The Left, the Right, and Social Revolt - Part 1

                            By Kerry Bolton
   

The revolutions of the past centuries have brought social revolt in the name of ‘the people’ — for the benefit of oligarchy.

The philosopher-historian par excellence of Western Civilization, Oswald Spengler, noted that there is no proletarian, nor even a communist, movement that does not serve the interests of ‘money’ and ‘in the direction indicated by money’. He pointed out that this is so because ‘socialism’ of the class-struggle variety arises from the same Zeitgeist as capitalism.¹ Julius Evola said much the same, and even more stridently: ‘Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical.’² Marx’s correspondence with Engels and others shows how thoroughly bourgeois Marx yearned to be. The distraction of the festering boils on his groin³ and his will to destruction prevented him from attaining the good things in life – the typically bourgeois things – for himself and his wife and daughters, other than what he could bludge from Engels, or from his father or other relatives. Marx’s doctrine was a projection of himself onto society as a failed bourgeois, his hatred of ownership a reflection of his detestation of small tradesmen who expected to be paid for their goods and services. His doctrine is a mirror reflection of capitalism, and the failure of an educated man with expensive tastes to rise beyond Soho squalor.⁴

Socialism does not aim to transcend capitalism. Its aim is to appropriate capitalism for another class.

Socialism does not aim to transcend capitalism. Its aim is to appropriate capitalism for another class. Hence, the proletariat becomes the owner, in theory, of capital, but capital retains its power; it is not overthrown.⁵

From the French Revolution to Marxism there is an unbroken lineage via Blanqui, Blanc, Babeuf and others. The Masonic lodges played a role in maintaining this lineage from the Illuminati and Jacobin clubs to the International Working Men’s Association. Hatred of Western Civilization, which is to say Christendom as exemplified by the Catholic Church, is a predominate theme for this line of revolutionists. It would not be surprising if this revolutionary ferment that aimed to destroy Western (Catholic) Civilization and hatched secret societies such as Freemasonry and Illuminism had its origins in the Reformation. Is it no more than coincidence that the personal crest of Martin Luther was the Rose-Cross, which became the name of a secret society, the Fraternity of the Rosy-Cross, Rosicrucians, from whence Masonry claims a lineage? What is known of the society is that it issued various manifestos calling for a new order to replace Catholicism. Masonry also claims lineage from the Knights Templar. Regardless of whether charges of heresy against the Templars were justified, Templar and Rosicrucian influences on secret societies would have provided an impetus for the anti-Catholic sentiment that found radical expression with the Illuminati, Grand Orient Masonry, Jacobinism and the rise of Leftism culminating in Marxism. Even if it is not a conspiratorial lineage, it is a world-view capable of proceeding with a life of its own.⁶

It is notable is that these revolts in the name of ‘the people’ have tended to consolidate the position not of the amorphous mass, but of oligarchy. This is done in the name of ‘democracy’ because traditional regimes based on a symbiosis or a synthesis between faith and monarch get in the way of the Free Market.

Right and Left

We might trace the Western malady back to the Reformation of Henry VIII. In the name of ‘freedom from popery’, the English Reformation led to the destruction of the Catholic social order that had ensured the social well-being of the common folk; it dispossessed the Church of property for the benefit of an emerging oligarchy, and perhaps more than any other upheaval set England on the path of decay – and, considering England’s role in hatching subsequent theories, set the West itself on the path of decay.⁷

Their democracy is really freedom for oligarchs to expand their power and wealth without the encumbrances of a traditional social order.

The Right and the Left assumed definitive form during the English Revolution: Cavaliers versus Roundheads, Puritans, Levellers and sundry other factions. Again, in the name of ‘the people’ we see a victory of the oligarchy. The Kingdom had been brought to near-ruin by the expenditures of King James and Queen Elizabeth. Parliament refused to allow King Charles I to levy taxes. He enraged the money merchants by grabbing their gold reserves stored at the Royal Mint and he confiscated the pepper and spice inventory of the East India Company, whose monopoly was challenged when he approved the rival Courteen Association. With the backing of mercantile interests, Cromwell usurped the authority of the Throne.⁸

Oligarchy Marches On

Something else called a ‘revolution’, and a ‘Glorious’ one no less, brought William of Orange from the Netherlands, then the centre of the money-merchants. It was from here that Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, leader of the Amsterdam Jewish community, had petitioned Oliver Cromwell in 1655 to allow the Jews re-admittance to England on account of the international commercial relations they could provide (the precursor of ‘globalization’), on the grounds that the ‘world prefers’ the ‘profit motive’ ‘before all other things’.⁹ This outlook of materialism and profit justified by religion was the basis of Puritanism and its revolts, and hence of the capitalist revolution against tradition,¹⁰ in which can be included the American Revolution and the present-day neo-Puritan ‘prosperity gospel’ of the American televangelists, who have assumed a significant political role in the USA and as allies of the Israeli lobby. This revolution, or invasion, in England was yet another revolt against Catholicism, and a coup for the Whig (Liberal) party. William’s extravagant expenditure led to an act of lasting significance, the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. The world financial centre gravitated from The Netherlands to England, and further undermined the authority of the Crown in favour of Parliament. Another ‘revolution’ in the name of resisting ‘popery’, extended the power of a Whig oligarchy. Party politics became fixed and the nexus between monarch and God, which is to say the foundation of traditional societies, was rent.¹¹

It is a symptom of ideological befuddlement, promoted especially by the abysmal ignorance of journalists and political scientists, that today Whiggery, also called ‘Classical Liberalism’, is confused with the ‘Right’. The historical legacies of Whiggery and the Right are not only different but antithetical, as different as a fight between a Cavalier and a Roundhead.

When Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, William of Orange, Duc d’Orleans, Jacob Schiff, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill, Mandela, Bush (X 2), Clinton (X 2), Obama, et al. – the immense gaggle of liberal-leftists whoring themselves for George Soros’ money, and the neo-Trotskyists of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), shout ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘human rights’, like their ideological forefathers shouted ‘down with popery’, and ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. Their democracy is really freedom for oligarchs to expand their power and wealth without the encumbrances of a traditional social order.¹² Hence the jubilation of American banking interests when the March 1917 revolution,¹³ prepared since 1905 by hack journalist George Kennan, with funding from Jacob Schiff of Kuhn Loeb & Co., brought down Czarism.¹⁴

The dozens of long-planned and well-funded ‘spontaneous’ ‘colour revolutions’ throughout Central and Eastern European and North Africa are of the same order, as is the combination of social revolt and NATO bombs that gave ‘freedom’ to globalize and privatize the immense mineral wealth of Kosovo, once the mines had been ‘liberated’ from the Serbian state. When the Allies sent their go-to man, Trotsky, from New York to Russia in 1917, and the Germans sent theirs, Lenin, it was a replay of William of Orange being sent from Holland to England. When the Bolsheviks set up Ruskombank under the direction of Olof Aschberg of Nye Banken, Stockholm, it was a replay of William establishing the Bank of England.

How far back this dialectic goes – social revolt in the name of ‘the people’ for the benefit of oligarchy – is indicated by Spengler’s reference to the revolt of Tiberius Gracchus, serving as a lackey for the Equites, a former military caste that had become an oligarchy.¹⁵ When the Duc d’Orleans paid the dregs of Marseilles to act as a revolutionary mob, expecting he would become First Citizen of the Republic, he was acting as a precursor of Jacob Schiff and George Soros. What the mob overthrew in the name of ‘liberty’ and for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and later oligarchs was the final vestige of the traditional – organic – social order of Western Civilization that had been inherited from Rome and fine-tuned by the Church into a uniquely Western ‘Gothic’ form. This was ‘class struggle’, but not precisely in the order and direction assume by Marx. Rather than a lineal ‘progression’ (the ‘dialectics of history’, according to Marx¹⁶) of serfdom – capitalism/liberalism – socialism – communism, the dialectic has been of serfdom – liberalism/socialism – capitalism – oligarchy. Spengler and Brooks Adams¹⁷ were much better historians in explaining cycles of rise and fall and the role played by money. Conversely, while Francis Fukuyama and other apologists for liberalism have argued that it is capitalism that is the epitome of history, beyond which there is nothing better, Spengler, Evola and other philosopher-historians of the actual Right, contend that capitalism is the final symptom of a civilization in its death-throes, the triumph of money; while Plato in The Republic long previously saw oligarchy and then democracy as the symptoms of decay.

Footnotes

1Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West(London: Allen and Unwin, 1972, Vol. II), p. 402.

2Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins ([1972] Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 166.

3‘Hidradenitis suppurativa’.

4On Marx see: Bolton, The Psychotic Left(London: Black House Publishing, 2013), pp. 70-100.

5Oswald Spengler, op. cit.

6Bolton, The Occult and Subversive Movements(London: Black House Publishing, 2017), passim.

7William Cobbett, The History of the Reformation in England and Ireland, (1824-1827).

8Some background on this is provided in John F. Riddick, The History of British India: A Chronology, (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), p. 4.

9Menasseh ben Israel to Oliver Cromwell. This lengthy letter, entitled ‘How Profitable the Nation of the Jews are’, reads like The Protocols of Zion, but its authenticity is not disputed. The letter was published in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jews in the Modern World: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 9-12.

10See the famous book by the German sociologist Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

11E. Vallance, The Glorious Revolution: 1688 and Britain’s Fight for Liberty, (Little, Brown and Co, 2006).

12K. R. Bolton, Revolution from Above (London: Arktos Media Ltd.), passim.

13John B. Young, National City Bank, ‘Is a people’s revolution’, New York Times, 16 March, 1917.

14New York Times, 18 March 1917; and 24 March 1917, pp. 1-2. On the nexus between revolution in Russia and oligarchic interests see: Bolton, Revolution from Above. For the best scholarly documentation on the history of the Russian Revolution and its oligarchic sponsors see Dr. Richard B. Spence, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905–1925 (Trine Day, 2017). Spence is a senior historian at Idaho State University, who has previously examined the enigma of Trotsky’s travel arrangements between New York and Russia.

15Spengler, Decline, op. cit., 402, 404 n1.

16Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

17Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilisation and Decay ([1896] London: Black House Publishing). Anyone who has Spengler’s Decline of The West, should have Adams’ book beside it. (Do not be confused by comments on Amazon by reviewers about another ‘poor quality’ edition; the BHP edition is of fine quality.)