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1. 1 Pingback by Eunomia · Dangerous Fantasies on 22 October 2007:

   [...] Monday, October 22nd, 2007 in politics, foreign policy by Daniel Larison The supposed right of secession is a part of the imagined right of self-determination, a fantasy drawn from the absurd political theories of Locke and Rousseau and given immortality by Jefferson’s utterly fatuous platitudes with which he began the Declaration. Applied universally, it means Montenegro–backed by foreign interests–had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, the Brda region on the border with Serbia to secede from Montenegro, and any three-man pro-secession village to secede from the Brda, until the Russian Mafia owned every square inch of the county. To speak of rights, in such circumstances–that is, when American corporations are busily breaking up nations and federations into weak little entities they can exploit–is not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense. ~Thomas Fleming [...]

2. 2 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 22 October 2007:

   The notion of Kurdish independence doesn’t shock my conscience. The Kurds were part of two multinational empires (Ottoman Turkey and Iran), and Gertrude Bell and others divided them among four countries (setting aside some who found themselves in the USSR).

   When the hideous Wilson was preaching, and the Brits were promising national states to all kinds of nationalities, the Kurds got left out. Perhaps the sermons should have been left unpreached, but the world has nodded to the concept of self-determination. Why should the Kurds be an exception?

   If there were a semi-decent multinational empire or a Middle Eastern confederation in the making, I’d be more sympathetic to your viewpoint. The Kurds certainly have a tradition, ties to the land, and a distinct way of life; they are also quite a few of them, not three villages worth. As for bloodiness, I doubt you would deny Germans or Russians their independence, despite their history.

   Of course, one need not support Kurdish independence at any price, especially if paid in American blood and treasure. That’s a prudential judgment about which reasonable minds can differ. I don’t see why the concept of an independent Kurdistan, however, is so horrifying.

   If the real issue is defense of Christian communities against their oppressors, your case may be stronger, but then you should make that case and consider the risks and costs of a general policy of that kind.

3. 3 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

   I don’t think the GOM has read what I have written. He certainly has not followed the argument.
   I did not say there was anything particularly horrifying about Kurdish independence. What I did write was that the Kurds are historically violent people who have been used to kill and oppress Christians. Since defense of Christendom is the primary object of our organization, the point hardly needs to be spelled out.
   It is entirely illogical to say that something is a false principle, but, oh well, so many people think it is true we may as well cave in one more time. Hit your foot with a hammer five or six times in the belief that you are curing gout. It doesn’t work and causes harm, but, oh well, let’s give it another whack. Or, if you like analogies, a man blames blonds for the murder of his wife and goes about the world murdering people with blond hair. In fact, as he discovers, the murderer was brunette and hair color has nothing to do with responsibility for the crime. Or, to bring the argument closer to politics, Marx’s theories tend to impoverish and enslave the people ruled by Marxist governments, but, since there have been so many experiments, why not try one more? If you wish to defend an abstract right to self-determination, defend it, but do not expect to finesse the point by saying it has been used in the past.
   Historical generalizations are easy to make but not so easy to sustain. We don’t have a 3000 year history for Germans and Russians as we do for the Kurds and their ancestors, and even looking only at the past hundred years, the Kurds have been a violent people. I don’t know that either Germans or Russians are particularly more violent than good old Americans. But suppose they were. What possible relevance is there to the question on the table?
   During the US occupation and with the help of US troops, Kurds have terrorized, robbed, and expelled one of the most ancient Christian populations of the world. This may mean nothing to the GOM, but it does mean something to Christians.
   If Kurdish independence serves the American interest, then it should be considered. If it does not, it should be rejected. What seems foolish in this case is to argue, as the administration is doing, that a) we need the Turks as our allies for the great patriotic war against terrorism, and b) we should alienate the Turks by granting the Kurds a safe haven for their terrorist activities.

4. 4 Comment by Michael on 22 October 2007:

   One more and more sees the wisdom of Washington’s farewell address, which warned against involving ourselves in the affairs of other countries, and of the futility of expecting anything from them but transitory and self-serving alliances.

   On the point of the ‘centuries of terrorism’ attributed to the Kosovo Albanians: in his history of the Venetian republic, Lord Norwich discusses the troubles the Venetians had, in their possessions on the eastern littoral of the Adriatic, with a brigand people then identified as “Uskoks.” Does TJF or one of the more ethnologically learned readers of this site know whether the Uskoks are the same as the Kosovo Albanians?

5. 5 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

   Uskoks were Slavs,mostly Croats. A word of warning,though. Lord Norwich’s history of Venice is very poor stuff. He likes dramatic stories and seems not to understand the larger context of Venetian history. In particular, his account of Venice’s trans-Adriatic Empire is not only thin but embarrassingly inaccurate. This is nothing, however, compared to his wretched history of the Byzantine Empire.

6. 6 Comment by Rob on 22 October 2007:

   “This is nothing, however, compared to his wretched history of the Byzantine Empire.”

   Hear, hear. I read the bloody books and the only thing I honestly enjoyed about that trilogy was Norwich’s descriptions of all the horrible ways emperors were maimed, killed, blinded, castrated, lost their noses and so on.

7. 7 Comment by Red Phillips on 22 October 2007:

   I have said a few times in the past, here and I think other places, that Southerners should be careful to avoid sounding like Lockean contract theorist when they discuss secession.

   But I don’t think “self determination” is necessarily equivalent to contract theory. It could also be a principle based on the conservative and historical idea that like should govern like. And that like generally does not appreciate the rule of the other. That organic government grows up from the people and is intrinsic not imposed by others and extrinsic. I think this idea is actually illiberal. When many people talk about self-determination they probably are invoking Locke whether they know it or not, but I don’t think everyone who invokes the concept is?

   This way of looking at self determination actually represents a threat to the liberal modern nation state.

   What is the demographic make-up of the area of Turkey in question? Do the Kurds actually have a reasonable claim that it rightfully should be part of greater Kurdistan? We should condemn any Kurdish mistreatment of Christians, but I am not inclined to defend Turkish territorial integrity either if the Kurdish claim is valid. (As best as these always murky claims can be determined.)

   The fact that we now bear some responsibility for the displacement and worse of Christians in Kurdistan and Iraq is one reason we should have followed Washington’s advice. Christians in Iraq actually had it pretty good under Saddam by Middle East standards if I am not mistaken.

8. 8 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 22 October 2007:

   Perhaps I didn’t follow your argument.

   If the issue is the fate of Christians, which is a concern I do share, we should first of all avoid poking hornet’s nests with a sharp stick. We don’t know how the hornets will react, but they probably won’t be having us to tea. (Incidentially, I hadn’t heard about recent Kurdish anti-Christian violence. Reference?)

   I’m no fan of a universal rule of self-determination and the division of the world into “democratic” nation-states, as the wretched Wilson advocated and in so doing helped perpetuate slaughter and oppression. And I take your point that we need not adopt a universal principle for organizing polities.

   Unfortunately, however, in the contemporary world there aren’t many alternatives to ethnic nationalism that people will accept. Of peoples of their population size, it seems the Kurds are about the largest to whom a state has been denied.

   Reject the general principle, but in the particular cases you are concerned with, Kosovo and Kurdistan, for example, what do you suggest as a general proposition, and as US policy?

9. 9 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 October 2007:

   The right of self-determination is a component of the right of self-government.

10. 10 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

    The object of this sort of discussion, at least as I have conceived of it, is not to find theoretical principles that can be put to use in an ongoing quarrel with the Left. To say that like should govern like is to make an abstract assertion for which there is no obvious justification, philosophically or historically. We might say that we often–though certainly not always–prefer to be governed by people like us, but that is like saying we like chocolate ice cream. In fact, alien subjects have often defended the empires that ruled over them because they were better off than under the capricious rule of a local warlord.

    Besides, the right of self-determination is, in fact, a development of social contract theory and natural rights. Therefore, it is no use trying to make up another justification for the notion or for finding a “way of looking at self determination.” This sort of argument is, to but it bluntly, a complete waste of time.

    Americans won the right to determine their destinies after years of fighting and when the French outnumbered the English in Virginia. Period. The Serbs won their independence by fighting for it. This is universally true. The only exception is when some hypocritical young empire pretends to embrace some theory of human rights, which it uses, as Wilson, Clinton, and Bush have done, to justify aggression. America had no business in entering WWI, attacking Yugoslavia, or invading Iraq. To speak of Kurdish rights, when they have not been able to make good their claims even by frequent acts of terrorism, is to speak of something that not only does not exist but also gives the neoconservatives one more justification for keeping troops in the Middle East. The result is to damage American interests. Enough is enough.

    Imagine a criminal Islamic gang moved into your neighborhood. Once their numbers reach a certain level, they begin demanding independence, sharia, and the right to abuse you. Do you stay and fight? Run? Capitulate? Numbers mean nothing; that is the problem with these theories. I feel the same way about the cracked Evangelicals in California and Kansas who are invading Anderson County, South Carolina, or the equally cracked libertarians who tried to take over a community in New Hampshire. The whole repulsive idea of democracy–the right of a tiny minority of the population to win an election, claim a mandate, and revolutionize other people’s way of life: It is based on utterly unproved theories of majority rule, human rights, and the social contract. These ideas have nothing to do with natural reality (where only force rules) or with Christianity (If you try to find democracy in the Scriptures, you will be wasting your time. When the majority ruled, the majority cried out “Crucify him!)

    The Turks ran a rotten empire, as corrupt and inefficient as it was brutal. They only sporadically managed to impose order in their farflung provinces and had to rule through local elites who abused their subjects from Egypt to Serbia. They were kept in power by brilliant Western statesmen like Disraeli, who hated the Russians and apparently wanted the Turks to provide a homeland for European Jews in Palestine. (This is a disputed point but there is a reported conversation by a reliable source confirming what had been said shortly after the Congress of Berlin). In other words, Westerners with a theory perpetuated Ottoman injustice, just as other Westerners with another theory today are backing the Kurds.

    While there have been Kurdish strongmen and rulers, there has never really been a Kurdish state. Spread across the borders of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, they pose a threat to the territory of three countries, not just one. If they did not have a history of anti-Christian terrorism, one might pretend to sympathize, but why waste the false tears? If without our help, they can achieve their independence, then it is up to Turks, Iranians, and Iraqis to do something about it. Giving these people a homeland is none of our business and cuts against our interest. The zanies in the Bush administration let this evil genii out of the bottle. It is amusing to see them all looking for the cork.

11. 11 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

    To my good friend Dr. Wilson. Where does the right of self government come from? I have never seen, heard, tasted, or felt such a right; I have not encountered one in the Scriptures or in the earliest traditions of the Church; and I don’t recall running across such an idea in the writings of the political writers I most admire, Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Thomas. Most people in most periods of history, especially our own, are manifestly incapable of managing their own lives, much less of governing themselves. Self-government, then, would appear to be one of those liberal aspirations that spring from a noble people and should be cherished as a cultural heirloom by their descendants. The US government, however, discarded this quaint notion about 1861 and has been acting on the contrary hypothesis with increasing vigor ever since. I deeply admire people who can govern themselves–the Spartans, the Romans of the early republic, our ancestors–but such models are as remote from the experience of people like the Kurds and Albanians as they are from our own.

12. 12 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

    To GOM. It hardly matters what policy I propose, since the people who make decisions are too busy consulting their personal interests to listen to anybody. In the case of Kosovo, we signed a treaty, guaranteeing it would remain a part of Serbia, as it has always been since being liberated from the Turks. We might, as a once Christian country, be justified in directing our troops to pacify the violent and criminal Albanians who have established a reign of terror as they dynamite ancient churches and cemeteries in order to eliminate every trace of Christianity from a land once held sacred by Balkan Christians, but to protect the Albanians as they go about their dirty business and to lay plans to give this criminal state–whose incomes are based on heroin trafficking and white slavery–is among the most despicable things this despicable administration has done.
    The ongoing Kurdish expulsion of Christians is a well-known story, documented in many journals and websites. The facts are not in dispute nor is the complicity of US troops. At Chronicles we have published several stories, but we are hardly alone. Syria has received, I believe, the largest part of the Christian refugees. Google news should get you started
    The US, over the past few decades has had a consistent policy of backing Islamic terrorism against Christian and European nations: In Agfhanistan, we have armed, trained, and paid the followers of Osama bin Laden, who then went to assist their co-religionists in Bosnia and Kosovo. I would be content if we just quit braying about the war on terrorism and contented ourselves with ending our support for Islamic terrorists, starting in Kosovo.

13. 13 Comment by TJF on 22 October 2007:

    PS I should have also explained that Christians have been fleeing Baghdad and going to Kurdistan to escape the war. The Christians expelled by the Kurds were the victims not so much of religious prejudice as of ethnic hostility and, even more, of greed: Kurds wanted their homes and property.

14. 14 Comment by m. zurich on 22 October 2007:

    I’m glad Grumpy Old Man is back as i recall him from the old sf site, and i selfishly got a pleasant wave of nostalgia.

    “As I recently explained, in a speech that antagonized a group of secessionists meeting in Chattanooga, there is no such thing as a universal political system or principle that applies to all peoples in all situations. ” -TJF

    also i have to agree that there is no such thing as a ‘right’ to self-government. All there really is is a dynamic – inevitable oppression and/OR the experience of such vis a vis fact or perception – and the inevitable response for better or worse. That is the dynamic of human life itself. Which also means there is no such thing either as the lack of the power to self-government… if you can to the extent you can you do. ‘Rights’ suggest so-called “gimmes” … in that dept. all we really have or don’t have are powers.

    This is because OF COURSE absolute or perfect balance in a living world is not possible (only as statues on a pedestal) and for this same reason approximate balance is requisite – i.e. opppression or perceived oppression and a response to it – is a given – over and over again… the ‘right’s’ thing is romatic if taken literally, usually it’s a cover for either aggression or the inevitable response to it.

    Life. Love it or leave it?
    ________________________

15. 15 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 October 2007:

    I am inclined to think that the right of like to be governed by like is implicit in the “morality of everyday life.” Most certainly not all peoples are equally capable of self-government—most are not and it is doubtful that Americans–at least in the mass–are any longer. However, I much prefer the Swiss Confederation or Carolina in its best days to the Byzantine Empire at its most glorious. Is it not better that the Turks, the Kurds, and the Arabs are at one another’s throats than united against what is left of the West? That might not be in the interest of the U.S. imperial machinery but on the whole it seems better for us.

16. 16 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 22 October 2007:

    The history of Christianity is the history of Christian monarchy. The decline of monarchy went hand-in-hand with the decline of Christianity. It seems to me that the hostility towards Christianity manifested by the secularized political elite of America and the West in general is merely a special case of their general anti-monarchism. Republics (Rome) and (pseudo) democracies (Athens) are the product of pagan cultures and the attempt to re-create them is likewise a pagan impulse. While I might admire some republics more than others (Prof. Wilson’s examples, for instance), the trajectory of republicanism is unmistakable. As for the Christians of Iraq, nothing we do now is likely to improve their lot. It is likely that the general exodus will continue and that many of them will end up here. As a matter of fact, a number of Iraqi Christians live in our county and are well-liked and valuable citizens.

17. 17 Comment by robert reavis on 22 October 2007:

    Every time Tom posts an article about anything, he soon becomes busier than a one legged man in a ass-kicking contest defending it. But to his credit, he is better with one leg than most ass kissers are with two or three. ( a third being possibly a cane, crutch, stick etc.. ) It is a joy to watch, even if you are too ignorant, too slothful or simply too timid to join him. Keep up the good work, Dr. Fleming. It is good exercise for you and great fun for we lurkers.

18. 18 Comment by BWA on 22 October 2007:

    “Lord Norwich’s history of Venice is very poor stuff. He likes dramatic stories and seems not to understand the larger context of Venetian history. In particular, his account of Venice’s trans-Adriatic Empire is not only thin but embarrassingly inaccurate. This is nothing, however, compared to his wretched history of the Byzantine Empire.”

    Suggestions for other better stuff both Venetian and Byzantine would be welcome, the more so with brief notes on their virtues. English only need not be assumed. (And speaking of Uskoks -any thoughts on Ms Bracewell’s Uskoks of Senj?)

19. 19 Comment by Boba on 22 October 2007:

    Dr. Fleming, this is an excellent article. I agree with most of what you wrote, except that Uskos were Croats. Uskos, particularly those of Senj, were mostly Serbians who defended Austrian Empire and cowardly Croats from Turkish onslaught.

    Here is one of many examples:… “The migration of Zumberaks into this area started in 1530, continuing on for approximately 10 years. According to Lopasic, Zumberak people are the oldest immigrants of the Eastern Church (ie Orthodox). These people came in large groups, known as Vlasi, less as refugees, and in Zumberak as Uskoci. Lopasic further says that the Zumbercanski people came from Serbia, Paska, Leta and Albania; then again, the monuments in Karlovac state the Zumbercani were Serbs or Rasans.http://www.sandsmachine.com/hist_001.htm

    It is said in 1530, Croatian Torkvat Karlovic reported from Mutnica to the Kranjska country captain, that about 50 Serbian families were asking for land. Then too, it was mentioned that Uskocia head man, Vladislav Stephovic, went to Emperor Ferdinand, seeking land for his people. ..
    “With the Emperor’s grant, it is known that Uskoks arrival into this area was one thing and land allocation the other. King Ferdinand, knowing who the Uskoks were and what they did, supplied Stephovic with documents indicating his satisfaction for the assistance these people gave him. The King further advised Vladislav that his Uskoks would receive additional beneficial assistance. Supplied with sufficient documents, the Uskoks were enticed into settling in this area which to this day is called Zumberak. In 1532 Emperor Ferdinand, in giving the Uskoci this land, further granted each tribe the privilege to select a Count and a Duke. This was all done; and other land benefits were given, in return for the military service the Uskoci have given and could give the Emperor of Austria, then and in the future.

20. 20 Comment by GJ Tryon on 22 October 2007:

    re: “just to make a few headlines and win a few cheap votes” Quite discreditable, but is it really credible? Occam’s scythe suggests that Pelosi et al. are doing an end run around a policy which has proven too “political” to challenge directly. Speculative casualty tolls aside, the more chaos in Iraq, the more attractive her party looks in 08.

21. 21 Comment by El Cid on 22 October 2007:

    Laying the Kurdish question aside Dr. Flemming does get it right in terms of describing secession and self-determination in general. People everywhere, at anytime do not have “natural right” to abolish government at will. His is a very paleoconservative viewpoint in that regard. Important things are best guaranteed by an overarching order.

22. 22 Comment by El Cid on 23 October 2007:

    “I feel the same way about the cracked Evangelicals in California and Kansas who are invading Anderson County, South Carolina” -TJF

    I believe you have missed the point of the effort of these people. Theirs is not to replace the current culture with a foreign one but to reinforce an existing culture, the historical culture of Christian morals and values that are currently in decline.

    What is so “cracked” about that? What would you have them do, sit alone and divided in California and elsewhere waiting for all vestiges of this culture to disappear? The situation in NH is a bit different, these folks plan to move, achieve a majority and replace the system with something new. This is not at all the case in Carolina.

    I agree with many portions of your argument, I did not see the proof of your description of the Kurds during the year I lived and fought with them – I became pretty close to them and found them very different that what you describe.

    I am curious about your notion that nationhood has to be fought for and earned, not granted by naive and distant decree. I agree with this but why dismiss the notion that the Kurds are justified in fighting for their own nation? I agree that Kurdish nationhood would in fact cause great turbulence. All the same I am not at all opposed to supporting it from a philosophical standpoint – not with blood or treasure.

23. 23 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 23 October 2007:

    I’m inclined to agree with a recent column by Charlie Reese in which he expresses the wish that Pelosi and company will succeed in their antagonism of Turkey to the point where the Turks will throw the US out of its bases in their country and refuse to let their country be used in any way to support the war against Iraq. Just as (per Dr. Trifcovic) Putin is trying (for reasons of his own, of course) to save us from the folly of an attack against Iran, perhaps Gul and Erdogan can force US withdrawal from the meat grinder of Iraq. Dare we hope?

24. 24 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 October 2007:

    “If man cannot govern himself, how can he govern others?”
    Jefferson

25. 25 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 October 2007:

    Somewhere C.S. Lewis points out that democracy properly reflects Christian brotherhood. I am always amazed when people say they are monarchists. One cannot be a monarchist in general, one can only be loyal to a particular ruling house. It is nonsense to talk about being a monarchist today.

26. 26 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 October 2007:

    To say that people do not have a right to abolish government is to say that some people have an inviolable right TO GOVERN. How do you determine this?

27. 27 Comment by Johan Dieckmann on 23 October 2007:

    “… To say that people do not have a right to abolish government is to say that some people have an inviolable right TO GOVERN. How do you determine this? …”

    By the Who Is Stronger method. Has there ever been a single case in history where “good prevailed” – without backing of the sword (excluding, of course, infectious diseases, rat invasions, floods, earthquakes, meteorites and … ergot poisonings)?

28. 28 Comment by G.S. on 23 October 2007:

    If Red Phillips’ belief that “like should govern like” is nothing but an abstract & unfounded assertion, then I’m not sure how I might argue against parental authority being transferred from parents to educrats.

    Aside from the bonds of “likeness” — heredity, shared experiences, etc. — I don’t know of any other empirical value that would give families more authority than bureaucracy, in the rearing of offspring.

    Does subsidiarity — a topic on which I confess extreme ignorance — come into this secession-discussion somewhere?

29. 29 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 October 2007:

    I want to thank my esteemed leader Dr. Fleming and others for this most thought-provoking discussion. It seems to me: that which may be said to have a right to self-government and self-determination is the organic community—which is, after all, something created by God through history. This does not involve any absurd assertions of individual natural rights, but is merely in accord with “the politics of human nature.” This is the very essence of “conservatism.” How do you define the organic community—it defines itself by the consciousness of its existence and the unity of its actions. Where many go astray, I think, is in conflating the organic community with government. They are not the same thing. In fact today, and throughout most of history, government is the primary enemy of community. It is always potentially so. To such thinkers the defense of governments (rulers) becomes the essence of “conservatism.” I become uneasy when people deny a right to self-government. If some men do not have a right to govern themselves, then it follows that some men have a right to govern others, which may be in accord with nature but is not in accord with civilization or Christianity. To maintain that Christianity and monarchy are linked is a serious misreading of history, at best only paretially true for a few centuries of European history.

30. 30 Comment by robert reavis on 23 October 2007:

    ” My county, it has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human and therefore, changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to things unchangeable, so they mature and broaden.
    On this account, Dear Sussex, are those women chiefly dear to men who, as the seasons pass, do but continue to be more and more themselves, attain balance, and abandon or forget vicissitude. And on this account Sussex, does a man love an old house, which was his father’s, and on this account does a man come to love with all his heart, that part of earth which nourished his boyhood. For it does not change, or if it changes, it changes very little, and he finds in it the character of enduring things. ”
    Hilaire Belloc in Preface to,” The Four Men.”

    Of ocurse there is no public for this truth in an age that would prefer owning our neighbor’s property than having a neighbor. The sooner we paleos realize there is no public for this scale of human truth, the sooner we will find our real audience. They are closer than we might suspect.

31. 31 Comment by Caper on 23 October 2007:

    It does seem that some people have a *duty* to govern others. St. Paul writes that the magistrate wields the sword for the chastisement of vices. If that does not give him some “right” (ius) to do so, I don’t know what would. This does not entail any “consent of the governed.” As for monarchism, I don’t see how someone “cannot” be a monarchist. If the person simultaneously holds that governments should vary with the traditions of countries, then he cannot be a “monarchist” strictly speaking at the same time. But not all people hold that the best government for each people is the traditional one. Some people really hold that monarchies are more stable, productive, effective, and just governments in general. That is an observation which *can* be made and a position which can be argued for or against. That does not entail devotion to any one particular dynasty. Someone can promote republicanism in general, or aristocracy in general. That may put them outside the realm of Dr. Wilson’s definition of paleoconservatism, but it does not make the position illogical or incoherent.

32. 32 Comment by TJF on 23 October 2007:

    My, you all have been busy overnight while we were entertaining guests until much too late. I don’t think Dr. Wilson and I disagree about much, even in this case. Self-government is a splendid ideal for those who can govern themselves. That lets us out. Small commonwealths are certainly better than great ones, though even there I am inclined to think that the conquered Gauls gained more than they lost.

    I see no evidence, either in nature or in the great political thinkers of the past, for any rights that are not civil, that is guaranteeed by law and tradition. The legitimate power of government is an extension, as Aristotle and Filmer recognized, of the power of a father over his household and a clan or tribal leader over his extended kindred. We do have duties that our station in life assigns, duties as parents and children, duties as neighbors and fellow-citizens or subjects. Rulers too have duties, and if they do not attempt to carry them out, they may forfeit their legitimate right to rule. But before speaking, if we should agree to speak in this confusing way, of a people’s right to self-government, we should first have to know what and who a real people is, as opposed to an aggregation of lost souls.

    The Evangelicals who are invading South Carolina are not, in fact, going there to strengthen an existing culture, about which they know absolutely nothing, but to impose their own subculture on people with whom they may well agree on a number of theological points. In Chattanooga, one of these yokels–a Kansan, I believe–argued that they shared a common philosophy with Carolinians. Now, in the first place, it was clear he had not spent much time reading philosophy and did not in fact know what it is, but, much worse, the poor guy thought Christianity is a philosophy. It made my skin crawl to hear this kind of talk. Fortunately, my laryngitis prevented me from correcting him, and I had to wait until my after-dinner talk. He and his buddies got hopping mad when I explained to them that Christians, since the time of St. Paul, are not permitted to take the OT literally, and when Judaizing heretics have done this, it leads immediately to grave mischief. The history of the first several centuries of Christianity is a history of the Church’s liberation from superstition.

    Uskoks were a mixed bag, since the name denotes more a profession–piracy and banditry–than an ethnicity. Besides, in some parts of the Adriatic coast, the modern distinction between Serbs and Croats is more tenuous: There were Catholic Serbs, for example, who would now be counted as Croats. In Senj, yes, mostly Serbs and perhaps Albanians, with whom Serbs intermarried in the Middle Ages. Farther north, however, probably mostly Croats. If my good friend Boba knows some good historical sources, on this I hope she will share them. I know in general she knows more Serbian history than I ever will.

    Constitutional monarchies work well for many peoples in many circumstances, where they are actually freer than under the theoretical tyranny of the majority. I am using “constitutional” as shorthand for the Aristotelian understanding of a ruler who exercises power according to law and custom and on behalf of his people rather than for his own benefit. This was the claim Charles I made before the Roundheads murdered him–in the name of the king!

    I do not know a good overall history of Venice. I don’t think there is one in English. There are many monographs, however, on different aspects and different periods. On Byzantium, one should ask Daniel Larison, who is a graduate student in Byzantine studies. I started with Gibbon (in Bury’s corrected and annotated edition) and went on to popular works on late antiquity such as, again, J. B. Bury. The best single volume I know of is Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State, which concentrates on big-picture political history. Runciman has written some popular things though his focus is more on the Latin West. The Byzantine historians and chroniclers are a good place to start–Procopius, though testy and personally motivated, is the best witness to Justinian, and his largely first-hand (he was personal secretary to Belisarius, the commander) account of the Gothic wars makes wonderful reading.

33. 33 Comment by TJF on 23 October 2007:

    PS to GS: The duty of parents is exclusive and unique. It cannot be transferred to a others unless the parents agree to an adoption. The trouble with universal theories of rights is that they encourage us to ignore particular duties in our pursuit of a universal law.

    There is, it goes without saying, nothing unChristian about monarchies, whether they are traditional dynasties (Merovingian Franks) or autocratic empires (Rome). Most of Christian history has been lived under such regimes, and neither our Lord, his Apostles, nor the greatest fathers of the Church, ever expressed hostility toward kingship or empire per se. But, Dr. Wilson is perfectly right to complain of monarchists they they too turn a peculiar loyalty to king, empire, or dynasty into an abstract principle. Here’s a proposal though. Let us go back in time and achieve Hamilton’s dream by making George Washington King. He had no sons. Eventually, I like to thing, the throne might have passed to the husband of one of his wife’s daughters. I like the sound of King Robert I a lot better than that of Father Abraham. I must get back to work, undeterred either by this spirited discussion or a mounting headache produced by two martinis, much good Italian wine–including a fine Amarone–much too much Old Overholt and the final coup de grace, a grappa to put out the lights.

34. 34 Comment by Johan Dieckmann on 23 October 2007:

    (Re. comment #30)

    Correction:

    “… which is, after all, something created by God through history …”

    which is, after all, something created by _men_ through history

35. 35 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 October 2007:

    There was a time, a time of my youth, in which I like the fellow males of my tribe, full to the brim and overflowing with testosterone, enjoyed ass kicking in almost all of its forms, from winning petty arguments to knocking one another’s teeth out over a comment that one hand made about another’s girl. Although I am not totally devoid of testosterone at the age of fifty-eight, I have long ceased to have it as my master; therefore, I do not frequent fora such as the one offered by Chronicles in order to lurk and experience ass kickings. I come rather to discuss intellectual, spiritual, philosophical and political matters somewhere across that spectrum which we think to identify as “conservative.” At the end of the day, some of us have made better arguments than have others, and we have hopefully become more aware and sharper as we take what we have encountered here into other domains of our lives. I, however, unlike a lurker on this particular forum do not frequent this site to experience the cock of the walk kick ass. If I wanted to do that, I’d go to one of the cock fights which, despite having been just recently declared illegal in Louisiana, still go on and where, unlike here, the beer and the barbecue are better. (That is a response to one post on this thread!)

    I am not a paladin of life, liberty and property because John Locke once championed them. Those “natural rights” are important to me because I see them as fundamental gifts and tools from the Ontological Absolute – God; for He is the Author of life and where He is there is life and where He is not there is not life, but decay and ultimately death. He is the Author of liberty; in the Christ He has truly set us free, and it is in the exercise of liberty that we can act as accountable moral agents. Property, in the Christian context, is held in stewardship and is the means by which we demonstrate our charity, i.e. we give of God’s property entrusted to us in stewardship not by coercion of the state or some polity but of our volition (liberty) motivated by God’s love. I hasten to add that unlike some libertarians I do not hold that “natural rights” can be “found” in nature or that they are “sacred” manifestations of some form of social positivism. Nor do I hold,, as do most libertarians, that “natural rights” are held in existential isolation, i.e. for the vainglorious individual, but, to quite the contrary, they are applied by the individual in his duty to the communal – family, church, his Gemeinschaft (I don’t have an English word for it) and his society. Natural rights are as gifts and obligations from God are real and very necessary and therefore must be cherished and defended. It seems to me that common law, negative law, which always strives to liberate is a natural ally of natural rights and that the right of association, individual and communal, flows out of these. (This is my response to a couple of posts on this thread.)

    One needs to be quite careful not to confuse a byproduct of Christianity with Christianity itself. Old Europe for all of its glory is a byproduct of its encounter with the Christian faith. It is itself not Christianity. Monarchy is no more Christian than is oligarchy, republicanism or democracy. When the Christian meme enters a culture, it changes that culture. When the transforming power of the living Christ enters a culture through His Church and under the unction of the Holy Spirit, that society changes. Christian values are reflected in the broader society and in the polities which that society creates for itself. When the Church is absent or is kicked out or when the Church becomes apostate, then those values wane and the society and its polity decay. To worship the artifacts of a past “Christian” era – monarchy, traditions, great deeds chronicled – is to commit idolatry. It seems to me that many of us, myself included, who post on the forums of Chronicles, are on the cusp of ancestor worship which is, of course, also idolatry. Serbs, Armenians and we Southerners, to cite some examples, are not Christians because our ancestors were. When we make such claims, we are walking the road that the Pharisees walked, fools who counted themselves righteous because they alleged that Abraham was their father. We need to be a hair more sober and recall that the Pharisees were told that God, if He wanted, could turn the very rocks into the sons of Abraham.

    The historical plights the Armenians or the Serbs of Kosovo do not undermine the notion of self-determination or of secession which is a manifestation of self-determination. It is obvious that the Ottoman Turks had no Christian sense of stewardship. One would not expect them to since they were not Christians. They also had no Christian sense of being peacemakers. One would not expect them to since they were not Christians. If one has a sense of stewardship and of being a peacemaker, one sees the wisdom of self-determination in autonomy or in independence. Parents who understand that they are God’s stewards of their children have a much easier time in allowing them to grow into independence than do those who think to own their children. It is not self-determination which has failed for the Serbs in Kosovo. The Serbs of Kosovo were simply for too many years under a polity which allowed for the demographic destruction of the Serbian community of the region. There is obviously no longer a viable Serbian self in Kosovo to do any determining. Again, where there is no life, i.e. a vibrant and dominant Serbian community, there is no liberty, i.e. a choice. A non-existent or mortally weakened community can make no choice. For instance, if Southerners who would hold to the right of self-determination and perhaps in that context, autonomy or independence, want to be able to exercise it, then we would be compelled to act before we no longer exist. We will become Kosovo, and it will be the aliens who replace us who will be seceding.

    This is an interesting topic and quite worthy of the consideration it is being given.

36. 36 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 23 October 2007:

    Dr. Fleming and I do not disagree all that much, as he says, but are focused on different aspects of the question. It seems to me that the right of a real society to govern itself (i.e., to consent to its rulers) is part of the moral order. Otherwise, one is in danger of legitimizing all tyrannies, including that of the Turk.

37. 37 Comment by Caper on 23 October 2007:

    “therefore, I do not frequent fora such as the one offered by Chronicles in order to lurk and experience ass kickings. I come rather to discuss intellectual, spiritual, philosophical and political matters somewhere across that spectrum which we think to identify as “conservative.” At the end of the day, some of us have made better arguments than have others, and we have hopefully become more aware and sharper as we take what we have encountered here into other domains of our lives. I, however, unlike a lurker on this particular forum do not frequent this site to experience the cock of the walk kick ass. If I wanted to do that, I’d go to one of the cock fights which, despite having been just recently declared illegal in Louisiana, still go on and where, unlike here, the beer and the barbecue are better. (That is a response to one post on this thread!)”

    Am I the lurker, Mr. Peters? I often wonder whether I am quibbling, and sometimes I know for a fact I am. So if you would please specify whom you are criticizing, the rebuke would be more effective. Perhaps I am just confessing my own denseness merely by asking. Thanks.

38. 38 Comment by Red Phillips on 23 October 2007:

    Sorry I missed your talk Dr. Fleming. I could not make it until Sat. The reports I got on your talk on secession were uniformly positive. I did hear about the Biblical literalism dust up.

    I don’t have much time now for a long discussion, but I don’t think either G.S. or Dr. Wilson or me are arguing for any sort of universal rights and certainly not for liberal democracy. It is the idea of organic and natural as opposed to imposed and foreign that I am trying to convey.

    This is in line with the point you were making about Filmer and Aristotle I think. The power flows from family to village to district etc. Not from district to the district that just happens to be weaker and we can conquer. Of course this is ideal. Conquest has actually been the norm of human history, and every group could have a claim for autonomy if you go back far enough. I guess you could argue for some right of conquest, and just get it over with. (I’m not saying you are doing that.) But then conservatives would have no need to feel remorse for the lack of Indians. This is all complicated. A balance between recognizing the realities on the ground and how far back you can go to bring up injustices. I certainly am not in favor of all Americans of European decent packing up and going back to the Continent.

    And I don’t think it is merely an issue of pure numbers. That is what I meant when I asked if the Kurds had a “reasonable claim” to the land in Southern Turkey.

    When I was in the employ of Uncle Sam, I had the chance to work with some Kurdish immigrants. (Long story that I can not elaborate on for several more years.) They did not consider themselves Iraqis. They spoke Kurdish. When asked they would say they were from Kurdistan. They generally didn’t really look like the Arab Iraqis either. I think Kurdish identity is genuine and not phony and trumped up. There have clearly been systematic efforts to stamp out their ethnic identity in Turkey and Syria. In Turkey it used to be illegal to speak the language. I don’t know what to do with all that information, but it seems an independent Kurdistan would be preferable to Turkey making it illegal to speak their language. And it seems like a Turkish nationalism, not based on true Turkish identity but on some somewhat artificial lines on a map, is what is standing in the way.

    All that said, we should not have let this genie out of the bottle.

39. 39 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 October 2007:

    Caper,

    I was lamenting that discussions and the well crafted arguments which are important parts of those discussions too often become competions which distract us from the issues. I am as susceptible to this distraction as the next. In fact, my own distracting reponse to your post is an excellent example of that.

40. 40 Comment by C Bowen on 23 October 2007:

    An independent Kurdistan bordering a NATO country? No, Dr.Fleming is right: not in our interest in the present.

    The Kurds, at least Lovecraft’s depiction of them in The Terror at Redhook, are a mischievous and treacherous people, but they are survivors. Since stories of the Turkish-Kurds border going hot have been episodic over the last 20 years (I assume more), my real question is the coupled with the timing of the State Department more or less canceling Hunt Oil’s (Texas based, friend of the Bush Family) contract with Kurdistan, was the permanent government looking for a two party distraction to keep eyes away from another change of teams, and Pelosi et al, willing to play a part, rather as good soldiers, then irresponsible muckrakers.

    No doubt, the Kurds are playing all sides, just as their enemies are, but our folks have only heard of Machiavelli, maybe through an edited episode of the Sopranos on A&E, and don’t really get it, while the Kurds, by their nature, their very survival, can play all sides at once.

    I’ll give the permanent government credit. The whole partition thing (pushed by Brownback-Biden in the Senate) gets people thinking about those “universal rights” or whatever, rather than: who got us into this mess?

41. 41 Comment by C Bowen on 23 October 2007:

    The Turks will come clean the day American conservatives begin talking about the curious lack of Indians in these United States.

    Priceless, though don’t tell the eugenics conservatives the smart one’s DNA walks amongst us. The cool ones were wiped out by our common enemies.

42. 42 Comment by TJF on 23 October 2007:

    The discussion continues to be interesting, and, in the case of Mr. Peters, I find little to disagree with. My defense of monarchy was not that it is Christian per se but that it is not incompatible with Christianity, as for example, radical democracy is in principle. I say in principle, because democracies have functioned very rarely, but the ideas advanced by democrats constitute a denial of any value beyond individual self-assertion and nose-counting.
    The problem comes in with that wretched and misleading term “rights.” I understand there are rights given to me by law and custom, which vary from place to place and cannot be made the basis of any universal principle. Beyond that, the word is slippery, even in Latin. Properly used, a right or ius is that which is right, proper, normal, and lawful, but rightness does not entail a claim upon other persons or upon society or a government. Thus while it is right to take care of one’s children, they do not necessarily have a claim upon the parents, much less one that can be exercised through the legal system or through government. In fact, St. Thomas uses this very example to demonstrate that rights do not entail claims.
    Thus, while it may be right, ius, themis, nomos, etc., that a people govern itself, that rightness does not entail a claim against an alien ruler, e.g. Iraqis or Turks, much less on third parties (the US or the UN). We have absolutely no duty to the Kurds except for the negative duties of Christians not to do unjustifiable harm, such as the harm we have inflicted upon the Iraqis.
    On the level of fact and history, the Kurdish question is complex, as most such questions are. Yesterday, I raised the question of Kurdish offenses against Iraqi Christians. I flubbed when trying to post a clarification to the effect that most of the violence seemed more due to greed (they wanted the houses and property) and nationalism than to religion. In fact, Kurdistan has taken in Christian refugees from other parts of Iraq–but they can be expected to go home, when it is safe, and play no part in a future Kurdish state. It is also true that there has been much intermarriage between Kurds and their overlords. A few years ago, I raised the question with a friendly waiter in the city the ignorant Turks insist on calling Istanbul (that is, pidgin Greek for Downtown). He turned out to be a Kurd married to a Turk and went on to describe all sorts of complicated mixed marriages within his family. He was perfectly proud of his Kurdish background, but he had little use for Kurdish nationalism and detested the PKK. (Similarly during the break-up of Yugoslavia, I met Serbs married to Croats, and with a Muslim brother-in-law.) So, mere numbers do not always tell the whole story.
    Nationalism is not only not always a great idea, but it is often a wicked impulse that springs from a desire to elevate one’s own group by denigrating or oppressing another’s. I cite such obvious cases as Croatia in the 1940’s and 1990’s, the Czechs, who did not treat the Slovaks much better than the Hungarians did and who abused the Sudeten Germans whom, at the end of of the war, the expelled with no little violence, the Russian colonists of the Baltic countries who have been whining about their rights in Lithuania.
    Perhaps I should clean up and abbreviate my talk on secession and post it.

43. 43 Comment by Caper on 23 October 2007:

    “Caper,

    I was lamenting that discussions and the well crafted arguments which are important parts of those discussions too often become competions which distract us from the issues. I am as susceptible to this distraction as the next. In fact, my own distracting reponse to your post is an excellent example of that.”

    Mr. Peters, not to distract any further, but thank you for the reproof. In the future when I step out of line, please do just address me directly and say “knock it off.” Thanks.

44. 44 Comment by Caper on 23 October 2007:

    Oh, and sorry for being distracting and rude. Dr. Wilson is always a good sport and Southern gentleman. {end current distraction}

45. 45 Comment by robert reavis on 23 October 2007:

    Capers and Mr. Peters,
    I enjoy all your posts. E-mail has no context and therefore must be tolerated as a poor substitute for conversation. Please don’t mistake me for a prig or a cock fighting referee.( although most Chronicle readers have been called much worse by less men) I read this site because of the honest characters and cavaliers who gather here. You are part of the attraction , so please forgive any unwarranted, Okie, intrusions or my vulgar comparisons to bar room brawls. It was only a memory from the days of youth. Cheers

46. 46 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 October 2007:

    I agree that monarchy is not incompatible with Christianity. Essentially, the monarch, if he rules in a Christian tradition and if he himself is a Christian, is a steward of his realm. A true steward realizes that his stewardship and the wards over which he has obligation and the commensurate authority to fulfill that obligation belong to God and not to him. If he is a Christian king, with the law written in his heart, he will be the head of his kingdom as Christ is the head of the Church – the suffering servant, washing her feet, dying for her and becoming her advocate with the Father.

    The temptation which the monarch must withstand and which few to none have managed to do is to turn the divine obligation into divine right. Once that step is made, then the next follows swiftly: the monarch no longer sees himself as subject to God and His law, but the monarch vainly believes that he has become the law. They then become vain enough to believe that their being the law means that they can make the law.

    Of couse, the same can be said of a “collective monarch,” i.e. a people in their sovereign capacity. I will assume that Jefferson was not being cynical when he, old deist that he was, wrote the line about being “endowed by our Creator” into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, not wanting to put too much emphasis on that preamble since Lincoln turned it to his own Jacobin purposes and stood the whole document on its head. Jefferson was at least tipping his hat to the notion that “the people” receive a divinie obligation associate with life, libery and “pursuit of happiness,” whatever that last one is. However, once the people emancipate themselves from the understanding that they are the stewards and come to believe that they are the owners, they are no better than the kings, perhaps worst because one can always hope that a new king will come as heir or by elector who will restore the old harmony; it is difficult, however, to hope for a whole new people. I guess that I could herein put in a plug for secession and say that those who have the authority to secede, at least in any divinie sense, are those who hold to the Chrisitian notion of stewardship of polity and who want to separate themselves from those who in their hubris and arrogance believe that God is dead and that they and their fickle wills have become god.

    I close with a footnote. In central Europe, as God in the perception of the medieval mind (the more accurate from my perspective) receded and was replace by Providence, a more benign and more secular (Calvinist) understanding, the objective correlative of the Platonic dichotomy was weakened and finally broke. In the end, authority and power were seen to rest on the monarch and ultimately on the factions which replaced the monarch: political parties and “the people.” In Prussia, there did remain a curious abstration, that hung between Wirklichkeit (the reality of the noumen) and Realität (the reality of the phenomenon): it was the notion of the Staat (state). This is the entity that both the Marxists and the fascists felt they needed to usurpe, take over and finally eliminate – the last fleeting vestige of God in an otherwise new secular order of things. Therein is an irony. Frederick the Great said of himself, “Ich bin des Staates erster Diener.” (I am the first servant of the state.) Thus was articulated by the secular Calvinist, not to be confused with the more dangerous versions thereof which would arise in New England, an almost last homage of a servant king to his Lord, even if his Lord barely hung to existence as an abstration known as the state. Compare Frederick attitude to that of his French counterpart at the time.

47. 47 Comment by ECHS1967 on 23 October 2007:

    Respect everyone. Cherish the faithful. Fear God. Honor the king.
    1 Peter 2: 17

48. 48 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 23 October 2007:

    The last time I checked C.S Lewis was not a Doctor of the Church nor even much of a traditional Christian. Scripture and Tradition are filled with monarchical imagery and assumptions. The fact that the modern secular republics are hostile to Christianity even to the point of supporting Islamic causes against Christians should not be a surprise. They were founded in a revolt against monarchy and that includes the Kingship of Christ. I don’t see why one cannot be a monarchist in theory while making the best of the present order. The soldier longs for peace even as he endures war. He knows peace to be generally superior to war.

49. 49 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 October 2007:

    Mr. Theodore Van Oosbree,

    With your post supra, I agree in the most part. However, my ignorance wonders about your reference to C.S. Lewis. I would have some light on this matter if you would.

50. 50 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 23 October 2007:

    “My defense of monarchy was not that it is Christian per se but that it is not incompatible with Christianity, as for example, radical democracy is in principle.”

    Are we sure? If Christianity is the true and natural religion, and Christ the true and natural King of the world, then is it not so hard to conclude that the best and most natural social and political order is that which is modeled on Christ’s Kingdom?

    *Most* (it is impossible, as Dr. Fleming says, to make universal statements about the organization of human society) organized (i.e., post-tribal) societies have been governed by monarchies of some sort, have they not? That is not the case today, but it is certainly the case that most of the present non-monarchies (i.e., liberal or socialist republics or those attempting to ape them) became such through a radical interruption of the monarchical order–generally on principles that have their origins in the Christophobic enlightenment.

    Dr. Fleming, of course, knows far more about history and literature than I ever will, but the older I get and the more good stuff I read, the more I truly believe that a monarchy is the best and most natural form of government–and in that sense, the most Christian.

51. 51 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 23 October 2007:

    “I much prefer the Swiss Confederation or Carolina in its best days to the Byzantine Empire at its most glorious.”

    Switzerland was and is in many ways a very fine place, but it has never been and cannot be a grand civilization on the scale of Rome, France or Britain. In some ways that may be a good thing. But the best of the saints were those who propagated the faith, and the richest historical legacy belongs to those countries that touched world civilization in a positive manner (even though France and Britain began spreading the seeds of their own destruction in the later days). Not everyone is called to be a prophet, and some obviously should never have tried–witness, obviously, the U.S.A., but I daresay it is not fair to compare our own experience in empire with that of the afformentioned three.

    “Is it not better that the Turks, the Kurds, and the Arabs are at one another’s throats than united against what is left of the West? That might not be in the interest of the U.S. imperial machinery but on the whole it seems better for us.”

    Well, that’s hardly based on any generalizable political principle. Pitting one’s enemies against each other is a time-honored diplomatic tactic.

52. 52 Comment by Michael on 23 October 2007:

    I never expected TJF’s original post, let alone my small query, to generate so much response. Thanks to Dr. Fleming and others for answering my question.

    It seems to me, for what it is worth, that self-government as I understand it, and perhaps as Drs. Fleming and Wilson do as well, is a particular cultural legacy rather than a universal and abstract moral ideal. It comes to us, as English-speaking Americans – especially to those of us of old American stock, whose ancestors were present on this continent when it was still British North America – not from 1776, but rather from 1215, when king John’s rebellious barons forced Magna Charta on him in asserting the ancient laws and liberties of Englishmen against his attempts to arrogate arbitrary power to himself. This action, of course, summarized many years of grievance on their part. Magna Charta’s provision safeguarding the independence of the church in England, for example, reflected the disputes surrounding the Constitutions of Clarendon, which Henry II sought to force upon the bishops, and the later murder of Thomas à Becket by Henry’s courtiers. Ultimately, the barons looked back to the Saxon days of conciliar government through the Witan.

    Like any legacy, the cultural tradition of self-government can be husbanded or it can be squandered (and we have done much more of the latter than the former). But it seems to me to be something on the order of an entailed estate – it is _our_ legacy, not someone else’s, and we neither can nor should try to give it away, especially to people half way round the world whose entire history has been one of alternating despotism and anarchy, constantly punctuated by bloodletting.

53. 53 Comment by TJF on 24 October 2007:

    The problem lies not with nature of quasi-democratic small republics like Athens and Switzerland but with the theory of democracy that reduces a polity to a competition between hedonistic individuals who base legitimacy on the counting of votes. To traditional Christianity, this is unacceptable, if only becaue one cannot subject the creed to the vote, or any basic moral and social principle. This consideration should not be used as a defense of tyranny, empire, or even some legitimate authoritarian regime, but it does indicate a fundamental incompatibility between Christianity and democratism.

    Lewis was an interesting literary scholar, who wrote some decent Christian pop fiction as well as some very cleary argued essays. He was not much of a philosopher and knew very little theology. He was fundamentally antagonistic not just to the Catholic Church but two the most ancient traditions of Christianity as they survive in the Catholic, Orthodox and even Anglican traditions. In his lectures on “Mere Christianity”–a term he borrows from Richard Baxter, a good moralist but more or less outside even the Anglican Church–he tries to reduce Christianity to the standard of lowchurch Anglicanism with a tinge of Methodism and Calvinism. This was, I now conclude, parochial and infantilist. I admire Lewis very much for the good things he wrote, but he was, as one of his surviving colleagues once remarked to me, no saint.

    Michael is, as they say, spot on. As Anglo-Americans we inherited and then squandered and then destroyed a great cultural tradition of liberty that goes back to Medieval Catholic England. Magna Charta, by the way, is anticipated and paralleled by decrees given freely by Holy Roman Emperors like Henry III who had to oppose his great Italian barons in order to secure the property rights of lesser nobles and soldiers. I wonder how surprised many American conservatives would be to discover the Medieval foundations of what they cherish.

    Finally, I assume that when St. Peter instructed Christians to obey the basileus, he could only have meant the emperor, presumably Nero. In the world he knew, there were few kings and, as he well knew, even Herod the Great (to say nothing of his lesser progeny was a Roman puppet and an Arab to boot).

54. 54 Comment by Caper on 24 October 2007:

    “He was fundamentally antagonistic not just to the Catholic Church but two the most ancient traditions of Christianity as they survive in the Catholic, Orthodox and even Anglican traditions. In his lectures on “Mere Christianity”–a term he borrows from Richard Baxter, a good moralist but more or less outside even the Anglican Church–he tries to reduce Christianity to the standard of lowchurch Anglicanism with a tinge of Methodism and Calvinism. This was, I now conclude, parochial and infantilist. I admire Lewis very much for the good things he wrote, but he was, as one of his surviving colleagues once remarked to me, no saint. ”

    It’s about time someone said as much!

55. 55 Comment by Caper on 24 October 2007:

    “Anglican Church”

    But we found out this year from the Vatican that this organization does not merit the name “church.” Cheers!

56. 56 Comment by Homeschooled Catholic High-Schooler on 24 October 2007:

    “Of course, the same could be said of a “collective monarch” . . . . . once the people emancipate themselves from the understanding that they are the stewards and come to believe that they are the owners, they are no better than the kings, perhaps worst because one can always hope that a new king will come as heir or by elector who will restore the old harmony.” – robert m. peters.

    A brief comment: this reminds me of the scene in the movie The Patriot where Gibson’s character refuses to condone the rebellion of America from England, and says that he would rather have one tyrant ten thousand miles away then ten thousands tyrants one mile away [or something to that effect]. Alas, such is the basic state of affairs in current America.

    I have greatly enjoyed reading both the article and all of the discussion which has followed, especially the discussion on monarchy, democracy, and the right of self-government.

    Mr. Fleming – I will be sure to look up both Filmer and Procopius. Being an avid history student I am quite sure that I will enjoy the latter’s works.

57. 57 Comment by Red Phillips on 24 October 2007:

    We should not get carried away with the Christian Monarchist argument. As the radical liberal Thomas Paine pointed out in Common Sense, the Bible is very clear that monarchy was not the ideal form of government for Israel. The Israelites wanted a King so they could be like the other nations. That may speak to a certain natural order argument for monarchy since it seems to arise so commonly, but it was a step down for Israel. Their form of government before was essentially revealed law with rule by judges (wise men) who were selected/appointed but not by the people as a whole (democracy).

    While we can only take the Israel analogy so far, it is I think instructive and not irrelevant.

    I agree that there is a Christian and Biblical reason to oppose mass democracy. There is a Christian and Biblical reason to oppose the notion that legitimate authority rests only on “consent.” (I think you could argue that this is the most fundamental and essential element of liberalism.) But I don’t think there is a Christian or Biblical endorsement of monarchy.

    That said, I drop the name of Filmer every chance I get. Not for the Divine Right argument, but for the contra-Locke argument.

58. 58 Comment by TJF on 24 October 2007:

    Doc Phllipps is right, and I agree we cannot push Samuel’s argument too far, correct though it was. The Israelites were in a transition from a warring confederacy of tribes and tribal alliances into something more like nationhood. Interestingly when the nation broke up, it was a northern secession from the Davidic kingdom.

    So far as early Christians knew, the Roman Empire was the only legitimate form of government, and, as the model of a commonwealth, both in its pagan and Christianized, forms, it holds a prior place in the Christian imagination over both the Davidic kingdom and the patriarchs. (For which reason, Christians should never bash the empire.) On the other hand, it too failed, though not, perhaps, for exactly the reasons that St. Augustine supposed. The latest and best theory seems to be the argument that our barbarian ancestors had learned agricultural technology from the Romans and multiplied to the point that with Roman weaponry and techniques, they were irresistible.

    Commonwealths “here” (to borrow the language of Gregory the Great) can even at their best only crudely approximate a Christian ideal, and the confusion between the city of man and the city of God will always produce much mischief, as it did in Geneva, Knox’s Scotland, and in New England.

59. 59 Comment by Allen Wilson on 24 October 2007:

    In my fantasy world – all I have since the real world is falling apart around us – much or all of what they call the ‘Kurdish’ parts of Turkey are given back to the Armenians, along with the rest of occupied Armenia, while occupied eastern Greece (the rest of Turkey) goes back to the Greeks, and Northern Iraq becomes once again Assyria…..and the priests re-appear in the great church in the city of Constantine and finish their service, while the emperor rises from beneath the gate and returns to his throne………as the ghosts of old Dandolo and Mehmet II amd Mahommed himself scream out in misery from the bowels of hell………

    Dr Wilson may be right concerning his preference for Carolina or the Swiss confederacy over Byzantium. I would too, largely because I’m a Southerner and naturally would prefer Carolina. However, I would prefer Byzantium over the empire of Lincolnia any time. In a certain sense, Richmond was our Constantinople.

    How does the secession of the ten northern tribes from the original kingdom of Israel figure into the secession debate and the right of political communities to self government vs. the right of the ruler to rule?

    Are there any sources we could consult concerning the way that the Byzantines balanced Athens with Jerusalem, calling classical learning ‘outter wisdom’, and Christian teaching ‘inner wisdom’?

60. 60 Comment by TJF on 24 October 2007:

    On the secession of Israel, I have always looked at it as a legitimate, if highly unwise, assertion of the constituent elements in a compact to withdraw, once the compact has proved prejudicial to their interests. It seems to me the northern tribes were acting more or less as the Southern states did in 1860-61. Neither was exerting an abstract human right; they were merely withdrawing from a union they had entered into voluntarily. If Judaea had conquered the northern tribes and forced them to swear allegiance, that would have been a different matter.

    On Byzantinium vs. Switzerland, I am pretty sure I would take Byzantium in one of its brighter periods. Harry Lime’s famous summing up of the Swiss contribution to civilization as the cuckoo clock was overstated, since it was the Bavarians and not the Swiss who made the clock. I have nothing against Switzerland, but its virtues seem to be more those of the constituents–German, French, Italian–than of any whole. For all their conspicuous failings, the Byzantines accomplished some magnificent things in church liturgy, architecture, theology, and history, and they were in the midst of a great cultural revival when they were conquered. Our own savage ancestors were alternately contemptuous and awe-stricken, but most of the Franks were scarcely able to grasp what they were seeing. The infamous Liutprand of Cremona strikes me as one of the greatest liars to have passed his slanders down to credulous modern historians. He, by the way, also created the legend of the Roman pornocracy of the 9th-10th centuries.

    I don’t think there is a shortcut to understanding Byzantium–I am only a dabbler myself. Increasingly, the sources are being made available in English. If you contrast, for example, Procopius with Gregory of Tours, you will see immediately the difference between a cautious, skeptical, an careful analyst and a credulous post-civilized Gallo-Roman for whom no miracle is too fantastic. (In another context, I would gladly defend Gregory’s History of the Franks as a very clever attempt to tell painful truth about those awful savages, Clovis and his offspring.) The best approach is probably to begin with some basic understanding of the late Empire from Constantine to the Fall of the West, then go on to the age of Justinian as the gateway to Byzantine history. For Catholics, a patient study of Photius and the temporary schism forced by an overly ambitious Pope might begin to create a sympathetic attitude. Photius was a strong-willed character and hardly an original writer, but he was also the most learned man, East and West, of his age. Again, I am only an amateur in Medieval and Byzantine history, but this is the subject that occupies most of my free time. My lecture course on the Christian Age has finally reached the Franks–Charlemagne next week.

61. 61 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 24 October 2007:

    I believe that much recent study and discovery by archeology and pre-historians is showing that our barbarian ancestors were not as barbaric, after all, in comparison to the Romans, as the Roman literary sources would have us believe. And that their natural social organization was republican.

62. 62 Comment by Michael on 24 October 2007:

    I suspect that both the failures and the successes of the Swiss have more to do with their poverty of natural resources than with their form of government, although I am certainly willing to be persuaded otherwise.

    I certainly take TJF’s point that there is an incompatibility between democratism and Christianity, in the sense that religious truth cannot be discovered by popular vote. However, it seems to me that Christianity is mostly indifferent to the form of government under which it exists. It arose under conditions of a pharasaical Jewish theocracy that was allowed local authority as an ethnarchy under the overlordship of pagan Rome. It spread throughout the Roman empire despite the continuing hostility of the latter’s rulers, which periodically rose to the level of bloody persecution. Christianity has persisted and will continue to persist under all sorts of governmental forms, whether imperial, absolutely or constitutionally monarchical, oligarchic, non-democratic but republican (as in the north Italian city-states of the late mediæval period), directly democratic (as in some Swiss cantons), indirectly democratic, as in this and some other countries. It has survived dictatorships, some extremely hostile to it.

    Christianity is not a legalistic religion – there being only two laws, to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbours as ourselves. The problem with Calvin’s Geneva, Knox’s Scotland, and the regimes of puritanism under Cromwell in Britain and under the colonists of New England, is that they attempt to reduce Christianity to a legalism of the sort under which the pharasaical Jews lived at the time of Jesus, or the present votaries of Mahomet live today. During most of its existence Christianity has been content to live with whatever was the prevalent secular law, whether that was the law of the Romans, the Salic Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, etc.

    The mistake made by Calvin, Knox, and the puritans of Old and New England was to expect the law to force people to be virtuous. To ask law to prevent people from sinning (which is after all their nature) is to ask the impossible. Law exists to prohibit and punish crime and to set minimal standards for behavior in their civil transactions. All that Christians can or should expect from the state is that it allow them to make the correct moral choices, and that it not actively encourage vice.

    On the subject of the Franks, it has long occurred to me that just as the chansons de geste are the epic poetry telling the legends of Charlemagne, so the Niebelungenlied must be a very distorted epic recounting of the terrible conflict instigated by Fredegonde, the concubine (and later, wife) of Chilpéric I, against the latter’s brother Sigebert, and sister-in-law, Brunehaut – their names obviously suggesting Siegfried and Brunnhilda. Hervé’s now forgotten French operetta “Chilpéric” seems to indicate that this was his reading, since it is musically a broad parody of Wagner.

63. 63 Comment by TJF on 24 October 2007:

    Yes, there is no Christian form of government, though patriarchal kings, at least as an image, have much to recommend themselves.

    On our savage ancestors, I concede that it is hard to characterize a people or an age, and there were certainly degenerate Roman rulers like Nero, Domitian, and Comodus, and silly ones like the sons of Theodosius, but generation after generation they produced very impressive men, like the mid Fifth century emperor Majorian or Boethius, victim of Theoderic’s rage, or Belisarius. Until Charlemagne–and he was not exactly a civilized gent–the Franks do not have too much to show for themselves. I think I prefer the Lombards, who at least kept the baths running in Pavia.

    So far as I know, the only recent historians who are whitewashing the Franks, Goths, and Lombards are dissembling Polyannas like Walter Goffart or sly dogs like Peter Brown. Two fine books, one a technical monograph and the other a more popular survey, by the archaeological historian Bryan Ward-Perkins give a horrifying snapshot of what happened when the savages overran Europe. If archaeology is not to your taste, browse through Paul the Deacon or Gregory of Tours. The Empire at its worst seems like paradise, especially when compared with the Franks of the 6th and 7th centuries. Clovis and his charming sons make the the celluloid Clantons and the Hole in the Wall Gang seem like a Methodist picnic. And it was not just at the top: the Franks were impossibly violent, greedy, and unjust, with few redeeming qualities. And if Bishop Gregory, who knew them up close, is a liar, why didn’t the stupid Franks burn his book–apart, of course, from the little fact that few of them could read.

    It is hard to tell too much about the social and political life of these savages, but anything like a republican spirit requires a disciplined self-restraint, which they utterly lacked. Clovis was typical: He killed anyone who could challenge his power, including most of his closest relatives, and then late in life, was heard to observe: “How sad it is that I live among strangers like a solitary pilgrim, that I have none of my own kinsmen left to help me when I am facing dangers crisis.”

    He is like the man in the joke who killed his parents and then asked pity from the court on the grounds that he is an orphan. The Medieval historian Roger Collins accuses Gregory of Turs, who records this story, of generally covering up for his hero Clovis’s crimes, but the historian finishes this anecdote with this frank admission: “He said this not because he grieved for their deaths but because in his cunning way he hoped to find some relative still in the land of the living whom he could kill.”

    The rivalry, alluded to by Michael, between Brunhild and Fredegone, woud be funny if it were a white trash comedy taking part in a trailer park instead of the rivalry of two queens. Brunhild, the Visigoth, at least had imbibed some of the spirit of late antiquity and, when she was not thinning out the nobility, she patronized St. Columbanus, but Fredegonde is an amazing specimen, to say nothing of what her great-grandson did to the elderly Brunhild when they captured her. The old woman (now at least 70 years old) was tortured for days, publicly humiliated, and finally “tied by her hair and one leg to the tail of an unbroken horse and …cut to shreds by its hoofs..”

    I don’t blame the Franks for being what they were, and in the end, they produced the greatest nation of modern times, the French, but it would be a mistake to underestimate what the world lost as a result of the barbarian invasions. Little things like all skilled trades, including pottery turned on a wheel, glassmaking, architecture on any large scale, medicine, basic hygiene, a concept of law more elevated than swearing an oath or killing your accuser, a concept of marriage higher than the Playboy philosophy tempered by uxoricidal rage. Don Livingston likes to say that Europe was better off for the barbarian’s fresh blood. Not many citizens of the Empire would have agreed, and even after experiencing the best Germanic ruler, Theoderic, most Roman Italians appear to have supported, at least at first, Justinian’s reconquest. The horror, the horror.

64. 64 Comment by Anonymous on 24 October 2007:

65. 65 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 24 October 2007:

    Briefly, as I’m a thousand miles from home and starving to death, but just to clarify: when I argue that a monarchy is the “most Christian form of government,” I do not intend to argue that it is in any way an ideal. Human beings are incapable of producing an ideal per se. But we can well conceive of one, and we can well approximate one, and certainly should.

    Perhaps I’m biased, because I’ve grown up with the results of radical democracy under the banner of “self-determination” and found them horrifying enough to viscerally oppose self-determination.

66. 66 Comment by Michael on 24 October 2007:

    There is a difference between the fashionable concept of “self determination” and the traditional concept of a nation, which is a state composed of people having a common culture. France or Spain are natural nations, in that they encompass within their borders people who (at least until the modern wave of Muslim immigration) spoke a common language, adhered to a common religious creed, had literature and art that were distinctly French or Spanish, etc. Contrast this with Belgium, for example, which is clearly a synthetic nation. Switzerland historically held together as a nation only because it was a loose confederation of cantons – the cantons, which were where the primary governmental authority lay, being each relatively homogeneous linguistically, religiously, and otherwise.

    The problem with Iraq, as with many of the basket-case African ‘nations,’ is that they were laid out by European colonial authorities that had no interest in the differing tribal/ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities of the people that fell within their borders, nor of the historic antipathies that long existed amongst them.

    It is too easy to idealize the Roman empire. It had no engine of economic growth other than through conquest and exaction of tribute from new territories. Latifundiary agriculture, though very much refined by the Romans in its management, had reached the marginal limits to its productivity. The Roman empire fell when it became overextended, and the cost of defending its frontiers exceeded the ability of its government to pay. It long put off the fatal day by a promiscuous extension of its citizenship, until people who could not say “cives Romanus sum” in proper Latin were freely given the freedom of a city-state with the historic culture of which they had absolutely no identity. We could profit by avoiding their negative example, if it is not indeed too late for us to do so.

67. 67 Comment by Sean Scallon on 24 October 2007:

    Secessionism cannot be a natural human right. If it was then we must also support the secessions of the child killers of Beslan and church-burners of Kosovo who are also “secessionists.” Many secessionist political parties such as those in Quebec, Scotland, Wales and the Basque region are dominated by leftists and globalists. They are taking advantage, as Nebojsa Malic has pointed out, of the destruction of the nation-state by super-national governing bodies like the EU. As the nation-state falters under assault by the EU, these little regions fill a political vacumn.

    Once before I mindlessly supported the secessions from Yugoslavia without realizing the deadly consequences and how much misery and instability it wound up leaving behind. Perhaps it was inevitable that Yugoslavia, which was as much a put-together state as Iraq is, would eventually break apart but the bloodshed was not inevitable and could have been avoided as it was when Bohemia and Moravia seperated from Slovakia.

    The Wars of the Yugoslav Secession proves the obvious that we have to take secessions on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, the secession of Flanders from Belgium would be a good thing. The Flemish can govern themselves. They would be economically better off and it would leave Brussels isolated. A conservative region of Europe, especially in the Low Countries, would prove potentially inspirational. In another example, given who would run an independent Quebec, an autonomous Quebec nominally within Canada would be better than an independent Quebec. An independent Kurdistan would distablize the entire Middle East and not be a good thing compared to an autonomous Kurdistan within a weak Iraq. Close to home, we may all sympathize with an independent South but if secession happened tomorrow, who would govern an independent South? The same people who have readily allowed the region to be dominated by U.S. government and globalist economic forces and no doubt such persons would continually try to integrate the region into the global economy.

    As Dr. Fleming pointed out, self government goes to those who can govern themselves and who will die for such governence, like the American colonies or the Greeks vs. the Turks or the Finns. This results in stronger nations than those who’s independence was granted by international fiat like East Timor or the former European colonies in the Third World.

    However, I would not take a dim view towards groups like Christian Exodus or the Free State Project. Demographics is destiny and migration defines a nation state as much as fighting or constitutional conventions do. It may very well be a person from Kansas moving to South Carolina will be an “alien” to the native Carolinians regardless of what religion they are simply because they are not born and raised nor are their families from the state. But as Dr. Fleming himself pointed out during his residence in South Carolina, he himself may not “fit in” with the locals but certainly his children and grandchildren will be if they continue to live there. I agree the antics of a few bullheaded FSP supporters in the New Hampshire town of Grafton were the absolute wrong way to go about what they want to accomplish. But if they are serious about having a “Free State” they will start families who in turn start other families that will be steeped in New Hampshire culture and traditions for generations to come. As I have said to many Free Staters, its not about winning political power, it’s about preserving a culutre from which that power springs forth. I believe most of them, libertarians they may be, understand this.

68. 68 Comment by TJF on 25 October 2007:

    What is the difference between Christian Exodus wackos invading your state and an invasion of Muslims or Communists? Making other peoples’ lives into an ideological project is like treating them as slaves. The CE invaders are not going to SC to accept the place for what it is but to transform it. There are already too many outsiders in SC, and a continued influx of aliens, who will be sure to start prating about the South’s racism, laziness, and lack of public services, is exactly what the state does not need. I hope the good people of Anderson know what to do with them.

    It is not at all a question of idealizing the Roman Empire. But in a comparison with the barbarian successor states, the Empire seems magnificent. The barbarians themselves knew it, and king after king, emperor after emperor, dictator after dictator in Europe has dreamed of restoring the empire. Friedrich Heer thought the restoration project virtually defined European history, from Charlemagne to Hitler to the EU.

    Since there is no consensus on why Rome fell, one cannot base a judgment on one or another theory. In addition, I don’t know that economic growth is much of a criterion for a civilization. If it were, 20th century America would have been a civilized place, which it wasn’t. After Trajan (d. 117) the empire did not expand but was shrunk deliberately. Most, though not all Roman conquests were in response to aggression and even when they waged a war of naked conquest, as in Julius Caesar’s invasion of Gaul, they had to pretend it was a war of defense or vindication, because Roman religion did not permit unjustified war. The “tribute” exacted was simply taxation, and while Roman taxes are a complicated matter, their tax rates–including harbor duties, import taxes, etc–were certainly lower than ours. Italy, for many centuries, was exempt from the tributum, except for grave crises, and even then the republic might pay back those who had been assessed. In times, of peace, as in the period from Nerva to Antoninus Pius, Roman provincials were in an almost as enviable position, as Gibbon believed.

    Roman agriculture began to be transformed into latifundia during the Punic Wars; however, the republic did take steps–admittedly under pressure and threats–to establish agricultural colonies for veterans and farmers. Slave labor proved costly, especially as the Empire shrank, and the great estates relied more on share-croppers. It is very hard to assess tehir condition, especially in the provinces. The problems really start not with internal decay but with the mounting need to stave off the barbarians. In the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the Germans posed no serious threat, except when their territories were invaded. They were too primitive to learn two necessary techniques:surplus-producing agriculture that encouraged population growth and the civilized methods of warfare. Alas, the Romans taught them both, and by the end of the 2nd century AD, the pressure was quite serious. More wars mean higher taxes; loss of provinces means loss of provincial tax revenues and thus greater pressure on other parts of the empire, but it became a losing game in the West. The fact is, though, that the richer Eastern Empire managed to slaughter the Germans in the capital and turn to citizen-barbarians like the Isaurians. The theme-system, as it developed, restored something like the farmer-soldier of the early republic, and despite incredible assaults from Arabs, Avars, Bulgars, Serbs, and Russians, Constantinople held much of Asia Minor, Greece, and the northern Balkans for a very long time, bringing Christianity and civilization to the Slavs and setting an example of civilized order that the Franks could only dream of.

    On tiny anecdote. When Justinian’s army forced the Ostrogoths to surrender, the poor Germans told their womenfolk they had no choice, since they were outnumbered by gigantic formidable warriors. When the women saw the Roman army marching in–the small number of short wiry men–they spat in the faces of the men. These little guys might be Thracians, Greeks, Syrians, Isaurians, but they had accepted the training and discipline of the Scipios. Read Procopius’ hilarious account of the Gothic siege of Rome and their childish attempts to imitate Roman siegecraft. Belisarius made monkeys out of the poor devils.

    So far as I know, my blood is all northern barbarian, but to the extent we are civilized, it is because of the Mediterranean peoples, the Greeks and Romans in particular. Some time after WWI, American middle class children were no longer taught Latin, though it persisted in the South down to roughly 1960. I do not say that the loss of Latin destroyed civilization in America, but what I do say is that for us barbarians, Romanitas is our only entry into a civilized world. Every important English writer knew this, from Ben Jonson to TS Eliot. If we don’t know it now, it is because we have returned to our native swinishness with none of the vigor. We are like the poor Vandals and Merovingians, drinking (and now drugging) and fornicating ourselves into impotence

69. 69 Comment by robert m. peters on 25 October 2007:

    “It is not at all a question of idealizing the Roman Empire. But in a comparison with the barbarian successor states, the Empire seems magnificent. The barbarians themselves knew it, and king after king, emperor after emperor, dictator after dictator in Europe has dreamed of restoring the empire. Friedrich Heer thought the restoration project virtually defined European history, from Charlemagne to Hitler to the EU.” TJF

    With most of this statement I can agree, since I have spent no little time mulling over and studying the German understanding of “Reich =empire.” During a time in which the values of the Christian faith were the prevaling values of the German princes and emperors, most of them understood themselves to be the stewards of the Reich. There was always, for most with that understanding, a double meaning – one related to being the temporal stewards of the Roman Empire itself and the other the servant stewards of Christ’s kingdom of which the empire was a mere foreshadowing. This dualistic understanding of their office lies, in part, behind the title “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.”

    WWI, from at least one of the German perspectives (there are more than one.), was fought for hegemony over Europe between the Western heirs of the Roman Empire – the German Kaiser and the Austrian Kaiser – and the Eastern heir of the Roman Empire – the Czar.

    In some circles, Hitler and Stalin are seen as the secular heirs of this same squabble.

    It is quite interesting, I believe, that the victorious allies in WWII disolved the existing German state and even wiped Prussia off the map, but in consensus and of one accord they all agreed that the German Reich would continue to exist – a kind of abstract spook hanging over Middle Europe. When Willie Brandt made his famous trip to Poland and recognized, as no other German government to that point, that the Oder-Neiße was the boundary between, he was highly criticized. His response was that the Federal Republic of Germany was only a caretaker government and that he, as Chancellor of that government had made the agreement with Poland. Then he went on to say that he had no authority to speak for the German Reich which alone could determine the final disposition of its ancient frontiers. This notion of empire is indeed quite useful, and one still awaits the last words of the Reich on the borders of Europe.

    “If we don’t know it now, it is because we have returned to our native swinishness with none of the vigor. We are like the poor Vandals and Merovingians, drinking (and now drugging) and fornicating ourselves into impotence” TJF

    The history of Rome is repleat with instances in which the Romans were also given to drinking and fornicating themselves into impotence. As a Christian, I would hold that the transforming power of the risen and living Christ, the unction of the Holy Spirit and the witness of the Church are at least as powerful in “civilizing” societies as is the Roman Empire, and I do not find that the witness of the Church is in any way bound to the Empire. The Church in the authority of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit can be the transforming agent of any society without the legions of the Roman empire marching along with it.

    Personally, when I am in Arlington, Virginia, I make a pilgrimage to the 16th section of the National Cemetery and suvey the monument there on which the following inscription is to be found:

    “”Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.”

    Yes, the South did have a sense for Latin, but its eye was toward the Republic and not toward the Empire.

70. 70 Comment by joe on 25 October 2007:

    Is it true that the South disliked the Empire? I simply don’t know that. Gildersleeve disliked the Romans, but then he like me was a Hellenist and he equated Rome with New England–quite unfairly. Certainly, Southern students had to read Cicero, Caesar, Plautus, Terence and Sallust–all from the republic–but they also read Vergil, Ovid, and Tacitus and, if they made any progress, Seneca, Juvenal, Lucan, et al. Naturally, they talked a good game about republicanism, but I am not at all sure this prejudice was reflected in their education or their reading.

    As for Christianity and the empire, it is more than a bit of an oversimplification to divorce the two. This is a vast topic, but Christians from Paul to Augustine and Boethius wrestled with their identity as Roman citizens. Most Christians, apart from Montanist and Donatist heretics, tried to be good citizens, and while there were disputes, the main stream of Christianity, as represented by the patriarchates of Rome and Alexandria, to which Constantinople would be added, did not repudiate the Empire or reject public service, even military service.

    I think we should separate out our personal and sectarian preferences when we are trying to make historical evaluations. I prefer small-scale commonwealths to empires and monarchies. I like Athens before the Persian Wars, the early Spartans, the pirates of ancient Phocaea and Medieval Pisa; I revere the highlanders among my ancestors and the magnificent provincialism of Jefferson’s Virginia and Calhoun’s South Carolina, but I do not see why such a preference should be converted into a prejudice against the one institution that came to embody the rule of law, high civilization, and the Christian religion. Posidonius, in the late 2nd century, advanced the notion that Rome, in providing law and peace, was uniquely fitted to preserve and extend all that was best in what the Greeks had created. America’s best men, Jefferson and Adams, to name only two, were in a cultural sense Greeks first, then Romans, then English and only then Americans by way of being Virginian or Yankee. Hostility toward the Roman order is one more manifestation of the modern Westerner’s self-loathing.

71. 71 Comment by TJF on 25 October 2007:

    Is it true that the South disliked the Empire? I simply don’t know that. Gildersleeve disliked the Romans, but then he like me was a Hellenist and he equated Rome with New England–quite unfairly. Certainly, Southern students had to read Cicero, Caesar, Plautus, Terence and Sallust–all from the republic–but they also read Vergil, Ovid, and Tacitus and, if they made any progress, Seneca, Juvenal, Lucan, et al. Naturally, they, like most Americans of all regions, talked a good game about republicanism, but I am not at all sure this prejudice was reflected in their education or their reading. Even for Jeferson, Vergil was second only to Homer.

    As for Christianity and the empire, it is more than a bit of an oversimplification to divorce the two. This is a vast topic, but Christians from Paul to Augustine and Boethius wrestled with their identity as Roman citizens. Most Christians, apart from Montanist and Donatist heretics, tried to be good citizens, and while there were disputes, the main stream of Christianity, as represented by the patriarchates of Rome and Alexandria, to which Constantinople would be added, did not repudiate the Empire or reject public service, even military service. By 400 Empire and Christianity were virtuallty co-extensive, and even by 600 people still thought this way, and indepedent barbarian rulers were proud to receive recognition as Roman consuls, patricians, etc., titles that gave them an acknowledged authority over their Roman=Christian subjects. There are some things we cannot hope to undo without causing vastly more harm than good. Christianity is, for the most part, a Romanized religion, whether we say we are Catholic, Orthodox, or Calvinist. It is better to deal with reality as we find it rather than to invent a fiction we find more pleasing.

    I think we should separate out our personal and sectarian preferences when we are trying to make historical evaluations. Like many of you, I prefer small-scale commonwealths to empires and monarchies. I like Athens before the Persian Wars, the early Spartans, the pirates of ancient Phocaea and Medieval Pisa; I revere the highlanders among my ancestors and the magnificent provincialism of Jefferson’s Virginia and Calhoun’s South Carolina, but I do not see why such a preference should be converted into a prejudice against the one institution that came to embody the rule of law, high civilization, and the Christian religion. Posidonius, in the late 2nd century, advanced the notion that Rome, in providing law and peace, was uniquely fitted to preserve and extend all that was best in what the Greeks had created. America’s best men, Jefferson and Adams, to name only two, were in a cultural sense Greeks first, then Romans, then English and only then Americans by way of being Virginian or Yankee. Hostility toward the Roman order is one more manifestation of the modern Westerner’s self-loathing.

72. 72 Comment by robert reavis on 25 October 2007:

    Mr. Peters,
    “I do not find that the witness of the Church is in any way bound to the Empire. The Church in the authority of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit can be the transforming agent of any society without the legions of the Roman empire marching along with it.’

    This is a good question and far more serious than the “why can’t we all just get along” ecumenical syncretism of the post VII years would indicate. The incarnation did answer questions the Greeks and Romans had wondered about for centuries. The wise men did travel West from the East looking for the God made man.. Ireland is the one exception of a european country that was never conquered by Romans and yet remained a kind of Catholic/European country. It must be admitted as a historical fact that wherever the Empire conquered, it prepared the soil for Christ. And there is more depth to the phrase “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe ” than anti-catholic historians like to admit.
    You mentioned in a former post that it is the relationship to Christ that develops the culture, not the culture that develops the personal relationship. The catholic would hold that it is both, and the exhausting arguments for this were conducted years ago in America between Brent Bozell and that libertarian fellow, that Bill Buckley preferred for so long in National Review. Of course in a popular sense, Bozell lost the debate , lost his magazine, his money and practically everything else. But he never lost his love for the truth. And as the years pass and our culture continues to break apart with each further “development” or heresy against Christian doctrine in the name of a licentious freedom of conscience, blinded by its own individual cravings and desires, one can see clearly who stood for the fullness of truth when the crowd was at the door.. ( The libertarian does not say “Love God and do what you will. ” but rather “love property and freedom, then do what you will.”)
    Now of course real protestant theology never gave this type of greed its blessing, but over the passage of time it has arrived at these same practical conclusions. There is no longer a center because in the process of cleaning the old religion of its abuse of authority, we mortally wounded all authority except “me”, “myself” and “I”. “I”is a lonely place to practice faith, in fact at least one of the classical definitions for hell is,”having ones own way forever.” But then again, who is to say ? rr

73. 73 Comment by robert m. peters on 25 October 2007:

    Joe,

    I, of course, can only speak for myself. I serve only one God who is and who has shown Himself in the three Persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In that sense, I serve neither the empire nor the republic. Further, I do not worship my ancestors nor the South. I look no little askance at the neo-Judaisers – dispensationalists or a little too much Jerusalem, if you will – and I have my misgivings about those who would Romanize, a little too much Athens if you will.

    Under the transcending authority and power of the Christ, I do believe that St. Paul lets us know in no uncertain terms that be we Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, slave or master, we can find fellowship in the Corpus Christi.

    It would seem that the Church (I am sure that Catholics and Protestants who frequent these cyber climes could rehash the Reformation if we were so inclined and had the energy) has survived the transformation and/or fall of the Western and the Eastern Empires and is finding its way into cultures quite alien to all that was Rome; or is it that Christ and His Church are to be held captive by the Empire?

    Roman order was once anti-Christian, and to the extent that the machinations of some like the Nazis was a quest to regain Roman order and recast it for their own purposes does not make that order particularly hospitable to Christianity.

    I view Greece and Rome and what they have uniquely contributed to the traditions of the West and to Christendom to be of great value. But those contributions are not above criticism, and a healthy intellectual criticism does not constitute self-loathing. I certainly do not in any way join with the hubris and arrogance of the current post-modern elites who dare anyone to judge them and who embrace relativism as a contradictory absolute truth and who then set about to create their own “cardinal” sins of racism, gener bias and homophobia and use them to judge and deconstruct the past and thereby destroy what is valuable and good in the present. However, neither will I join in the myth building of a sacrosanct past which was not.

74. 74 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 25 October 2007:

    On the question of the South and Empire, may I suggest the essay “The South and the American Empire” in my book DEFENDING DIXIE. I think much of our discussion is conflating different and dissimilar time periods—Republican Rome, late imperial Rome, the “Dark Ages,” the Middle Ages. etc. I see little value in discrediting whatever present hopes we have by unfavourable comparison to the virtues of past eras which Western man can never hope to reacquire. Our thinking must deal with the world we have to work with. Is realism and action not the essential spirit of the West?

75. 75 Comment by TJF on 25 October 2007:

    A few brief observations:

    Before saying that realism and action were the spirit of the west, I would want to know what we mean by West, action, realism, and, perhaps, most importantly, spirit.

    How can people can know where they are going if they have no idea of where they have been?

    Realism, action, and pragmatism, unless they are in the service of some higher loyalty, are unlikely to do any good. Simply patting our selves or our ancestors on the back for being better than Third World heathens is another version of the very American habit of self-congratulation we see in our ignorant students who have very high self-esteem. This is not the approach taken by Jefferson or General Lee or Basil Gildersleeve. If Southerners wish to turn their backs on the classical tradition and embrace the Anglo-Celtic myth, they are revolting against all the best leaders the South produced.

    Western man, isolated from his ancient and Medieval past, is reduced to barbarism, and that is where we are today. We have been here before, and the way out led through the Church and a revival of the higher standards of ancient civilization.

    To introduce the word “sacrosanct” as a rebuttal of an argument based on historical research distorts the argument and implies that an ad hominem response is being given to questions of fact. (What sort of Christian would treat the Greeks as sacrosanct?) Similarly, to rush to invocations of faith and divinity, when the discussion is largely about hygiene, manners, and standard of living is simply a way of avoiding the questions at hand. I have never argued that Greek or Roman civilization was perfect, only that it is the necessary foundation of our own. If that argument is going to be refuted, it must take be addressed and not avoided.

    It is a waste of time to make generalizations about other cultures unless they are based on evidence. If the Greeks or Romans are to be criticized, then it must be on one ground or another, not on the basis of a general and unsupported generalization.

    The devil is said to lie in the details, but perhaps that is because it serves the devil’s interest to avoid complicated details. For example, St. Paul is invoked, out of context and in a misleading manner to suggest that all cultural differences can somehow be ignored or subsumed. Taken literally, the statement “that St. Paul lets us know in no uncertain terms that be we Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, slave or master, we can find fellowship in the Corpus Christi.” is either a tautology–of course there are no religious and spiritual distinctions among the disparate peoples who become Christian–or misleading. A Greek Platonist or Aristotelian did not have to give up much of his philosophy to become a Christian, while a Jew had to give up many precious items of his tradition, including the notion that the Creator had made some things that were unclean. Early Christians rejected not only kosher laws but all the thinking that lay behind them.

    Finally, if one is going to say there are important differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, one cannot them run off and ignore the question as if it is trivial or question of taste. There is all to much “I think” and “I believe” in this discussion, and as soon as an “I think” has been debunked, then the argument is turned in other directions, either toward pragmatism or toward matters of faith. Many professing Christians lead immoral and repulsive lives, while many pagans led comparatively virtuous lives. I do not say I would not rather be an immoral Christian than a virtuous pagan, but if we were to stick to the points at issue and avoid professions of faith, we might avoid the trap of saying 2 + 2 may = 4, but my Biblical math (in which pi = 3) is better than the math of those dirty heathens. Let us compare apples with apples.

76. 76 Comment by robert m. peters on 25 October 2007:

    Mr. Reavis,

    Your words:

    “It must be admitted as a historical fact that wherever the Empire conquered, it prepared the soil for Christ. And there is more depth to the phrase “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe ” than anti-catholic historians like to admit.”

    With your quote given supra, I am in full agreement. To put it in the vernacular, the Ontological Absolute – the Author, Creator, Sustainer and Finisher – ain’t stupid. He would certainly know the optimal time in which to write Himself into history in the person of the Christ in order to ensure that the gospel moved swiftly and surely not only in the context of Roman roads and the peace of the Romans but also in the common Mediterranean languages of Greek and Latin as well as in the openness of the Greek and Roman minds to this new meme which entered their cultures. The Great I Am had spread his Jews across that empire in order to ensure that the way would be prepared – John the Baptist was not only the preparer of the way in Judea, but his disciplines had taken the new doctrine of repentance across the Empire to the Jewish synagogues. It is, we must conclude, absolutely no coincidence that St. Paul had the vision from the Holy Spirit to take the gospel to Macedonia – Europe. So, I do not believe that we disagree on this aspect of your post.

    Your words:

    “But he never lost his love for the truth. And as the years pass and our culture continues to break apart with each further “development” or heresy against Christian doctrine in the name of a licentious freedom of conscience, blinded by its own individual cravings and desires, one can see clearly who stood for the fullness of truth when the crowd was at the door.. ( The libertarian does not say “Love God and do what you will. ” but rather “love property and freedom, then do what you will.”)”

    I have been sitting in the hard pews of Souther Baptist congregations for nearly fifty-eight years – some of them Primitive Baptist (Calvinist), some of them Free Will Baptists (Arminian) and some of them Land Mark Baptists (Apostolic) and never once have I hear it preached, sung or taught “Love God and do what you will.” In fact, I would attest that to a man, the old preachers who have thundered out the Word have called such and would call such an utter heresy just as you have. As I have said in a previous post, I embrace life, liberty and property as gifts and obligations from God and the only true freedom as freedom in Christ, not outside of Him. So, to the extent that your quote supra correctly portrays the “libertarian” I am in full agreement with you.

77. 77 Comment by robert m. peters on 25 October 2007:

    TJF,

    Your words:

    “Western man, isolated from his ancient and Medieval past, is reduced to barbarism, and that is where we are today. We have been here before, and the way out led through the Church and a revival of the higher standards of ancient civilization.”

    I have absolutely no disagreement with this statement. While you are the champion of antiquity, I am the paladin of the Middle Ages. We have, I believe, common ground against the polymorphous perversity of post-modernity.

    “Your words:

    “This is not the approach taken by Jefferson or General Lee or Basil Gildersleeve. If Southerners wish to turn their backs on the classical tradition and embrace the Anglo-Celtic myth, they are revolting against all the best leaders the South produced.”

    I certainly do not advocate Southerners turning their backs on the classical tradition, nor would I on the other hand ask them to deny the struggles of the Anglo-Celtic dichotomy and its impact on their history. I would not be so one-dimensional in my thinking as to focus only on an Anglo-Celtic thread. I am fully aware, for example, that General Lee admired Marcus Aurelius. As an undergraduate at the University of Vienna, I had become acquainted with Marcus Aurelius through his Meditations which I read in German, their having been translated from the Greek as I recall. I suppose that I was caught up in Marcus Aurelius because Vienna had been the place of his death. As a child, I had already come to admire General Lee. Imagine that to my delight, I learned as a young adult that Lee and I had a common intellectual mentor in Marcus Aurelius.

    Your words:

    “For example, St. Paul is invoked, out of context and in a misleading manner to suggest that all cultural differences can somehow be ignored or subsumed.”

    My words:

    “Under the transcending authority and power of the Christ, I do believe that St. Paul lets us know in no uncertain terms that be we Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, slave or master, we can find fellowship in the Corpus Christi.”

    Where do I say that cultural differences can be somehow ignored or subsumed? What would be the proper context? What is misleading?

    Your words:

    “A Greek Platonist or Aristotelian did not have to give up much of his philosophy to become a Christian, ….”

    I do not disagree, yet they did have to give up a lot of vices, nicely listed in Romans 1 as well as in other places in the New Testament.

    Your words:

    “If the Greeks or Romans are to be criticized, then it must be on one ground or another, not on the basis of a general and unsupported generalization.”

    Are you suggesting that they are beyond criticism? I believe that I saw some pretty general criticisms of the barbarians. My response was merely a short hand quid pro quo.

    Finally, the beginning at the end.

    Your words:

    “To introduce the word “sacrosanct” as a rebuttal of an argument based on historical research distorts the argument and implies that an ad hominem response is being given to questions of fact. (What sort of Christian would treat the Greeks as sacrosanct?) Similarly, to rush to invocations of faith and divinity, when the discussion is largely about hygiene, manners, and standard of living is simply a way of avoiding the questions at hand. I have never argued that Greek or Roman civilization was perfect, only that it is the necessary foundation of our own. If that argument is going to be refuted, it must take be addressed and not avoided.”

    I did not see an argument based on historical research! The opinions expressed may well have been the tip of a historical research iceberg, but I did not see them in the post(s) to which I was responding. Also, I must plead my utter ignorance. I did not know that one could give an ad hominem response to a question of fact. I always thought it was an attack to the person, something I have always tried to avoid. Now I learn that questions of fact are sensitive as well.

    “What sort of Christian would treat the Greeks as sacrosanct?” is precisely the question which I was raising.

    If the discussion was about hygiene, manners and standard of living, I missed it entirely. If that is what it was about, then I can agree with you whole heartedly. By the High Middle Ages, almost all of Europe had forgotten how to bathe. That Greek and Roman civilization are not perfect we can agree on. That Greek and Roman civilization is the foundation of our own we can agree on. I would quibble with the word “necessary,” however. “Our good fortune,” perhaps, as compare to those who did not enjoy it, but “necessary” does not seem to fit. But it may well be that it is simply too nuanced for my Celtic, Saxon and Choctaw mind.

78. 78 Comment by robert m. peters on 26 October 2007:

    Dr. Wilson,

    Defending Dixie is the next of several books on my agenda. I do not like the wait of ordering it on line; however, I am compelled to do so because the “imperial” bookstores in these climes do not carry it.

79. 79 Comment by El Cid on 26 October 2007:

    “What is the difference between Christian Exodus wackos invading your state and an invasion of Muslims or Communists?” – TJF

    To begin South Carolina was never Islamic or Communist, but at some point it certainly was Christian – so the difference is obvious.

    Of course I agree that no place needs more outsiders that want to come and cry for change – change that does not represent the permanent things of the culture in which the outsiders find themselves.

    I would say that if the CE folks get to SC, behave, become part of the culture and insist only in a change to what was before then all is well. If on the other hand they or anyone else comes into a place and wants to change things into something that never was good people certainly know what to do with the invaders.

    I am certain that it is possible you may have met a “wacko” from Kansas in Chattanooga, I do not know who but any group attracts it share – it is beneath you to label the entire group as wackos – I have spoken with many of them and simply do not find this to be the case in the whole – I may disagree on points of theology but I do not see the entire group as “wacko”.

    In any event, I believe you mislabeled the Kurds – from my personal experience with them, and I think you have mislabeled the CE folks – from my personal expereince with them.

80. 80 Comment by TJF on 26 October 2007:

    El Cid does not address any of my argument, which is that it is wrong to make a colonial project out of other people. South Carolina, like many Southern states, is predominantly Christian, but like other Christians around the world, they come in a variety of types: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic. The Scriptural inerrancy professed by the two CE representatives I ran into would resonate with some but certainly not all South Carolinians. Indeed, they did not appear to represent the majority Southern opinion in the room where I spoke. There is no such thing as “mere Christianity,” and Christians are often as divided against each other as they are against non-Christians. Furthermore, a South Carolina has its own cultural traditions going back to the 17th century. From what I have observed of CE people, interviewed on television and their self-presentations, they know nothing of the state and its history, so convinced they are of their own righteousness. My general conclusion is that they are smug in the ignorance, ill-mannered, and possessed of all the silliness that typifies big-church Evangelicals today. There are plenty of people like this in SC, but the silliness is often tempered, in my experience, by the claims of kinship and community.

    Since my remarks are about the Kurds as an historical nation with several thousand years of history behind them, it is irresponsible for El Cid to defend them on anecdotal grounds. Of course there are many fine people among them, but the violent tactics of the PKK , which has a support, according to news reports, of a majority of Iraqi Kurds, do little to change the impression. I do not condemn rebellion, per se, but when a rebellious people rob and dispossess our fellow-Christians, I do not see why our country should not only continue to back them but worse, write a blank check for their independence. No one in this discussion has put forward a single good reason to give them a state.

    The conversation has been wide-ranging and before abandoning it, I should like to summarize the points the or rather my argument that have found a good deal of agreement. 1) There is no good reason, either drawn from prudence or justice, why the US should make an independent Kuridstan. 2) There is no right of self-determination because there is 3) no right, in nature or in the Christian tradition nor in the Greek and Roman tradition that formed our civilization, to self-government, because 4) there are no universal rights and the languge of universal rights is the invention of anti-Christians. 5)There is no one ideal form of Christian polity, and monarchy and empire are at least as compatible with Christianity as a self-governing republic. Jacobin democracy, as practiced in the French Revolution and modern America, is inconsistent with Christian principle on a fundamental level.

    The conversation shifted at this point to claim that our barbarian ancestors were not savages and provide a good model for a Christian republic. I showed, I believe that 6) They were brutal, greedy, ignorant, and incapable either of self-government or handling any of the arts of civilization, concluding, 7) that Germano-Celtic-Slavic man, cut loose from Mediterranean civilization, slips back into hedonistic barbarism.

    Mr. Peters’ repeated charge that I whitewashed Greek and Roman vices is simply not true, as anyone can see who reads the exchanges. It is not up to the defense to make the prosecution’s case. I do not know why people who take so little interest in ancient history should insist upon maintaining a polemical position. An attack is ad hominem if it is framed in such a way not to address facts but to discredit the opponent. If I characterized Mr. Peters’ view of the Greeks as obscurantist, the insult would be obvious. It is less obvious but no less ad hominem, if I were to say he approached them as accursed. If a Christian treats the Greeks as “sacrosanct,” then he is either a crypto-pagan or a de facto idolater. I don’t think this is too subtle an argument to follow.

    If one is going to attack the vices of the Greeks, however, one has to do so with accurate details and within a comparative context. The fact that the Old Testament several times refers, not always disapprovingly, of human sacrifice–a charming custom the Greeks and Romans gave up with only a few exceptions–should not be used to show that the Jews were more bloodthirsty than their neighbors when, in fact, the reverse would seem to be true. I can see absolutely no good that can come from general statements such as the allegation that by the High Middle Ages they had forgotten how to bathe. The best evidene is they were bathing once a week, if they were able.

    In addressing non-classicists, I do not think I should be giving footnotes and bibliography. If Mr. Peters would llike an introductory bibliography on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, I would be happy to put something together. I have tried to make it clear that, as a classical philologist, I am not an expert on the Middle Ages, though I have tried to read everything available relating to the Italy in the period 500-1000 AD, both ancient sources, the traditional big historians, and as much of the recent research as I can lay my hands on. I have been plowing through some history on early Medieval France and Germany, though in the case of the HRE, I am only a student.

    This has been, on the whole, a good discussion that made headway on a number of valuable points, and I want to thank, in particular, my old friend Prof. Wilson for raising important issues, but thanks are also due Red Phillips, Robert Peters, Robert Reavis, Michael, Nicholas Moses, and others. If any of us became a bit too sharp, I put that down to the sincerity of opinions and the damnable influence of the internet. If I am able, I hope to find a series of little topics that can be discussed and debated both as news items and as the jumping-off point for broader philosophical and historical discussions. If you have suggestions of topics, please send them to the webmaster. I am leaving for France next Wednesday, but I’ll try to post something before then, though I shall only be able to follow it sporadically, since I am too lazy to drag along a laptop for only two weeks.

81. 81 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 26 October 2007:

    I have only a few minutes to send these last lines before the power goes down for good. I had hoped to have time to work on my definitions of West, spirit, action, realism, sacrosanct, etc., to study once more the encounter of Rome and the barbarians, and perhaps re-read the Church fathers. But the Aztec and Mongol hordes have breached the lines and are slaughtering everyone in sight. I must go and take my place in the last stand here on the western marches. May Our Lord grant greater success to those in the east in your struggle with the encroaching Turk……..

82. 82 Comment by robert reavis on 26 October 2007:

    Colonel Wilson,

    Sir , received your message:” I must go and take my place in the last stand here on the western marches.”
    God’s speed, Sir. Our left flank is weakened, our right flank can not hold, our center is broken and in full retreat. A remnant will join you in the marches at first light tomorrow, or in the enduring light of God’s eternal glory —whichever comes first.

    Yours etc.,
    Captain Pain in The Rear

83. 83 Comment by robert m. peters on 26 October 2007:

    I too am probably best suited for fighting on the western marches. The frontier of the western march has become right here where I live. It is estimated, if current trends continue, that thirty-five percent of Louisiana west of the Red River will be speaking Spanish by 2010. My farm is right on the eastern side of the river. My father said that the armadillos did not come into Louisiana until Huey Long built a bridge across the Sabine River. He often recalled in a story the first one he saw. Thus, the bridges seem to be the key as a new and less benign horde of aliens amass on the Red. We have pretty much written Texas off.

    P.S. Dr. Fleming. I would love a bibliography of late antiquity and promise to set about reading as much as I can once I get it. I have acquired basic knowledge from Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus to Flavius Romulus Augustus over the years. Your input into my yawning Bildungslücke is looked forward to with appreciation. I also agree, needing some scapegoat for my ignorance, that the Internet has perhaps caused us to miss a nexus or two in our thinking.

84. 84 Comment by Michael on 27 October 2007:

    This has indeed been an interesting discussion. For what little it may be worth I have to agree with Dr. Wilson that the Founders – and particularly in the South – admired republican Rome, and not the principate. They alluded to that paragon of republican virtue, Cincinnatus, in the naming of the Society of the Cincinnati, to which two of my Virginian ancestors, captains in the Continental Line, belonged. Patrick Henry, in his famous “treason” speech, observed that “Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George III” (at this point being interrupted by cries of “treason!”) went on, “…may profit by their example.” Brutus was not understood here as Dante and Shakespeare portrayed him, as regicide and traitor, but rather as a defender of republican institutions. I recall, but cannot put my finger on, some passage of oratory from this period which compared George III to Tarquinius Superbus, which would of course cast the American revolutionaries in the role of those who, under the leadership of an earlier Brutus, overthrew the Roman monarchy and instituted the republic.

    In referring to economic growth, I did not mean to suggest it was “much of a criterion for a civilization,” but rather that Rome’s foreign conquests owed at least in part to its thirst for wealth, and that conquest was the principal means they had to get it. Yes, many of her early territorial acquisitions came about because of the need to defend her borders. But how about the Roman invasions of Spain or Britain, which were not contiguous with the Roman homeland in the Italian peninsula and which posed no direct threat?

    The desire for wealth – whether as land, as slaves taken from the conquered populations, or as treasure – was insatiable in the home territories. “Panem” paid for with foreign gold, silver, or precious objects, and “circenses” featuring elephants, apes, lions, and peacocks brought from exotic places were needed to placate the vulgar mob, after the conquerors took their cuts.

    Wealth through conquest, and subsequently through agricultural development, were Rome’s engines of economic growth. Her manufactures never surpassed the artisanal, although some were conducted on a large scale. Two reasons may be identified. First, Roman science was not well-enough developed to support technical industry; it consisted of philosophical speculation along Greek lines, as in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, coupled with a jumbled empiricism, as exemplified by Pliny the Elder. Second, while the Romans were good architects and engineers, they held the mechanical arts in low esteem. Even if the science had been present to support technical industry, it is hard to envision the type of inventor-entrepreneur so characteristic of the ‘industrial revolution’ (e.g. James Watt, Sir Joseph Whitworth, Lammot du Pont, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or Thomas Edison) arising in ancient Rome, much less achieving great wealth, high social status, or popular acclaim.

    Romanitas is an important part of western civilisation and we would be the poorer without it. Still, it is worth remembering that had it not been for Christianity, there would be no question of public policy about abortion – we would still be abandoning unwanted infants on hillsides, to die of exposure or as the prey of the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Our popular entertainments would not be vulgar movies and television simulating acts of violence and sexual perversity. They would be real killings in the arena, with every disgusting refinement of sadism. Some things were changed for the better by the fall of Rome.

85. 85 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 27 October 2007:

    Neither the voice of the prince nor the voice of the people is the voice of God. Either can become the voice of the Devil. But as Lewis put it, ordinary folks are less likely to get up to mischief than one man with power. That was the whole point and teaching of republicanism—Roman and American

86. 86 Comment by robert reavis on 28 October 2007:

    “But as Lewis put it, ordinary folks are less likely to get up to mischief than one man with power.”

    This seems true Dr. Wilson and I admire you for asserting it. Once upon a time catholics mistook the notion of infallibility in Christian matters of faith and morals for the Montanist notion of impeccability. But all that is in the past. As Federick Wilhelmson noticed four decades ago, “nowadays the Popes might as well throw their encyclicals in the Tiber river as to think Americans will pay any attention.” Once filitered through the minds of our current catholic commentators — Wiegel, Neuhaus , Buckley,Hitchcock, and co., they look more like republican party briefs than Christian critiques and hope for fallen man. Thank God for backward folks who don’t read these learned men or believe everything they hear. rr

87. 87 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 28 October 2007:

    A belated thanks to Dr. Fleming for starting this thread, and thereby a meaningful and sober discussion on the delicate issues of secession and legitimacy.

    Ultimately, from a Southerner’s point of view, my heritage is European; my family arrived here in the twentieth century and I have no roots in antebellum America, north or south. And the truest defenders of civilization in Europe have almost uniformly been monarchists and not republicans. I suppose this colors my point of view, and will ever continue to do so.

    As for the Stuarts, Cromwell was a regicide and his spiritual descendant King Billy was a gruesome murderer.

88. 88 Comment by TJF on 29 October 2007:

    One final note before saying good by. Common folks have almost never run or controlled a government. Even in the apparently exceptional cases, a few people have vastly disproportionate power. The American Revolution and early republic were managed by the gentry and the middle classes, and the same can be said of the Tuscan and early Greek city-states. On the other hand, no enduring monarchy has ever been a simple despotism, and it can hardly be argued that Medieval kings had anything like the power over their subjects that the American government had in 1945, to say nothing of today. The abuses of England’s King John that led to the Magna Charta are taken for granted in the government of George Bush. All this is a roundabout way of restating Mosca’s thesis that in practice there is only one form of government and that is oligarchy. The terrible problem with all quasi-democracies of modern times is the assumption that since power ultimately rests with the people or at least a majority, any safe-guards agains the tyranny of the majority (or in our case of that roughly 25% who vote for the winning candidate) are viewed as authoritarian obstacles to the popular will. At the King John’s barons knew who their enemy was. We, alas, are trapped by our democratic rhetoric into thinking that we the people really run the government and thus must be obeyed. Is this the real meaning of Walt Kelly’s Pogo’s famous declaration that we have met the enemy and they is us?

89. 89 Comment by Mark Depré on 29 October 2007:

    Mr Moses,

    What’s wrong with “regicide” ?????

    I live in the “kingdom Belgium” and I hope and pray to see that glorious day when a Flemisch Cromwell
    (or Jehu) will send “our” smirking and mediocre king (who is a puppet on a string in the hands of the quasi-socialist regime here)
    to hell like just like Ollie did with the rotten Stuart (the house of Achab) aka the house of Coburg).

    You complain about the gruesome murderer king Billy ?

    Well…why do you mention only William III ? Almost all english kings were gruesome murderers : John without Land, Edward III (and his bloody sons), Edward IV,Henry V, Henry VI, VII, VIII,Richard III, the Stuarts (especially the beast Charles II who was the most rotten thug-untill Tony Blair-England has ever known) ….they were all murderers, thieves and adulters (even the best of them) just like most of the Bourbons, Habsburgers and many popes.

    I hate socialism as much as you (and the good people of Chronicles) do but your nostaligia for monarchs and the “ancient regime”
    is a disgrace :you can reject socialism, cultural marxism, egalitarian mass democracy and feminazism without longing for the return of the rule of kings and popes. You can hate todays tyrants without longing for the return of yesterdays tyrants.

90. 90 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 29 October 2007:

    Perhaps I am mixing up my religious sensibilities with my political ones, alas. The reason I only mentioned Cromwell and William was because they were the only ones relevant: I wanted to express disdain at the idea of taking the Glorious Revolution as a wholesome precedent, and perhaps that disdain is colored by my utter disgust for the Protestant Ascendancy, but so be it.

    As for the rest, evil men we will always have with us, but how disgraceful is it to reminisce about an order that, while it was often working far out of step with Christianity, owed its deep roots to the faith and not to an intellectual movement dedicated to its wholesale atrophy? The ancien régime, like our present rulers, broke many laws of God, but only rarely did they deny that Divine Law actually existed and try to create a society built upon natural lawlessness.

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