Woke – Curse of the Thinking Classes

Posted on July 22, 2020 by leslie

Morgan Russell, Cosmic Synchrony

Woke – Curse of the Thinking Classes

Ilana Mercer on the enemy within

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” at cancel culture. The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization, founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster, which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group. American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes. Supine is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people. For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.” Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Fake History, from the EU

Posted on July 15, 2020 by leslie

William Bell Scott, Iron and Coal

Fake History, from the EU

William Hartley has iron in the soul

In 1999, recognising there was no single event which shaped the European landscape greater than the Industrial Revolution, Britain, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands applied for EU funding to draw up a master plan. What flowed from this became known as the ‘Duisberg Declaration’. The aim was to create interest in the common European heritage of industrialisation. This became known as the European Route of Industrial Heritage. In terms of leisure and tourism it wasn’t a bad idea. After all, shouldn’t citizens of Europe learn about what shaped the modern world? This being an EU funded project, however, a problem arose through an overarching requirement to achieve commonality. Rather reluctantly, the ERIH only hints at where the industrial revolution originated before crossing to the continent. Evidently no nation was to be given a leading role.

There were various social, environmental and geological reasons why the industrial revolution began in Britain. The early start thesis has been well covered by economic historians and as we know that for Britain it meant both benefits and burdens. The ERIH moves quickly on from that awkward point of origin question, giving the impression that the industrial revolution was breaking out everywhere. Certainly, what followed in Europe was important. Yet much of what is to be found on the Route is nineteenth or even twentieth century in origin. The fact is that the building blocks of the Industrial Revolution originated in eighteenth century Britain. Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

When “Col. Mike” met the “Mercerator”

Posted on July 12, 2020 by leslie

The Seattle East Police Precinct in the now defunct Autonomous Zone

When “Col. Mike” met the “Mercerator” 

Ilana Mercer, back on the air

On July 2, 2020, with my favorite radio broadcaster, “Col. Mike”, of the John Fredericks Show, syndicated out of Virginia, for a wide-ranging discussion of the issues of the day—from the Soweto-style shantytowns that had sprung-up in Seattle, to China and the Covid quagmire, to America’s immigration-visa labyrinth, and much more.

In his interview style, the Colonel, so dubbed in deference to his military rank, will remind older listeners of the legendary George Putnam (by whom I was honored to be interviewed years back). Thus, when this columnist ventured to say that the Seattle police had no business deserting their headquarters and posts; that their first duty was to uphold the rights of the citizens of Seattle, not to obey the politized commands of Police Chief Carmen Best and Mayor Jenny Durkan—Col. Mike, who knows a thing or two about a chain-of-command, roared: “They should all be fired.” Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Fear of Frying

Posted on July 8, 2020 by leslie

Statue of Martin Luther, Frauenkirche, Dresden

Fear of Frying

Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, Sinclair McKay, Viking (imprint of Penguin Books), 2020, reviewed by Leslie Jones

“Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast”, Arthur Schopenhauer

Historian James Holland, a ubiquitous presence on television programmes about World War 2 these days, featured in ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’. In the undated footage in question, a group of Jews are being deported from Dresden. Holland confides that he had always considered the city “an innocent place”, bombed needlessly in February 1945. But having watched this amateur film, he reminds us that it was also a rail hub with over 140 factories producing war material. For example, from 1942 the Zeiss Ikon camera plant produced precision instruments and optical technology for the military. It employed slave labour, including Jewish women. In this “hotbed of Nazism”, Holland maintains, the Jews were dealt with as brutally as anywhere in Germany. He acknowledges, however, that the Dresden firestorm was “horrendous”, something of an understatement.

In ‘Greatest Events of World War 2 – Dresden Firestorm’, Holland returned to this contentious subject. He referred to the German air raids on England, notably those on London and Coventry but conceded that in all of these attacks, ‘only’ 40,000 people were killed. Dresden suffered more losses between the 13th and 15th of February. Holland blames the Nazi authorities in Dresden, notably the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann (‘King Mu’), for failing to build air raid shelters for the civilian population (but not for himself). Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Failure of Canadian Conservatism

Posted on July 5, 2020 by leslie

Justin Trudeau at the Vancouver Pride Parade, 2018

The Failure of Canadian Conservatism

Mark Wegierski, writing on the 153rd anniversary of Canadian Confederation

This essay is partially based on Mark Wegierski’s paper, ‘An Ineluctable Direction of Progressive Development?: The Ongoing Failure of the Right in Canada’ (read by Dr. Tomasz Soroka). 8th Congress of Polish Canadianists (Polish Association for Canadian Studies) ‘Canadian (Re)Visions: Futures, Changes, Revolutions’ (Lodz, Poland: University of Lodz, Faculty of Philology) PACS. September 25-27, 2019

Canada has indeed developed far away from its origins. July 1, 2020 is the 153rd anniversary of Canadian Confederation. That was the date on which the British North America Act (Canada’s original constitution) was passed in 1867 by the British Parliament. Four provinces (Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) formed Confederation. It was also a union of two, long pre-existent nations, English Canada, and French Canada (the latter mostly centered in the province of Quebec). The Aboriginal peoples were included insofar as they were traditionally considered to be under the special protection of the Crown. The Canadian Constitution of 1867 was anti-revolutionary. What was called the Dominion of Canada was characterized by “peace, order, and good government” in contrast to the American credo of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

Until 1896, the Conservatives under John A. Macdonald dominated the Canadian polity. Macdonald was a real nation-builder, extending the railways across the continent, thus bringing British Columbia into Confederation in 1871. He also suppressed the two Riel Rebellions which stood in the way of a coast-to-coast Canada. However, the execution of Louis Riel for treason was a baneful act. Indeed, in the 1896 federal election, French Quebec turned away from the Conservatives, voting en masse for the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier.

Throughout most of the Twentieth Century, Quebec would overwhelmingly support the Liberal Party in federal elections, thus virtually guaranteeing a Liberal majority in the federal Parliament. However, until the 1963 federal election, this did not have socially radical implications for Canada, as the country was dominated by a “traditionalist-centrist” social consensus. Indeed, even the social democratic third party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), was mostly socially conservative. However, in 1961, the party changed its name to New Democratic Party (NDP), which suggested a more “futurist” orientation. Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Writer’s Writer in an Age of Mediocrity

Posted on July 5, 2020 by leslie

H L Mencken, 1928

A Writer’s Writer in an Age of Mediocrity

Ilana Mercer on H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and consummate critic, who wrote prolifically from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his. Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history are unsurpassed.

How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot? He can’t: he should, but he can’t. Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.

How can Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth. Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

ENDNOTES, July 2020

Posted on July 1, 2020 by leslie

Gabriel Fauré, by John Singer Sargent

ENDNOTES, July 2020

In this edition: late-romantic piano quintets by Franck and Fauré; & a classical music establishment in meltdown, by Stuart Millson

The Prague-based Wihan Quartet – winners of the London International String Quartet Competition in 1991 – has achieved enormous success in the world of chamber music. The quartet’s players are the violinists Leos Cepicky and Jan Schulmeister; the viola player, Jakub Cepicky; and cellist, Michal Kanka – artists who gave the first-ever complete Beethoven quartet cycle in the Czech capital and who have covered most of the classical, romantic and native Bohemian repertoire in the concert halls of the world. For their latest recording on the Nimbus Alliance label, they collaborate with the Japanese pianist Mami Shikimori, a graduate of the Royal College of Music and a performer at such venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Choosing the late-romantic repertoire of Cesar Franck and Gabriel Fauré, the musicians show us just how, in the music of Franck, chamber compositions can achieve an almost muscular “symphonic” character – the first movement of the Franck Quintet, alone, a chapter of extraordinary, sinewy, bold musical structure. The music, composed in 1879, seems to contain all the power that orchestras and listeners have devoured in the composer’s bravura Symphony in D minor – the Wihan Quartet and Miss Shikimori generating on the Nimbus recording a great surge of sound for which the listener may have to reduce the volume – so intense is the interpretation. Gentler waters are navigated in the Lento con molto sentimento second movement, although seven minutes into this section, Franck builds to another febrile climax, the composition once again thick with intensity and suffused with a sense of melancholia, even tragedy. Restless themes announce the last movement, but there is a more subdued discussion of ideas, before the clear, onward trajectory to a triumphant conclusion is embarked upon: Franck saving all his dramatic emphasis for one last great statement. Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Matters, ENDNOTES:Music, QR Home | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Love in a Covid Climate

Posted on June 28, 2020 by leslie

Constantin Brancusi, 1907, The Kiss, Credit Wikipedia

Love in a Covid Climate

 by Ilana Mercer, spellbound

There was a reason why this expatriate missed Canada of late. In particular, the every-day normalcy of its local CTV News. Often so apolitical, Canadians are always less eager to feature the caterwauling of politicians than to cover the joys of a cat rescue. Or, a kiss.

How natural, then, that a CTV Toronto News anchor intuitively ran one of the most enchanting, culturally significant little video clips I’ve seen for a long time. A young, adorable girl, clutching a tiny dog, is being interviewed about face masks in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park. Her meandering replies are meaningless. She’s just a regular, uninformed, inarticulate millennial, until…  wait for it. A dashing and daring young man with a mop of dark hair appears out of nowhere. He is dressed like the rebel characters in the film “Hair,” Milos Forman’s formidable musical. He grabs the girl and kisses her long and deep and oh-so romantically. The cute girl goes as limp as a ragdoll in his arms. Or, like Scarlett O’Hara in the arms of Rhett Butler. Every bit of her is saying “yes.” Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Embattled Monuments

Posted on June 23, 2020 by leslie

Lord Acton

Embattled Monuments

Ilana Mercer, contra “kerns and gallowglasses” 

Steve Hilton is a Briton who anchors a current-affairs show on Fox News. Mr. Hilton made the following feeble, snowflake’s case for the removal of the nation’s historically offensive statues:

It’s offensive to our Africa-American neighbors to maintain statues in public places that cause not only offense, but real distress. And it is disrespectful to our native-American neighbors to glorify a man who they see as having committed genocide against their ancestors. None of this is to erase history. Put it all in a museum. Let’s remember it and learn from it.

“What’s wrong with Camp Ulysses Grant,” Hilton further intoned, sanctimoniously. He was, presumably, plumping for the renaming of army installations like Fort Bragg, called after a Confederate major general, Braxton Bragg.

Sons of the South—men and women, young and old—see their forebears as having died “in defense of the soil,” and not for slavery. Most Southerners were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a War for Southern Independence. Hilton, it goes without saying, is a follower of the State-run Church of Lincoln. To the average TV dingbat, this means that Southern history comes courtesy of the likes of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Lincoln idolater and the consummate court historian. “Doris Kearns Goodwin,” explains Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, the country’s chief Lincoln slayer, “is a museum quality specimen of a court historian, a pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men.” Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Knee Jerk Reaction

Posted on June 21, 2020 by leslie

Rudyard Kipling, portrait by John Collier

Knee Jerk Reaction

From Stuart Millson, standing tall   

By the end of the 19th-century, the British Empire had achieved a supremacy surpassing that of ancient Rome. The onetime Roman colony at the edge of Europe had become the greatest colonial power in history. The eagle of the Roman legions marked the suzerainty of Caesar, from North Africa to Northern Britain – their power eventually ebbing from our island, 400 years after the birth of Christ. Nevertheless, they left a rich legacy: the foundation of our principal towns, a system of roads and ports to supply them, a wealth of trade and perhaps, more intangibly, the seeding of an imperial ideal that would come to fruition 1500 years later. The maritime expeditions of the first Elizabethan era marked the beginning of this episode.

For the people of the Mother Country in the age of Queen Victoria, the British rulers of India and Africa were heroes. Her empire engendered – if not automatic loyalty from the subject peoples – than at least a strangely long-lasting affiliation, which turned in some cases, after the granting of independence, to a form of imitation. One need only look at the ceremonial uniforms and peaked caps of the modern Indian army and its brigadiers, now facing the Chinese on India’s northern border, to see that. Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs and Comment, QR Home | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments