December 16, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
BEETHOVEN’S BIRTHDAY, the Fall of France, and the Duke of Wellington
Friends,
Today we commemorate one of those significant
anniversaries in the continuum of our Western Christian civilization, one that
perhaps will go unnoticed or uncommemorated by the vast majority of our fellow
citizens….but should not be forgotten.
Tomorrow, December 17, 1770—248 years ago—the
great musician and composer Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in the city of Bonn in the Rhineland in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, then
part of the Holy Roman Empire. Traveling to Vienna as a young man, he spent
much of his life there as perhaps the greatest composer of music of all time. His
compositions and his persona continue to resound through the ages—as long as there
is a Western culture to admire and celebrate.
Biographies of Beethoven abound, and I will not
spend time recounting facts and events that are easily obtainable via the
Internet or in hundreds of books written about him.
What I wish to do is simply emphasize the
importance of cultural giants like Beethoven who have left us a precious and
unique heritage, a heritage that is critically threatened in our time by demonic
and Gnostic demiurges who seek nothing less than the complete perversion of two
millennia of Culture founded upon the philosophy of ancient Greece, the
religious gift of the Hebrews, and the classical traditions of Rome.
Beethoven was an integral part of that continuum.
And like so many others who have contributed to our inherited corpus of art,
music, architecture, literature, folklore, customs, and legends, not to mention
our beliefs and religious credo which characterize our historic civilization,
he stands above the ages athwart the disintegration and the frenzied assaults
on the legacy of that “rocking cradle in Bethlehem”—that “rocking cradle” from
which our culture proceeds.
Just as the post-Marxist and Progressivist academics
and mobs and their allies in our cowardly political and media elites wish to
put all reminders of our past—those monuments and symbols—whether Confederate
or colonial, in remote museums, safely away from the inquiring eyes of most of
our citizens, so too those Epigones of Evil, those cultural vandals who would
destroy our inheritance, wish to lock up our sacred traditions of music,
literature, and the arts away from our population for whom that inheritance is
a birthright. Or, separate them and make them practically inaccessible. Or, far
worse, “re-interpret” them using new templates based entirely on “race” and “gender”—thus,
“women’s studies” which views literature and music through the lens of “masculine
oppression” and “toxic masculinity” throughout the ages.
In December 1940, at the end of a live national Saturday
broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, the famous soprano
Lily Pons advanced to the front of the stage, and holding a French flag aloft,
sang “La Marseillaise.” The audience erupted in emotional enthusiasm…not just
there in New York, but across the entire nation where as many as forty million
listeners tuned in and heard her salute to a defeated France. Forty million
Americans in every state and territory (out of around 130 million), were united
not only in remembering fallen France, but by and in a culture and musical
tradition they all shared, and, even if not devotees of opera, they at least
understood to be part of their precious patrimony.
Today that unity no longer exists. It has been
rent asunder by the very guardians of that cultural inheritance, those
entrusted with its care and transmission, who have succumbed to the Dark Lord
and the enticements that emit from the foulest voices and most fetid enemies of
our civilization.
And it is they who have now in great part become
the Enemies of our heritage. It was the Roman poet Juvenal two millennia ago in his Satires who wrote, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?,” which translated
means: “Who is guarding us against the guardians?” Today we must ask the same
questions: Who is guarding us against the cabal of our Intelligence Agencies
which are now controlled as instruments of the Deep State?—Who is guarding us
against a political class bought and paid for by globalists who have no loyalty
to country or to faith, but rather only to their secularized vision of a global
Godless Utopia?—Who is guarding us against the academic elites who control our
educational system and pollute the minds of our children?—Who is guarding us
against the feculent pollution of our cultural and artistic heritage?
In
recent weeks millions of Frenchmen have demonstrated against the pro-European
Union statist government of Emmanuel Macron, who was supposed to be the “new
leader” of a united Europe (replacing perhaps the discredited Angela Merkel).
Indeed, did we not hear those vaunted Fox All-Stars, the cream of
Neoconservative “opinion,” Jonah Goldberg and Marc Thyssen, endorse Macron when
he was challenged by Marine Le Pen in the past French national election? Le
Pen, you see, was a French nationalist…a “Make France Great Again” type person—too
much like Trump—too much a “populist,” or to use Goldberg’s hackneyed catch-all
epithet for anyone who opposes his globalist lunacy, just maybe a “fascist?”
These
Neoconservatives are nothing more than a wing of the same Army of the Night
that seeks to undo our civilization. Just consider how they—from Goldberg, the
late Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, to so many others—have evolved on such
issues as feminism, racism, same sex marriage, and transgenderism, not to mention
their own frenzied secular designs to impose a universal egalitarianism on the
rest of the world, whether those other peoples desire it or not: a New World Order,
without God, without Grace, and without, most assuredly, Hope.
After
an initial flirtation with what he thought Napoleon might achieve, Beethoven
later in his life became a strong supporter of the Habsburg monarchy…and an
avowed foe of the Napoleonic destruction of the Old Order. He understood what
that meant, just as Thomas Jefferson late in life understood the deleterious
effects of equality and the fanatical desire to centralize the American nation.
In
1813 to celebrate the great victory of the Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington
over the armies of Napoleon at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain (June 21, 1813), Beethoven
composed a wonderful little ceremonial piece—“Wellington’s Victory”—a kind of short
visually evocative symphonic poem depicting that momentous battle that freed
Spain from Napoleonic tyranny. In it he interpolated both French and British
airs and songs, including "Rule, Britannia!" and a rousing version of “God Save the King.” It stands
as a symbol of both the cultural reaction that Old Europe offered to “the great
thief of Europe” as well as a paean to military triumph over the forces of Revolution.
For us my wish is that it become once again our
hymn of crusade against our powerful enemies who seek nothing less than our
extinction.
I offer a Youtube of it here; I think you will
like it (even if you prefer Kentucky Bluegrass!):
"Wellington's Victory":
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