RUTHFULLY YOURS

This gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents.

In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death.

83 years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the ad that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life. Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper ads, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children, and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war.

From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/13/michel-houellebecq-the-prophet-of-europes-decay/

Whether Michel Houellebecq is a great writer will be debated for as long as his books are read. What few will deny is his status as one of the early 21st century’s most challenging and original artists.

That might not be saying a great deal. After all, the first 25 years of the new millennium – at least in the West – are unlikely to be remembered as a time of great artistic or intellectual originality. Just look at recent winners of the Turner Prize, or read one of Sally Rooney’s novels.

Still, Houellebecq stands out thanks to his willingness to say the things other writers don’t dare to. In an era when artists and authors tend to share the same ‘progressive’ worldview, Houellebecq has consistently refused to bend the knee to fashionable orthodoxies. He remains a critical figure for those who still believe in a writer’s ability to capture the unique ‘spirit’ of the age they live in. Taken together, his works chronicle and explore the creeping sense of decline shared by many in the West.

Born in 1956, Houellebecq’s journey from young dilettante to literary fame was far from orthodox. By all accounts, he enjoyed an unpleasant childhood, taking the surname ‘Houellebecq’ from his paternal grandmother, who raised him in place of his indifferent parents. After school, he studied agronomy at university in Paris, before working as a computer programmer. He published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994, when he was 38, and has had seven more novels published in the roughly three decades since.

While Houellebecq’s literary journey has been unusual, there was one familiar aspect: the repeated rejections he received from French publishers. It is easy to see why. What he was writing simply didn’t chime with the era. It was the 1990s. Sexual liberation and multiculturalism were seen as unequivocally good, and capitalism was viewed as triumphant. Sensible writers accepted all this. Houellebecq did not.

It was not until 1998 that Houellebecq eventually broke through, with the publication of his second novel, Atomised. In the finest French tradition, it provoked disgust and awe in equal measure. According to the New York Times, Atomised was ‘bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile’. The judges of the Dublin Literary Award, which the novel won in 2002, described it as ‘extraordinary’. A fair-minded reader might find it hard to fault either response.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/dietrich_bonhoeffer_pastor_martyr_prophet_spy.html

For a very long time, I have heard of the man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I recognized him as someone who wanted to save the Jews from Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Recently, I saw a movie about him, and was inspired to learn more about him. Coincidentally a friend told me that Eric Metaxas had written a book about Bonhoeffer, and I felt compelled to read it.

I was impressed and deeply moved.

Like so many brilliant men, Bonhoeffer was complicated. And yet he demonstrated so much clarity in his ideas and beliefs that he left no doubt about his relationship to the Church and his abhorrence of the Nazis. He grew up in a family that was not deeply religious, although Christian, but eventually he saw his own destiny emerge:

It wasn’t until 1920, when Dietrich turned fourteen, that he was ready to tell anyone he had decided to become a theologian. It took a bold and courageous person to announce such a thing in the Bonhoeffer family.

Although his family was taken aback at his decision so early in his life, over time they grew to fully support him in his academic and religious pursuits.

In this review, I don’t plan to review the details of his maturation. Suffice it to say that he saw the dangers well in advance of the Nazi rule, and acted accordingly:

When the Nazis were taking over the German Lutheran Church, he would lead the charge to break away and start the Confessing Church. [The church] must completely separate herself from the state. . . It wouldn’t be long before the people return because they must have something. They would have rediscovered their need for piety.

Bonhoeffer was well aware of the violations against both the Church and the people who the Nazis would target. He realized early in his career that the Jews were going to be in Hitler’s sights, and he rejected the dictator’s decisions:

The Bonhoeffers learned that something especially disturbing called the Aryan Paragraph would take effect April 7 [1933]. It would result in a series of far-reaching laws that were cynically announced as the ‘Restoration of the Civil Service.’ Government employees must be of ‘Aryan’ stock; anyone of Jewish descent would lose his job. If the German church, essentially a state church, went along, all pastors with Jewish blood would be excluded from ministry. But perhaps the most grievous aspect of the church turmoil was the willingness of mainstream Protestant Christian leaders to consider adopting the Aryan Paragraph.

The German Christians, which Bonhoeffer refused to support, had allied themselves with the State and supported its perverse views:

In her book, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, Doris Bergen wrote that ‘the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.’ To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. One of the leaders, Georg Schneider, called the whole Old Testament ‘a cunning Jewish conspiracy.’

The lives of Army brats have always been a core component of the US military. Scarcely described until now, Army Brat: World War II is an essential account that fills a major gap in history.

Author Laura Thurston Gutman lived deeply embedded within the US Armed Forces from before the United States’ earliest entry into World War II through the Vietnam era. Chronicling pivotal events during those years, this historical autobiography describes a life inextricably intertwined with the military. From her birth at West Point’s hospital, to her cobbled-together education, and witnessing her father’s many military honors, Laura’s childhood was one of intense awareness of the danger her father faced and the courage her mother displayed. As she grew older, she lurked in the background during long evenings of intense discussions of policy. Through the constant upheaval and disruption so familiar to military families, Laura developed a radical independence, a determination to gain control over her life, and a fearless approach to her own education.

Chronicling the experiences of a strong military family as they witness and participate in the unfolding of history in a dangerous and challenging world, Army Brat identifies consequential insights into the critical importance of a strong religious foundation; an educational system dedicated to core concepts of nation and loyalty; and leadership that prioritizes sovereignty, national defense, and military support.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-death-cults-and-decadence/

If you haven’t read Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, you’ve very likely read about it. Released in April, it’s still near the top of the bestseller list, and it deserves to be.

In part, it’s a piece of first-rate reportage – truly historic, world-class reportage of the kind that the legacy media used to publish at their best. Immediately after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Murray flew to Israel and has spent much of his time there ever since, experiencing things to which neither you nor I would gladly expose ourselves except in the service of truth. Which is to say that Murray takes the title of journalist very seriously: to him, plainly, it is a calling, a trust, a profession in the best and noblest sense of the word.

Of course, to speak of journalism in such terms is to be reminded just how grotesque it is for most of the big legacy-media names – the ones who pull down the million-dollar salaries for staring into cameras, perfectly clad and coiffed, while reading scripts written by other people – to claim the same label for themselves. The day before I am writing this, I turned on CNN, with the usual dread, in hopes of hearing the latest news about the riots in Los Angeles. [Note: This piece was written before Israel and Iran began firing on each other.] I happened to catch the opening moments of Christiane Amanpour’s program. She began with what was meant to be a summing-up of the situation in L.A. She must have spoken eight or ten sentences before I switched the TV off. Why did I switch it off? Because every single sentence that came out of her mouth was a bald-faced lie.

This is the legacy-media landscape of our time: a landscape of lies. More and more of us can see through it, but millions of Americans are still being blue-pilled by Christiane, Wolf, Anderson, Jake, Rachel, and the rest of the whole crooked, compromised crew. For years these millions of Americans have been fed, and have swallowed, lies about Trump – the Russia hoax, the “fine people” hoax, the bleach-drinking hoax, and so forth. But even the lies about Trump aren’t as deeply twisted as the ones surrounding the events that Murray recounts with extraordinary precision and passion in On Democracies and Death Cults.

At times during this post-October 7 era, it has seemed almost as if the legacy media’s lies about the situation in Israel have rewired the minds of half the American population. Perhaps it just seems that way to me because I have so many friends (or “friends”) on social media whose age, sex, color, educational background, and job description render them most likely, for whatever reason, to fall for those lies. In other words, they’re college-educated white women in late middle age who belong to what you might call the creative class – poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, artists, actors, etc. – and who live, most of them, in New York or Los Angeles. More correctly, they live in a bubble of culture – an echo chamber of opening nights and poetry readings and vernissages. You might call it decadence.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/literature/george-orwell-a-man-for-our-time/

Thomas Banks: Orwell and the Life to Come

George Orwell was an atheist for nearly all his life. If the account of his school years which he supplied in his long essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” is to be relied on, he had ceased to believe in God by the time he was fourteen years old, and had conceived a strong distaste both for the doctrines of Christianity and for its Founder:

I hated Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs. If I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera: in the New Testament my friends, if any, were Ananias, Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate. But the whole business of religion seemed to be strewn with psychological impossibilities.

As the boy grew into the man, his views on Christ and the characters of sacred history do not appear to have changed very much, though his early esteem for such oddly chosen heroes as Haman and Judas appears to have left him. But to the religion of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in which he had been raised Orwell never returned. His guiding allegiances were to the revolutionary working classes, to the socialist movement, and the liberal tradition of free speech. All of these loyalties, as he understood them, were bound to turn him into an enemy of organised Christianity in general and of the Catholic Church in particular. For Catholic intellectuals he rarely had a good word, even if he might on occasion recognise the literary talents of a Chesterton or a Hopkins, or the plainspoken honesty of a Frank Sheed. As for the Catholic culture of his time, to him it principally meant General Franco, mental stagnation, authoritarian politics and repression generally.

Contempt for the sacred he carried about like a loaded weapon, and was willing to use it against even fairly innocuous targets. In a letter to a female friend in 1932, he describes an experience at an Anglican parish in a poor neighbourhood where he was temporarily lodging:

My sole friend is the curate—High Anglican but not a creeping Jesus and a very good fellow. Of course it means that I have to go to church, which is an arduous job here, as the service is so popish that I don’t know my way about it … I have promised to paint one of the church idols (a quite skittish looking [Blessed Virgin], half life-size, and I shall try to make her look as much like one of the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne as possible) … 

La Vie Parisienne, for those not familiar with the name, was an erotic men’s magazine in the early twentieth century. To quote this much is to demonstrate that Orwell was not, like certain other sceptics, a man burdened with any lingering fondness for the religion he had cast off as an adolescent.

The lessons of war gave his odium more fuel on which to feed. Orwell served as an infantryman with a Loyalist unit in the Spanish Civil War, in which the cause of the Church was closely bound up with that of Orwell’s Nationalist enemies. The cause of literature nearly suffered an irreplaceable loss on May 20, 1937, when the future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was shot through the neck by an enemy sniper. Orwell recovered and returned to England with no kinder feelings towards the political Right than those he had carried with him to Catalonia. His encounter with the Catholic Church in the flesh had, if anything, left him even more hard-bitten in his anticlericalism. He wrote approvingly at this time of the burning of Spanish churches in communist-controlled areas, mentioning with regret that Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia was spared during the violence. He treated with scepticism accounts of murdered nuns (stories now known to be horribly true), and, being left hors de combat, continued his war with the Nationalists and their sympathisers with his pen.

One notes in his journalism from the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s with what vigilance he kept accounts of allies and enemies. He was not by nature a bitter man, but he made a point always to know which side of politics a fellow writer was on, and party affiliations certainly factored in his judgments of books and their authors. His professed belief in literary objectivity was not a hypocritical sham, but its application in his own practice had its limits. He was saved from turning into a narrow and tiresome ideologue by his generous instincts and quintessentially English sense of fair play, yet he never let sleep his awareness of who is For us and who is Against.

The political was not everything to him. The doctrinaire Marxist and every other crank who lives to overthrow the established customs of mankind were, equally with the Jesuit and the reactionary, objects of his personal disgust. The civilised decencies of private life he never ceased to value, as the reader discovers in Orwell’s homely reflections on the English pub, the English rose garden and the domestic fireplace. These and other of this life’s unbought graces had in him a devout appreciator. Still, a writer less interested in the world above this world would be far to seek.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/karine-jean-pierre-book-launch-shows-why-democrats-are-losing-men/

Give Karine Jean-Pierre credit. The former Joe Biden press secretary has faced criticism in the past over her performance behind the White House podium for a variety of reasons. But in launching her new book this week, she revealed the reason Democrats are having a hard time getting men to vote for them.

The initial promotion for her book, made via a social media video, urged viewers to, “stop thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes, and not be so partisan.” Employing a half-century-old business management cliche might appear trite but given its common usage, Jean-Pierre can be forgiven. Thinking outside the box sounds like a good thing.

For those wondering what to think if we’re thinking outside the box, Jean-Pierre provided helpful guidance saying, “If you are willing to stand side by side with me, regardless of … how you identify politically, and as long as you respect the community that I belong to and vulnerable communities that I respect, I will be there with you.”

Jean-Pierre’s duplicity is glaring: ‘Think outside the box and don’t be so partisan, just think in my box instead and respect what I respect.’ It stands to reason that if you don’t think in her box, she will not be there with you. It sounds like she wants us to trade in one brand of partisanship for another – hers.

This is one of the reasons the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging white male voters, not to mention black, Latino, younger and women voters. The party’s underlying ideology requires falsehoods just to survive. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Some will recall a 2012 political ad targeting former House Speaker and GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for an earlier budget proposal. The ad depicted an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman being pushed over a cliff.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/david-mamets-tribute-to-trump/

Like the late David Horowitz, David Mamet, now 77, was a red-diaper baby who, after spending the first act of his career as a prominent member of the left, eventually had second thoughts. Horowitz announced his change of mind in a 1985 Washington Post article, co-authored with his writing partner Peter Collier, headlined “Lefties for Reagan”; Mamet went public with his own political metamorphosis in a 2008 Village Voice essay entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” In the years since, Mamet, whose oeuvre already included first-rate plays like Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and top-notch screenplays like Wag the Dog (1997) and Hannibal (2001), has published a slew of wise – and wise-ass – books about politics, culture, and the arts, including Recessional (2022), which I summed up as follows: “What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about?”

Like Recessional, Mamet’s new collection of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, also covers a wide range of topics: the glories of his hometown, the Windy City (“The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan”); the destructiveness of American schools under the aegis of the Department of Education; the mediocrity of poetry (or, at least, New Yorker poetry); the corruption of art museums; the the fraudulence of climate-change orthodoxy; the greatness of Shakespeare; the nature of heaven. While I agree with Mamet almost all the time, I must admit that I dissent from a handful of his robust assertions. “Government, like Circe, turns men into swine,” he states. Does it really? Or does it instead, I wonder, attract men who already are swine?

Unsurprisingly, given his long career as a Hollywood writer and director, many of Mamet’s reflections are about cinema (which was the focus of his delightful 2024 book Everywhere an Oink Oink): the preposterousness of the current Oscar rules, which demand that the credits of nominated pictures include a certain number of minority-group members; the lameness of most of today’s film dialogue (“few,” he insists, “can write dramatic dialogue”) and film music (nowadays, he feels, “all film scores sound alike”); and the absurdity of the concept of “Method acting” (“there is no such thing as ‘The Method’”). Ditto on all counts, although I beg to disagree, again, with the claim that the imposition of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–68) resulted in three decades of cinematic “drivel.” Drivel? Casablanca? Random Harvest? The Good Earth? Citizen Kane? Really?