Displaying items by tag: marxism

Cancel culture is all around.  It crushes rational debate and destroys freedom of thought and speech.  The latest victim is the eminent British historian David Starkey, caught up cruelly in the Black Lives Matter debate.  His cancellation raises important questions for how those who value freedom fight against leftist revolutionary thought and practice.

There is a madness to crowds, as writers such as Douglas Murray have observed, with great perception.  To explain the modern world's predicament only as a problem of madness is to miss a big point.  The problem of evil.  Christians understand this.  It is time for the world to catch up.

Chesterton once said that the non believer in God doesn't believe in nothing - he is prone to believe in anything.  Observing the current political madness in the world only confirms Chesterton's wisdom.  Whether it is the mad wokeness of the new revolutionaries, or the crazy hysteria over Covid 19, it seems to be everywhere.  There is a madness to crowds.  Not just in Victoria.

First they came for the explorers.  Statues' live matter.  The culture war has ramped up in these Covid times, perhaps unexpectedly.  It behooves those of us with an affection for tradition and freedom to, first, understand the war we are in, and then to comprehend what needs to be done to fight back.

In an age where reason and logic are not exactly the flavour of the month, sloppy thinking abounds. Public discourse has taken a big hit with plenty of talking heads offering us just plain nonsense. They can throw out utterly illogical and contradictory statements and think they are giving us great contributions to a discussion or debate.

Bella Dodd was a member of the Communist Party in the US during the mid twentieth century. She was eventually expelled from the party and experienced a conversion, which led to her rejoining the Catholic Church, the church of her childhood. Dodd testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1953, explaining how Communists had infiltrated trade unions, teacher training colleges, seminaries and other institutions in order to subvert them. This extract is taken from Chapter 11 of her autobiography, School of Darkness:

Today's history lesson looks at communism: its founders, Marx and Engels, try to convince of communism's necessity and inevitability; this is contrasted with the reality of life under a communist regime, as explained by Solzhenitsyn. 

There are older teachers around today that are as depressed about modern education as many of the Tavern's customers. Most ordinary punters, both dads and mums consumed with work, send their kids to what passes for schools, whether they like it or not, to have their little chaps and chapesses spend more time with a (very possibly) uneducated moron than they do with themselves. It is a bleak picture. Older folk remember many of their early years' teachers with affection and gratitude, but few kids today will have such pleasant memories.

[Photo credit: xT3ddotcom - still taken from video] I had the pleasure of hearing the wonderful Gabriele Kuby speak on her book,  The Global Sexual Revolution,  last weekend. This is the second time I've heard Dr. Kuby speak about her groundbreaking book, which is subtitled, 'The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.'  That phrase alone speaks volumes about the gender ideology and sexualised culture that is perverting our children, marriages and family life.

When Santayana told us to never ignore the lessons of history lest we repeat its mistakes, he could not have been more correct. And those who do study history see his advice being played out – that is, ignored – all the time: historical mistakes are being replicated constantly for the very reason that we do NOT study history and learn from it. One of the most frightening examples of this is our historical amnesia when it comes to communism. A century of communism should confirm to everyone that this has been one of the worst, bloodiest and most deplorable political ideologies ever. Yet plenty of folks who should know better (such as university students, etc) are utterly clueless. Certainly most Western young people seem totally unaware of recent history, and are therefore heading over the cliff in repeating its mistakes.