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Today Seattle Is Conducting Unity Meetings Storm Signals Mean Political Change Ahead

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Smell the Whiff of Panic?

by Christopher Chantrill
August 06, 2006 at 4:53 pm

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SMELL THE WHIFF of panic? Iraq has/may/will soon collapse into civil war! Israel may not be able to fully dismantle Hezbollah! Like Falstaff before battle we whine to Prince Hal that we “would ’twere bed-time, Hal, and all well.”

It’s as if Europe never had its tribal politics and terrorist warfare, with roving militias camped out in weak states lacking the power to suppress them. In the Hundred Years War, the English did a splendid job of reducing France to a wasted land. As the Black Prince went raiding deep into France what was he but a prototype of Iranian President Ahmadinejad whose proxies are wasting Iraq and Lebanon? Then the Brits came home and laid waste to their homeland in the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare gave us a picture of that period.

Feel sorry for the French? Don’t waste your sympathy. Two hundred years after the Hundred Years War the French under Cardinal Richelieu help lay waste to Germany in the Thirty Years War as armies from several nations march to and fro across that unhappy land, eating all the food and looting all the wealth as they went. It is estimated that the population in Germany declined by at least one third from 1608 to 1648, a disaster far worse than the butchery of the Second Thirty Years War of 1914 to 1945, leaving aside the special attention paid to the Jews.

It was in the aftermath of the first Thirty Years War that the Europeans tried to put a limit on all-out war and its rampaging militias. They tried to make warfare civilized. It can’t have hurt that shortly afterwards the British brought home from India the civilizing cotton textiles of India—muslins, calicos, and chintz. All of Europe fell in love with these exotic eastern fabrics.

But love had nothing to do with it. It was British tinkerers that made the newly civilized world go round. Men like promoter Richard Arkwright invented power cotton spinning and Rev. Edmund Cartwright invented a power loom. When the Yanks stole the British power spinning and weaving technology and brought it to the United States they immediately lowered the cost of cotton cloth from 40-50 cents a yard to 10 cents a yard, according to Stephen Yafa in Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber.

Want to start a revolution? Lower prices by 80 percent.

Up until that time all the world had been ruled by thug warrior dynasties except in highly refined city states like Venice and Florence or the free German cities where the rising bourgeoisie ruled. Now, as a result of the cotton revolution and its incredible wealth potential, political power needed to achieve a delicate accommodation with economic power if it wanted to strut upon the world stage. It was a new world order.

Just ask thug dictator Mao Tse-Tung if you aren’t convinced. He tested to destruction the notion that all political power grew out of the barrel of a gun. He tried to make China into a world power by starving the peasants to buy guns and by keeping the Chinese people in constant revolutionary turmoil. Instead he succeeded in completing the transformation of China from the richest country in the world into a political, economic, and cultural backwater.

Again and again thug dictators have tried to turn the clock back and revive the good old days of thug rule. Think of Robespierre and Napoleon in France, Kaiser Bill and Hitler in Germany.

Learning nothing from the French and the Germans the pan-Arab nationalists tried and failed in the Middle East. The Fidelistas failed in Cuba. Thug Nkrumah failed in Ghana. Thug Mugabe failed in Zimbabwe. Now thug Ayatollahs in Persia are trying one last time to build a world thug empire.

The beauty of the modern era is that any political regime that departs from the recipe of democratic capitalism, the system that grew out of the eighteenth century cotton revolution, immediately starts downhill fast. But there turns out to be one exception to this rule.

Thug regimes sitting on top of oil wells are able to mainline oil revenue, the only true unearned income in the world. Leaders of oil nations seem to share a narcotic addiction to dreams of world conquest that dies, as the habit of the drug addict, only in the ruin of everything around them.

As we all run around flapping our hands over the disproportion in Lebanon and the mess in Iraq let us not lose faith in our glorious democratic capitalism that has tamed, in Europe and North America at least, the sway of thug political power.

But let us not forget the grim lesson of the last two hundred years. It seems that nobody will accept democratic capitalism without trying everything else first.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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