And the New Sun Rose Bringing the New Year

One of the most stirring passages from Tennyson's Idylls of the King are the last stanzas of "The Passing of Arthur," in which the wounded king is spirited away to the "island-valley" of Avalon. 

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seest—if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

But when that moan had past for evermore,
The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groaned, ‘The King is gone.’
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’

Whereat he slowly turned and slowly clomb
The last hard footstep of that iron crag;
Thence marked the black hull moving yet, and cried,
‘He passes to be King among the dead,
And after healing of his grievous wound
He comes again; but—if he come no more—
O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,
Who shrieked and wailed, the three whereat we gazed
On that high day, when, clothed with living light,
They stood before his throne in silence, friends
Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?’

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

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The Great Replacement Is Not a Conspiracy

 From Amuse on X:

Here the left retreats to a verbal defense. Replacement migration, they say, is not a deliberate plot to replace native populations. Perhaps. But this defense wins a point no one contested. The claim was never that elites gathered in secret to swap populations. The claim is that elites converged, openly, on a single solution to demographic decline, mass migration, while dismissing or ignoring alternatives. Intent does not negate outcome. A bridge that collapses through negligence still collapses.

For twenty five years Western publics have not been asked whether they consent to this transformation. When critics attempt to discuss replacement migration they are branded racist, far right, xenophobic, or bigoted, and the conversation is shut down. Debate itself is treated as illegitimate. This is a form of soft censorship more effective than law, anyone who proposed alternatives was ridiculed, professionally punished, or excluded from polite society. Citizens were never offered a choice between importing millions of outsiders or rebuilding the conditions of family formation at home. They were told there is no alternative. That is the lie.

Consider the United States. Roughly $7B per year is spent resettling and supporting refugees and migrants from societies with low literacy, low trust, and little cultural compatibility with Western norms. This is not humanitarian triage. It is a structural commitment. At the same time, native born Americans face housing scarcity, marriage penalties in the tax code, student debt, delayed family formation, and cultural messaging that treats children as lifestyle accessories rather than social necessities. (Read more.)

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Giving Voice to the Fatherless

 From One Peter 5:

Following the regicide of King Louis XVI of France on the 21^st January 1793, and the immense shockwave that rippled through Europe after the murder of His Most Christian Majesty, Pope Pius VI gave a famous address in which he not only argued that Louis had died a Christian martyr, but that monarchy was the “more excellent” form of regime than republican democracy. This was a re-articulation of what had long been taught by churchmen, albeit not magisterially. In his letter on kingship to the King of Cyprus, St Thomas Aquinas wrote that “it is best for a human multitude to be ruled by one person” (De Regno, Chapter III). One of the keys to this perennial teaching on the superiority of monarchy as a form of government might be found in an expression that was dear to the jurists of Ancien Regime France. They would say: “The king is the father of the fathers of the society.” The family, arising from the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, was the model for the political community and so the regime was paternal.

Likewise for Spanish jurist Professor Miguel Ayuso, monarchy as a political form, “is nothing else than the continuation of a society, which consists of families through the continuity of one family, the royal family, symbolising the continuity and vitalisation of each and every one of the families of the realm.”^[1] It is no mere coincidence then, that monarchy’s fortunes are at such a nadir in our age in which the multitude reject the natural realities of the family and patriarchal authority. Coulombe frequently evokes the consequences of the lack of long-term thinking that follows in contemporary supposedly “democratic” regimes: great spiritual alienation, chronic short-termism, and an all-important “spoils system” (amusingly a “trough” in Coulombe’s idiom) by which the rulers of today only rule to accrue and maintain power and enrich themselves. As Ayuso writes, and Coulombe echoes throughout his work, when “the elective principle is the only variable that determines the regime – political life is exhausted in the electoral process, becoming more and more discontinuous.”^[2]

Miguel Ayuso has provocatively said: “Today there are no monarchies.” There is the British monarchy, the Nordic monarchies and the monarchies of the Low Countries, but these are all parliamentary monarchies. This he calls “a contradiction in terms” because monarchy is personal. Personal command means the responsibility of the exercise of power is personal. Today this does not exist because where there are kings, at least in the formerly-Christian world, they are tied by parliamentarianism. This would be analogous to a father no longer exercising power over his wife and children and these subordinates governing the family. In such a scenario paternal authority would have been renounced. Coulombe, however, does not go so far as to claim there are no monarchies and makes an impassioned defence of those, admittedly Liberal institutions that remain. (Read more.)

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