Catalan separatism emerged when the region’s bourgeoisie began facing the end of a long period of economic privilege during which the Spanish state’s policies had benefited Catalonia over most other regions. The threat of secession would now function as an invaluable bargaining chip to retain privileges.
Kyiv is under constant air attacks. The sirens can go off at any minute, sending the capital’s residents into basements or the subway, and the warning usually sounds at least a couple of times throughout the day and night.
“Christopher was quite capable of respecting Christians. If you really believed it and were willing to defend the challenges thrown up against it, he respected that and he liked it.”
We need stories. It is not enough to have a conception of virtue; we need to witness a virtuous person. It is not enough to know truths; we need truths embodied, for embodied are we.
Churchill was remarkably clear-eyed about the dangers of the soulless and secular statism promoted by everyone from the Bloomsbury elites to the twin barbarisms of Bolshevism and Nazism.
Today we are far from understanding carnival, precisely because we live in a continuous carnival, a constant inversion of norms. But if revolution is a parody of carnival, the totalitarian control that follows is a parody of Lent—and we can already see those austere masts on the horizon.
Given these facts, today’s wokeist global governance project turns out to be anything but a benign program to improve humanity’s lot around the globe. Instead, it is an unlimited power grab to define truth and justice, under the banner of ‘universal human rights.’
Hayek’s ingenious arguments against a centrally run economy are equally devastating to the idea of a centrally run bio-security state.
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.
