Spain: Whispers from the Past
The playwright Federico Garcia Lorca once wrote that in Spain, “the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.” He may be right.
The playwright Federico Garcia Lorca once wrote that in Spain, “the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.” He may be right.
In a remarkable break with its historic policy, reflecting either incompetence or deliberate national sabotage, the Spanish government has accepted Moroccan designs over the Western Sahara.
Visiting Ypres today is a somber affair. The surrounding farmlands were the main battlefield, but the town itself was almost totally destroyed by German bombardment in the autumn of 1914. The devastation was so great that Winston Churchill wanted to depopulate the town and transform its environs into a vast memorial site.
All sport originates in acts of violence. This, which might seem to condemn it from the start, is actually its redeeming characteristic: sport was, and remains, the best means for ordering that particular human impulse.
Whereas prudence emphasizes political or reasonable action adjusted to particular and contingent circumstances, liberal progressivism like other forms of modern rationalism sees global problems only in terms of universal panaceas.
What one finds here is a wonderful group of people from many walks of life, gathered together in friendship and comradery, to learn together, pray together, eat together, and rediscover what it is to be an heir of the great Christian civilisation that the modern West is now dedicated to repudiating.
Progressives declared war on Trump on live TV. Trump was watching. Regardless of his ideological promiscuity, the die was cast: abortion activists were his enemies. They paid dearly for the mistake.
Understanding how the fortunate fall leads to a different conception of universal order—and how it might allow for distinct and interpenetrating spheres—should inform conservative thinking about transnational cooperation and the shape world order ought to take today.
The ideal of brotherhood is supposed to put everyone on equal footing. In reality, it has served as a moratorium on the cultivation of fatherly responsibility, barring everyone from the requisites for adulthood.
Apart from deciding who is eligible for financial compensation, the Law of Historical Memory from 2007 has been used to define how history is taught. Its trajectory will be accelerated with the Law of Democratic Memory of 2022.
Catalans have historically understood themselves to be Spaniards, and it is within this conception that Catalan culture flourished and her people accomplished feats of genuine heroism. But separatism requires that we sacrifice our memory—for only then are we fully receptive to a new, invented past.
Bismarck succeeded, by a combination of chicanery and bullying in uniting Germany militarily, legally, and culturally in the image of Prussia. Subtract the military element, and the EU seems to have been trying to do the same thing to Poland, albeit using more subtle methods.
For all his faults, we need Cobbett today, or at least something of his fighting spirit, because he really did love the little guy.
The concept of a neoliberal ‘free market’ is fundamentally nihilistic.
The ideal of a market society (distinct from a society with markets) and that of an all-regulating central government, in principle, arise as opposite paths to the same destination.
Bosnia is not the way it is because of the Dayton system; it is the way it is because of the divided nature of Bosnian society.
Douglas Gresham vividly remembers the frosty December day he met his stepfather, the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, and later life.
Pope Pius XII was perfectly aware of the reality of the Shoah, so much so that he created an office within the Secretariat of State specifically dedicated to these issues. Pius XII tried—in vain—to alert the American authorities to what was happening in Europe, but the Americans did not believe it.
What then is the conservative approach to the question of foreign policy intervention? The answer is reassuringly inconclusive: it depends.
We who watch the wilderness fearfully, we do not become knights.
One cannot be a ‘citizen of the world,’ and the sense in which it is invoked often tends to accompany a vexed gesture meant to cast off the weight of provincialism, thick accents, and attachments.
Are we not already seeing Europeans cast as bloodless believers in empty pietisms, and has Europe not, for some time now, been seen as an ineffectual beached whale on the far west of Asia?
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