Sappho of Lesbos

Posted on February 4, 2021 by leslie

Sappho of Lesbos

by Darrell Sutton

John William Godward, In the Days of Sappho

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace
Byron

Byron had a strong affection for Lucan’s Pharsalia. His attachment to Aeschylus’s Prometheus was equally pronounced. Acquainted with the classical tongues, bi-lingual editions of Greek and Latin texts were commonplace. His poems illuminate his penchants. He preferred the territories and literature of ancient Greece to its modern terrestrial forms. The ‘Isles of Greece’, though nationalistic in tone, is imbued with nostalgia. From a distance of two thousand years, Byron roamed the ruins of Greece daily by means of its preserved treasury of writings, and this he accomplished without a great fondness for their contemporary scenery. To quote his own words:

Let Aberdeen and Elgin still pursue
The shade of fame through regions of virtu;
Waste useless thousands on their Phidian freaks,
Mis-shapen monuments, and maimed antiques;
And make their grand saloons a general mart
For all the mutilated blocks of art.

Byron had other appetites. Had the public known of them, his reputation would have been sullied. These cravings came and went. Whether they were enabling or inhibiting factors of his poetic prowess is a matter for his critics. But clearly, select authors of classical Greece retained a permanent place in his heart throughout his life. Continue reading →

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Automatic for the People

Posted on January 30, 2021 by leslie

2nd Amendment Rally, Jan 20th 2020, Richmond, Virginia, credit Wikipedia

Automatic for the People

by Ilana Mercer

When Uncle Sam threatens some blighted and benighted region of the world—ostensibly on behalf of the American People and for their own good—our representatives call it peace through strength. It is then that ordinary Americans are encouraged to pipe up in praise of the State’s invariably Orwellian peace-through-strength strategies.

Peace through strength on our front porches, while being menaced by lowbrow looters and assorted louts? For that you can be incarcerated in the land where the criminal roams free. And when practiced by pale faces, our Second Amendment rights, exercised on the perimeter of our properties, as we stand vigil against the vilest of human beings—that’s tantamount to white supremacy and privilege. Witness the fate of some courageous home owners (the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Missouri) exercising age-old rights—also American constitutional rights—when they ventured out onto their verandas with firearms, intending to stand their ground and deter mobs from overrunning hearth and home.

Good people standing their ground were libeled and charged as criminals. Since these home owners did nothing illicit in the natural law, state authorities had to cunningly conjure charges against their naturally licit stance of deterrence. Law-abiding Americans who practiced deterrence, or peace through strength, have all-too-often been prosecuted by a justice system characterized by institutional rot. Continue reading →

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Ominous Stirrings in the World of Woke

Posted on January 27, 2021 by leslie

Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Bibel in Bildern, credit Wikipedia

Ominous Stirrings in the World of Woke

by David Ashton

The ideology of “equality, diversity, inclusion”, which some call “Wokeism”[i], is spreading into every nook and cranny of our national life. Perceptive observers compare it to a new “faith”[ii], recently adjunct to Black Lives Matter militancy. It has no formal creed, unlike traditional Christianity or orthodox Islam but its adherents and missionaries repeat the requisite jargon better than neophytes of yesteryear Sunday School and, sadly, with deeper psychological internalization than thought-reform penitents of Communist China. Some converts seem almost deranged[iii] and invoke as their icon an African-American criminal “martyred” in dubious circumstances[iv].

Who are these “engineers of the human soul” (to quote Stalin)? Conveniently, in a pull-out section, the New Statesman has illustrated the “equitable future”[v] in store for the hapless inhabitants of these isles by quoting several woke supporters. Commencing with the ridiculous statistical complaint that the current pandemic has exposed such “underlying inequalities” as that half of “black, Asian and ethnic minority” women are worried about their work prospects, the magazine advocates proactive plans for “equality of gender, race, disability and class”. Continue reading →

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Storming the Citadels of Statism

Posted on January 24, 2021 by leslie

John Martin, Belshazzara’s Feast, credit Wikipedia

Storming the Citadels of Statism

by Ilana Mercer 

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus. BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses. Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—sometimes forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves. In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Yet, despite the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, have concluded, in error, that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters. Continue reading →

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“Unequal Equals, Helots Egalités”

Posted on January 20, 2021 by leslie

John Martin, Pandemonium

“Unequal Equals, …Helots Egalités”

A. R. Kneen on the ‘great reset’

On 29th September 2020, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated:

Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the SDGs. Canada is here to listen and to help.[…] This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality[1], and climate change[2].[3]

Other public figures, including Boris Johnson[4], Joe Biden[5] and Prince Charles[6], have linked the idea of achieving ‘equality’ through a ‘reset’ with the 2020 declaration of a pandemic. As with Trudeau, this is often called ‘building back better’.

A number of commentators consider the ‘great reset’ a form of communism – The Washington Times published an article titled ‘Great Reset is Corporate Communism, and It’s Coming to America’[7]:

It’s a takeover of free markets and an imposition of behavioral, political and economic standards on entire countries, by unelected, unaccountable, often even unseen and unknown billionaire elites. And it’s coming to America. It’s communism dressed as social justice capitalism. […] Build back better means something. The great reset is real. And Americans must fight the communism these soft-sounding phrases are actually selling.

Continue reading →

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A More Perfect Union

Posted on January 18, 2021 by leslie

Joseph Chamberlain

A More Perfect Union

by Stuart Millson

Within minutes of the Brexit transition period ending on New Year’s Eve – the moment when the United Kingdom finally left the economic jurisdiction of the European Union – the leading lights of the Scottish National Party appeared on our television screens. Their purpose was to remind the Government at Westminster that a majority of Scots had voted, in 2016’s referendum, to remain part of the EU – thus providing the devolved administration in Edinburgh with (as they saw it) the right to (a) call for a second referendum on Scottish independence and (b) for Scotland to rejoin the European Union. Speaking on Sky News just hours before the UK finally severed its EU ties, SNP MP, Dr. Philippa Whitford – ignoring the agonising four years of grinding negotiation that had finally extracted us from the Brussels superstate – spoke hopefully about “… finding a way back to the EU” – an astonishing statement, even for “pro-Europeans”, most of whom now recognise the once-and-for-all ending of our membership of the (former) Common Market.

Dr. Whitford, as a Scottish Nationalist (and admittedly, an excellent parliamentarian) will see things somewhat differently from those for whom Great Britain, the Union, the Island Nation etc., are their guiding lights of politics and history. For once it might be helpful to try to see the matter from her perspective. Until 1707 Scotland was an independent country– the year of its binding together with England under the Act of Union – and it was said that on the morning after the dissolution of the old Scottish Parliament, the bells of Edinburgh churches rang out with a mournful peal of bells: “Why am I so sad upon my wedding day?” Continue reading →

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Locked Down then Locked Out

Posted on January 16, 2021 by leslie

Mysteries of the Horizon, René Magritte, credit Wikipedia

Locked Down then Locked Out

by Ilana Mercer

AS A COINAGE GOES, DEEP TECH is superior to the term Big-Tech. It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists. That reach notwithstanding, many libertarian-minded and “small-government conservatives” (a contradiction in terms, considering the national debt is $28 trillion) have been stalwart defenders of the rights of Deep Tech to deploy unprovoked financial force to kneecap those users who don’t conform to its monolithic image of the ideal citizen.

LET DISSIDENTS EAT CAKE

David French, writer at the Dispatch—and one of the many political dwarfs tossed periodically at Donald Trump by Never Trumpsters (hey, dwarf tossing is a cruel sport)—emphasized the immutable right of private platforms to de-platform (limit and throttle) “millions of Americans who engage in wrongthink,” the president included. Let the disenfranchised—those of us who’re routinely blocked from being able to grow our appeal and peddle our intellectual products, now fearful that our books will be digitally burned—create platforms of their own, exhorts French, from the comfort of his conformingly banal, pixelated perches. “Find other off-ramps,” exhorted affectatious podcaster David Rubin. Coming from the conformist mediocracy that runs Conservatism Inc., this cynical suggestion is the equivalent of, “Let them eat cake,” which, in practice means, let political dissidents go dark or resort to a barter economy. Continue reading →

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Mendicant Order

Posted on January 14, 2021 by leslie

Doré, Inferno, credit Wikipedia

Mendicant Order

by Bill Hartley

There is a large restaurant in Leeds city centre and at the side of the building is a fire escape. The doors to the fire escape are blocked and given the prominent location it might be assumed that this would attract the attention of the Fire Service. After all there are penalties for blocking fire escapes.

In fact the Fire Service is aware of the situation but chooses to do nothing. The blockage consists of a tent; one of those igloo type designs commonly seen at Everest base camp. It is occupied periodically by a ‘homeless person’. A police officer who patrols the district is acquainted with this middle aged male and says he has been offered accommodation but prefers life on the streets. The officer would like to remove the tent but is forbidden from doing so because it is occupied and its removal would contravene local policy. In fact, there are various agencies in Leeds who prefer to play pass the parcel, even to the extent of ignoring a breach in fire regulations.

The sight of people begging on the streets, particularly in our larger cities, is common these days. Begging is of course illegal but it goes on and how it is dealt with varies from place to place. There is a tendency to hang the label of ‘homeless’ on those seen begging. As we shall see there are many beggars who take advantage of this. Like the man blocking the fire escape homelessness may be hard to define and officialdom finds it convenient to roll all street people into the same bundle to become a problem which is being ‘managed’. Continue reading →

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MAGA Patriots, in the House

Posted on January 10, 2021 by leslie

Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore

MAGA Patriots, in the House

by Ilana Mercer

Why repeat hackneyed phrases about annus horribilis 2020? Recall the opening paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens. Interspersed in that epical introduction are countervailing, sweetness-and-light words. Excise these—and you get 2020:

“… it was the worst of times…it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch…of incredulity, it was…the season of darkness… it was the winter of despair. … we had nothing before us.”

MAGA men and women are just that: the best of Jah people in the worst of times. They converged on D.C., Jan. 6, to protest the certification of the Electoral College vote. They, who have “nothing before them,” had come to demand that something be done by those who had “brought [them] forth into this wilderness,” yet sit “by the fleshpots [on the Potomac] and [eat] bread to the full” (to paraphrase Exodus 16:3.) Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, January 2021

Posted on January 4, 2021 by leslie

Mathilde Wesendonck, by Karl Ferdinand Sohn, 1850

ENDNOTES, January 2021

In this edition: Stuart Millson’s Wagner

The twilight of the gods, the violence and feuds of the great characters of The Ring Cycle, the exploits of knights and Die Meistersinger of mediaeval Nuremberg – these are some of the characteristic stories and settings associated with the music, chiefly operatic, of Richard Wagner (1813-83). Even when translated into the concert hall, Wagner’s contribution to the programmes of the world’s orchestras often consists of “bleeding chunks” from his music-dramas, or curtain-raising overtures – the surging Tannhauser, or The Flying Dutchmen, or the exhilarating prelude to Act lll of Lohengrin. But despite these majestic sequences and the many experiences this reviewer has had of Wagner’s operas (Bernard Haitink at the Royal Opera House in ‘Die Meistersinger’; Sir Reginald Goodall at English National Opera and the Proms in Parsifal) it is Wagner’s understated, small-in-scale, nature tone-painting which arguably constitute his most profound achievement.

Let us turn accordingly to an overlooked song-cycle, written in the late 1850s, with words by the poetess Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of Wagner’s supporters. The work consists of five songs, and throughout the sequence there is an immediate sense of introspection – a surprising pre-echo, in fact, of the mysterious and melancholic orchestral songs written by Mahler at turn of the century – the Rückert-Lieder, for example, of 1901. Continue reading →

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