On
the 330th anniversary of the Glorious
Revolution -- the historical significance of the English Civil War
(Part Six)
By
Mark
Wegierski
web
posted
April 30, 2018
Ultimately,
it
was not the dour Puritans who were to reap the benefits of Cromwell's
victories, but the Whigs, properly defined. This was the
haute-aristocracy and
rising merchant-classes, who prevailed after 1688, in the period known
as
"the Whig supremacy". Discarding the earlier royal and feudal
paternalism, the Whigs created what basically was an open oligarchy,
enjoying
little sense of legitimacy, and maintaining itself largely by naked
force, the
prison and the press-gang, as well as by the ideology of
“anti-Popery”. A
paradigmatic example of their system of rule was the class of absentee
landlords
in Ireland. England had passed from being a society defining itself by
monarchical and aristocratic honor (which at least nominally
acknowledged the
paternal responsibilities of a ruling-class) to a society defined by
capitalist
money (where, for example, the starving to death of the poor was deemed
to be a
fitting result of their “idleness”). Typical of
this stance was the strong
criticism of Charles I's extensive distribution of food to the poor in
a time
of famine, as profligate and unnecessary state-intervention.
Ultimately, the
religious idealisms and enthusiasms of the Puritans led not to a
renewal of
asceticism and fundamentalist, "back-to-the-basics" Christianity, but
to the flowering of the most intense new forms of industrial
development,
money-making, and exploitation.
A
transition
which was vital to the future emergence of the United States had been
made in
the English Civil War, and its real fruit, the so-called Glorious
Revolution.
The American Colonies, especially in New England, intensely
concentrated
Protestantism, as well as the new English system and its ideas,
transforming it
in the unencumbered atmosphere of the "open" New World into something
even more potent. The justifications for the American Revolution were
responses
to – it could be argued -- comparatively minor administrative
encumbrances. (It
might be quite instructive to compare the impositions of King George
III to,
for example, the impositions of the U.S. federal government today.) As
in the
English Civil War, it could be argued that it was a revolutionary
vanguard that
strove to carry out its program. And again, it could be argued that it
was mostly
the interests of the oligarchs that were served.
It
may be
difficult to understand today that American and Canadian patriotisms
are quite
different in their origins. It may be remembered that the harried
refugees of
the American Revolution -- stripped of their erstwhile social position
and most
of their possessions -- the so-called "Tories", or "United
Empire Loyalists" – settled mostly in Upper Canada (Ontario)
and the
Maritimes. They allied with the traditional French society of Quebec to
eventually
form the Canadian state (polity) in 1867, which remained culturally
quite distinct
from America right up to the 1960’s, and politically even to
this day.
The
success of
the American Revolution, which would have probably been made both
conceptually
and physically impossible by Cromwell's defeat in the English Civil
War,
created what became a restless society constantly pushing at the
envelope of
social and technological change, while at the same time being
characterized by
an entrenched and virtually impermeable world-level oligarchy, which
seems to
have grown in power with every revolutionary surge. For example,
although the
1960s movements were characterized by (among other features) idealistic
and
sentimental feelings of opposition to the large corporations, by the
1990s, transnational
corporations had reached new pinnacles of economic influence and power.
Nevertheless,
one can see in the history of America, an ongoing conflict between an
“organic
America” (which could be characterized by various terms like
“the heartland”, or
“fly-over country”) and an “oligarchical
America” (which could be characterized
by terms such as “the megapolitan centers”, or
“the bicoastal elites”). The
irony is that without the workers, farmers, soldiers, policemen, and
small-businessmen provided by the “organic America”
– the “oligarchical
America” would have foundered. The “oligarchical
America” appears to have
little sense of stewardship, gratitude, or care for the
“organic America.” It
is difficult to explain, for example, how the ongoing
“de-industrialization” of
America – with its massive
outsourcing and loss of jobs -- became an acceptable policy. Also,
policies of
high immigration have been imposed on America since 1965 despite
widespread
popular opposition.
It
is possible
to see the history of America as characterized by an ongoing series of
revolutionary and transformative upheavals, which share many features
with the
initial defining upheaval of the so-called “Anglo-American
societies” -- the
English Civil War. Just
as an
“oligarchical Britain” has tended to undermine the
“organic Britain”, an
“oligarchical America” has – at virtually
every point in its history -- continued
to undermine the “organic America” –
until there is substantially very little remaining
of the latter.
It
could be
argued that the ironic aftermath of the Sixties’ revolutions
is such, in its
drive to unlimited technological advance, consumption, and grotesque
selfishness, and its desire to impose this way of life on the entire
planet,
and all local cultures, that neither the American Republic in any
marginally
meaningful sense, nor possibly the ecosphere itself, will survive the
outcome. 
Mark
Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher.