De Civitate

Arguably "civitas", which gives us the word for "city" in most Romance languages (though literally it means "citizenship"), is the Latin word for politics. "Politics", after all, being the Greek word for "of the city".

• Remember how I've basically said that the English Whigs were the original Bolsheviks? Yeah, well, aside from their deliberate ideological distortions of history, their denial of the very humanity of anyone who disagrees with them, and their use of rape and forced famine as weapons of terror, there's also this.
  
  They call the event where their faction coalesced, "the Glorious Revolution". QED, comrades.


• I was thinking about our society's utterly mythological approach to history, and about how Jim Crow was motivated by real abuses, however unjustified a reaction it was. Other than the terror-campaign that was Reconstruction, there were the tactics the Union used during the Civil War itself. Everyone knows about Sherman, though most don't understand that his motive was pacifism ("war is intrinsically evil" leads naturally to the idea "anything we do that might shorten a war is justified"; it was basically the argument of all Prussian militarists who didn't follow Bernhardi in saying "war is always good"). Most also don't know about another little war-crime on the Union side, though: the Emancipation Proclamation.
  
  See, the timing of the proclamation, coupled with the fact it excluded the non-seceding slave states, pretty much puts paid to the notion that it was motivated by any abolitionist ideals on Lincoln's part—if you needed any other refutation of those ideals than the fact his whole attitude to slavery can be summed up as the same "personally opposed, but" so familiar from our own abortion debate. Also, anyone who knows military history knows that "If we win the slaves go free" is a very common tactic. Hideyoshi Toyotomi used it in Korea.
  
  I say it was a war-crime because that tactic runs contrary to the whole military tradition of Christendom, and not just because Christendom is the only civilization that didn't have slavery in its formative centuries. The sole motive for saying it, in a belligerent territory, is in the hopes of recruiting the enemy's slaves to one's side. But slaves are almost worthless against soldiers under arms; no, the value of a slave revolt is in its ability to terrorize the enemy's civilian population—see also Hideyoshi's Korean campaign. The Emancipation Proclamation is essentially the same tactic as firebombing Dresden.
  
  That doesn't mean the South was right, slavery-wise, anymore than Dresden means the Nazis were right; it doesn't even mean the Union or Allies were "just as bad" (I'm not Kurt Vonnegut, thanks). It's just an illustration of the important distinction between a hero and a saint, whether that hero be Lincoln or Winston "until the rubble jumps" Churchill.


• So, I was reading...I think it was Jonah Goldberg, but anyway one of the writers at National Review, about this debate with a libertarian, where, apparently, one of the religious-fanatic types said, quote, "The state uses force", as if that was a statement with any moral content whatsoever. The state also uses combustion and gravity; why should just "that physical quality equal to the product of mass and acceleration" be tabooed?
  
  But aside from the inability to grasp the distinction between a physical and a moral phenomenon, I was reminded of a Chesterton quote.

  I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice.

  But it's interesting that Libertarians believe force to be evil. Libertarians, after all, are the ones who usually complain when the military moves an inch out of its way to spare noncombatants; they're the ones who think absolutely any steps are justified in a war. Why? Easy, they think force is evil. If you think "it's evil to do bodily harm" but are forced to acknowledge that "sometimes it is permitted to do bodily harm to prevent it being done to innocents", then, rather than coming to the correct conclusion—"it is not evil to do harm in defense of oneself or others"—they, having conflated "harm" with "evil", conclude (logically correctly), "one may do evil in defense of others." You also get it in Communists and Objectivists; nobody is quite as cruel in war as the pacifist, since he believes war to be evil—not only will he do anything if he thinks it will shorten the conflict, he also holds the phrase "ethical warfare" to be a contradiction in terms.


• But you must make a distinction between Objectivists and Libertarians; I hate to break it to Rand's Libertarian fans but she hated you. See, e.g, here.
  
  But I thought it was funny how she calls Libertarians hippies. Even though there is a lot of overlap (halfwitted admiration for counter-cultures and their "authenticity" is at least as old in America as Thoreau), it's just rich coming from the lady who wrote Atlas Shrugged. What, after all, is the point of Atlas Shrugged, except that everything would be perfect, except for The Man, who's Keeping Us Down, Man? And then Galt and co. turn on, tune in, and drop out—"we'll wait out the apocalypse" was something the Beatniks hated about hippies, remember?—in their little free-loving, self-sufficient settlement. In the Rockies, no less—have you ever been to Colorado?
  
  Who Is John Galt?


• So you know when people say America is a republic, not a democracy? As if it were a good thing, as if republic weren't a perfect synonym for oligarchy? Yeah, uh, no. America is, in fact, a system of representative government resting on popular sovereignty, with a strong unitary executive. That is, a case can be made for classifying this country as a republic, as a democracy, and as a monarchy. Belloc actually considered it to be that last one, and he knew a hell of a lot more history than you do.
  
  It's actually funny to me that American conservatives—whose movement prides itself on not being ideologically purist, e.g. the "big tent"—have a problem with that. Isn't this the thing you're always talking about? The compromise and interaction between multiple systems? It goes deeper than the "checks and balances" of the three branches of the federal government; there's not a single part of this system that's not a mix and a balance.