The Undying Revolution

"Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population." — Sunday Times (London), 24 May 2009

William F. Jasper’s article ("The New Jacobin Elite") supports the hoary maxim "Everything old is new again":

The spirit of the French Revolution continues to stalk our planet as virulently as ever, an ideological plague that refuses to die and continues to be transmitted from one generation to another.

Can the revolution in France be making a comeback, at least in analog form?

From the Duc d’Orleans’ Palais Royal these Orleaniste Jacobins unleashed their agents to terrorize, de-Christianize, and depopulate France, in the name of “reason” and the creation of a “Republic of Virtue” based on “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Christianity was outlawed and churches were closed and/or desecrated; crucifixes were trampled on; Catholic Mass was forbidden; priests and nuns were butchered, exiled, or forced to apostatize. More than 300,000 people, including many women and children, were slaughtered — by guillotine, mass drownings, “fusillades,” and other inventive means of extermination. But this was barely a start; the Jacobins had plans to kill between eight and eighteen million more (one-third to two-thirds of the nation’s human population) as part of their green plan to depopulate France and turn its people from the Christian worship of the Creator God to the pagan New Age worship of Creation. Thus were the orgies of bloodletting accompanied by appeals to the Jacobins’ new environmental theology: “Perish forever the memory of the priests! Perish forever Christian superstition! Long live the sublime religion of Nature!”

Jasper points to the almost completely unreported meeting of wealthy elitists last month who seem to have internalized the aspirations of those 18th-century elitists who felt — because of their wealth, intellects, and social positions — that they knew how to direct social evolution better than the masses in whose name, ironically enough, they were willing to commit outrages against mankind if their secular materialism called for it:

These are the folks [David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey] who have been the leading private financiers of the global depopulation and de-Christianization campaigns, the promoters of abortion, homosexuality, and New Age environmentalism. And in Barack Hussein Obama they have found their Camille Desmoulins, a handsome young lawyer with oratorical skills to push their agenda — all the while declaiming against the rich and powerful.

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Doing the Con-con

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power. — Thomas Jefferson (1820)

Larry Greenley’s article ("Dangers of a Constitutional Convention") cautions the common people not to be too quick to try to alter the nation’s Founding Document out of a sense of frustration with the recent federal lurch towards total government:

Although attempting to get the federal government back under control by amending the Constitution is very appealing to many conservatives and constitutionalists, it does not address the primary problem. The primary problem is that the three branches of the federal government do not adhere to the Constitution as originally intended by the Founders …. with the advent of the Obama presidential administration combined with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, we’re now witnessing almost daily naked displays of raw, unconstitutional usurpations of power by the federal government with regard to states, businesses, and individuals. In this environment, simply amending the Constitution would not be sufficient to get the government back under control. However, there are numerous individuals [e.g., Glenn Beck] and groups [e.g., the Tea Party activists] that still advocate constitutional amendments as the solution.

Greenley feels that approach could open a Pandora’s box of potential abuse that could conceivably backfire:

While it would be perfectly constitutional to convene an Article V constitutional convention, it would not be prudent. Given the present-day general lack of knowledge of both the Constitution and the original intent of our Founders, along with the inordinate influence over our political processes by very biased elites, the chances that a modern-day constitutional convention and subsequent ratification process could change our Constitution for the worse are too great to risk calling for such a convention.

The problems Americans experience with government don’t originate with the constitutional system but with the systematic, persistent, and wrong-headed attempts by elitist politicians to circumvent it for their own selfish ends.

—Mike Gray