Ironically I read Marx’s Manifesto only after 1990 just from curiosity. That reading gave me the understanding of what was going on and that my literary instinct was somehow sane enough.

To put up a real defense of aristocracy is a really difficult enterprise. Just take a look at the list. It is necessary to overcome a lot of talent.

Also you can not delete the European history.

As a small example: how can someone in Romania appreciate somebody like Nikolaus Adolf von Bukow, an Austrian general during the time of Catholic Empress Maria Theresa? The general bombarded and burned hundreds of Romanian churches between 1759 and 1761 in an attempt to convert the Romanian Orthodox peasants to Catholicism (otherwise pretty much alike with the chouans of 1799).

Another example might be the occupation of Poland by its neighbors, Prussia, Russia and Austria. Let’s see who signed the treaty of Vienna in 1815:

- Prince Metternich, Baron Johann von Wessenberg, Emperor Francis I
- Viscount Castlereagh, Duke of Wellington, Earl of Clancarty
- Karl Robert Nesselrode, Tsar Alexander I
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
- Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt (the scholar), King Frederick William III of Prussia

All of them from the most pure aristocratic families. What the people of Poland might felt nobody says. They were pacified with cannons by another Russian prince reporting back to Moscow that “Order reigns in Warsaw.”

So I have to ask: what peace? What valor? Why decrying the falling of these two empires? Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian?

So what can we see? That the European aristocrats were using cannons against unarmed loyal men and women (no mater to whom or what). This is true history that can not be wiped easily Kossuth style (the Hungarian 1848 revolutionary). A darling of Karl Marx himself (the great “wise” man considered that anything opposing Kossuth was automatically “reactionary”) became through some almost religious and ideological stunts the icon of Hungarian nationalist right. Even George Soros can become a rightist and nationalist icon by the same means (as he was in Hungary in the nineties).

We can not idealize a certain epoch or a certain kind of people. Was Wilson worse than Romanovs? Are you really, really sure? Is it useful to ask this question? Or was he a great man sometimes, just as the Romanovs were sometimes doing really horrendous things?

The article is beautiful but hasn’t convinced me of anything. Each epoch has it’s own elite. When a people is not able to generate that elite anymore there is a great danger of extinction. The forces amassed against such a national elite are indeed extraordinary. Anyway this new national elite has to be different from anything that was before. More rational, more scientific, more intelligent, and much better humanly speaking than anything before.

Compare H.S. Chamberlain with your essay, fits nicely, as time-periods and causality make their mark on each epoch…I suggest that, in the near future, you continue this process (thesis?), in the hope of adding to the mighty repository which may, hopefully, deconstruct our mistakes, and delineate the organized path which we must tread.