Month: February 2015

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Henry Adams)

Henry Adams is the type of author, and an author, whom every educated American once read and discussed. Now, he and his type have been replaced by stupid studies of so-called “white privilege,” and the triumphant martryologies of the past have been replaced by the mewling victimologies of the present, much to the detriment of everyone involved, and most of all to the detriment of any useful intellectual discourse, as can be seen from a cursory view of the comments section of any article in the New York Times. But by reading Adams, we can at least educate ourselves, and educate the Remnant, as Isaiah did before the renewal.

Crunchy Cons (Rod Dreher)

Published by Charles Haywood

This book is a classic that I finally got around to reading. Maybe it’s strange to say a book less than ten years old is a classic, but Dreher is the foremost exponent today of what might be called “alternative conservatism,” and he would call the “Benedictine Option,” but what most people would call “traditional conservatism,” which has considerable overlap with certain viewpoints on life commonly attributed to liberals, or more accurately to hippies and similar “alternative lifestyles.” He nicknames it “Crunchy Cons,” a term which has passed into the general modern conservative lexicon.

Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (Michael Burleigh)

Published by Charles Haywood

Michael Burleigh is a noted European historian, primarily known for a synthesis approach that blends intellectual, cultural and “hard” history, frequently with a heavy focus on religious and moral elements. Sacred Causes, along with its earlier companion, Earthly Powers, aspires to a synthesis of religion and politics in all of Europe, from the French Revolution to now, with a primary focus on “political religions,” ranging from Jacobinism to Islamism, that are “the abusive exploitation of the human religious sentiment.”

Milestones (Seyyid Qutb)

Published by Charles Haywood

Milestones claims to be a revivalist primer, to return Islam to its roots, but it is really a hybrid of traditional Islam with modern ideological organizing systems, primarily Leninism. This hybrid has proven to be a powerful combination, perhaps unsurprisingly given the power of both Leninism and modern Islamism in the 20th Century. Qutb’s contribution was to meld the two, promising the fusion will create harmonious societies with unparalleled virtues equivalent to those of the first Islamic societies. This is the core of modern, late 20th-century Islamism, of which Qutb was its primary theoretician.

The Locust Effect (Haugen & Boutros)

Published by Charles Haywood

I was hoping to find real insight in this book. I didn’t. Not because the authors are not well-informed—they are very well informed about their topic. Nor because the authors are not well-intentioned—they are very well-intentioned. Nor do they appear to be wrong about most or all of their facts. But despite all their effort, coupled with constant and justified moral indignation and calls for global justice, they fail to confront the real reasons and solutions for the problem they outline.