Revolution
All posts tagged Revolution
| If you are old enough, you probably remember Michael Milken’s first professional life as a Titan of industry. He built great enterprises in a hurry, at risk, and at mostly profit to the investors. He was a force of nature. In his second professional life, after being prosecuted for financial misdeeds in the ’80s—he has since been pardoned by President Trump—he has focused on philanthropy. He is still a force of nature and has probably done as much in the war on cancer as anyone alive. He remains what he was, active and effective regarding every good thing. Having followed Michael’s career for years, I met him for the first time this month when I took part in an education panel he hosted in Florida. The panel consisted mostly of college presidents, and the question before us had to do with why elite colleges have gone bad. The cause of these colleges going bad is very deep, but it is mostly this: they no longer understand their purpose as the pursuit of truth. Instead, they see it as training their students to be revolutionaries. The search for the truth is a hard discipline at any level. At the highest level, it requires a lifetime. The classics say it requires even courage. One must focus upon each thing that is studied and attempt to hold these things together in one’s mind. Being trained to be a revolutionary requires different virtues. First, the student must think he can perfect the world and think he knows how. Second, he must learn to comply. These seem opposite, but they are inextricable. Revolution today is made easy by the view that the standards of perfect and imperfect, of good and bad, are completely subjective. Each of us decides what things mean. Each of us has a right to our opinions, whatever they are. This way of thinking does not make young people thoughtful; it makes them adamant. Some others are bored into passivity. Gaining strength by declaring that opinions hold no value doesn’t create a forceful revolution. And who wants a limp revolution? So asserting the holiness of the cause is essential. But it can’t be a genuinely holy cause because holy things are uncreated. The cause needs to be created by men, and it’s even better if it’s implausible or fantastical. If it lacks coherence and is built on ignorance, then its followers can be certain that it is uniquely their own. Recently, the rising cause on college campuses has been support for the terrorist group Hamas. It identifies the murdered Jews of last October, and not the murderers themselves, as evil. This is a grave matter not only for elite colleges, but for our nation. We are the most successful and longest-enduring free republic in human history. We have a constitution to protect our freedom, but our practices under that constitution have become warped. The cause of the warping is closely related to why elite colleges have gone bad. The Constitution aims to protect our liberties under the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” These laws are proclaimed in the first sentence of the most beautiful political document ever written, the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln, arguing against slavery, called these laws the “father of all moral principle in us.” Our elite colleges and many others have repudiated these laws. They recognize no laws above us, written in nature or ordained by God, to command what we do. They teach that we can remake the world as we please. This teaching is the basis of the American form of totalitarianism: scientific, comprehensive, ever advancing. It is evil. Read 1984. Much of the blame for this madness has come upon Harvard, the oldest and most elite college in America. One must condemn what Harvard has become, but also one should wish Harvard well. It is an old institution that has been great, and there is still some greatness in it. It must return to its old purposes if it is to save its freedom and recover its interest in the truth. To read more about the causes of the decline of education, read the “1915 General Declaration of Principles” by the American Association of University Professors, of which John Dewey was founder and president. Also instructive is an article I wrote years ago titled “Why the GOP is Flunking Higher Education” and an exchange about it I had with former president of Boston University John Silber. Best regards, |
| Larry P. Arnn President of Hillsdale College |
‘Informed people know that the far left has desires, designs, and determination to overthrown America because we have been a beacon of freedom for hundreds of years. They want that light extinguished forever. The light has grown dim in recent years and is now flickering. Traitors, dupes, and fellow travelers have been at work and the results are obvious in Washington, D.C.
What is happening in Democrat-controlled cities is not accidental. It’s called treason. The desired result is revolution.
Historian Will Durant wrote in the Age of Napoleon that the Jacobins and all Frenchmen who had rejected divine revelation and were now dependent on reason “all concurred in hoping that devotion to the young republic would become the religion of the people; that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity would replace God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that the furtherance of the new Trinity could be made the overriding aim of social order and the final test of morality.”
But it was not to be.
Abbe Augustin Barruel was an honest, scholarly, informed apologist and defender of Christian morality and Roman Catholic Church’s rights. He was a Jesuit priest and famous writer during the French Revolution who charged that the Revolution was planned and executed by secret societies and had been planned for decades, beginning with Voltaire. Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophers conspired with secret societies to destroy Catholicism and France’s monarchy.
The philosophers’ writings had a significant influence on those who would lead the Revolution, and Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their followers were responsible for the training of budding revolutionaries. However, they would have been horrified had they lived to see the results of their diatribes against the church, the crown, and the cottage.
It is charged that Barruel developed the above as a conspiracy theory because of his hatred of the Illuminati. Still, even if he hated or feared the Illuminati, that does not mean his information is faulty. The Illuminati refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society founded on May 1, 1776, in Bavaria, now a part of Germany. The secret group opposed all religious influence over public life and what they considered abuses of state power. Moreover, they believed any kind of government was unnecessary because of the perfectibility of man. There was no need for the church, crown, or cottage.
Highly principled and respected leaders in Europe and England, living at the time, had high praise for Barruel’s work in exposing the conspiracy. The much-respected Englishman Edmund Burke wrote to Barruel in praise of his book, declaring, “I have known myself, personally, five of your principal conspirators; and I can undertake to say from my own certain knowledge, that as far back as the year 1773, they were busy in the plot you have so well described, and in the manner, and on the principle you have so truly represented. To this I can speak as a witness.”
A contemporary of Burke in England, the Scottish scientist John Robison, published Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Robison reported the same as Burke as to secret societies and their involvement in the Revolution.
Winston Churchill wrote of the Illuminati in a February 8, 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald and referred to it as “this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.”
This alone does not prove that the Illuminati were a significant cause of the French Revolution, but it does demonstrate the group existed at the time and exercised enormous influence. It was not a group of nutty men who had more toes than teeth, but the opposite—the Illuminati were the leaders in the universities and some European governments. The Illuminati were such a threat that various governments outlawed them.
In his Lectures on the French Revolution, Lord Acton observed, “The appalling thing in the French Revolution is not the tumult, but the design. Through all the fire and smoke, we perceive the evidence of calculating organisation. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first.”
The first two volumes by Abbe Barruel published in 1797 and the other two in 1798, following the French Revolution in 1789, took great pains to document that Jacobins, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and others carefully planned on removing from France all government authority, all churches, and the father-led family. The conspirators used the peasants’ resentment toward the special privileges of the Church and nobles and gave the people the reason for self-justification for the extremism that followed.
The philosophers, trying to change public opinion, decided to publish a multi-volume Encyclopédie consisting of general knowledge. It was co-founded and edited by Denise Diderot, who thought he was moral because he had only one mistress at a time. They began publishing in 1751 and had profound political, social, and intellectual repercussions in France just before the Revolution. Its contributors were called Encyclopédistes.
The Encyclopédie’s purpose was “to change the way people think” based upon human reason, not divine revelation. Chief Editor Diderot expressed the radical philosophy of many revolutionaries by having one of his characters in a drama say, “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” That was the tone of many of the articles that were published and prepared France for revolution.
It would have been a surprise if a revolution had not happened.
Among the skepticism and humanism in the publication, there was much useful information. Of course, a little poison can make a pot of soup deadly. The writers had a big job to corrupt the nation since the people (especially outside Paris, Versailles, and Marseilles) had marinated for centuries in family traditions, the Roman Church, and respect for the king. For decades, they and their children had been educated by the Catholic Jesuits.
Barruel defined philosophism as “the error of every man who, judging of all things by the standard of his own reason, rejects in religious matters every authority that is not derived from the light of nature.” The political termites believed mankind must rely on reason, not revelation since the elitists thought only fools trust revelation over reason. So, religion (the Roman Catholic Church) and the monarchy based on the divine right of kings must be denigrated, denied, and destroyed.
Barruel believed the volumes of the Encyclopédie were successful in controlling the minds of intellectuals and creating public opinion against the church and crown. The various writers were men dedicated to expanding science and secular thought, laying a foundation for the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was reasonable, reforming, and eventually revolutionary.
Barruel and others declared the publication was an intellectual introduction to the French Revolution. He and others believed the volumes of the Encyclopédie were successful in controlling the minds of young intellectuals and creating public opinion against the church and crown and cottage.
The skepticism and lack of support for the Church and the Bible in the Encyclopédie brought much criticism and opposition from Church leaders from its first volume. The Catholic Jesuits especially fought the offensive publication, and the group was made illegal in France in 1764 as they were in Portugal, Hungary, Austria, and other nations.
The Encyclopédie’s publication was opposed by Church and government officials and was censored and repressed in 1752. In 1759, the government denied permission for publication. The Revolution started in earnest in 1789 and lasted until the late 1790s ending with Napoleon’s dictatorship.
The volatile, vicious, and often vile authors fed into the common people’s hatred and envy against the Church and anyone wearing silk knee-breeches, the nobility. Aldous Huxley correctly asserted, “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’— this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
The Revolution was an attack upon all authority and gave frustrated, angry, resentful, and hungry people an excuse to take their licks on those people and groups they hated.
America has been softened by pious preachers, purring politicians, pathetic professors, and a perverted press to where few people think for themselves or think critically. They long ago rejected revelation and climbed into bed with reason.
We are ripe for the Second American Revolution, and the chaos around us was planned by the radical left; and they are charging Trump and his followers of doing what the left itself has successfully accomplished. Democrats have traditionally accused Republicans of what the Democrats have been doing.
I don’t want to shout fire in a crowded theater, but folks, we are surrounded by an uncontrolled conflagration, and leftists have cut the water hose. It is time to form bucket brigades, and everyone does their part to extinguish the flames.
America is at risk.’http://donboys.cstnews.com/like-france-traitors-live-among-us-producing-revolution
‘Revolutions in France, Russia, or Cuba didn’t happen by accident because they were planned, preached, and promoted by leftist thugs. Those thugs did not know that all revolutions devour their own.
In the eighteenth century, some eloquent, highborn French wanted a national makeover that stemmed from their hatred of Christ and the Bible, Christian morality, property rights, orderly government, and strong father-led homes. There were some legitimate complaints against the government but none that justified anarchy and wholesale executions without a trial.
The promoters of the French resistance, rebellion, and revolution were willing to wait for the time to strike. It took decades, but it came.
It took decades in America, but it is here.
Waiting gives revolutionaries time to organize and gather their cadre of conspirators. The French were led to the guillotine by suave, sophisticated, and often sincere spokesmen such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other brilliant, immoral, but arrogant conspirators who detested revelation and deified reason. With the passing years, the leaders who replaced Voltaire and Rousseau were more vicious and deadly. They spoke about liberty, equality, and fraternity while they mocked their essence.
Voltaire and Rousseau would have been horrified if they had lived to see the Reign of Terror—heads rolling hour after hour in the middle of Paris; thousands of innocent people killed, usually without trial; climaxing in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Voltaire was known for freedom, independence, and defense of the little guy as expressed in his alleged comment, “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” He would not have approved of the revolution that became a repulsive river of blood emanating from the guillotine in the center of Paris.
Rousseau famously wrote, “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,” so he would have vetoed the revolution. Both men would have been aghast, even ashamed with the destruction, deception, and death. However, their humanism, secularism, and distrust, distaste, and disdain for the crown, the church, and the cottage set the stage for what followed decades after their initial attack.
But they started it and are stuck with it. That’s what happens when a nation rejects heavenly revelation and snuggles up to human reasoning.
I wonder what Voltaire and Rousseau would have thought of present-day America where one is condemned for what he did, wrote, or said 30 years ago! Where you can’t say, “All lives matter” or “Blue Lives Matter,” but must say, “Black lives matter.” Where historical monuments are being destroyed, and history is being rewritten to resemble a fairy tale.
The French should have seen it coming over the decades as critics of the crown, the church, and the cottage became progressively louder, bolder, and shriller.
Local and clandestine Jacobin clubs (consisting of Philosophers, Freemasons, and Illuminati) were the workhorses of the Reign of Terror in 1793 during the dictatorship of the revolution. At the time, there were up to 8,000 clubs in France consisting of about 500,000 members. They were no longer merely civic or social clubs but instruments of terror.
Their ostensible responsibility was to help with the running of local governments, policing the local markets, and raising supplies for the military and local police departments. They presented themselves as the epitome of public virtue and were quick to point out anyone suspected of disloyalty to the cause. And, with missionary zeal, they helped destroy all vestiges of Christianity. They became the tool of terrorist leader Robespierre whom he manipulated to his advantage.
Members of the Jacobin clubs were “snake in the grass” Frenchmen who had been radicalized over decades and were waiting for the signal to rebel, resist, riot, and revolt. All leaders of the plot had secret names for one another in their private correspondence. It was arranged so that no one knew many members.
Most historians smile at the suggestion that the French Revolution was promoted by conspirators decades before the streets exploded and the guillotine blade became dull with constant use. Just another conspiracy theory.
Those historians are wrong.
Yale President Timothy Dwight was an American educator, Congregational minister, and President of Yale from 1886–1898. He documented the origin of the revolutionary Jacobin organizers who agitated for a brutal revolution. He declared, “About the year 1728, Voltaire, so celebrated for his wit and brilliancy and not less distinguished for his hatred of Christianity and his abandonment of principle, formed a systematical design to destroy Christianity and to introduce in its stead a general diffusion of irreligion and atheism. … With great art and insidiousness the doctrines of … Christian theology were rendered absurd and ridiculous; and the mind of the reader was insensibly steeled against conviction and duty.”
Dwight continued, “The fabrication of books of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite doubt and generate contempt and derision. … The being of God was denied and ridiculed … The possession of property was pronounced robbery. Chastity and natural affection were declared to be nothing more than groundless prejudices. Adultery, assassination, poisoning, and other crimes of the like infernal nature, were taught as lawful…provided the end was good. … The good ends proposed … are the overthrow of religion, government, and human society, civil and domestic. These they pronounce to be so good that murder, butchery, and war, however extended and dreadful, are declared by them to be completely justifiable.”
Note the similarities: There was a design to destroy, as today. There was an attack on Christ and the Bible, as today. There was an attack on property, as today. Horrible crimes were permitted if they were for a good cause, as today. If the end was desirable (to them), then the means were justified, like today. The worst crimes, even murder, were acceptable, as today.
The slow but sure erosion of the foundations of France began with Voltaire and was continued by the self-righteous philosophers and anti-crown, anti-church, anti-family fanatics over the following decades.
They dispensed with the corrupt Roman Catholic Church and installed the Cult of Reason. A prostitute was enthroned at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as the goddess of the French people. France was renamed The Republic of Virtue! The press and theaters were turned into tools for state propaganda. More than 2,000 churches were renamed Temples of Reason and became the voice of this cult. Crosses offended some people, so they were outlawed; religious monuments and statues were destroyed; public and private worship and education outlawed; Christian graves were desecrated. Churches were closed or used for immoral, lurid, licentious, scandalous depravities; and priests and ministers (along with those who harbored them) were executed on sight for a while.
What was their theme again? Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
The Apostle Peter warned about this in II Peter 2:19 when he wrote, “While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.”
All secret societies are dishonest, deceptive, and dangerous to any society, whether it be the KKK, the Freemasons, or the elitist Order of Skull and Bones, a Yale University society originally known as the Brotherhood of Death. All sober people should flee such groups as if their hair was on fire. However, insecure elitists gravitate to such groups where they wallow in supposed superiority and delight in awarding and receiving honors. They spend much time patting each other on the back and stroking each other’s egos.
The secretive Jacobins (who met on Jacob Street in Paris) were sensitive to public virtue but thought personal virtue repugnant. They reported people who were suspects or who were not sufficiently pro-terror. It was an ideal time to take revenge on someone by suggesting to others about his or her suspicious political positions.
Many top-level aristocrats who had suspicious political views were beheaded or imprisoned, while those who remained alive lost all special treatment and privileges. The middle class took control following the much-touted program of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. That was great for a while, but when Robespierre took control, terror reigned. Civil war followed as believers of the monarchy (upper class) fought the revolutionaries (mainly lower-class except for leaders) for control. About half a million people were imprisoned between 1793 and 1794, and up to 300,000 were killed by firing squad and drowning. The bloody guillotine claimed 40,000 lives (without trial) in Paris, most of them because they held the wrong political views.
The basic philosophy behind and driving the Revolution was an attack on all authority—the church, the crown, the cottage. It was a deliberate conspiracy or plot to overthrow the throne, altar, and authoritarian family structure in Europe. The motive was the dissolution of all civil society. They would not need government because they believed in man’s perfectibility; consequently, no government would be necessary. This belief resulted from the influence of the Illuminati, who became leaders in the Jacobin clubs.
America stands at the crossroads. Revolutionary leaders in the U.S. make their destructive contributions to national disruption as Robespierre and Denis Diderot did in France. All revolutionaries plan change, control, and chaos in their nation.
They must be stopped, but revolutions, once started, are almost impossible to stop.’http://donboys.cstnews.com/america-be-warned-revolution-in-france-and-america-planned-preached-and-promoted-by-leftist-thugs
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