Are you a conservative or rightist of some kind? Have you heard about neoreaction? Have you heard good things about it? Have you heard bad things? Have you heard that neoreaction is just a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds with obscene power fantasies? Have you heard neoreaction is really just bunch of wimpy Yankees theorizing from an Ivory Tower (skyscraper?) in New York City? Have you heard neoreaction is just a poorly articulated justification for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry? Have you heard neoreaction is just a lazy, long-winded excuse not to engage in right-wing political activism? Have you heard, perhaps, that neoreaction is nothing more than another Jewish conspiracy to subvert the interests of white European Westerners and everything they know, love and stand for?

What you have heard, my friend, may not be entirely accurate. There has been ample, pained, and published work trying to answer the question “what is neoreaction?,” and the answer seems elusive yet. It is, however, less difficult to enumerate a list of things neoreaction is not. For example, neoreaction is not a motor vehicle. Neoreaction is not a form of government. Neoreaction is not libertarianism. Neoreaction is not [just] monarchism. Neoreaction is not a website. Neoreaction is not a Jewish conspiracy. Neoreaction is, for that matter, not a conspiracy of Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots or lazy conservatives. It is true that some Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots, and lazy conservatives all find a home in neoreaction — as do some Jews. Yet no single group dominates the neoreactionary bubble of thought, so much so that neoreactionaries delineate three separate zones of neoreactionary thought and affiliation, termed the Trichotomy of theonomy, ethnonationalism and techno-commercialism. In other words: faith, blood, and property. God, family, and guns. Everybody’s got a favorite, but nobody maintains less than all three.

Neoreaction was more-or-less founded by the prolific writer and programmer Mencius Moldbug sometime around 2007. This basic point seems to be agreed-upon by nearly everyone. Moldbug could easily qualify as a Jew (a half-Jew), a Silicon Valley nerd, and a pompous urbanite. Moldbug may have been the catalyst for this new intellectual phenomenon, yet before, during and after Moldbug’s de facto hiatus in 2013, neoreaction has flowered into far more than him alone. Dozens of neoreactionary articles are written every day. Neoreactionaries are meeting offline. Neoreactionaries are forming occult networks. If you don’t see neoreaction doing anything, that’s just because you haven’t looked — or, because neoreaction doesn’t want you to see what it’s doing. Moldbug hasn’t been scheming for years behind-the-scenes, directing neoreaction from a synagogue. He’s been busy with far less sinister things. So who exactly has been steering the NRx-Mobile, hidden behind tinted windows?

1. Neoreaction is demographically less Jewish than a Hamas birthday party.

How could anyone imagine that a group adopting a mascot as supremely non-kosher as a crab was Judaic in any shape or form?

Shellfish: not kosher.

There are three Jews who are or have been involved in neoreaction. Two are half-Jewish. The third is quarter-Jewish. This makes them gentile enough to be Nazi field marshals. The three are the aforementioned Mr. Moldbug, Mr. Boetel from Radish Magazine, and the Anti-Democracy Activist. Mr. Moldbug is not religious, and hasn’t contributed a word to neoreaction since 2013. Mr. Boetel posts sporadically (the last time was in November), and makes a blogging out of masterfully mocking and deconstructing liberal-progressive narratives on history and current affairs. The Anti-Democracy Activist is a convert to Catholicism. Instead of the flag of Israel, he flies the flag of Rhodesia. If this here is a sinister Jewish conspiracy, it strikes me as a rather lackluster one. My Jew-dar just isn’t detecting anything. In any case, I must recommend reading all three men. And so what about the rest of the neoreactionaries?

The columnists for this very neoreactionary website include one Minnesotan Catholic, one Catholic Slav, a grizzly American Southerner and three Anglo-Saxon gentiles. Zero Jews. Guest writers have included Russians, Scandinavians, and more Anglo-Saxons of various kinds. No Jews to my knowledge. The aggregator for neoreaction, Reaction Times, is curated by a reactionary Protestant from Canada. Listed in the aggregator are 30+ sites maintained by gentiles of European descent, and three maintained by the aforementioned souls of the most tangential Jewish background. Aside from Mr. Moldbug, the most influential neoreactionaries are largely English, American and otherwise natively Anglophone. Russians, Slovenians, and Bulgarians make a mark too. Ditto American Southerners. The latest newcomers have been Croatian and Turkish. Hangers-on from Spain, Brazil, Scotland, the rest of the Anglosphere, South Africa, the Netherlands, Ireland, India, Panama, Scandinavia and elsewhere round out the neoreactionary sphere. I am still not aware of any neoreactionaries from Israel, nor any with surnames suffixed with ‘-berg,’ ‘-stein,’ or ‘-witz.’ Indeed, yours truly receives more traffic from Taiwan, Romania, and the United Arab Emirates than from Israel. Judaeoreaction? Why not Sinoreaction or Islamoreaction?

Current and active neoreactionaries are overwhelmingly European gentiles. The largest currents seem to be Anglo-Saxon, Roman Catholic, American Orthodox and Slavic. The most grossly over-represented ethnic group among neoreactionaries is not Jews, but South Slavs. The most cursory demographic investigation will reveal not just that neoreactionaries are not Jews, but that neoreactionaries aren’t necessarily Silicon Valley nerds, highfalutin’ Yankees, pompous urbanites, incorrigible bigots or lazy conservatives either. Some married with kids and others unattached students. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, neo-pagan and atheist. Former libertarians, former progressives, former Tea Partiers, former paleoconservatives, former fascists, former apoliticals, and former Marxists. Born and raised everywhere from Alaska to Australia. I think we even have a woman or two. The diversity of neoreaction, in fact, highlights precisely how non-Jewish it is. Jews, far from running the show the way they do for neoconservatives, communists, or progressives (but I repeat myself), are conspicuously missing. If neoreaction is a Jewish conspiracy, it is the first one without any Jews.

2. Moldbug alone is not the sole arbiter of neoreactionary thought.

Mr. Enoch from The Right Stuff objects to Moldbug’s dismissal of white nationalism and psychologist Kevin Macdonald’s theory of innate Jewish behavior. Many neoreactionaries find Moldbug’s original position lacking, myself included. Many more accept Macdonald’s theory. Many are explicit ethnonationalists. Is Moldbug’s Jewish ancestry preventing him from reaching some unsavory conclusions? Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. Moldbug is not the sole arbiter of neoreactionary thought. His long deconstruction of the progressive worldview was an indisputable godsend to us Children of Modernity. His neocameralism — disputable. His poetry… eh. Key tenets of neoreaction, including the Trichotomy and the concept of Gnon, were not brainchildren of Moldbug’s. Neoreaction tangles with Evolian metaphysics, the tripartite caste society, entryism, geopolitics, holiness spirals, practical reaction, Western religion, “gene-culture co-evolution” and more, cheerfully and without Moldbug. Disagreements with Moldbug do not entail disagreements with neoreaction as a whole. Neoreaction is more than just Moldbug — which is why it’s called neoreaction and not Moldbuggianism.

Moldbug’s focus on Puritan/Protestant leftism to the exclusion of negative Jewish influence on Western civilization rightly irks some. Let it be repeated and emphasized that both Moldbug and neoreaction at large focus not on Puritanism, Protestantism or Christianity per se as the sicknesses of civilization, but rather the steady process of leftist degradation that used them as a vector over the centuries. No, Puritans wouldn’t approve of Iggy Azalea. This does not invalidate neoreactionary theories about leftism, holiness spirals, and Puritanism. It seems that now a more rightly neoreactionary position would be that both Jews and Puritans share significant blame for the decline of the West. An autopsy for Western civilization might read: “Immune system critically weakened by virulent holiness spiral and concomitant leftism. Fatal stroke from foreign pathogen.” There are surely many other groups and individuals who helped cause this untimely death in some way or another, but these two religious minorities seem to be the primary culprits.

Is Macdonald’s theory of Jewish behavior correct? If not, it wouldn’t be for lack of evidence. I don’t find the theory shocking, strange or unique at all. Macdonald does a thorough job of documenting what a hostile minority looks like. Regular minorities turn into hostile minorities after majorities try to forcibly convert, enslave, eradicate or otherwise injure them. Alternately, regular majorities turn into hostile majorities after minorities try to scam, deceive, impose on, thieve from or otherwise injure them. Minorities become hostile to survive. Majorities would argue that the minorities deserved it, being the dirty parasites and predators that they are. The minorities view the majorities the same way. Who “started it” is always impossible to figure out, and instead of turning to endlessly complicated conspiracy theories, it is much easier just to remember a simple heuristic: diversity plus proximity equals conflict.

3. Neoreaction answers the Jewish Question, once and for all.

Neoreaction, contrary to vitriolic accusations leveled against it, has not stayed suspiciously silent on the Jewish Question. Nick B. Steves wrote a three-part series on the issue. He concluded:

The Jews qua Jews are so uniquely destabilizing that no Jew could ever be trusted with any amount of power. They should be banned from our organization (presuming we had one) and probably forcibly relocated to a homeland of their own.

Do you smell latkes? I don’t. Jim has done a lot of his own commentary on Jews and cultural Marxism, Jews and anti-Semitism, Jews and Puritans, and Jewish misbehavior. Nick Land has staked his position. 28Sherman displayed a keen awareness of all things Jewish and political just yesterday. Neoreactionaries, steeped as they are in politically incorrect, anti-Semitic, old history books, are far more than acquainted with questions of Jews and Judaism. The perceived silence of neoreactionaries on this topic is not borne of conspiracy or cowardice, but conclusion.

The most perfunctory appraisal of the situation reveals that the Jews were and are a religiously and genetically distinct minority among Christian Europeans. Diversity plus proximity equals conflict. Each and every nefarious action attributed to Jews throughout history in the West can be traced to the ubiquitous and ever-present hostility that exists between different ethno-religious groups (or thedes or phyles). This hostility is a law of the Universe, a dictate of Gnon’s. Evil Jewish Bolshevism, depraved Jewish pornography, destructive Jewish capitalism, chauvinistic Jewish Zionism — all can be easily and sensibly interpreted as various manifestations of natural conflict between hostile groups i.e. Jews and Christian Europeans, Jews and Muslims, etc. There is little reason to zero in on the Jews and obsess about them as uniquely heinous among all the world’s peoples. The only thing unique about them is their continued survival despite the scale and length of their run-ins with foreign gentile civilizations, but this differentiates them by degree, not type — Jews are not at all the only hostile minority on the planet, and not at all the only one that’s survived to 2015. Various expressions of anti-Semitism throughout history, such as the Holocaust or the Russian pogroms, can also be sensibly interpreted using this paradigm of ethnic conflict. The manifestations of ethnic conflict may be complex, but the underlying causes are always the same: diversity and proximity. It is not difficult to figure out and most neoreactionaries have done so, and thus shut up about it.

Law of Gnon: This is what the out-group looks like to the in-group. Always.

The answer to the Jewish question, as Mr. Steves concluded, is quite simple: segregation and separation. This solution is not unique to the Jews, but is the standard tried-and-true, traditional method of solving the problem of the violence at the nexus of diversity and proximity. Note that unlike progressives, neoreactionaries do not believe one can abolish the laws of nature and turn diversity into a strength, least of all using the State. Diversity engenders animosity and eventually violence, and is thus a weakness. The only solution to diversity is unity. Separate and segregate. This axiom is true when considering Jews and Europeans, and it is true when considering any other two distinct groups.

This is how liberals see conservatives. Law of Gnon strikes again. Always.

-

Satisfied with the question of the Jews, neoreactionaries notice that the rot in Western civilization frequently attributed solely to the Jews had in fact existed long before subversive Jews did (see: Jim). Neoreactionaries notice that there exists an entire science of civilization with its own laws and principles. They notice that the architecture of contemporary civilization is slowly disintegrating. They notice saboteurs and invaders. Ahead they notice a barren grave with their names on it, and they notice grotesque monstrosities rising from Hades and beckoning to them with meticulously tailored malformed claws: “Check your privilege.” Neoreactionaries notice all this and judge it terribly unworthy. It is just a matter of opinion whether the next step is letting the edifice of civilization collapse, building a new civilization in the ruins, or attempting to stay the badly quivering columns.

Or maybe what’s needed is Zombie Hitler and another round with those damn shadowy Hebrews. But if so, close your Internet browser — you won’t find them here in neoreaction.

The post Neoreaction is a Jewish Conspiracy to Thwart the Incipient National Socialist Revolution 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.

The post Enter the Don Felix Sarda y Salvany: Liberalism is a Sin appeared first on Social Matter.