The problem with complacent ruling elites is that, to justify their dominance, they are forced to resuscitate old terrors and to make up new ones. They rely on phantom enemies against which they can pose as our protectors.
Fictional rebellions invite us to side with the underdog. The story conveniently ends with their victory, but leaves no ruined lives and no unhealable scars—nothing to contradict the idea of a newly found paradise.
The Arthurian legend, despite attempts to use it for other purposes, is a parable of a militant Catholicism that saved Western civilisation.
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.
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?
The communist revolution of today is far more difficult to fight than that during the 20th century. Perhaps the first thing that needs to be done to bolster our fight is admit that what we are facing is essentially a revolution aimed at moving the world towards communism.
I do not like revolutions in any case, but I especially dislike the proposals of the Davos Jacobins.
Standing athwart the emergence of a ‘literal society’ which no longer appreciates irony, nuance, or sarcasm, the intellectual Alain Finkielkraut’s embrace of high culture makes him a reactionary in today’s France.
We must know how to trust great literature, which invites the deployment of intense and demanding feelings. The elevation of the soul of the youth suffers in the absence of great literary works; they remain constricted in an elementary vision of the world, of feelings, of relationships between people.
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