Category: Feature

The day before the Easter we celebrate in the West, my thoughts go out to Christians in the East who once endured the horror of Islamic rule.  I wrote this piece in September 2001, and it was published  n December.   “You’ve never been to Nish?!”  My friend was incredulous.  How can someone who has traveled, it sometimes seems, every inch of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Kosovo, not have found the time to go to Nish?  The lady is far from being a local chauvinist, but when I first met her and asked (as I had been taught by a Belgrader) if...

Here is Hillary Clinton’s response to the terrorist attacks on Brussels: “Calling for 12 million immigrants to be rounded up and deported.  Demanding we turn away refugees because of their religion, and proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the United States…America should be better than this, and I believe it’s our responsibility as citizens to say so…If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.” Ms Clinton actually made her remarks at an AIPAC meeting where she spent most of her time attacking the Republican front-runner, but...

In Genoa I spent several hours talking with the philosopher Pier Luigi Zampetti.  In his book His book La Sfida Del Duemila (1988), Zampetti blames our spiritual malaise as well as environmental catastrophe on modern consumerism.      Materialism has become the dominant philosophy both in the West and in the East…. Capitalism, as we know, is the economic system of the entire contemporary world.  East and West are worlds bound by capitalistic systems, even if of different types.  But, how is man considered in these systems?  Can he express himself, his free and responsible choices; in other words is...

This is the revised first part of an essay I published in 2000 in a magazine I used to edit. I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist.  I spent much of my childhood walking on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings.  I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries with my sister, or helping friends with their traps.  Until we moved near Charleston, I had never seen a city that did not deface the landscape, and to...

This multi-cultural hatred of the West was, of course, anticipated in the Communist Manifesto; indeed, it can be traced back through the Enlightenment all the way to Michel de Montaigne in his “Essay on the Cannibals.”  However, Western self-hatred reached a new level of coherence in France after WW I.  When Paul Claudel, Catholic poet, patriot, and diplomat, spoke of preserving the religious and cultural traditions of the West, a coalition of Communists and surrealists denounced him for defending a civilization which the surrealists derided as inferior to all the cultures of the world, high and low.  If the classical...

The History of the Revolution in Three Easy Lessons Lesson One: The revolution began during the Renaissance.  The very name “Renaissance” (or Renascence) suggests that mankind had gone through a long dark age, beginning roughly with the triumph of Christianity in the Age of Constantine.  The early proponents of this movement—classical humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio—had honorable goals: They wanted to restore classical Latin, recover ancient manuscripts that lay buried in monastic libraries, and acquire a knowledge of Greek. Like every other movement, however, the Renascence rapidly acquired other objectives;  some of them worthy, such as the civic humanist’s...

Radicalizing Anti-Southern Bigotry The Adamses and their ilk represented the conservative/Old Yankee view of the South.  There was a more radical position before the War, that slavery was a moral evil of so black a color that slaveholders and those who defended them had to be eliminated.   This was the view of John Brown, Wendell Phillips and other radical abolitionists, whose Old Testament ferocity was all the more intense among Unitarians and atheists who had lost every other shred of religion and clung only to their millenarian fantasies of a New Jerusalem, wiped clean of sin, history, and human...