Enjoying the view from Limbo
Should we be surprised that “Lula,” the Brazilian bore much adored among international socialists, is publicly blaming Ukraine and the U.S. for the war, accusing them of having precipitated the conflict by refusing to “negotiate” with Vladimir Putin or to make concessions to him in advance, i.e., by neglecting to adopt appeasement as their official stance before making Putin angry? Or that Noam...
Fascist demagoguery proclaiming itself the only bulwark against communism. Communist thuggery declaring itself the only bulwark against fascist demagoguery. America 2021. Germany 1930. Everyone who warned of these echoes for decades — and was mocked out of both polite society and the ivory tower for so warning — appears to have been fully vindicated. The question is, why would any American have expected...
In the 1970s, Larry Grathwohl, a most courageous FBI informant, famously told the world that the Weather Underground leadership had hypothesized about the process of dividing up the United States among the major communist powers after their Marxist revolution, and further, that in answer to his own question as to how those who remained resistant to the necessary communist re-education would be dealt...
We all know the expression of Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, commonly misattributed to Voltaire himself, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Believers in modern liberty are wont to see this sensibility, elevated to the status of a principle, as a guarantor of the free speech so essential to classical liberalism....
Just the other day, in the context of discussing the wave of monument destruction currently devouring the American heritage, I parenthetically asked whether, now that even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, not to mention such lesser lights as Teddy Roosevelt, are being officially banned from the public square, or the public school, as inappropriate viewing, it can be long before Mount Rushmore gets...
Over the past week, there have been a few interesting developments in the People’s Republic of America. California has begun the process of renaming public schools named after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, arguably the two most revered and celebrated founding fathers, because it has been determined, upon reassessment, that the author of the Declaration of Independence and the man who led the...
If you are a reasonably intelligent, somewhat politically ambitious man, and you see that the political class in your society is exploiting a crisis as a means of establishing extremely illiberal powers far beyond the legitimate necessities of the current crisis — powers of the sort that no state ever relinquishes once the precedent has been set and publicly accepted — then if...
Black Lives Matter. What does that even mean? You don’t know, so don’t bother trying to answer. You don’t know, because the phrase actually means exactly nothing, or at least nothing to do with the words that comprise the phrase. It is a slogan meant to sound brave and ideological precisely to obscure or deflect from its lack of any comprehensible significance in...
The problem with espousing Marxist political philosophy, in any of its many modified iterations, is that every time Marxism is attempted in any kind of systematic way, it fails. It fails economically, and it fails morally. It devolves into corruption, scarcity, criminality, violence, and starvation. It fails so profoundly that the world’s enlightened academics are consistently reduced to shaking their heads, half-embarrassed, while...
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy. Reflections of a Young Man (1935) What, then, do history and experience call the man who has devised the means to the most universal forms of collective misery, and in whose name...
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