The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly gesturing and gesticulating, hopping and hawing with each sentiment he expressed. Simple questions were whispered, furtive inquiries, well-wishes were joyous spasms. Ordinary greetings, from this Middle-Eastern Santa Claus, looked to lifeless American onlookers like two long-lost brothers reuniting after a lifetime apart — except the one portly, bespectacled, mustachioed brother was obviously far happier than the other one, who invariably seemed confused or surprised. Professor Al-Santa ibn Claus’ verve was nonetheless infectious, and I would be shocked to learn he was anything but beloved by his students. Born and raised on the ancient Nile, this smiling pedagogue was a living reminder of a bygone era when the sad stereotype of the bitter Marxist academic still didn’t exist.

The young lady conversing with him — if memory serves correctly — was an undergraduate student at the university. She was an international student, a Turkish girl from Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and liveliest metropolis, geographically (and culturally) bridging two continents. Her social lineage, much like that of most Turkish immigrants to the United States (and deeply unlike that of the infamous Turkish immigrants to Germany — but I digress!), was borne from the European half of Istanbul. Turkey, though now making sensational headlines as a rising power sliding into Islamic fundamentalism, still has a significant, wealthy, secular upper-class; liberal cosmopolitans who wish Turkey could join the European Union, and who explain to non-Turks the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President Recep T. Erdoğan the same way pious American liberals used to explain the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President George W. Bush. These Turkish Europhiles and Occidentalists, concentrated in Istanbul, spawned this idealistic young woman who joyfully gushed about her future plans to work in non-profits aiding Palestinian refugees and Kurdish orphans. Like all true liberal, upper-class E.U.-peans — or, in her case, aspiring ones — her tender bleeding heart couldn’t countenance the horrors the Zionist apartheid state imposed on her downtrodden brothers and sisters in Palestine. Her English — likely carefully nurtured by her urbane parents, who likely put her in one of Istanbul’s many French, British or American international schools — was impeccable, with only the slightest veneer of Anatolian staccato modulating the same American accent the animated Egyptian could only shovel out in bursts of Cairene vim. This scioness of Turkey’s aspiring class of secular Eurocrats was the kind of girl who would soon spend nights hunched over her laptop screen in champagne-revolutionary fervor, impulsively tweeting #OccupyGeziPark.

(No such literary introduction will be given of yours truly, I am afraid. In this anecdote, I am but the anonymous catalyst for a revealing conversation.)

Rather poorly read on the contemporary Middle East, but curious to no small degree, I asked the professor about the level of social conservatism in Egypt. Do Muslims pray often? Is there a large black market for alcohol? Is there religious tension because of the Copts? In my pre-reactionary, progressive-by-default naiveté, I even asked “Are women in Egypt oppressed?” The professor answered my questions eagerly, with all the expected gesticulations and mini-dramatic-performances. The Turkish girl and I listened, rapt, as one is when witnessing such a masterful union of entertaining affectation and unornamented truth. Finally, he informed us of the state of women’s liberation in Egypt:

(I strive to convey his affable, slightly-broken English.)

“In Egypt, there is no girls living alone; single girls alone, this — it is not allowed socially! It is unapproved in Egyptian society. Egyptian girls must always live with the family if they are not married. The married girls live with the husbands, yes, but the single girls always live with the families.”

The female Istanbulite’s eyebrows leaped up in anticipation of news of an incoming women’s rights violation. “Trigger warnings” weren’t a thing back then, so far as I can remember, but even if they were, this bombastic professor would not have come with one. Asks the Turkess: “Women can’t live alone? Why? What if they’re students?”

The professor continued gracefully with his energetic explanation: “Aha, yes, sometimes if the girls are students they live in the dormitory. But this is rare, very rare. Not common, I think. Girls who are studying at the university also live with the family mostly. In Egypt it is not acceptable in society for the girl to live alone. If girls will live alone in an apartment, this will be shocking, it will be disgraceful. Even sometimes the janitor in the building, or the electrician, or the neighbor, he will knock on the door or he will find the girl, and he will say ‘Hey, you! What are you doing? Where is your husband? Where is your father? Why are you living alone here? Are you having men come in your apartment? Do you meet men there? Do they pay you to come there? What are you doing there alone?'”

The Turkish girl’s eyebrows at this point were practically detached from her head, so wide were her eyes with shock: “That’s… that’s horrible! Women have a right to live by themselves if they want to! Women have a right…” More high-pitched, futile cosmopolitan protests followed, but the conversation had essentially ended there, with an unperturbed professor shrugging his shoulders and rushing off to a meeting (with a dramatized wave, a hint of a bow and a gracious “Ma’a As-Salaama!” [“Good-bye!” in Arabic] — as always) and an amused me, softly smiling outwardly, and inwardly chuckling the kind of mischievous chuckle one can only enjoy after witnessing a truly monumental yet unintentional trolling. The disquieted young lady turned to me slack-jawed for reassurances for her offended liberal sensibilities, but I too had places to be, and quickly emulated the professor’s neutral exit. “Well, I guess that’s just how it is over there! See ya later!”

- – -

I love interacting with people from cultures that an effeminate Harvard sociologist would consider “hopelessly backwards.” These cultures, though often deeply alien in many ways to our own Western/European tradition and civilization, nevertheless share large similarities with the old Western world one reads about in history books. Though I doubt this fine site’s astute readers will need the point of the anecdote explicitly repeated, I will repeat it for the sake of the stray left-wingers who sometimes stumble into our territory: in Egypt, a girl living alone is immediately and automatically assumed to be a prostitute. And, hilariously, by the standards of Islamic Egyptian society, single girls living alone in the West are invariably precisely that: whores. And, distressingly, single girls living alone in the West are invariably whores by the standards of the Western society of 1950, of 1850, of 1750, 1650… and every century of Western society all the way down to 50 BC, and earlier. Women have four lifetime sexual partners on average, says The Telegraph. I will venture a guess that this figure is far below the actual amount — nobody wants to admit to being a slut or a whore, after all, even anonymously to a researcher. Despite abysmal modern sexual mores, even four is about three more than millennia of human civilization would have considered appropriate for a properly-reared young maiden. I can hear the protests already: “Not all women are like that! Some women who live alone aren’t whores!” Averages, baby, averages — I’m not here to talk about outliers, who always exist. The strong, independent, feminist woman high off women’s liberation sleeps around like a man, and this makes her a whore by any standard of civilization.

Whore of Babylon: Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Just kidding; she’s been around since 1969, corrupting your daughters and fighting manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting… no, no joke, Google any of one the three.

Average age at marriage for Western women only ever increases, and the divorce rate likewise only slowly climbs upwards and upwards. More fornication, more adultery, more divorce, more bastard children, more fatherless children, more broken families, more pornography — not to mention more public (and even state-backed) sexual perversion of all kinds of vile multicolored stripes. The only related metric that is decreasing is total fertility rate. To maintain a stable population, a nation’s fertility rate would have to hover around 2.1 children per women — enough children to replace the parents, and an extra 0.1 children to make up for all the people who die prematurely from accidents, war, disease, excessive masturbation, and what-have-you. A nation with a fertility rate below the magic number of 2.1 will steadily shrink in population until it disappears from the Earth. How is the West doing with fertility rates then? United States: 1.97. United Kingdom: 1.88. France: 1.98. Russia: 1.53. Spain: 1.50. Italy: 1.48. Germany: 1.42. Tiny Iceland is managing 2.08, but Portugal a dismal 1.32. Poor Bosnia is at 1.28, one of the lowest in the world. Austria, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Cyprus and Slovakia are all below 1.50. These countries are quite literally slowly disappearing from the map. For a sobering comparison, the smoldering crater known as Afghanistan is at 5.00, war-torn Iraq is at 4.06, and the dysfunctional Congo is at 5.98. Even North Korea is managing a 2.00 fertility rate — the same country where amassing a nuclear arsenal and luxurious liquor cabinet for the Supreme Leader is more important than preventing mass starvation and widespread famine. A North Korean family could probably survive for a year on one of their Supreme Leader’s many chins, and they’re still reproducing more than Americans ostensibly living in the vast land of plentiful bounty and limitless opportunity.

Seriously, just look at this guy.

This 21st century Bacchanalia is flashy and fun, bursting with a vibrant hedonism of clubs, bars, festivals, conventions, easy sex, easy drugs, easy booze, easy desserts, easy work, constant novelty and stimulation from the Internet, the television and from Hollywood, but it will end us all. If everyone is avoiding family life and child-rearing so that they can spend more time doing what our grandparents (and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great-grandp…) would have called “mortally sinning,” we’ll all be gone without a legacy before the end of the century. When one speaks of “mortal sin,” one must remember that the very English word “mortal” is derived from the ancient Latin word for death, mors. Our forefathers are looking down on us as we commit the most pathetic and protracted suicide in history. Rather grim, innit?

If you are a standard, milquetoast, liberal-by-default Westerner, this might all sound like racist, sexist and homophobic vomit. I would remind you then that, in our culture, we have multiple mainstream, high-tech systems for helping complete strangers prostitute each other. Take Seeking Arrangement, a popular service that helps young females, typically college students (the girls who, in any other era, would have been nobly raising society’s next generation), whore themselves out to unscrupulous and wealthy men for expensive gifts and money. Like Monty Python’s rude French sentry, I vomit in the general direction of this service. Prostitution is still largely illegal in the West, de jure. It seems we make some exceptions, however, when the pimps and prostitutes can satisfactorily rationalize their whoring to us — just enough to soothe our dwindling consciences and atrophied probity.

Alternatively, consider the extremely popular mobile phone application Tinder, “rumored to have upwards of 10 million daily users” making 15 million “matches” a day. What purpose does Tinder serve? Perhaps the “Tinderfessions” Twitter feed, with a mind-boggling 188,000 followers, can shed some light. Looks like Tinder is useful for supporting adultery (“Met my boyfriend on Tinder. Pro: so hot, great in bed. Con: has a wife…and 3 kids. – Emma”), taking the hassle out of fornication (“Swiped right on a girl that was ahead of me in line at Publix. Heard her phone go off when we matched. We banged 2 hours later – Chase”), helping modern-day troubadours build harems (“Been hooking up with a match for a month now. On my way to front stage seats cuz the lead singer of this band is in love with my pussy – Kas”), and most nobly of all, helping all-American sweethearts become home-wrecking, blackmailing whores: “Blackmailing a match I fucked who tried to hide the fact he was married. Can’t wait for my new Macbook Air to arrive. #ThanksTinder – Kim.” Thank you, Tinder, thank you indeed! “Mother of 3 slept over and fucked all night while their dad babysat them at home. She was Constantly cumming, and came in her pussy twice -F” Good Lord. When did the West run so low on self-restraint, virtue, shame, guilt, conscience, charity and kindness that 56 people felt a need to “favorite” the kind of morally reprehensible behavior that destroys the lives of three children? 15 million matches a day: when you hear someone say Cthulhu is digesting our civilization, this is what they mean.

Paraphrasing the admirable James A. Donald, the West of the 18th century considered women so lacking in continence that they would crawl through nine miles of broken glass to fornicate with their demon lover if not restrained by their husbands, fathers, brothers and pastors. In Egypt, a sexist, homophobic, hopelessly backwards Islamic society, girls living alone, beyond the reach of their family, are assumed to be whores. The Egyptians, I think, are not as backwards as we chauvinistically presume, since it seems their intuition about the behavior of unrestrained females has been more than comprehensively vindicated by the state of Western society today, where all girls can live alone (and do much more besides) — and where all girls are whores. Feminism failed. Modernity failed. We got women’s liberation and ubiquitous technology of unimaginable power and complexity, and the result was not a new Golden Age for civilization, but a new Golden Age for depravity.

“Modern,” “enlightened,” “liberal,” protestations aside, the situation in the West of 2015 is clear. Females can live alone, vote, run for office, commit infanticide, get away with murder, work men’s jobs, receive preferential treatment in universities and corporations, deny fathers their children, ruin innocent men with false accusations of rape & assault, and almost anything else they want to do — with the full support of the educational system, the media and the exponentially-expanding police-surveillance state. The dream of women’s liberation has been achieved, and then some. And then some. And then some more. And even some more after that! Females can live alone, unlike in Egypt. Females can live alone, and they do exactly what our 18th century forefathers, and 21st century Egyptian fellows a continent away intuited that they would do — they whore themselves. “Women’s liberation.” Women’s liberation is women’s prostitution. We should have known better.

If I miraculously became the Supreme God-Dictator of the West tonight, and upon finishing my gourmet breakfast of bacon, eggs and the finest Caspian caviar the next morning, I issued an edict that no woman may live alone, what would happen to the West’s marriage and divorce rates? The fertility rate? The bastardy rate? The amount of fornication, adultery, pornography and sexual perversion? The number of broken families? The number of kids shuffling between Mommy’s house and Daddy’s house on alternating weekends? (Or, more likely, just watching Mommy shuffle boyfriends while Daddy contemplates the taste of gun metal with a restraining order trembling in his hand.) What would happen to the rates of suicide, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, mass shootings, herbivore men, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, self-radicalization, depression, gambling, drug abuse, obesity, cat-lady spinsters, gang violence, self-harm, ethno-religious tension (and violence), juvenile delinquency, social alienation and hollow shambling wrecks of human beings one missed medication away from walking off the edge of a thirty-story building?

A metaphor for Western society: not really working out as planned.

Quite simply, if we put every woman back in the home, back next to the hearth, and gave her one son and one daughter to educate, civilize, inform, teach, nourish, protect, cultivate, cuddle, cherish and love, what would happen to our society? What if we gave her a fit, cultured, intelligent and loving husband who could teach his son baseball and read Cinderella to his daughter? A husband who didn’t spend his boyhood drugged out on ADD medications, his teenage years drugged out on cannabis, and his young adulthood drunk out of his mind? A husband who was taught to appreciate Beethoven, recognize Van Gogh’s Starry Night, recite a little poetry in French, and recognize a Biblical quote in Ancient Greek? A husband who was taught to shoot a gun, punch a drunkard, row a canoe, and hike up a mountain without complaining? Who kept a library where the television might’ve been, and who knew who his father was, his grandfather, and their fathers and grandfathers before them? Who worshiped the same God as his most distant ancestors, and lived on the very same land they conquered long ago? Who maintained and honored the inheritance bequeathed to him by his forefathers, both material and spiritual, and left it in better condition than he received it, and passed it on to his own sons and daughters? Might we see a resurgence of the stable, loving family? Might we actually see — trigger warning – a better society?

Dramatized wave. Hint of a bow. Knowing wink. “Ma’a As-Salaama!“

The post Women’s Liberation is Women’s Prostitution appeared first on Social Matter.

Statue of Don Felix Sarda y Salvany. Photograph by Josep Renalias.

The good Dr. Don Felix Sarda y Salvany (1844-1916) was a Spanish Catholic priest and writer from Spain’s Eastern region of Catalonia. His scribal tenacity was impressive; the Don was the editor of the Catholic weekly journal La Revista Popular for more than 40 years, and in the years leading up to the start of the civilization-ending First World War, he published a twelve-volume series titled Propaganda catolica (“Catholic Propaganda”), dryly described by an unknown Wikipedia contributor as “a vast collection of short books, pamphlets, articles and conferences.” The Italian historian Roberto de Mattei says of the Don Sarda: “[he] was a popular priest in Spain at the end of the century and was considered exemplary for the firmness of his principles and the clarity of his apostolate.”

(I note here wryly that my Google Chrome browser attempts to correct the word ‘apostolate,’ describing [among other things] organized religious works, to the word ‘apostate,’ describing a religious defector.)

According to the Spanish Bibliography of Reference, the Don exercised an “apostolate of immense efficiency and resonance.” His writings against the growing liberalism of 19th century Europe achieved some level of notability after a series of Spanish political fiascoes from 1868-1874 that began with a liberal revolution and deposition of the ruling Queen Isabella II, followed by a short-lived monarchy under the Savoyard Prince Amadeo, followed by his own deposition and a similarly short-lived Spanish Republic that ended in 1874 when the original Queen Isabella II’s son Alfonso XII was restored as King of Spain in a military coup. Three coups, two monarchies, one republic, and all back to square one in just six years — politics today just isn’t as exciting as it used to be. But I digress.

I will here provide a choice quote of the Don’s so that the reader may be sufficiently intrigued to studiously follow the forthcoming backstory and analysis (my highlights in bold):

 “The theater, literature, public and private morals are all saturated with obscenity and impurity. The result is inevitable; a corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation. Liberalism is the program of naturalism. Free-thought begets free morals, or immorality. Restraint is thrown off and a free rein given to the passions. Whoever thinks what he pleases will do what he pleases. Liberalism in the intellectual order is license in the moral order. Disorder in the intellect begets disorder in the heart, and vice-versa. Thus does Liberalism propagate immorality, and immorality Liberalism.” (Liberalism is a Sin, Ch. 26)

During the 1868-1874 interregnum, the Catholic Church in Spain suffered a number of blows to its status, especially due to the short-lived First Spanish Republic that moved to establish a secular state. While Catholicism retrieved its status as the state religion of Spain after the restoration of the monarchy under Alfonso XIII in 1874, the sense of spiritual decay that had gripped Spain since the 18th century continued unabated. Yale historian Noel Valis describes a “a growing alienation from the Church,” and refers us to the observations of a Protestant chaplain in Spain Hugh James Rose, who dedicated an entire chapter of his 1873 book on the country to the “Decay of Faith in Spain.” Choice observations of Rose’s: “The Church of Spain … is an institution which has lost its hold on the masses, both educated and uneducated … [there is in the Spanish] a sense of spiritual drift, of having come unanchored from their religious moorings.”

It is in this context that Don Sarda’s magnum opus was released, the 1886 book Liberalism is a Sin, which was subsequently reprinted up to twenty times by 1960. Salvany, who believed liberalism “is the burning issue of our century,” found a quick rebuttal to his work by the liberal-leaning Catholic intelligentsia — both pieces were submitted to the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (the successor institution to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — List of Prohibited Books). The Congregation’s secretary ruled soon after in favor of Salvany, finding errors in the rebuttal and “uncharitable insinuations” about the good Don.

To illustrate the then Church’s zealous and masculine dismissal of liberal protests, I will excerpt the secretary’s letter to the liberal Bishop who ordered the rebuttal:

To The Most Rev. Jacobo Catala Et Alboso,

Bishop of Barcelona

Most Excellent Sir:

[…]

D. Felix Sarda, merits great praise for his exposition and defense of the sound doctrine therein set forth with solidity, order and lucidity, and without personal offense to anyone.

[…]

The same judgment, however, cannot be passed on the other work, that by D. de Pazos, for in matter it needs corrections. Moreover, his injurious manner of speaking cannot be approved, for he inveighs rather against the person of D. Sarda than against the latter’s supposed errors.

[…]

Therefore, the Sacred Congregation has commanded D. de Pazos, admonished by his own Bishop, to withdraw his book, as far as he can, from circulation, and in the future, if any discussion of the subject should arise, to abstain from all expressions personally injurious, according to the precept of true Christian charity; and this all the more since Our Holy Father, Leo XIII, whereas he urgently recommends castigation of error, neither desires nor approves expressions personally injurious, especially when directed against those who are eminent for their doctrine and their piety.

[…]

Fr. Jerome Secheri, O.P.
Secretary of the Sacred Congregation Of the Index.

Don Sarda had the full backing of the Roman Catholic Church of the late 1800’s, and his works built on the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors) issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX in 1864, which condemned, among other things: pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, communism, and modern liberalism. This is all relevant to the crux of this entire piece, which finally manifests itself: that the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany, and his contemporaries in the Catholic world, were not just potentially in agreement with the tenets of the nascent neoreactionary school of thought (more introduction to it can be accessed here, here and here), but fully paleo-neoreactionaries, a clumsy description which we might condense into reactionaries, with the understanding that our contemporary neoreactionaries are rediscovering reactionaries and applying their insights to the chaotic world of 2015 (hence, neo-). I will now highlight several key tenets of the 21st century neoreactionary school of thought that were articulated nearly word-for-word by the 19th century Don, and, crucially, firmly defended by the Catholic Church at the time, as illustrated above. There are far more instances of overlap that I will go over comprehensively sometime over the next 1-2 weeks on my personal blog, Ara Maxima, but these three will suffice for now.

1. To Hell with the journalists.

The contempt that most Westerners hold for the “mainstream media,” and the much deeper contempt that neoreactionaries hold for journalists themselves is rooted in a very real and consistent tendency for journalists to style themselves as heroic investigators of dark secrets held from the masses for illicit gain, but to act in reality as left-wing propagandists advancing a uniform agenda of feminism, multiculturalism, LGBT-ism, and a myriad of other -isms through a long-cultivated routine of mental gymnastics and/our outright fraud. The result is a “mainstream media narrative” divorced from reality to one degree or another, useful only to leftists (Don Salvany’s “liberals”) for political purposes — namely, attacking and crushing with overwhelming propaganda the rightist resistance they invariably face.

“Here are theoretical and practical Liberals. The first are the dogmatizers of the sect—the philosophers, the professors, the controversialists, the journalists. They teach Liberalism in books, in discourses, in articles, by argument or by authority, in conformity with a rationalistic criterion, in disguised or open opposition to the criterion of the divine and supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Ch. 9)

“Amongst Liberals we must not forget to include those who manage to evade any direct exposition or expression of the Liberal theory, but who nevertheless obliquely sustain it in their daily practice by writing and orating after the Liberal method, by recommending Liberal books and men, measuring and appreciating everything according to the Liberal criterion, and manifesting, on every occasion that offers, an intense hatred for anything that tends to discredit or weaken their beloved Liberalism. Such is the conduct of those prudent journalists whom it is difficult to apprehend in the flagrant advocacy of any proposition concretely Liberal, but who nevertheless, in what they say and in what they do not say, never cease to labor for the propagation of this cunning heresy. Of all Liberal reptiles, these are the most venomous.” (Ch. 9)

“And all this comes of a foolish desire to be estimated Liberal. Insane illusion! The usage of the word Liberal makes the Catholic who accepts it as his own one with all that finds shelter in its ominous shadow. Rationalism is the toadstool that flourishes in its dark shades, and with Rationalism does such a journalist identify himself, thus placing himself in the ranks of the enemies of Jesus Christ!” (Ch. 13)

2. To Hell with the “moderates.”

A more niche contempt held by the modern Dissident Right at large — including the gamut of neoreactionaries, monarchists, paleoconservatives, white nationalists, New Rightists, identitarians, right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, radical traditionalists and so forth — is the contempt for the mainstream right-wing political forces that exist in every Western country but act as little more than controlled opposition for the zealous Left, making loud noises in parliament halls but inevitably and invariably capitulating to the Left’s demands, only to style themselves as the vanguards of the old order a decade later — but not the primordial rightist order, but the 10-year-old new order of the Left!

“This class has not fully penetrated into the domain of truth. That they will ever enter the city of light depends upon their own sincerity and honesty. If they earnestly desire to know the truth in its fullness and seek it with sincere purpose, God’s grace will not fail them. But they are in a dangerous position. On the borderland between the realms of light and darkness, the devil is most active and ingenious in detaining those who seem about to escape his snares, and he spares nothing to retain in his service a great number of people who would truly detest his infernal machinations if they only perceived them. His method, in the instance of persons infected with Liberalism, is to suffer them to place one foot within the domain of truth, provided they keep the other inside the camp of error. In this way they stand the victim of the devil’s deceit and their own folly. In this way those whose consciences are not yet entirely hardened escape the salutary horrors of remorse; so the pusillanimous and the vacillating, who comprise the greater number of Liberals, avoid compromising themselves by pronouncing themselves such openly and squarely; so the shrewd and calculating (according to the measure of expediency—how much time they will spend in each camp), manage to show themselves the friends and allies of both; so a man is enabled to administer an official and recognized palliative to his failings, his weaknesses and his blunders. It is the obscurity that arises from the indefiniteness of clearly defined principles of truth and error in the Liberalist’s mind that makes him the easy victim of Satan. His boasted strength is the very source of his weakness. It is because he has no real solid knowledge of the principles of truth and error that he is so easily deluded into the belief of his own intellectual superiority. He is in a mental haze—a fog which hides from him the abyss into which his vanity and pride, cunningly played upon by Satan, are invariably drawing him.” (Ch. 8)

3.  Demotism

Demotism, the idea that a ruler must rule “in the name of the people,” is a malady of civilization omnipresent in the post-Enlightenment period: the three great dragons of the 20th century, capitalism, communism and fascism, all ostensibly ruled “by the will of the people,” a stark contrast to the aristocratic monarchies of Old Europe which ruled not “by the will of the people,” but “by the will of God.” The idea of demotism is a uniquely neoreactionary insight, which the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany foreshadowed heavily in this excerpt on the differences between Catholic and secular governments, and their relationships to monarchical and republican governments. Don Sarda’s point seems to be that the crucial worth of a government lies not in its constituted political form i.e. whether it is republican or monarchical, but rather in its agreed-upon basis for legitimacy — the people, or God? Couldn’t an absolute monarch be a demotist, and wouldn’t this constitute a problem? And couldn’t a republican government consist of ardently religious aristocrats sharing a divine right to rule over the masses? There is ample room for debate here.

“A government, whatever be its form, is Catholic if its constitution, its legislation, and its politics are based on Catholic principles; it is Liberal if it bases its constitution, its legislation, and its politics on rationalistic principles. It is not the act of legislation—by the king in a monarchy, by the people in a republic, or by both in a mixed form of government—which constitutes the essential nature of its legislation or of its constitution. What constitutes this is whether it does or does not carry with it the immutable seal of the Faith and whether it be or be not conformable with what the Christian law imposes upon states as well as upon individuals. just as amongst individuals, a king in his purple, a noble with his escutcheon or a workman in his overalls can be truly Catholic, so states can be Catholic, whatever be the place assigned them in the scale of governmental forms. In consequence, the fact of being Liberal or anti-Liberal has nothing whatever to do with the horror which everyone ought to entertain for despotism and tyranny, nor with the desire of civil equality between all citizens; much less with the spirit of toleration and of generosity, which, in their proper acceptation, are Christian virtues. And yet all this, in the language of certain people and of certain journals, is called Liberalism. Here we have an instance of a thing which has the appearance of Liberalism and which in reality is not Liberalism at all.

On the other hand, there exists a thing which is really Liberalism and yet has not the appearance of Liberalism. Let us suppose [i.e., imagine] an absolute monarchy like that of Russia, or of Turkey, or better still, one of the conservative governments of our times, the most conservative imaginable; let us suppose that the constitution and the legislation of this monarchy or of this government is based upon the principle of the absolute and free will of the king or upon the equally unrestricted will of the conservative majority, in place of being based on the principles of Catholic right, on the indestructibility of the Faith, or upon a rigorous regard of the rights of the Church; then, this monarchy and this conservative government would be thoroughly Liberal and anti-Catholic. Whether the free-thinker be a monarch, with his responsible ministry, or a responsible minister, with his legislative corps, as far as consequences are concerned, it is absolutely the same thing. In both cases their political conduct is in the direction of free-thought, and therefore it is Liberal. Whether or not it be the policy of such a government to place restraints upon the freedom of the press; whether, no matter under what pretext, it grinds its subjects and rules with a rod of iron; a country so governed, though it will not be free, will without doubt be Liberal. Such were the ancient Asiatic monarchies; such are many of our modern monarchies; such was the government of Bismarck in Germany; such is the monarchy of Spain, whose constitution declares the king inviolable, but not God.

Here then we have something which, without seeming to resemble Liberalism, really is Liberalism, the more subtle and dangerous precisely because it has not the appearance of the evil it is.” (Ch. 12)

Without regard to political or religious identity, I recommend all sane men take a day or two to carefully read the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany’s Liberalism is a Sin. Filled with biting commentary, no-holds-barred reactionary criticism, and such ardent and unforgiving opposition to the leftist-liberal movement that would make the staunchest Ultramontane blush, the entire text is available for free online at this link. Go, young men of the post-modern world: let your ancestors’ spiritual guides’ teach you the real things that they’ll never teach you in school.

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