The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Brownlow / Essays

14 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part II: War, Taxes, And Socialism

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What happened to the middles classes?  Three things happened to them: war, socialism, and what we can call, borrowing a term, the great secession. We can start with war.  All governments routinely soak their citizens or subjects to pay for their wars, and that is why the first income tax was introduced into England in 1798 to pay for the war with revolutionary France.  It was rescinded on the signing of the Peace of Amiens, but reinstated with the renewal of hostilities a year later.  A year after the Battle of Waterloo it was repealed again, in 1816.  Then the...

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Fleming

13 Oct, 2015

Properties of Blood, Chapter I, Part G: Rome, Urbs Aeterna

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In addressing himself to the Jews (and the stray Gentiles who may have been in the crowd), Jesus was able to take for granted certain customs and traditions of moral law, whose inner and original meaning He now revealed.  Although modern Christians make much of the Ten Commandments, the moral injunctions it contains, against blasphemy, theft, perjury, adultery, murder, and filial impiety were hardly unique in the Mediterranean world.  Such prohibitions were the common stock of ancient moral and legal traditions.  Greeks and Romans (going beyond the Egyptians and Sumerians, whose moral codes were similar to that of the Jews)...

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Fleming / Interviews

12 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part II

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PC     Do you believe the neoconservative dominance of mainstream discourse of US foreign policy is slowly coming to an end or we simply seeing a generational shift? Also, have the neoconservatives in your judgement played a role in instigating the current crisis in Ukraine? TJF    The neoconservatives in themselves are of little or no importance.  They do not formuulate policy, they merely repeat the slogans of the Cold War Democratic Party and put a slight conservative spin.  Their great success was in making an alliance with American Evangelical Zionists, who have been taught to see the world...

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Fleming / Interviews

11 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part I

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Thomas Fleming was interviewed in August by Mike Krupa of Polonia Christiana.  For readers of Polish, the inteveiw is available here.  For those less fortunate, we have posted the original exchange in English., PC  After almost 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency, what kind of country is the United States? TJF  When Barack Obama was elected President, reaction was divided along party lines.  Democrats, especially those who belonged to ethnic minorities, expected rapid improvement in their condition and in their opportunities for advancement. They also expected a quick end to the military adventurism that had characterized his predecessor’s administrations.  Republicans, by contrast, feared...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

9 Oct, 2015

John Kasich’s Bible

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Governor Kasich has finally got himself into the news.   Falling asleep in the debate did not work.so now he turns to that last refuge of corrupt Republican: religion.  Accused of pandering for votes by supporting socialized medicine, he offers to give his critics free copies of the Bible. Looks like this is one more cause of a good Catholic boy who has followed the papacy into  non-revolutionary socialism. This is one we cannot blame on Pope Francis or Paul VI or even on Leo XIII.  Kasich abandoned  the Catholic Church for materialist hedonism, and when he found he needed some...

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Autodidact / FF / Fleming / Reading Lists

7 Oct, 2015

The Autodidact’s Reading List: Romans of the Golden Age

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The Essential Romans In this first draft of the Roman section, I am only going to list a few indispensable works with a few suggestions on translations.  As the weeks and months go by, I’ll be updating this and other sections that are posted. The Golden Age Poetry Vergil, The Aeneid.  I prefer the the polished if far from literal translation of John Dryden, a major work of English literature.  Otherwise, any older prose translation will do.  More recent verse translations, especially those concocted after WW II, are alien in spirit and in form.  Less entertaining the Homer, Vergil is...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

7 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: The Three Consuls

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  In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

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Fleming

5 Oct, 2015

Properties of Blood I F: The Heresy of Globalism

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The Rights of Nations Viewing Christianity as the enemy, intellectuals have always felt justified in misrepresenting its teachings, either to make them contemptible (as Nietzsche and the neopagans have done) or to pervert them to what they saw as good use.  So-called Christian Socialists and social gospellers made it appear that “true” Christianity (as opposed to the bogus faith of the previous two millennia) would dispense with all distinctions, including national boundaries. To delegitimate the right of nations to defend their territory, leftists like to quote Paul’s statement that in baptism “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” as if Paul’s...

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Brownlow / Essays

5 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part I

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It is not so long since any time historians wanted to explain something—the wealth of medieval Europe, the disappearance of bubonic plague, the Reformation—they would trot out the middle classes as the uncaused cause of all effects.  Others—the more prophetically-minded—took a gloomier view of the middle classes, and attributed all the things they disliked to them.   Bad taste in art, for instance.  How does one explain that?  Or the general stodginess and frumpiness of all those people commuting into work on the train in the morning?  Their refusal to be impressed by free-verse poetry, twelve-tone music, and abstract expressionism? ...

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Best Revenge / Fleming

2 Oct, 2015

On Secund Thawt: The Grammar of Dating

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Good grammar is said to be all the rage on dating sites.  This story would be good news, had it been reported anywhere but in the Wall Street Journal, whose columnists and editors do not appear to know the difference between grammar and spelling.  They lead the story with a young man who was put off by a potential date who  wrote him a confirmation of their first meeting: “I’ll see you their.”  Poor Mr. Cohen—a chump more interested in spelling than romance.  The young lady has made a fortunate escape.  One is almost tempted to agree with the Columbia University...