I believe it was Louis XIV of France (1643-1715) who started embellishing all pieces of artillery in this fashion.
Ultima Ration Regum means that [Force] is the Supreme or Final Argument of Kings.
In other words, brute force is the only thing that ultimately matters.
Most people tend to forget this because they want to keep on believing in every nice turn of phrase they hear politicians or pundits say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through Change.
Thing is nothing ever changes, for better or for worse, without the application of force. Nothing, nada, zit.
Idealism, meaning that which ought to be, is always brought about by realist means.
Realism, meaning that which is, doesn’t require make believe, empty promises of justice, that are always based on lies, violence, and mayhem, to exist. Realism just is. It is not predicated on any anterior foundations. It does not require any basis. It exists.
Realism is the rule of natural laws as they are here and now.
Idealism is about dreams. But as it always happens, someone’s dreams of a better future are based on everybody else’s nightmares.
Consider this.
Every major revolution, starting with the French Revolution of 1789, promised to do away with socio-economic and political inequalities, by fulfilling Diderot’s desiderate. The man aspired boldly to strangle the last king using the guts of the last priest. What can I say, the man was a dreamer, baby!
Well, history teaches us how not so many years later, the French Jacobins actually implemented his objectives to the letter. They went ahead and killed all the Catholic priests who would not forswear God for the French State, ending up with killing their King and his Royal Family. All in the name of putting French society on a sound basis. All thanks to and in the name of the ideals and principles of the Age of Enlightenment. Oh sweet irony! Oh my!
1,000,000 French dead and 26 years later, and France was back under the Kings. An this tally doesn’t include all the victims of the Spirit of the Bastille, who died or suffered all over the world in the name of the noble ideals of the Revolution. No, folks. Those figures are much higher: 5 to 7 million people died during the Napoleonic Wars. And remember this is before the age of modern artillery and the advent of the machine gun. This was done entirely by hand: burning, drowning, stabbing, cutting, bayonetting, shooting, and with cannonballs. Ah, perhaps I forgot starvation, pestilence, and exposure. There you go. Now you get the picture.
All in all, millions died so that Man could be free from the Monarchs. Yet, somehow most peoples replaced one tyrant with thousands or tens of thousands of them, who ruled over them, more oppressively, but this time, in the name of Freedom and Democracy.
Freedom became the operating mantra of government. The State replaced the Monarch, and was quickly backed by a subdued Church. And because there were elections, whereby the people could now choose their preferred executioners, at regular intervals, they called that Democracy. It all somehow served to whitewash, to justify any legal excess perpetrated by the agents of the State.
Consider how so many more died under the guise of Freedom than under that of Tyranny. The irony of it all is bitter. The people of France rose up because they were starving while the nobility and clergy were getting fat. They went postal on their King because they were the only ones carrying the burden of taxation. And 25 years later ended up with a regime that had made taxation into a national sport, extending it beyond what the previous kings had done. I guess the joke was on the people all along. They were now hungrier, more destitute, and without any hope, but hey as long as they were free to vote their tormentors, I guess it had all been worth it.
Oh sweet irony!
The tyranny of monarchs was potential, for kings almost never exercised all their powers, since they did not have to, as their subjects operated under the assumption the King knew best.
Whereas Democratic governments know it in their guts the only way to keep the People under control is via stifling taxation, a pervasive encroachment of personal freedoms under the guise of the Law, and by replacing Faith (and the Church) with Reason (and public schools teaching students to be good servants of the State).
The State weaponized the Law to make sure the People always know who the Boss, the Big Brother is.
The proof is in the pudding. All the mighty revolutions, that came after the 1789 one, achieved is to reinforce the control of the State over an indoctrinated populace that had been force-fed for the previous 250 years the bovis stercus false notion that their Freedom came from the State under the Law.
The Bolsheviks capitalized on Marx’ ignoble ideals by splitting society into haves and have-nots and pitting the latter against the former. They called that class struggle and first, made it the new compulsory religion of their new USSR, and thereafter, that of the entire world.
The Bernie Sanders of this world, the Maduros, the Chavezes, Castros, Trudeaus, Maos, Pol Pots, Hitlers, Mussolinis, all of them and so many of their ilk, they all danced and continue to dance to the same tune, to the same Danse Macabre of Idealism.
Idealism is basically a false flag operation, a Psy-Op that made it possible for tyrannical governments, activists, and revolutionaries to genocide hundreds of millions of people starting in 1917 and continuing to this day, in the name of social justice, equality, and freedom.
As Hannah Arendt realized it, revolutions never settle, as they promote the need for constant vigilance, against the enemies of the people. That is why and how those hundreds of people lost their lives. Because the State decided one day to divide society into good citizens a.k.a. murderers and executioners & deviationists and dissenters a.k.a. victims. You can’t have one without the other.
Consider this. For every person lying in a mass grave with a bullet hole in the back of their head, there was/is another individual with a smoking gun in his hand.
This is what the State wants for you. They want you to become one or the other. There’s no place for neutrals, fence-sitters, or conscientious objectors in this post-20th century world we live in. There is no place for debate, disagreement, or dissent. There is only room for people who, when asked to Jump, respond How high?! There is only room for murderers and mass murderers. Alas, such has become our world. Some say, it’s always been like that. But I do not agree with them. Consider that the vast majority of mass murder happened in the 20th century, a century marked by Atheism, by godlessness, and moral decay. We killed God or we wanted to kill Him but in the end we killed our own species. We are suicidal freaks on an epic scale.
Orwell put it best, when in his seminal 1984, he foresaw the future by taking one clear look at his recent past and coming to the conclusion that the whole raison d’être of the State is to establish a dictatorship. And in order for that to happen, the State has had to embrace the ‘sacred ideals‘ of Revolutionary Marxism.
Cause and effect, people. Cause and fucking effect!
Idealism led to Revolution. Revolution led to Dictatorships disguised as Democracies.
Idealism is killing us with its stranglehold on thought, culture, justice, you name it, idealism is here to suffocate our Free Will.
No, ladies and gents. No. This is why I refuse to stand by idle and give idealism a free pass.
Let others do that. Or better yet. Not on my watch. Fuck idealism and idealists. For they are murderers in waiting, and they do not even know it. Fuck them and their nefarious and nebulous ideals.
The time has come for realists to take back their destinies.
We must make bold with power. And we must be men again. We must be courageous and be ready to sacrifice our lives even for the sake of our souls and beliefs.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), whose courage was never in question, and who sacrificed 25 years to the Soviet Gulag, had this to say upon his release from his Siberian prison. After spending a few short years in the West, from Switzerland to the USA, he pointed out the obvious.
Western civilization has been declining for the past 75 years or so. The more gadgets we have, the less courageous we have become. Even biology, he said, knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It’s time, in the West, but also everywhere — it is high-time to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
He also observed, and this is 50 years ago, mind you, he observed that “a fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West, while in the East, they are becoming firmer and stronger.”
Now, how did he know that?! And how much truthful he is now than then?!
He continued “There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.”
Insane, right?!? Right?! The man was if not omniscient, prescient.
The man did not just warn us of the slippery slope we were on. He also came up with fixes.
“Only moral criteria can help the West (and at this point, the world) against communism’s well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.”
For “in spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West (and the world) has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is.”
“And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West (and the world) until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side.”
He went on to rightly claim that all individual human rights stem from God. Freedom was given to us by Providence on condition of the assumption by Man of his constant religious responsibility. Without faith, all technology and what we call Progress is Meaningless. For what does the conquest of outer space represent if God is absent?! We are moral paupers who’ve lost their ethical compass in the 20th century. And nobody, or almost nobody saw it coming even as late as the 1890s.
Our Salvation lies under God. And to find God is not an article of faith but of realism.
God exists whether we believe it or not. He exists outside our faulty instrumentation or deluded imagination. God is Real because God is Reality.
And reality has rules that do not depend on our imagination. Realism above all else is what makes the world move. And it is up to us how the world will move. For God has granted us Free Will. It’s up to us if we go to Heaven or to Hell.
And that is the beauty of Free Will. God’s Great Design gives us discretionary power to decide if we want to be the architects of our Salvation or the instruments of our own demise.
Götterdämmerung 