Rod Dreher. “It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti-communist dissident, wrote that Western people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it… Read More The “Gentleness” of “Soft” Totalitarianism
Philosopher Nikolai Onufriyevich Lossky (1870-1965): analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s complex views on socialism. While Dostoevsky supported just economic arrangements for workers and the peasantry, he also vehemently rejected the atheism and materialism that underpinned so many socialist ideals. Russia’s great writer was a prophet, right down to foreseeing famine, cannibalism and the deaths of 100 million people that would characterize twentieth-century… Read More Dostoevsky on Socialism
Better to to appear Quixotic to fools than Egalitarian in the American / French and modern Western sense. St. Thomas Aquinas writes regarding the ideal: “One of the principal things to be considered,” Thomas wrote, “with regard to the good establishment of princes [rulers] is that all should have some part in the government; for in… Read More St. Thomas Aquinas on the Ideal Form of Government
Take National Socialism for instance: “If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Austrian Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty Werthman wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. Kitty was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching. “We elected… Read More Everyone is “equal” in the Socialisms
… and Our time. Mark Groubert. “Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key… Read More The Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
And the philosophy of science. The Philosophy of Science challenges a fundamental facet of the modern outlook: that science as such can answer ultimate questions about ourselves, the universe, and God. Disdaining mere discussion or mordant criticism of purely scientific conclusions, Sheen opens science to a realm of thought commonly diminished at best and denigrated… Read More Marx and Hegel: The Philosophy of Communism
Woke White Historians Need Not Apply. Forced to taste their own medicine. “David Austin Walsh is a historian who would like to be a professor. He is one of those historians who would literally cover himself in ashes and wear sackcloth to apologize for his sin of being white. It’s hard to look at. Anyway,… Read More When the Revolution Eats Its Own
“Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In… Read More Mark Groubert On the Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
“And fate made everybody equal Outside the limits of the law. Son of a kulak or Red commander, Son of a priest or commissar . . . Here classes were all equalized, All men were brothers, camp mates all, Branded as traitors every one . . . —Alexander Tvardovsky, “By Right of Memory” It all… Read More Lenin’s Pure “Equality”. Three Weeks Before the October Revolution.
“Intersectionality is a Woke standard, but what is it? Where does it come from? The history of the concept isn’t that hard to trace, and where it leads us is back to some of the worst regimes in history. Kim Crenshaw tends to be credited with Intersectionality, but she got it from the radicals in… Read More Maoism With American Characteristics
This war is not like any other war. A revolution … involve[s] ideologies, dogmas and creeds. 1914 The so-called “Age of Reason” was really an Age of Unbelief for its strongest protagonists were corrosive men like Hume, Kant, Voltaire, who measured the growth of reason by its alienation from God Who Alone could guarantee its… Read More Fulton J. Sheen, 1943. War Against Christians and Jews.
As a Christian I’ll eagerly go as far “Left” as seeking to meet the needs of a person’s physical hunger, injury or homelessness; but never so far “Left” as approving absolute “equality” (so-called “equity” today!) in wages; or approving promiscuous immigration, or the supposedly “equitable” availability of abortion, automobiles, personal video games, pornography, sex changes,… Read More Going Left
At the dawn of the 20th century Pope Pius X warned against the teachings of the theological Modernists who were already infiltrating the Church: “… in their books you find some things which might well be expressed by a Catholic, but on the next page you find other things which might have been dictated by… Read More On the Doctrine of the Neo-Modernists
Vaclav Havel waves to crowds in Prague, shortly before becoming Czech president in December 1989. Kamila Valenta writes in America, “I was 17 years old when I heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in public for the first time. It was in November 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, which brought freedom to Communist Czechoslovakia. The crowd… Read More The Lord’s Prayer, Freedom, and the Spiritual Vaclav Havel
And the Whittaker Chambers masterpiece, Witness. Excerpt from an Amazon review of Witness by T. Graczewski. “Witness” makes the Red Scare of the early 1950s much more palpable and understandable for twenty-first century American readers. The conspiracy that Chambers details in “Witness” is stunning in its scope and audacious in its aims. Today, McCarthyism and… Read More Are We Reliving a New Phase of the Hiss – Chambers Drama In Our Time?
By far the most important book on Western revolutionary culture I’ve read in over a decade. Indispensable. A REVIEW OF THE LONG MARCH. BY ROGER KIMBALL. Encounter Books, 2000.By Bill Muehlenberg In many ways the cultural revolution of the 60s has been as influential and momentous as other great social upheavals, such as the Industrial, French or… Read More The Long March by Roger Kimball
Never more timely. Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979). A formidable scholar, prolific author, and Catholic University professor for 23 years, Archbishop Sheen was also a pioneer of the new evangelization. A charismatic radio and television personality and a zealous preacher of the Gospel, his whole-hearted embrace of modern means of communication gave him access… Read More Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen on False Compassion
“Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega has continued his fierce assault on the Catholic Church, shuttering two important Catholic universities and appropriating their assets. In the official government newspaper La Gaceta, the Ministry of the Interior published Tuesday the annulment of the legal status of the Juan Pablo II University, based in Managua and four other cities, and the Autonomous… Read More Nicaraguan Dictator Daniel Ortega Closes Two Catholic Universities
Note: Most of us understand I think that it is important to distinguish homosexual persons (persons with homosexual tendencies) from the elite ideological movements which, flouting the objective Natural Law, serve as the vehicle for totalitarian transformation: …of morals, language, law, history, culture, institutions and nations in the West. — SH Cultural Marxism See AOC enjoying the Queens Drag Show… Read More The Battering Ram
The following conversation took place in 2018 and it appears we remain essentially stuck where we were then. Many, of course, argue that it’s much worse today since the issues discussed here seem to have been eclipsed and complicated by bizarre psycho-sexual agendas from coast to coast. Others say not really since both the legacy… Read More Stuck ‘Twixt Him and Him
“On August 13, 1961, the Communistgovernment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state,… Read More Far Left Power. A New Berlin Wall.
… every worker-bee stuffed into housing pods … Permanent capital is buying up single family housing stock.
by Hilton Kramer A reprinting of Mr. Kramer’s 1976 article published in The New York Times. I. Introduction. “Few among the intellectuals in the Party realized at the time that their mentality was a caricature of the revolutionary spirit; that within the short span of three generations the Communist movement had travelled from the era of… Read More The Blacklist & the Cold War Revisited
Quod Apostolici Muneris.On Socialism. Pope Leo XIII – 1878. To the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the Apostolic See. At the very beginning of Our pontificate, as the nature of Our apostolic office demanded, we hastened to point out in an encyclical letter addressed to you,… Read More Encyclical on Socialism. Pope Leo XIII.
How we came to where we are today. By Dinesh D’Souza “The typical socialist today is not a union guy who wants higher wages; it’s a transsexual eco-feminist who marches in Antifa and Black Lives Matter rallies and throws cement blocks at her political opponents. We see it in the riots and looting sweeping the country… Read More The Philosopher of Antifa
By Timothy Matthews, Catholic InsightIssue: March 2009 “Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal… Read More The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to corrupt
Lee Edwards is a leading historian of American conservatism and the author or editor of 25 books. American Spectator Excerpt: “According to a YouGov survey, one-third of all Americans would prefer to live under socialism rather than capitalism. Why? Is it idealism — the desire for a classless society in which everyone is equal and… Read More What Americans Must Know About Socialism
Catholic Critique 