Neo-con propoganda - here's a clue jacobin France was a deomcracy, nazi Germany was a democracy, the USSR was a democracy, hell Iraq was a democracy with mandatory sufferage! In fact every modern tyranny has used the languague, forms and idealogy of egalitarian democracy. Every modern tyranny has come to power by agitating the masses with promises of paradise lost or paradise to come. You see a microcosm of this in America with both parties constant appeals to "the working family", "the common man", the "disadvantaged" or "the poor". It's nothing but recycled jacobin and marxist propoganda.
Monarchs can never claim their actions were "the will of the people" or some such nonsense. Finally and most convincingly is the factor of time preference. This concept has been fully explored in Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God that Failed
It was jacobin France that pioneered the concept of total war - nation vs nation. In short the plague of nationalism:
"With its ideal of equality, democracy’s revival from antiquity was closely connected with “nationalism,” a term most Europeans equated with what Americans might call ethnicism (not to be confused with racism, which is not a linguistic -cultural concept but a biological one). The basic drive is the craving for sameness, the twin of equality. (Whatever is the same is also equal, although it is not necessarily true the other way around.) After 1789, differences became suspect, and were to be rejected and eradicated.
The social pyramid in the new horizontalism was now upturned, and quantity, not quality, had its day. Everybody had the same rights —a truly microscopic share in decisions, effective only if it, were part of a majority—but also the same obligations. One could vote for a representative, but, in turn, a male had the duty to defend his country (or to participate in its aggressions), which might mean drudgery in barracks, captivity, wounds, mutilation, or even death, a bad deal indeed. The draftee almost ceased to be a real person a she was dragged out of his privacy and became an “individual,” the meaning of which is only the last indivisible part of a collective whole. Hippolyte Taine described the results of this return to the stage of primitive tribes with these ringing words, taken from his Origines de la France contemporaine:
One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well.
One of the most immediate and degrading consequences of general military service in time of war was the “indoctrination” of the draftees. They were in the vast majority innocent, and largely even unwilling, civilians whose enthusiasm for fighting and killing was limited. They were, therefore, taught to hate the enemy, degraded to the point of wickedness, and stripped of all virtue. This had been different in previous ages when soldiers were men— gentlemen as well as ruffians—who loved to fight and offered their services to anybody who led and paid them well. Prince Eugene of nally to Baron Gideon Loudon (Laudon), born in Livonia, but of Scottish origin, whose father was an officer in the Swedish services. Loudon, however, served first in the Russian Army, and then offered his experience to Frederick II of Prussia. Rebuffed, Loudon joined the largely Austrian army of the Holy Roman Emperor, and defeated Frederick in battle. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of “recruits” had scant education (mass illiteracy prevailed for generations), and had to serve long stretches in the army, frequently three, sometimes four years. Those who had bachelor’s degrees (aged 18 to 19 years) served only one year, received a commission, and became reserve officers. The idea was to have trained soldiers under arms, as well as in a reserve capacity, periodically called to maneuvers. The loss of time for all was considerable.
Yet if one major power adopted that system, it forced other countries on the same continent, to keep from being outnumbered, to do exactly the same. And since the European monarchies had painfully experienced the numerical superiority of the French armies in the Napoleonic wars, and, as “constitutional” monarchies, were drifting into the democratic cauldron, they too were now victims of a phenomenon called “militarism,” resulting in the “Armed Horde.” England, relying on its “splendid isolation,” was an exception to the rule, but the United States, politically already a victim of the “French School,” during the War Between the States drafted not only its citizens but also foreigners on its soil. Although they could not vote, they earned money; thus, cash was redeemed with blood. Voluntary military service, however, is a different matter. On a lower level, it might rely on the desire to fight, on a higher one the fascination of army life, and on the highest the wish to Savoy had vainly offered his services to France, but ended up as the glorious military hero of the Habsburgs. The same happened fidefend one’s country or bring to life a great ideal.
In the book from which we quoted Taine, American author Hoffman Nickerson writes:
During the last century-and-a-half, civilization has recreated the armed horde. Previously a rarity, it has become the accepted instrument of any great military effort. It has not, however, come alone. Exactly a hundred fifty years ago in 1789—shortly after the United States had sought to protect themselves against democracy by their Federal Constitution—the French Revolution began. From that time to our day, democratic ideas have come to dominate politics just as the mass army has dominated war. It is the thesis of this book that the two are inseparably connected with each other and with a third thing, barbarism"
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
(formatting may be screwy due to the original text is a PDF)
This is an important point the effect of which on Europe in the 20th Century, indeed the whole world, cannot be be underestimated.
Under the rules of the ancien regime war between states was a very different thing, it had the character of intercine feuds, civilian massacres were extrodinarily rare (no Dresdens) and the common people were rarely interested in or affected by the outcome. (no "re-education camps" or radical changes in daily life).
Modern states can no longer entrust power to a single unchecked individual, Catholic or otherwise.
As opposed to investing it in an easily manipulated, amorphous blob called "the people"?
In the first place the notion of the modern state needs to go in it's entirity, it has been responsible for too much blood. Small, decentralized, and independent societies are the only way for the preservation of humanity or anything resembling civilization.
None of these were democracies. I guess you simply don't understand what a democratic constitution is.
Bump to this. In fairness, there were other practioners of total war before the French, but they gave it its modern, ideological character.
Beyond that, though, it warms me to the cockles of my heart to see Prof. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quoted on FR. It used to happen more often...