"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.
I was thinking very much of the last couple of generations, where Christianity has degenerated into just another form of liberal humanism, so as to be “relevant” to a liberal age. On the wider point I tend to agree.
As a practical political point I think you're correct about such degeneration. I'd like to point out, though, that once again this is purely a fact of practical politics - Christians have been on the losing side of several cultural and not a few military struggles over the past 400 years, and not because of some inevitability of dialectic, but simply because enough men with power saw the promotion of liberal philosophy as a vehicle to acquire more power.
There are still Christians of the old stripes out there, and rarely but occasionally their needs and capabilities are relevant in political struggles - such as, behind the scenes, the war in Ukraine.
I mention this to pour cold water on the Liberal presumption of the inevitable dialectical march of History, because it needs as much cold water as it can get, being pretty basic to modern Western perceptions due to inculturation, even among dissidents.
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."
I'm not sure about the validity of attributing the founding fathers with desire to prevent the tyranny of a minority. Otherwise, it's hard to justify the 6% of Americans legally qualified to vote in the first years after independence.
By the way, have we passed the 50% or all residents in US having the right to vote already? I have not checked recently. I suppose it doesn't really matter, as a third of those eligible, even as simple as it is to vote presently, decided not to waste their time with voting.
A shocking 80% of those who did not vote say that they dont feel that any politicians care about improving the lives of their electorate, and also about the same 80% are convinced that the media and public figures manipulate and deny them objective information about events, for financial or self interested reasons, making any informed political choice impossible in practice. The funny thing is, for those who DID VOTE, those numbers are 72% and 73% percent. NPR polling conducted in 2020 from entire population, not just their audience, error calculated not to exceed 3-4%.
P.S. The residents of "U.S. territories" like Puerto Rico and Guam mentioned, they would love to have a talk about "taxation without representation" or some such nonsense. Land of the free, fighting for democracy and human rights anywhere but at home. The American ridiculous hypocrisy never ceases to amaze me.
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?
Well, there you get into very complicated arguments about the origins and the nature of the Crusades, which are a bit outside my area of expertise. I’d say firstly that, yes, there was genuine religious feeling involved, but secondly it was essentially a war for territory (to recover the Holy Land) rather than an existential clash of religions. In any event the Crusaders never had the military capability to confront the Arabs on any larger scale. On the other hand, you could argue I suppose that the Arab conquests themselves were an example of Schmitt’s Enemy hypothesis since, at least at the beginning, the coexistence of Islam with any other belief system was theoretically impossible.
I think you're best off saying Schmitt's argument holds best to modern politics and states as such. Once you go medieval you step into a completely different arena that it's hard for modern thinkers to even realize exists, much less understand. For instance, medieval realms weren't states at all.
Pithy and apt. I'd like to add that the term "responsibility to protect" just drips of colonialist-imperialist-racist arrogance and condescension--"white man's burden" with the serial number barely filed off and wrapped in politically correct lingo for today.
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."
I left it out because it gets us into very complicated areas: all of the books I have read on the subject begin by pointing out just how messy and confused the whole conflict was. It was arguably not a war of religion as such, but rather a war between shifting alliances, marked by religious affiliations, but not exclusively. Which is why the French allied with Protestant powers for example. It’s a fascinating subject but best treated separately.
The Thirty Years War, an obsession of mine, is even more complex in that what starts as a religious conflict (not simply Catholics vs. Protestants, as there were serious internal divisions within the camps) evolves eventually into a national one that gives birth to "nationalism" in the modern sense, but that incipient "national interest" is still coded in religious terms. It's very weird.
I would make an alternative viewpoint - that 30 Year War was significant for entirely different reasons. That maybe, the fundamental shift was not due to religious motivation at all. Religious conflicts were neither new, nor particularly unique in conduct to any other war, really. That the demarcation separating the teams, was merely a convenient banner to be raised for the sake of everyone's familiarity the rules of conduct. That reformation supporters only used religion as a pretext, as a deceptive cloak for masking their true aims. An excuse to coerce some useful idiots to partially fill out the required numbers voluntarily - hence free of charge and even self-motivated sword lubrication meatpuppets, from the ranks of simpleminded commoners. Otherwise, they would have to cough up a fair financial compensation for employing full mercenary contingent, and nobody likes to pay for free soon-to-become-corpses, needlessly.
What was actually going on behind the scenes, beyond the always maneuvering and scheming dynastic houses and secret alliances, was the awakening of the long dormant and ancient, remembered only in old fairytales and crumbling unreadable chronicles, battlefield for controlling which path will channel the raw power of humankind, to shape its future and our basic right to exist or perish - the arena of class struggle for controlling the social structures and ideals. Craftsmen and merchants, the growing in power, yet relatively young bourgeoisie class, no longer wanted to be deemed as untermench and required to buy their way through marriage into some impoverished aristocratic family, to be treated as fellow human beings, not some worthless genetic trash. They got the balls to assert themselves by challenging the traditional landowning aristocracy. At that point, everyone considered the status quo as natural order of things. Nobility with the help of religion was a colossus, firmly securing their stranglehold on control of human destinies. Their inherited right to rule was guaranteed by hitherto unrivaled capability and willingness to drop everything and anything they were doing, and dish out such incomprehensible all-crushing levels of violence and ruinous extermination against anyone foolish enough to utter a questioning whisper of decent, that it was more merciful to strangle you idiot child in their sleep, before someone cought any rumor of it, and brought the fire and steel boot of repression upon the doomed birthplace cursed to be the birthplace of such abomination. Who in their right mind dares to question God's will? His holy and eternal mandate to delegate the rule the plane of the living?
Well, it is undoubteble that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, that only he dictates to course of any life, but apparently, even he takes technological progress quite seriously. He too, can be swayed while picking chosing a mortal delegate to rule over mundane and trivial daily matters. Surprisingly, widespread use of gunpowder weapons - one of the main equalizers between a barely trained musket weilding peasant mobs and professional aristocratic warfighters, who trained for combat their entire life, happened to coincide with redistribution of political power to a broader,if still tiny, fraction of society, beyond nobility. Truly, God works in mysterious ways.
This is what I was thinking when I was pointing to the similarity between the Spanish Emoire and the present day US, plus the fact that both empires are "rich" because they mainly export money itself while shunning manufacturing. One difference is that Philip II was a genuinely competent, hardworking, and, by the contemporary standards, public-minded leader, even if a real religious fanatic. I wish we at least had a competent hardworking leader who is mindful of the public.
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.....
One analogy that I like to draw between US today and the Spanish Empire, especially after the beginning of the Reformation. Both are using American gold to finance an ideological war against heretics. Both empires were rich in gold, but not in production of stuff. Both imagined themselves paragons of virtue for "spiritual" reasons whose ultimate triumph was ordained by God. So will a freak storm scatter the 6th Fleet like the Spanish Armada? (People seem to know the Kamikaze that scattered the Sino-Mongol fleet, but not the Protestant Storm....). I wonder how far one could take this analogy, on a more serious note....
One of the interesting things about Confucianism is that rights and obligations are mutual.
Citizens owe the emperor a duty of loyalty, but emperor owes the citizens a duty of care, and the citizens are entitled and obligated to overthrow the emperor (and even the gods themselves) if they are slackers or are just ineffective.
Ancient kingship (thinking of the Bronze Age here) was deeply entwined with the notion of obligation for the well-being of the people, especially in propitiating the gods.
Not just confucianism. That was at the core of the concept of Citizenship in European city states since at least Ancient Greek times. Not everyone was entitled to be a "citizen," but along with citizenship came both rights and duty, reciprocated by collective rights and duties of the corporate entity, whether the city itself or guilds or whatever.
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.
I was thinking very much of the last couple of generations, where Christianity has degenerated into just another form of liberal humanism, so as to be “relevant” to a liberal age. On the wider point I tend to agree.
As a practical political point I think you're correct about such degeneration. I'd like to point out, though, that once again this is purely a fact of practical politics - Christians have been on the losing side of several cultural and not a few military struggles over the past 400 years, and not because of some inevitability of dialectic, but simply because enough men with power saw the promotion of liberal philosophy as a vehicle to acquire more power.
There are still Christians of the old stripes out there, and rarely but occasionally their needs and capabilities are relevant in political struggles - such as, behind the scenes, the war in Ukraine.
I mention this to pour cold water on the Liberal presumption of the inevitable dialectical march of History, because it needs as much cold water as it can get, being pretty basic to modern Western perceptions due to inculturation, even among dissidents.
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."
I'm not sure about the validity of attributing the founding fathers with desire to prevent the tyranny of a minority. Otherwise, it's hard to justify the 6% of Americans legally qualified to vote in the first years after independence.
By the way, have we passed the 50% or all residents in US having the right to vote already? I have not checked recently. I suppose it doesn't really matter, as a third of those eligible, even as simple as it is to vote presently, decided not to waste their time with voting.
A shocking 80% of those who did not vote say that they dont feel that any politicians care about improving the lives of their electorate, and also about the same 80% are convinced that the media and public figures manipulate and deny them objective information about events, for financial or self interested reasons, making any informed political choice impossible in practice. The funny thing is, for those who DID VOTE, those numbers are 72% and 73% percent. NPR polling conducted in 2020 from entire population, not just their audience, error calculated not to exceed 3-4%.
P.S. The residents of "U.S. territories" like Puerto Rico and Guam mentioned, they would love to have a talk about "taxation without representation" or some such nonsense. Land of the free, fighting for democracy and human rights anywhere but at home. The American ridiculous hypocrisy never ceases to amaze me.
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?
Well, there you get into very complicated arguments about the origins and the nature of the Crusades, which are a bit outside my area of expertise. I’d say firstly that, yes, there was genuine religious feeling involved, but secondly it was essentially a war for territory (to recover the Holy Land) rather than an existential clash of religions. In any event the Crusaders never had the military capability to confront the Arabs on any larger scale. On the other hand, you could argue I suppose that the Arab conquests themselves were an example of Schmitt’s Enemy hypothesis since, at least at the beginning, the coexistence of Islam with any other belief system was theoretically impossible.
I think you're best off saying Schmitt's argument holds best to modern politics and states as such. Once you go medieval you step into a completely different arena that it's hard for modern thinkers to even realize exists, much less understand. For instance, medieval realms weren't states at all.
Responsibility to Respect.
NOT Responsibility to Protect.
Pithy and apt. I'd like to add that the term "responsibility to protect" just drips of colonialist-imperialist-racist arrogance and condescension--"white man's burden" with the serial number barely filed off and wrapped in politically correct lingo for today.
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."
I left it out because it gets us into very complicated areas: all of the books I have read on the subject begin by pointing out just how messy and confused the whole conflict was. It was arguably not a war of religion as such, but rather a war between shifting alliances, marked by religious affiliations, but not exclusively. Which is why the French allied with Protestant powers for example. It’s a fascinating subject but best treated separately.
The Thirty Years War, an obsession of mine, is even more complex in that what starts as a religious conflict (not simply Catholics vs. Protestants, as there were serious internal divisions within the camps) evolves eventually into a national one that gives birth to "nationalism" in the modern sense, but that incipient "national interest" is still coded in religious terms. It's very weird.
I would make an alternative viewpoint - that 30 Year War was significant for entirely different reasons. That maybe, the fundamental shift was not due to religious motivation at all. Religious conflicts were neither new, nor particularly unique in conduct to any other war, really. That the demarcation separating the teams, was merely a convenient banner to be raised for the sake of everyone's familiarity the rules of conduct. That reformation supporters only used religion as a pretext, as a deceptive cloak for masking their true aims. An excuse to coerce some useful idiots to partially fill out the required numbers voluntarily - hence free of charge and even self-motivated sword lubrication meatpuppets, from the ranks of simpleminded commoners. Otherwise, they would have to cough up a fair financial compensation for employing full mercenary contingent, and nobody likes to pay for free soon-to-become-corpses, needlessly.
What was actually going on behind the scenes, beyond the always maneuvering and scheming dynastic houses and secret alliances, was the awakening of the long dormant and ancient, remembered only in old fairytales and crumbling unreadable chronicles, battlefield for controlling which path will channel the raw power of humankind, to shape its future and our basic right to exist or perish - the arena of class struggle for controlling the social structures and ideals. Craftsmen and merchants, the growing in power, yet relatively young bourgeoisie class, no longer wanted to be deemed as untermench and required to buy their way through marriage into some impoverished aristocratic family, to be treated as fellow human beings, not some worthless genetic trash. They got the balls to assert themselves by challenging the traditional landowning aristocracy. At that point, everyone considered the status quo as natural order of things. Nobility with the help of religion was a colossus, firmly securing their stranglehold on control of human destinies. Their inherited right to rule was guaranteed by hitherto unrivaled capability and willingness to drop everything and anything they were doing, and dish out such incomprehensible all-crushing levels of violence and ruinous extermination against anyone foolish enough to utter a questioning whisper of decent, that it was more merciful to strangle you idiot child in their sleep, before someone cought any rumor of it, and brought the fire and steel boot of repression upon the doomed birthplace cursed to be the birthplace of such abomination. Who in their right mind dares to question God's will? His holy and eternal mandate to delegate the rule the plane of the living?
Well, it is undoubteble that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, that only he dictates to course of any life, but apparently, even he takes technological progress quite seriously. He too, can be swayed while picking chosing a mortal delegate to rule over mundane and trivial daily matters. Surprisingly, widespread use of gunpowder weapons - one of the main equalizers between a barely trained musket weilding peasant mobs and professional aristocratic warfighters, who trained for combat their entire life, happened to coincide with redistribution of political power to a broader,if still tiny, fraction of society, beyond nobility. Truly, God works in mysterious ways.
This is what I was thinking when I was pointing to the similarity between the Spanish Emoire and the present day US, plus the fact that both empires are "rich" because they mainly export money itself while shunning manufacturing. One difference is that Philip II was a genuinely competent, hardworking, and, by the contemporary standards, public-minded leader, even if a real religious fanatic. I wish we at least had a competent hardworking leader who is mindful of the public.
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.....
One analogy that I like to draw between US today and the Spanish Empire, especially after the beginning of the Reformation. Both are using American gold to finance an ideological war against heretics. Both empires were rich in gold, but not in production of stuff. Both imagined themselves paragons of virtue for "spiritual" reasons whose ultimate triumph was ordained by God. So will a freak storm scatter the 6th Fleet like the Spanish Armada? (People seem to know the Kamikaze that scattered the Sino-Mongol fleet, but not the Protestant Storm....). I wonder how far one could take this analogy, on a more serious note....
One of the interesting things about Confucianism is that rights and obligations are mutual.
Citizens owe the emperor a duty of loyalty, but emperor owes the citizens a duty of care, and the citizens are entitled and obligated to overthrow the emperor (and even the gods themselves) if they are slackers or are just ineffective.
Ancient kingship (thinking of the Bronze Age here) was deeply entwined with the notion of obligation for the well-being of the people, especially in propitiating the gods.
Not just confucianism. That was at the core of the concept of Citizenship in European city states since at least Ancient Greek times. Not everyone was entitled to be a "citizen," but along with citizenship came both rights and duty, reciprocated by collective rights and duties of the corporate entity, whether the city itself or guilds or whatever.
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.
PS to Aurelian I left a link there back to here, as well, in the interests of facilitating cross-communication.
Enjoying that post! Thanks
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.