When the Mad Monarchist Thinks (It Is What It Sounds Like)

MM favours us with a stream of consciousness on the Renaissance, monarchy and other topics.

From The Mad Monarchist (19 November 2014)

I have been thinking a lot recently about the Renaissance. A lot of people are very negative about the Renaissance, but I love it. There was plenty of negative things going on to be sure but it was also a glorious period, a flowering of the High Middle Ages and a high point of western civilization. It had achieved the height of Christendom in the High Middle Ages, then in the Renaissance that flowered into a more total encapsulation of western civilization with the rediscovery of classical history, of glorious ancient Rome and putting the sum total of western civilization altogether in one glorious package. There was good and bad like always, but it was grand and only the good was celebrated while the bad was recognized for what it was and nobody tried to twist it into something good. But I was thinking about the Renaissance and about Tudor England and all the things that happened back then and that forces one to think about King Henry VIII. And Henry VIII is not one of my favorite monarchs, he was not what I would consider ideal because he did not hold fast to the traditions that were handed down to him and many people today who do admire him, though that is a majority of a minority, do so because he set the stage, not because they would have liked the play at the time. It’s because he was a colossus in English history because everything that happened before him was all his creation (it created him not that he created it) and everything that happened after was a result of what he did or what he set in motion and a lot of the people that admire him today admire him because they like what came after, because that became the new normal, the new tradition but if they were alive at the time, with their current mindset and values, they would have criticized King Harry for upsetting everything and being so revolutionary in all the things he did but what he did became the new normal for the conservatives to hold on to. And you can’t get around the fact that a lot of that has to do with religion because that’s when the division in England started between the Catholics and the Protestants so the Protestants have a reason to admire him or at least defend him while the Catholics have a reason to hold anger on him. They have more reason because they were the injured party in that country but they also cannot single the King out alone because the bishops in England, they all went along with it, all but Fisher we know and that really wasn’t unusual. They let him have his way and made him think he could always have his way and most of them went along with whatever way the wind was blowing. Who can say they were entirely wrong? Things might be seen very differently, even by the Catholics, if the Queen had died sooner or even if Queen Mary had had the son she thought she was going to have, it might have all been just a small bump in the road toward an Anglo-Spanish era of domination. Because bishops going along with their king was not new and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it has helped the Catholic Church survive a long time. When the Hundred Years War was going on, the French bishops told their king that God was on his side and the English bishops told their king that God was on his side and they both went to war full of faith and nobody questioned the Church about it. If they had tried to carry out some sort of super-national master plan they would have been seen as suspect and as enemies and the reaction would have been only natural just as it was perfectly natural at the time for clerics to be faithful to God and loyal to their king, no matter what borders they were inside of because they are not other-worldly beings but people too. The Pope made Chalemagne an emperor, gave him the title, and bowed down to him because he was the emperor. And this is part of what monarchy is and why it has lasted so long and why revolutionary republicanism is so fundamentally evil, because it goes against nature. It tries to be beyond nationality and all about legal constructs and not about people, not about the earth or the hole of the pit we were dug out of that we’re supposed to remember, by God’s command. To love your country is perfectly natural and I don’t trust people that don’t love their country. Love your country even if you distrust your government. Thomas More said something like that, the King’s servant as far as that could take him because he was English and that’s what he was supposed to do, that was natural. Of course, being a monarchist in the United States, I get people all the time accusing me of hating my country and nothing could be farther from the truth. I don’t hate my country and I get very frustrated when monarchists start going anti-American just because it’s popular to be against whoever is riding high at the moment, when there’s no reason for it. Right now there’s hardly a monarchy in the world that doesn’t depend on the United States for protection. But if you love your country you’re going to love your king because he is the personification of your country, the land, the history, the traditions, the whole national story are all bound up in that one man or woman and their family, if it’s a long one or a short one. All this republican, internationalism is devilish stuff, super-national, globalism and all, that’s Tower of Babel type chicanery, that’s nothing new and it’s nothing good. Of course, that doesn’t mean being xenophobic, a xenophobic person is a small-minded person, they got a pinched sense of reality, they’re blind to the world around them and they’d cut their own throat if they thought it’d make their neighbor have a bad day. You shouldn’t talk negatively or insulting about countries or nations anyway, individuals is one thing, a government is one thing but not the country, not the people, who are just trying to make their way and follow the path of least resistance. They’re just looking for some peace. But you have to walk that line, that narrow path that isn’t easy between internationalism and the sort of nationalism that’s just xenophobic and self-destructive because the enemy is pushing both ways. They push the internationalism junk openly but they don’t mind the radical, destructive type nationalism either because it is self-destructive and so they know it helps internationalism win in the end and it’s a perfect bogey man for them to scare the great mass of moderate, middle of the road types while they go on herding them in the internationalist direction, trying to tell them that’s the path to salvation and world peace. It’s what caused the world we have, it’s what made the world after the world of the Renaissance was destroyed. Just when western civilization started to reach this new level of learning, of art and religion and all that they started to undermine it and tear it down. Then the bad guys got their big moment of inspiration with the French Revolution. It wasn’t the American Revolution, that was child’s play to these people and those Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 weren’t singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” marching down the street, they were singing “La Marseillaise” and raise the bloody banner, water the fields with impure blood, the world is against you, so go fight against the world. It’s why Marx said “Workers of the WORLD unite” and why Stalin said he would see the world conquered in his lifetime and why Mao said the “world has stood up” on the heavenly gate of peace. And if love of king and country wasn’t stamped on our DNA they would have done it too but they’re still trying. They have about got people poisoned off on their kings, helped out here and there by those that put their prejudice before even their own self-interest and now they’re going after (and having an easier time of it with the kings all shackled) the countries by going after property, the idea that anyone has a right to own anything, to their own property or their own native soil. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to everyone! It belongs to whoever needs it worst. How do we know who needs it worst? The commissar will tell you, don’t worry about that and even your country, that doesn’t belong to you or your people, it belongs to the whole world, because countries are just legal constructs, a border is just a line in the dirt, it’s not like nations are each unique families, their own unit with a father-monarch that embodies them, no, they say, we’re all just alike, we’re all interchangeable and nothing belongs to you, it belongs to everyone. That’s equality and all good, decent people believe in that, they all believe in liberty, equality and brotherhood right? This is what people don’t understand when they tell me that I have to make a better case for monarchy, I have to better show how monarchy can take care of everyone better, do what a revolutionary republic does but do it better and they don’t understand that I don’t even see it that way. You can, it’s a perfectly legitimate way to go if you want to, you can make that case and it’s true because when things are going the way nature intended, it will be better and it will be easier in a way at least, but that’s not my bottom line, that’s not my standard of judgment and people don’t see it when they tell me that you can’t just be critical of republics, you have to show that monarchy is better. I want to shout at them, but I can’t because I’d be doing it over and over again every time until I blow out my throat, that that’s a fine way to go but I don’t feel like I should have to prove that monarchy is better because I don’t believe that’s the standard of judgment. My standard is not fundamentally utilitarian, I say a third time, that’s fine if you want it and it can work like that, but I say you make your life better, that’s not the King’s job to make your life better, it’s not him who is responsible if you’re a failure. I say he is the King and should stay the King because it is his right and no one should have the power to take that away from him. I don’t care if you can run my property better than I can, I don’t care if you think you can make it more profitable than I can, it’s mine and that’s all the reason I need for saying you can’t have it. The King is the king because it’s his birthright and no one should be able to take that away from him. Change things around him all you like if it makes you feel better, you’ll just get burned by it eventually but you have no right to take away his birthright. When you do that, everything else is pointless. Everything reaches but it’s too low to catch, it bottoms out and going from there, you might inch up once in a while, some spots may be a little higher than others but you’re totally playing on the wrong damn field and nothing you do can change that until you get back on the right track and have things based on what they’re supposed to be based on, the way things grew up naturally to make you who you are or what you are, Understand? It’s like God, I’ve probably gone on with this long enough, but a monarch is like God, not in an idolatry kind of way but in that you have to have a monarch to have everything else in order, on the temporal side of things. That’s not clear. Sorry. I say God like God is the number zero. What is zero? It’s a contradiction, it’s the number that isn’t a number, it’s the quantity of nothing, it doesn’t make any sense but if you don’t have zero, if you don’t have that starting place, you can’t have math, you can’t have fractions even, you have to have the number that isn’t a number so you can have actual numbers. Nothing would make sense without it, it’s the starting point and so God is a contradiction, God cannot be explained but without that basis there is nothing and so the monarch is like that for peoples, you just can’t have a country without that natural framework. Even if you have a system, not a system but a tradition that is done a different way like the Chinese Confucian sort of system, you still have to have that basic traditional framework that grew up organically over centuries, even thousands of years, or everything falls apart so that you look at China today, after the Qing were torn down and there’s hardly anything really Chinese about China anymore. You could say the same thing about some colonial countries that went revolutionary and abolished their monarchies and today, looking back, they were more true to themselves when they were ruled by foreign powers than when they are independent because they’ve gotten rid of that anchor, that basic necessary starting point that everything else flowed from. Vietnam was more Vietnamese when the French were there, when the damn French Republic was there, because the soul survived, the spirit was maintained, in a real sense the spirits were maintained so it was okay there was hope there was the foundation. It’s what the patriot Tran Cao Van said right before they cut his head off, “The earth is still below us, Heaven is still above us, the Dynasty is still there, we wish 10,000 years to His Majesty the Emperor”. It’s good, we’ll come through. Now look at it. The spirit is being smothered or they’re doing their best to. Or you look at Mexico, look at Maximilian who took up where his ancestors had left off, he heard a divine calling to save those people, like the Holy Ghost fluttering over the abyss, I know he heard it and when he took his oath it MEANT something to him and when he died, he died like a king, he died with dignity and his generals died like heroes and that’s the first thing the enemy comes for is your dignity, we see that all around us. They come for your dignity first, they set up conditions so people give up their own dignity willingly, so that they shed it like wet clothes, fast as they can, with great enthusiasm just for the mere chance of some reward or just for a few minutes when people will notice them because they’re cutting us off from each other. They cut up the family so we don’t have that support and they cut us off from the king, from that anchor to the ancient and fundamental or they shackle them with so many chains that they can just glimpse us and we can just glimpse them like through that dark glass. We can see them we can see each other but we cannot touch, they want to slowly or quickly however they can do it, tear us away from our roots, from who we are and make us into something else. That’s why I don’t like hateful criticism of those royals we have today with so many limitations on them. I don’t hold anything against them, I can’t, I feel sorry for them because they are suffering too even if they don’t realize it because they’re being torn from us just like we’re being torn from them. It’s happening all over and we can see all over the world the powers that be dragging us in the same direction, some want to go faster, some want to go slower, but almost all of them are going in the same direction or are at least trying to. One side may put the brakes on from time to time but none have the courage or maybe none have the strength to take us back because the villains have managed to make that into something seen as hateful. You can’t go back, is what they tell us, you can only go forward, even if behind you is paradise and before is misery and despair they say it’s only good going forward and you shouldn’t even look back (because they’re afraid of what the people might see) but just take their word for it that it was all horrible behind you and keep going forward even when you see the cliff coming in front of you. This is going to probably be pretty hard to read but, too late now, may as well go on. It’s happening everywhere in one form or another, we just have a hard time keeping it straight, between helping each other out (because they’re all pulling together, at least when it counts they certainly do) while we’re torn between wanting to avoid losing who we are, because it’s because something so precious rare, and falling off into tribal bickering and old hatreds for injustices long past. It’s hard to keep straight and all the while the villains keep trying to pick away at our roots, at our foundations, trying to rip us away from that thing that someone once called the “taproot to Eden”, you know who it was. Some countries have done it quickly, just ripping it off like a bandage, you see this more in Third World countries and they are generally pretty miserable places but even in First World countries, the same thing is happening just more slowly, it’s all part of the same thing and it’s trying to strangle every last shred of decency and grace and glory out of all of us. In the western world I think they started doing that or at least making progress with that around the time of the Renaissance or the end of it, that probably helped end it but the bad guys were assisted by plenty of close-minded people too, there are always collaborators, you can count on that, always collaborators. And that’s not to say no one was trying before, they were always trying but they were not making any real progress because their holes kept getting patched up but just like the fall of Rome, because the Romans did everything in the world two thousand years ago already, eventually the holes became too many and people got lazy about patching them up or maybe made mistakes in which were the most serious but I think you know what I mean. Actually you probably don’t but I may as well stop now as don’t really have a set place to stop because I didn’t really set out with any goal in mind here, just think of it as “thinking out loud” but written down. If you got anything useful out of it, I’ll say it was worth it and if not, I probably won’t have the nerve to put this sort of stuff out here again anyway so maybe next time things will be more familiar.

To end, I’ll just say “Remember”. Always. (monarchists should at least get that one)