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The War for Christendom

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The War for Christendom

Tag Archives: Liberalism

The Vice of Illiberalism

05 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

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Catholic Civilization, christendom, Civilization, Conservatism, Illiberalism, Integralism, Liberalism, Restorationist, The Left, The Right

The root is liber (“free”). The term liberalis (and liberalitas) implies generosity in intellectual and material matters. The sentence “he gave liberally” means that the person in question gave with both hands. In this sense liberality is an “aristocratic” virtue. An illiberal person is avaricious, petty-minded, tight-fisted, self-centered. Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth century the word “liberal” figured neither in politics nor really in economics.

-Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism

It has become very popular among the new wave of Integralists and other counter-cultural political groups to speak of a “post-liberal” world or order in politics. This conception of history presupposes a vast triumph of so-called Liberalism in the general World Order which has created such dissatisfaction that it is on the brink of collapse. It identifies the main problem of Modernity as political and economic “Liberalism”, the collapse of which has opened many opportunities for those of a Catholic political orientation to exploit the “Liberal” state for their own ends. Abandon the hopeless task fighting the centralizing administration and embrace it, has become the new rallying cry. On the surface this all seems very appealing, name the enemy and use his own weapons and successes against him. While some might question the efficacy of using the very tactics of the Liberal State, very few realize the fundamental problem; that the Liberal World Order that is now supposedly collapsing never actually existed in the first place.

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“Men Hastening to be Slaves or Tyrants…”

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

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Anarchy, Illiberalism, Left, Liberalism, Right, Tyranny

Whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we [the devils] make Liberalism the prime bogey.

This quote, taken from The Screwtape Letters (those quite literally infernal epistles recorded by C.S. Lewis), struck me as something very telling about the Left, and the current opposition to it. The Left, understood as that which throughout the ages leads men further from Salvation, has indeed created “Liberalism” (as understood in the form condemned by the Church), but it has also created Illiberalism (understood as a disordered hatred of Liberty, as opposed to Liberalism as a disordered love). Leftism is both Nationalist and Internationalist, without the Patriotism and ordered love of nationality that the Right has, nor the Right’s concern for the greater good of Mankind.

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Liberty and Catholicism

11 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

≈ 21 Comments

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Authority, Catholicism, christendom, Common Good, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Freedom, Integralism, Liberalism, Liberty, Pope Leo XIII, Reactionaries, Tyranny

Krafft,_Peter_-_Zrínyi's_Charge_from_the_Fortress_of_Szigetvár_-_Google_Art_Project

This post was written with the help of my good friend The Catholic Professor.

“When it is all over, will ordinary people have any freedom left or will they have to fight for it, or will they be too tired to resist?”- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters

Pope Leo XIII called Liberty “the highest of natural endowments”¹, yet in these modern times there are those who claim to represent the Catholic Tradition who wholeheartedly reject that Liberty can have anything but a negative position in the political order, if even that. By subscribing to an artificial, indeed Leftist definition of Liberty, they defeat the own cause. In the following body of the post I hope to demonstrate the traditional Catholic and Intergralist understanding of Liberty and its place in government.

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Losing One’s Head!

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

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Chesterton, Islam, Liberalism

Walka_o_sztandar_turecki

Someone with whom I was recently arguing* said:

if I had to choose between liberalism or Islam ruling the world, I would choose Islam.

Which is as much as saying:

if I had to choose between being guillotined or being decapitated with a scimitar, I would choose the scimitar.

As a Restorationist, I prefer to keep my head, as I sometimes find it useful. If I do lose it, I hope to lose it battle for the defense of Emperor, Christendom, and freedom or failing that by dying a martyr. A martyr does not choose death, rather, he chooses Christ and is killed for his choice. Indeed very much the same point was made by Chesterton at the end of an essay, appropriately named, On Losing One’s Head, if one substitutes “Liberal” and Muslim for anarchist and sophist:

The separation of body and head is a sort of symbol of that separation of body and soul which is made by all the heresies and the sophistries, which are the nightmares of the mind. The mere materialist is a body that has lost its head; the mere spiritualist is a head that has mislaid its body. Under the same symbol can be found the old distinction between the sinner and the heretic about which theology has uttered many paradoxes, more profitable to study than some modern people fancy. For there is one kind of man who takes off his head and throws it in the gutter, who dethrones and forgets the reason that should be his ruler and witness; and the horrible headless body strides away over cities and sanctuaries, breaking them down and treading them into mire and blood. He is the criminal; but there is another figure equally sinister and strange. This man forgets his body, with all its instinctive honesties and recurrent sanities and laws of God; he leaves his body working in the fields like a slave; and the head goes away to think alone. The head, detached and dehumanized, thinks faster and faster like a clock gone mad; it is never heated by any generous blood, never softened by any healthy fatigue, never checked or warned by any of the terrible tocsins of instinct. The head thinks because it cannot do anything else; because it cannot feel or doubt or know. This man is the heretic; and in this way all the heresies were made. The anarchist goes off his head and the sophist goes off his body; I will not renew the old dispute about which is the worse amputation; but I should recommend the prudent reader to avoid both.

*Out of fairness to the individual I am withholding his identity and where he said what I now quote. Some of you may know already.

S. Mauritius

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