History consists for the great part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites.

~ Edmund Burke

Continuing a series of columns on Benjamin Wiker’s “10 Books Every Conservative Must Read,” we come to Chapter 4, “Reflections on the Revolution of France” (1790) by Sir Edmund Burke, whom Wiker calls the first great modern conservative philosopher.

The French Revolution (1789-99) – also called “The Reign of Terror” (1793-94) where 40,000 people were killed that year alone and by some estimates as many as 450,000 killed during the War in the Vendee (1793-96) – mirrored the terrible genocide perpetrated by Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot in the 20th century. The French Revolution remains a point of historical revisionism and idealism and is still widely viewed by liberals as an anomaly of the lofty principles of revolution – as opposed to Burke’s contemporary narrative based in realism as the predictable catastrophe of the French Revolution.

Burke queried: How could such sublime precepts like Liberté, égalité, fraternité devolve so rapidly into the bloodlust autocracy of the Jacobins? Perhaps one cause was the anti-Christian, materialist atheism of the Enlightenment and the propaganda generated by French philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot; that all evil was to be found in the nobility and the church, and its allegation that all virtue and righteousness belonged to the secular rationalists and the common people. It is no mistake, then, that Maximilien de Robespierre, a devotee of Rousseau, and the poor working-class radicals, the sans-culottes, enflamed by propaganda, perpetrated the Reign of Terror, murdering the nobles, the clergy and destroying the Christian church.

Burke, a student of history and traditions, understood that humanity’s love of chaos was viral throughout history, regardless of gender, time period, race, social class or circumstance. The problem is sin. The impact of these vices can be comprehended and their impact upon society lessened, but they cannot be conquered by man without abolishing him, so deep and intractable the curse of sin is. It was this sin problem being ignored by man’s great modern technological advances that prompted the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis to write, “The Abolition of Man” (1943). Against this secular utopianism, the French revolutionaries arrogantly proclaimed that they were establishing a Republic of Virtue, and then engaged in many cruel, maniacal crimes against humanity that live on in infamy to this day.

Wiker argues that the primary basis of Enlightenment Age brutality was the utter hatred of Christianity, for in rejecting Christianity, those following Enlightenment philosophies rejected original sin. In rejecting sin, French revolutionaries tragically and foolishly assumed that the origins of human misery in history could be remedied entirely by human action (humanism), that the origin of the corruption in political life was not in the soul but in defective and unjust social structures, particularly in Christianity – a religion holding that because of original sin human nature and humanity was in a fallen state of nature and must be redeemed.

The diabolical strategy of the French Revolutionaries was to demolish the social institutions, eliminate the social orders, exterminate Christianity, and upon its ashes build by force an entirely new secular order based upon humanism and rationalism, where all problems that have plagued mankind from antiquity would magically vanish.

Yet Burke tells us that the Enlightenment Age summary rejection of sin could not prevent the revolution’s maniacal bent toward chaos and genocide. On this point Wiker wrote of Burke:

For those who reject the sacred, nothing is sacred – not the desecrated churches; not the guillotined priests and nuns; not the massacred women and children; not property, tradition, customs, manners, or laws. Nothing is holy; anything may be destroyed for the sake of the revolutionary utopia. This spirit of profanation filled the populace with a “black and savage atrocity of mind,” which superseded “in them the common failings of nature as well as all sentiments of morality and religion.” This bold spirit of profanation, they believed, would usher in a new, just social order.

Burke’s prescient worldview came from years of cloistered study, scrupulous and often unpopular observations (i.e., his support of the Irish Catholics over British hegemony, freedom for the American colonists, favoring limited monarchy checked by a strong Parliament) and a profound reverence for the lessons of history against the savage beauty of human nature – all this emanates from Burke’s conservatism.

It was Burke’s conservatism that made him understand in the midst of the French Revolution the fatal flaw of the Enlightenment Age – an over-reliance on reason and rationality at the expense of other human traits. It was Hume who famously said that “Reason is merely the slave of the passions” and along with Kant argued that reason is instrumental in bringing about our desires, but is not the fundamental driving force of mankind, let alone the universe at large.

The French Revolution is not some bygone series of unfortunate events. The same depraved spirit that gave humanity Darwinian evolution, the genocide of Marxism and Hitler’s anti-Semitic, anti-Christian pogroms is now being manifested in the Age of Obama through utopian socialism, welfare-state progressivism and liberalism.

Like the atheists and secular humanists of the Age of Enlightenment, Obama arrogantly decreed that America is no longer a Christian nation. He is evidently dismissive of America’s constitutional principles and clearly hates the historical role America has played in the world, which places him at constant odds with American constitutionalism and exceptionalism. Obama hates our Judeo-Christian heritage and detests America’s historical allies.

Thus, during these perilous times of great societal upheaval and despair during the Age of Obama, I repeatedly return to the writings of Burke and find his prophecies as fresh, his analysis as agonizingly accurate as they were 220 years when he originally wrote them. Only the characters and countries have changed.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. His weekly podcasts are available Mondays at The Conservative Beacon. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

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The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and
it is a travesty that we can’t … . Our observing system is inadequate.
- Scientist at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit

On Thursday. Nov. 19 a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released 160 megabytes of confidential files onto the Internet – including 1,079 emails and 72 documents.

Over the past 10 days, those materials have now been posted all over the Internet and reveal what most rational people have thought all along – that anthropogenic (man caused) global warming is perhaps the biggest scientific hoax in the past 150 years, or since publication of  Charles Darwin’s treatise on evolution, “The Origin of Species” (1859).

Last Tuesday, radio host Rush Limbaugh, in his commentary on the recent climate change scandal, put this outrage in a bigger context he referred to as the “four corners of deceit” which consist of: government, academia, science and media.

This theory is placed in the paradigm of two worldviews that have warred against each other since antiquity – Veritas vs. Infidus – a worldview based on Truth vs. a worldview based on the Big Lie.

Liberalism with its multiplicity of manifestations – paganism, humanism, Enlightenment, Darwinism, progressivism, Marxism, socialism, fascism, communism, naturalism, Nazism, Statism, Obamaism – is all part of the same existential Big Lie.

Writer James Delingpole said of the climate change hoax:

“Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.”

One of the alleged e-mails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L. Daly (one of the first climate change skeptics and founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Just as 150 years ago the academic world replaced scientific skepticism with cult devotion, holding naturalist Charles Darwin’s work as the greatest scientific discovery since Newton and deified his suppositions as beyond questioning, so have we in modern times through the New World Order and socialism worship at the pagan altar of global warming (“climate change”).

We allow this Groupthink, despite the existence of irrefutable proof from these phony scientists’ own e-mails that all of their scientific data was a fraud perpetrated to get government grants, to further the “green movement” and to “save the planet.”

With this voluminous amount of materials now public regarding this climate change scam, what has the Stalinist-controlled media done over the past 10 days since this story broke? Absolutely nothing.

The New York Times is reluctant to give any substantive coverage because the hackers violated the scientists’ “privacy” in obtaining the incriminating materials.

The only substantive analysis about this story to date has been on Fox News, the alternative media and on conservative talk radio.

Socialists, liberals and progressives feel entitled to lie, steal, cheat and even kill to further their agenda at all costs. Why? Because it is done all in the name of a moral cause greater than ourselves; whether we are talking about saving the polar bear, the spotted owl, snail darter, saving the planet, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, or upholding the unchallengeable secular principles of science, as Machiavelli stated:

“The end justifies the means.”

And what does our exalted leader, President Barack Obama, have to say about this? Well, Obama boldly proclaimed that the world has moved “one step closer” to a “strong operational agreement” on climate change at next month’s Copenhagen summit. Countries must “reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty,” he told a press conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

I thought to myself, is this guy crazy? Is Obama on drugs? Is Obama that insulated from reality that 5 days after the greatest international scandal in science was exposed since Darwinian evolution 150 years ago, Obama doesn’t express outrage that the scientists and scientific data behind the climate change/green movement is all a Big Lie? Moreover, he displays his arrogance even more by redoubling his efforts to cram this climate change fascism down the throats of the American people. Efforts the anti-climate change scientists have shown will return our technology use to the year “1867!”

Remember the infamous words of Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Indeed, we believed in the Big Lie of Darwinian evolution and got separation of law from morality, eugenics, Nazism, scientific mythology dominating the academy and influencing law, policy and culture. We believe man-made climate change and have already spent billions on policies related to the “green movement” which is a contrived hoax.

These modern-day fascists in government, in the academy, in science and in the media are so narcissistic in their zeal to save the world they will do so even if it means destroying the world. Liberalism is so sick and delusional that these people think they have the power to affect the temperature of the earth, which most scientists realize is predicated not on man, but primarily on the sun.

The four deceits: government, academia, science and media, are all dominated by Machiavellian hacks in Washington, D.C., in Hollywood, in the academy, in corporate America, in science and at the United Nations. Now that we know the truth behind this climate change scandal from the e-mails at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, any person in a position of power to effect energy policy who believes in man-made or anthropogenic climate-change nonsense should all be given a nice straight jacket and put inside a padded cell at the insane asylum.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington, authorized biographer for the conservative intellectual Dr. Michael Savage (see www.MichaelSavage.com), is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

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