The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
I’m heading back to the United States this month to spend some time with my family, and I’m headed back to an America whipped up into a political frenzy. Europeans do not mistake an accent for an ideology, but when they hear my accent these days they do want to know what I think of the Trump juggernaut. Before I focus on the electorate I should note that democracy, a form of government I’m not particularly fond of, necessarily requires a virtuous and informed electorate in order to thrive (it will survive and subsist on much less). It’s also important...
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,...
What do we mean when we say “the great monotheistic religions”? Can we even grant the premise of the question? How can we reconcile admiration for classical culture, which was polytheistic, with the practice of Christianity, which is monotheistic? How did the early Christian fathers, including St. Augustine and Tertullian, examine this tension between Athens and Jerusalem? Can we argue that the timing of the Incarnation allowed for the Church to derive maximum benefit from Roman law and government and Greek philosophy? Dr. Thomas Fleming and host Stephen Heiner examine these and many other questions on this month’s episode. Original...
