See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for my take on the topic of one important aspect of American moral character. Solzhenitsyn had a similar take and summarized the situation as: Americans are a uniquely evil people. He was speaking of large-scale American crimes against Russian POWs and refugee peoples in the … [Read more…]
With most of my books packed away and not easily accessible, I’m going to let my sometimes misfiring memory have a partially free rein. I remember that Hannah Arendt had once asserted—I believe in Life of the Mind—that Americans (by circa 1970) had already made political decisions which would force us to a crisis point … [Read more…]
There are those who prefer facts and rational thought. There are even those who are Christians and realize that participation in a campaign of lies against a man or a country is a mortal sin. Moreover, Christians should realize that a mind deformed by lies is a disordered mind, a mind of a human being … [Read more…]
That Brazilian globetrotter, Pepe Escobar, has summarized the New Cold War in a recent article, The new European “arc of instability”. In that article, he published a paragraph from an email he received from the Saker, a former military intelligence analyst who lives outside his homeland of Russia but defends her strongly and intelligently in … [Read more…]
I’m writing this essay to set up my responses to Claes Ryn’s essay describing how the moral teachings and traditions of the West could re-establish some sort of peace in our world: The Moral Path to Peace. I’m planning for now to finish the set-up in this essay, following up on what I wrote in … [Read more…]
Human being is complex, as is true of most interesting entities. Even God’s simplicity, touted rightly by ancient and Medieval theologians and their not-so-worthy successors in modern times, is only a way of speaking against very specific types of errors. Mostly, they were concerned in ages which saw change lead eventually to decay that God … [Read more…]
In a recent essay, Deep States and the Modern American Citizen, I addressed the ways in which members and gangs of members of the ruling class of the modern world, and many other ages of man, use crimes—even brutal and murderous crimes—as tools to gain control over other human beings or human communities. In the … [Read more…]
The issue of `deep states’ had drawn the attention of at least some mainstream journalists for an instant or so around February of 2014 because of a very interesting article by Mike Lofgren, a former Senate staffer; I’ll get to that article in a short while. The attention seems to have been a flash in … [Read more…]
Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm? Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human … [Read more…]
My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]