He and I are not in agreement on the 1789 revolution. He passes over the intent of the Terror (depopulation according to Webster) and favors a Marxist vs. Burkean view of the matter. I doubt he thinks conspiracy writers are worth his time as a serious journalist. This is a pity. His ideas are interesting, though like linking patrimony to some ancient warrior of great renown myth and history trade places. He thinks of Bonaparte and his Empire as progress. Thinks of Louis Napoleon as progress. Cannot or will not ask if hidden hands moved pieces on the chess board. When I visited Paris, just prior to the destruction of Iraq a book was for sale Napoleon: Emperor of the Masons. Then there is the work of a Tory writer Nesta Webster: Free: Nesta H. Webster: The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy(1919)
Gary North -March 13, 2013
This book is never mentioned in university history departments. This is because it is accurate.
This book was published in 1919. It was well received. A young Henry Cabot Lodge wrote a favorable review of it.
The book reveals the Illuminist and masonic background of the revolution. These topics have been politically incorrect since the end of World war II.
Of course there is also the view that the 18th century English “conspiracy” theorists were reading the Revolution through the lens of Women’s Rights and the Irish rebellion of 1798. This view I believe is upheld by Ramin Mazaheri.
http://thesaker.is/the-paris-commune-the-birth-of-international-neoliberalism-and-eu-neo-imperialism/
Yellow Vest: “The G7 is spending 30 million euros over one weekend to give rich ministers champagne, caviar and lobsters, while people in France don’t have money for food or electricity. They talk about saving the environment, but only after flying here in their private, first-class planes. France’s billionaires see their fortunes rise every year, whereas the minimum salary France is forced to stretch more and more. We need a real redistribution of wealth.”
The socialist Paris Commune lost. What up-heaved was not socialist society but a new form of liberalism – one where Western elitist-imperialists turned on Westerners themselves in massacres formerly reserved for Brown peoples. It also marks the start of where liberalism began its war to eradicate socialist societies, a war of eradication which was as brutal and as highly-censored as the monarchical war against liberalism was before the two began colluding in 1871.
Paris Commune: The start of what 1917, 1949, 1959 and 1979 carried
To summarise simply:
“It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last under which to work out the emancipation of labor. … The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.” (emphasis mine)
And if we aren’t working for a classless society, then why are you reading this? Go out and rob, cheat and steal to join the upper class, and then join in their suppression the working, middle, pensioner, student, youth, female, minority, etc. classes.
There’s a lot of nonsense emanating from France on the Commune – four months of siege will do that to you, perhaps – and it’s on the side of the anarchists.
The Commune is considered by anarchists to be their heyday – a day when the stages of socialism and communism were leapfrogged (who needs development?) – and the immediate repression didn’t give a chance to push aside these deluded bores. The only thing duller than, the founder of collective anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin’s self-referential writings on the Commune are his metaphysical thoughts. The certainties of the Commune’s anarchists are as full of false “universal values” as much as any Western Liberal Democrat. Marx and Trotsky detested their generations’s anarchists as much as the Yellow Vests refused to hand any sort of political leadership to Black Bloc or Antifa.
Western Liberal Democrats love to focus on the most individualistic, fantastic and nonsensical ideas espoused during The Commune – again, four months of siege will produce some of that – because it avoids any talk of the actual politics which was discussed, and allows for caricatures such as “morally degenerate”. They want to make The Commune like May 1968, but the former was not just a movement for individual rights but about the political right to form a new type of government. As time goes on the unity of the Yellow Vests and their political goals became more apparent – not 68ard individualism but 1789 class and cultural warfare. The Yellow Vest are a class warfare group.
Yellow Vest: “There has been enormous repression never seen before in France. Even in 1968 it was not as bad as this. But this has been the policy chosen by the president in order to break the movement. We will keep improvising new solutions to win our demands.”
But the biggest problem leftists must unlearn from the Commune’s legacy is that it was totally Parisian. It’s led to a veneration of urbanites as outdated as the veneration of factory proletariat – rural people, cubicle dwellers, pensioners and other groups must be in the vanguard, too.
Here’s an interesting thought: if we are to accept that – at 1871’s time of rural domination – that the urban areas were the political vanguard, then perhaps we should consider that today, when most societies are urbanised, that rural areas are now the political vanguard? With the Yellow Vests this generalisation appears to hold generally true.
What’s interesting is that the Paris Commune proved Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, correct regarding the way Western Liberal Democracy, in its ultimate goal of federalism (seen in the US, Canada, Germany, Australia and many Western monarchies are allegedly “unitary”), centers everything around the capital and thus ultimately creates fragmentation and disunity. Federalism is opposed in socialist democracy because Western Liberal Democratic federalism serves to weaken society by weakening the power of government and thus increasing the power of the rich individual – it allows for capitalists to “divide and conquer”.
Burke foresaw this: “You cannot but perceive in this scheme that it has a direct and immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of republics, and to render them totally independent of each other without any constitutional means of coherence, connection or subordination, except what may be derived from the acquiescence in the determinations of the general congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic.”
More importantly, Burke would’t have been surprised one bit by the elite’s response in 1871 to the democratic rejection of Western Liberal Democracy:
“Neither they have left any principle by which any of their municipalities can be bound to obedience, or even conscientiously obliged not to separate from the whole to become independent, or to connect itself with some other state. … To this the answer is: We will send troops. The last reason of kings is always the first with your Assembly.”
Indeed: become Western Liberal Democratic or die, be sanctioned, etc.
Burke sees a more modern Western problem – capital domination – but agrees that Western Liberal Democrats must control the capital above all.
“All you have got for the present is a paper circulation and a stock-jobbing constitution; and, as to the future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, upon the republican system of eighty-three independent municipalities (to say nothing of the parts that compose them), can ever be governed as one body or can ever be set in motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its ruin. These commonwealths will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris.”
Because the “republic of Paris” in 1871 was socialist the rest of France had nothing to fear from the capital – quite the reverse in modern Western Liberal Democracy. The smothering of local cultures via an ethnocentric capital is something expressly opposed in Socialist Democracy.
In order to forestall incorrect anarchists about Marx, we should note his recognition of the need for centralisation. “The centralisation of government, required by modern society, rises only upon the ruins of the military and bureaucratic governmental machinery that was forged in contrast to feudalism.” (emphasis mine)
Above all the Commune represents what neoliberalism requires: armed rule is what keeps Western Liberal Democracy going.
We would do well to remember that Engels believed the biggest mistake of The Commune was to not attack the real heart of Western Liberal Democracy: its Bankocracy.
For a literature review of conspiracy thought on the French Revolution see the Jstor article. You may subscribe for free. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24690289?newaccount=true&read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Nesta Webster writes on depopulation: It was an attempt to realize the ideal of Rousseau—“ If there were a people of gods it would govern itself democratically.” The French, so far, were not gods, but they were to be made so.
But could a nation of 25,000,000 be thus transformed ? To the regenerators of France it seemed extremely doubtful ; already the country was rent with dissensions, and any scheme for universal contentment seemed impossible of attainment. Moreover, the plan of dividing things up into equal shares presented an insuperable difficulty, for it became evident that amongst a population of this size there was not enough money, not enough property, not enough employment, not even at this moment enough bread to go round ; no one would be satisfied with his share, and instead of universal contentment, universal dissatisfaction would result. What was to be done ? The population was too large for the scheme of the leaders to be carried out successfully, therefore either the scheme must be abandoned or the population must be diminished.
To this conclusion the surgeons operating on the State had at last been brought. In vain they had amputated the gangrened limb of the nobility and the clergy, had paralysed the brain by attacking the intellectual classes, had turned (as in Æsop’s fable) upon the stomach, that is to say, the industrial system, by which the whole body of the State was fed, and denied it sustenance—all these means to restore health to the State had failed, and they were now reduced to a last and desperate expedient : the size of the whole body must be reduced. In other words, a plan of systematic depopulation must be carried out all over France.
That this idea, worthy of a mad Procrustes, really existed it is impossible to doubt, since it has been revealed to us by innumerable revolutionaries who were behind the scenes during the Terror. Thus Courtois, in his report on the papers seized at Robespierre’s house after Thermidor, wrote : “ These men, in order to bring us to the happiness of Sparta, wished to annihilate twelve or fifteen millions of the French people, and hoped after this revolutionary transfiguration to distribute to each one a plough and some land to clear, so as to save us from the dangers of the happiness of Persepolis.” (Chapter 7 of her book.)