SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY -3
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
But perhaps nowhere does M. de La Mahotiere show the difference between England and Europe more clearly than in his explanation of just how “The Common Market really is a ‘Community’ within itself” (page 16), a statement that he substantiates by listing its institutions- the Assembly, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Committee etc. And one of the things that Brexit supporters object to most about the EU is that indeed the Common Market did create a sense of community amongst the people at the top, restoring the Greco-Roman idea of a ruling elite bonding together in common self-interest in the courts and corridors of power where indeed “The pen is mightier than the sword” because the as long as “the establishment” sticks together it is well placed to play “divide and rule” because only their relationship with the Superstructure gives any sense of common cause to the masses. And in the light of the widespread use of the slogan “The pen is mightier than the sword” in 2015 it is worth understanding what it means.
It seems that the phrase was first used in a play about Cardinal Richelieu written in the late 1830s, and then associated with not dissimilar assertions by Oliver Cromwell in Thomas Carlyle’s 1840s campaign in the 1840s that championed the cause of great heroes who were prepared to seize hold of the powers of the State and courageously drive through what they saw as divinely progressive change “for the greater good”, even at the cost of violence, bloodshed and atrocity against those who opposed them. And historically Richelieu rose to prominence before Cromwell playing a leading role in creating “The Ascendancy of France” in Europe of the Seventeenth Century. It was this Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, brought up as a Jesuit “Soldier of Christ, basically ruling France in the name of Louis XIII, who must be held responsible for French policy during the Thirty Years War which produced “the German Holocaust” which was estimated to have killed one third of all of the people of German Europe one way or another. And as a ‘Man of God’ in command of a sovereign state he only needed his pen.
But in 2015 most people using the phrase associated it with the great French writer Voltaire the ‘leading light’ of the European Enlightenment because Voltaire had been inspired by his exile in England in the aftermath of Macaulay’s “Glorious Bloodless Revolution”, where he was struck by the whole English idea of the essential unity of one “common people” and the very different attitude to ‘commoners’ than the prevalent ones in France, that had made it necessary for him to flee for his life. These were the years when ‘the great commoner’, Sir Robert Walpole really established the idea of government by a Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Prime Minister having to not only be a member of the House of Commons, but also to command the support of a majority of that House. Such things were practically inconceivable in France.
Moreover as a man of genius himself Voltaire was struck by the massive demonstration of respect from all sections of English society on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, whose work in Physics had done much to create a new sense of order, stability and predictability to the not only life on Earth, but to the Solar System that began to emerge with Copernicus revelation that the Earth moved around the Sun, not the reverse, but to the whole universe. The oneness of English common law reflected a wider oneness in the application of the Laws of Physics: and Newtonian Physics created a sense of a Steady State Universe that underpinned the self-confidence of Western Civilization for at least the next two hundred years, a self-confidence that arguably reached its zenith in 1945 when the boffins and technocrats who were the ‘high priests’ of a new Civilization of Science and Technology claimed the spoils of victory in the Second World War and therewith the right to build another Brave New World, like Monnet’s France and the EU.
Voltaire’s “English Letters” kicked off the whole European Enlightenment which in general terms may be defined as a collective endeavour to apply Human Reason to the challenge of identifying the universal and ‘self-evident’ laws of ‘the Creator’ so that they could be harnessed to existing State machinery and traditions, replacing the outmoded “Old Regimes” almost inevitably as a first stage by an “Enlightened Despotism”: and Voltaire’s innovatory study of “The Reign of Louis XIV” that paid tribute to the way that “The Sun King”, by creating the whole court complex at Versailles as a place that would dazzle, and fascinate all of France by its magnificence as the source of all meaningful life, just as the Sun was the source of all life on Earth, had created at least one powerful centripetal force led on quite naturally to the emergence of a pool of radical new thinking that was encyclopaedic in its scope and ambitions, as almost an “alternative government in waiting” centred largely on the great salons and the artistic and cultural life of Paris, the artistic and cultural heart of Europe, while the courts and corridors of power at Versailles became increasingly remote and alien.
But then as C. Delisle Burns summed it up: “The State …in France, as a unifying force, at first a king’s inheritance, has been traditionally separate in thought from the nation…Thus, the most difficult task of the French Revolution was the unification of the laws; because the territory called France was divided into so many jealous and exclusive units by the customary laws of the early Middle Ages and laws of the local lords in later times. As Voltaire wrote in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, about France before A.D.1789: “In one single province of Europe, between the Alps and the Pyrenees, there are more than one hundred and forty small peoples who call themselves compatriots, but who are really foreigners one to another.” (page 358)
In the crisis in 1789, however, the representatives of the Third Estate, the French ‘commoners’, declared themselves to be the National Assembly and started sweeping away all the old laws, along with the old years, and months and the weights and measures in the Enlightened spirit of revolutionary universalism, that led logically to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that sought to spread the liberation of the common people to the rest of Europe, eventually leading to the military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte in a France in which all domestic affairs were regulated by the new “Code Napoleon” that still means that, unlike legal professionals in much of the English-speaking world, French lawyers do not have to worry too much about all the English Case Law, which is the massive heritage of our grass roots democracy within a judicial system based on the right to be judged only by your ‘peers’.
But perhaps nowhere does M. de La Mahotiere show the difference between England and Europe more clearly than in his explanation of just how “The Common Market really is a ‘Community’ within itself” (page 16), a statement that he substantiates by listing its institutions- the Assembly, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, the Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Committee etc. And one of the things that Brexit supporters object to most about the EU is that indeed the Common Market did create a sense of community amongst the people at the top, restoring the Greco-Roman idea of a ruling elite bonding together in common self-interest in the courts and corridors of power where indeed “The pen is mightier than the sword” because the as long as “the establishment” sticks together it is well placed to play “divide and rule” because only their relationship with the Superstructure gives any sense of common cause to the masses. And in the light of the widespread use of the slogan “The pen is mightier than the sword” in 2015 it is worth understanding what it means.
It seems that the phrase was first used in a play about Cardinal Richelieu written in the late 1830s, and then associated with not dissimilar assertions by Oliver Cromwell in Thomas Carlyle’s 1840s campaign in the 1840s that championed the cause of great heroes who were prepared to seize hold of the powers of the State and courageously drive through what they saw as divinely progressive change “for the greater good”, even at the cost of violence, bloodshed and atrocity against those who opposed them. And historically Richelieu rose to prominence before Cromwell playing a leading role in creating “The Ascendancy of France” in Europe of the Seventeenth Century. It was this Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, brought up as a Jesuit “Soldier of Christ, basically ruling France in the name of Louis XIII, who must be held responsible for French policy during the Thirty Years War which produced “the German Holocaust” which was estimated to have killed one third of all of the people of German Europe one way or another. And as a ‘Man of God’ in command of a sovereign state he only needed his pen.
But in 2015 most people using the phrase associated it with the great French writer Voltaire the ‘leading light’ of the European Enlightenment because Voltaire had been inspired by his exile in England in the aftermath of Macaulay’s “Glorious Bloodless Revolution”, where he was struck by the whole English idea of the essential unity of one “common people” and the very different attitude to ‘commoners’ than the prevalent ones in France, that had made it necessary for him to flee for his life. These were the years when ‘the great commoner’, Sir Robert Walpole really established the idea of government by a Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the Prime Minister having to not only be a member of the House of Commons, but also to command the support of a majority of that House. Such things were practically inconceivable in France.
Moreover as a man of genius himself Voltaire was struck by the massive demonstration of respect from all sections of English society on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, whose work in Physics had done much to create a new sense of order, stability and predictability to the not only life on Earth, but to the Solar System that began to emerge with Copernicus revelation that the Earth moved around the Sun, not the reverse, but to the whole universe. The oneness of English common law reflected a wider oneness in the application of the Laws of Physics: and Newtonian Physics created a sense of a Steady State Universe that underpinned the self-confidence of Western Civilization for at least the next two hundred years, a self-confidence that arguably reached its zenith in 1945 when the boffins and technocrats who were the ‘high priests’ of a new Civilization of Science and Technology claimed the spoils of victory in the Second World War and therewith the right to build another Brave New World, like Monnet’s France and the EU.
Voltaire’s “English Letters” kicked off the whole European Enlightenment which in general terms may be defined as a collective endeavour to apply Human Reason to the challenge of identifying the universal and ‘self-evident’ laws of ‘the Creator’ so that they could be harnessed to existing State machinery and traditions, replacing the outmoded “Old Regimes” almost inevitably as a first stage by an “Enlightened Despotism”: and Voltaire’s innovatory study of “The Reign of Louis XIV” that paid tribute to the way that “The Sun King”, by creating the whole court complex at Versailles as a place that would dazzle, and fascinate all of France by its magnificence as the source of all meaningful life, just as the Sun was the source of all life on Earth, had created at least one powerful centripetal force led on quite naturally to the emergence of a pool of radical new thinking that was encyclopaedic in its scope and ambitions, as almost an “alternative government in waiting” centred largely on the great salons and the artistic and cultural life of Paris, the artistic and cultural heart of Europe, while the courts and corridors of power at Versailles became increasingly remote and alien.
But then as C. Delisle Burns summed it up: “The State …in France, as a unifying force, at first a king’s inheritance, has been traditionally separate in thought from the nation…Thus, the most difficult task of the French Revolution was the unification of the laws; because the territory called France was divided into so many jealous and exclusive units by the customary laws of the early Middle Ages and laws of the local lords in later times. As Voltaire wrote in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, about France before A.D.1789: “In one single province of Europe, between the Alps and the Pyrenees, there are more than one hundred and forty small peoples who call themselves compatriots, but who are really foreigners one to another.” (page 358)
In the crisis in 1789, however, the representatives of the Third Estate, the French ‘commoners’, declared themselves to be the National Assembly and started sweeping away all the old laws, along with the old years, and months and the weights and measures in the Enlightened spirit of revolutionary universalism, that led logically to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that sought to spread the liberation of the common people to the rest of Europe, eventually leading to the military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte in a France in which all domestic affairs were regulated by the new “Code Napoleon” that still means that, unlike legal professionals in much of the English-speaking world, French lawyers do not have to worry too much about all the English Case Law, which is the massive heritage of our grass roots democracy within a judicial system based on the right to be judged only by your ‘peers’.
