Written by Brendan Maloney   

Much importance is placed by historians on the Great Charter / Magna Carta  imposed on King John Longshanks by his barons at Runnymede near Windsor on June 15, 1215.  Yet in the Wiki article on it below, we learn that it was immediately ignored by all parties, and over the centuries, political expediencies dictated by the financial fortunes or misfortunes of kings and their subjects caused it's effects to rise and fall accordingly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

I submit that the waves of Bubonic Plague that decimated Europe in the 14th century had much more to do with the economic, and thus political, rise of commoners than the Great Charter did. When nobles hiding in castles ventured out after the second main wave of the Black Death passed,  they found many of their fields reverted back to woods and that for the first time they had to pay what few peasants remained exorbitant prices for their labors to restore fields for crops. Embracing their new-found economic worth, peasants formerly tied by law to their lords' lands began to roam much more freely, in search of better living conditions and wages- "voting with their feet," so to speak.

Another consideration is that many nobles died and surviving peasants took over their lands and titles, or created their own, so that these new nobles injected a lot of new democratic principles into the British/French/Continental power elite. Many current noble houses only date back to the Plague Years for this reason.

Of course there has always been a lot of push-back from power elites: Henry VIII exercised the Divine Right of Kings in establishing the Church of England in order to get a damned divorce, with its horrific costs and repercussions lasting for centuries. Charles I, later caught up in Henry's gigantic mess, married a Catholic, dissolved Parliament and suffered push-back in turn that cost him his head.

Re our Constitution, what good did it do us citizens when our taxes were increased by ten thousand percent as soon as British troops left our shores? Push-back for that was immediate, resulting in Daniel Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Tax Rebellion,largely manned by former Continental Army soldiers who had just fought the British over taxes! (See my RSN article on Shay's Rebellion and how it caused the Constitution to be debated/written behind closed doors and the creation of power-elite safeguard Electoral College).

My main point here is that Great Charters of any type, including the Constitution of the United States, have far less to do with personal freedoms than do current, on-the-ground, economic realities that are created by war, plague, and major weather shifts, among other things. Many times, long cold spells in northern regions have driven their very- tough-of -necessity inhabitants (Huns, Vikings, etc.) south, where they kicked some serious ass for centuries and socially altered the many lands they conquered. Both my Irish and Swedish ancestors came to America fleeing famines, and after trashing Ireland and Scotland with devastating wars, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell sent hundreds of thousands of Irish slaves to America before the first African slaves were brought here. (See my RSN article on Irish Slaves in Early America).

The modern “Age” of Oil, with its resulting easy international travel and heating/air-conditioning permitting people to live anywhere, has hugely skewed and altered this reality, however; making billionaires of men who sit in air-conditioned office towers and move immense sums of imaginary money around at nearly the speed of light. And because of that, modern democracy is more endangered than ever, with the lovely New World Order / American National Security State.

But the “Age” of Oil is really only a “Bubble” that will not last another century; as is our current “Funny Money” world financial system that is only a state of mind, with little of real value to back it up. If we Destroyers of Earth can manage to survive another century, the natural forces of plague, war, weather and famine – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that have been with us for thousands of years – will be back in charge of our economy and resulting personal freedoms.

To see how utterly worthless laws on paper can be, you should know that perhaps as many as ten times as many laws are on the books as there were at the end of World War Two in the USA; and what, precisely, have they accomplished re protecting us, our property, or our freedoms?

For those interested in this topic and mindful of the ancient and subtle Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”, I recommend Barbara Tuchman's book, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”. A related read is off-the-charts genius Neal Stephenson's “Baroque Cycle” historical novels. Check out the long lists of both historical and fictional characters that populate this series: Stephenson employs these awesome characters like a mad chemist mixing highly volatile chemicals and the resulting literary explosions are often hilarious, with LOLs every 3-4 pages.

“Robert Wiersem of The Toronto Star called The Baroque Cycle a "sublime, immersive, brain-throttlingly complex marvel of a novel that will keep scholars and critics occupied for the next 100 years"".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle