14 Mai 2021 Jahr - 2021: Quadrant: Western Civilisation and its Irrational Critics

Beschreibung:

14th May 2021

Eugene Alexander Donnini

"The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke’s notions of government with the consent of the governed and the idea of natural rights had a profound influence on the Enlightenment and the growth of Western civilisation. Locke believed all human beings were equal before the law, regardless of their religious, cultural, racial or political affiliations, and were entitled to equal opportunities and justice. He believed each human being had basic natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that these rights are rights that one is born with and nobody can take away, for political, religious or other reasons. The right to live means you have the right to be born and live your life in peace. The right of liberty basically means nobody can enslave you or control your thoughts or actions. The right to property means that anybody can buy or own property.

In his most famous work, The Treatise on Civil Government, Locke argues that sovereignty (supreme authority) resides in the people, and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract (the voluntary agreement among individuals): “Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.” Locke recognised the primacy of human freedom and that a legitimate government needs to be established on that basis...."

"Civic nationalism vs racism

Civic nationalism, through trial and error, has proven historically the most successful, equitable form of government ever devised. What guarantees its success is the equal value of every person based on a voluntary agreement to put Enlightenment values above all other values and laws that relate to religion, culture or anything else. Locke believed these were basic requirements for people who wish to live in peace and harmony. But in Western nations today Enlightenment-derived law and values are being attacked and eroded by governments that treat the sovereignty of their people with contempt, by legislating beyond the mandates they were elected to implement.

Attacks against civic nationalists by the Left and Right are two-pronged. The minuscule ethnocentric Right (ethnonationalists) considers Enlightenment values a threat to the European race, while the Left sees Enlightenment values as a mechanism of the capitalist class to control the workers and exploit their labour. Both these views are false and derived from eighteenth-century mechanistic philosophy (which likens the universe to a large machine) and antiquated tribal nonsense, not historical fact. There has, however, since the 1960s, been a primary shift by the Left away from the capitalist-versus-proletariat classical Marxist theory—which is still used to incite hatred in new recruits but has been almost totally abandoned in terms of ideology and function...."

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