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Today Seattle Is Conducting Unity Meetings Storm Signals Mean Political Change Ahead

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Smell the Whiff of Panic?

by Christopher Chantrill
August 06, 2006 at 4:53 pm

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SMELL THE WHIFF of panic? Iraq has/may/will soon collapse into civil war! Israel may not be able to fully dismantle Hezbollah! Like Falstaff before battle we whine to Prince Hal that we “would ’twere bed-time, Hal, and all well.”

It’s as if Europe never had its tribal politics and terrorist warfare, with roving militias camped out in weak states lacking the power to suppress them. In the Hundred Years War, the English did a splendid job of reducing France to a wasted land. As the Black Prince went raiding deep into France what was he but a prototype of Iranian President Ahmadinejad whose proxies are wasting Iraq and Lebanon? Then the Brits came home and laid waste to their homeland in the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare gave us a picture of that period.

Feel sorry for the French? Don’t waste your sympathy. Two hundred years after the Hundred Years War the French under Cardinal Richelieu help lay waste to Germany in the Thirty Years War as armies from several nations march to and fro across that unhappy land, eating all the food and looting all the wealth as they went. It is estimated that the population in Germany declined by at least one third from 1608 to 1648, a disaster far worse than the butchery of the Second Thirty Years War of 1914 to 1945, leaving aside the special attention paid to the Jews.

It was in the aftermath of the first Thirty Years War that the Europeans tried to put a limit on all-out war and its rampaging militias. They tried to make warfare civilized. It can’t have hurt that shortly afterwards the British brought home from India the civilizing cotton textiles of India—muslins, calicos, and chintz. All of Europe fell in love with these exotic eastern fabrics.

But love had nothing to do with it. It was British tinkerers that made the newly civilized world go round. Men like promoter Richard Arkwright invented power cotton spinning and Rev. Edmund Cartwright invented a power loom. When the Yanks stole the British power spinning and weaving technology and brought it to the United States they immediately lowered the cost of cotton cloth from 40-50 cents a yard to 10 cents a yard, according to Stephen Yafa in Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber.

Want to start a revolution? Lower prices by 80 percent.

Up until that time all the world had been ruled by thug warrior dynasties except in highly refined city states like Venice and Florence or the free German cities where the rising bourgeoisie ruled. Now, as a result of the cotton revolution and its incredible wealth potential, political power needed to achieve a delicate accommodation with economic power if it wanted to strut upon the world stage. It was a new world order.

Just ask thug dictator Mao Tse-Tung if you aren’t convinced. He tested to destruction the notion that all political power grew out of the barrel of a gun. He tried to make China into a world power by starving the peasants to buy guns and by keeping the Chinese people in constant revolutionary turmoil. Instead he succeeded in completing the transformation of China from the richest country in the world into a political, economic, and cultural backwater.

Again and again thug dictators have tried to turn the clock back and revive the good old days of thug rule. Think of Robespierre and Napoleon in France, Kaiser Bill and Hitler in Germany.

Learning nothing from the French and the Germans the pan-Arab nationalists tried and failed in the Middle East. The Fidelistas failed in Cuba. Thug Nkrumah failed in Ghana. Thug Mugabe failed in Zimbabwe. Now thug Ayatollahs in Persia are trying one last time to build a world thug empire.

The beauty of the modern era is that any political regime that departs from the recipe of democratic capitalism, the system that grew out of the eighteenth century cotton revolution, immediately starts downhill fast. But there turns out to be one exception to this rule.

Thug regimes sitting on top of oil wells are able to mainline oil revenue, the only true unearned income in the world. Leaders of oil nations seem to share a narcotic addiction to dreams of world conquest that dies, as the habit of the drug addict, only in the ruin of everything around them.

As we all run around flapping our hands over the disproportion in Lebanon and the mess in Iraq let us not lose faith in our glorious democratic capitalism that has tamed, in Europe and North America at least, the sway of thug political power.

But let us not forget the grim lesson of the last two hundred years. It seems that nobody will accept democratic capitalism without trying everything else first.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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