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.
228 search results for: Solzhenitsyn
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Alone Perhaps, but Is Trump Right?
At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid?...
A New Bottom Line
In his provocative book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver offered some poignant observations regarding modern times. Western man, he wrote, has fallen prey to a “falsified picture” of the world, characterized by materialism and an egotism which assumes that “man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual...
Something of Art
In Something of Myself, his 1935 autobiography, Kipling remembers that when he was a young man, working for the English newspaper in the Punjab, “I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or—I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks.”...
Be Sensitive—or Else!
Horror stories about punishments for insensitive behavior on college campuses are old news. But leftist hypersensitivity has permeated everyday life in the real world as well. In Manassas, Virginia, a white woman called 911 at 3:08 A.M. to report that some black men—whom she referred to as “niggers”—were trying to break into her house. According...
Russia Baiters and Putin Haters
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
The Uses of Diversity: Recovering the Recent Past
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
History as Paranoia
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
The Oligarchy is Losing Its Grip, But Its Death Throes May Prove Fatal – to Us
“How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice” Several weeks ago the mainstream media (MSM) gave saturation coverage to a picture of a little boy pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after his home and family were crushed in what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,”...
Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
Nunc Est Bibendum
Or Now That Poetry Is Dead, I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink A new battle of the books is in progress. This time, the lines are not being drawn between modern and ancient but between the present and the recent past, and the antagonists are not Homer against Milton or Aristotle vs. Bacon,...
Genetic Roulette
Once, a long time ago, when, as a result of one of those complex misunderstandings that cast long shadows over the course of my life, I was getting married in a small town in Connecticut, my father showed up at the church stuffed with promotional literature. This consisted of leaflets describing his new organization, donation...
So Far From God
The poor United States of America: so far from God, so close to Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his First Inaugural Address, announced what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy. “In the field of world policy,” Roosevelt said, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects...
The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern France), the Near East became the Middle...
What’s Really behind the State Department’s Meddling in Ukraine?
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On March 31 the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election was held. In line with all polls, the top spot (with about 30 percent of the vote) was taken by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comic actor who played President of Ukraine in a popular TV series, making him the leading candidate for the...