The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Liechtenstein is the 6th smallest country in the world, larger than San Marino but smaller than the Marshall Islands, and is roughly twice the size of the island of Manhattan. The Principality is ruled by a stable royal family that is so popular that when in 2002 a referendum was put to the people to increase the executive power of the prince, including giving him the right to dissolve Parliament, it passed by a 64% margin. Snuggled in between Austria and Switzerland, it enjoys a prosperous existence, profiting from a close cooperation with the Swiss, whose money they use via a currency union....
In April of 1945 as the Red Army penetrated deep into the German Reich, as the British Army raced across the German low country and as the American Army plowed through Bavaria and into Austria and the Czech Protectorate, Adolph Hitler-ensconced in his bunker under the ruins of the Reichskanzlei, his French SS Division Charlemagne fighting his last battle-unleashed his scorn, his anger and his wrath, not against the agents of his coming doom-the Red Army, the British Army and the American Army-but against his own people, the Germans, in whose name without their consent he had unleashed war on...
The Return of Revenge If we admit to harboring the dark and primitive impulse to take revenge, a priest or minister or professor of ethics, will probably tell us it is an evil desire that ought to be resisted. We should forgive our enemies and get on with our lives. After all, living well is said to be the best revenge. It is not always that easy. Consider the situation in which the hero of Hank Williams, Jr.’s song, “I Got Rights,” finds himself. The song tells the story of a husband and father who buys a handgun and goes...
The book is the classic written by our inspiration and patron, Boethius: On the Consolation of Philosophy. For well over 1000 years, this book—the reflections of a condemned man on what makes life worth living—was required reading for anyone who pretended to the smallest degree of literacy. It was translated by two English monarchs (Alfred and Elizabeth I) and represented the introduction to philosophy that people in the Medieval period received. It is that rare gift of literature—a profound book addressed not to specialists and geniuses but to everyday men and women. As luck would have it, our discussion will...
This is another review essay published in 1983, the year before I came to Rockford, Arnold Toynbee: The Greeks and Their Heritages; Oxford University Press; New York. Mary Renault: Funeral Games; Pantheon Books; New York. by Thomas Fleming Modern man seems haunted by the specter of Greece. Like memories of childhood, the visions of ancient Athens and Sparta hold a place in our minds, forever green. It does not matter how we first formed the image—a translation of Homer, the illustrations in Bullfinch, the tales we had to translate in first-year Latin. However we were struck, the Greeks inevitably become...
The unangelic Angela Merkel is the worst German chancellor after Hitler. Neither believed in borders. He erased borders by sending his panzers across them and absorbing the lebensraum into a Großgermanisches Reich. She erased borders by welcoming millions of “rapefugees” into her dissolving country. It’s not surprising she’s a “former” communist youth leader from Honecker’s East Germany. Unlike Vladimir Putin, who started out performing his “internationalist duty” as a KGB agent, but has become a Russian patriot, Merkel remains stuck in the borderless Marxist rhetoric of the 1969 DDR. According to the Daily Mail, “Angela Merkel’s open door policy to...
II Let’s start with the one piece submitted in response to my challenge. This comes from my former managing editor, Kate Dalton Boyer, who is still harboring some dark feelings about her former boss’s sloppy office. Doggerel for TF I know a man named Thomas, his desk will give you pause. If one inquires the reason: “Tace!” he’ll say. “Because.” Beneath a Mac his thesis (of Grecian poetry) is propping up his keyboard and in danger from his tea. The office door won’t open –review books in the way– it seems another forty-two have just arrived today. The lamp’s a...
olitics III.9-12 [1284b-1288b] In this final section of Politics III, Aristotle comes to grips with the systems of government ruled by one man. He begins [9] by surveying the various types of legitimate monarchy: the constitutional monarchy of the Spartans, where the power of the kings was determined by law and limited largely to military affairs, barbarian monarchies in which the kings act much as tyrants do but rule willing subjects and maintain inherited laws and traditions. One sign of their lawfulness is their use of domestic rather than foreign bodyguards. Aristotle is clear that while barbarians would tolerate such...
Julian Assange did his best to spoil the Hillary-fest being held in the renamed City of Sisterly love. No sooner had Wikileaks released the DNC emails confirming the active collaboration of party leaders with the Clinton campaign than the state media attempted to divert attention from the fact of what the hacked hacks had actually done to ruin the Sanders campaign. This is all part of a Putin plot to elect Donald Trump. Why, it’s an outrage when one country tries to rig political outcomes in another. I could not agree more, which is why American administrations have never involved...
This is my forty-eighth post in this space–a panoply variegated enough for a whole Well-Tempered Clavier of distempered musings – and some of my readers may have noted that not once did I review or commend a book. This is because the industry that produces books, which were once significant events, each with a claim to absolute uniqueness or at the very least to qualified originality, now functions like the writer of Melania Trump’s address to the Republican convention. Plagiarism long ago ceased to be an intellectual crime, yet it remained a niche product, like tales of the supernatural or...
