Saturday 6 November 2010

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Sa Majesté

To what or to whom will “Anglo-French” forces swear and bear allegiance? The News Quiz thought this question at once hilarious and unanswerable. It is neither.

Liberty is the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed. Equality is the means to liberty, and is never to be confused with mechanical uniformity; it includes the Welfare State, workers’ rights, consumer protection, local government, a strong Parliament, public ownership, and many other things. And fraternity is the means to equality, for example, among numerous that could be cited, in the form of trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and mutual building societies.

Liberty, equality and fraternity are therefore inseparable from nationhood, a space in which to be unselfish. Thus from family, the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learned. And thus from property, each family’s safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, therefore requiring to be as widely diffused as possible, and thus the guarantor of liberty as here defined.

The family, private property and the State must be protected and promoted on the basis of their common origin and their interdependence, such that the diminution or withering away of any one or two of them can only be the diminution and withering away of all three of them. Nothing guarantees them better than monarchy as an embodiment of Christianity.

2 comments:

  1. You are obviously not aware that from German unification till the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Germany had four armies - the kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony and Wurttemburg retained their own armies and were responsible for drilling, recruiting etc alongside the Prussian one which contained soldiers from Prussia proper and the smaller German states of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hamburg, Hesse-Dramstadt etc

    To whom did the Bavarian army hold allegience to. And the armies of Wurttemburg and Saxony. To their kings or to the King of Prussia in his capacity as Kaiser of Germany and supreme imperial warlord?

    (Our imperial warlord is of course who is ever in the Whitehouse).

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  2. For the life of me, I cannot see what that has to do with this post. But the answer to your final question is, "Whoever they had sworn allegiance to".

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