Those who know C.S. Lewis’s short book The Four Loves will remember that Lewis speaks of the four different kinds of love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. But, in a preliminary chapter about “likings and loves for the sub-human,” he writes about “love of one’s country” or patriotism. He points out that, in the first...
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Truth Against the Grain
“Zeus gives no aid to liars.” —Homer Richard Gid Powers’ history is a powerful, even brilliant, piece of scholarship which documents one of the most bizarre political phenomena of the 20th century. While Soviet communism, in its 70-year dictatorship, was probably guilty of every conceivable crime against humanity, it was yet able to escape the...
Weasel Words
Dr. Fleming, Mr. Cadfael, and now Mr. Navrozov in recent posts have opened a fruitful discussion of the American tendency to debase the language with prettified terms in order to disguise reality and enforce conformity of thought. Actually this is nothing new and is in part a product of what our two most penetrating foreign...
Comment
George Orwell’s 1984. We’re almost there. Or are we? Walter Cronkite thinks the danger looms, and if anyone speaks for the “thinking”American it is surely Walter Cronkite. He said it again in a special preface to the Orwell novel in 1983, as the fatal year approached. After ticking off the menace of orbiting satellites that can read...
God, Man, and Family
The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The next verse contains the first command given to the...
China’s Future: Ascendency or Fragmentation?
As the American Empire declines, many see the People’s Republic of China, with its dynamic economy and powerful military, surpassing the United States and emerging as the new world power. The reality is more complex, and China’s future more uncertain. According to one set of statistics, China has seen impressive economic growth as a result...
Ruffled Feathers
I’ll leave it for the birds to pick the salvageable bits out of Jason Michael Morgan’s vomitous screed (“Ride On, Proud Boys!” September 2019) and restrict myself to some much needed correction of this horrendously anti-cultural, anti-Christian, and therefore anti-Western (in the only sense in which “The West” has any real meaning) diatribe. The apparent...
The Transmaid’s Tale One Year Later
The deadly dynamics behind Audrey Hale’s murder spree.
To Russia, With Respect
Does anyone in the media read Alexis de Tocqueville? Many will have gone to college, and some have encountered a reading list that includes Democracy in America. It is the best book ever written on America, and because of its time the best that ever will be written. Tocqueville makes this astonishing forecast: There are...
Exit Stage Left
The Outside: beyond wall and watchtower, on the far lee of the border, the place of the Other, the place of exile. Now that the walls are crumbling around the world, helped along by the crowbars of angry patriots; now that the faces of the other look pretty much like our own, the Outside seems...
Letter From Budapest
Observation of intellectual life in Hungary today provides a fascinating picture of a nation living in two worlds and, in certain ways, profiting by both. “East” and “West” become suddenly realities, cultural as well as political. Soviet occupation has compelled the intellectuals to study Marxist writings, in fields where their Western colleagues, even the leftist...
Fine China
“In this age of decadence people love antiques and willingly submit to deception.” —Cheng Hsieh, 18th-century Chinese poet and painter Anyone who fondly supposes that the Chinese Communists are the “good” Communists should read this exciting, powerful book by the Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryekmans, writing under his nom de plume, Simon Leys. As far back...
Future Directions?
“The way up and the way down are one and the same. “ -Heraclitus Newt Gingrich: Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future; TOR Books; New York. Robert Kuttner: The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. The idea of progress provides much of the rhetorical...
The French Revolution in Three Acts
Taken as a whole, the French Revolution, like any other historical event, may be understood in many ways. Excluding material or circumstantial causes, I see it as a sort of drama, each act of which is performed by characters—sometimes the same, sometimes different—who all, driven by some idea, strive to achieve a certain goal that...
The Ideological Temptation of the Media
There have been, in recent decades, two focal points around which radical, utopian ideologies could concentrate. As a result, these two focuses-labor unions and youth-were surrounded by a veritable cult, and they acquired power, both political and cultural, even though the second of the two focuses was not, as such, organized, let alone structured. Power...
Glasnost American Style
Glasnost American style is all the rage among the nation’s literati. At over a dozen universities, American academics are now waking up to the Soviet equivalents of Good Morning America and Richard Simmons. After years of watching our own People’s Broadcasting System, students and faculty alike may now get a glimpse of the real thing....
Against Political Clichés
Being human is something far more complex and beautiful than the habit of ideological repetition can show us. We miss that if we submit to the current morphing of reality in the service of clichés that condemn us to an inanimate fake life.
A (Pardon the Expression) Baccalaureate Address
The irrepressible John Towne tells us what he really thinks of higher education. Something to offend nearly everyone. I want you to know I share your disappointment that nobody you really care about and wanted could be here to make this speech. Sorry that Gary Hart is indisposed. Alan Alda was too busy and so...
Beating the Left at Their Own Game
Leftists love to obsess about hate. It seems to be on their tongues all the time, and it may have already surpassed racist as their expletive of choice to hurl at conservatives, traditionalists, Middle Americans, and other folks they detest. You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand the meaning of projection—that, when people...
The Continuing Revolution
In his critical work about the bicentenaire of the French Revolution, Le Grand Déclassement, French historian Pierre Chaunu explores the first stages of the unraveling of the glorification of France as a revolutionary nation conceived in 1789. By the time Chaunu’s book was published in 1989, however, the official celebrations had been both scaled back...
Books in Brief
The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977-1989 (St. Augustine’s Press; 352 pp., $35.00). On July 4, 1983, in Prague, there occurred one of those moments that may rightly be considered a single loose pebble that caused an avalanche. Film director MiloŠ Forman had been permitted to return to his native Czechoslovakia...
Lies and More Lies
Having come across several references this spring to a French literary critic, Jean Sévillia, who is criticizing leftist historical reconstructions, I read his two most recent books, Le Terrorisme Intellectuel (2000) and Historiquement correct: Pour en finir avec le passé unique (2003). An associate editor of Le Figaro magazine, Sévillia makes clear that he is...
When East Meets West
With every passing day the Eastern European countries are absorbed and integrated into Western-sponsored international institutions—the U.N., NATO, the European Union, the World Bank, etc. For Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, and Kiev, the West represents the light at the end of the tunnel, the gate to salvation. It is funny (tragic) to see: while the...
Jack and Jill, or Why I Am Not a Conservative
He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius, and this is why the floor of my study is made concave by the aggregate weight of all the newspapers and magazines I have acquired since moving to Cambridge: I simply cannot bring myself to throw away a single page of newsprint. In...
The Country Writer
I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...
Politics Is the New Religion
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
They Were the World
Most people are unconcerned about the plight of the very poor because they have their hands quite full enough providing for the health and safety of their own families. But then there are “the fashionably concerned,” those who are very concerned that they appear concerned about the poor. One thinks of certain entertainment personalities, religious...
Rev. Wright’s Star Pupil
“A steady patriot of the world alone, “The friend of every country—but his own.” George Canning’s couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the...