Food for thought

Coal miners used to form study groups to read Gibbon & Thucydides. Lincoln and Douglas delivered speeches that lasted three hours with no pauses. C. S. Lewis, like many kids of his era, read Paradise Lost at age nine and was translating Homer by sixteen. The brain rot is real. https://t.co/Wr1eHVBJRv

— Boze the Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ (@SketchesbyBoze) June 22, 2025

HT: Fr. Z

A walk through the 18th century via the paintings of Bernardo Bellotto

Foreigner Killed Attempting Illegal Entry

A 27-year-old American tourist was killed by members of one of India’s most isolated hunter-and-gatherer tribes, according to police in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The American man, John Allen Chau, paid five fishermen to take him to North Sentinel Island, said Deepak Yadav, a senior police official in the city of Port Blair.

The island is home to the tiny Sentinelese tribe, whose members reject contact with the wider world and react with hostility and violence to attempts by outsiders to interact with them. The island is off-limits to visitors under Indian law.

Yadav said that Chau and the fishermen arrived at the island around midnight on Nov. 14. The next day, Chau used a kayak to approach the island and attempted to speak with the islanders, who have been known to fire arrows at interlopers. The fishermen told police that they last saw Chau alive on Friday.

The following morning, they saw his body “being dragged and then buried,” Yadav said.

Read the rest here.

The West Cannibalizes Itself

What civilization has ever sought to repudiate its own culture and traditions as we do today?

Some 13 European thinkers issued an intellectual protest late last year against the assault on the Western heritage that has been raging on the Continent and in Britain for years. They called their 11-page document “The Paris Statement” and gave it a title: “A Europe We Can Believe In.” The Europe they believe in, write the 13 signatories (well-known in Europe, less so in America), is under threat of destruction from the forces of globalization, multiculturalism, and the EU managerial class, as well as growing anti-Christian prejudice.

“These lands are our home,” says the Statement, “we have no other. Home is a place where things are familiar, and where we are recognized, however far we have wandered. This is the real Europe, our precious and irreplaceable civilization.” 

The Statement has received a smattering of attention in the European media—broadcast television in Poland and the Netherlands; major newspapers in Germany, France, Spain, and Poland; national weekly magazines in Poland and Hungary; and opinion web sites in the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain. But mostly it is an intellectual statement written for and consumed largely by other intellectuals.

And of course the assault on the Western heritage from within is a potent phenomenon in Europe, fostered by nearly the entire elite structure of the civilization. Thus it isn’t clear what a few highly accomplished intellectuals, however eloquent or anguished, can do to stem the erosion of the civilizational identity. But we are witnessing the emergence of some powerful political currents within the general European population, manifest in increasingly populist voting patterns in France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. Hence the Paris Statement could become a significant intellectual underpinning for Europeans who are increasingly concerned about the direction of things in their homeland. 

The threat to Europe, says the Statement, comes from “a false understanding” of what Europe is and represents. This “false Europe” is the product of people who are “orphans by choice,” glorifying their vision “as the forerunner of a universal community that is neither universal nor a community.” Believing that history is on their side, these patrons of the false Europe have become “haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing.” The false Europe, says the statement, is “utopian and tyrannical.”

The true Europe, on the other hand, encompasses a number of fundamental elements—a body of law that applies to all yet is limited in its demands; a shared understanding of political and cultural traditions and a fealty to those traditions; an appreciation of the nation state as “the political form that joins peoplehood with sovereignty”; a shared regard for the role of the Classical tradition in shaping the Western mind; and an understanding of Christianity as the religious bulwark of the civilization.

Now, write the signatories, “all this is slipping away. As the patrons of the false Europe construct their faux Christendom of universal human rights, we are losing our home.”

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

"It is more or less incontestable that the artistic production of mediaeval and renaissance Florence, with a population a seventh of contemporary Akron, Ohio, or a quarter of that of the Croydon, was of greater value than the whole of the western world, with a population 7000 times greater at the least, for the last seventy years."

-Theodore Dalrymple

A Haunting Look at Life in Britain at the Turn of the 20th Century

The world's political and economic order is stronger than it looks

Stefan Zweig tells us in The World of Yesterday what it feels like when the wheels really do come off the global system

Readers have scolded me gently for too much optimism over the past year, wondering why I refuse to see that the world economy is in dire trouble and that the international order is coming apart at the seams.

So for Christmas reading I have retreated to the "World of Yesterday", the poignant account of Europe's civilisational suicide in the early 20th century by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig - the top-selling author of the inter-war years.

From there it is a natural progression to Zweig's equally poignant biography of Erasmus, who saw his own tolerant Latin civilization smothered by fanatics four centuries earlier.

Zweig's description of Europe in the years leading up to 1914 is intoxicating. Everything seemed to be getting better: wealth was spreading, people were healthier, women were breaking free.

 He could travel anywhere without a passport, received with open arms in Paris, Milan or Stockholm by a fraternity of writers and artists. It was a cheerful, peaceful world that seemed almost untainted by tribal animosities.

Read the rest here.

Revisiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's warnings to the West

... According to Solzhenitsyn it was no coincidence that Soviet Russia shared certain common problems with the West, for he saw socialism and liberalism as kindred ideologies. Both were rooted in a common utopian project that began during the Enlightenment, he claimed, and thus both were marked by anthropocentricity—the belief that man is the measure of all things. Each ideology began by rejecting tradition and transcendent authority in favor of theories of liberation, and each was destined to afflict mankind with moral chaos. Although more economically efficient than socialism, liberalism will in the end prove just as unsatisfying, he concluded, for “the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer” than “commercial advertising, TV stupor, and intolerable music.”

Unsurprisingly, the Harvard address shocked Americans, particularly journalists, and even struck some of them as ungrateful. How could a man who had escaped the jaws of a despotic regime have the nerve to criticize the country which had taken him in? While Solzhenitsyn insisted that his criticisms were meant to be constructive, coming “not from an adversary but a friend,” he alienated Americans across the political spectrum by condemning a “destructive and irresponsible freedom” that had, in America, been granted “boundless space.” President Ford, put out by Solzhenitsyn’s intransigent anti-Communism, had already declared the dissident a “horse’s ass.” Now others agreed.

Asinine or no, Solzhenitsyn’s speech must be read in the context of Russian conservatism, a tradition which differs in key respects from its American counterpart. Whereas the American conservative imagination is typically informed by the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers, the Russian conservative takes his bearings from iconography, liturgical music, and folk tales. For better or worse, Russian patriotism is bound up with Slavic heritage and the Orthodox Church, not the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Read the rest here.

Thank you Aleksandr Isayevich. May your memory be eternal.

Can war be a good thing?

...Thinkers have long grappled with the relationships among peace, war and strength. Thomas Hobbes wrote his case for strong government, “Leviathan,” as the English Civil War raged around him in the 1640s. German sociologist Norbert Elias’s two-volume treatise, “The Civilizing Process,” published on the eve of World War II, argued that Europe had become a more peaceful place in the five centuries leading to his own day. The difference is that now we have the evidence to prove their case.

Take the long view. The world of the Stone Age, for instance, was a rough place; 10,000 years ago, if someone used force to settle an argument, he or she faced few constraints. Killing was normally on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas and raids, but because populations were tiny, the steady drip of low-level killing took an appalling toll. By many estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all Stone Age humans died at the hands of other people.

This puts the past 100 years in perspective. Since 1914, we have endured world wars, genocides and government-sponsored famines, not to mention civil strife, riots and murders. Altogether, we have killed a staggering 100 million to 200 million of our own kind. But over the century, about 10 billion lives were lived — which means that just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s population died violently. Those lucky enough to be born in the 20th century were on average 10 times less likely to come to a grisly end than those born in the Stone Age. And since 2000, the United Nations tells us, the risk of violent death has fallen even further, to 0.7 percent.

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

I am not sure what else is to be expected when the West invades barbarian lands and then invites the barbarians here. Cameron is a pathetic sissy calling this "terror-related." No, Prime Minister, it's far worse than anything you and the rest of the Cathedral's blank slate adherents can imagine. It's just the sort of thing that barbaric primitives in thrall to a hostile creed are going to do when placed in an unarmed, passive society. The immigrants are what they are; they do not belong and never should have been invited. If there's to be outrage, it should be directed to the people who dream up these awful social engineering schemes.

-The Anti-Gnostic

I have generally disagreed with AG's hardnosed anti-immigration stance. And for the most part I still do. But I think I am coming around to his POV at least with regards Islamic immigration. There is a lot of evidence that Muslims just don't assimilate well and that their cultural and moral compass is incompatible with that of Western Civilization.

See also these related articles...

The Manhood of the West

Cameron: Attack Not Representative of Islam; Al-Shabaab: Yes It Is