In his anti reactionary FAQ Scott tells us how terribly repressive Queen Elizabeth was, failing to compare actually observable dissent in her time with actually observable dissent in our time:
Likewise, Elizabeth and the other monarchs in her line were never shy about killing anyone who spoke out against them. Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, passed new treason laws which defined as high treason “to refer to the Sovereign offensively in public writingâ€, “denying the Sovereign’s official styles and titlesâ€, and “refusing to acknowledge the Sovereign as the Supreme Head of the Church of Englandâ€. Elizabeth herself added to these offenses “to attempt to defend the jurisdiction of the Pope over the English Church…â€. Needless to say, the punishment for any of these was death, often by being drawn and quartered.
But every Shakespearean play was written from within the worldview that Roman Catholicism is true in its views about the next world, or that paganism is true, or that materialism is true and God or the gods care nothing for humans. They are incompatible with the official religion of which Queen Elizabeth was the head
In contrast, today every television show preaches our official religion. Thus, for example every father on television is an idiot and/or evil, and his family would be much better off without him.
Under democracy, efforts to control public opinion are far more strident, aggressive, and intrusive than they were under monarchs.
Under Stalin, thought crime could get you killed, but it generally just caused you to lose your job. Under democracy, thought crime causes you to lose your job.
Under monarchy, thought crime did not cause you to lose your job, or get you killed. Using speech to in an attempt to overthrow the ruler could get you killed, but you did not have to worry about microaggressions against the monarch, the way one has to worry about microaggressions against women or blacks.
Shakespeare could not present a play in which Queen Elizabeth needed to be overthrown, but he could present a play in which a King needed to be overthrown, a play in which England’s official religion of which Queen Elizabeth was the head, was assumed to be false.
Today you could not present a play in which father knows best, still less one in which a wife deserves a spanking for failure to perform wifely duties, gets one, and improves her conduct.
If you turn on the television, you get strident, insulting, non stop propaganda, all counter stereotypical women and blacks, all insultingly and viciously stereotyped fathers and husbands, and continual denigration of males. If you attended a play in Elizabethan England, you seldom got propaganda.
Whenever someone wants to argue that Shakespeare’s plays were propagandistic, they point to his enthusiastic demonization of Richard the Third. But Richard the Third attained the throne by murdering his nephews, the rightful heirs to the throne. How is a playwright going to depict an uncle who murders his nephews?
Another example of Shakespeare’s plays being propagandistic is that they are unkind to Joan of Arc. But the official story was that Joan of Arc was a witch. Shakespeare implies the official story is a politically convenient lie. On today’s television, not only are all today’s official stories true, but anyone that thinks that today’s official stories are lies is a tinfoil hat wearing nazi white supremacist moron. Official government issued truths, such as Global Warming and female equality, are not presented as state issued, but as issued by plucky rebels resisting government power – and repeated over and over again, and woven into stories without regard for story, plot, or drama.
If you share your workplace with women or blacks, you live in continual fear of losing your job on charges of sexual harassment, sexual assault, racism, or sexism, and your employer lives in fear of a “civil” lawsuit by government charging him with alleged acts of racism or sexism by his employees, or even mere thought crimes by his employees. People in the days of Queen Elizabeth did not live in fear of losing their jobs for lese majeste.
Today, everyone lives in fear of being accused of thought crime. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, they did not. You can criticize today’s regime, but only through an identity that cannot be easily linked to your employment or business.
[…] covered in various comments. Besides Michael‘s piece with which I agree with, here are some of the responses to it I may not. In one of his responses Jim elaborated somewhat on my old […]
What is a “microagression”?
Google the term and despair. It is part of the expanding frontier on the edge of Leftism.
I prefer to define it as “Treating another person as the sum of their apparent stereotypes, rather than as a person who might vary from stereotypes.”
For example, treating a person of Chinese descent as Japanese, even after being corrected.
Observed examples of microaggression are things like a male using the phrase “fork the repository”
Microaggressions are the sins that white males commit in other people’s dreams, for which they must be punished.
“You can criticize today’s regime, but only through an identity that cannot be easily linked to your employment or business.”
Hear, hear!
Queen Elizabeth (the daughter of Henry VIII) comes off smelling like roses in relation to her predecessors. Here’s what happened in the 1500s in England.
Under Henry VIII, first protestants were put to death. And then Henry VIII converted and started to decapitate Catholics like Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Fisher who would not repudiate the Pope.
Next came Henry VIII’s daughter Mary Tudor (‘Bloody Mary’), whose mother was Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife. She had a fondness for burning people unless they embraced the pope and she burned a whole lot of very high people in just a short reign. She enforced the crime of high treason to have a religion different from the monarch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Protestant_martyrs_of_the_English_Reformation
Next came Elizabeth and once again it was high treason to be Catholic. But she killed a smaller number and so is remembered well.
Oh, and I left out some parts. When Henry VIII saw hard pushback, he sort of went back significantly to Catholicism. Next his son Edward VI went hard toward protestantism before Bloody Mary went all in for Catholicism.
So for those keeping score at home we have this exciting 30 year span:
1529 — England goes from Catholic to Protestant under Henry VIII all because he wants to marry some Boleyn girl.
1538 — Henry VIII, experiencing pushback, and surprised by the radicalism, reverses the reformation.
1547 — Henry VIII’s son Edward VI reverses again, back to protestantism.
1553 — Mary I goes all in for Catholicism.
1559 — Elizabeth takes things back to protestantism.
Henry VIII wasn’t a very good Fnargl. He destroyed enormous amounts of church property and art (which was much of England’s wealth at the time) during his bouts of protestantism. Edward VI was similarly destructive of wealth.
I think he sold enormous amounts of Church property and art. The puritans smashed stuff. He did not.
The church had been operating a welfare state.
Analogously, suppose, as seems likely, a reactionary regime confiscates the endowments of the Ivies. People will say it destroyed knowledge, even if it scanned all their libraries and open sourced them.
Elizabeth seems to have had quite a number of people executed for plots that seem pretty far-fetched.
The Pope called for her overthrow.
Called on her people to overthrow her.
Sent in secret agents with instructions to murder her and to attempt to organize insurrection.
The Pope had his secret agents (most of them Roman Catholic clerics) attempt to blow up Parliament.
She found herself at war with Roman Catholic states.
What is far fetched about those plots?
There seems to have been an enormous amount of outright destruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries
A large number of buildings and libraries destroyed. Knowledge lost forever. Iconoclasm demanding the destruction of religious art, which at the time was most art.
I can’t say I believe in democracy for America in 2013, although with a higher quality electorate (as we had for many years in the past) democracy in America was pretty good.
A monarch combined with a respected Bill of Rights seems like a workable solution. That does not describe England in the 1500s. Although the Magna Carta had come long before, it wasn’t until later in English history that the Bill of Rights got proper respect.
>>However, the tradition that there was widespread mob action resulting in destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the looting spree of the 1530s with the vandalism wrought by the Puritans in the next century against the Anglican privileges.
The monasteries where looted of anything of value. I unless they had peasants doing the looting most of those books were probably sold.
That is not what your link describes.
Your link describes a slow and orderly process of religious reform, the assertion of Kingly authority, and the slow and orderly transfer of money, land, and valuables from theocratic governance to monarchical governance.
You are probably mixing up the orderly, gradual and gentle assertion of monarchic authority by Henry the eigth, with the looting and burning performed by the Puritans after Charles the First was executed.
I am currently watching ‘The Turdors’ on Netflix. In it, Henry VIII actually brings in Huguenots (radical protestants) from France in order to *destroy* (not sell) the monasteries and treasures and works therein, since Englishmen would not destroy their own heritage.
On the TeeVee it showed a good an proper sacking, with burning buildings and smashing treasures and monks running panicked this way that that as they got their butts kicks. Maybe they take liberty, but I think the historical fact is that the Abbeys were wreaked.
Probably there was a lot of blame on the English too, because once a party gets started, everyone gets on the fun. There was a lot of jealousy among poor people over the wealth that was there. In any case, I don’t think many books remained. Many books were destroyed as heresy according to the latest religious fad of King Henry.
Netflix is not a reliable source.
The dissolution of the monasteries was a slow and undramatic process, far slower and less dramatic than Obamacare replacing private healthcare. A realistic depiction of the process would depict bureaucrats and red tape slowly emptying out a monastery over many years, with periodic auctions of monastery assets. No riots, no lootings, no sackings.
Kingly bureaucrats organized alternate living arrangements for monks, leading to their marriages and their slow absorption into the secular community, into preaching jobs in the church, and into academia. The carrot (marriage and alternate jobs) was applied, as well as the stick. Monks were persuaded to gradually leave over time, rather than abruptly kicked out on the street.
After armed protestant insurrection, Bloody Mary burned two hundred protestants, eight hundred protestants fled into exile. I seem to run into US exiles all over the place, so clearly a lot more than a thousand have fled.
Roman Catholicism was not as pervasive under Bloody Mary as progressivism is pervasive today. Bloody Mary purged the elite, as McCarthy attempted to do. Progressivism aims to remake every man and every child in its own image.
Jim, I think it has to, because it seeks to control its citizens’ lives to an extent undreamed-of by any historical monarch, who had neither the technical means, the money, nor the need. Without pervasive thought control in place, modern subjects would perceive, and then resent, their chains.
In the past, European Monarchs only needed to defend themselves against factions contesting their authority, and ship off annoying Irish, Catholics and other troublemakers to be worked to death in Barbados or what have you every once in a while. My understanding is that your typical subject didn’t really feel the heavy hand of the state in his life at all, but rather lived ensconced in a context provided by tradition, local organizations and social institutions. Unless these became revolutionary, I imagine they were of no interest to a Monarch. But since Progressivism seeks to transform and rule every man’s soul, it needs as heavy a hand as technology, social control, and revenue will allow.
“He is a liberator and an oppressor combined.”
isteve comment, on David Coleman’s Common Core.
[…] The anti-anti reactionary FAQ Part 3, Freedom and Monarchy. « Jim’s Blog […]
Most of ye are in the very monasteries. You know this…
A bit O/T but on topic: The Utility of the Tea Party was ending passivity. The first step in any dignity for man. Only then is it possible to point out the true intentions of his Oppressors.
I speak of the Tea Party in past tense [I may be wrong], as Obamacare has in a month wiped out the individual insurance market – which was the self employed and small businessperson – which happens to be the Tea Party Core.
As real life Tea Party Terrorist Cadre Profile is: Stay at Home Mom…we may anticipate Mommy now transformed into supplicant dependent.
All while everyone was gaping at the website. Perhaps the most degrading of our endless list of degradations being the Cargo Cult Worship of our own machines.
[…] Jim Donald, “The Anti-Anti Reactionary FAQ” (Series, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, Sluts, War and Democide, […]
[…] James Donald: freedom and monarchy […]
“But Richard the Third attained the throne by murdering his nephews, the rightful heirs to the throne.”
You should read Josephine Tey ‘The Daughter of Time’ She presents another hypothesis as to who the real murderer of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ framing it as a detective story. Really well done– excellent presentation of the evidence, pro and con, and quite an entertaining read as well.
I always thought there was a good chance Buckingham did it on his own initiative without orders from Richard (though Richard probably would have gotten worried as they aged and probably would have ordered their murder eventually).