Tagged: Tyranny

Over There, Over There

One of the U.S. Democratic Party’s leading propaganda outlets, MSNBC, is blithely reporting today, in this new year of our Election Lord 2024, that: a Politico report indicates that the Biden administration is quietly shifting away from backing Ukraine’s bid for total victory. Instead, the White House is now thinking about how to best position Ukraine for negotiations that are likely to lead to territorial...

Activism Vs. Rational Thought: The Netherlands’ Case

Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational...

Paying Them to Kill You

Economic engagement with tyrants has long been proffered, by “conservatives” and “liberals” alike, as a way to moderate the tyrant’s aggression while serving your own national interests by opening up new markets. In the end, you will win short-term financial gains at the price of giving the tyrant an artificial economic, technological (aka military), and legitimacy boost he could never have achieved without...

The Ultimatum

If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...

Late Modernity: What It Means and Whence It Arose

When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...

Power and Judgment

The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...

Reflections on the Tyrant

Tyrants and time.— In the final years of an ambitious tyrant’s reign, he typically takes his shot at ultimate glory — and ultimately hits himself. Why? Because he mistimes the shot. All his earlier calculations and preparations were undertaken with patience and painstaking forethought, so much so that the preparation and forethought themselves almost became the essence of the game. At the end,...

What Everyone Knows

Everyone knows that a greedy man will never reach the limits of his desire for more, for it is the essence of greed to acknowledge no natural limit to its ambition. Everyone knows totalitarians are intrinsically, definitively, obsessed with totality with respect to control, and that an obsession with totality admits of no inherent restraint or misgivings, for totalism in the quest for...

The Special Danger of This Moment

During the acknowledged period of the Cold War (which never really ended), the nuclear risk, though serious, was always somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Soviet Union’s goals and strategies were systemic, rather than personal. That is, the Cold War was waged not against one unstable individual who, if feeling threatened — including from within his own country — might become rabid...

Random Reflections on Freedom, Fear, and Fools

I love and cherish freedom — not the word, not a particular material advantage that I associate with some byproduct of freedom, but the thing itself. This is a testament to the power of imagination, and to love’s natural capacity for clinging to ideals; for I have never seen real freedom in my midst, let alone experienced it with any fullness in my...