Monty Cantsin
23rd March 2005, 02:26
Neo-Jacobins In the white house.
Condoleezza Rice gave a speech in Paris to the Institut dEtudes Politiques-Sciences in Paris, on February 8 2005, where she restated the Bush administrations support for the united nation and its affiliates, along with the Administrations plans for democratic revolutions around the world.
The French president Jacques Chirac was one of the harshest parliamentary critics of bushs foreign policy especially concerning the American lead invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Rice being quite aware of this fact took measures in her speech to pamper to the sensibilities of the French hosts, talking of the shared values of both countries past. Rice Reminiscing said:-
I remember well my first visit to Paris -- here -- my visit to Paris here in 1989, when I had the honour of accompanying President George Herbert Walker Bush to the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Americans celebrated our own bicentennial in that same year, the 200th anniversary of our nation's Constitution and our Bill of Rights.
Rice continued
Those shared celebrations were more than mere coincidence. The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values, and by each other. They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity that have inspired men and women across the globe for centuries.
Condoleezza expressed the idea that France and America share the same value system because of their revolutionary past which upheld the notion of liberty, freedom and democracy.
But to state this is to greatly misunderstand or even mislead on the nature of both the foundations of French revolution and the America revolution.
The American Revolution was an independence movement which wanted the right of self-determination from the British Empire. The declaration of independence issued July 4, 1776 and with the new found independence of the thirteen colonies the founding fathers established a republic. The republic was founded under the notions stated in the declaration as truths self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were never betrayed, because the founding fathers never implemented the principles; slavery wasnt abolished, the genocide directed against the Native American continued, many European Americans suffered a paupers existence and today the death penalty continues for adults moreover only in 2005 being removed as a punishment for children.
A few years after the declaration of independence, in France in 1788, the third estate which traditionally had supported the aristocracy against the despotic monarchy realised that when the parliaments talked of the nation they referred only to themselves. So third estate realised that its once allies were really its enemies and set the objective to double its representation in the parliaments. Necker a leading figure of the monarchy argued to the royal council that the king had more to worry about from the two higher orders and that introduction of the third estate into the political fray would defeat the aristocratic revolution. Alfred Cobban a leading revisionist historian wrote that with the stroke of a pen Necker, the council and the king had defeated the revolution of the privileged classes. The victory of the third estate would produce the stumbling block for the old feudal order.
In 1789 France suffered from a grain crisis which put the icing on the cake of the inability of the absolute monarchy to reform the finical system which had suffered years of successive wars and capitulation to the demands of parliament. Grain riots followed and hatred flowed towards the monarchy with their perceived indulgence and lack of fiscal responsibility blamed for the peoples problems, the affair of the necklace a campaign of deformation aimed at Marie Antoinette is evidence of agitators attempt to undermine the feudal order. The anti-absolutist monarchist Agitators used the masses of poor peasants and city labourers as a political weight because of their propensity to riot.
The Jacobin club was a major political pressure group within the assembly whose propaganda was aimed at agitating the poorer members of the third estate and thus was able to secure great political power. Originally Robespierre considered the leader of the club was in support of a constitutional monarchy. But gradually Robespierre aligned with the more radical revolutionaries which led to advocating a form of republicanism.
The republicanism which was advocated by the Jacobin clubs during the height of its power named the reign of terror is often seen as the start of modern totalitarian ideologies. The committee of public safety which was the organ of this terror arrested 200,000 people and the options were either acquittal or death. The term terrorism was coined during this time as a reference to official government policy.
This state terrorism was done in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Liberty like in the American Revolution never really went forward because of the protest of plantation owners and merchants because slaves were in one case the labour force and in the other the commodity. Equality was not meant as the abolition of all class distinctions but rather the removal of feudal hereditary offices and orders in place of a meritocracy, but this has obvious limits because it was still a class society. Fraternity was used for the justification of state terrorism; a patriot is he who supports the republic in general, whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor was the call of Saint-Just leading extremist Jacobin.
The morality of the Jacobins which lead to the terror was based on virtue being the will of people universalised and the republic was the embodiment of this while the monarchy represented arbitrary power wiled against the general will of the people. Thus as saint just proclaimed the republic is not a senate, it is virtue. Thus to transgress the general will was criminal and tyrannical and between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common but the sword, we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice we must oppress the tyrant (Saint-Just). The Jacobins standard for the putting their finger on the pulse of the general will was that of which was accepted by the people but of cause anyone who transgressed their decrees was a not a patriot and thus a traitor. So on a practical level what existed in France was not a republic of the people which would be known as a democracy but rather a republic of philosopher kings.
The notion of philosopher kings was the ideal expressed in Platos republic which was standard in the education of the republicans both sides of the ocean. Anyone familiar with this text with recall its fundamental rejection of democracy as a form of tyrannical government which around the time of Plato was leading prejudice of the aristocracy who demonised radical democrats such as Cleon, who has been attacked by the likes of Aristophanes to Thucydides to Plutarch (all aristocrats). Both the republicans of America and France had an innate hate of democracy declaring rather that the government should be run by a political elite (or in Platonist language philosopher kings).
These political elite in America (weve already seen how anti-democratic France was) expressed the anti-democracy ideas freely. Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. "Democracy never lasts long," he noted. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." He insisted, "There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
The reason why the republicans believed democracy commits suicide is because the masses cannot understand the underling truths of government thus a philosopher elite must tell them a noble lie, The noble lie being another notion out of Platos republic. A notion that the republicans of old and new support thus continuing to spread their noble lies because we are unable to understand the workings of good government.
Thus Condoleezza Rice is right when she stated that America and France have shared values because of a shared and intertwined past of revolutionary republicanism. But it is not that of democracy and freedom another then in the form of noble lie. But their shared vales rather rest in a moral Platonist-Jacobinism epitomised in the call of Gorge w. Bush "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror", echoed by the call of the totalitarian, Louis Saint-Just a patriot is he who supports the republic in general, whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor
Condoleezza Rice gave a speech in Paris to the Institut dEtudes Politiques-Sciences in Paris, on February 8 2005, where she restated the Bush administrations support for the united nation and its affiliates, along with the Administrations plans for democratic revolutions around the world.
The French president Jacques Chirac was one of the harshest parliamentary critics of bushs foreign policy especially concerning the American lead invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Rice being quite aware of this fact took measures in her speech to pamper to the sensibilities of the French hosts, talking of the shared values of both countries past. Rice Reminiscing said:-
I remember well my first visit to Paris -- here -- my visit to Paris here in 1989, when I had the honour of accompanying President George Herbert Walker Bush to the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Americans celebrated our own bicentennial in that same year, the 200th anniversary of our nation's Constitution and our Bill of Rights.
Rice continued
Those shared celebrations were more than mere coincidence. The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values, and by each other. They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity that have inspired men and women across the globe for centuries.
Condoleezza expressed the idea that France and America share the same value system because of their revolutionary past which upheld the notion of liberty, freedom and democracy.
But to state this is to greatly misunderstand or even mislead on the nature of both the foundations of French revolution and the America revolution.
The American Revolution was an independence movement which wanted the right of self-determination from the British Empire. The declaration of independence issued July 4, 1776 and with the new found independence of the thirteen colonies the founding fathers established a republic. The republic was founded under the notions stated in the declaration as truths self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were never betrayed, because the founding fathers never implemented the principles; slavery wasnt abolished, the genocide directed against the Native American continued, many European Americans suffered a paupers existence and today the death penalty continues for adults moreover only in 2005 being removed as a punishment for children.
A few years after the declaration of independence, in France in 1788, the third estate which traditionally had supported the aristocracy against the despotic monarchy realised that when the parliaments talked of the nation they referred only to themselves. So third estate realised that its once allies were really its enemies and set the objective to double its representation in the parliaments. Necker a leading figure of the monarchy argued to the royal council that the king had more to worry about from the two higher orders and that introduction of the third estate into the political fray would defeat the aristocratic revolution. Alfred Cobban a leading revisionist historian wrote that with the stroke of a pen Necker, the council and the king had defeated the revolution of the privileged classes. The victory of the third estate would produce the stumbling block for the old feudal order.
In 1789 France suffered from a grain crisis which put the icing on the cake of the inability of the absolute monarchy to reform the finical system which had suffered years of successive wars and capitulation to the demands of parliament. Grain riots followed and hatred flowed towards the monarchy with their perceived indulgence and lack of fiscal responsibility blamed for the peoples problems, the affair of the necklace a campaign of deformation aimed at Marie Antoinette is evidence of agitators attempt to undermine the feudal order. The anti-absolutist monarchist Agitators used the masses of poor peasants and city labourers as a political weight because of their propensity to riot.
The Jacobin club was a major political pressure group within the assembly whose propaganda was aimed at agitating the poorer members of the third estate and thus was able to secure great political power. Originally Robespierre considered the leader of the club was in support of a constitutional monarchy. But gradually Robespierre aligned with the more radical revolutionaries which led to advocating a form of republicanism.
The republicanism which was advocated by the Jacobin clubs during the height of its power named the reign of terror is often seen as the start of modern totalitarian ideologies. The committee of public safety which was the organ of this terror arrested 200,000 people and the options were either acquittal or death. The term terrorism was coined during this time as a reference to official government policy.
This state terrorism was done in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Liberty like in the American Revolution never really went forward because of the protest of plantation owners and merchants because slaves were in one case the labour force and in the other the commodity. Equality was not meant as the abolition of all class distinctions but rather the removal of feudal hereditary offices and orders in place of a meritocracy, but this has obvious limits because it was still a class society. Fraternity was used for the justification of state terrorism; a patriot is he who supports the republic in general, whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor was the call of Saint-Just leading extremist Jacobin.
The morality of the Jacobins which lead to the terror was based on virtue being the will of people universalised and the republic was the embodiment of this while the monarchy represented arbitrary power wiled against the general will of the people. Thus as saint just proclaimed the republic is not a senate, it is virtue. Thus to transgress the general will was criminal and tyrannical and between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common but the sword, we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice we must oppress the tyrant (Saint-Just). The Jacobins standard for the putting their finger on the pulse of the general will was that of which was accepted by the people but of cause anyone who transgressed their decrees was a not a patriot and thus a traitor. So on a practical level what existed in France was not a republic of the people which would be known as a democracy but rather a republic of philosopher kings.
The notion of philosopher kings was the ideal expressed in Platos republic which was standard in the education of the republicans both sides of the ocean. Anyone familiar with this text with recall its fundamental rejection of democracy as a form of tyrannical government which around the time of Plato was leading prejudice of the aristocracy who demonised radical democrats such as Cleon, who has been attacked by the likes of Aristophanes to Thucydides to Plutarch (all aristocrats). Both the republicans of America and France had an innate hate of democracy declaring rather that the government should be run by a political elite (or in Platonist language philosopher kings).
These political elite in America (weve already seen how anti-democratic France was) expressed the anti-democracy ideas freely. Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. "Democracy never lasts long," he noted. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." He insisted, "There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."
The reason why the republicans believed democracy commits suicide is because the masses cannot understand the underling truths of government thus a philosopher elite must tell them a noble lie, The noble lie being another notion out of Platos republic. A notion that the republicans of old and new support thus continuing to spread their noble lies because we are unable to understand the workings of good government.
Thus Condoleezza Rice is right when she stated that America and France have shared values because of a shared and intertwined past of revolutionary republicanism. But it is not that of democracy and freedom another then in the form of noble lie. But their shared vales rather rest in a moral Platonist-Jacobinism epitomised in the call of Gorge w. Bush "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror", echoed by the call of the totalitarian, Louis Saint-Just a patriot is he who supports the republic in general, whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor