History

October 23, 1956 The Hungarian Revolution: impotent, poignant, personal.

Wall Street Opinion Journal Peter Nadas October 23, 2006

So, on that Tuesday afternoon, a single flow of humanity was moving down the avenues; they were coming on Váci Avenue, on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Avenue, but on Marx Square many stopped in hesitation: Which way now? The piled-up streetcars stood motionless where they had gotten stuck in their tracks, with the lights burning in the empty compartments. There were about 80,000 people stranded around the edges of the square, on the banks of this vast intersection. They were singing, shouting demands, having visions, speechifying. A crowd, half a million strong, was already in front of the Parliament building. They demanded that the Russians go home, and clamored for Imre Nagy to make a speech.

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The General in His Labyrinth

Wall Street Opinion Journal Matthew Kaminksi June 10, 2006

Is Poland’s last communist leader an opportunist, cynic, or “evolutionary revolutionary”?

WARSAW–Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader, is still fighting hard to shape history. Press any hot button and the general holds forth in long, clear, numbing sentences, as if back at a Party Plenum. Martial law imposed by him in the early hours of Dec. 13, 1981, to break Solidarity and Lech Walesa? That, he claims–as he has always done–“saved Poland” from the Soviets. His unswerving loyalty to Moscow and a decade of strongman rule? That paved the way for democracy. Gen. Jaruzelski’s self-obsession has filled several memoirs, including his Polish best-seller, “Martial Law: Why?” A man so closely associated with the darkest episodes in his nation’s recent past wants the future not so much to forgive him as to understand him–and even give him a little credit for a free, undivided Europe.

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Judas seen as Jesus’ collaborator, not his betrayer

JBL: It’s always interesting that controversial Christian historical topics are released at Easter (or Christmas).

San Francisco Chronicle John Noble Wilford, Laurie Goodstein April 7, 2006

Icon of Judas betraying JesusAn early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.

In this text, scholars reported Thursday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four Gospels in the New Testament.

Here Jesus was said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, “you will exceed” the other disciples.

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Vatican changes heart over Crusades – again

Reopens debate on war for ‘noble aim’ of regaining Holy Land for Christianity

WorldNetDaily.com March 25, 2006

Despite a 2000 request for “pardon,” widely interpreted as an apology to Muslims for the Crusades, by the late Pope John Paul II, the Vatican reopened the debate last week with a conference that characterized the wars fought centuries ago as defensive measures taken with the noble aim of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity, according to the London Times.

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Europe’s utopian hangover

Jewish World Review Paul Johnson

The EU is built on fantasy.

One thing history teaches, over and over again, is that there are no shortcuts. Human societies advance the hard way; there is no alternative. Communism promised Utopia on Earth. After three-quarters of a century of unparalleled sufferings, the Soviet Union collapsed in privation and misery, leaving massive Russia with an economy no bigger than tiny Holland’s. We are now watching the spectacle of another experiment in hedonism, the European Union, as it learns the grim facts of life.

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Edmund Burke

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

This famous quote was from British statesman Edmund Burke, who was born this day, January 12, 1729. Considered the most influential orator in the House of Commons, Burke stands out in history, for, as a member of the British Parliament, he defended the rights of the American colonies and strongly opposed the slave trade.

In “A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791, Edmund Burke wrote:

What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

AmericanMinute.com

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AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

Jeffrey Hart offers a compelling assessment of modern conservativism in a Russel Kirkian vein. (Anyone familiar with Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” will appreciate the piece. Those unaware of Kirk will appreciate the introduction to him here .)

One area where Hart fails in his assessment of abortion. He does not see, it appears to me, that abortion is both a religious and political issue, or at least who politics and religion meet in any discussion of abortion, no matter what side of the question a person holds or what his religious ideas and beliefs might be.

The Wall Street Journal Jeffrey Hart December 30, 2005

Prudence, skepticism and “unbought grace.”

In “The Conservative Mind” (1953), a founding document of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed, and even that such thought was highly intelligent–a demonstration very much needed at the time.

Today we are in a very different and more complicated situation. Nevertheless, a synthesis is possible, based on what American conservatism has achieved and left unachieved since Kirk’s volume. Any political position is only as important as the thought by which it is derived; the political philosopher presiding will be Burke, but a Burke interpreted for a new constitutional republic and for modern life. Here, then, is my assessment of the ideas held in balance in the American Conservative Mind today.

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C. S. Lewis

American Minute

His death went unnoticed, as he died the same day John F. Kennedy was shot, but his works are some of the most widely read in English literature.

Originally an agnostic, he served in World War I and became a professor at Oxford and Cambridge.

He credits his Catholic friend and fellow writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “Lord of the Rings,” as being instrumental in bringing him to faith in Christ.

Among his most notable books are: The Screwtape Letters; Miracles; The Problem of Pain; Abolition of Man; and The Chronicles of Narnia, which include The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe.
His name was C.S. Lewis, born this day, November 29, 1898.

Over 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide and continue to sell at a rate of a million copies a year, even forty years after his death.

In his book “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis wrote:

“All that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

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