Category: the French

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A monarchical rant

I came across this socialist rant against the monarchy and the idea of monarchy, which stimulated the creative juices. I thought it was worth responding to.  First the case against monarchy, from the World Socialist Website, which I am  sure you will enjoy for its over-the-top-ness..

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/17/pers-s17.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

 

“The capitalist class buried the ghosts of its republican ancestors long ago. Confronting social and political crises of unprecedented magnitude, they turn to autocracy and authoritarianism as bulwarks in defense of their privileges and recognize in monarchy an institutional form of their class aspirations.

Monarchy is an institution of colossal stupidity, a barbarous vestige of the feudal past; its persistence is an embarrassment to humanity. Founded on heredity, shored up with inbreeding, intermarriage and claims of divine right, the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity and maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power.

The kings and queens enthroned by this principle are stunted by more than just hemophilia and the Habsburg jaw. Their social function distills in their lineage the most concentrated reaction. Elizabeth II was cousin to the Tsarist Romanovs; her Nazi-sympathizing uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 and headed off to Germany with his Nazi-sympathizing wife to salute Adolf Hitler.

The royal family is marked by the sorts of scandals that develop among those with a great deal of unearned money and unspent time. Her son, Prince Andrew, sold arms to autocratic regimes and paid £12 million to cover up his role in sex trafficking underaged girls with Jeffrey Epstein. Her grandson, Prince Harry, used to dress up in full Nazi regalia.

It was in defiance of the monarchic principle that the American Declaration of Independence stated, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This conception fueled the American Revolution. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, which historian Gordon Wood termed “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era,” directly attacked not just George III but the very existence of monarchy, writing:

In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshiped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the US Constitution codified this principle for the new nation: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.”

Immense concentrated private wealth, founded on exploitation and inequality, and the unending expansion of empire have stamped out any trace of such democratic sentiments in the American ruling elite. They no longer, in the phrase of Milton, prefer “hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp.” They seek to defend their interests through autocratic rule and look with welcome upon the principle of monarchy.

On the order of President Biden, US flags were deferentially lowered for the dead queen, placed at half-staff for 12 days. Elizabeth II is separated from George III by generations; Biden is separated from Jefferson by an unbridgeable historical chasm.

Over the past six years we have witnessed a turn among the ruling elite around the globe to openly autocratic and dictatorial forms of rule as social and political crisis have sharpened and turned deadly. It is this that fuels the unrestrained adulation in the American media for the dead queen and the crown she wore. An unprecedented political crisis grips the United States. The idea of a monarchical system, of an autocratic head of state who stands above the conflict, has a powerful appeal to the embattled bourgeoisie.

The media give voice to these longings and package them for popular consumption. The phrase of J.A. Hobson, writing of imperialism at the opening of the 20th century, is apt: “snobbish subservience, the admiration of wealth and rank, the corrupt survivals of the inequalities of feudalism.” The deferential and servile talking heads of television news cultivate these traits. Often dressed up as progressive by identity politics, the monarchic principle is everywhere glorified, from Wakanda to Beyoncé to Downton Abbey.

The relentless adulation for the dead queen is mind-numbing. It is tempting to hunker down and weather the storm of stupidity. It must, however, be taken seriously, for it is a warning.”

To which I responded as follows:

I always love these rants against constitutional monarchies. The same way I enjoy Richard Dawkins railing against God with his materialist conception of reality. Both conflate a shallow form of instrumental reasoning with great depth of insight. Both misunderstand critically what makes people tick. Both are suffused with an obvious condescension to the large proportion of humanity that believes in the institution of constitutional monarchy and believes in God. Both think that an atheistic republic of means and ends would be better (by what criteria I ask?) for humans. Both fail to understand that God and kings are adaptive, in a Darwinian sense, in that they  promote group cohesion and cooperation.

 

When we say ‘God save our gracious King’, we ask one imaginary friend, power and ruler of the universe to help another imagined ruler fulfil his much less important earthly-scale job. Otherwise we have to swear allegiance to an abstraction like the Constitution and the flag. You do not escape imaginary political and emotional constructs by de-feudalizing them.

 

Quote: “the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity -yes it does, and suck it up, because it is the truth of the human condition – and maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power.” No, but by the force of allegiance to something greater than ourselves and the persons who embody that greatness. The Crown is all of us. We participate ina greatness which is not ours. We have elected politicians for the actual exercise of power, but they are in a real way restrained by having to be polite and subordinate to the monarch.

None of which prevents me from thinking Charles III is an eco-babbler, and saying so.

In short, my God is greater than your god, and much more powerful than your rational association of self interested actors seeking maximum personal autonomy, or whatever it is that socialists do in their miserable little lives.

 

Someone should read Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War, on the subject of asabiya, the power of societies to cooperate for collective purposes. The term is taken from the Arabic philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun. Then we might have a meaningful exchange about monarchies that dealt with what they actually do, rather than what socialists think they do.

A better anti-monarchical argument is presented by the barbarian Ygritte presenting the casefor equality in this excerpt from Game of Thrones: “You know nothing, John Snow”.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Professor Attaran

Trudeau calls for end to ‘Quebec bashing’ after Ottawa professor says province run by ‘white supremacist government’

 

Dear Professor Attaran:

I take exception to your characterization of the Quebec government as “white supremacist”. I think that is wide of the mark, and quite unfair to the Government of Quebec.  Quebec’s government is not white supremacist. It is French supremacist. The French speakers just happen to be white. Let us imagine for instance that the original founders of French Canada were not French but Tunisians. As the only Muslim majority and North African-origined ethnos in North America, the government of Quebec would believe it was its duty to protect the historic Tunisian and Muslim nature of the country. In this conjecture,  street signs and public advertizing would have to be in Tunisian Arabic with Latin letters distinctly smaller. There is an endless fret about whether the Tunisian nature of Quebec is being lost because the immigrants are assimilating to the English speaking majoriy of Canada. And so forth.

To call the government of Quebec “racist” is misleading. The only race they are concerned about is their own. Need I point out that English-speakers are not part of their “race”? Nor are any other peoples of any skin colour. Their axis of discrimination is entirely ethno-cultural.

And here is the irony. No place in North America is now safer for white people from the anti-white propaganda of the woke. If you attack Quebec for racism they will put on the armour of righteous indignation and the Prime Minister will come to their defence, as he ought to. The Quebecois are immune to “woke” because their politics are frankly about French supremacy. They just happen to be white.

Years ago some self-righteous Liberal apparatchik who normally lives in Westboro, a posh part of Ottawa, was in North Hatley, Quebec. He said how typical it was to find me in the whitest part of North America, or was it just the whitest part of Quebec that he referred to? I can’t quite recall, but he did not mean it in a complimentary or friendly way. Apart from his towering condescension and hypocrisy, of which he was completely unconscious, I find myself in agreement with him. [And what, pray tell, was he doing there?] It is nice living in a place where locking your doors is optional. It is nice living in a place where there is high social trust. Being a part of an English-speaking minority in a French language majority is sometimes aggravating because not all the Quebecois are worldly or accepting of outsiders of any description. But they do not suffer from doubt that the main point of politics is to keep themselves in existence and able to speak French. I like the protective umbrella this offers to fend off the anti-white cultural and racial attacks of the likes of yourself, and the self-loathing of my Liberal apparatchik.

And if we could have just five percent of that attitude in English North America, we would spare ourselves a great deal of grief.

Yours sincerely,

 

Dalwhinnie

 

 

 

 

 

Terroirism

In the annals of complete rubbish, I would like to add my observations of the French obsession with “terroir”. My own view is of no importance and I declare that terroir is nonsense: French mystification about wine.

First,  my views are mere matters of taste, and you are completely free to believe passionately that wine is inescapably a matter of its “terroir”, the land from which it sprung, and that terroir matters extremely to the quality of wine.  Better men and thinkers than me, such as the late Roger Scruton, passionately believed in the importance of terroir. Nevertheless I maintain that “terroir” is nonsense on stilts.

The issue arises because of the success of standardized points systems for evaluating wines. The fellow who started the most successful of them, the late Ralph Parker, established a 100 point scale, which you can frequently spot attached to the label of a wine. The Parker scale offended a lot of wineophiles – as  I call them – because it rated more highly jammy flavour-forward wines like cabernets than twee or less forceful varietals like gamay, pinot noir and grenache-syrah-mourvedre blends. The latter are often referred to as GSM, which can be mistaken for a cellular telphone protocol, and the two taste about the same.

I had a cousin who made well-received and highly sucessful films. I asked him once what made for a good film, one that he would invest in. Without hesitation he said: “script script script script and director”. Likewise I shall say that what makes for a good wine is “grape grape grape grape grape and everything else, including soil.” A wine maker’s largest expenditure is for the grapes, not the storage, bottling, sales, transport or any other factor. This is reassuring to know. It means that, in the production of wine, the quality of the grape is of paramount importance, and lies not in post-grape-pressing fiddles with the chemistry of the fermentation.

Giles Fraser provoked this entry by an interesting article on Roger Scruton’s attitude towards wine and terroir, which is worth reading for the terroirist point of view. He cites the following:

“Writing in Decanter magazine, the geologist Professor Alex Maltman challenges the very idea that geology has any particular contribution to a wine’s taste. “Vines and wine,” he writes, “are not made from matter drawn from the ground, but almost wholly of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, abstracted from water and the air.”

Exactly. It is the grape and the vine which is the engine of production. I would never deny the influence of soil and climate, to the extent they have some. But it is mystification to believe that generations of monks clipping the vines, or other extraneous factors of society and history, influence the flavour. But if  you are entitled to believe in the Holy Ghost, you may also believe what you want about terroir. Just don’t try to snob me for my unbelief.

Taste, and taste alone, ought to be the criterion of quality. Contrary to this view, and  consistently with the terroirism, blind tastings are thought to be suspect, because they eliminate all the associations of politics, culture, sentiment and history. Fair enough, if you are a terroiriste: a Lebanese wine will forever carry with it associations, pleasant or not, of the Christian near-east, and Bordeaux something else entirely.

Yet even the most dedicated terroiriste would likely acknowledge that the doctrine lends itself to snobbery, mystification and lack of broad consumer acceptance.  Winesnobs are not concerned, of course. The French like to think they have a special relationship to wine that other wine producing Latin cultures do not. Their classification systems are pre-Revolutionary: local,  particularistic, and controlled by clans. No national equivalent of the metric system has ever been imposed on or accepted by the French wine grower. Thus you still get all kinds of information about terroir or region on a bottle of French wine and almost nothing about the grape varietal. Other countries, such as Australia, were forced to develop a national approach to wine marketing that emphasized the key pieces of knowledge required to assess wine: grape varietal, and year of production.

Most French wine derives from the pinot noir grape. When I tasted my first bottle of Australian pinot noir, I had a revelation. It tasted exactly like French wine made from pinot noir.

This revelation happened in about the year 2000 in a restaurant in Sydney, New South Wales. I can still remeber the moment. I was like Galileo having seen the moons of Jupiter with my primitive telescope. If pinot noir from Australia tasted like pinot noir from France, then the concept of terroir was bullshit, just as Galileo knew that Aristotle had to be bullshit (on this subject at least) if the planet Jupiter had moons. Simple as that.

Eighty percent of humans do not have a sufficiently accurate sense of taste to engage in the flavour discriminations necessary for accurate wine tasting. This is not the same as insights into how taste rankings can be manipulated by associations of one kind or another. This finding is more like eyesight: most people do not have the capacity to taste with the discriminations that only twnety percent of us can. My wife is among the 20%, I am among the 80%. Yet I am the joyful wine drinker, not she.

My classificiations have nothing to do with terroir. I go by nation of origin, grape and price. It provides a reliable matrix by which to judge from the label. Australian/cabernet-sauvignon/$15.50 tells me infinitely more that Pouligny-Montrachet/no information on varietal/$23.50. And if the label vapours on about the wine makers’ respect for the terroir, I put it back on the shelf with the thought that they are bullshitting me, especially if the wine is American.

If all these reflections are too serious, enjoy Peter Lorre and Vincent Price in a wine tasting contest. Remember, this wine goes well with this wine. Keep drinking. The screw top has had more to do with the success of wine than terroir. Discuss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“What?”

The Prime Minister this morning maintained in essence that his chief fault in the whole affair was not to make clear to his staff and his ministers that his door was always open for them to come and air their grievances and concerns. Jody Wilson Raybould might have availed herself of the opportunity for an open-hearted chat if only had had been clearer on this point.

No money exchanged hands in the recent Raybould affair. For some people, the absence of an illegal act means there is nothing to the scandal. This was the view of Barbara Yaffe in the Globe a few days ago. As soon as I saw that piece, I recollected that Gerald Butts or someone in the regime said that they could sprinkle op-eds around the system minimizing the damage.

The French press wonders, with some justification, why the English are in one their periodic outbursts of indignation. But they too have noticed that Trudeau has done great damage to the Liberal brand. I am reminded of a great scene in a movie about Queen Elizabeth 1 when she was being courted by the French Duc D’Orleans, successor tot he throne. His problem was that he was actively homosexual. When he failed to show up for a state dinner, Elizabeth and her chief counsellor Lord Burleigh visit the Duke of Orleans state apartments. They find a party going on, with the Duc d’Orleans dressed in the Queen’s clothes being courted by homosexuals. Outraged at this interruption of his good times, the Duc d’Orleans yells “Whaaat?” to Elizabeth, completely unembarrassed. As in, “what are doing here, you bitch, interrupting my private amusements?”.

“Yes I was wearing a dress”, said the Duc d’Orleans. “So what? It is what I do on private with my friends.”

I suddenly thought of Justin Trudeau, saying, in so many words: “What?” What scandal? Who me? You must be kidding!” Then after a few weeks of this, he realizes that maybe he has committed a small boo-boo. The English and their stupid ideas of rectitude.