Unlike the majority of refugees, Transcarpathian Hungarians are at least familiar with Hungary thanks to family ties or working relationships. They do not come as strangers.
Howard, the writers who influenced him, and many of those that came after in the same heroic vein seem more outside the pale of literary respectability than they would have been a century ago. It is not just the artificial divide between Literature with a capital L and popular genre fiction, or the modern disdain for the writers of the past. The even greater divide is between unironically portraying heroism in the West and despising it and deconstructing it in order to bring about its demise.
To fully appreciate Perosi, we must try to look at the hope he sparked in people during his golden age.
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.
