Comments by "Lynott Parris" (@DenUitvreter) on "If We Lose John Locke, We Lose America | 5 Minute Video" video.

  1. Actually Locke wasn't that original. He wrote most of his stuff living in the Dutch Republic. The Dutch had already decided a 100 years before that: - There was no divine right of kings - A king had to serve his people and respect their natural and ancient rights - One of those rights was freedom of conscience and therefore religious tolerance - If a monarch did not respect those rights and had become a tyrant, the people had the right to no longer recognize the king and get him out. So Locke was already living in the product of very similar ideas about people and the state he is said to have fathered. Of course he deserves credit for writing it all down properly and refining it a little, but he was also a hands on philosopher. He was part of the conspriracy to invade England and replace the absolutist catholic monarch with a protestant constitutional monarchy with a bill of rights, religious tolerance and freedom of thought and press. He even accompanied William of Orange's wife and future queen to England after William had occupied London. William was prince of Orange but his power as head of the Dutch Republic came from his election to stadtholder, a public office, not from the small principality in Southern France he inhereted. For reasons of stability, legitimacy in the light of the underlying philosophies and peace, it was presented as a liberation/revolution and an act of the English people rather than the invasion it in fact was. William had planned it brilliantly as a propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people that there was hardly any fighting in England. But he came with a fleet larger than the Spanish Armada and 40.000 troops.Lock's writings were further legitimation after the fact of the invasion/liberation/"Glorious Revolution by the Dutch Republic. This also explains why the American Declaration of Independence is materially almost a copy of the Dutch DOI of 1581, het Plakaat van Verlatinghe or Act of Abjuration. The British constitutional monarchy is the odd one out in between for British reasons of legitimacy and William didn't mind playing king either. He was not a devote republican, for him it was about the threat of absolute catholic monarchs to protestantism, freedom and the Dutch Republic.
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