The Royal Flush

There was a long period of European history in which the dominant Roman church was allied with rich landholders, dukes, earls, barons, kings and queens. For a very long time, after the demise of Roman hegemony, landholders were calling the shots in any dispute about who is in charge or who is going to establish the bounds of civil and military society and culture. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this hegemony began to fall apart. A period of philosophical and political revision, the Enlightenment, illuminated the minds of many thinking people. Those rowdy Americans lit the flames of Liberty when they declared independence from King George the third of Britain. Not long afterward, the working people of France caught that same flame of Liberty and the supposed Equality of all men and women. The French radicals mounted a revolution in 1789 and ultimately beheaded their king and queen. In the middle of the 1800’s, Karl Marx presented his theory about ultimate revolution, fomented by the working people, who would overthrow the the royals and the rich landowners and the owners of the factories and replace government and capitalist enterprises with a new type of governance, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working people. The hot wind of Liberty and revolution was still blowing across the Continent when the royal houses of Europe ignited a firestorm of war in 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand was shot dead by a Serbian nationalist in Sarejevo, Bosnia.

But the royal regimes of Europe, accustomed to being in charge, ignited a clusterf**k of military destruction that ultimately inflicted four years of death and destruction on the people of Europe.

It just so happened that, during that time, 1914-18, the Marxist doctrines of the dictatorship of the working people were being actualized, up in Russia, where the working people were getting sick and tired of being exploited by the czar and his lap dogs of rich landowners and warmakers.The Marxist doctrine of dictatorship of the proletariat was applied to the Russian workers, who were mostly peasants laboring in vast estates, serving the landlords of the vast Russian steppes, where industrialization had not yet taken hold of society and industry. Long story short, the Russian radicals executed the czar and his family, then went on to terrorize the countryside, herding the Russian people into a new regimen of dictatorship by the working people, as Marx had theorized. After taking control of the land and all the institutions, the communist revolutionaries grabbed power away from their more moderate contemporaries. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, having no loyalty to the dead czar, released themselves and the Russian people from fighting the war that the royals of Europe had imposed on the entire continent. The new communist regime of Russia made peace with the Germans and Austrians, and began to establish their own dictatorship of the proletariat, a revolution that ultimately brought forth the communist regime that dominated Russia until the 1990’s. The Enlightenment winds of Liberty had been stirred up, but with a Marxist twist, to blow over the steppes of the far north of Europe and Asia, imposing a Stalinist cruelty that terrorized, then tamed, the Russian people until the 1980’s. Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were, at last, leaders who illumined by the flames of reform that had lit revolutions since the early 1800’s. What they were able to accomplish was no beacon of Liberty and Justice for all, but it was, functionally, a nation that the czars and the rich landowners would never have approved, ruled by bureaucrats. Later, at the end of the 20th century, a fresh group of Russian-styled neo-capitalists were able to commandeer the evolving institutions of new management, governance, and now wealth accumulation. Opportunistic rich Russian oligarchs were able to gain control of the bureacracy and the emerging web of newly-capitalized resources and assets of the new Russian nation, an unprecedented hybrid of communist/socialist/capitalist nationhood. So, to conclude. . .By the time that the 1920’s-30’s rolled around, the rich royals who had formerly ruled Europe were obsolete. Tragically, the 1940’s were doomed to more war when a maniac Austrian with a toothbrush moustache took hold of the highly skilled, habitually militarized German state and inflicted a World War I rerun on Europe, but with a pagan, war-obsessed nazi cruelty built into that “third reich” machinery. By the time World War II was over, most of the royal rulers of Europe had either been killed, or set aside into cultural and political irrelevance. Since that time, Europe has been a relatively peaceful place, with disputes between working people and rich people being managed by parliamentary governance. As for Russia, we shall see what the new dictator Vlad the Mad imposes on his people and the people of Ukraine and beyond. The western world process of replacing royals with governance by We the People took about a century and a half to complete. We do not want to—we must not— regress into those obsolete systems of governance by kings and queens.

Glass half-Full