by invitation of bronies & Tania
<Avatard RP reactionary leech is oUr fWiEnD u GuIsE
548 posts and 996 image replies omitted.Thucydides is praised as the father of political realism / Realpolitik and Hobbes praised as
>the most politic historiographer that ever writ
The Melian Dialogue is a sample.
Athenians:
>For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Melians:
>And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?
Athenians:
>Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.
Melians:
>But we know that the fortune of war is sometimes more impartial than the disproportion of numbers might lead one to suppose; to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect.,
Athenians:
>Hope, danger's comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources, if not without loss at all events without ruin; but its nature is to be extravagant, and those who go so far as to put their all upon the venture see it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found wanting. Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale; nor be like the vulgar, who, abandoning such security as human means may still afford, when visible hopes fail them in extremity, turn to invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to their destruction.
>>711459Another item Hobbes has from Plato's Laws:
Plato:
>That the man who receives the portion should still regard it as common property of the whole StateWhich Hobbes does. The Sovereign / "The People" by a community of pleasures & pains as a whole says "Thine" & "Mine" in a way
Hobbes writes,
>Propriety of a subject excludes not the dominion of the Sovereign, but only of another subject. Court Eulogy to Ramses II:
>They were upon their bellies, wallowing upon the earth before his majesty, saying: "We come to thee, lord of heaven, lord of earth, Re, life of the whole earth, lord of duration, of fruitful revolution, Atum for the people, lord of destiny, creator of Renenet, Khnum who fashioned the people, giver of breath into the nostrils of all, making all the gods live, pillar of heaven, support of earth, adjusting the Two Lands, lord of food, plentiful in grain, in whose footsteps is the harvest goddess, maker of the great, fashioner of the lowly, whose word produces food, the lord vigilant when all men sleep, whose might defends Egypt, valiant in foreign lands, who returns when he has triumphed, whose sword protects the Egyptians, beloved of truth, in which he lives by his laws, defender of the Two Lands, rich in years, great in victory, the fear of whom expels foreign lands, our king, our lord, our Sun, by the words of whose mouth Atum lives. Loe, we are now before thy majesty, that thou mayest decree to us the life that thou givest, Pharaoh, breath of life, who makes all men live when he has shone on them.
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Monarchies will make a comeback sooner or later.
Yet monarchists shouldn't count on the Bourbons, Orléanists, or Bonapartists. The Law monarchists should oblige is the Law of Nature:
Empires rise and fall, & generally old dynasties don't come back after being deposed 100+ years.
I'd say 70 years maximum.
The current state of monarchist legitimatism does more harm than good: 1st, monarchists are too easy to depose a ruler to begin with on any pretense of tyranny; 2nd, while Restorationism is feasible within 1 or 2 generations, 100+ years Restoration of an old dynasty is hoping for a miracle and does more harm than good, because it becomes a Scorched Earth policy against potential new monarchies that might develop, likely by Caesarism (which monarchists despise, but really that is how it usually happens).
Sadly, the overwhelming majority of monarchists are stupidly legitimatist.
I wish monarchists were as stupidly loyal when the dynasties in question were alive (& not stupidly loyal when they are finally dead), but monarchists are the opposite and are easy-going about overthrowing a monarchy in question when it is alive but stupidly loyal upon overthrow and successful usurpation – an effort to take it back and trying to restore a regime is considerable within 70 years, but 100+ years it is a lost cause.
…
If monarchists were smart, they'd be endorsing Caesarism and trying to slip Christian crowns over Christian-affirming, rightwing would-be Caesars or just push for hereditary dictatorship or go back to thinking how monarchies sprout up naturally (as if there were no dynasties to begin with).
>>717215Yo, Grace-Anon. You own 8chan.moe/b/ correct? I'm from /rwby/
We're going to be streaming RWBY on the weekends* and I'd like to make the announcement on the Meta Thread, but I'd rather avoid trolls, whaddya think?
*See:
https://8chan.moe/rwby/res/8643.html >>717488Gracefag will look.
Louis XIV story with Nicholas Fouquet:
>The King always wants to be the richest man & he never likes anyone wealthier than himself
<Louis XIV on reforming finance (part one):
Removing the superintendant
>It was then that I believed I should give serious attention to the re-establishment of the finances, and the first thing I deemed necessary was to remove the principal officials responsible for the disorder from their positions. For ever since I had assumed the care of my affairs, I had every day discovered new evidence of their squandering, and particularly by the superintendant. The sight of vast establishments of this man and of his insolent acquisitions could not but convince me of his wild ambition, and the general distress of my entire people constantly urged my justice against him.
>But what compounded his guilt toward me was that, far from profiting from the kindness I have shown him by retaining him in my councils, it gave him renewed hope of deceiving me, and that far from being the wiser for it, he merely tried to be more skillful at it. but whatever artifice he might employ, I was not long in recognizing his bad faith, for he could not refrain from continuing his extravagant expenses, fortifying strongholds, decorating palaces, forming conspiracies, and purchasing important offices for his friends at my expense, in the hope of soon becoming the sovereign arbiter of the State.
>Although this behavior was assuredly most criminal, I had initially intended only to exclude him from affairs, but having subsequently considered that with his restless disposition he would not endure this change of fortune without trying something new, I thought it best to arrest him. I postponed, nevertheless, the execution of this plan, and this plan distressed me greatly, for not merely did I see that he was in the meanwhile employing new subterfuges to steal from me, but what disturbed me more was that in order to appear more influential, he made a point of asking me for private audiences, and that in order not to arouse his suspicions, I was compelled to grant them and to submit to his useless discussions, while I know all about his disloyalty.
>You can imagine that I was at an age when it required a great deal of self-control for me to act with such restraint. But, on the one hand, I saw that the removal of the superintendant was necessarily connected with transferring the farmed taxes, and on the other hand, I knew that it being summer, this was the worst season of the year for making such innovations, aside from wanting above all to have a fund of four millions on hand for whatever needs might arise. Thus I resolved to wait for autumn to execute this plan.
>But having gone to Nantes toward the end of the month of August for the meeting of the Estates of Brittany and getting a closer look from there at the ambitious enterprises of this minster, I could not refrain from having him arrested at that very place on September 5. All France, as convinced as I was of the misconduct of the superintendant, acclaimed this action and praised particularly the secrecy with which I ha kept a decision of this nature for three or four months, primarily in regard to a man who had such private access to me, who was in contact with all those who were around me, who was receiving information from within and from outside the State, and whose own conscience should have given him ample warning that he ha everything to fear.
>But what I believed I had on this occasion that was most worthy of being observed and most advantageous to my people was to abolish the office of superintendant, or rather to assume it myself.
>Perhaps in considering the difficulty of this undertaking, you will one day be astonished, as all France has been, that I have undertaken this labor at an age when it is usual to love only pleasure. But I shall tell you frankly that although this work was unpleasant, I felt less repugnance for it than another might have, because I have always considered the satisfaction of doing one's duty as the sweetest pleasure in the world. I have even often wondered how it could be that love for work a quality so necessary to sovereigns should yet be one that is so rarely found in them.
>Most princes, because they have a great many servants and subjects, do not feel obliged to go to any trouble and do not consider that, if they have an infinite number of people working under their orders, there are infinitely more who rely on their conduct and that it takes a great deal of watching and a great deal of work merely to insure that those who act do only what they should and that those who rely tolerate only what they must. All these different conditions that compose the world are united to each other only by an exchange of reciprocal obligations. The deferences and the respects that we receive from our subjects are not a free gift from them but payment for the justice and the protection that they expect to receive from us. Just as they must honor us, we must protect and defend them, and our debts toward them are even more binding than theirs to us, for indeed, if one of them lacks the skill or the willingness to execute our orders, a thousand others come in a crowd to fill his post, whereas the position of a sovereign can be properly filled only by the sovereign himself.
Of all the functions of Sovereignty, the one that a prince must guard most jealously is the handling of the finances
>But to be more specific, it must be added to this that of all the functions of sovereignty, the one that a prince must guard most jealously is the handling of the finances. It is the most delicate of all because it is the one that is most capable of seducing the one who performs it, and which makes it easiest for him to spread corruption.
>The prince alone should have the sovereign direction over it because he alone has no fortune to establish but that of the State, no acquisition to make except for the Monarchy, no authority to strengthen other than that of the laws, no debts to pay besides the public ones, no friends to enrich save his people.
…
>And indeed, what would be more ruinous for the provinces or more shameful for their king than to raise a man who has his own private objectives and affairs, who claims the right to dispose of everything without rendering any account and to fill his coffers and those of his creatures constantly with the most liquid public funds? Can a prince be more foolish than to favor private individuals who use his authority in order to become rich at his own expense and whose squandering, although it gains him nothing, ruins both his affairs and his reputation? And putting it more piously, can he fail to consider that these great sums which compose the exorbitant and monstrous wealth of a small number of financiers always come from the sweat, the tears, and the blood of the wretched, whose defense is committed to his care?
>The maxims I am teaching you today, my son, have not been taught to me by anyone, because they had never occurred to my predecessors. But now that your advantage in being instructed in them at such an early age will come back to haunt you if you don't profit from it.
>Aside from the councils of finances and the boards that had always been held, I decided, in order to acquit myself more responsibly of the superintendancy, to establish a new council, which I named Royal Council. I composed it of Marshal de Villeroi, of two Councillors of State, D'Aligre and De Seve, and of an Intendant of Finances, who was Colbert, and it is in this council that I have been working ever since to disentangle the terrible confusion that had been introduced into my affairs.
>This was assuredly no minor undertaking, and those who have seen the point at which things were and who sees the precision to which I have no reduced them are astonished, with reason, that I was able to penetrate in so short a time into an obscurity that so many able superintendants had never yet clarified. But what must put a stop to this surprise is the natural difference between the interest of the prince and that of the superintendant. For these private individuals, approaching their position with no greater care than to preserve their own liberty to dispose of everything as they see fit, often put much more of their skill into obscuring this matter than into clarifying it, whereas a king, who is its legitimate lord, puts as much order and precision as he can into everything, aside from the fact that I was personally often relieved in this work by Colbert, whom I entrusted with examining things that required too much discussion and into which I would not have had the time to go.
>The manner in which the collections and the expenditures had been made was something incredible. My revenues were no longer handled by my treasurers but by the clerks of the superintendant who combined them haphazardly with his private expenses. Money was disbursed when, how, and as they pleased, and one looked afterwards at leisure for false expenses, orders for cash, and canceled notes to consume these sums. The continual exhaustion of the public treasury and the perpertual avidity for more money made for the easy awarding of exorbitant commissions to those who offered to advance it. The wild disposition of Fouquet had always made him prefer useless expenses to necessary ones, so that the most liquid funds having been consumed in gratituities distributed to his friends, in buildings constructed for his pleasure, or in other things of a similar nature, it was necessary, at the slightest need of the State, to have recourse to alienations that could only be negotiated at a pittance because of the extreme necessity. By these means the State had become so impoverished that notwithstanding the immense tailles that were levied, the treasury netted no more than twenty-one million per year, which had itself been spent for two years in advance, aside from my having been made liable for seventy millions in notes issued for the profit of various individuals.
(Pic related: Louis XIV against financial harpies)
<Part 2
>The thing that I was most eager to correct about this general abuse was the use of orders for cash, because these had assuredly contributed more than anything else to the squandering of my money; for in this way one gave freely to whomever one wanted, without shame and without any fear of discovery. To avoid this confusion in the future, I resolved to draw up and to record personally all the orders I would sign, so that no expenditure has since been possible without my knowing the reason.
>I also wanted to recontract my farmed taxes, which had not been brought to their just value, and in order to avoid the frauds that were so common on these occasions – whether through the corruption of the judges who awarded them or through the secret compacts between the bidders – I was present at the bidding personally; and this first effort of mine increased my revenues by three millions, aside from making the value of the contracts payable monthly, which then gave me enough to provide for the most pressing expenses and enabled me to save the State a loss of fifteen millions a year in interest on loans.
>As for the contracts for the direct taxes, I reduced the commission from five sols to only fifteen deniers per livre, a diminution that amounted to such a large sum for the entire kingdom that it permitted me, in my great exhaustion, to lower the taille by four millions.
<I was astonished myself that in such a short time and by such entirely just means I should have been able to procure so much profit for the public. But what might cause still greater astonishment in that those who dealt with me on these terms made almost as great and much more solid a gain than those who had dealt previously, because the respect of my subjects for me then and my care in protecting my servants in all their requests made them find as much facility in their collections than as there had previously been chicanery and obstruction.
>I resolved, a short time later, to reduce from three quarters to two the payments on the salary increases that the officials had acquired at the pittance and that had greatly diminished the value of my farmed taxes. But I have already explained the justice and the facility of this reduction to you now in passing as one of the good effects of the economy that was so necessary to my state.
>But my last decision of that year concerning the finances was the establishment of the Chamber of Justice, in which I had two principal motives: the first, that it was not possible, in the state to which things were reduced, to diminish the ordinary taxes sufficiently and to relieve the poverty of the people promptly enough without making those who had grown wealthy at the expense of the State contribute heavily to its expenses; and the second, that for this chamber to examine the contracts that had been made was the only means to facilitate the settling of my debts. For they had been raised to such prodigious sums that I could not have paid them all without ruining most of my subjects, nor cancel them arbitrarily without running the risk of committing an injustice, aside from not wanting to return to the abuse that had been practiced in the redemption of treasury notes, by which means influential people were paid sooner or later for sums that were not due them while the real creditors would have drawn only a small portion of their due. This is why I believe that I should liquidate exactly what I owed and what was owed to me in order to pay the one and to be paid the other, but because these discussions were delicate and because most of those concerned ha a great deal of influence and a good many relatives in the ordinary courts of justice, I was obliged to form a special one out of the most disinterested men in all the others.
>I have no doubt that from reading all these details you will get the impression that the effort required for all these sorts of things was not very pleasant in itself, and that this great number of ordinances, contracts, declarations, registers, and accounts that it was necessary not merely to see and to sign but to conceive and to resolve, was not too satisfying a matter to a mind capable of other things, and I will grant you this.
<But if you consider the great advantages that I have drawn from it later, the relief that I have granted to my subjects each year, of how many debts I have disengaged the State, how many alienated taxes I have repurchased, with what punctuality I have paid all legitimate burdens, and the number of poor workers I have supported by employing them on my buildings, how many gratuities I have given to people of merit, how I have furthered public works, what aid in men and in money I have furnished my allies, how greatly I have increased the number of my ships, what strongholds I have purchased, with what vigor I have taken possession of my rights when they were challenged, without ever having been reduce to the unfortunate necessity of burening my subjects with any extraordinary tax, you would certainly find then that the labors by which I have reached this position must have appeared very pleasant to me, since they have borne so much fruit for my subjects.
<For indeed, my son, we must consider the good of our subjects far more than our own. They are almost a part of ourselves, since we are the head of a body and they are its members. It is only for their own advantage that we must give them laws, and our power over them must only be used by us in order to work more effectively for their happiness. It is wonderful to deserve from them the name of a father and sovereign, and if one belongs to us by right of birth, the other must be the sweetest object of our ambition. I am well aware that such a wonderful title is not obtained without a great deal of effort, but in praiseworthy undertakings one must not be stopped by the idea of difficulty. Work only dismays weak souls, and when a plan is advantageous and just, it is weakness not to execute it. Laziness in those of our rank is just as opposed to the greatness of courage as timidity, and there is no doubt that a monarch responsible for watching over the public interest deserves more blame in fleeing from a useful burden than in stopping in the face of imminent danger; for indeed, the fear of danger can almost always be tinge by a feeling of prudence, whereas the fear of work can never be considered as anything but an inexcusable weakness.
>Louis XIV's close management of finances
>In working at the reorganization of the finances, I had already acceded, as I have told you, to signing personally all orders issued for the slightest expenses of the State. I found that this was not enough, an I was willing to go to the trouble of marking in my own hand, in a little book that I could always see, on one side, the funds that I was to receive each month, on the other, all the sums paid by my orders during that month.
<It may be, my son, that among the great number of courtiers who will surround you, some, attached to their pleasures and glorying in their ignorance of their own affairs, will someday portray this care to you as far beneath royalty. They will tell you, perhaps, that the kings our predecessors have never done such a thing and that even their prime ministers would have believed they were lowering themselves if they had not relied for these details on the superintendant and he, in turn, on the treasurer or on some lowly and obscure clerk. But those who speak this way have never considered that in the world, the greatest affairs are hardly ever concluded without the smallest, and that what would be baseness if a prince were acting through mere love of money becomes loftiness and superiority if its ultimate object is the welfare of his subjects, the execution of an infinite number of great plans, his own splendor, and his own magnificence, of which this attention to details is the most secure basis.
>Imagine, my son, what an entirely different thing it is for a king, whose plans must be varied, more extensive, and more hiden than those of any private individual, of such a nature indeed that there is sometimes hardly a single person in the world to whom he can entrust them all in their entirety. There are, however, none of these plans in which the finances do not enter somewhere. This is not saying enough. There are none of these plans that do not entirely and essentially depend on them, for what is great and wonderful when the state of our finances allows it becomes fantastic and ridiculous when it doe snot. Think then, I beg of you, how a king could govern and not be governed if his ignorance of these financial details subjects his best and most noble thoughts to the caprice of the prime minister, or of the superintendant, or of the treasurer, or of that obscure and unknown clerk, whom he would be obliged to consult like so many oracles, so that he could not undertake anything without obtaining their advice and their consent.
>But there are, you will be told, loyal and wise people who, without penetrating into your plans, will not mislead you about these financial details. I wish, my son, that these qualities were as common as they are rare.
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>>720203>>721140STOP INVITING THE BLACK SUPREMACISTS, RETARDS.
Grace-chan…
>"A State may be strong when it serves a greater destiny when it feels itself to be the instrument of a great destiny for a people. Otherwise, the State is tyrannical."
>“Spain cannot be defined by having its own language, or by being a race, or by being a set of traditions, on the contrary, Spain is defined by an imperial vocation to unite languages, unite races, unite peoples and unite customs in a world destiny; Spain is much more than a race and much more than a language, because it is something that is expressed in this way, from which I become more and more sure that this is the unity of destiny throughout the world."
>“All humans are brothers, white and black, all because many centuries ago, in another distant land, one martyr shed his blood and sacrificed himself so that this blood would establish love and brotherhood among people on Earth.”
— José Antonio Primo de Riverа
This is a great Catholic sentiment, but I wouldn't deem it as very Fascist.
>"That is a grave problem, since the transcendent conception that rules over the Catholic Church contradicts the immanentist character of the political conception of Fascism."
- Giovanni Gentile
Fascism is totalitarian, statist & nationalistic, because of its immanentism; it values life in the here and now & Fascism values the State/Nation/Race & Language (these aren't mere pawns in the game of the High Church & Fascism isn't apathetic to the political like Spiritual Sword > Political or Church sword > political sword).
I feel this way strongly because Hitler blames the Habsburgs not caring about race/nationalism and saying the Habsburgs put Religion in service of Politics; but what is responsible for every grievance of Hitler towards Habsburgs is what José Antonio Primo de Riverа is saying.
The reason why various churches portray Christ as different races is because that is what a King is for his Nation, their archtype and cult of personality at their core of their identity:
Where there is no Christianity, a King or Emperor would have fulfilled this role naturally.
As Christian Monarchy is concerned, K.James I had it right in stressing the Kingdom as a family under their King (which is lacking in Windsorism/Habsburgism).
Albeit too much High Church to the detriment of your own core identity and that relationship: like I see with Habsburgism and to a latter extent the partisanship of many Catholic Jacobites in sacrificing this in turmoil with Low Church Protestants as I explain here
>>683454 Who both are very adamant about Christ is King, but by the radiance of that statement very blind to the King before their eyes and they family they could be with that King in their Kingdom.
North Korea.
Ancestor worship & blood relationship between the Leader & his people: White nationalists don't understand this in Monarchy, because many nationalists are blind to what dynastic patriotism is because they restrict this view to the Church & not Politics.
It is a mixture of Catholicism and Aristotle's mixed constitutionalism that has made Europeans so inept at nationalism and East Asians as better nationalists.
That is a controversial opinion of mine:
East Asians do nationalism better than Westerners.
Their nations are what White Nationalists really want: big national blocs, monoliths of their ethnicity.
This is the case because they have always been big families truly united around their imperial dynasties and kings: whereas political pluralism in Aristotle's mixed constitutionalism has denied this and Catholicism has only made this idea a spiritual reality but not politically manifest amongst the people themselves.
…
GK Chesterton is vindicated in his writing that European peoples have always been a motley patchwork of peoples because of their attachment to mixed constitutionalism and the primary of High Church.
<The Judaism of Hitler
>Hitlerism is almost entirely of Jewish origin.
>But what i frankly and flatly deny, in history as a whole, is that any Nordic Men ever brought anything in the way of an idea into the world. The Germans came in due course to describe their piracy as imperialism; but they borrowed the idea of imperialism from the Romans. They produced a sort of Prussianism that was praised or blamed as militarism; but they borrowed the idea of militarism from the French. The German Emperors modelled themselves on the Greek Emperors and the Roman Emperors. The greatest of the Prussians did not even conceal his contempt for Prussia. He refused to talk anything but French, or to exchange ideas with anybody except somebody of the type of Voltaire. Then came the liberal ideas of the French Revolution, and the whole movement of German unity was originally a liberal movement on the lines of the French Revolution. Then came the more modern and much more mortally dangerous idea of Race; which the Germans borrowed from a French man named Gobineau. And on top of that idea of Race, came the grand, imperial and insane idea of a Chosen Race, of a sacred seed that is, as the Kaiser said, the salt of the earth; of a people that is God's favourite and guided by him, in a sense in which he does not guide other and lesser peoples. And if anybody asks where anybody got that idea, there is only one possible or conceivable answer. He got it from the Jews.
…But among the thousand and one ways in which Semitism affected Germanism is in this mystical idea, which came through Protestantism. Here the Nordic Men, who are never thinkers, were entirely at the mercy of the Jews, who are always thinkers. When the Reformation had rent away the more Nordic sort of German from the old idea of human fellowship in a Faith open to all, they obviously needed some other idea that would at least look equally large and towering and transcendental. They began to get it through the passionate devotion of historical Protestants to the Old Testament. That, of course, is where the joke comes in; that the Protestants now wish to select for destruction what nobody else except the Protestants had ever wanted to had ever wanted to select and set apart for idolatry. But that is a later stage of the story. By concentrating on the ancient story of the Covenant with Israel, and losing the counter-weight of the idea of the universal Church of Christendom, they grew more and more into the mood of seeing their religion as a mystical religion of Race.
>But it is true that it all began with the power of the Jews: which has now ended with the persecution of the Jews. People like the Hitlerites never had any ideas of their own; they got this idea indirectly through the Protestants, that is primarily through the Prussians; but they got it originally from the Jews. In the Jews it has even a certain tragic grandeur; as men separated and sealed and waiting for a unique destiny. But until we have utterly destroyed it among Christians, we shall never restore Christendom.
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>>722230This artist has really good style.
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Unique IPs: 5