution. The only absolute for Communism is the pure theory of dialectical materialism. But here, the Communist concept of the material world is not as an objective physical reality. They hold to the Hegelian principle of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It is subjective to the dictates of the Party. Black is white on one day, green on another day according to whatever is promulgated by the Party. One is expected to follow along. Reason and memory are destroyed. Our intellect is nullified.
Yet, as bad as Communism is, there is something greater, more sinister, and more insidious. President Woodrow Wilson, himself a proponent of the new world order, had this to say in his book The New Freedom in 1913:
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
What is this thing without a name, this power? Actually Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI had a grasp of what was going on. Pope Leo XIII saw it as a rapacious usury under a different guise. Pope Pius XI saw it as a dictatorship of those who control credit. Wilson noted that anyone who wished to build a business, if he wished to enter certain fields, would find himself closed out by organizations who do not wish him to succeed. This is how the revolution controls society. The world of financial capitalism is the world of dematerialized money in which purchasing power consists of ones and zeroes electronically stored in a computer memory. And as a name for this nameless thing we can propose the name Luciferianism after its originator.
The imagination is attacked using the performing, visual and literary arts. Many movies today would have been roundly condemned in previous generations, not only for the graphic depiction of sexual scenes, but also for the attitude towards morality in general. Think, for example, of the depictions of sexual activity. They are all, all related to fornication or adultery. This is touted as “reality”. And it’s all suggestive to young people that this is acceptable because “everyone does it.”
Today’s twisted affections elevate everything except God in the minds of people. The new religion is environmentalism. If you question humans caused global warming you are called a “denier” and treated as a heretic. Catholics respect nature because it is a gift from God. The modern day pagans worship nature and hate humans. Hence, the promotion of abortion to get rid of humans, seen as a plague upon the earth. When the secularist man does concern himself with the welfare of humanity it is within the context of socialism and the use of the masses to instigate political change. The revolutionary spirit feeds on and aggravates negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and depression.
For a revolution to succeed it must eliminate the memory of the old order so that a new order can be implemented. If the memory of the old order cannot be completely erased it must be buried under an avalanche of lies, calumnies and black legends so that people would be reluctant to return to it. Some examples come to mind. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith was employed in editing history and news items to expunge particulars that the Party wanted to drop down a memory hole. The Protestant Revolution conducted a campaign of lies and defamation of the Catholic Church to picture it as an enemy of science and rationality. The revolutionaries of the Catholic Church, using the Second Vatican Council as a launching point, have been trying over the past half century to remove from the minds of the faithful the memory and practices of the Catholic Church of the previous 2,000 years. All of this is a vicious “purification of memory.”
To accomplish these things the spirit of revolution uses deceit. Human communication is typically by means of words, images and music. There are as many methods of deceit through fraudulence, duplicity, misrepresentation, dissembling and dissimulation as there are ways of communication.
One way is through the use of euphemisms. For example, who can be opposed to “Women’s health”? But what is really meant by the code word of “Women’s Health” is abortion. And it is fashionable to speak of abortion as “termination of pregnancy.” The change of meanings and definitions is a gradual process achieved by propaganda in the media and schools. Propaganda uses the power of fashion, repetition, print and news media, and the arts to reframe the mentality of the people into a new paradigm.
The power of fashion comes from a misplaced human-respect. No one wants to be thought of contemptuously or ostracized as a refusenik who won’t go along with the current ideology (like human caused global warming, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, etc.). It makes those who’ve bought into the current ideology feel uncomfortable to think that they are wrong or might have to summon the courage to join the opposition to the status quo. But even more than that, opposition to such new political dogmas is treated, not as a difference of opinion which may be debated in the public square, but as a heresy to be crushed. The new paradigm is treated as a creed and questioning of it must be stamped out.
Constant reiteration crowds out contrary ideas. The Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels said that with constant repetition people will eventually accept what is said as true: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” Reiteration comes through what seem like separate sources but which all follow the same play book of what they are allowed to say.
Let us recognize that the major news media and public education establishment are political players. The main stream media are not about the objective reporting of news. Journalism is slanted by what is given prominence and the way it is presented, as well as what is buried. The public educational system is less about giving students the intellectual tools to make proper judgments and more about indoctrinating them into the ideology of the elitist promoters of the secularist world view. According to Josef Stalin: “Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.” Public schools are organs of propaganda meant to train students to be a certain type of citizen with a certain frame of thought and accepting of the current ideology.
But we ourselves cooperate with this process of our own deceit. As noted by the philosopher Josef Pieper, the world wants flattery. And not only that, but also that the flattery be disguised so that the fact that we are lied to can be ignored so as not to sting our conscience. But there is also in propaganda an element of menace, a concealed but nonetheless recognizable threat. We are led by propaganda to think that by acquiescing to intimidation we are doing what we would have wanted to do anyway. We are only being politically correct. So effective is the sophistry employed against the general public that people “not only are unable to find out about truth but become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions.” Moreover, constant change as a feature of revolution keeps people mentally off balance. Before one can make a considered judgement about one situation another situation takes its place.
Yet, all of the above does not guaranty the success of a revolution. To use concepts from scholastic philosophy, it brings society to the potential for revolution. That potential needs to be actuated. But as we learn from previous revolutions, all that is needed to launch the revolution is proper social circumstances such as unemployment, famine, war, or any other severe social stress and a trained cadre of revolutionaries dispersed in critical areas of influence and able to take advantage of those circumstances which the revolutionaries themselves are instrumental in bringing about. To be perfectly successful the revolution must so completely efface the old order, even the memory of it, that the revolution is no longer even seen as revolution.
Revolution necessarily becomes totalitarian. But so far, no revolution has permanently and totally achieved this. There have always been memories in some people about the way things had been. There have always been some records of the past. There have always been some people who have not succumbed to the fear which revolutionaries must create in people in order to succeed. And there have always been martyrs.
But more than that, revolution has up to now been curbed by the most important institution in the world – the Catholic Church. The revolutionaries tolerate Christianity as long as it is confined to private belief and is sufficiently amorphous so as to pose no threat to the power of the revolutionary state. It can even serve the purpose of the revolution such that the revolutionaries can tout their acceptance of religious liberty – for a time.
But the Catholic Church is another matter. It is not just a religion. It is also a human organization, a society with a hierarchical structure held together by obedience and a unified faith. Ultimately, its true head is Jesus Christ. It is an alternative source of authority to that of the state. And it has a pope. Many nations and philosophies have tried to crush the Catholic Church and failed.
So what now is the tactic of the modern revolutionaries? Destroy the effectiveness of the Church from within. Infiltrate it with revolutionary agents. Use the imperative of obedience to change the doctrines and decouple the Church from its past. We know from the testimony of Bella Dodd, a former Communist, that she was personally involved in the infiltration of 1100 Communist agents or sympathizers into the clergy in the 1930's. Nor are the Communists the only sect seeking to infiltrate the Church. There are also Masons, Modernists, Satanists, homosexualists, One Worlders, and other gnostic reprobates. An excellent and comprehensive source of information about the plot to destroy the Catholic Church from within is Dr. Taylor Marshall’s book Infiltration.
The elimination of the Catholic Church as an opponent to the New World Order of syncretist religion is essential for the advancement of the revolution. The Catholic Church must give up all claims to be the one true Church established by Jesus Christ and possessors of the one true religion which all people are morally obligated to accept. We must be able to ignore Christ as King to whom all people owe homage. The pope, whose mandate is to preserve Tradition, can drop his title as Vicar of Christ as anachronistic.
This is happening in the pontificate of Pope Francis. What an ingenious plan hatched by the revolutionaries: use the papacy to destroy the papacy as the rock of Catholicism! After all, it is the papacy as an institution which is the chief stumbling block. Destroy it, co-opt it, or render it impotent, and the way of the Antichrist is opened.
This article appeared in the June 15th Remnant Newspaper.
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Pope Francis has used his power and voice to twist doctrines and in the 2019 Amazonian Synod to authorize pagan idol veneration in the Vatican. He has welcomed the presence of socialists and globalists in the Vatican. His tactics include the skillful use of ambiguity and refusal to clarify what he said. This brings to mind a prophesy of St. Francis of Assisi. Shortly before he died St. Francis warned the members of his order of the tribulations which would befall the Church in the future. He said that a man, un-canonically elected, will be raised to the Pontificate, who, by his cunning, will try to draw many into error and death. There will be scandals and many will consent to error. Those who preserve their fervor and adhere to the truth will suffer injuries and persecutions as rebels and schismatics. Sanctity of life will be held in derision. In those days Jesus Christ will send not a true Pastor, but a destroyer.
Who is to blame for this mess? We can, of course, point to the apostate prelates. But we would also have to point to ourselves for our acceptance of flattery and acquiescence to the intimidation by those who run civil society and the Church. Let us recognize that we are under attack. We have to be vigilant and not simply accept what is said to us by the hierarchy of the Church or by government officials. They are already compromised by the revolution. Rather, we have to remember what St. Paul said: our enemies are not flesh and blood but fallen angels. Against them by ourselves we have no power. But with God and our guardian angels as sword and shield we can conduct a spiritual war against the dark powers which infest the Church and the world at large. We are in this world but not of it. We need to pray as if our lives depend on it – because they do. But this is our hope: we are assured that God will not leave us orphans. May Jesus and Mary preserve and defend us in our tribulation.
Ping
Very good article, thanks.
Bookmark for later reading
The populations of that vast area continue to value the enduring ideas which motivated the Founders and Framers of America's Constitution over 200 years ago to seek, above all, FREEDOM (liberty) for individuals.
Even today, words matter, and the words of the Declaration of Independence mean something to those who value that document's claims.
On the other hand, Progressive actions to devalue those documents and words are rejected, as evidenced by that voting map.
In an effort to explain what may highlight the "chasm," that great author of The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk, is quoted below:
". . . the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old."Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.
". . . The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."
http://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/
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I would call whats Coming a :
CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMATION
Restoring the Constitution, and giving the BOOT to Leftists who are its enemies.
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Like that Child in that Movie : “I SEE LOTS OF DEAD LEFTISTS”
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