A New Abolitionism

Lord Nicholas Windsor spoke in New York city last month.

Lord Windsor modestly described his lecture as "modest," but the importance of his message is monumental and he is a particularly noteworthy messenger. He is a great-grandson of King George V of the United Kingdom, the first blood member of the British royal family to be received into the Catholic Church since King Charles II on his deathbed in 1685, a patron of the Right to Life Charitable Trust and the Catholic National Library and a student of theology at Oxford University. His godfathers include Prince Charles and an Archbishop of Canterbury.

After crediting European accomplishments during the twentieth century, Lord Windsor asked whether "anything of any real significance...had been overlooked, anything dangerous smuggled into this new phase of history that has caught us unawares." He answered affirmatively and identified "the abortion of our unborn children" as "a practice that constitutes the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life: the abortion of our unborn children."

The first member of the British Royal Family to be born in a hospital and married in the Vatican, Lord Windsor noted that he was born in 1970, about the time abortion was legalized in both the United Kingdom and the United States and lamented the "historically unprecedented cascade of destruction wrought on individuals: on sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, future spouses and friends, mothers and fathers—destroyed in the form of those to whom we owe, quite simply and certainly, the greatest solidarity and duty of care because they are the weakest and most dependent of our fellow humans."

Lord Windsor's based his case against abortion on the primacy of the right to life and human instinct . As he put it in his article: "All else that we concern ourselves with in the lives of human beings derives from the inescapable fact that first we must have human lives with which to concern ourselves. By disregarding this self-evident fact of the debt owed immediately to the unborn—which is to be allowed to be born (and let us not forget that all of us might have suffered just the same fate before our birth)—humanity’s deepest instincts are trampled and shattered."

Explaining what he deemed the "normalization" of legal abortion and "insidious," Lord Windsor related that what had been "only an implausible glimmer in the eyes of the most radically progressive thinkers and activists a century ago" is now "a fact of life so deeply embedded and thoroughly normalized in our culture that...it has been rendered invisible to politics in Europe" and its mention "has become the first taboo of the culture."

Lord Windsor acknowledged his fellow pro-lifers in both Europe and the United States, but opined that abortion is "a matter that impinges little" "[f]or most of our contemporaries" because "[t]he effectiveness of determined campaigns of propaganda at the outset to harden consciences, and gradually to enforce a conformism that fears to question what is said to be a settled issue, has worked wonderfully well."

Lord Windsor attributed this conformism to the allure of "choice": "...enforcement of a new status quo succeeds so well due, surely, to benefits enjoyed as a result—benefits of an order that make acceptable even the killing of innocents, by their protectors, on a scale that freezes the imagination. How much then must depend on its remaining so, remaining beyond question? This is the nub of that ideological word choice. So much else can be chosen in a given life if the option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably available. So many intoxicating freedoms are newly established, if only abortion is never again denied to women and to men."

To dispel the allure of "choice," Lord Nicholas eloquently explained the inevitable cost--to the aborted, to those who choose abortion and to society.

"But what of the cost? As with the cost of previous great willful destructions of human life, of whole classes of human life, the fact that it must and will be borne is a certainty, whatever the nature and scale of it. Of course, in the first order of consequences, the price paid by the victims is not obscure: We must never forget that the heaviest price is paid by those whose lives are not to be lived.

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Music at Versailles

Eric Hester, a retired head master in England who is an admirer  of this website draws our attention to five one-hour programs about the music of Versailles which were broadcast on BBC Radio Three last week.  They can be heard for about a week until 10^th April, HERE.     

Eric  Hester adds:  “The BBC is not the great service that it used to be during the Second World War and immediately after.  It is biased to the left politically and contains much that is ( to use a useful phrase from American English) 'dumbed-down'.  But Radio Three has mainly classical music and is worth listening to.”

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Catholic Emancipation

The triumph of Daniel O'Connell. To quote:

If you read through just a few of the speeches given by the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords (which included the Anglican Bishops) to encourage the reading and the passage of this bill, you can certainly see how contentious this issue was in Parliament--the crux of the issue being that since Catholic attorney Daniel O'Connell had won a seat in Parliament, the King's Government in England feared an uprising in Ireland if he was not allowed to take his seat, since he was Catholic--for fear that Emancipation, removing all the penal laws, would in fact encourage the growth and spread of Popery and weaken the Church of England. Robert Peel worked on passing the Emancipation Bill in the House of Commons. Since both Wellington and Peel were Tories and were previously opposed to Catholic Emancipation, they were regarded as traitors--Welllington threatened to resign to force King George IV to give his Royal Assent to the Act.

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America's Turning Point

How the Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. To quote:

The great irony of the Civil War is that all that changed at the very moment that abolition triumphed. As the last, great coercive blight on the American landscape, black chattel slavery, was finally extirpated—a triumph that cannot be overrated—the American polity did an about-face....

The common refrain, voiced by Abraham Lincoln himself, that peaceful secession would have constituted a failure for the great American experiment in liberty, was just plain nonsense. “If Northerners . . . had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart,” the conservative London Times correctly replied, “the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy; but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war rather than suffer any abatement of national power, it was clear that nature at Washington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg. . . . Democracy broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms.”

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Le Radeau de la Méduse

Gareth Russell on the allurements of propaganda. To quote:

Théodore Géricault chose to unveil his masterpiece in the Paris Salon of 1819 not because he was especially moved by the story of human frailty, but because he wanted to indict Louis XVIII's government for what he saw as its corruption and deceitfulness. The painting isn't really about the men lying in various extremities across a sea-tossed raft; it's about the government that put them there. The figure looming largest in Géricault's fevered imagination are not the sailors who cut the ropes binding the raft to the other lifeboats or the men who tossed their weaker colleagues into the swell. It's not even really about de Chaumareys. What Le Radeau de la Méduse is about is the restored monarchy. It's about Louis XVIII and the culpability of corruption which allegedly flowed inexorably from his ci-devant hands. And that's basically what the French Revolution is. The first time you look at it, like Le Radeau de la Méduse, it seems to be about people. It seems to be about human suffering and outrage that such conditions should exist. But look at it closer and you'll see that what it's actually about are ideas, cleverly masked behind the misery of the people it claims to be representing.

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Prostitots

I've rarely seen anything so depraved. Parisienne Farmgirl gives a scathing social commentary. Share

Trivia from the Battle of Vienna

Polish hussar

A reader writes:

I recently read a book, Why do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything by Michael P. Foley (2005, Palgrave MacMillan). There were a couple of pieces of trivia in there that might interest you for your blog:

Cappuccino coffee (p. 35) was named after Blessed Marco D'Aviano, a Capuchin friar and miracle worker beatified by John Paul II in 2003, who rallied the Christian troops at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 against the Turks. "But D'Aviano," writes Foley, "is better remembered for what happened afterwards. According to legend, he found sacks of coffee beans that the Turkish forces had left behind in their haste. D'Aviano brewed himself a cup, but finding it too bitter for his taste he added milk and honey, thus turning the coffee brown. The grateful Viennese dubbed the drink 'little Capuchin,' or cappuccino, in honor of D'Aviano, whose Capuchin habit was the same color."

Croissants (p. 29) also commemorate the Christian victory at the Battle of Vienna. They are shaped like a Moslem crescent. There is a legend that a baker discovered the Turks mining under the city walls and gave the alarm. After the victory, he was rewarded with a monopoly on making the croissants.

Foley does not mention bagels, but according to legend, they also commemorate the victory at the Battle of Vienna. According to some sources, the word "bagel" comes from the German word for "stirrup". A Jewish baker created them to honor the Polish prince Jan Sobieski, whose cavalry charge of 20,000 horses downhill saved the day. It is more likely that the stirrup-shaped bagels simply commemorate the Polish cavalry charge--after all, it was the largest cavalry charge in history. It included the famous Polish winged hussars--heavy cavalry riders who wore wings behind them and wore lion and leopard skins on their horses. The wings--which were tied at the top--prevented enemies from lassoing the rider and pulling him off his horse. The feathers made a rushing sound that terrified enemy horses that were not used to the sound--the lion and leopard skins may have had similar effects. The winged hussars were very effective. Witnesses said that they looked like angels on horseback.

Some people speculate that the Polish cavalry charge that lifted the siege of Vienna was the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien's cavalry charge of the Rohirrim that lifted the siege of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings.

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Irish Artisan Cheeses

While researching my Irish novel I discovered a site called I Married an Irish Farmer with a lovely post about the cheeses of Ireland. Share

The Politics of Porn

Robert Reilly on how freedom has nothing to do with license. To quote:

Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent because only a virtuous person's reason is unclouded by the habitual rationalizations of vice. Vice inevitably infects the faculty of judgment. No matter how democratic their institutions, morally enervated people cannot be free. And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants. Thus, our Founders predicated the success of democracy in America upon the virtue of the American people.

In light of this, it is positively Orwellian to suggest, as Forman does, that America is free because it produces hardcore pornography. The authors of the First Amendment would claim the opposite -- that acceptance of pornography tends to destroy our capacity for freedom in both a personal and a political way, and therefore should be proscribed....

Pornography has been deliberately used as a social and political dissolvent during periods of revolutionary change. To prepare for the French Revolution, the radical Jacobins flooded Paris with pornography. Who would know the politics of pornography better than that greatest of pornographers, the Marquis de Sade? De Sade desired to indulge his sexual passions without moral restraint and saw clearly what that ultimately meant. In The Philosophy of the Boudoir, de Sade wrote that the murder of King Louis XVI was insufficient to bring about the desired revolutionary freedom. The morality of the social and political order had survived the King's beheading. How could it finally be destroyed? In the first known use of the phrase, de Sade wrote that the murder of the King must be followed by the "murder of God." Only when the morality represented by Divine Kingship was abolished could man express himself in the fullness of pornographic existence. This would include, after regicide and deicide, homicide. De Sade perceived and approvingly depicted in his works the inexorable logic of pornography: sex outside of the moral order ultimately leads to murder and death. The Marquis would not be surprised by the FBI study on homicide that found that pornography is the most common interest among serial killers. As one convicted murderer and child molester told the Meese Commission: "[Pornography's] effect on me was devastating. I lost all sense of decency and respect for human life."

The Founders forbade pornography not only because it subverts virtue, but because it attacks the political foundations of society. Though largely consumed in private, pornography becomes a political problem when it is widespread because it undermines chastity. Chastity is not only a moral virtue; it is also indispensable to political order. Chastity is integral to the functioning of the irreducible core of a polity. Aristotle begins The Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. A healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive sexual relationship between a husband and wife. The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual union both symbolizes and cements and for the welfare of the children that issue from it. Violations of chastity undermine not only the family, but society as a whole. That is why chastity may be spoken of as the first political principle.

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