RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/why-we-must-teach-western-civilization/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The legacy of our culture is unsurpassed in human history; to ignore it is an act of rank self-hatred

On Tuesday, December 3, 1940, Winston Churchill read a memorandum by the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart that advocated making peace with Nazi Germany. It argued, in a summary written by Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, that otherwise Britain would soon see “Western Europe racked by warfare and economic hardship; the legacy of centuries, in art and culture, swept away; the health of the nation dangerously impaired by malnutrition, nervous strains and epidemics; Russia . . . profiting from our exhaustion.” Colville admitted it was “a terrible glimpse of the future,” but nonetheless courageously concluded that “we should be wrong to hesitate” in rejecting any negotiation with Adolf Hitler.

It is illuminating — especially in our own time of “nervous strains and epidemics” — that in that list of horrors, the fear of losing the “legacy of centuries” of Western European art and culture rated above almost everything else. For Churchill and Colville, the prospect of losing the legacy of Western civilization was worse even than that of succumbing to the hegemony of the Soviet Union. 

Yet today, only eight decades later, we have somehow reached a situation in which Sonalee Rashatwar, who is described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “fat-positivity activist and Instagram therapist,” can tell that newspaper, “I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.” Whilst their methods are obviously not so appallingly extreme, Ms. Rashatwar and the cohorts who genuinely want to “undo” Western civilization are now succeeding where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis failed.

 The evidence is rampant in the academy, where a preemptive cultural cringe is “decolonizing” college syllabuses — that is, wherever possible removing Dead White European Males (DWEMs) from it — often with overt support from deans and university establishments. Western Civilization courses, insofar as they still exist under other names, are routinely denounced as racist, “phobic,” and generally so un-woke as to deserve axing. 

Western civilization, so important to earlier generations, is being ridiculed, abused, and marginalized, often without any coherent response. Of course, today’s non-Western colonizations, such as India’s in Kashmir and China’s in Tibet and Uighurstan, are not included in the sophomores’ concept of imperialism and occupation, which can be done only by the West. The “Amritsar Massacre” only ever refers to the British in the Punjab in 1919, for example, rather than the Indian massacre of ten times the number of people there in 1984. Nor can the positive aspects of the British Empire even be debated any longer, as the closing down of Professor Nigel Biggar’s conferences at Oxford University on the legacy of colonialism eloquently demonstrates.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2020/04/let-me-go-instead/

Riccardo Bosi is a former Australian Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. This is the slightly edited text of his  address on Anzac Day

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2020/04/let-me-go-instead/

‘Let me go instead’.These words from over a century ago were spoken by a Digger pleading with his officer in the trenches.

The reason? “He has a wife and family to look after, Sir.”The Digger’s wish was granted. His mate’s life was saved. The young Digger died that night. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

‘Let me go instead’.

There will be those who denigrate the commemoration of this day, the 25th of April. They will speak at length about the purposelessness of war, that it is only to frighten little children and to open wounds of those who have lost loved ones.

They will say it glorifies war and lionises warmongering thugs. But it does not. And it is both ignorant and naïve to think so. Those who say these things know little of Australian history and less about Australians at war.

Every generation believes they have evolved beyond barbarism, and at particular times and in particular places that might have been true. But there are always some who never evolve, who confuse sophistication with civilisation, and so there will always be another war, another tyrant with whom we cannot negotiate, cannot find peace.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-iran-welcomed-jewish-refugees?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In the summer of 1942, Bandar Pahlavi, a sleepy Iranian port town on the Caspian Sea, became a city of refugees. On its shores were clusters of tents, a quarantine area for typhoid patients, and a large area for distributing food. Outside the tented area, local peddlers hung baskets of sweet cakes and sewing thread, disappearing periodically when club-wielding policemen appeared. 

The refugees were Polish citizens who three years prior, with the outbreak of World War II, had fled into the Soviet Union and now, having journeyed nearly 5,000 miles, sailed from Soviet Turkmenistan to northern Iran. More than 43,000 refugees arrived in Bandar Pahlavi in March 1942.

A second wave of almost 70,000 came with the August transports, and a third group of nearly 2,700 was transferred by land from Turkmenistan to Mashhad in eastern Iran. Of these, roughly 75,000 were soldiers, cadets, and officers of what was known as Anders’ Army, a Polish army in exile that had assembled in the Soviet Union under the command of Gen. Wladyslaw Anders.

The rest were mothers and babies, elderly men and women, and unaccompanied children. Three thousand, perhaps more, were Jewish, including four rabbis and nearly 1,000 unaccompanied children who were taken from Polish orphanages in the Soviet Union. There were also several hundred Polish Jewish stowaways, recent converts to Catholicism, women who pretended to be married to Polish officers, and the like. 

From the vantage point of the world we live in today—a world of turmoil in the Middle East and peace in Europe, a world of refugees fleeing the Middle East into Europe, a world in which Iran and Israel are locked in a seemingly eternal conflict—it is hard to imagine that another world existed. 

In that world, refugees fled war-torn Europe into Iran, Turkey, and Mandatory Palestine, and they lived there in relative peace for the duration of the war. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/a-letter-from-lombardy/

Lombardy is ground zero of Italy’s coronavirus crisis. One of the richest regions in Europe, it is home to Italy’s financial capital, Milan, also a world fashion capital, which may be how Lombardy caught the coronavirus. Clothes that are designed in Milan get manufactured in China. Lots of people travel back and forth to make that happen.

Lombardy is, of course, named for the Lombards, the marauding German tribe that conquered Italy in the late 500s. The original Lombards ruled Lombardy for around 200 years, until losing it to Charlemagne in 774. They soldiered on in southern Italy for much longer, in fact until 1077, when they were finally defeated by the Normans. Yes, those Normans.

Eat your heart out, 1066. While William ‘the Conqueror’ was busy subduing a poor, remote, semi-barbarous island in the North Sea, his upstart rival, Robert Guiscard, took possession of the rich, cosmopolitan urban centres at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. William got cold, grey London. Robert got sunny Naples and the Amalfi Coast.

https://fee.org/articles/how-isaac-newton-turned-isolation-from-the-great-plague-into-a-year-of-wonders/?utm_source=ntnlrvw&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nationalreview_partnership

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people. Isaac Newton, a 24-year-old student from Cambridge, was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

College students around the world left campus this month, unsure when they would return and what daily life would look like until then. Forced to leave their friends and classmates behind and return to their childhood bedrooms, young people, who on average are less impacted by COVID-19’s dire health effects, may understandably feel angry and resentful. Free and independent, with their futures full of possibility, these students are now home and isolated. It can seem wholly unfair and depressing. But the story of another college student in a similar predicament might provide some hope and inspiration.

Isaac Newton’s Quarantine Experience

In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people (roughly one-quarter of London’s population), in just 18 months. A 24-year-old student from Trinity College, Cambridge was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home.

His name was Isaac Newton and his time at home during the epidemic would be called his “year of wonders.”

Away from university life, and unbounded by curriculum constraints and professor’s whims, Newton dove into discovery. According to The Washington Post: “Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived.” At home, he built bookshelves and created a small office for himself, filling a blank notebook with his ideas and calculations. Absent the distractions of typical daily life, Newton’s creativity flourished. During this time away he discovered differential and integral calculus, formulated a theory of universal gravitation, and explored optics, experimenting with prisms and investigating light.