3 Comments

Jeet, I'm so glad that you are putting all of this in a larger historical context, which is so often missing from journalism these days.

Expand full comment

The impressive thing about House Hapsburg is that their title to rule over lesser mortals by right of birth derives from two different deities - Jupiter and Jesus Christ. Jupiter, by granting the Romans the "gift of empire without end" (Virgil, The Aeneid, I:278) and Jesus, by establishing the Papacy (Matthew 16:18), who then declared the Romans' empire to be "Holy".

You socialist and liberal republicans might try your luck against one single god, but two? You're way outgunned.

Expand full comment

Hopefully we can someday name (without diffidence) the 800lb gorilla in the room that ties the homophobia, the authoritarianism, the revanche, the grift and the trafficking of untaxed money and authoritarian power to The Second Estate of Far Right nations:

The First Estate rallies the proletarian troops to battle, unburdening the faux nobility of their noblesse oblige as a wolf uses a sheepskin. Unlike the 20th century, the demagogues of the 21st century back the people who were overthrown by their grandparents and great -grandparents a century ago. They haven't changed, and they were already an international syndicate 2000 years before the birth of modern liberal Democracies.

Expand full comment