“one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun!”

Tom Joad in John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath

In my latest National Post column I argue that the strange juxtaposition of wokism and vicarious debauchery in the New York Times is actually a logical and coherent consequence of being “nonjudgemental”… without being a message well-tailored to me.

“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

“William Blake, 1757-1827” quoted in Gravitas Vol. I #2 (Summer 1994) without further attribution.

“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].

“If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need. There exists very little likelihood that you will travel in a loop between your parked car and your bedroom for the rest of your life, but there is a very great possibility that if you are tormented by guilt and pain and self-doubt – and vast floods of self-accusation that hit every day without fail – that a fixed idea will, once it is happened upon, remain.”

Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“Our motive may be taken to be the desire to serve our day and generation in the way that seems nearest to our hand. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted upon but what can be counted upon is that we should go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end which we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms, without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right so far as we can see the right.”

Part of Orde Wingate’s words to the Chindits as they set out into Burma in February 1943, quoted in Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [and note the contrast with the tone and content of totalitarian wartime or for that matter peacetime rhetoric].

“Troops departing from Japan in the heady days of December 1941 were given a booklet to enlighten them as to the nature of their enemies: ‘Westerners – being very superior people, very effeminate and very cowardly – have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. Night in particular (although it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize upon it, lies our great opportunity.’”

Quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].