(209) Pītaḥ

I have been many things in my life, but I have never been a liberal. Liberals are proto-communists, but what’s annoying about them is that they play the innocent. I saw this again today in an essay by Hilaire Belloc, himself a stalwart in the Liberal Party. Belloc’s essay was against socialism, a plea in the 1900s for Liberals to rally to their core principles at a time of crisis (some relation to “moderate centrists” and “the woke” today). At the same time, Belloc derided the fact that 2/3 of British land was owned by “12,000 families” and that these families provided the judges, lawyers, soldiers, priests, academics, and civil servants who ran the country (empire). Their estates needed to be cut down, by Liberals, to create an “English peasantry”.

You know, it might make you pause to think if, when you live in a country with a vast world empire and when that country was responsible for the unprecedented Industrial Revolution, whether the “12,000 family” system is actually quite such a bad thing after all—I mean, it got you to this point (Belloc is keen to note how much wealth capital has created for the country). Yet no, Belloc was very keen on social justice—and would later write for a magazine of that name. So the obvious reality didn’t interest him.

Neither could he infer that if you attack the “12,000 families” then it is really only so long before the proletariat—their representatives—do the same to you. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander—the same arguments used to strip privileges from the 12,000 families can be as easily applied to the middle-class liberals. Belloc didn’t get it at all—once you start to play the game, you can’t stop. Liberals annoy because they set up the conditions—the chaos—whereby Hitler and Stalin come to power but then lament these conditions; they weep and moan—then start the same process again. They’re so “innocent”.