FAMILY REUNION
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/09/swinburne-rossetti-and-the-power-of-the-erased-line/
Since Lent began this past week, I thought I might take a vacation from current events and repost an updated and decidedly non-newsy reflection on religion I wrote some years ago.
When Alcibiades defected from Athens to Sparta at the height of the Sicilian Expedition, one of the things that made his treachery so effective was that he knew the Athenian military strategy intimately from within. Having himself been a commander of the Athenian forces, he understood exactly what Sparta should do to inflict maximum damage on Athens’s interests. It would be unfair in all sorts of ways to compare the English writer A. N. Wilson to Alcibiades—“the most complete example,” Sir Edward Creasy remarked in 1851, “of genius without principle that history produces, the Bolingbroke of antiquity”—and I have no intention of doing so. But there is a peculiarity about Wilson’s book, God’s Funeral, that kept reminding me of someone who, feeling betrayed, switches sides and sets out to avenge himself on his former compatriots. Wilson’s announced subject in God’s Funeral is “the demise of faith among the Victorians”—less, he explains, “the end of a phase of human intellectual history” than “the withdrawal of a great Love-object.” And Wilson himself, as one reviewer put it, is “a lapsed orthodox Anglican.” (At one time he even studied for the clergy.) In God’s Funeral, this interesting conjunction of lapsed orthodoxy and lost love yields a species of intellectual history in which arrogance infects the exposition and professed admiration often betrays a current of contempt.
Of course, that is not the whole story. A. N. Wilson is an engaging and knowledgeable writer—a notably prolific one as well. In addition to having written a shelf of novels (Wise Virgin, The Vicar of Sorrows, Daughters of Albion, etc.), Wilson is also the author of something like a dozen biographies: of Milton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis, St. Paul, Jesus, and Tolstoy, among others. He is also an inescapable presence in English journalism, producing with indefatigable regularity articulate, quirkily Toryish columns for various quality papers.
It is not surprising that such prodigious output often lends Wilson’s excursions in intellectual history an intermittently potted quality. It would be surprising if this were not the case. Much of God’s Funeral, in any event, shows signs of hasty digestion, though in this book as elsewhere the verve of Wilson’s rhetoric helps to mitigate—or at least distract attention from—its summary, swotted-up character. But because the subject of God’s Funeral continues to resonate powerfully, it is worth following the course of its argument with some care.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/07/europe-must-fully-cooperate-with-trumps-ukraine-peace-efforts/
Although a ceasefire to stop the killing in Ukraine appeared closer this week after Ukrainian President Zelensky sent President Trump a letter promising to cooperate with his peace efforts, European states are floating several unhelpful proposals that could hurt the peace process.
Zelensky was supposed to sign a deal at the White House last Friday, giving the U.S. access to his country’s rare earth mineral deposits. However, Zelensky’s insistence on first resolving other issues and his rude behavior during an Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President Vance caused him to be booted from the White House and his relationship with Trump to break down.
This relationship breakdown led President Trump to say for the second time in a week that if Zelensky continued to resist his efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, he might walk away from the conflict. Tensions grew further when Zelensky said on March 3 that the end of the war with Russia was “very, very far away,” a comment that irritated Trump because it appeared to be a jab at his peace efforts. Also on March 3, President Trump paused U.S. military aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to support his peace efforts.
Tensions between Zelensky and Trump appeared to improve by March 4 after the Ukrainian leader sent a conciliatory letter to Trump in which he agreed to work under President Trump’s leadership and “come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.” Zelensky said he was prepared to agree to “a truce in the sky—ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy, and other civilian infrastructure—and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same.”
Zelensky also said Ukraine was prepared to sign a deal giving the US preferential access to Ukraine’s natural resources and minerals at “any time and in any convenient format.”
During his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, President Trump expressed his appreciation for Zelensky’s letter. U.S. and Ukrainian officials said the next day that discussions were underway on the date and location of a new round of formal U.S.-Ukraine negotiations.
Europe’s positions on stopping the fighting in Ukraine have been inconsistent and somewhat unhelpful. In meetings at the White House with President Trump last week, French President Macron and UK Prime Minister Stamer dropped their previous constant criticism of Trump’s Ukraine peace efforts and said they were prepared to support these efforts.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/05/the-death-rattle-of-the-resistance/
Remember when the phrase ‘the Resistance’ would conjure up visions of sexy French youths in berets battling actual Nazis? Now all it brings to mind is ageing dullards in pink suits holding up signs saying ‘This is not normal’ while sporting the most turbo-smug look on their faces. As US president Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress last night, ‘across the aisle the Resistance was stirring’, gushed the Guardian’s DC reporter. His piece was illustrated with a pic of some congresswoman in pearls and a balding Democrat looking aghast as Trump talked. Seriously, if this is ‘the Resistance’, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.
Yesterday’s ‘Democrat fightback’ and ‘resistance to Trump’s rhetoric’ – journalists are literally calling it that – was next-level cringe. It occurred during Trump’s 100-minute speech, the longest Congress talk in 60 years. As Trump bashed Joe Biden and bigged up Elon Musk, the Dems came over all soixante-huitard. Fury coursed through their ranks. Then the revolt started. The Squad’s Rashida Tlaib held up a scrawled sign saying ‘That’s a lie!’. Dem representative Al Green ‘shook his cane and pointed his finger’ and cried ‘You have no mandate’ to cut Medicaid. How the regime must have quaked at the sight of this revolution!
The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ ‘stirring’ acts of rebellion will have ‘given hope to the Resistance’ and sent a message to ‘the world’, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the ‘resistance’ to the Trumpist tyranny has been ‘splintered’, but now we know it’s ‘getting better’, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the ‘aggressive resistance’ we really need.
Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like ‘False’ and ‘Liar’ are not ‘the Resistance’ – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems ‘removed their outer business wear’ to reveal black t-shirts with the word ‘RESIST’ in ‘bold white letters’.
https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/reality-jew-hatred-and-denial-of?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
—Ernest Becker
The Garden of Eden myth is the mother of all Utopias. In that perfect creation there is no aggression- the lion lies down peacefully with the lamb-there is no fear, no anxiety, no sex, no shame and there is no death. Blissful ignorance, peace and plenty prevail. In this perfect world Adam made the terrible mistake of opening his ignorant eyes to reality. Giving in to physical desire he eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge and instantly becomes aware of sexuality and of his body. Shame at his nakedness is the first human emotion in response to this biological and physical reality. Fear is the next emotion producing the vain effort to escape from reality by hiding from God. Then in Genesis (3:23) “…the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever and therefore the Lord sent him forth from the Garden of Eden…” The expulsion occurs along with the death sentence: “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Death appears as an inevitable, inescapable part of reality.
Death is probably the most difficult part of reality for mankind to accept. Fantasies of immortality have existed since the dawn of civilization. Gods in Greek, Roman, Egyptian and other mythologies live forever. Religions promise life in the hereafter to the right people, and ultimate resurrection to the just. The bitter realities of life—aggression, fear, anxiety, illness, aging and death—have been contested since the dawn of civilization. Utopian ideologies have come and gone, all of them challenging one or another element of reality. All those realities foreshadow the final one, death. As Philip Larkin wrote of death, “the anesthetic from which none come round” in his poem, Aubade: “Most things may never happen: this one will.”
Death’s grievous blow to our narcissism has generated many counter assaults.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/07/if-you-genuinely-think-trump-is-a-fascist-go-and-have-a-lie-down/
This is an edited version of a speech that was delivered at the Cambridge Union on February 6 opposing the motion, ‘This house believes Donald Trump is a 21st-century fascist’.
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. Il Duce, der Führer, The Donald. The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.
Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.
Totalitarian control. Messianic dictatorship. A cult of racial superiority. Paramilitaries crushing the left at home. A Darwinian military struggle for supremacy abroad. The worship of war and violence. The mechanised attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews.
If this sounds anything like America in 2025 to you, then I suggest you leave here right now and go and have a nice, long lie down.
Trump is many things. He’s a right-wing populist. He’s a trenchant opponent of illegal and mass migration. He’s a culture warrior. He can also be a thin-skinned, occasionally conspiratorial, blowhard.
But try as I might, I am struggling to find the extermination camps or the goose-stepping gunmen killing with impunity. Perhaps my colleagues on the other side can enlighten me.
I almost feel sorry for the speakers for the proposition. It must be exhausting – petrifying even – to see fascism everywhere. To see everyone who disagrees with you, about immigration or gender or whatever, as literally Hitler. I’m amazed you can sleep at night.
http://Douglas Murrayhttps://thespectator.com/topic/will-britain-follow-americas-lead-on-aid/
The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: “That’s not fair — it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.”
The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID — the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.
Like Britain’s Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organizations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the twenty-first century is as a sort of large NGO.
This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” $47,000 to fund a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.
It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American “educators” were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the twentieth century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/farewell-america-hello-victorias-swamp/
“It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends.
Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.:
It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list.
All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food, cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-u-s-a/trump-redux-defeating-identity-despots/
Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.
Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/editors-column/the-fight-for-free-speech/
“The taboo against telling the truth is what protects the woke establishment. Trump has been derided as everything from a boor and a buffoon to a fascist. Yet it was he, not his preening critics, who observed, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.” Amen to that. And merry Christmas, happy Hanukah, and happy holidays to all.”
The attack on free speech is one of the most disturbing manifestations of the “woke mind virus” which has captured ruling elites in the West. Donald Trump’s re-election is its most encouraging rebuttal. The historic size of Trump’s victory is evidence that we have, at last, passed “peak woke”. The lamentations and gnashing of teeth of America’s left liberals is, one hopes, its wake.
At the top of the president-elect’s to-do list he says is ending the “censorship cartel … that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’” driven by a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media … conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people” by suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health”.
The good news is that Trump’s proposed legislation to protect free speech in America will hamper Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attempts to censor social media in Australia.It follows a pushback on the Starmer Labour government’s attack on freedom of speech in the UK. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to quietly throttle the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been condemned by more than 600 academics, writers, and public intellectuals including Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, historian Tom Holland, Lady Antonia Fraser, and former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. While they might have their political differences, they were united in condemning the government for not protecting “humane and liberal values” or opposing “cancel culture” in British universities.
