Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
In his 1978 book, Bonaparte, Correlli Barnett deconstructs Napoleon so thoroughly that it reads like a carricature of Napoleon’s critics. The great general’s victories are explained away as the results of the blunders of his opponents. Napoleon was saved time and again by the mistakes of his adversaries. Barnett does not explain how a man who never made a good decision dominated Europe for two decades. If Napoleon prevailed time and again despite his bad decisions, what was the quality of his opponents?
Barnett’s Napoleon comes across as an American neoconservative who seeks hegemony via violence and not diplomacy. Napoleon’s diplomatic incapacity lost Spain and Portugal to the English and tied down a huge French army in Spain to no effect.
The British do not like Napoleon because he, like Hitler, constituted a grave threat to Britain’s hegemony over the European continent. But Barnett goes to such length in exposing myths of Napoleon’s capabilities that it removes all the glory of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.
Actually, Napoleon wasn’t defeated by Wellington at Waterloo. According to another English historian, David Howarth in his 1968 book, Waterloo: Day of Battle, Napoleon was sidelined by an extremely painful bladder infection and could not concentrate for more than 3 minutes at a time. The battle was conducted by Napoleon’s Marshall Ney who did not adhere to Napoleon’s instructions, some have said in an act of treason. It was Ney who defeated Napoleon by committing France’s last reserves just prior to the unexpected return of the Prussians under Blucher, who had been driven from the field the previous day by Napoleon.
Barnett dismisses Napoleon as a tyrant and an egoist. But Napoleon rose from the failure of the French Revolution. When the social structure that upholds a society is destroyed by revolution, the vacuum is filled by whoever can best use power. In the Russian Revolution this was Lenin. In the French Revolution it was Napoleon.
Napoleon became France. He was the government. The inability of his beloved wife Josephine to deliver an heir endangered France, which could fall again into internal strife or to which the Bourbons could be restored by the English. Barnett’s conclusion that Napoleon’s divorce of Josephine was “one of the most selfish and dishonourable actions of his life” is untrue. Napoleon gave up his happiness and life of memories with Josephine in order to produce stability and continuity for the French empire by marrying an Austrian princess who delivered the heir. Of course, it was all for nothing when Napoleon’s willfulness sent him marching off into Russia.
Why am I writing about Napoleon? Because reading Barnett brought to mind that revolutions never achieve their ends. They destroy a civilization. The result is chaos into which power steps and becomes the basis of government.
Unlike the French and Russian revolutions, the so-called American revolution did not overthrow an established order. The American revolutionaries merely evicted the British tax collector and took that role for themselves. The same society and law prevailed. Life went on as usual. It was not a real revolution. British rule ended, but the society was not overthrown.
Today the US is susceptible to revolution. Jobs offshoring has destroyed America’s economic vitality. Living standards are falling, and homelessness is rising. Debt service drains the remaining resources. The country has become racially diverse and divided by Identity Politics. The white liberal-left segment is alienated from, and critical of, the country’s history which they portray in the most unfavorable light. The result is a loss of confidence on the part of the original white population and growing assertiveness of “oppressed” people of color. White Americans are being margainalized just as were their counterparts in France and Russia. In the US today, there is more weakness than strength in the bonds that make a cohesive society. Today we are experiencing the total failure of enculturation of Western elites in Westerm culture. Among the elites, Cultural Marxism’s march through the institutions has succeeded in destroying the structure of belief that upholds society.
When Louis 16th called the Estates-General in 1789, he did not expect to be beheaded. When Russian liberals pressured the Tsar during WW I for a constitutional republic, they did not understand that they were destroying the structure of belief in the society, much less expect Lenin to be the result. There are always unintended consequences. The folly of America’s white liberals will produce its own unintended consequences.
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Yes,yes,yes,
I read this over and over again in other op-eds but what do we, rational individuals, do about it?
This is History. This is the inevitable Death of Empire. What can be done about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Anyone interested in understanding the mechanics of human history must first and foremost understand the cycles of Nature and the nature of living things. There exist a balance in every closed system; creation and dissolution, growth and decay, life and death. There is no escape from this dynamic, no means by which one can exist without the other. Sometimes societies ascend, but eventually, over time, they collapse.
For a very long time America has benefited from exploiting the reserves of other nations- their labor, their resources, and their environments in a form of cultural strip mining. It has given the appearance of a sustainable system that required no effort to store surpluses or to build reserves for the future. There has been a perpetual live for the moment feel to our experience that was based on such illusory systems as credit and fiat.
These things are not real. They are manifest realities, things that exist only because a critical mass of people agree to believe in them rather than what is reflected by actuality. When such time occurs that a large enough number of people abandon their participation in that system, reality rushes in to the void left behind.
A large part of what we are seeing- as described to us by experts or media- is occult in nature, hidden not by design or subterfuge, but due to the ignorance or stupidity of the mass of men. They no longer recognize that a large part of what is taking place on the streets of cities like Portland and Minneapolis is simply a mating ritual for a generation that was so atomized and dissolute that they had no opportunity to make real life connections with the opposite sex except through electronic devices. Living beings cannot- despite the assurances of the Musks and Weils- exist by proxy. They must eat, sleep, perform some activity during their waking hours, seek companionship, etc. These drives can be sublimated or suppressed either by societal controls or chemical dependencies, but they cannot be removed from our core drive. This is what happens when humans are thwarted from fulfilling their animal destinies- the drives of their particular species. If you eliminate the family, you do not stop fornication. If you eradicate healthy foods and a connection to its production, you do not eliminate hunger. Thus the dramatic rise in obesity and the ubiquity of pornography.
Everything exists in context, there is no way to eliminate the void left behind in a fatherless home without a corresponding flow of the feminine. A mind that has no reason will seek to replace it with an equal measure of emotion.
The Western Cultural experience that gained prominence and near global hegemony over the past several centuries is in terminal decline, accelerated by the opportunistic interference of competing cultural spheres, but predominantly by its own senescence. We are, in short, spent. What we are seeing is not a political or ideological struggle- again, manifest realities- but the natural process of a cultural expiration. The West is dying and with it all of the ideals and symbols that were attached to its rise. Just as an elderly family member in their last days makes a point to give away their possessions, America is passing its treasures on; freedom of speech, the iconic symbols of Manifest Destiny like the statues of its heroes, even its own birthright to the rising of a new cultural expression, one that is less concerned with things like honor, nobility, truth and justice. None of those things exist in Nature, but rather are created and used like iron tools to achieve an end. Now that its energy is spent they serve no purpose, especially to the multitudes of others who share a far more dynamic and exuberant expression of collective identity.
This is a natural event, no different from a forest fire, but one which applies to the human species specifically. This is how we clear the ground for whatever is to replace us and we will serve as its fertilizer.
As usual, your discourse requires one to pause and reflect. Between you and PCR my usual hope and optimism is replaced by sadness. As an old fart, at least I can still hope to pass on in my bed, rather than with an empty magazine.
The same year as the Declaration of Independence, Alexander Fraser Tytler laid out the normal progression of a democracy. Even though we are not a democracy, we appear to be on the same trajectory.
“From bondage to spiritual faith,
From spiritual faith to great courage,
From courage to liberty,
From liberty to abundance,
From abundance to selfishness,
From selfishness to complacency,
From complacency to apathy,
From apathy to dependency,
From dependency back again to bondage.”
Comment should be an article in it’s own right.
Wise men gather on TBP.
Wise men and women…
And wiseguys!
“The folly of America’s white liberals will produce its own unintended consequences.” Yes, think about the outcomes, maybe a presidency backed by the military, a nation under martial law, show us your papers, comply or die ? If we were lucky, try reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collapse_of_the_Third_Republic
The most powerful army in Europe went on to become a Nazi footstool.
This is not just folly, this is Liberal Derangement, and there is a whole lot of group insanity going on here.
This from a black congresswoman from Florida on Face the Nation just today.
REP. DEMINGS: Yeah, but wouldn’t it be nice for the president of the United States to take to the microphone or the airwaves and send a message for peace and calm, talking to the protesters, talking to the demonstrators, but also talking to those who come in and loot and steal and do harm, those who are on his side, his supporters who have come in and taken the lives of people trying to send a calming and peaceful message. And this is a time, more now than ever,–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
REP. DEMINGS: –that we need to hear from the president of the United States. But the chaos and the disorder and the lawlessness that we are currently seeing, that’s Donald Trump’s America.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-rep-val-demings-on-face-the-nation-august-30-2020/
One of my customers at whose place I was last Friday was in a fever pitched mood about Donald Trump’s speech the night before, and said basically the very same thing as the woman in Florida . I brought up Sen. Rand Paul’s encounter, and just said it was the Democrats that were doing the rioting, well she went off. Was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. These people are blind.
See Romans 1: 21-32