For your amusement and edification
Only Posting a Link Archive
Eggcorns
Posted June 4, 2024 By John C WrightWright on Christianity (Gosney Interview)
Posted June 2, 2024 By John C WrightAn interview with Steven N. Gosney of Crimelaw, a friend and a fan, on the deep topics of faith and fealty.
Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn
Posted May 27, 2024 By John C WrightGULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Solzhenitsyn, published in the West in 1973, reaches its Golden Anniversary of 50 years. Gary Saul Morson writing in the New Criterion pens an ode to the work and the writer, so deeply despised by the Left in the West, who put paid to their fool’s gold.
Required reading for Memorial Day, to recall what demonic vision of dystopia all soldiers in the Twentieth Century died to curtail and turn back.
It is also required reading for those of us who hope to live to see the day when the Soviet and Red Chinese genocides, lies, mass expropriations, slave-camps, human butchery, and sadistic atrocities are condemned in the West with equal hatred and fervor as are Nazi ones.
Historical note: GULag is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.”
Morson lauds Solzhenitsyn’s work and titles his column as the Masterpiece for Our Time.
The column reads, in part
Western intellectuals usually supposed that Russian dissidents might suffer the sort of punishment that in their own countries is reserved for dangerous criminals. At worst, Westerners pictured conditions like those in tsarist Russia, long considered the model of an oppressive state. That is why Solzhenitsyn devotes so many passages to contrasting what passed for tyranny in nineteenth-century Russia with ordinary Soviet conditions.
Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”
By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”
On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles). “The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.
Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.
By all means, read the whole thing Masterpiece for Our Time.
On Writing with Mr. and Mrs. Wright
Posted May 22, 2024 By John C WrightThe Wright family was interviewed by Steven N. Gosney of Crimelaw, a friend and a fan.
John C. Wright on Crimelaw on Christianity
Posted May 5, 2024 By John C WrightAn Interview with CRIMELAW starring Steve Gosney, who is a friend as well as a fan. We discuss the Credo and some objections to Catholicism.
What do Catholics Actually Believe?
https://rumble.com/v4s0e9h-john-c.-wright-on-christianity-tuesday-8-pm-est-livestream.html
History Nook: Blind King John of Bohemia
Posted May 2, 2024 By John C WrightJohn was killed at age 50 while fighting against the English during the battle. The medieval chronicler Jean Froissart left the following account of John’s last actions:
… for all that he was nigh blind, when he understood the order of the battle, he said to them about him: ‘Where is the lord Charles my son?’ His men said: ‘Sir, we cannot tell; we think he be fighting.’ Then he said: ‘Sirs, ye are my men, my companions and friends in this journey: I require you bring me so far forward, that I may strike one stroke with my sword.’ They said they would do his commandment, and to the intent that they should not lose him in the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles each to other and set the king before to accomplish his desire, and so they went on their enemies. The lord Charles of Bohemia his son, who wrote himself king of Almaine and bare the arms, he came in good order to the battle; but when he saw that the matter went awry on their party, he departed, I cannot tell you which way. The king his father was so far forward that he strake a stroke with his sword, yea and more than four, and fought valiantly and so did his company; and they adventured themselves so forward, that they were there all slain, and the next day they were found in the place about the king, and all their horses tied each to other.
My comment: if there is not a hard rock song by Sabaton on this topic, there should be.
Occult Theosophy of the United Nations
Posted April 28, 2024 By John C WrightPlease take the time to listen to this lecture. It is perhaps the most important you will encounter this year.
Language warning. Mr Lindsay indulges in some justifiably coarse gutter language during the some low points of the lecture.
Balls in Straight Lines Make Circular Illusion
Posted April 26, 2024 By John C WrightFrom Rob Eaglesfield
He says:
12 steel balls each travel along a straight line in a sine wave motion. This gives the illusion that they are forming a rotating circle. Not real, its animated in Blender.
My comment:
Watch with “loop” turned on. The end and start frames line up nicely.
APRIL 19
Posted April 19, 2024 By John C WrightFrom Instapundit:
ON THIS LEXINGTON AND CONCORD ANNIVERSARY, LET’S RAISE A GLASS TO SAMUEL WHITTEMORE:
On April 19, 1775, British forces were returning to Boston from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening engagements of the war. On their march they were continually shot at by American militiamen.
Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British grenadiers of the 47th Regiment of Foot from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols, killed a second grenadier and mortally wounded a third. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment had reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was subsequently shot in the face, bayoneted numerous times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found by colonial forces, trying to load his musket to resume the fight. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore recovered and lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.
Foundations of Dune & Not a Hero
Posted April 14, 2024 By John C WrightA man not named Little Platoon offers the most fascinating, in depth analysis of Frank Herbert’s DUNE and its relation to Asimov’s FOUNDATION, I have ever heard. To me it is utterly eye-opening.
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My Brush with Fame
Posted April 13, 2024 By John C WrightA reader calls to my attention that I was mentioned by name during an episode of
Called to Communion with Dr. David Anders April 8th, 2024
The question of private revelations or visions is asked at 5:15 and my name is mentioned at 8:06.
For some odd reason, he calls it a near-death experience, which it most certainly was not. I did see the Christ, the Father, the Holy Spirit, and saw and spoke with the Virgin. A month later, I saw separate visions about eternity and other realms, I did not visit heaven nor claim to have.
To be sure, I would not expect a casual readers of my account to remember these distinction. They were only meant for me. I was ordered to speak but little about exactly what I saw, and so misunderstandings are inevitable.
But neither vision was not a “near-death” nor an “out-of-body” experience in the way that term is normally used. It was just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, inexplicable supernatural experience.
From the Pen of Scott Adams
Posted March 23, 2024 By John C WrightA comment by Scott Adams on Twitter, which I pass along without comment:
Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.
And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.
I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.
When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.
The Democrats planned to cripple Trump financially so he couldn’t spend as much on the campaign. Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser.
Lots of interesting developments lately on the topic of the 2020 election. The Simulation wants at least one of those fresh allegations to be a Kraken.
Trump’s legal maneuvering is likely to keep him eligible for the election.
You can fantasize about a heroic Democrat such as Newsom swooping in and replacing Biden, but it’s looking less likely every day. If it had always been the plan, it would have happened by now. Looks like Biden has to stay on the job to keep the Biden Crime Family out of jail.
The predictable Democrat Summer Hoax will add some excitement, but it will be forgotten and debunked by November.
Trump’s upcoming victory is looking like it will be, as Trump says, “too big to rig.” And by that I mean Democrats will try to rig it anyway and get caught. That will be fun.
The gears of the machine have become visible. We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized. We know the border is open intentionally. We know the cartels are working with our government. We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there’s only one reason for it. We can see Biden is not in charge. We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them. We know our rising debt is ruinous. We know our experts are liars. We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us. We know our government is racist. We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population. We know the 1st and 2nd amendments, and X, are under sustained government attack because they are the public’s last defense against the government.
But we are not quitters.
And the odds do not apply to us.
Apologizing for Truth
Posted March 12, 2024 By John C WrightFrom Newsbusters:
What’s the most upsetting thing about the sentence, “An illegal alien violently murdered a 22-year old nursing student?” If you work in the corporate news media, the answer is the word “illegal.” When President Biden referred to the illegal alien who allegedly murdered Laken Riley in cold blood as “an illegal,” the news media sprang into action and rushed to the violent felon’s defense.
No comment necessary. Media delenda est.
Klavan, Shakespeare, Transhumanism
Posted March 11, 2024 By John C WrightShakespeare vs. the Transhumanists
One of the most insightful essays I have ever encountered on the topic of transhumanism, oddly enough, as seen through the eyes of King Lear and Prospero the Magician.
Mr. Klavan begins:
I find these days that even friends with no religion have begun to speak in religious terms. Recently, within a single week, I heard the word “demonic” used five times, four times by people who don’t believe in demons. Stranger still, and not long after, I found myself in two separate conversations in which the sort of men who would never speculate upon the coming of the “end of days” began, with some embarrassment, to do exactly that.
The subject, in each case, was transhumanism: transgenderism, artificial intelligence, artificial wombs, the melding of man and medication, man and machine. There was a sense that we were arriving at a moment of choosing—choosing, each of us, whether we would continue to be what we were originally made, male and female, mortal, fallible, passionate, irrational, seemingly random in our individual qualities and yet recognizable, even if only in metaphor, as the image of God. Or would we, through medication, surgery, implants, and the like, become whatever it is we would: happier presumably, smarter in some sense, maybe even eternal in some sense, free in form, no mere image of God, but electric gods ourselves?
He goes on to examine two Shakespeare plays in which a king shouts commands at a storm, and, unlike the Messiah, is unheeded by deaf and roaring nature.
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Paradigm Shift
Posted March 8, 2024 By John C WrightLet me draw your attention to this conversation. I found it insightful to the point of vertigo.
Andrew Jones in this forces me to reconsider my zeal for the Enlightenment project of individualism, individual rights, and a franchise extended to all and sundry — the idea that big government and big business, historically speaking, are coconspirators, nor competitors, makes a mockery of the Right-to-Left political spectrum I have used my whole life as the lens to view the world.
Left and Right agree on an axiom of individualist collectivism (ironic as that sounds) which the Catholic Church denies.
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