Category: Access

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The Left’s Jihad Against the South, Part I On the House

This is the slightly revised and expanded text of a lecture given in March at the Abbeville Institute’s program in Charleston. I Preface My title may strike readers as a bit alarmist.  The word “Jihad” conjures up images of unwashed religious fanatics in a terrorist campaign to eliminate any religious or cultural tradition they find alien.  One thinks immediately of the Taliban wrecking Buddhist shrines, of ISIS strapping their victims to the columns of an ancient temple in Palmyra before blowing both temple and victims to  smithereens.  By contrast, the campaign to eliminate the Southern Identity is being waged by...

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Wednesday’s Child: The Hilarity of Evil

I loathe photography on principle, along with all the other abominations of the Edwardian era which presage the ethical phantasmagoria of our times – notably women in trousers and a music-hall view of everything east of Brighton – yet there are moments when I wish we could publish photographs here.  With today’s post, I would have the gentle reader scrutinizing a snapshot of a young lady by the name of Valeria Rytvina.  Blond, not bad looking, she’s the very picture of what most people would call a normal girl. Last year, a woman in Yekaterinburg – a city in the...

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Ransom Notes March 5–On the House

Ransom Notes  March 2 2016 Q: Several people have asked me about the Uzbek nanny in Russia who decapitated the child she was minding.  Some news stories have reported that she was distraught because her husband back in Uzbekistan had decided to take a second wife.  Other reports indicated that she was psychotic.  What really was her motivation? TJF: The answer should obvious to anyone familiar with the old Flip Wilson routine whose signature was “the devil made me do it.”  In this case the Uzbek nanny claims allah—which amounts to more or less the same thing—told her to murder...

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Wednesday’s Child: Super Wednesday

  I have not really been following the fruit salad of the American presidential election, as the only apparently human being among the Republican candidates might have bumbled, and yesterday’s Super Tuesday is no exception. So I write this through a fog of wilful ignorance, its mists made all the more impenetrable by the Atlantic’s breadth.  At times, however, such scanty impressions, gleaned almost against one’s will, have some salubrious value, as not buying a used car simply because one had taken a dislike to the peonies on the salesman’s shirt can have a salutary effect on one’s wallet. Carson,...

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East is East, Part II ON THE HOUSE

If human experience were rmin glacier, slowly accreting facts, pebbles, and statistical debris in its course, some case might be made for writing impartial history, but most of what he call history is a conflict of wills, between leaders and nations.  Who could write an impartial account of the Crusades?  Not a faithful Catholic or Muslim, and certainly not an atheist who is “neutral” on the religious claims of the two parties: he, in fact, has the biggest ax to grind.  I prefer Hilaire Belloc or the Whig historians who never concealed their prejudices or their agenda. Once upon a time,...

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On the House: East is East, and West is Wuss, Part I

This piece was published in a very slightly different form in 1999.  It is being offered free to our free subscribers, and I hope that they will enjoy it.  I also hope that they will see their way to joining us more fully by subscribing to the website. If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time; post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude...

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Vienna

“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.”  Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

  From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends?  Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light.  Irina Stolyarova – such is...

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Wednesday’s Child: The Way to Malibu

“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.”  So a headline in the Financial Times.  It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism.  Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings.  What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”?  Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”?  Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...

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On the House: The End of the American Century

About On the House.  From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing.  A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix.  This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away.  I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine.  Then, come on, do not...