Essays in Idleness

A false idea of me, I have noticed, tends to go with false ideas of everything else. And these false ideas can only be corrected when they can be discussed, openly. It is the contrary of the “shut up” instruction. That is, as it were, the practical necessity of free speech, which is currently under intimidation from the Left in most Western locations, as it has always been in most Eastern. A “Gleichschaltung,” or authoritarian standardization, has descended over most of Western civilization, as it descended over the Nazi realms in the nineteen-thirties. Another way to describe this is as “institutional capture” (of the universities, media, bureaucracies, &c) by the Left, and the “cancel culture” that has been spawned by it.

The same fate for the Jews, who are currently under persecution, more or less publicly, everywhere but in the most conservative rural backwaters of the U.S.A., and in Israel itself. For instance, 75 percent of Jewish students in American universities report they have been personally molested, for being Jewish, in the time since the mass Palestinian rapes and murders on October 7th.

Freedom of speech is the only possible corrective; for every crime may be excused by the enforcement of deceitful and mendacious language. Unless persons who have been smeared, or otherwise misrepresented, are given the right to respond to their “critics” — and thus allowed to reply to everything that is charged — we must live with the tyranny of “progressive” stupidity and malice. (Among the worst things to endure is the smugness of its beneficiaries.)

Chanukah is the Jewish celebration of the recovery of Jerusalem: something especially appropriate in the current age. We may read about this, and the rededication of the Second Temple, in the Books of the Maccabees. The Seleucid powers had begun a campaign to suppress the Hebrew religion, 168 years before Christ. One might suggest the Maccabees were the original Zionists, freeing Judea, but other signal moments in the Mosaic histories had spoken eloquently of freedom. We find that spirit also in Christianity, proudly and unquestionably inherited from the Jews. We will not be slaves.

We will not be slaves, whether to a foreign conqueror, or to an alien, pagan ideology, or to the Gleichschaltung that it has imposed. For after all, we are history’s non-conformists.