Category: Essay

“The essential problem is not the political issue of European federation or the practical question of European economic organisation. The vital question is how to preserve the spiritual inheritance of Europe…”1 These words were written by the excellent English historian, Christopher Dawson in his book Understanding Europe, published in 1951.

In the first few pages of this important book, Ryszard Legutko describes the oddity whereby former communists adapted far more easily and successfully than former dissidents and anti-communists to the new liberal-democratic regimes established in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Others have

Excerpt from The Demon in Democracy*   One can look at the affinities between communism and liberal democracy from both a narrower and a wider prospect. The narrower point of view may lead us to a sad conclusion that the modern Western world never really understood quite correctly the communist

Apart from Iceland, which is a European country situated by itself out in the North Atlantic, the east-west extremes of Europe are the west coast of Ireland at 10 degrees west longitude and Russia’s Ural Mountains at 60 degrees east longitude. The central meridian of these extremes is 25 degrees

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him.The unreasonable man adapts conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw A Conservative is a statesman enamoured of existing evils,as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Ambrose Bierce, The

A Voice for Minorities in Dangerous Times Part II 1949–50: HOPELESSNESS […] Ödön Pásint retired […] at 48, but possibly not quite on his own initiative. As the “bourgeois” traditions of publishing the personal news of public administration (appointments, promotions, awards, retirements, etc.) in the Official Gazette had been laid

I mentioned to a friend yesterday that I was preparing a lecture for the Night University and he was naturally interested in the topic. When I said I would talk about lies, he thought it was an exceptionally demanding theme. Together, we decided that once you are born into this