I just started reading Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.
Just two sentences in, his prose elicits an appreciative grin. What a pure pleasure.
One gets the feeling one is in the presence of a giant among men.
I'm really looking forward to the rest of it...
There’s plenty to blog about, but I don’t really have the discipline to do that on top of schoolwork, paid work, and life...So, here you go, a third helping of Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago. And if you ever get a chance, I recommend you read it yourself.
A must read for anyone interested in morality and freedom.
In no exact order:
Quoting the head of the Cheka, Martin Latsis from the newspaper Red Terror, in 1918:
"We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during an interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of the red terror."
And I wonder how far away we are from this:
Particularly here in Great Britain:
How many citizens who were robbed knew that the police didn't even bother to look for the criminals, didn't even set a case in motion, so as not to spoil their record of completed cases - why should they sweat to catch a thief if he would be given only six months, and then be given three months off for good behaviour? And anyway, it wasn't certain the bandits would even be tried when caught.
Finally, sentences were bound to be reduced, and of course for habitual criminals especially. Watch out there now, witness in the courtroom! They will all be back soon, and it'll be a knife in the back for anyone who gave testimony!
Therefore, if you see someone crawling through a window [...] shut your eyes! Walk by! You didn't see anything!
Three guesses as to who wrote that.
Peter Hitchens? No.
Melanie Phillips? No.
Theodore Dalrymple? No.
Cobb has tagged me with the following instructions:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
So, here goes...
I've just started reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East by Martin Sieff. I have read all, save two, of the books in the Politically Incorrect Guide series from Regnery and have found them veritable fonts of useless trivia which helps win political pub debates with your opponent going "I'm sorry, I don't know enough about that subject to comment on that aspect. But if it's true, you may be right." (Okay, I made up that last sentence, because there are very few political pub debates that end up with such magnanimous statements. Or if it does, it's usually followed by "You fill in appropriate expletive, you!")
I don't take the facts presented in each book with a grain of salt, but I do take the opinions of the authors with a slight grain. Many of them seem to have a specific axe to grind, which, using the BS detectors, leaves me usually about half-way between the authors' views and the views from which I began the book.
Anyway, this part of the book is in a chapter entitled "The Israeli-Arab Wars" under a sub-section entitled Results of the Six-Day War...This passage speaks of Nasser:
He rapidly rebuilt his army and air force with his Soviet backers. By 1969, he felt strong enough to start bombarding the defenses the Israelis had built to hold the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. In so doing, he launched the War of Attrition.
Anyway...whom to tag...whom to tag....
1. Robert, the Expat Yank
2. Steve, the Pub Philosopher
3. The Gorse Fox
4. Laban Tall at UK Commentators
5. Cllr. Gavin Ayling
When it rains it pours...Blog while the sun shines, as they say...
So, anyway, I am almost finished reading Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 1: The Birth of Britain. (My project is to read all four of Churchill's volumes and then finish reading Andrew Roberts's follow-up of history since 1900 over the coming year.)
It has been a real pleasure to read so far. I've encountered a lot of the subject matter before, but Churchill reaches across the decades and speaks of history with a unique voice to all of us. I keep thinking, though, of what a rarity and treasure Churchill was, and how I cannot think of any one individual with the same level of achievements mixed with intellect in the past 100 years. Maybe Teddy Roosevelt...But even that's stretching it.
Churchill originally began writing this series in the 1930s in order to stress the culture that the British and Americans shared. For obvious reasons, he had to put it down in 1939. He finally published it in 1956.
And as I read it I am also reminded of how things have changed and stayed the same since he originally wrote it:
Continue reading "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples - Churchill" »
I recently finished reading Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy. Although I finished it about a week ago, its effects are still lingering with me.
Don't be fooled by the title, it is not a self-help book in the traditional sense.
It's a book filled with philosophical assertions and conundrums and discourses on semiotics, followed up with short mini-quizzes, which culminate in a question as to which sort of world would one want to live in (after several hypotheticals). And I suppose it is within these short Q & As that one "discovers" oneself, or is forced to confront the fundamental inconsistencies within one's belief system.
Unlike with comparable works which I have read - by the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, for instance - one is left a bit more hopeful and less agnostic than from the point whence one begins.
He also hits upon a few issues that have been in the forefront of my navel-gazing of late:
Yesterday was my birthday and the wife bought me the book How to Be RIght: The Essential Guide to Making Lefy Liberals History by James Delingpole
It is an amusing glossary of all that is wrong with the UK and the world. Very funny. One definition that jumped out at me last night as I was reading, really hit home (as I used to be just like this):
So, I've been sick and busy, as usual.
Blogging definitely takes a back seat when the rest of life is filled up.
Anyway, finally finished reading The Iliad as translated by Richmond Lattimore. Wow...It was a bit of a slog to read, mainly because of the format. The free verse has no spaces, anywhere, and so it doesn't give one a whole heck of a lot of white space on the page to rest one's eyes. I'd have much rather have read a book that had another hundred pages or so, but let the eyes rest every once in a while. When every line is the same length and the page is filled with lines, it is very hard not to either skip lines or reread lines, so I wasted a lot of time going backward and forward trying to figure out who was saying what.
Otherwise, it would have been eminently readable. [When I move on to the Odyssey (not any time soon) I shall look for a prose version that isn't so uptight about maintaining line numbers with the text.]
That being said...I learned a few things and observed a few things:
Continue reading "Been a long time, been a long time, been a long..." »
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