Recent events such as a terrorist attack in the center of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu’s Moscow visit, his meeting with President Putin, and the opening of an exhibition, “Open A Door to Israel,” all led the author to book an immediate flight to Tel Aviv the following day. Having visited two […]
Sunday reading
The Russian World and European Civilization
Continually invaded from all sides and forced to live in an incredibly harsh climate, the Russian people managed to colonize vast swathes of land, but without slaughtering, enslaving, robbing, or forcibly baptizing any nation.
Anti-Gagarin: Hollywood The Dream-Killer
“LET’S GO!” – Yuri Gagarin’s famous cry at the start of the first manned spaceflight (1961) “DON’T LET GO” – the official tagline for the movie Gravity (2013) Watching Academy Award-winning movies is often more thought-provoking than entertaining. In addition to their responsibility for much of the visual indoctrination of […]
Of China, conservatism, constitutions and Communist revivals
As I have said before, the modern Chinese thinker I admire most – both on an ideological level and on a personal level – would probably be the late great Fei Xiaotong, who is not without reason sometimes considered the Alexis de Tocqueville of China. Not only was the good […]
‘Primitive and irrational’ – autopsy of a social dogma
Romanian-British historian Dr. David Mitrany’s 1950 book, Marx Against the Peasant: a Study in Social Dogmatism, is a pleasant surprise in a number of ways. For one thing, it is prescient in ways one wouldn’t normally suspect. In 1950, Europe was struggling in the midst of political division, poverty and […]
Pobedonostsev – personalist, populist, perennialist, patriot, peacenik
If one studies late Romanov Russia, or the Golden Age of Russian thought, poetry and literature, there is one name in statesmanship and political philosophy that, alongside the literary giants Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky and Dostoevsky, you probably can’t get away from. Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the éminence grise of Russian […]
Culture wars and the non-West
In the United States we used to talk about the ‘culture wars’, as though the ‘culture’ was the battlefield, the undifferentiated contested space on which the wars were fought. Indeed, many of us still seem to think and speak this way. Our political and pundit classes will still often talk […]
Peter, Paul and Putin
Since having been back in the United States, I got to make a visit to the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York. It was an awesome experience – and I say this not in the colloquial way but in a heartfelt way. It was one of my first ever […]
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