In Praise Of Kings, Emperors, Tsars, And Shahs - The Sorry Tale Of An America Which Has Lost Its Way

The mantra of the Left is familiar and predictable - monarchy, royalty, aristocracy are irrevocably bad, throwbacks to white colonial rule, feudalism, and upper class rule.  Forget that kings and queens, emperors, shahs, and czars created the world's great civilizations, spread art, philosophy, religion, and sophisticated culture throughout the world, they say, and remember only slavery, exploitation, and 'Let them eat cake' arrogance. 

Revisionism of course, and a particularly myopic one.  Seen through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity, diversity, and inclusivity history never happened. Today, as Pol Pot said, is the beginning of The Year Zero. 

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and in April 1975 enforced a mass evacuation of Cambodia's cities to found a new agrarian society.  Any one with links to a bourgeois past - anyone who had worked in white collar professions, who had owned property, land, or businesses were executed.  Only the laboring class would survive his pogroms and would live to populate a new world of socialist roots and Khmer communitarianism.  Over two million people were killed during his regime. 

Maoist Enver Hoxha returned Albania to the Dark Ages, and in a perverse fantasy like that of Pol Pot turned the country into a Neolithic, primitive society.  'We will begin again', he said, reprising Pol Pot, 'and create a new, wondrous society'; but to get there, nothing must remain of the old, the European, the capitalist monarchies of the past.  His regime was brutal, unforgiving, and murderous. 

The predecessor and inspiration for these two men, Mao Zedong was responsible for 100 million Chinese deaths due to starvation, persecution, forced labor, imprisonment, and mass executions. 

The political similarities among Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Mao, and American progressives is striking - all wanted to pretend the past did not exist, that human nature could be reformed and fundamentally changed, and that progress towards an engineered Utopia was indeed possible. 

European white civilization, of course, is our heritage, our legacy, and our model.  The American Republic was based on European Enlightenment, English jurisprudence, French philosophy, and Greco-Roman principles of governance. Its art and literature have been the foundations for American creative enterprise.  While America, like any country, has developed its own indigenous national cultural resources, it would not exist as a modern society without Europe.  It was Europe, not Africa which gave  us our cultural start, our enterprise, and our ethos.

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The revisionism of progressives is profoundly hypocritical and dangerous.  Attempts to negate the past, expunge it from historical records, damn it universally, and start over are frighteningly similar to the ideas of Mao, Hoxha, and Pol Pot. Their attempts to remove all traces of Southern history - i.e. to deny that it ever existed - and to disparage, dismiss, condemn, and ignore white European civilization, are no different. 

This new ethos has had serious consequences - there is no longer a universal ethos, guiding moral and cultural values at the center of American society, no unifying fundamental principles within a civil society.  All has been divided, parceled up into segments of irrelevant racial, ethnic, and gender identity within a distorted philosophical notion of 'equality'. 

Every institution is being forced to accommodate this revisionist Orwellian nightmare. Schools have lost their charter, their responsibility to educate and are little more than hothouses of faux forums on injustice and social ills.  The courts - especially the Supreme Court - is overwhelmed with cases dealing with race, gender, and ethnicity.  

Municipalities are hemorrhaging funds spent on 'social reform', attempts to redistribute wealth according to race that are no different from Soviet-style economic re-ordering.  The media have lost track of world affairs and are obsessed with transgender issues, black supremacy, and anti-capitalism. 

At the same time as the American ship founders; ballast, hold, cargo, and fo'c'sle splintered and strewn on the rocks, Xi, Putin, and the Ayatollahs laugh with glee.  They, inspired by and looking to their imperial past with no compunction, hesitation, or shame, operate from a strong, definable, and unshakeable cultural center.  They do not want to forget Persepolis, Czarist Russia, the great dynasties of China, or the Mauryan and Gupta empires.  These historical antecedents are not just historical events, recorded and recounted, but living, relevant realities.  

Louis XIV, the Sun King of France did not limit his cultural expression to Versailles. He was so confident of the universal relevance of French culture - art, music, philosophy, literature, and science - that it had to be spread.  Imperial conquest is very much about territory, land, and wealth; but it is also about cultural certitude. 

The United States has no dynastic or imperial history, but a legacy of one.  To assume that our process-oriented, legalistic, and economic-based society can somehow stand independent of the past is arrogant at best. America does have its own history - that of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, documents which embody the Enlightenment principles on which the nation was founded; but even they are dismissed as irrelevant, outdated, and anachronistic in a woke age. 

Returning to these roots - early independent American history and the European civilizations to which we owe our culture - is essential to regain our footing; and not least to regain the respect of our allies and adversaries. Xi, Putin, and the Ayatollahs see us as patsies, mired in narrow, parochial disputes, obsessively inward-looking, naive and hopelessly idealistic.

They are all Machiavellian to the core, opportunistic, nationalistic, and hegemonic - but such an attitude cannot be based on airy idealism.  Behind it is their imperial past - a sense that Russia, China, and Iran are descendants of greatness who have not lost sight of it. 

 

Meanwhile the United States fusses over the definition of a woman, racial fantasy, and who should be an American.  Russia wants Ukraine and Slavic hegemony, China wants Taiwan and Tibet, Iran wants an Islamic caliphate - raw, anti-democratic imperialism? Hardly.  Putin, Xi, and the Ayatollahs are doing what comes naturally to powerful imperial regimes while the United States can only watch, carp, and whine.