"Schmitt argued that, after the period he identified in the nineteenth century, the First World War had been different, because the Allies had attempted to moralise everything, while really pursuing the economic objective of destroying Germany. He argued more generally (but clearly by reference to that War) that it was possible to hijack and monopolise the concept of “humanity”, such that you deny “the enemy the quality of being human” and declare him to be “an outlaw of humanity .” Thus, paradoxically, “war can be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” The concept of humanity, he argued “is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.” So the “ideological structure” of the Versailles Treaty “corresponds precisely to this polarity of ethical pathos and economic calculation.”"
This is likely one of the real reasons that the Saudi government today decided to rethink its continuing support of Credit Suisse. MBS would have to be insane to put cash or marketable securities in jurisdictions such as the US and EU, lawless jurisdictions without respect for property rights, the moment you do something that Washington doesn't like.
MBS would have more leverage, sending his money to a Nigerian prince.
This moralization of everything also makes the war harder to stop. If Putin really is a hundred Hitlers and Russia is in fact guilty of every one of Lord Posonby's Ten Commandments of War Propaganda, then there is no way to negotiate, everything is permitted other than moderation.
I would argue it’s not so much that liberalism domesticated Christianity as that liberalism is a heresy or even a decay-product of Christianity; something like an unstable isotope. All its originators were vaguely Christian deists and assumed a society full of people like themselves.
Very nice, thank you! I'll offer only that US-NATO military TOEs spring from a set of assumptions -- your term for them is Liberalism -- that are inconsistent with reality. Russia, so far, has given those assumptions about 10% of the hammer she holds, which in the event is more than adequate to put the "Liberal" (US-NATO) establishment to confusion.
You're right, we wait to see how destructive of their own countries and countrymen "Liberals" can be, will be allowed by The Almighty to go. The forces in play far exceed in strength anything touchable by economic or political prowess. It's only a sliver of Euro-Americans who propel the madness, after all. IIRC, our founders were most at pains to prevent this very situation: minority rule by way of democratic means.
Were he honest, Jonah Goldberg would have written a companion for "Liberal Fascism:" "Conservative Fascism."
IMO the real conflict is between practitioners of "Old Economy", which produces the tangible goods enabling the first two levels of Maslow's Pyramid, and the leaders of "New Economy", who use financial legerdemain to enslave those producing tangible goods. "Woke Liberalism", a mendacious subversion of Maslow's 5th level, is just a convenient cover. Russia is fighting for her life. Otherwise, paraphrasing Bismarck, "Der ganze Ukraine wäre nicht die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen russichen Grenadiers wert".
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your, or Schmitt's, point, or I have an inaccurate understanding of history, but weren't the Crusades very similar to the modern PMC's "religious" wars against those who are preventing the universal spread of Liberalism? In fact Bush Jr I believe actually used the word "crusade" (lower case) to describe the PMC's depiction of the "endless war" to rid the world of the "enemies of freedom and democracy" (ie those opposed to a global benevolent economic and political dictatorship based in Euro-America). No?
Aurelien, I don't know why you avoid discussion of the 30 Years War -- it seems to me crucial to an understanding of how Europe moved away from wars of religion and into the kind of dynastic wars you suggest are characteristic of the pre-1914 era (with the exception of the French revolutionary period).
As for Liberalism, its messianic impulse absent any basis reminds me of a term one of my undergraduate professors used to describe Romanticism -- "spilled religion."
One thing I wonder is whether Liberalism has always had problem specifically with "Islam" or that it could somehow make peace with "Christianity," let alone "Buddhism." What allowed Liberalism to triumph is the West, I think, is that, because of the bloody and prolonged conflicts between various Christian sects in the West, politicized religion became untenable for sufficiently large states and created room for political Liberalism. Some "Buddhist" societies embraced certain aspects of Western Liberalism, but they were not exactly governed by "political Buddhism," which is relatively rare nowadays (maybe Myanmar, where Buddhism and nationalism seem to exist side by side, and maybe Sri Lanka, where Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism seem to be closely linked), and neither is exactly a "Liberal" polity.
In Orthodox Russia, Liberalism is having trouble taking root. Even if "China" is mostly areligious, it is grounded on statist ideas of Confucianism (where the state is basically God on Earth) and its traditions seem incompatible with Liberalism. Even South Korea and Japan are not really "Liberal" societies in Western mould either, although more so, I guess than their neighbors, besides all the Islamic examples.
So, I think, it follows that Liberalism is a sort of religious faith, born out of the peculiar situation in Western Europe and was able to adapt in societies where social and political conditions (even if not historically of "Christian" traditions) allowed it to adapt and take root, I think. Even there, though, it's not exactly same as Western Liberalism--per Fr. Fereira's observation in the novel Silence about Christians in 17th century Japan. I suppose I'm not straying too far from Schmitt--who did after all write "political theology," but how religions evolved and spread (or failed to do so) can provide useful guidance to how "Liberalism" (not necessarily "democracy," which is an altogether different beast) spread to different settings.....
referring to the 'civilisation state' as opposed to 'liberal democracies', which may also be of interest, plus there are links to two other articles on the same subject. I hope this isn't too much of a digression from the main article here, which is very interesting and thought provoking, although I will have to re-read my history books for a couple of weeks to get to grips with it. Thanks, Aurelian.
It has to be noted that Liberalism is conducting its war against Russia only as a proxy war for the time being, not by mobilizing in its core territories in Western Europe and North America. The proxies are from Ukraine, of course, a country that has been touched by liberalism but has been spared many of its worst trappings, as well as Ex-Warsaw Pact nations like Poland, which have come further along this path but have still not proceeded as far as the West by any means. Not only that, it's integral to the proxy war effort that Ukraine itself is resting under the yoke of Bandera nazi forces, which are as illiberal as it gets. The question is, whether the West will be able to mobilize once its Central and Eastern European proxies have run out of steam. A certain degree of becoming like Ukraine will certainly be necessary to achieve that. It will mean that Western leaders will have to engineer the historical marriage of Liberalizm and Nazism, a process that will be as brutal as it will be astonishing to behold in its utterly schizophrenic outcome. The most difficult obstacle to that will not be presented by the cowed and brainwashed populations of native European descent but by recent Non-European immigrants. Interestingly, the ones from Islamic backgrounds will pose the biggest mobilization challenge. Their alliance with liberalism is emphatically only a tactical one, designed to be able to gain a foothold in the West. Their value systems, as noted, are the farthest from liberalism of any value systems that exist. They will not only not be prepared to be used as cannon fodder for the liberal universalist, utopian project. They will also have the wherewithal to resist. Which recruiting party will be able to enter a French Banlieue to go on a similar kidnapping rampage as we seeing in Ukraine? It's hard to imagine.
An excellent and insightful article. It will indeed be interesting to see the cataclysmic collective nervous breakdown in the West when it loses in Ukraine.
"Schmitt argued that, after the period he identified in the nineteenth century, the First World War had been different, because the Allies had attempted to moralise everything, while really pursuing the economic objective of destroying Germany. He argued more generally (but clearly by reference to that War) that it was possible to hijack and monopolise the concept of “humanity”, such that you deny “the enemy the quality of being human” and declare him to be “an outlaw of humanity .” Thus, paradoxically, “war can be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” The concept of humanity, he argued “is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.” So the “ideological structure” of the Versailles Treaty “corresponds precisely to this polarity of ethical pathos and economic calculation.”"
This is likely one of the real reasons that the Saudi government today decided to rethink its continuing support of Credit Suisse. MBS would have to be insane to put cash or marketable securities in jurisdictions such as the US and EU, lawless jurisdictions without respect for property rights, the moment you do something that Washington doesn't like.
MBS would have more leverage, sending his money to a Nigerian prince.
This moralization of everything also makes the war harder to stop. If Putin really is a hundred Hitlers and Russia is in fact guilty of every one of Lord Posonby's Ten Commandments of War Propaganda, then there is no way to negotiate, everything is permitted other than moderation.
I would argue it’s not so much that liberalism domesticated Christianity as that liberalism is a heresy or even a decay-product of Christianity; something like an unstable isotope. All its originators were vaguely Christian deists and assumed a society full of people like themselves.
Very nice, thank you! I'll offer only that US-NATO military TOEs spring from a set of assumptions -- your term for them is Liberalism -- that are inconsistent with reality. Russia, so far, has given those assumptions about 10% of the hammer she holds, which in the event is more than adequate to put the "Liberal" (US-NATO) establishment to confusion.
You're right, we wait to see how destructive of their own countries and countrymen "Liberals" can be, will be allowed by The Almighty to go. The forces in play far exceed in strength anything touchable by economic or political prowess. It's only a sliver of Euro-Americans who propel the madness, after all. IIRC, our founders were most at pains to prevent this very situation: minority rule by way of democratic means.
Were he honest, Jonah Goldberg would have written a companion for "Liberal Fascism:" "Conservative Fascism."
IMO the real conflict is between practitioners of "Old Economy", which produces the tangible goods enabling the first two levels of Maslow's Pyramid, and the leaders of "New Economy", who use financial legerdemain to enslave those producing tangible goods. "Woke Liberalism", a mendacious subversion of Maslow's 5th level, is just a convenient cover. Russia is fighting for her life. Otherwise, paraphrasing Bismarck, "Der ganze Ukraine wäre nicht die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen russichen Grenadiers wert".
Ishmael Zechariah
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your, or Schmitt's, point, or I have an inaccurate understanding of history, but weren't the Crusades very similar to the modern PMC's "religious" wars against those who are preventing the universal spread of Liberalism? In fact Bush Jr I believe actually used the word "crusade" (lower case) to describe the PMC's depiction of the "endless war" to rid the world of the "enemies of freedom and democracy" (ie those opposed to a global benevolent economic and political dictatorship based in Euro-America). No?
Responsibility to Respect.
NOT Responsibility to Protect.
Aurelien, I don't know why you avoid discussion of the 30 Years War -- it seems to me crucial to an understanding of how Europe moved away from wars of religion and into the kind of dynastic wars you suggest are characteristic of the pre-1914 era (with the exception of the French revolutionary period).
As for Liberalism, its messianic impulse absent any basis reminds me of a term one of my undergraduate professors used to describe Romanticism -- "spilled religion."
One thing I wonder is whether Liberalism has always had problem specifically with "Islam" or that it could somehow make peace with "Christianity," let alone "Buddhism." What allowed Liberalism to triumph is the West, I think, is that, because of the bloody and prolonged conflicts between various Christian sects in the West, politicized religion became untenable for sufficiently large states and created room for political Liberalism. Some "Buddhist" societies embraced certain aspects of Western Liberalism, but they were not exactly governed by "political Buddhism," which is relatively rare nowadays (maybe Myanmar, where Buddhism and nationalism seem to exist side by side, and maybe Sri Lanka, where Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism seem to be closely linked), and neither is exactly a "Liberal" polity.
In Orthodox Russia, Liberalism is having trouble taking root. Even if "China" is mostly areligious, it is grounded on statist ideas of Confucianism (where the state is basically God on Earth) and its traditions seem incompatible with Liberalism. Even South Korea and Japan are not really "Liberal" societies in Western mould either, although more so, I guess than their neighbors, besides all the Islamic examples.
So, I think, it follows that Liberalism is a sort of religious faith, born out of the peculiar situation in Western Europe and was able to adapt in societies where social and political conditions (even if not historically of "Christian" traditions) allowed it to adapt and take root, I think. Even there, though, it's not exactly same as Western Liberalism--per Fr. Fereira's observation in the novel Silence about Christians in 17th century Japan. I suppose I'm not straying too far from Schmitt--who did after all write "political theology," but how religions evolved and spread (or failed to do so) can provide useful guidance to how "Liberalism" (not necessarily "democracy," which is an altogether different beast) spread to different settings.....
There are comments here:
https://golfcharliepapa.blogspot.com
referring to the 'civilisation state' as opposed to 'liberal democracies', which may also be of interest, plus there are links to two other articles on the same subject. I hope this isn't too much of a digression from the main article here, which is very interesting and thought provoking, although I will have to re-read my history books for a couple of weeks to get to grips with it. Thanks, Aurelian.
It has to be noted that Liberalism is conducting its war against Russia only as a proxy war for the time being, not by mobilizing in its core territories in Western Europe and North America. The proxies are from Ukraine, of course, a country that has been touched by liberalism but has been spared many of its worst trappings, as well as Ex-Warsaw Pact nations like Poland, which have come further along this path but have still not proceeded as far as the West by any means. Not only that, it's integral to the proxy war effort that Ukraine itself is resting under the yoke of Bandera nazi forces, which are as illiberal as it gets. The question is, whether the West will be able to mobilize once its Central and Eastern European proxies have run out of steam. A certain degree of becoming like Ukraine will certainly be necessary to achieve that. It will mean that Western leaders will have to engineer the historical marriage of Liberalizm and Nazism, a process that will be as brutal as it will be astonishing to behold in its utterly schizophrenic outcome. The most difficult obstacle to that will not be presented by the cowed and brainwashed populations of native European descent but by recent Non-European immigrants. Interestingly, the ones from Islamic backgrounds will pose the biggest mobilization challenge. Their alliance with liberalism is emphatically only a tactical one, designed to be able to gain a foothold in the West. Their value systems, as noted, are the farthest from liberalism of any value systems that exist. They will not only not be prepared to be used as cannon fodder for the liberal universalist, utopian project. They will also have the wherewithal to resist. Which recruiting party will be able to enter a French Banlieue to go on a similar kidnapping rampage as we seeing in Ukraine? It's hard to imagine.
An excellent and insightful article. It will indeed be interesting to see the cataclysmic collective nervous breakdown in the West when it loses in Ukraine.