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Edmund Burke and regime legitimisation
The most earth-shattering revolution the world has ever seen, ultimately with the most violent of consequences for countless millions of its victims to this very day, was described by its propagandists as a victory for moderation.
Whig historians of the so-called Glorious Revolution in Britain (1688) have always worked on the basis that if you are going to tell a lie, you might as well make it a big one. Edmund Burke, that hero of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, in reality liberalism, set the tone for the historical analysis that continues largely unchanged to this day. He proclaimed that ‘The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty’. The English, Burke argued, were not creating a new regime, merely restoring the old one that had been distorted by the Catholic James II. ‘The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror,’ Burke concluded.
Burke wrote these words in his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, just over one hundred years after the usurpation of the British throne by Dutch financiers and their Whig aristocratic collaborators. He was either oblivious to the significance of this coup d'état, or a propagandist in its service. His work was contrived to give an air of historical legitimacy and continuity to the new banker regime in Britain after 1688, even to the point of fooling avowed French counter-revolutionist and Burke-admirer, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821).
Legitimacy was vital to the occupiers of the country estates that were springing up all over eighteenth century Britain. For these beneficiaries of the coup, the revolution must have seemed truly glorious. Burke’s work of regime legitimisation was continued after him by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote of the 1688 coup that this ‘was a revolution strictly defensive, and had prescription and legitimacy on its side’. Macaulay's great nephew George Macaulay Trevelyan was equally propagandistic in his disinformation. Trevelyan opined that ‘the spirit of this strange Revolution was the opposite of revolutionary.’
Burke indeed was a supporter of the American revolutionists, but this was strictly from a Whig perspective and therefore wholly consistent with his enthusiasm for the so-called Glorious Revolution. His famous 1775 parliamentary speech was more about the commercial benefits of a reconciliation with the colonists than their ultimate liberty. Recognising this, the traditionalist Samuel Johnson penned a parody of Burke’s speech, in which the devil says of the Americans:
Be not dispirited then at the contemplation of their present happy state: I promise you that anarchy, poverty, and death shall, by my care, be earned even across the spacious Atlantic, and settle in America itself, the sure consequences of our beloved whiggism.(1)
The erection of the statue of Burke in Washington (pictured) in 1922 coincided not only with the shifting centre of Usura’s power, but also marked the ultimate rejection by the U.S. of its former history of resistance to usurious banking power - the sure consequence of ‘our beloved whiggism’.
Emile Keller's counter-revolutionism
Emile Keller
'Today,we have financial liberty, an absolutism of capital freed from all laws- human and divine - and dealing mortal wounds to the social liberty itclaims to have founded.'
Edmund Burke’s contrasting of the so-called Glorious Revolution with the French Revolution was but a superficial window-dressing of history. He and the Whig historians who followed him, simply rendered events acceptable to the Whig collaborators who, on their newly updated and porticoed country estates, were welcoming the money-lenders into their social circles and families. To say the Glorious Revolution was a peaceful handover of power neglected the extended and bloody struggle that led up to it - namely the English Civil War and Dutch Wars. The outcome of the revolutions in Britain and France was certainly the same:financial freedom for the beneficiaries of uncontrolled usury and the fractional reserve lending of central banking.
In contrast to the lickspittle Whig histories, the French counter-revolutionists described the aftermath of financial freedom as anything but glorious. Emile Keller’s account, written in 1865, remains just as relevant to this day.‘The poor and the state itself’, wrote Keller, ‘found themselves at the mercy of capital, which had complete license to sell, to buy, to speculate, to charge fees, to retain funds, or to lend at high rates’. Keller elaborated the implications of financial freedom, which later became the credo of liberalism, the dominant ideology of Usura.
The newly emancipated wealth was quick to refuse those free services that hitherto had been regarded as an honour to render to the country. In confiscating the goods of the clergy, great care was taken to leave to the state’s expense, and thus to the nation’s the provision of education, charity, and worship that the church had originally provided.
With the one hand they had pushed away the work of pure devotion, with the other they had grabbed the best ranks, offices, and functions that the nation dispensed.
The country now has the obligation to pay a triple army of soldiers, employees, and creditors, an army that grows each day and whose general staff is drawn from a small circle of favoured families. Thus, in place of a great reservoir of natural riches on which each could draw, we have a public debt of ten billions... Thanks to this predominance of material interests, the aristocracy of devotion, virtue, talent, military honour, judicial integrity, and municipal patriotism is everywhere eclipsed by the aristocracy - or better, by the feudal barons - of finance, the basest and most self-serving of all.
Today, we have financial liberty, an absolutism of capital freed from all laws - human and divine - and dealing mortal wounds to the social liberty it claims to have founded.
For the man with nothing, equality under the law, social liberty, political liberty, and religious liberty are mere decoys.
Thence comes - and think deeply on it - the inevitable menace of war and social revolution, the mere spectre of which froze the bourgeoisie in terror in 1848. At the end of these violent struggles came the no less lamentable necessity of a new centralisation, a new absolutism of the state on the economic terrain.
The country will resemble a giant rail road company, incapable of managing its own fortune, hardly knowing those who are chosen to represent her, and whose hearts, minds, arms, and fortunes will be at the mercy of several braided helmets, at once all-powerful and irresponsible.(2)
Now, instead of the country as one giant rail road company, we might think of the world approaching the globalised state of one giant enterprise. Financial liberty - or liberalism - remains at its heart.
Liberalism, which started with money and was founded on the ‘mundane principles of pursuing one’s own advantage’, the universal outlook described as Judaic by Marx, became the dominant ideology of Usura. The education of the masses ensured liberalism’s deep-rootedness, with science and the aptly named humanities - politics, economics, the arts and philosophy - all serving to reinforce its dominance, with a controlled mass-media ensuring the belief is nurtured throughout life, through entertainment as well as misinformation. Even the remnants of religion in the West now have liberalism as their guiding ‘ethic’.
The ignorance upon which finance thrives
Louis-Gabriel-Ambrose de Bonald
It did not take long after the French Revolution for Louis-Gabriel-Ambrosede Bonald to recognise that a devotion to science and the study of material things was complementary to the thriving of commerce. It led, however, to a decline of the mind and reason.
I even believe that a people exclusively devoted to the study of material things - which improve no other faculty than the student’s memory - will eventually become inferior to other peoples with respect to the mind, reason, and other social qualities... Their mercantile commerce will be able to flourish, but their social commerce will be little agreeable.(3)
Bonald recognised the ignorance upon which finance thrived, an ignorance which Ezra Pound later described as antithetic to discrimination by the senses.
Discrimination by the senses is dangerous to avarice.It is dangerous because any perception or any high development of the perceptive facilities may lead to knowledge. The money-changer only thrives on ignorance.
He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception. An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.
You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception, anything that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes hand in hand with drives towards money profit.(4)
In such conditions of carefully nurtured mass ignorance, the usurocracy can depend on democracy as a safe and efficient instrument of dominance and control. The separate political parties of Usura represent but the separate wings and tendencies of liberalism in what is, in effect, one party rule. Challenges to the money-based power which, given the nature of liberal society, will only ever be from a small minority of enlightened individuals, are thus banished to the margins.
Liberalism and all that goes with it is the ideology that Usura seeks to impose upon the world. Britain, France and the USA are still in the business of exporting the French Revolution, where necessary through war. And in the name of what are these wars fought? Liberty and democracy. And what follows? A thing known commonly as ‘the winning of hearts and minds’, through education, entertainment and misinformation - in short, indoctrination. And what is the result? The ignorance upon which finance thrives.
1Johnsoniana: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson LL.D, Mrs Piozzi, Richard Cumberland, Bishop Percy and others together with the diary of Dr Campbell and Extracts from that of Madame D’Aeblay newly collected and edited by Eobina Napier, London, George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden, and New York, 1892, pp.20-12
2Émile Keller in Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum, ISI Books, Wilmington, 2003, pp. 277-294.
3Louis-Gabriel-Ambrose de Bonald 3in Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum, ISI Books, Wilmington, 2003, p. 60.
4 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, New Directions, New York, 1970, p.281
John Dunn.
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