The End of the Republic

As I write that title it suddenly reminds me of the title to a Pat Buchanan book The End of the West. But the inspiration for this post is actually William L. Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic. Shirer, an American journalist, is actually much more famous for his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Berlin Diaries. I always knew of this book, which concerns what happened to France, among the victorious allies in WWI and considered to both be the strongest military force on the European continent and a bastion of freedom, that it would fold so quickly when war came.

The short answer to the question is a very politically divided society, trust in useless and often cowardly leaders, both political and military. I'm not here to capture the essence of the book, but to go to two short bits that stood out for me, one at the beginning, one at the end.

The first, in the Forward, where he summed up his thesis:

"I lived and worked in France for a good many years, beginning in 1925 when the country was not only the greatest power on the continent of Europe but, to me at least, the most civilized and enlightened. In the ensuing years I watched with increasing apprehension the Third Republic go downhill, it’s strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic, and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and by a feeling of growing confusion, helplessness, and cynicism (Je m’en foutisme) in its people. And though at the beginning of the 1930s I left for assignments elsewhere, I returned frequently to Paris throughout the decade and thus was able to keep in touch with the deterioration one could see—or at least feel—all around."

Towards the end, he shows us the character of the leaders of the Republic self-destructing out of self-gratification and fear. It is impossible to miss the sickness and sadness:

" . . . As for the unhappy President of the Republic, who knew he was on the way out, Baudouin recorded in his journal: 'the president of the Republic says not a word. His silence, his passivity, stupefies me.' the brash young foreign minister does not seem to have been stupefied by his own--or the other ministers' --silence and passivity. If not stupified, LeBrun was at least depressed. But, like everyone else, resigned.

            Laval explains the resolution for revision to be submitted tomorrow to the two chambers [LeBrun records]. Everyone feels at a debate with the useless. All know from the events of the past few days that the game is over. We are submerged in a heavy and mythic atmosphere which annihilates you.

               'In this atmosphere of threats and fears and defeatism and baseness and dupery and confusion, all but a handful of the politicians, who only 10 months before had enthusiastically and unanimously voted the credits for war, who all their political life had thought, almost all of them, that the Third Republic was the best possible form of government for France and its democracy and freedoms a cherished blessing, were now intent, with whoops of enthusiasm, to destroy it and substitute a copy of the barbarian totalitarianism of the Nazi German conqueror, cutting suddenly loose, as Ambassador Bullitt had reported in his dispatch of July 1, after talking with the leaders, from all that France had been and meant and stood for so long.'

               How was it possible?  Léon Blum later tried to account for it, but he succeeded only in describing it.

               'The men whom I had seen the day before and with whom I had talked and shaken hands, were no longer the same men. They seemed plunged in some horrible mixture, in a corrupting bath of such power that those who touched it for a moment emerged poisoned. . . . Within a few hours their thoughts, their words, their faces even, became practically unreasonable. . . .  The poison and one now held be held was fear, quite simply the panic of fear.'

            Fear, he said that if they didn’t follow Laval, the Germans or General Weygand, as Laval warned, would take over.

            'The nature of fear permits no reasoning. If the pitiful victims of Laval had been capable of a reflection, of a critical examination, this whole structure of artifice would immediately have crumbled into dust. . . .To escape from the whirlwind there was only needed a moment in sang-froid, an effort for reflection. But no one reflected. One let himself be carried away, like a crowd in panic, by the collective currents of dread and cowardice.'

            The ease with which men can be corrupted counted too.

            'Laval did not so much convince them as infect them. . . . He offered them jobs, as formerly he promised portfolios. Every revolution produces a scramble for spoils. Laval offered embassies, prefectures. . . .'

            What hurt Blum most was the baseness with which the French politicians endeavored to ape Hitler and his totalitarian regime, thinking they could thereby curry his favor.

            'To be vanquished does not mean that you have to become a vassal. To imagine that by being obliging to Hitler one could appease his scorn or moderate his hate was a senseless chimera. . . . well I suppose that if there existed a means of softening or seducing Hitler, it can only be by baseness?'

          . . . . Paul Boulet, A professor of history and a deputy who supported Badie’s motion, later described the scene to the Parliamentary Investigating Committee.

'Every time someone wanted to speak, his voice was drowned out by 400 voices against 20 or 30! You have to imagine what it was like in this assembly where there were 400 members who did not want anyone to speak.'"

We can imagine it easily. Every time a conservative speaker is shut down by threats or actual violence in America, which happens not infrequently, we see it. We are seeing it even in law schools, where kids being trained to be lawyers - that is, to debate - think it is okay to shut down conservative speakers. Why shouldn't they. The school allowed it. No one was suspended or sent home.

How far away are we from this? Go back to the third paragraph in the second selection above and read it again. Ten months in France. Our leaders, often Republicans, are capable of great fecklessness in order to preserve their own skins.

We saw it after Charlottesville, when a group of protesters, at least some white supremacists and as vile as they come, but others who thought there was a value in maintaining their Southern subculture by preserving confederate statuary, all with a permit to march, being savaged by a left wing mob - no other word for it (one attacker had a flame-thrower). One right-winger, described as a neo-Nazi, apparently angered by the attacks, perhaps to help someone in trouble, perhaps to flee (I can find no information online on what actually happened, which makes me very cynical), ran his care into the mob and killed a woman. Instantly, not only did the left scream white-supremacy and murder loud as they could, but the Republicans did too, or at least most. Amazingly, Trump initially did not, saying their were fine people on both sides. So hot was the heat that he had to walk it back. I was shocked to see political bodies insist that it the violence was one-sided, to her Republicans say the same. The videos were there for all to see. The media reaction was certainly one-sided. 

We saw the same phenomena in Seattle when a group of left-wing morons in Seattle take over a few city blocks and declare themselves independent (if you remember CHOP). The mayor, also, apparently a moron, declares that this is what democracy looks like (it's actually the opposite of what democracy looks like). a few weeks and two dead CHOP residents murdered, she changed her mind. 

In Portland, the problem has been ongoing for 2 years now, as the police have pretty much been neutered.

In Chicago and other urban (left-wing dominated) states cops have been so beat down that they are not even allowed to chase suspects without permission (usually meaning they can't as the suspects don't exactly wait around). In San Francisco, the police are rapidly leaving. There and in many other cities (NY, where the D.A. immediately showed his true colors upon entering office and in L.A., where they won't even prosecute misdemeanors (meaning miscreants can commit most any crime they want without fear so long as they aren't felonies), Portland, where the police have acted so bravely, and the first time one strikes a so-called protester, is arrested for it, causing the entire SWAT team to quit, and so on. 

We have a star-chamber for a January 6th committee, really a political organization against Trump, as Pelosi refused to let Republicans pick their own members and allows only Trump haters among them. January 6th is probably the biggest sign of the fascist state taking over other than the joint censorship with the government and big tech (thank you, Elon Musk, I think). A cop died soon after the trespassing (by morons) and the left pretended he was killed and he was given a state funeral for political purposes. His family revealed it had nothing to do with the riot. A young woman, a veteran was murdered in cold blood by a cop while she had her hands to her side and was surrounded by other cops with big guns. Somehow, that was okay and he was not only not prosecuted, they wouldn't release his name (he self-revealed). Yet, ordinary liberals will say it was justified, but somehow Kyle Rittenhouse, set upon by a mob, was not justified in saving his own life and they think he should have been convicted. 

There are thousands of examples of our continued collapse - the deliberate weakening, almost abolition of our southern border, the deliberate weakening of our armed forces, our kowtowing to our enemies, including Iran, China and Russia, the continued destruction of our education system, the attempt to proselytize amongst our children including sexualizing infants or confusing them about gender. The false narratives (like pretending Florida's law prohibits the saying someone is gay, or pretending the overturning of Roe v. Wade means they will overturn Brown v. Board of Education), the ruination of our criminal justice system in woke cities and states, the demonization of police, particularly the false narrative that they hunt down and shoot blacks, the ruination of the minority communities with the victimization narrative, the denunciation of merit in our education system, the racialization and racialism against whites, Asians and Jews while blacks are given a privileged status, as if that is the fair way to handle past racism. The attacks on right-wing speakers which has been going on for years, the abandonment of our schools by feckless administrators who give in to violent and stupid children who think they should be running things, the dumbing down of almost everything. The politicization of our health agencies. The censorship of government in conjunction with big tech. The bonfire of the vanities like rigidity and demoralization of our businesses and institutions such that people are afraid to be normal (no, I don't mean abusive) or to speak their mind. The threats to our democracy by those who threaten Justices they don't agree with (the Goebbel's like Chuck Schumer, for example), or demand to pack the court, end the electoral college or the right to defend our border. Corruption of the DOJ and FBI which helped attack Trump and threatens concerned parents with anti-terrorism laws while not recognizing actual terrorists like Antifa as such. 

I could go on for pages and have in the past here. But, I decided not to make this post one of these extensive lists or statements. But, if you care to know, you can go down through my archives or just start reading on the web. No, not the NYTimes or the Washington Post, not CNN or MSNBC. But, it's out there. You can't take any organization at its word. You have to research it yourself, read cases and statutes and listen to what people actually said. It's often (not always) out there. 

This is more a warning that powerful and great republics can fail and fail remarkably quickly. If people do not continue to wake up (the last few weeks have been better), we will continue this slide into fascism and in one way or another, the fate of the Third Republic will become ours. It never happens the same way twice. But, it always ends up with sickening coercion, violence and elitism.