Gish Gallop: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 118-128

Webster continues trying to lay the intellectual foundation of the world revolution (which she opposes) with Comte de Simon. Simon, Webster claims, was born with an unbalanced brain inherited from his mother; but I do not see confirmation of this fact in any source I quickly checked. She then claims Simon “had early thrown himself into the wildest excesses and led the life of ‘an adventurer in quest of gold and glory’ but after a while, weary of orgies, he had turned his attention to the regeneration of the world…”

I don’t know about the orgies, but I did find her source, “La Monarchie de Julliet;” and while my French is pretty bad what isn’t bad is my ability to search through a PDF. I can find no mention of Saint-Simon apart from the ideology that bears his name. Again, her ability to cite cannot be this bad accidentally. Simon did go on a bit of an adventure when he served with the artillery corps in the American revolution where he held the rank of Captain. This is something that it is doubtful that anyone with an “unbalanced brain” could accomplish. What we find with Simon is the same thing we have found earlier—an opposition to the aristocratic system and the recognition that the working classes need aid if society is to function.

Did Saint-Simon have contact with the Illuminati? Probably not, but since he was alive during the French Revolution Webster has no trouble in indicating that he did, “Saint-Simon, who, we know, was connected with this formidable secret society, accordingly continued the scheme of Weishaupt by proclaiming the abolition of property, of inheritance, the dissolution of the marriage tie, and the break-up of the family — in a word, the destruction of civilization.”

We’re told that he was in league with “this formidable secret society” but she’s not made the link. The other problem is that her writing confuses which “this” she refers to—is it the Illuminati or is it the Haute Vente Romaine? The latter being that work of my personal hero Piccolo Tigre (just because of the name). In her view, and the view of all conspiracy theorists of her ilk—the name doesn’t matter, it’s just a label pitched to the same idea.

Secondly, her view of Saint-Simon’s position is incorrect. She views (and conspiracy theorists all do the same thing) any attack on the existing society as a call to pull the whole thing down. Simon’s position seems to be that the elimination of the aristocratic classes, in his words the ‘idle classes,’ would be a boon to society. He wanted to strip Christianity down to its essential features and eliminate all the trappings and circumstance. His recommendations are pretty mild, but because they are recommendations for change Webster has to cast them as the most revolutionary drastic things that every took place.

In a truly classy move Webster exploits Simon’s attempted suicide as proof that his ideas are bad. In reality Simon saw that his ideas were being ignore and placed a pistol to his head, fired six times, and somehow survived blinded in one eye. Simonism, carries forward, despite Webster’s claim. It remained an influential minor philosophy until it was subsumed by other political theorists but I’m sure that there exists an 18th century French philosophy expert out there.

She moves to a follower of Saint-Simon named Pierre Leroux whose crime appears to be that he selected “Equality as the supreme object of desire.” The ultimate crime of wanting people to be born outside of a caste system.

From Leroux, we meet Charles Fourier. Fourier is a name that is vaguely familiar to me, though I couldn’t tell you why at all. Fourier was a utopian idealist, who believed that people living in Communes would solve the problems of society. He attempted to make the sexes equal through education, and according to wikipedia, may have been the person to coin the word “feminism.” What’s interesting about Webster’s description of Fourier is that Fourier was a pretty bad anti-Semite. He thought that the trade of the Jews was a parasite on the system (which I take to mean the charging of interest) and eventually advocated for their return to Palestine.

The only guess I can make is that she didn’t want to taint her own anti-Semitism by association with someone she thinks is Socialist which may color her own view as bad.

I’m not going to follow every name she’s dropping—this is a Gish Gallop. She’s going to try and drown the reader in names that they assume she knows about. I will contend that she’s, at best, cherry picking and at worst, just making up their positions. For a Londoner it wouldn’t be hard to go to the British Library, request books by 18th and 19th century French political theorists, and then just pretend to have read them. Especially someone like her who has works in that library. The telling clue here is in her arbitrary citation practices and her consistent citation of secondary sources rather than primary. Instead of citing Leroux’s work we have to assume that she’s getting her information from Benoit Malon. I’m not picking on her for going to secondary source, I’m an academic myself it’s a thing that we do. However, she’s rarely going to the primary source which is odd when she mentions that people like Leroux and Fourier wrote books and she’s using the secondary source to claim what’s in them.

While she busies us with the listing of these men, she fails to explain what is wrong with their positions. This is especially odd because she attempted to do this when she covered the French Revolution. She went to some lengths to explain who the French peasant was actually benefitting from the aristocratic system. Here, we get turn of the century and early 19th century socialists arguing for better lives for the French worker, but we don’t get her defense of the system they were arguing against. While it’s not necessary to have to explain why the leopard eating the face is bad when the alternative is not that; she is making her argument that the change is bad so by default the status quo is good. An interesting prospect because the only reason that status quo existed was because of the revolution she so bitterly opposes.