The recent Oscars, I’m told, were a drag, but at least Emma Stone and Oppenheimer are worth watching. Yes, Hollywood still fascinates, however grotesquely. Being au courant with modern sensibilities means normal people do not merit depiction as such, but as freaks, a role reversal worthy only of Hollywood. And this is where our Western culture has gone wrong. While communism imploded and the free markets took command during the late ’80s and early ’90s, the victors ignored the culture and allowed the Marxists to take command. Universities, TV studios, the media, and Hollywood were all taken over by the left, which then infiltrated Silicon Valley and Big Tech. Now it’s too late, the bad guys are in and the good guys are running scared.
Looking around, all I see are brainwashed people endlessly repeating things they’ve learned from watching TV commercials and down-market movies. Although Scotland is 95 percent white and England 82 percent—only 4 percent of Britain is black—every commercial and every presenter of news and such is close to 50 percent black. In the U.S. the whites are now at 59 percent, yet the overrepresentation of the so-called underrepresented, the blacks, is even more drastic still. See what I mean by losing the cultural wars?
Our cultural leaders have also rewritten our past. George Washington is now at times depicted as black, as are all those black founders in Hamilton, and the Brits are not far behind. That poor headless Anne Boleyn has been shown as black, as has half the regency. They’ve even retroactively made Mozart black, but at least they haven’t credited him with rap.
Universities, needless to say, churn out the antiwhite propaganda quicker than you can say Stalin, ignoring the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity because it is too white. And yet, dead white males have done all the heavy lifting these past 2,000 years, with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hemingway, and the rest of the giants now needing to have blackface imposed on them. But if I stood up and quoted the above segment in any college in Britain or America I would be lynched, although—and here I’m bragging—it would take quite a lot of these weenies who have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
But let’s get back to the movies, as literature and the rest of the arts might confuse the present-day bunch. I have discovered a way to make a fortune, and it deals with moving pictures, as once upon a time the present filth was called. As in every successful film, you need goodies and baddies. You cast whites as baddies and blacks as goodies and presto, you have the reviewers and the New York Times ignoramuses on your side. The next step is trickier. The white males in the film need to be not only in the wrong but also weak-willed when compared with the black women they’re in contact with. No black woman should be portrayed as being dumb or having too many children by the time she’s 18 years of age. Just as no white man should be shown not to be a white supremacist.
The baddies in the film all have to be self-employed and to be exploiting people. The goodies are all into nursing or playing the bongo drums on Park Avenue while raising money for underage pregnant women who have been raped by whites. Straight people are out—if you want your film to be reviewed, that is, especially straight white people. Married white couples should never be shown as happy—unlike married black couples—but living in misery and relieving their unhappiness by putting obstacles in the way of young black gays.
Do not make the mistake of depicting a woman with a shrill voice, a turned-down mouth, messy hair, and a manner that would scare a Gestapo torturer. If you need to cast an Oriental, make him or her neutral and without a Charlie Chan accent. Palestinians can be portrayed as killers and blowers-up of things, and their roles reversed by Israelis if and when the film is shown in Arab countries. Dedicate the movie to some woman who was killed in a Trump rally, and invent a good name for her to be seen as the curtain falls. Do all of the above, open a Swiss bank account, do not reveal the secret of your success, and keep reading Takimag for future advice.
]]>The dictatorship of the minority rules supreme in the West, with our children being coerced into therapy by gender activists. When Nazi Germany brainwashed children, we called it an earth-shattering crime; now a far worse brainwashing is taking place with our approval. What has happened to us, and why are we allowing these freaks to brainwash and damage our children? And why is the left-wing main American and European media playing along?
If I knew the answer I’d yell it from the rooftops, but I don’t. It is partly cowardice on our (normal people’s) part, partly the concentration of left-wingers in the media that spreads lies and propaganda against normal folk. Most of the people who control the news and cultural output, along with the corporate elite and Silicon Valley freaks, have painted the U.S. and the U.K. as malignant forces for the enslavement and oppression of black and brown people. As I write, there are commissions drawn up all over American states to study reparations for slavery, as ironic as this may sound if one takes into consideration the trillions already spent propping up our African-American cousins. But when cultural Marxists occupy the heights of education, entertainment, mainstream media, and technology, what can the voices of average Joes actually accomplish?
In the case of African Americans, how many times have we read or heard in the news that blacks in America die of homicide at eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, and are overwhelmingly killed not by cops, nor by whites, but by other blacks? The answer is probably never, certainly not in The New York Times or on mainstream television.
Which leads me to the conclusion that ordinary Americans have become unreachable by the truth, and an alienating high-mindedness by conservative organs such as this one will not do the trick. It’s time to get down and dirty, for lack of a better metaphor. Just envision how the Muslims treat their problem living in European, Christian countries: If I were to write a denunciation of our Lord Jesus, there would be a few angry letters following, but were I to denounce Muhammad, death threats and much worse would follow. Parisian journalists paid with their lives for a few cartoons of the prophet, and hundreds continue to die each and every time a joke appears against him, yet in the case of our Lord it is always open season.
So, what is to be done? That’s an easy one to answer. Freedom of speech should be the first step. For example, write or film or talk about the South’s history of valor, honor, and benevolence now besmirched by low-life lefties whose falsehoods are printed by the Times as truths.
If you feel like making fat jokes, do, but not in the presence of fatties because that would be bullying. Political incorrectness is as phony as political correctness; all one has to be is a gentleman or lady, the old-fashioned kind who never insulted unintentionally. Resist and openly denounce woke, which now controls all three branches of government, dominates the media, owns and controls the social platforms, and dominates Big Tech.
The first act of tin-pot dictators upon seizing power in banana republics is to abolish free speech. Newspapers and radio stations are warned to follow texts that are given to them. In the U.S. and lesser so in the U.K., wokesters followed the banana republic script by doing away with our freedom of speech by making our most precious liberty politically incorrect to begin with, and absolutely a non-sayable today. By being offended, and using the offense card to demand that they be prevented from saying it, the woke have managed to become a dictator’s dream, because the next step is punishment for saying something the woke don’t like.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. After doing away with freedom of speech, there is diversity. It has now replaced religion, and nations are judged by diversity rather than identity. The new on-dit is that the contribution of migrants and their descendants is what makes a country. The mix of history, institutions, language, culture, and rules means nothing. Only the D-word matters. Diversity, according to woke Nazis, is our only strength.
So, dear Takimag readers, freedom of speech in order to denounce these woke Nazis is all-important. Do not be afraid to use this most precious of freedoms, the right to declare out loud our opinions.
]]>The longtime Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner, had successfully published an opus called “Paris Was Yesterday,” so Bill thought an article called “Paris Really Was Yesterday” a hopeful upgrade. Well, all I know is I’ve written of this three times at least over these past fifty years, but I can’t resist one more because it illustrates the kindness and total lack of self-worship—to which today’s celebrities are so addicted—of a wonderful writer named James Jones. For any of you young whippersnappers unfamiliar with Jones, he wrote the great bestsellers From Here to Eternity and Some Came Running, both very successful in print and as movies, and many other novels.
Jones and family lived in a grand house on the Left Bank in Paris, but rumor had it that he was going back to America. Jones was a close friend of Irwin Shaw, another terrific storyteller, author of bestsellers like The Young Lions, Two Weeks in Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, Lucy Crown, and Rich Man Poor Man, and some extremely good short stories like “Girls in their Summer Dresses,” “The Eighty Yard Run,” and “Tip on a Dead Jockey.” I had skied and played tennis with Irwin, who had encouraged me to write, but I was unable to contact him in order to get an introduction to Jones, who was perfectly placed to tell me why Paris was yesterday.
So, on an evening I’ll never forget, I drove by Rue de Berry, where the old Herald Tribune was based, left Alexandra in the car, dropped a jeton in the wall telephone, and rang James Jones. A gruff male voice answered.
Me: May I speak with Mr. Jones, please?
JJ: I’m Jones.
Me: Mr. Jones, my name is Taki Theodoracopulos and I work for William Buckley’s National Review and would like an interview with you.
JJ: I do not give interviews, sorry.
Me: Not as sorry as I am, sir, as I just got back from Vietnam and have a wife and three children to feed on eight thousand per year. An interview with you would help a lot.
JJ: Jesus, who did you say you work for?
Me: William Buckley’s National Review.
JJ: God help us, you better come around.
And so I did. Jones was wonderful. He had enough of Paris, was not in good health, and was eager to go home. The student revolt of 1968 had changed the carefree glamour days that had lured the chic and the intellectuals since time immemorial; now it was America’s time. He didn’t talk about himself or his work, but mostly about what Paris meant before and now, especially to American expatriates like himself. He was generous and kind, and tried to explain that the Paris of Papa Hemingway and Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald was no more, that he had tried to live the dream and now it was all over. Paris was just another city in trouble.
As I was leaving, his wife came in and we shook hands. She was extremely polite and asked if there was anything they could do for me. Slightly embarrassed, I thanked them profusely and left. I then wrote the story, telexed it to NR, and that was that.
A while later, Time magazine ran a cover story with the headline announcing the death of the novel. Irwin Shaw and the Joneses were dining in a Parisian bistro and discussing the Time article. “Who the hell do they think they are?” said Irwin. “We are storytellers, and we will always tell our stories, and to hell with Time and their bulls—.” “Don’t take it so bad,” said James, “I had a kid in my house the other day, and he makes eight thousand a year working for that fascist rag of Bill Buckley’s. I can’t pronounce his name, it was a long Greek one.” “Funny,” said Irwin, “the only Greek I know who writes is Taki Theodoracopulos.” “Yes, that’s the one,” said James.
Well, said Irwin Shaw, laughing in his drink, “You’ll be pleased to know, dear Jimmy, that next week I will be going on his sailing yacht in the South of France, and I’m rather looking forward to it.” “F—,” yelled James Jones, slamming the table, “I’ve been had by a Fascist.”
Years later, when I was a columnist for The Spectator, Esquire, and the London Sunday Times, I attended a Southampton, L.I., party in honor of Irwin Shaw, who was toward the end—James Jones had died—and Mrs. Jones approached me as I was talking to Irwin, who was laughing about the incident. “You never fooled me for a minute,” said Mrs. Jones. I’m not so sure.
]]>Even Donald Tusk is not playing fair. He’s trampling Polish democracy but is being given a pass because he’s pro-Brussels, the great unelected body of nobodies who rule the lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans and live in the style of the old maharajas. European farmers are revolting, and rightly so.
The other Donald, Trump, after being targeted by a black Attorney General and a Jewish-American judge, will end up being the poorest American citizen after being forced to pay fines that would financially weaken Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. This is a politically motivated tar-and-feather job on the Donald, and it’s the price one pays for being a right-winger nowadays. It also signals that New York City is no longer open for business unless you’re on the left. Here’s what David Lammy, the black shadow foreign minister of Britain, had to say about America’s 45th president: “A woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath.” What was the reason for this very un-British outburst? Trump dared to say to NATO bigwigs, “You gotta pay your bills or we won’t defend you.” Nice!
And speaking of matters military, chicken hawks in Washington keep looking for a fight—the latest is a Russian threat in space—and what bothers me is, who is going to do the fighting? We have created a society where young people think that words, or even silence, can be violent; quite how those with this mindset could ever fire or be fired upon is unclear. But I forget that those who start wars, like the dreaded neoconservatives Kristol, Podhoretz, Feith, Wolfowitz, Abrams, and their ilk did in 2003, do not do the fighting and, like Cheney, who took five deferments during the Vietnam war, cheer the brave ones on from afar.
And now back to Trump, if I may, and this time it’s not about money but something better than the root of all envy: sex. As everyone knows, Trump is facing “hush money” trials for paying “ladies” like Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to not go public. What I don’t understand is, what’s wrong with paying such “ladies” money to keep their trap shut? If they were my type, which they are not because they’re much too down-market, and I happened to be running for office, which I am not, I too would pay them to shut up. Instead, and as if he didn’t have enough problems, Trump will have to sit in a drab New York courthouse and listen to a bunch of greedy lawyers go on and on about how these two “ladies” were badly treated and their reputations ruined by the mean old Donald. This is comic-book stuff, except that the people involved are real. In the meantime, a couple of miles east, a Brooklyn school proposes that 9-year-old kids should be allowed to explore their gender, whether they want to be trans or queer. My only wish is that a large asteroid crashes and blows up the school while the committee is meeting to decide whether the kids should have such a choice. Come on, asteroid, where are you now that we so badly need you?
The civilized French are way ahead of us in this respect. When Felix Faure, President of the Republic from 1895 to 1899, and as old as Biden, died in the saddle, they named an avenue after him for trying to please a lady and expiring as a result. Vive la France! When an opponent of very old Lord Palmerston threatened to expose him in 1865 for having a quickie in his office, he was advised to keep his trap shut because if word got out, Palmerston would win in a landslide. Nelson Rockefeller had bad luck because his womanizing did not get out until he dropped dead at 70 while having it off with his secretary Megan Marshak, definitely not to be confused with that other lollipop, Meghan Markle.
The hypocrisy in the Trump case is what bothers me. Show me a businessman who doesn’t overvalue his assets and downgrade his debits and I’ll show you someone who chooses his wife in an orgy. In a more serious vein, the Biden regime has allowed 6 million migrants to invade America, among them terrorists, robbers, rapists, and murderers, and by continuing to do so is changing the ethnic, racial, social, and political character and composition of the American family. With this invasion has come a flood of the narcotic fentanyl, which in one year has killed more Americans than all the U.S. war dead in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. Biden is the worst thing to happen to America and the civilized world since the invention of the internet.
]]>So, everyone I mention in this column is, alas, dead, but their writing continues to enthrall and fascinate, as well it should. I never read Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange but have always admired him, and more so after I got hold of his Mozart and the Wolf Gang. Written partly in prose, partly in verse, it is a kaleidoscope of snatched conversations between Wolfgang and other geniuses up in heaven. Not my cup of tea, but Burgess is as perceptive as they come, and his use of language is unequaled.
Try this as an opening by Burgess on music and musicians: “Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the bloody mary helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing.” Would you call this an arresting first sentence? Apo-what? Being Greek, I wasn’t fooled by old Anthony. The tongue twister means “I want to die.” Ancient Greek was laconic, and one word did the trick.
Opening sentences are famous for their brevity—“Call me Ishmael”—although my favorite is by Barnaby Conrad, a great gent and friend, amateur bullfighter, boxer, and wonderful writer: “On September 22, 1947, in Linares, Spain, a multimillionaire and a bull killed each other, and plunged a nation into mourning.” I may have the date of the month wrong, but the rest is kosher. That’s what I call an opening. It’s The Death of Manolete, the greatest bullfighter ever.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that writing followed the Greeks, whose teachings and philosophies were mostly oral. Today no one writes, they type or text, and they certainly don’t write love letters. But just try to imagine what the world would have been like if pencils had never existed, or pens, or paper, no typewriters nor printing presses. What kind of a world would we be living in now without those? My only and great regret is we didn’t stay that way, without computers or word processors, no email or internet, and no social media. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates recounts a story in which an Egyptian god has invented writing and is admonished for it: “This discovery will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls because they will not use their memories.” If only old Plato could see us now, with people unable to string two words together except when quoting from a hamburger commercial. Plato, however, was aware of writing’s social value. Always in one of his dialogues, he has the great Athenian lawmaker Solon made to feel shame by the Egyptians because they know through writings more about the Greeks than the Athenian.
Then there is the theory that adopting literacy in ancient societies fundamentally reconfigured the human brain. If it did, it certainly is undoing it now with all the garbage online. Literacy for the ancient world is like the internet for us, say left-wing pundits, who also inform us that preliterate societies were matriarchal and worshipped the Goddess and feminine values. The written word propelled culture toward linear, left-brained thought and brought about the ascendancy of patriarchal rule and misogyny.
And speaking of total left-wing bullshit, Hollywood has never managed to appreciate great writing, and why should it? The medium is made for morons, as the written word is not easily visually turned into its equivalent. Both Faulkner and Fitzgerald failed, and Hemingway never even tried despite some pretty good offers from Hollywood. These scummy types showed their contempt for writers with their jokes, the most revealing being about how dumb a blonde was: She f—ed the writer rather than the producer.
Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly complained: “He understands only the women he invents, the others not at all.” Well, yes, that’s how most writers are, or were. In today’s world we are documented and ultra-surveilled, our movements, purchases, step counts carefully recorded. Writing is no longer an act of creation because of too much information. The first time I read Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, I was left dumbfounded by the beauty of his description of the prince. Prince Salina’s masculinity, nobility, fairness, and adoration for the fairer sex had me yearning for that noble period. Years later, another nobleman, Luchino Visconti, director of the movie, exclaimed: “I cannot understand how a Bronx-born acrobat can play Prince Salina as close to the real thing as he does.” He was referring to Burt Lancaster playing the prince like the real thing. But leave it to Burt, he could do anything and did.
I loved discovering great writers when I was young. The novels of John O’Hara, his short stories, and the characters I’d meet in nightclubs that were straight out of his works. And authors like James T. Farrell, and John Steinbeck, and Theodor Dreiser, and their characters that were formed by the emotional consequences of money’s absence. Those were the days, my friends, and they’re not coming back. Now we have a woman whose best-selling true story is how she had threesomes and foursomes with her husband and they helped keep a sound marriage together. It was favorably reviewed by the Times; in fact most of the people who work for that rag were very jealous, and I don’t blame them, as I’ve seen some of their wives.
]]>Never mind. Modern writers say that art begins in a wound, an imperfection. Perhaps that’s why modernists are so unreadable, centers of their own universe, hypertrophies of their egos. I first read Tender Is the Night at 15 years of age, and it remains the incarnation of all my memories. I was reading it in study hall at my boarding school, having flunked math and other subjects after excelling in sports. I had it on my knees, under my desk, as Mister Barrett, a teacher who was not best pleased with my attitude, spotted it. “Is it a dirty book you’ve got there?” as he reached for it. When he saw it was Tender he handed it back and lowered his voice: “Keep reading it.” Good old Fitzgerald had saved me.
I discovered Maugham with The Razor’s Edge. By then I was 17 and looking to the future. Larry Darrell became my hero, along with Dick Diver and Jake Barnes. Darrell’s search for emotional perfection and God through knowledge became mine—but through pleasure. Tennis tournaments, Paris, the Riviera, and Gstaad were good places for research. Books by Maugham, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald were as ubiquitous as dinner jackets, bathing trunks, tennis rackets, and skis. I was among the lucky ones: The gaiety never turned to bitterness, as was the case with many of my playboy buddies. The books helped keep me on my toes.
A week ago I turned on the idiot box and watched The Razor’s Edge starring Tyrone Power as Larry. Power was perfect in the role, being extremely handsome, and with a kind and intelligent look, enigmatic but luminous. The film sure brought back memories. I had met the actor while he was appearing in a one-act play on Broadway, and I was tripping the light fantastic with his ex-wife Linda Christian. I was 21 and Power was in his early 40s, but he took the time to discuss Darrell and Maugham and the making of the film. (Power died of a heart attack the next year.)
Maugham’s short stories were among the best ever written. Prudish missionaries, fallen women, spoiled-rich bored ladies, secretly honorable but flashy playboys, defrocked priests, and society bores were his forte. He traveled nonstop and knew the world like no one else. He understood his characters’ humanity, never putting them in black-and-white boxes. The power of his works derived from psychological insight, and like Papa and Scott, Maugham expressed his characters through conversation more than action. “The Letter” is a wonder, with three films made of his short story, the best being the one with Bette Davis.
Unlike Maugham, who came from a privileged background, Scott Fitzgerald was at times naive, especially about wealth. The upstart Gatsby pursues his Daisy while self-conscious of recent wealth, arrivistes posing as aristocrats. In a socially fluid America, new wealth had to be guarded against the next wave of gate-crashers. Tom Buchanan’s complaint that “civilization’s going to pieces…. If we don’t look out the white race will be submerged” reminds me of my own recent cries, not that I have anything else in common with ghastly old Tom.
Good old Scott portrays Buchanan’s wealth as the worst possible kind, for it comes without the usual obligations and duties that Scott believed distinguished old money from new. Hollywood has tried time and again to film Fitzgerald’s epics but has failed every single time to even approach his psychological insights. The closest Tinseltown ever got was an old black-and-white Gatsby starring Alan Ladd, whose enigmatic “Shane” demeanor and mien made later Gatsbys look like impostors.
Papa, needless to say, never approved of a single movie made of any of his works and insulted every movie man he ever met as a result. But I thought The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro were not only good interpretations of Papa’s short stories, but the heroes reflected the author. When Papa finished A Moveable Feast he wrote: “After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.”
Good old Papa, writing well is like making love, and it does have the same aftereffect. Papa, Scott, and Mister Maugham, you’re the best ever.
]]>Now, I wonder why that is? I guess it’s because we whites are a soft touch and feel guilty as hell for having built places like the Parthenon and the Colosseum, not to mention the pyramids in Giza, with a little helping hand by those who were caught up in losing wars—back then they were given jobs for life and called slaves. But please don’t get the wrong idea. Back then slaves were not treated in the manner white American lesbian writers of today present their condition. It was more like Big Sam of Gone With the Wind than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. How do I know this? Because I still can read, despite the fact some lefties hint that I was alive and a slave owner back in those good old days.
The Romans even gave their slaves a free day off—Saturnalia—where slaves were free to eat and drink as much as their hearts desired and stomachs could stand, and as an added bonus, were served by their owners in brilliant role reversals. Many noble Romans and Greeks married their slaves, which is more than some of these Harvard types who poison young minds ever do as they always marry ugly transsexuals.
Slavery throughout the ages has taken many forms, yet it is the American version of it that tends to dominate the way we think about and envision it. Latin America practiced slavery and it wasn’t all black, as did the Barbary Coast, and the latter were mostly white captives. The Greeks only used slaves they had captured in battle, and even then they were never slaves in the manner of Hollywood. The Romans were slave owners but certainly not racist. Their slaves came from all over the empire, and believe it or not, some slaves were volunteers. There were no welfare payments back then, and people were poor and slavery meant free room and board in some plush Roman villa, so why not? Slave Roman women were highly regarded and highly appreciated as mothers. In big cities during Roman times the slave population was around 20 percent, and despite what Hollywood teaches, slaves were an important investment, especially educated ones, and it was in the owner’s interest to look after them.
“Okay, what about Spartacus?” you might ask. There were slave revolts, but they were very, very rare, and this failed spectacularly, despite what Kirk Douglas did on screen. Modern-day phonies who believe what The New York Times writes will be appalled to read that once a slave was freed in ancient Rome and automatically became a Roman citizen, the first thing he did was purchase a slave. An endurable life by a slave depended on their owner, although if a slave worked in the gold and silver mines in Spain, their life was short even for the standards of that time.
There is even better news about being a slave: Because the Roman elite were not allowed to engage in sordid business deals like today’s Anglo-American tycoons are, slaves took their place and became very rich as a result. Mind you, they were tycoons on behalf of their masters, but they were able to engage in commercial enterprises and become doctors and bankers and all sorts of professionals. Apparently on a wall in Pompeii one slave, Faustilla, advanced loans with a very high interest rate.
Slavery was taken completely for granted back in those days, and it showed how advanced Romans and Greeks were to treat their slaves as almost equals. Going back in history, the early times of Mesopotamian and Assyrian civilization, as well as Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia, and onwards, slavery was a fact. It was the Christians who were the first to argue against its evils, around 200 years before the Brits made slavery illegal in 1833.
The new so-called democracies of the Caribbean are banging the drums for reparations, the latest con to be exported by black American political leaders who want lotsa moola from our taxes to be paid to people whose ancestors were never slaves and not even in the country during slavery. Such are the joys of not being born white. Even the Frogs are at it. Back in 1642, King Louis XIII authorized the slave trade, as did his son, the Sun King, and now some French people of color are very angry that the royal tombs are left unmolested.
The French held some 4 million people in bondage over 200 years. Paris is famous for its historical statues and commemorative plaques and 130 museums, not to mention the streets named after past heroes. Black Lives Matter protesters recently splashed red paint on the statue of Jean Baptiste Colbert, being unaware that Colbert was a hero around 1685, and the French revolted in 1789, but then how would they know? BLM is a con even in France where people actually read and don’t always fall for bullshit.
]]>The Ukrainian leader’s life is a public melodrama, whereas Putin’s inner thoughts are a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma—Churchill’s description of Russia. The late Dr. Henry Kissinger, a great American statesman who cannot be compared to the morons running the US of A nowadays, got it right when he said that in order to understand Putin, “one must read Dostoyevsky, not Mein Kampf.” I knew Dr. Hank, as I once boldly dared to call him, only slightly, but I know Srdja Trifkovic, an all-knowing geopolitical expert, much better, as we both write for Chronicles, a conservative monthly. Both Dr. Hank and Srdja agreed that Russia’s soul has a hell of a lot to do with her wars, and no one better understood the Russian soul than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.
No nation takes its literature more seriously than Russia, and I thought of that tortured land when I recently walked into an American bookstore that contained mostly ghostwritten autobiographies of illiterate celebrities. “How can you not root for Russia?” I asked an appalled friend of mine whose father, Norman Mailer, was known to write the odd book or two.
Never mind. Russians still read Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, whereas Americans are busy canceling Hemingway, Mailer, Fitzgerald, and O’Hara. Russians can withstand wars and deprivations until victory is achieved, whereas Americans—according to my own father—were complaining that Coca-Cola was hard to find during World War II. According to Kissinger, Putin is “a character out of Dostoyevsky,” and as everyone but a Hollywood ignoramus type knows, Dostoyevsky’s life and writing were one long struggle with the demons.
The demons, needless to say, were both his own and those of Mother Russia. Dostoyevsky was transformed by having faced a firing squad—as close as one can get to death—before being reprieved and exiled, turning to God as a result. For the next 40 years his characters—mostly bad, tortured souls—all found Christ toward the end. He saw the Russian soul as being divided between the greatest evil and the greatest good, with both God and the devil ruling the world. The latter grants us great freedoms—as Americans enjoy their porn and drugs today, while accusing Putin of making Russia less free and other such crimes. The devil also guides Uncle Sam in his pursuit to reshape the world into a collective utopia and ideological conformity, and into blurring the sexes because the old devil is a trickster like no other. The devil says that an American cannot discriminate in favor of his own brother or sister, father or mother; he must love them less than abstract humanity. See what I mean by how tricky Satan is?
The American affectation of denied rights for newly minted oppressed groups I see as the devil’s work, because it annuls freedom in the name of collective happiness. These denied rights also include the legitimacy of the nation in the name of a global utopia. The ever-encroaching E.U. is a perfect example. Putin’s Russia, with its nationalist theme and opposition to the global vision of our Western political establishment, is seen as the great enemy, the one that needs to be canceled and eradicated.
What does all this have to do with Crime and Punishment? Well, as Srdja Trifkovic wrote, Putin going after Zelensky and NATO enlargement reminded him of Raskolnikov going after that horrid old woman. And just as hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians and Russians have been killed in the process, so did the old hag’s innocent half sister, Lizveta, become collateral damage of Raskolnikov’s crime. And do you now see why Dr. Hank was correct in advising us to read Fyodor in order to understand Vladimir?
Do any of you remember when everything Russian was hunky-dory? When Yeltsin was in power and every crook in every corner of this earth was eager to do business with him? Well, what followed Boris was chaos, inflation, unemployment, crime, and, most likely, erectile dysfunction. It was only natural for Putin to emerge as a leader and hard man. We, the West, in our unlimited greed, had egged, enabled, and lionized the robber-baron crooks of the Yeltsin era. Putin put a stop to it and will never allow Russian lackeys to genuflect to Western robber barons and banks.
Russia has always been held in a certain antipathy by Western elites for reasons unknown, although I suspect they have a lot to do with the Russian deep belief in Christianity. What America should do is force Ukraine to sit down and talk. Just as it should force Netanyahu to never show his face again in any public forum. But Uncle Sam is greedy and scared and can only pick on midgets like the Syrians and Iraqis.
]]>People of my age all grew up with music, and by that I don’t mean the noise that now passes for music. And because one’s inner life now consists mainly of memories, they tend to be unspoken. Hence it is universally acknowledged that music is better than words because words can only go so far in explaining music’s magic. Let’s face it: Music awakens the mysteries of the soul, which literature and painting cannot express.
The visual and the written follow the sound in the transmission of feeling, especially when one is in love. And again, by sound I don’t mean the ghastly noise that now passes for music, that horror called rap, so ruthlessly shorn of depth and musicality, not to mention rhythm or charm. Rap is an insult to our aural sense, a crime against nature and the self. Mind you, that brain-jolting cacophony of modern rock, with each “song” indistinguishable from the last, is not much better. Calling these people artists is abuse of language to an intolerable degree.
Let’s take it from the top: There are so many great works in classical music, I find it very hard to list their creators as if they were baseball players whose batting average can be compared. Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Haydn, Handel, Mendelssohn, Grieg, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Bellini, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, I could go on, and then there’s a miracle called Mozart, although so many of the above are very close to his genius. Beethoven’s nine symphonies are one of the supreme accomplishments in the history of human endeavor. It is a body of work that can compare with the building of the Parthenon or the Chartres Cathedral, but it is actually beyond meaningful comparison with anything.
Ditto for the rest of these divine composers. Back when they were creating their divine music, the glossy modern instruments today’s orchestras are blessed with did not exist. The period instruments were strained to their limits by the demands of the compositions. Chopin’s demons were dragged out of the piano like the wind howling around the gravestones, said the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein about the Pole’s “Funeral March.” Chopin died soon after he composed it.
Verdi and Wagner were born the same year, and they are opera’s great antipodes. They embody two completely different outlooks on life. That’s why every German city has a Wagnerstrasse and every Italian one a Corso Giuseppe Verdi. Imagine if you can, the effect of the delay between conceiving music in the ear and writing it down without much paper or light to lengthen the working day. No telephone, no secretary, no publicity machine, no backers, no permanent orchestra, nobody but oneself. Yet the piled-up volumes of Mozart’s editions on display in Salzburg measure over six feet high.
But enough about classical highbrow stuff; what about the American boys like Gershwin and Porter? I think they’re just as great as Wolfie and Ludwig, and don’t let any snob tell you different. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is as good as any sound I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot. And it’s uniquely American. Cole Porter wrote both the music and the lyrics to his songs, his irrepressible talent creating twenty Broadway musicals that typified style, sophistication, and grace, along with deceptively simple melodies that were thought modern but were ingenious and complicated. Porter enchanted audiences like no other, and there were many others.
The golden age of Broadway and Hollywood came about because of people like Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, just to name a few. What gave the songs and music their popularity and their emotional power was the African American jazz that had come before, and pure talent. I had the good luck to be born during the golden age of American popular song, and I remember coming down from boarding school to see plays like South Pacific and Oklahoma! and taking records back to school that we listened to every night while swooning over some blonde actress we had seen on stage.
Oh well, no use reminiscing, it’s too late in the day. Today’s sounds remind me of a butcher chopping up meat. “And if her behavior is heinous, kick her right on her Coriolanus,” wrote the great Cole in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” He’d be arrested today for his lyrics. Wolfie, Colie, where are you now that we really need you?
]]>The Sulzbergers are longtime owners of the rag, and are of German-Jewish extraction, and most of the people they employ are of the Jewish faith, hence linking Trump to Hitler is a natural. Mind you, much of the propaganda and lies the Times spews out daily could match much of the Führer’s during his heyday. The last big one was a 5,000-word diatribe by a criminally verbose and obtuse Jewish lesbian, Anna Marks, naming the extreme heterosexual Taylor Swift as a fellow sapphic. It’s a wonder the Times has not yet declared Trump to be gay, but that’s only because the gay community would revolt. Trump’s heterosexuality suits the Times; men who like women are suspect to great crimes, Nazi-like crimes, white supremacist type of outrages—according to the paper, that is.
Never mind. Biden has been instructed that Trump and Hitler are one and the same, and is about to conduct his reelection campaign accordingly. What is great help to sleepy Joe is the fact that there seems to be no boundaries left-wing journalists won’t cross when writing about conservative politicians. But why bring in Hitler? Why not Stalin or Mao or Lenin? Okay, I get it, although Adolf killed far less people than Stalin and Mao, he did pick on the Jews rather hard, if you know what I mean. I lived under German occupation when I was 4 years old until I was 7. I had a German fräulein as a nanny, a wonderful Prussian 60-year-old with white hair who ordered about the German officers who had occupied our house like a sergeant major. Some might not like to read this, but the officers were gentlemen and treated us with respect. I have German blood from my father’s side, and I was and remain a Germanophile despite how Hollywood depicts my favorite people.
I don’t know what it is, but ever since the greatest German of them all, Otto von Bismarck, united the various Germanic states and later on taught the Frogs a sharp lesson in 1870, anti-German propaganda has had a field day. Just off the top of my head, here’s a news dispatch from a Riviera journal of around 1920: “Patients were haunted by what they had seen—Germans ransacking villages, bayoneting babies, shooting the infirm.” Now, this is a crock, and the first thing to appear once the German army had swept the Belgo-French lines aside. The Belgians are nice people who produce great french fries and molest children. The Germans have produced Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Hoderlin, and Bismarck and have never bayoneted babies, but such are the joys of propaganda in wartime. The big lie stuck, then Hitler and his Nazis cemented the original lie.
I am lucky to have a good friend in Count Leopold Bismarck, the great-grandson of Otto, who depicts all the good that is German in his personality and manner. In his unassertive way, he has influenced style and fashion in present-day London, his kindness and superb, unaffected manners being the embodiment of a gentleman. But of course you wouldn’t expect a know-nothing ignoramus like Biden to compare Trump to someone as intelligent, perceptive, and gracious as Bismarck. It had to be Hitler, or no cigar.
The irony is that Trump is as far removed from Bismarck as he is from Hitler, but how would the Times or Biden know all that? The rag used to be reliable but is now a joke, run by woke-crazed numbskulls desperate to exclude anyone who disagrees with woke mandates. Biden has never been employed and has lived off the national trough ever since he finished among last in his class in a very undistinguished place of learning. So he picks up the baton passed to him by the Times that a Trump presidency will turn into a dictatorship and presto, Adolf is back in the news and this time no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Trump is not my cup of tea because he’s vulgar, but as president no one dared cross him. It took the whole Washington establishment to invent a Russian connection that was as false as the Hitler one, and 8 million illegals had not camped out on major American cities with all expenses paid. COVID did the Donald in, and my hunch is that he will win the nomination but lose the election. All the media except for the Murdoch TV and two newspapers are against him, and—mark Taki’s words—Hitler and Trump will be seen as one and the same sooner rather than later.
]]>The historic transformation from the royal to the democratic may be characterized as that of Austria to that of America, during and after World War I. Austria started it, America finished it, and as far as I’m concerned, the genie had been let out of the bottle and has been making trouble ever since. The murder of the Austrian crown prince could not be ignored, but the slaughter of the next four years reminds me of the overreaction by the Israelis who are yelling foul while murdering more than 20,000 Gazan innocents.
Woodrow Wilson is my bête noir; without his intervention the war would have ended in a stalemate around late 1916 or early 1917. A mutually accepted and face-saving compromise peace was at hand due to exhaustion by both sides, rather than the Versailles dictate that assured another world war. Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Russia would have remained monarchies, and the bloody Bolsheviks would still be whistling Dixie. Millions upon millions of Communism’s victims would have been saved, had Woodrow Wilson croaked three years before his actual demise.
All that’s in the past, needless to say, so no use crying over spilled you-know-what. Democracy has won the Cold War and everything’s hunky-dory. Or is it? Ex–British premier Boris Johnson was my editor for years and is a good man, but he was hustled out of office by undemocratic means by those people who hold power while remaining in the shadows. They go by the name “elites,” and like unseen microbes, they are everywhere. Boris has obviously not learned his lesson. He recently wrote an article praising the state of democracy in the Western world, which reminded me of a cuckold I once knew who spoke admiringly of another man who had run off with his wife. Boris insisted in his article that free speech, free press, free politics, freedom of religion, and freedom of association are all doing fine, and I suppose they are doing just that over on our side, if one discounts the fact that Western democracies can never make the truly big decisions. By that I mean democracies are incapable of taking the bull by the proverbial horns when it comes to, say, immigration, a problem that will become an existential one in the very near future.
I have yet to meet someone who is not worried about Muslim and African immigrants pouring into Europe, or South American and Caribbean ones into North America. Yet the moment someone raises their voice it’s deemed racist, no ifs or buts about it. With tens of millions of Africans coming north in the next twenty years in search of food and water and a better life, Cassandra voices will cry out, but it will be too late. Our free speech and free press and freedom of association will have failed us. And they will have done so because there is no REAL free press and REAL free speech—only a few voices such as ours ignored by our elites who call the shots.
In Western Europe, a single European superstate with its own laws, currency, economic policy, defense, and parliament—the E.U.—is not my idea of a democratic institution. All the major decisions are taken by unelected bureaucrats who live high on the hog and view voters in the manner a benevolent parent sees his children who need guidance and direction above all. When someone rears their head about the flood of illegal Muslims pouring in, and does something about it, as is the case of the great Viktor Orban in Hungary, he is ostracized by the great and the good and painted a fascist by woke papers like The New York Times and the TV media.
Better yet, take crime. Although crime in American cities is completely out of control, stop-and-search methods are deemed by media leftists as unacceptable because minorities are those they’re aimed at. Hence crime continues to rise while media leftists feel safe in their expensive houses in crime-free sections of town. And another thing: What kind of democracy is it when there are more illegal migrants entering a country—the good old US of A—than there are births? Just think about that.
So let’s get back to democracy. We Greeks began it in a very cautious manner, making sure that only educated people with a stake in the game could use it. The ancient ones in their infinite wisdom knew all about human nature. Just look at the E.U. It went from a trade agreement to a proto-state involved in defense, criminal justice, immigration, the environment, and foreign policy. Democracy passed over into the hands of unelected civil servants and not a peep was heard. The results are mass protests relating to ethnic and religious identity highlighting how divided Western countries have become. While nice Boris is praising democracy, there is an elephant in the room that all our leaders are ignoring, starting with him, and the pachyderm is called immigration.
]]>The reason this writer is no Trump fan is his lack of dignified language and behavior; otherwise, I agree with most things he’s for. But the Times writing that Trump’s rhetoric echoes authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy during the 1930s is as big a lie as those uttered by the German and Italian leaders back then. The reporters who wrote this rubbish are two, Michael Bender and Michael Gold, and their reporting is in the noble tradition of the whoppers the Times is known for, especially while picking up a Pulitzer back in the ’30s by announcing that there was no hunger nor any dead as a result in the Ukraine thanks to Uncle Joe Stalin. (Only 5 million, that’s all.)
Never mind, there are wiser men and women than I who understand the dangers of fascist rhetoric, people like one Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who told the Times: “The overall Trump strategy is an obvious one of dehumanizing people so that the public will not have as much of an outcry as the things that you want to do.” I think Ruth’s overall strategy should be to first learn to speak in coherent sentences before engaging with reporters.
Again, never mind. The lefty media has for years accused Trump of praising foreign dictators and disdaining democratic ideals. But in my humble opinion, Trump is persecuted as well as prosecuted by a government in cahoots with the media and the deep state. The New York Attorney General, a black woman by the name of Letitia James, has repeatedly called Trump an “illegitimate president” and has promised to “get him.” She also participated in a chant of “Lock him up,” one that is back to haunt Trump, Donald having used it against Hillary in 2016.
We are now in a situation of choosing whose abuse of office is worse, the government’s or The Donald’s. It’s a sham spectacle, and typical of authoritarian states, one that the U.S. was never called by anyone in the past. Trump has four major trials coming up, and still he leads in the polls, hence no wonder the Times calls him a Hitler in the making. I lived under German occupation during World War II, and a Greek military dictatorship from 1967 until 1974. I visited Spain while Franco was in power, and Portugal under Salazar. The Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese dictatorships were benevolent ones, but authoritarian where freedom of the media was concerned. Very big lies were written by the left about the last three European countries to be under a dictatorship, but unless one was involved in politics, one would never have known that they were living under an authoritarian regime. All three European dictatorships ended peacefully and were followed by democracy and peace.
So, however crude it may sound, there are people in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, and many other cities in America whose houses and businesses have been burned or ruined by riots following the death of a career criminal, who would not exactly be opposed to an authoritarian government in Washington. Mind you, it ain’t gonna happen. Law and order are now dirty words thanks to the media and Hollywood. The criminal is a hero, the cop an oppressor, the happy law-abiding family a sepia-tinged postcard from the past.
Alas we’re in a situation in which some of the worst people on this earth get to determine what gets published, or seen on television and the movies. Add to that the internet and social media and you get chaos. Plus old Joe and inarticulate Kamala, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, and you have a ruined country. Trump doesn’t seem all that bad compared with them.
Needless to say, Trump is his own worst enemy where rhetoric is concerned. His hyperbole—“I will have no choice but to imprison political opponents”—feeds the media’s need to cry the fascists are coming. Trump himself is convinced that the indictments against him have been engineered by Biden in order to sabotage his chief rival. I happen to agree.
Because of uncontrolled immigration from Africa, Europe is turning to the right, with conservative politicians resisting open borders typically labeled neofascists by the media. The good uncle is not far behind. There are 50 million, yes, 50 million out of 330 million Americans who were born outside the United States. No wonder homelessness and rampant drug use are what most sane people notice about the nation nowadays. Smearing people as racists is now America’s most popular sport, so I’m not surprised the Times is calling the Donald a fascist racist.
]]>Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t watch the drivel that Tinseltown puts out nowadays, but a bad case of bronchitis had me in bed high up in the Alps, with a cough of a Volga boatman and a high temperature. There was nothing to do but watch TV, as I could not focus on the written word. And what I saw only made my temperature go up—actually, it made me so angry I got better. I will not mention the serial except that it’s been very successful. It takes place out west and the cowboys are all bad, bullies, criminals, sadists, and worst of all, white. The few black cowhands are wise, introspective, and very perceptive with their advice. The victims are the red Indians, sorry, Native tribesmen. One pretty Indian girl teaches history class, and her opening remarks to a new class are what a major criminal Christopher Columbus was. But the best part is the utter awfulness of the whites. They’re greedy, cowardly, murderous, bullying, dishonest, and I’m talking only of the men. The white women are drunks, sleep with everything that walks but the horses, and are very greedy and vengeful. My only thought was thank God I’m watching this in my own bed. In a movie house I’d probably be lynched once the lights went on. Mind you, I only watched less than a segment, and I’m told the characters improve later on.
Hollywood is at present doing the work UFA films did for Hitler in the ’30s. Back then, in film after film, the “International Jew” was portrayed as conspiring against Western interests, institutions, and Christian mores. By the time war broke out, there were few Germans who weren’t convinced that the Jews had conspired against them. Now our Jews in Hollywood are doing something along the same lines against the white man, white males having replaced on screen at least the “International Jew” as figures of hate.
Is America going the way of Weimar? Our Jews in Hollywood are not Hitlers, some of them are even nice guys. But they lack talent and courage, they love money, and the easiest way to get it is to follow the woke agenda, it’s as simple as that. Their grandfathers were Mittel-European Jews, uneducated and unsophisticated, but they learned quickly, could spot talent, used it well, and, when war broke out, turned Hollywood into a PR firm for Uncle Sam. These new Harvard guys are smart, well educated, but greedy, cowardly, and willing to debase themselves for woke ideology.
The verdict of history is always too late for those who correctly predict how it will turn out, hence the greatest Greek writer since Homer will abstain. One thing is for sure: Sub-Saharan Africa passed the one billion population mark in 2015, and it is going to more than double to 2.12 billion by 2050. By then it will be ten times what it was when I first visited Africa in the ’50s. The stance of some conservative politicians in Europe to counter an inevitable invasion from Africa is seen as fascist, and politicians who warn against unlimited African immigration as the embodiment of the Duce, if not the Führer. Woke is like the snowplow that opens the road after a heavy snowfall. Why should the whites have Europe to themselves? What have they done to deserve it except enslave people and profit from it? And what about America? The country is too big for a few rich slobs with large yachts and big private planes. Land and wealth need to be redistributed, and now.
The funny thing is, that show I watched while coughing my poor lungs out is all about this: one man with a large ranch, and many without large ranches who want to take it away from him because he did bad things in order to keep it from them in the past. Oy vey, as a Jewish granny would say. But here’s an idea for you Hollywood types. Why not make a movie about one of the bravest men alive, a man who saw action with the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry, acquired a law degree, wrote four well-received books including Men of War and on the Rhodesian SAS We Dared to Win, is a big-game hunter and conservationist, and survived a goring that ended with him operating on himself without anesthetic; a man who was mistaken by the doctors in Nairobi for Mel Gibson and, most important, a 14th-generation African—but white. He’s my dear friend Hannes Wessels, and the Hollywood bums should be filming his life. If they’re interested, he lives in the Cape of Africa and is known to everyone.
]]>Recently, however, something bad happened to me. A totally false accusation and a staged entrapment by someone whom I hardly know and have never physically touched was passed off as truth in a Swiss village court of law. Then something extraordinary took place. My wife, Alexandra, a devout Catholic whom I married 52 years ago when she was young and didn’t know what she was doing, quoted the Bible and told me, “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” She also quoted from the Book of Job, in the Old Testament. God must have had a reason to punish Job so cruelly, yet poor old Job was innocent. God did it to illustrate his unquestionable power and that his ways are never understood by mortals. “We have two beautiful children and four even more beautiful grandchildren,” she said. “You’re healthy and well-off, what else do you want?”
She was hard to argue with—she was not born a Serene Highness for nothing—and she has persuaded me not to hate or ask why it happened to me. Mind you, I’m appealing, but it takes a long time. Having said that, now let’s get back to Christmas: We live in a world where people exaggerate the value of entertainers and professional athletes while neglecting spiritual heroes. Sometimes I think anti-Christian forces take Christ more seriously than most nominal Christians do. The Western world, including many of those who consider themselves Christians, has turned Christmas into a bland holiday of mere niceness. Ironically, the natural reaction to Christ is to reject him, and he said so himself. He predicted his own death and told his followers they must expect persecution too. He performed miracles of love and mercy but also warned of eternal damnation, insulted the Pharisees, and rebuked people who adored him in words that can make us cringe.
He was no con man. He accompanied his words with miracles, and those against him disputed his words rather than the miracles. His modern enemies don’t try to dispute that miracles happened, they simply assume he never performed them. The fact that large crowds witnessed the blind who saw, the deaf who heard, and the cripples who walked convinces those of us who believe in his truth.
And yet there is a growing army of unbelievers, who like skeptics for centuries say that this is all kids’ stuff, and some go further: A benevolent God or Son of God would never allow things like war and the death of millions to happen. How could a loving God permit such gratuitous ruin? Surely any rational human being is bound to think that natural disasters that kill innocents are proof of the nonexistence of a good God. And yet, the miracle of birth alone proves otherwise. As does the satisfaction derived from doing something good for others, a very rare thing nowadays. Mindless violence (with women and children being killed by the thousands in Gaza) is now part of Western culture, as are anti-Christian beliefs.
Crusading atheism is now the banner many so-called thinking people march under. It separates the men from foolish boys and so on. Articulate secularists, however, have a problem: The Enlightenment story does not add up. As people opened their eyes, the superstition of religion gave way to science; parochialism and tribal allegiance were replaced by cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems were out, separation of church and state were in. And what did that bring us? Millions and millions of dead from wars, especially during the 20th century, and the big causes of the wars and destruction had little to do with religion but a lot with secularism.
Science is a great blessing but has not managed to replace religion where spirituality is concerned, and the great scientists are among the greatest of believers. Many churches are empty in Britain because of the secular teachings of the Church of England. Try to get into a Czech church on Christmas Eve, or a Greek village one. From Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Einstein, God was a reality. The West and America in particular are suffering from a culture of self-absorption and self-promotion. The person who lied so egregiously against me is one embittered by anonymity, as if that were a crime.
And now it’s time. I want to wish every Takimag reader a very happy Christmas, and a happier New Year.
]]>And now, all of a sudden, the very same heads of American institutions that have squelched free speech in favor of woke bullshit are bending over backwards, declaring their hands were tied by their duty to allow unfettered dialogue. Which is also a big lie. There was never a hint of dialogue, nor discussion, just rules set by woke zealots, to be obeyed by everyone, starting with the heads of institutions such as Harvard, Penn, and MIT. (The Penn one is gone; now for all the rest.)
How did this turnaround come about? Easy. Jewish billionaires are not known for acting like blushing brides, and some of the biggest donors decided to call a halt to the giving once the woke freaks turned anti-Semitic. The irony is that free speech was acknowledged only when Jewish students felt intimidated. Until then free expression was allowed only for woke and lefty freaks, with Harvard leading the way for canceling any conservative voices.
Apollo CEO Marc Rowan started it, and other Jewish heads of Wall Street followed. They quickly got results: Israel will not be criticized or else. The heads of famed universities got the message. These were the same heads who didn’t invoke free-speech defenses for conservative speakers when student mobs threatened to burn the place down. Money, you see, dear Takimag readers, speaks louder than words.
So there you have it. A few Jewish billionaires managed in one swoop to do what hundreds of millions of the rest of us failed to accomplish: establish freedom of speech at American universities. The hard left’s takeover of campuses was no secret but was commented upon only by a few conservative reporters and columnists. The sick trend of American higher education included the phasing out of courses on the classics and of kangaroo courts and mob-rule assaults. All this was ignored by so-called administrators until the Gaza riots. College administrations in America are terrified of the campus left, with faculty the most terrified of all. Grievance-mongering student groups rule the roost, and in my not-so-humble opinion, they will return with a vengeance once things quiet down a bit.
That parts of American higher education were led by moral imbeciles was obvious to some of us but ignored by papers like the Times because they served a lefty purpose. That student leaders and senior faculty members began numerous public events by declaring that the campuses were located on occupied lands tells us everything we need to know. These insincere pronouncements, nothing but virtue signaling by a weak and cowardly faculty of third-rate thinkers, are typical of the rot. Which in American education begins at the top.
And it gets much worse. As my friend Roger Kimball wrote in his magnificent opus Tenured Radicals, campus troublemakers in the ’60s and ’70s had returned to the scene of their crimes as teachers, subverting the system from within. These bums had their way, with great books and intellectual traditions of the West being replaced by studies of obscure black feminists and other such nobodies.
Never mind, as Samson whispered to no one in particular when he began to shake the columns. The Jewish billionaires have spoken and American educators have listened. It took one word—genocide—to do the trick. When pro-Palestinian protesters called for an end to the genocide in Gaza, the billionaires got busy. There is only one thing wrong: Americans decry some deaths but not others, and as we tell the world that we provide Ukraine with weapons because we believe in a “rules-based international order,” we also provide weapons that end up killing children on a huge scale in Gaza. 17,700 dead, 70 percent of them women and children, up to this writing on Dec. 11. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by?
So I ask you, dear readers. Wouldn’t it have been better if Israel had used smaller bombs and not pulverized entire neighborhoods, killing thousands of innocents? Palestinian children are dying from American bombs, yet pro-Israeli commentators are surprised that young mobs are calling for the genocide to end. Israel’s army should have used a surgical tactic in response to the October 7 massacre. Instead, Israel has lost an opportunity to show magnanimity and compassion. But not to worry. American Jewish billionaires will now resume the giving, and knowing how easily American university heads bow to the richest, the word “Palestine” will soon be joining the N-word as one never to be uttered.
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