Happy Vijaya Dashami!
I hope your Navaratri has been wonderful. Goddess bless.
Been reading, writing and consuming media from many perspectives lately. Dropping some thoughts here…
Some want to make everything about persona, painting all others who differ in their viewpoints in a negative light. Tearing down personas, after all, is ever so much easier than having a civil discourse about policy.
Some want to make everything about attacking the personas of others, but only end up destroying the credibility of their own persona; mischaracterizing and lying to the point where absolutely nothing they say is taken seriously anymore. Examples would be personas like Adam Schiff, Andrew Cuomo and Johnny Neptune. That most of the poser facade-worshipers in Hollywood and lamestream media would take that same tack does not surprise me.
Some want to make everything about politics, and they're not even very politic about it! That some would seek to sow division and hatred, even using violent mobs of conformity-enforcers to gain the power to control others does not surprise me. Neither does the fact that there are very few who focus on practicing self-control, but MANY who would seek to enact overt enforced control on others.
History is replete with examples of revolution in thought and deed, changes in the societal current of the time; yet history repeats itself in so many ways… ways in which we may learn… or not…
Oftentimes, however, taking the stance of being anti-anything is a sure-fire way of becoming the very thing which we hate, so it may behoove us to delve deeper into the pages of history now and then. I'm reading about the anti-Jacobin sentiment of the 1790s right now and am finding some of the material quite pertinent to us today, soFAIR WARNING:
I'm gonna drop some links:
Pitt and Anti-Jacobin hysteria: in the 1790s a press campaign lambasted Jacobins and fellow-travellers
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Pitt+and+Anti-Jacobin+hysteria%3A+in+the+1790s+a+press+campaign...-a021104462
>In the 1790s a press campaign Lambasted Jacobins and fellow-travellers. Stuart Andrews considers whether the Government orchestrated it all.
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In Rachel Cleves' book, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Anti-Slavery ( https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Reign+of+Terror+in+America%3A+Visions+of+Violence+from...-a0244716443 ) she makes some interesting observations that seem fairly apropos for us right now. Follow the link, but here's an excerpt:
>One of Cleves's most important contributions is her careful vindication of the Federalist response to the French Revolution as emerging not simply from a self-serving elitism, but rather from a genuine concern out of how to contain what they believed was humanity's violent nature. Worried over the consequences of the violence of their own Revolution, Federalists were especially appalled when faced with the September 1791 massacres of the French Revolution. They argued that only a strong government could control human's natural passions and protect the American people from the excessive liberty that corrupted the French Revolution. Cleves contends that a fear and abhorrence of violence was at the heart of Federalist thought. What emerged from these concerns, Cleves argues, was a radical anti-Jacobin ideology that "violently transformed American political culture" (p. 57).
>Cleves locates this anti-Jacobin sentiment within a Calvinist-Federalist tradition that inherited from its Puritan ancestors a conviction that humanity was depraved and prone to violence. While the Federalists sought to control "human" nature of this sort, they wanted to do so within republican institutions. What was new and ultimately most significant about the anti-Jacobinism of the 1790s and beyond was that it identified internal enemies (republicans and later slaveholders), rather than external ones (Indian people and the French Jesuits), who, if left unchecked, would destabilize civil society and sink the United States into chaos. The call of Federalists for a stable civil society and a state capable of regulating these baser natures was a genuine reaction to their fear that liberty, unchecked, unleashed violence and robbed individuals of their freedom.
The Independent Man:
Aquainting oneself with a little history never did anyone any harm!
The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England ( https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Independent+Man%3A+Citizenship+and+Gender+Politics+in+Georgian...-a0172597648 ) has an interesting look at different anti-Jacobin views that went into the formation of our country. Follow the link. Here's an excerpt:
>But it was the Whigs who carried the day, with an understanding of independence that fused the requirements of property to an idealized vision of an autonomous household, led by the educated, intelligent, respectable, and morally-fit males of the nation. What was created was a new basis for citizenship within the political order one that deliberately limited the definition of a citizen as much as it expanded it.
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Johnny Neptune–, and others practicing the new "Woke" Religion do not even know how they are being controlled…
Bakunin's anti-Jacobinism: 'secret societies' for self-emancipating collectivist social revolution ( https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Bakunin%27s+anti-Jacobinism%3A+%27secret+societies%27+for+self-emancipating...-a0392792928 ) is well worth reading. At least follow the link! Here's a couple excerpts…
>Talmon's classic study set out the main philosophical and practical problem with the Jacobin-Blanquist inspiration. It established that Rousseau's superficially democratic notion of the 'general will', lying behind the theory of the social contract, contained the germ of authoritarianism and eventually totalitarianism and in practice opened the way towards the usurpation of state power by a restricted clique. (7) As Bakunin put it, 'In the past there has never been a free contract…. Man does not voluntarily create society, he is involuntarily born into it.' (8) The bourgeois State recognises only citizens as equal under the law, and not human beings as equal in society.
Bakunin was opposed to participating in bourgeois politics and opposed to any nationalist or ethno-racialist appeal to unity…
>That is because any theism will lead to the institutionalisation of theological doctrine through social structures characterised by privilege and oppression: i.e., it leads to rule by a priestly hierarchy, a system for which Bakunin invented 'theologism' as a denotation. 'One sole master in the heavens' was all that was necessary 'to create thousands of them on earth,' and this 'anti-doctrinaire stance applies equally to religious theology and political ideology.'
>'The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the bureaucratic class, when the State falls or riseswhichever you wishinto the condition of a machine.'
~ Bakunin, 'Open Letters to Swiss Comrades of the International'
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The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
(https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Gordon+Riots%3A+Politics%2C+Culture+and+Insurrection+in+Late...-a0307673910)
>This collection is not concerned with rehashing the now well known facts about the riots but with bringing 'the Gordon riots out from under the shadow of the French Revolution and to return the "June days" to their original context of Georgian politics and culture'. The text is divided into three parts. The first, 'The Political Moment of 1780', has four essays looking at the riots and their relation to the politics of war, the wider 'culture of petitioning', plebeian Dissenters and anti-popery, and the imperial perspective. The second part'Representing the Unrepresentable'has three essays which look at the riots as 'sublime spectacle', Ignatius Sancho's 'take' on the riots, and an examination of Thomas Holcroft's A Plain and Succinct Narrative. … The third part, 'The Aftermath: Politics, Social Order and Cultural Memory', again has three essays which examine the impact of the riots on the criminal justice system, the whole question of the public execution of some of the rioters, and 'new connections' between the riots and the anti-Jacobinism of the 1790s.
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In the biography [Disraeli's Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe](https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+splendid+failure%3F-a0151845565) by Mary S. Millar, she describes an age-old story…
>If reading Smythe's life does change our view of Victorian England, it is because Smythe himself wanted to be Victorian and more. He was of his period, but he also stood outside it–and came to grief because he did so. In one sense, he was a modern man, chafing at Victorian restraint; in another, hc was an aristocrat yearning for days of yore when the gentry set an example and practiced a benign feudalism. Call Smythe's vision of the past fantasy, if you like, but it had a powerful impact on his contemporaries, especially Disraeli, whose career is shown in fascinating new perspective in this biography.
>At a time when revolution was in the airin 1848 a king was deposed in France while Smythe sat as MP for Canterbury and the Chartists were staging public protestsSmythe and his small cohort of MPs envisaged "class reconciliation." Of course, the aristocrats would lead the way, enacting legislation regulating child labor and other abuses in factories and mills. Disraeli joined this band of believers in compassionate conservatism only after his hopes for office in Sir Robert Peel's government were dashed.
Trust Me, There Is Much We May Learn From History
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Deeper in the anti-Jacobin weeds:
"Like a lady of a far Countree": Coleridge's "Christabel" and fear of invasion
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/"Like+a+lady+of+a+far+Countree"%3A+Coleridge%27s+"Christabel"+and+fear+of…-a0191908203
An excerpt:
>When a nation is in safety, men think of their private interests; individual property becomes the predominating principle, the Lord of the ascendant: and all politics and theories inconsistent with property and individual interest give way, and sink into a decline, which, unless unnaturally stimulated, would end in speedy dissolution.–But is the nation in danger? Every man is called into play; every man feels his interest as a Citizen predominating over his individual interests; the high, and the low, and the middle classes become all alike Politicians; the majority carry the day; and Jacobinism is the natural consequence. Let us not be deceived by words. Every state, in which all the inhabitants without distinction of property are roused to the exertion of a public spirit, is for a time a Jacobin State.