Forgotten Freedoms [Part 1]
February 10, 2015
The early days of January 2015 have been disturbing ones for Western Europe and the 'democratic' world generally, as the streets of Paris have been visited with devastating violence and death manifesting the fruits of a totalitarian Islamic ideology growing again in influence and power. The Ottoman siege led by Sultan Mehmed II culminated in the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire (a Christian empire which had lasted for over 1100 years) on May 29, 1453. Since then, questions over the nature of human liberty, freedom and government have ben almost exhaustively explored by Western thinkers and fought over by armies at great cost. WIth the fall of this great centre of Christendom some scholars mark the end of the Middle Ages or Christian era and the beginnings of modernity. It is argued that several Greek and non-Greek intellectuals fled the city around the time of the siege, taking up residence in Italy. Some believe that these men helped fuel the Renaissance which eventually led to a movement in the church called the Reformation. For a season, the Reformation took hold in much of Europe, dramatically shaping institutions, liberties and freedoms in Western society, especially in what we used to call the Protestant world. The liberating effect of biblical faith, however, was followed by the so-called Enlightenment beginning in the seventeenth century, which wrote off the Christian era as 'The Dark Ages' and, jettisoning Scripture, sought to enthrone human reason in the place of the Triune God and his self-revelation in the Bible. The Enlightenment had asserted human autonomy (law of the self), but ironically, this did not leave lead to freedom but to political absolutism.
Recall another scene from Paris. In 1789 France began a bloody revolution, with pagan Freemasons leading the charge. WIth the rise of Robespierre and the Jacobin reign of terror, a dictatorship was imposed by a Committee of Public Safety (how thoughtful) and de-Christianization began in earnest with a new calendar! Around forty thousand civilians died in this quest for freedom as the streets of Paris ran with blood and over a thousand priests massacred. After the execution of key revolutionary leaders in a countermovement, a corrupt executive council was established, only to collapse in a coup led by Napolean Bonaparte in 1779, and thus war was unleashed by the revolution on a global sense for decades by a new dictator. What followed was the rise of various forms of socialism, secularism and facism in continental Europe with the development of the French Revolution's new forms of 'human rights' declarations. Islam's attack on Constantinople thus played a key role in the de-Christianization of Europe and Islamist is today intent on finishing the job, something the majority of politicians fail to understand.
The revolutionary values of today's statist Europe, with its enforced equality and anti-clericalism, have never been either the result, or productive of, freedom, but rather absolutism. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, 1688 saw the Glorious Revolution where, finishing what the Purtians began, Parliament exerted its will over the absolutist monarchy. The difference lay in the Protestant approach to the Bible, the rule of law, property rights and personal freedoms. As Daniel Hannan points out, 'the post-Jacobin Continental strain of democracy elevated majority rule over individual liberty' [1]. De-Christianized Europe today is weak and exposed and the Islamists know it, because its view of freedom is defective and debilitating. Rousseau believed in the absolutist concept of the 'general will' of the people that is expressed by the state, in which rights are handed down by government, in place of the private rights of the citizen in the common-law (read Christian law) tradition; where a free society can only exist when there is an aggregation of free individuals. Hannan correctly identifies the fatal flaw in the revolutionary model: 'the contracting out of human rights to a charter, necessarily interpreted by some state-appointed tribunal, left the defense of freedom in a small number of hands... in the Anglosphere, where the defense of freedom was everyone's business, dictatorship and revolution were almost unknown' [2]. In short, in collectivist France and Europe, liberty was and remains something theoretical, but not actual, for the people. The defence of freedom is delegated to an elite group of utopian bureaucrats seeking to realize their equalitarian order that the blood-letting of the Revolution had failed to achieve.
