Sunday, May 8, 2011

Nefasto I - the War on Our Nation's Integrity From Within


Part I Nefasto: Evil Aimed at Destruction of Our American Nation-State.

Nefasto. It’s a great word in Italian for wicked or evil. Why not use an English word?  Because of its origins in ancient Rome, Nefasto describes the evil used to attack the fundamental integrity of a nation-state better than any English word I know.

Nefasto describes the subversive processes aimed at our destruction. Today, those attacks come from both the merchant class on the right and from the Social Justice Warriors of the left who seek a subversive overthrow of our nation-state in the name of said “social justice”.

Nefasto describes what takes apart the fas, the bindings you see on the bundle of rods that were carried about as a sign of a Roman’s authority. We see these bindings in a lot of American political art, such as Lincoln's throne.








Those bundles were carried by an aide to a lector who could give you a beating with those rods if you failed to show respect to some official. That is where “giving a licking” came from, a corruption of the word “lectoring”.

The bound rods symbolized the unity that underlay the Roman city-state and its great invention, the abstraction called “the Republic”. The binding, the law, was the fas.

Etruscan kings ruled Rome for several centuries, and the Romans did not like it. Once overthrown, concerned that a new tyranny might arise from within, the Romans set up this abstraction called “Res Publica”, the people's entity, to hold and administer the assets of Rome: roads, buildings, temples, public baths, aqueducts, its army, its very existence, in place of a king.

That way the people of Rome could rule themselves without a king, without a tyrant. They also had the advantage of the fact that Rome's assets never got divided on the death of a king among his heirs. The “Res Publica” established in formal terms the People of Rome as the essential owner and sovereign of Rome.

The binding, the fas of the fasces, represented the agreement of the thirteen tribes of Rome to constitute themselves as that republic. Hence, anything that undermined that unity was “Nefasto” : “Ne-“, as in “negative’, the “fas”, the lawthe unity and integral structure of the Republic of Rome. Nefarious is the closest English equivalent.

No, it wasn’t a constitutional democratic republic of the kind we have, but, given the times, it was light-years ahead of anyplace else in the world. The Res Publica was a major milestone on the road to our constitutional republic.

City-states were found in the Mediterranean in the ancient world, but none were formally “republics”. Some existed for a while in places such as India. Empires existed, but they were not nation-states in the truest sense of the term.

In the modern world, nation-states sprang up all over Europe as the railroads permitted trade to go long distances among people speaking similar dialects, such as the Italians. Modern communication, such as the telegraph, helped bring those regions together into a nation-state. Nationality as an identity got born as people began to think of themselves as a member of a nation, not simply a region. The Germans talked about “Deutschland Uber Alles”, a cry to put regional differences aside to create a German nation-state. Not so easy to do…Our own American republic floundered twice from within as regional/state differences threatened to break our republic apart: before the adoption of the US Constitution, and during the Civil War.

On the practical side, to create and maintain the nation-state, there are three technical requirements and one political-philosophical one.

First of all, a nation-state must be able to assert control over its borders, keeping invaders out.

Second of all, a nation-state must be able to control its territory within, applying some kind of consistent law-and-order.

And, third of all, a nation-state needs tax money to finance the whole thing from an economy that produces enough wealth to do the trick.

The fourth requirement, the political-philosophical requirement, however, is the most important.

The people of a nation-state need a shared vision of what the nation-state is about, a thing that rouses the people in terms of its whole culture- political, religious and otherwise. Without this shared vision, a nation never can get past its wanna’be phase and will soon fall apart when local interests trump national ones to the point of unbinding the fas, killing the nation-state’s existence.

Just ask yourself why a country such as Yugoslavia fell into such chaos and suffering, and you can understand in its absence what it means to have that animating principle, that shared vision of a nation-state. Paranoia reigned and people whose family lines had lived together for several centuries in relative peace took to killing one another.

Politics, policies, attitudes, demagoguery that attack our essential unity are nefasto: they unbind the unity and I think you, the reader, now get what is so good about this word. 

Let's make sure that legitimate dissent is not nefasto.  Necessary dissent is good; in fact is anti-nefasto...  

As I continue on in this blog, we will get to a discussion of subversive rebellions, the illegitimate attacks which seek to overthrow our nation-state today from both sides of the political aisle…

Next, though, something better and to the point has come up: the film, "2016", about President Obama and his anti-colonialism. 

7 comments:

  1. From my friend "Nocturne" via a private message: "Nefasto(c) Roy

    Pernicious, harmful and damaging...

    Yes I read through this detailed and 'smart' blog with interest, thank you...

    one would hope that such malicious entropy is bablanced out by the growth of Anti-nefasto and that his constant cold war keeps healthy countries in balance.."

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  2. I love your dissection and explanation of this word. Culture - Language - Borders this is what a good government protects and promotes. You are a link for those who need to brush up on what is critical thinking. Thanks

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  3. Thanks for the comment. I have checked your site and my wife will be looking at it shortly. Beautiful jewelry!

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  4. The popular thinking now seems to be "personal truth". To survive and thrive, there needs to be one definitive truth. Borders, language, culture are mainstays of that truth. This is a message we must insist be at the root if all of America's policies. If we allow these to crumble, we have no foundation upon which to build.

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  5. Thanks for stopping by and posting, Dian. Appreciate it!

    Right now, on my laptop, there is a download of the UNESCO magazine about humanism. One of the lead stories is about how "there is no one 'reason'"!

    Ha!

    Real truth is not a convenience and doesn't set you free. Real truth is a "convenience" in the long run because it forces you to deal with the uncomfortable essential aspects of any given problem so you don't succumb to hurried optimism and set yourself up for a quagmire.

    We are set free by the truth and put on its cross at the same time. The religious metaphor works even if you are not a believer.

    Once again, thanks.

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  6. Related: "The Long March through the Institutions" and the "Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis":
    https://www.facebook.com/notes/joe-kidd/obama-and-the-cloward-piven-strategy-of-orchestrated-crisis/705107972835094

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