“When a soldier killed a man he earned the title of first-stage Bodhisattva (Buddha-to-be). The more he killed the more he went up the echelon towards sainthood … the insurgents were given an alcoholic drug that made them crazy to the extent that fathers and sons no longer recognized each other and didn’t think twice before killing each other; the only thing that mattered was killing.”

Buddhist Warfare forms an accurate history of violence in the name of religion. Its most shocking material is the studies of various sutras that justify killing with detailed reference to the Buddha’s central philosophical tenets. The book therefore presents a uniquely Buddhist “heart of darkness”.

A Review of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

One of Alinsky’s greatest insights is that change has to be cloaked in the language of tradition. Liberals who burned the American flag were fools who were more interested in striking a posture for radicalism than actually changing the world. Such actions were counterproductive and turned many Americans away from the left. Let this be a lesson to any White nationalists that feel the need to periodically dress up as Nazis.

“The elite is blind. The state can’t be toppled by revolutionary masses of workers, but by capitalists blinded by greed. Information technology is the rope from which the capitalist will hang. The revolution will be fought on the terms of the middle classes. Liberals should be beaten every day!”

Is he being serious?

He says that he wrote the book in earnest, with a post-modern twinkle in his eye. He sought to analyse society, to find aesthetics in words and thoughts.

The idea for a modern day revolutionary guide came from his notebook, where he had jotted down ideas for his thesis, which was on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s military strategy in the cross-currents of Maoist ideology.

I’d really like to urge everyone here to read Troy Southgate’s new novel, Hitler: The Adjournment. And not just because he’s an old friend of mine. It’s one of the most memorable books I’ve read this year and that’s even including The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. So he’s definitely in good company! The very fact that this is Troy’s first outing as a novelist bodes very well for his future work.  

An interesting little summary of an obscure book: The New Rome; or, the United States of the World by Theodore Poesche and Charles Goepp (1853).

“This book in its opening pages claims to be a ‘a horoscope’, ‘a map of the future of mankind’, and ‘what must be’.”

Americans must recapture their old habits of frugality and restraint.

Five hundred years after his death, Cesare Borgia still ranks as one of history’s most reprehensible figures: ruthless, power-hungry and peacock-vain. But his reputation as a brute obscures the full human dimensions of this duke who sought to reunite Italy and place himself at the head of a new Roman Empire.

Unlike most environmentalists, Pentti Linkola does not try to talk to us through the filter of denial and distraction. Instead, he levels with us as a Machiavellian scientist would: each additional person takes up space our nature needs, we have too many people, most are thoughtless oafs who destroy eternally beautiful things for temporary cash, and our modern laziness arises from the ease with which we interact with life through machines.

A review of two new books on the timeless Tintin and his creator Herge:

“Politically, he charts the boy hero’s transformation from a political partisan fighting communism, Belgian colonialism and American capitalism in his first three adventures (all bugbears of the Catholic right in the early twentieth century) into a populist champion of the little guy, battling gangs, cartels, and villains.”

“The period can aptly be described as America’s adolescence. It was also the Golden Age of the White Republic.”

An interesting review of Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought:The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

An excellent review of Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition:

And it was not just conservatives such as Carlyle who attacked the dehumanizing effects of modern life. Liberals and socialists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Morris all felt the same way. When such thinkers looked back to a more organic and religious past, it was not because they were enemies of the human spirit, but because they felt that the spirit was starving in modern conditions. Traditionalism is not always the same as authoritarianism.

Sternhell never really engages this critique of the Enlightenment and its legacy. He simply dismisses it out of hand, leaving the reader to wonder why some of the arguments of Burke and Herder sound so reasonable.

As to what the diaries tell us about Orwell himself, they confirm, if any confirmation were needed, his ineradicable grounding in the Edwardian world of his boyhood… From his upbringing, too, comes that infallible habit of trying to “place” people, generalizing about social types, and – for all the instinctive fair-mindedness – arriving at a judgement based on class or gender divides.