Displaying items by tag: History

The nightmare of Covid hysteria and the crushing of freedom it has caused only grow afresh during an expected, relatively mild winter outbreak of an equally expected, overblown "variant".  Two questions are endlessly repeated by those who worry about these things.  One, how the hell did we get here?  And two, why did we give up our freedom without a fight?  The ground was long prepared for this.

It is fashionable to deride the Middle Ages.  "Medieval" is normally an insult, a term of abuse.  A new book begs to differ.  Pondering the lessons of the book, one is drawn to massive contrasts between our own age and that of "the medievals".  And the contrasts are mostly not in our favour.

The enemies of freedom are coming for the past.  Exposing the fallacies of their claims, and the poverty of their understanding of history, is an urgent and ongoing task.  But it may not be enough.

Cancel culture is all around.  It crushes rational debate and destroys freedom of thought and speech.  The latest victim is the eminent British historian David Starkey, caught up cruelly in the Black Lives Matter debate.  His cancellation raises important questions for how those who value freedom fight against leftist revolutionary thought and practice.

The feminarchy, intersectionality, cultural relativism, a galaxy of phobias & authoritarian thought police – is there a clear line between classical Marxism and the war against Christian culture, or is it just a right-wing conspiracy to justify hate? In this video, I talk to Dr Stephen Chavura about Marxism, socialism and post-modernism.

Bella Dodd was a member of the Communist Party in the US during the mid twentieth century. She was eventually expelled from the party and experienced a conversion, which led to her rejoining the Catholic Church, the church of her childhood. Dodd testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1953, explaining how Communists had infiltrated trade unions, teacher training colleges, seminaries and other institutions in order to subvert them. This extract is taken from Chapter 11 of her autobiography, School of Darkness:

Today's history lesson looks at communism: its founders, Marx and Engels, try to convince of communism's necessity and inevitability; this is contrasted with the reality of life under a communist regime, as explained by Solzhenitsyn.