Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen (photo from his Twitter/X account).
1,652 words
Eduard Habsburg
The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times
Manchester, N. H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2023
Unless you’re one of those people who reads the gossipy autobiographies of the British royal family, chances are it’s not often that you hold in your hands a book written by actual nobility. Thanks to Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Ambassador of Hungary to the Holy See, that privilege can be yours! Last year, His Imperial and Royal Highness — Wikipedia informs me that this is the appropriate way to address a Habsburg Archduke — wrote The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times.
It’s a pleasant little read. Right from the introduction, the Archduke displays a confident forthrightness, love and admiration towards his forebears, and an almost paternalistic demeanor. He makes it very clear that he is proud to be a Habsburg and that his book is not going to indulge the modern reader with lazy and tired criticisms of his family — a family that we’re supposed to deem out-of-place in today’s world, a useless relic from a bygone era. No, for Eduard Habsburg his lineage is not just a list of vaguely familiar names. His ancestors are not merely long-chinned men clad in armor, forever frozen in time on painted canvas. His family is a living, breathing thing that exists today in his beating heart and the hearts of his children and relatives. And he has a thing or two to say about the current state of Western civilization.
Them’s The Rules
There are plenty of books which attempt to impart wisdom and instruction by laying down a set of rules. Jordan Peterson gave the world his 12 Rules for Life in 2018. In 1998, Robert Greene revealed that there were no more and no fewer than The 48 Laws of Power. That same year John Maxwell wrote his 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Eduard Habsburg’s list of rules is considerably shorter. I won’t spoil all of them for you, but there are a few which are worth mentioning.
You can buy Anthony M. Ludovici’s Confessions of an Anti-Feminist here.
The very first rule is “Get Married and Have Lots of Children.” In this chapter, the Archduke shares with us the remarkable love story of Emperor Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy. When the two were 18 and 19 years old respectively, their parents arranged for them to wed. We often think that young people placed into an arranged marriage were unhappy and dreaded the day of their nuptials, but Maximilian and Mary seemed to fall in love immediately, even if at first they only knew each other through the exchange of yearningful letters.
Then Mary’s father, Charles the Duke of Burgundy, was killed in battle, and this left Mary alone and vulnerable to the machinations of King Louis XI. He mustered his army and marched on Burgundy, intending to make the territory his and make Mary a wife for his own son. Mary sent a letter to Maximilian pleading for him to save her from this fate. Charismatic young Max would raise a small army, but one which grew bigger and bigger as supporters joined him on his way to Ghent, where his betrothed was waiting desperately. Maximilian arrived just in time, wearing a golden suit of armor, and he and Mary got married before the French could do anything about it.
Eduard Habsburg uses this truly chivalric tale as a springboard to impart lessons on the importance of love, marriage, and procreation. He shares anecdotes about the relationship between Maximilian and Mary which makes them more relatable to us moderns. It’s a very strong opening for the book.
Another worthy rule is “Stand for Law and Justice.” Here, the Archduke makes the case that aristocratic families such as his were not out-of-touch bourgeois hedonists, and are not useless relics now. They were effective rulers in their time and we can learn valuable lessons from them. I think Mr. Habsburg gets a lot of things right in this chapter. He points out how so much of modern culture is a hollow fantasy centered on fighting injustice and inequality, and this is in large part due to the global influence of the American foundational myth and so many Hollywood films in which there is an evil empire or tyrant king. Because of this, he writes:
It may take effort for my American readers to accommodate their thinking to the idea that the very purpose of monarchies was to stand for law, justice, and peace for your people. Monarchs may not always have achieved this goal . . . but, nevertheless, it was the goal.
He goes on to say:
[Americans] haven’t seen, or considered, how future monarchs were raised; how they took their first responsibilities and finally took over from their parents; how they then raised children of their own. All they imagine is an oppressive tyrant, sitting on a faraway throne. But the populations in countries with active monarchs, who witness royalty directly or are raised to consider the history of royalty throughout the generations, benefit from a completely different perspective, and this creates a close social bond.
The Archduke argues that the royal families of Europe were raised first and foremost to serve and to fulfill the duties of their station. Throughout this chapter, he cites examples of how the Habsburgs had to get to know the nooks and crannies of their domain and the people they ruled, and understand in great depth the threats to them, as well as how they were trained to learn several languages and taught the examples of their forebears. While admitting that he may have a rose-tinted view, he says that he has firsthand experience of seeing these rigorous standards still being applied to the members of Europe’s royal families today.
To reinforce the point about the bond between monarch and subject, Habsburg tells of an encounter between Joseph II and a traveler stranded on the road. Joseph offered the traveler a place in his carriage, and the traveler, not knowing with whom he was now riding, began telling jokes and sharing stories with the Emperor, at one point even slapping the Emperor’s leg amidst cackles of laughter. When the traveler finally realized who he was speaking to, he was horrified by his vulgar behavior, but Joseph merely laughed and said, “I knew who I was, you didn’t. Nothing has changed. Let’s roll on!”
Earlier this month I wrote a review of another piece of pro-monarchy material from 2023, the French film Vaincre ou Mourir. As in my review, Habsburg implores us to consider what life would be like in a society governed by responsible individuals trained from birth on the art and craft of leadership. He recounts numerous examples of Habsburg rulers acting as intermediaries between disgruntled factions and as a check against all manner of the degeneracies that can afflict a nation. Even into the early twentieth century, when Habsburg rule was no longer as important as it once was, the Emperor Franz Joseph still maintained that the purpose of his office was “to protect my peoples from their politicians.” Habsburg ends this chapter by asking a question similar to the one I posed in my review of Vaincre ou Mourir: Despite all the flaws that one might accuse monarchy of having, who protects us from politicians today?
The book’s other rules are mostly focused on the importance of being Catholic. Obviously, this is a matter close to home for the Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See and descendant of a long line of Catholics. If you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll enjoy those chapters. I found them the least interesting, and also betraying the inherent Catholic tendency towards universalism and, ultimately, the liberalism to which Eduard Habsburg thinks he and his family represent an opposition.
This universalist tendency is also on display in a chapter which I did find very interesting, the one entitled “Believe in the Empire and in Subsidiarity.” This rule is perhaps the most politically-centered. I found it compelling and enjoyable because of the Archduke’s not-so-subtle winks and nods telling the reader, “Look, I’m unironically saying that monarchy is based and you’d love it.”
He puts forth trenchant criticisms of the European Union and the current trend of centralizing policy and lawmaking to higher and higher levels of power which are farther and farther away from the people who will live under these policies and laws. At the same time, he also sings from a rather liberal hymn sheet when he praises the Habsburg realm for essentially being a multicultural state done right. Still, I can forgive him for this. While being a hopeless romantic pining for the days of aristocracy and empire, he is also trying to be a realist and a pragmatist. The world is ever more connected and, in the case of Europe particularly, many nations do live under one flag: the blue and star-spangled banner of the EU.
The lesson to be learned from the Habsburg way of doing things is found in the concept of subsidiarity. We might not restore the monarchies or the Holy Roman Empire, but we might be able to restore some of their values and ideas regarding proper governance. At the very least, the bureaucrats in Brussels could learn to respect the lower levels of government (nation-states, regions, provinces, and townships) and understand the importance of empowering them. None of this seems likely to happen without the current ruling class being made to learn this lesson the hard way.
Eduard Habsburg’s book couldn’t have come out at a better time. He has noticed and seized upon the growing discontent of people all across the liberal democracies of the West. It’s hard to read The Habsburg Way and not come away with a sense of admiration for this famous family and a hint of longing for a ruling class more like them. So, mission accomplished, Your Imperial and Royal Highness.
27 comments
It sounds like a good read, but I as a commoner can’t help but feel that having a name like “Eduard Karl Joseph Michael Marcus Antonius Koloman Volkhold Maria Habsburg-Lothringen” is utterly ostentatious, or maybe even conceited, but I guess if you wear a regular-looking suit and tie you have to distinguish yourself as nobility some other way…
Unfortunately, as our aristocracy loses its sanction to rule I suspect it will eventually lose the ability. Many of them almost certainly are just feckless pretenders these days. Still, I agree that we probably need a return to aristocracy, because few politicians even pretend to have real worth.
Human nature being what it is, much of the aristocracy became corrupted, unfortunately. But even at their worst, they didn’t bring in boatloads of foreigners to replace their people. Even Ireland, ruled by an English king, remained genetically Irish for the hundreds of years under English rule. Under corrupt politicians, Ireland is becoming a mongrel nation. Unless something changes soon, mongrelization will be the fate of many more White nations.
People forget, however, that the Northern Irish are actually mostly Scots, imported into the north of the Island because they were Protestants. A Great Replacement of one White ethnos by another.
Heavily, but not mostly, or you wouldn’t have all those O’Neills, Kellys, Quinns in Antrim. Ireland and Scotland are only about 20 miles from each other, and the Scots largely came from Ireland to begin with, so they’re hardly foreign peoples with a Great Replacement.
I’m sure that the Irish Catholics who were being expelled and replaced by the Protestant Scots might have a somewhat different POV.
I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days in Budapest, where the architectural legacy of the Hapsburgs is a real pleasure to experience*, rebuilding the city after they managed to drive out generations of the life-sucking Turkish Muslims who were doing their ancient imperialist jihad routine. High marks to the Hapsburgs for both victory and aesthetics.
However, as is the usual case in this sublunary world, the Hapsburg treatment of Hungary and the Hungarians left very much to be desired. The native Hungarian aristocracy were just as bad. Here is one element, about the 18th century, which sounds painfully recognizable:
Centuries of Ottoman occupation and war had reduced Hungary’s population drastically, and large parts of the country’s southern half were almost deserted. A labor shortage developed as landowners restored their estates. In response, the Habsburgs began to colonize Hungary with large numbers of peasants from all over Europe, especially Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, and Germans. Many Jews also immigrated from Vienna and the empire’s Polish lands near the end of the 18th century. Hungary’s population more than tripled to 8 million between 1720 and 1787. However, only 39 percent of its people were Magyars, who lived mainly in the center of the country.
*To say nothing about the happy shock of the city being so demographically very European. I know of no large American cities, and few Western Europeans ones, which are so delightfully White.
Warszawa is not less white, and Riga is, and Vilnius is, and Tallinn is. But they are, of course, “not real Europeans”.
“not real Europeans”.
I don’t know who you are quoting, but that’s certainly not the attitude around here.
That’s the typical attitude in France and Germany where they do not consider s0-called “Middle and Eastern Europeans” as real Europeans.
Reminds me of the time I lived in Rome years ago. The Romans said they were the only real Italians. They considered everyone north of them to be Germans and everyone south of them to be Arabs.
I know of no human group, no matter how homogeneous they seem to an outsider, which does not quickly develop internal divisions. Hell, I know few individual humans without them!
Das Habsburger Reich unter dem Kaiser Franz Josef I und der Kaiserin Elisabeth von Bayern war die beste Staatlichkeitsform für alle Völker des Mittel- und Osteuropas. Alles, was danach kam und was auch jetzt da existiert, ist bedeutend schlechter.
Google Translate: The Habsburg Empire under Emperor Franz Josef I and Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria was the best form of statehood for all the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. Everything that came after and that exists now is significantly worse.
“At the same time, he also sings from a rather liberal hymn sheet when he praises the Habsburg realm for essentially being a multicultural state done right.” It was a different type of multiculturalism. There were no Africans or middle eastern Muslims involved. The groups were different European ethnic groups, or nationalities, living together in one empire. Multiculturalism, which has been championed for the last five or six decades by those in power, has been greatly praised, or severely criticized, depending on the time period, and that praise or criticism had little to do with justice. It was a means to accomplish something entirely different.
At the end of WW I, the victorious allies wanted to weaken the two German states, Germany, and Austria-Hungary (previously known as the Austrian Empire for centuries). They broke up both countries to weaken them. They championed what they called “self determination”, claiming they would create separate states so each ethnic group would rule themselves. This was their claim to being moral. But “self-determination” only applied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, and not the British or French Empires. The British and French had no intention of freeing India, Algeria or the vast territories they held in Asia and Africa, and in fact, greatly added to their empires after WW I. They also broke up the Ottoman Empire and added much of the middle east to their countries. After WW II, they claimed the opposite was good. Now multiculturalism was good, where all different groups should live together. Now, this is claimed to be moral, and “self determination” is racist, unless your Israel. Notice, also, how Viktor Orban and Hungary are now treated for being Hungarians, and not Europeans.
There are also differences in how empires are run. In Austria-Hungary, each language group had representation in the country’s parliament. Indians, Algerians and others did not have representation in the French or British parliaments.
The victorious allies created a real mess after WW I with their jealousy of the Germans. Germany was not a multicultural country. It was one of the most homogeneous countries in the world, but it had a small population of minorities. No country is 100% homogeneous.
The allies claimed Alsatians were not German. They like to say they have their own language, “Alsatian”, because it’s a dialect of German. But all of Germany had different dialects. Before Germany became a unified country, there were many dialects spoken and some unintelligible to different Germans. The same as Swiss-German. Someone from Germany can’t understand that language. So Hochdeutsch (High-German), the Prussian dialect, is used so all German speakers can understand each other, including those in Alsace and Switzerland. It is not uncommon for a language to have different dialects that are unintelligible to other speakers of that language. Italy had the same situation before they became a unified country.
In Germany there were some ethnic Poles, and where there was a higher concentration, they took that land from Germany and gave it to Poland. In the northeast, Germany had bordered the Russian Empire until 1919, and they took the Memelland, where some Lithuanians lived, and made it a so called “free city”, until Lithuania attacked and took over the territory in 1923, and the allies said nothing. When there was a vote held in the Memelland, the vote revealed many ethnic Lithuanians felt German and wanted to be part of Germany. The results were a strong victory for re-unification with Germany. They even took the Saarland and wanted to make it French. When a vote was held on which country they wanted to belong too, 98% of them voted for re-unification with Germany. They were all Germans.
Austria-Hungary was different. They had many nationalities. After WW I they took a chunk of land from Austria and created a country that had never existed before – Czechoslovakia. With that name, they concealed, that Germans (actually Austrians) were the second largest ethnic group in the country, after the Czechs. Germans made up about 23% of the country. Slovaks were also a sizable population, but Czechs were the largest group. But, none of these groups were asked if they wanted to be be torn from the empire they had always belonged to. 3.5 million Germans in the Sudetenland didn’t want to be part of a new country and demanded the right to unify with Germany, which they did. Slovaks, then also demanded independence, which they got, and they allied with Germany in WW II. For their trouble, at the end of WW II, the 3 million plus Germans had their homes and everything else stolen from them, and they were driven off of their lands. Czechs moved into their homes.
Czechoslovakia was reconstituted until it broke up for good in 1992, when Slovaks demanded independence again. It was the country nobody wanted.
Yugoslavia was another fiasco the jealous allies forced on people. They took lands of Croatia, Slovenia and other lands from Austria, combined them with Serbia, and formed the new country of Yugoslavia, another disaster, the French, British and Americans have never been made to pay for. Croats and Slovenes had good relations with Austrians and Germans, and fought on the German side in WW II. There was bitter fighting in the war. After WW II, the country was reconstituted after many more were killed at the end of the war. Forty five years later, in 1990, fighting broke out again, and Yugoslavia broke up for good this time.
The Russian imperialists instigated the separatism among Slav peoples of Austria-Hungary with this stupid Panslavism, and also American Intelligence, using Czech emigree traitors, tried to break this state down.
That state was already crumbling long ago because of the greed of the Germans and Hungarians. Czechs only dethroned the Habsburgs from the throne of the Czech kingdom and occupied Slovakia, where a very similar language was spoken. Slovaks wanted to be part of Czechoslovakia initially and only later wanted more autonomy. They definitely didnt want to stay in Hungary. Russians did not need to send any agents to get the Czechs to reject the Habsburgs.
That’s Pangerman nonsense. A country called Czechoslovakia may not have existed until 1918, but the Czech state has always been there and has never ceased to exist. The Habsburg Empire was in fact a union of several independent monarchies with Czech kingdom of Bohemia (the Bohemian Crown) at its core. If Czechs had not elected a Habsburg prince called Ferdinand I as their king in 1526 in order to fight off the Turks, the Austrian Empire would not have existed at all. Czechs merely dethroned the Habsburgs in 1918 and annexed areas of Slovakia where a very similar language is spoken. It is not true that Slovaks did not want a common state with Czechs at that time.
Germans in Bohemia were descendants of settlers from various Germanic speaking regions who were settled by the Bohemian nobility in the less fertile areas of the kingdom in the 13th century. They were always subjects of the Bohemian state and the territory where they lived never had any legal personality. Their identity as Sudeten Germans did not emerge until the early 20th century. In fact, they inhabited a number of disconnected territories on the outskirts of the country. These areas could not be geographically separated from the rest of the Czech state without making Czechia a non-viable rump state. The expulsion of these Germans after 1945 was a consequence of their disloyal and hostile behaviour and in retaliation for the destruction of Czechoslovakia and also for its occupation by the Third Reich. Before that Germans had all imaginable political rights in Czechoslovakia as any other citizen. But they thought they could lord over Czechs (with the help of the Reich Germans) and it backfired on them badly.
But that is all a history long past. Today’s Czechs and Germans have no problem with each other. From a WN viewpoint if the Sudetenland belonged to Germany today, the German government would certainly send Muslim refugees in large numbers there, which will probably happen anyway.
From a WN viewpoint if the Sudetenland belonged to Germany today, the German government would certainly send Muslim refugees in large numbers there, which will probably happen anyway.
That’s surely correct. The same could be said also about Schlesien and Ostpreussen, which now belongs to Poland. When hypothetically Russia agrees with Germany to change the Polish borders, i.e. to give to the Poles former Polish lands of the Western Ukraine back and demands for this from the Poles to give former German lands back to the FRG, also, to restore the borders of the August, 1939, then you could suggest that in Schlesien and Ostpreussen would the refugees from Sham (Syria) be settled. So it is better when these lands stay Polish.
No, the Germans, nor the Slovaks didn’t have the same rights under the nationalistic Czechs that were put in charge of the country. That’s why they both demanded independence from it. Maybe the Czechs that went along with the WW I victors to steal a large peace of land from Austria-Hungary and create a new state were traitors. The Germans in the Sudetenland and the Slovaks did not want to be a part of that bastard country. Czechs weren’t asked either, but the allies put the most nationalistic Czechs in charge. The “legal personality” of the Germans that lived in Bohemia and Moravia was the same as any other German that was part of the Austrian Empire, later the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
When the famous university in Prague was founded in 1348, the faculty was predominantly German, and German was the language used at the university. In other words, the famous university in Prague was founded by Germans. Until the 1800s, German was the predominant language in Prague, Prague’s history is just as much German, as it is Czech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21wpBoISoco&t=572s
The Czechs were not asked if they wanted to be part of a separate country either, when Czechoslovakia was created. The WW I allies that created the new state made sure to never hold a plebiscite (vote) to ask the population if they wanted to be part of the new state, because the population would have rejected it. The country’s short history shows that. Many Czechs were not German hating bigots, but WW II lies have affected the hearts of people’s all across eastern Europe that welcomed German troops as liberators from Judeo-Bolshevism. Since 1991 eastern Europe got a new dose of anti-German propaganda, when the Holocaust hoax was introduced to them, and the lies have become part of the school curriculum in eastern European countries to spread more false history. Czechs and Germans intermarried too. I met a beautiful Czech in the US once. She was 1/4 German. A Czech actress married the German boxer Max Schmelling in the 1930s. This was not unusual.
“At a mass meeting in Prague, 200,000 Czechs pledge loyalty to their homeland and to the German Reich. This rally in Wenceslas Square, near the historic statute of St. Wenceslas, is on July 3, 1942 — four weeks after the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, SS General and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia.
Emanuel Moravec, Czech Minister of Education and National Enlightenment, addresses the crowd. He concludes with an expression of confidence in a better future for the Czech people, and of appreciation for the “new Europe,” the “National Socialist revolution,” “our leader, Adolf Hitler,” and “our state president, Dr. Hacha.”
Emil Hacha, Czech State President, is present, along with the Mayor of Prague and the mayors of many other cities and towns of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. The meeting concludes with the vast crowd singing the Czech national hymn. From a Czech newsreel report, July 1942. In Czech. No subtitles.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wiB1fwR6Tw
A Czech actress
was a lover of Dr. Goebbels.
Thanks.
You’re mixing things up. Czechs had an ambivalent relationship with the Habsburg Empire. The Austrian Habsburgs were descendants of the former Czech royal families by female line. They were legitimate Czech rulers thanks to the royal succession and the election by the Bohemian Diet. A number of Habsburg emperors enjoyed great popularity among the Czechs. For example, Joseph II is still very popular in the Czech Republic as an enlightened monarch.
Problems arose mainly after 1867 and 1871. Austria became a constitutional monarchy and was actually divided into two parts – Austria-Hungary. The Czechs came up empty handed in this power division despite their loyality to the Habsburgs in the War against Prussia in 1866. This made the Czechs very angry and they began to distrust Vienna. In addition to that Germans in Austria and Bohemia began to yearn more and more for a unification with the new German Reich. Gradually they started to see their capital in Berlin. This was not acceptable to the Czechs and they began to think about secession from Austria as it became more pro German.
The final break came during the First World War, when Viennese politicians established a military dictatorship in Bohemia and began to oppress the Czechs. It was clear that if the Central Powers won, Austria (and Bohemia) would essentially merge with Germany. Czech soldiers asked themselves why they should support such a thing. Many of them crossed to the other side of the front and gradually formed the Czechoslovak Legion. Thanks to this, Czechoslovakia had the status of a minor Entete power with its own army and could set its own conditions during peace negotiations in 1919.
In October 1918, no Czechs wanted to remain in the monarchy, among other reasons, because it had collapsed of its own. After the defeats in Italy it was the Hungarians who were the first to break away and the Hungarian regiments were leaving the front for home. The Czechs declared an independent Czechoslovak Republic in Prague on 28 October and dethroned the Habsburgs. Later, the leader of the foreign Czechs, the philosopher Masaryk, returned from American exile and became president of the new state. Some Germans in the Sudetenland didn’t like it. They caused unrest and wanted to join German-speaking Austria. But the Czech army quickly pacified these areas. Similarly, the Czechs occupied Slovakia and defended it against Béla Kun. The Poles also wanted to conquer the county of Těšín from the Czechs, but they were repulsed and the matter ended in the division of the region. As for the behaviour of some collaborators during the Second World War, it does not indicate any sympathy of the majority of Czechs with the German occupation.
Lida Baarova
She died only 24 years ago, when she was 86 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADda_Baarov%C3%A1
The partition of monarchichal empires was conducted in three main phases, that of the Spanish Empire from 1810-1898, China and the Central Powers including the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s and that of the Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese and residual Spanish, Italian and German Empires from 1944 to ca 1975. Whatever the objectives of the states which broke up these empires there was an overarching objective of a world of interdependent liberal democratic states reliant on international finance and a prohibition on territorial gains by said states, Israel excepted of course.
Once this was largely achieved, demographic destruction of the White race was commenced in earnest. It seems most likely that there has been a guiding entity behind this sequence of events which is in some sense supranational. That so many elite Europeans in Europe and America seem to be involved at a fairly senior level I find perplexing. Is it a case of “they know not what they do” or do they imagine themselves to be like Hugo Drax’s space colonists (Moonraker 1977) who plan to repopulate the Earth, perhaps on the proviso they marry into Jewry in accordance with Coudenhove-Kalergi’s doctrines? It’s only a theory of course and how do they plan to deal with China, their somewhat renegade golem?
There was a bond of sorts between the peasant class of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the ruling Bourbons. As an indicator, children of peasants were often named after the king.
It was the peasant class that supported the monarchy when the Piedmontese from Northern Italy and their foreign allies invaded the South during the time of the American Civil war. Peasants formed various and separate outlaw bands to resist the occupation. Support for the invasion came from the Southern merchant and educated classes.
There is something to be said for monarchy. One knows who to blame if things go south.
Francis Parker Yockey made the point ─ usually lost in our age where Marxist and extreme-Libertarian interpretations of the U.S. Constitution are the norm ─ that the Federalists were motivated not by greed, as the socialist Columbia University History Professor Charles A. Beard argued, but instead by the ancient virtues of noblesse oblige, the rule of law, and the eternal love for State and Nation (and Race as I would argue). Yockey singles out Alexander Hamilton for praise, the apprentice of General Washington himself.
This sense of Nationalist virtue is outlined fairly well in the Preamble of the Constitution, and with the possible exception of the word Liberty then in vogue, might have been written for the benefit of an ancient Republic ─
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Some strongly diasgreed with the idea of a unified Nation-State and wanted thirteen “Switzerlands,” each provincial and weak, and probably utlimately too tempting for foreign powers despite the buffer of a great ocean and an enormous and nearly-empty continent full of land and resources.
In the end, although the Constitution was ratified, it was too weak to overcome the inevitable factionalism that would come.
And the document failed to put into black-letter law what was already understood at the time, that citizens were to be “free White people of good character,” as spelled out in the Naturalization Act of 1790.
On the other hand, there is no vaccine against subversion hundreds of years in the making save for daily vigilance.
Many proclaim the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as the origins of this subversion. There is some truth to this; we all know where (((radical))) egalitarianism leads, even though we have hardly even begun to plumb those sordid depths.
Nevertheless, I find this common WN view overly simplistic.
The American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell once wrote that had he been born over a hundred years earlier, he would have sat on the Left ideological side of the Assembly during the French Revolutionary times.
That means that he would have been in opposition to the corruption and dogmatism of the three Estates: the Monarchy, the Clergy, and the Bourgeoisie.
But once systemic reforms had been made, Rockwell would have returned as a man of the Right and in support of Authority, Law & Order and traditional virtues, and against the Jacobins and Jews who were out-of-control totalitarians who thought that all ideology should be fine-tuned by the guillotine.
I don’t want to give too much credit to the Freemasons, but their opposition to the Latin Church was vital for change. It was an organization that allowed Protestant businessmen to network ─ and so long as sordid criminal secrets were not kept, probably harmless.
The lodges did not permit atheists, not that someone like myself would be interested in joining, but this was an effective counterweight to Papal machinations, the same universalistic values that are turning Ireland today into a race-mixing hellhole.
In the 1980s, I wondered how Nïgger-loving Irish activists like the Rock music group U2’s Bono, who thought that Apartheid (or Apart-Hate as he said it) was like gassing the Jews, got to that stunted mentality. Obviously it is not okay to be White.
In any case, the First Amendment is notable for not elevating any particular sect ─ and at least giving voice to protect the rights of nonbelievers like myself.
I’m old enough to remember when the Ku Klux Klan did not allow Catholics but changed that policy after Vatican II when the Pope lost his divine infallibility, and politially after John F. Kennedy thoughtfully declared that he believed in the separation of Church and State, declaring that he believed that this arrangement was the best for our society (and Western societies in general as I would argue). The Thirty Years War is finally over.
Rockwell said that he was an atheist or agnostic but that White people had earned the right to freedom of conscience with their blood and brains, and that of those that came before them. So he supported Whites being Christians if that is what they wanted and for as long as they wanted to be.
I don’t agree with throwing out the good things of the Enlightenment and the Constitution along with purging the toxic bathwater that threatens the health and future of our Race.
The Constitution purported to create a Aristocracy of Merit. How well the Founding Fathers succeed in this is a matter of debate. We certainly have nothing of the sort today because our elites have utterly failed us; they are corrupt at best and subversive or treasonous at worst.
We have lost our way as a people and race and we do not even know what Meritocracy means, nor how we could define it objectively. It is not a spreadsheet drawn up by a nappy-haired DEI administrator somewhere, of course.
Thanks for this thought-provoking review of Herr Hapsburg.
More thoughts later …
🙂
Seen from the historical point of view, there is no reason to say that left-wing politicians cannot also be nationalists and patriots. If we take the European political left during the revolutions of 1848, so those Leftists were both leftist and nationalist, while the Right represented then a feudal-Catholic reaction whose time had passed. The French of 1789 were unambiguously nationalists. The Italians Garibaldi and Mazzini were both Left and nationalists. The Pole Pilsudski was a socialist, and at the same time he was an ardent fighter for the independence of Poland. The Türk Atatürk was a man of leftist views, and the current Kemalist party CHP in Turkey is considered as social democratic, which does not prevent it from being completely nationalist. The Ukrainian Petlyura in 1917-1920 was a socialist and a nationalist at the same time, and Mussolini was also initially a socialist and a nationalist.
For the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, being a leftist and a socialist meant defending the rights and interests of the working masses of one’s own nation, not of a some foreign one. Only much later, somewhere in the 1960s, when the European and American workers received enough rights and enough material benefits, the left forces gradually lost their national-progressive character and switched (or were deliberately switched) to the defense of various kinds of strange outsiders – national and sexual minorities, for example, which is why the modern Left has lost its nationalistic character, turning into accomplices of the world’s globalist elites. But the modern Right is also mainly supporters of globalist ideology, and differs from the Left only in tactics. Thus, the modern political split is not between left and right, but between globalists and anti-globalists.
Eduard is one my favorite tweeple and we’ve exchanged a word now and again. I might have bought this book a while back but when he first showed it off on Twitter he was sitting there having tea with the (soon to be exiting) Henry Kissinger. If ever you sort through the thickets of his family tree you’ll find he’s not going to be Kaiser anytime soon. He’s of the same main branch (Habsburg-Lorraine) as the last Austrian emperors but at a remove of two or three centuries.
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