Author: Thomas Fleming

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

Rome, Year 16 AMT

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I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had recently been changed,...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Nov, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Gadarene Light

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Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...

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Autodidact / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

The Plagues of Greece, an Interview with Nikolaos Hidiroglou

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First, the one homework submission. Vince Cornell sends in:   t is inevitable what we face. What we did once treasure we must now break. But first must we state our causes plainly. That this divide did arise from just cause Be assured, for we declare with one voice That our lives, our liberty, and our joy Are those goods which we must of our own secure. Britain, it was you that did bar our way, Cruelly depriving us of our base rights. Destructive became your rule over us, And we now do form our own government Building it upon...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

13 Nov, 2015

Trump: The Lesser Evil

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Hillary Clinton’s take on a large percentage of the American people is drawing fire: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right, The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” and added, “some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The other half of Trump supporters are simply stupid and depressed, and people in Hillaryland should pity them. Let’s do some quick and very rough math.  In round numbers, the country has about 280 million people, about three fourths of whom—or 210 million—are old enough to vote.  Making...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

13 Nov, 2015

Greece II

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Athens may be the oldest city in Europe. It is certainly the oldest that is still significant. There were settlements on the Acropolis before the Greeks arrived, and, although the Athenians may have slightly exaggerated in claiming that their citadel was never abandoned in the Greek Dark Age brought on by the so-called Dorian Invasion, they are more or less right that they maintained some kind of polity throughout that grim period. Whether they can survive the new Dark Age, brought on not by more primitive northern Greeks–or still more primitive invaders from the Middle East–but by Athenian politicians who...

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Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

Properties of Blood I: L

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Exiled City of Eve:  The Conclusion Human Society As a Platonist, Augustine was not inclined to respect traditional human institutions and, as a Christian convert in conflict with a stubborn paganism that refused to leave the stage, he conceded few virtues (at this point in his career) to the Roman Empire, whose fall plunged the West into violence and poverty, but he was too hardheaded not to understand human reality.  The City of God could not be arrived at, if the saints who were destined to live in it had not been created as social beings.  Marriage and parenthood, he...

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Fleming / Interviews

9 Nov, 2015

Interview with Misa Djurkovic, Part III

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The Bigger Picture 8.  Why is this happening.  Is this a case of historical accident?  Do you agree with American and European who say it is all the fault of President Assad or does US support for the rebels—only the “moderate and democratic” rebels, of course—play a part? The roots of this problem spread deep into neoconservative (neotrotskyite) schemes and are behind the agenda of “democratizing” the Muslim world. It started with Afghanistan and reaches a climax with Arab Spring. There is now massive instability all around MENA (the Middle East and North Africa): the slaughter of Christians, outbursts of...

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Fleming / Interviews

3 Nov, 2015

Misa Djurkovic Interview, Part II

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Part II:  The European Context 5. The Germans seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouth, with Merkel saying early on that this had to be treated as a humanitarian crisis but later blaming Hungary and Croatia for letting so many migrants into the EU.  What do you think she and other EU leaders have in mind? I just published a book called The Illusion of European Union. One big chapter deala with immigration politics in the EU. It is a mess, that basically comes down to a strong internal fight between ordinary people–which includes even statesmen...

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Fleming

3 Nov, 2015

Properties of Blood, Chapter I, K

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Doing the Lord’s Work Philosophically, Augustine was a Platonist and, like Plato and Thomas More (a Renaissance Neoplatonist), he was inclined to extremes in his speculations on human moral and social perfectibility. While I agree entirely that the great philosophical tradition is that of Plat and Aristotle, there are subjects o which one or the other great master may be a more useful guide. Idealists, it sometimes seems, are too often in a rush to erect the lofty and towering kingdom of God on earth, even before they have properly surveyed the ground or laid the foundations. The results of...

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Autodidact / Fleming

31 Oct, 2015

Cicero, Part II: Enter Cicero, Stage Left.

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The most notable event of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, however, was the political trial of Gaius Verres. As governor of Sicily (73-71) Verres had outdone all his predecessors and rivals in corruption and theft, and he could afford to retain the greatest legal and political talent of the day, the former consul and arch-conservative, Q. Hortensius Hortalus. The desperate Sicilians turned to M. Tullius Cicero, a young orator with great political ambitions. Cicero was a well-to-do novus homo (a new man, that is, someone with no ancestors who had reached high office) from the sticks, Arpinum, in fact,...