Clarity
One ought to be clear about at least a few matters — war, capital killing, aborting the unborn! Isaiah invites such clarity, and in a sense, leaves to us the conclusions, the details, the issues. …
Category: Power and Ideology
Warning
Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…
Devouring Its Own
As a result of this upheaval Vietnam has indeed freed itself from its former colonial masters. But the national liberation that the revolution achieved was not the only liberation for which it was fought. “We…
You Say You Want a Revolution?
My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the…
Today’s One-Liner (#189)
Jokes could be fatal in the Soviet Union. –Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
Don’t Take Everybody to Be Your Friend
We see the same salmon-cream-lilac obtuseness when Lefties try to talk religion. They live and move and have their being in a secular elite culture that has nothing but disdain for Christianity and Christians; at…
Look Within
I find [René Girard’s] ideas have enormous explanatory power not only for the world we see around us – but the world we find within us. People may question his reading of archaic societies or…
The Old and the Young
There was something peculiarly wounding in the New Left attacks on older liberals and radicals. I felt that some of its spokesmen wanted not just to refute my opinions – that would have been entirely…
Saving One’s Own Skin in the Soviet Union
But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence–in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the…
The Demise of Kindness
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…