Wordsworth sang* to Milton, “thou shouldst be living at this hour,” and the same goes for G. K. Chesterton, the connoisseur of paradox. Weighing nearly four-hundred pounds at the end, today he would float like a dirigible over modern foreign affairs; plucking choice paradoxes at every hand and drawing as many lessons from our globalised Divine [...]
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM Delivered June 12, 1987 Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: Twenty-four years ago, [...]
To the size of states there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt. – Aristotle The great Aristotle is always worthy of our deference and [...]
I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between [...]
On July 19, 1988, Bruce Springsteen played a concert in East Berlin, telling the crowd: “I came to play rock ‘n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” The program included Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” An East German concertgoer recalled: “What I got [...]
Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president’s family. But what is transpiring in Hong Kong may be of far greater consequence. Last weekend, Hong Kong authorities used pepper spray and tear gas to scatter the remnants of a student protest of [...]
In The Duel, a riveting account of Churchill’s confrontation with Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940, John Lukacs wrote that Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was [...]
Only a week or so before Henry Regnery published Russell Kirk’s first masterpiece, The Conservative Mind, Mr. Ray Bradbury, science fiction novelist, screenplay writer, and all-around wit, wrote and published a fascinating and insightful article, “The Day After Tomorrow.” Whether or not my ideas on censorship via the fire department will be old hat by [...]
An author too robust and significant to be wholly un-personned can still be marginalized. Consider this elegant pasquinade, which years ago won a parody-contest award in Britain’s New Statesman and which employs the same rhyme scheme and meter as Hilaire Belloc’s own “The chief defect of Henry King”: The chief defect of dear Hilaire Was [...]
A Review of William H. F. Altman’s Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013). In this imaginative and refined commentary on Nietzsche’s political thought, Altman provides an incisive critique of the achievement of Nietzsche, as well as his limitations. The work is the third volume of a trilogy on German [...]
When debating communism, I often encounter those who do not know exactly what it is. My answer is the one known by millions and millions: arrest, purge, gulag, and death. That’s communism. But the knowledge of communism gained by those who live under it (that is, those whom communism has not murdered) is vastly different [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. Interview of Joseph Pearce by Annamarie Adkins After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached [...]
When we survey that last 100 years in even the most cursory manner possible, the one objective and rather obvious thing that holds the century together is both the attempt to deconstruct the human person and the counter effort to uphold his dignity. Contempt and defense, seemingly in a Manichaen-like struggle. While the Gulags, the [...]
Of all of the readings in volume one in The Great Ideas Program, by Mortimer Adler, an introduction to the Great Books toward a liberal education, possibly the one that many would be more likely to skip and yet should read now is the The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. You might ask why? [...]