What Beijing Intends

 From AND Magazine:

In light of Xi Jinping’s demand that we stand aside while China “reunites” with Taiwan, it seems appropriate to republish this interview with one of the heroes of Tibetan resistance to Communist invasion. The Chinese told the same lie about Tibet when they marched in and began the systematic erasure of Tibetan culture. (Read more.)

 

From Townhall:

 President Trump boarded Air Force One early this morning, departing China after a three-day visit with President Xi. During the visit, the two leaders discussed several issues, including ending the flow of fentanyl precursors into the U.S., Chinese investment in the U.S. economy — including the purchase of agricultural goods and U.S. oil — and cooperation on issues concerning Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. China also hosted a State Dinner for President Trump and his delegation, which also included 16 American CEOs like Elon Musk and Tim Cook. They traveled to China to talk about expanding American businesses into the Chinese markets. During the dinner, President Trump said the two countries have a "deep sense of mutual respect," and added that the U.S. relationship with China is one of the most "consequential relationships in world history." (Read more.)

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Salvador Dalí, the Nuclear Mystic

 From Word on Fire:

Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, and baptized in the Church of Sant Pere (St. Peter). His older brother, also named Salvador, died nine months prior and haunted Dalí throughout his life. He created many paintings and drawings inspired by his brother, writing, “[My brother] was probably the first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute.” Dalí’s father was a staunch atheist and his mother an ardent Catholic. His father’s nonbelief and his mother’s sincere faith formed the foundation for Dalí’s lifelong, complex connection to God and Catholicism. When Dalí was sixteen years old, his mother died of uterine cancer, which he described as “the greatest blow he had experienced in his life.” 

A year later, he moved to Madrid and began studying at San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he met future surrealist director Luis Buñuel and modernist poet Federico García Lorca. Dalí began studying the old masters, particularly Velazquez, and experimenting with cubism. He also became acquainted with contemporary avant-garde movements like Dada and futurism, which, along with the cutting-edge psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, were to have a profound influence on the young Dalí. In 1926, he met Pablo Picasso and later quipped about their similarities and differences, “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.” 

From 1927, Dalí became increasingly “surrealist” in his work. The poet Apollinaire coined the term in 1917. The word was adopted by André Breton, who penned The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defining surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (Read more.)

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Bellister Castle

 

From Country Life:

There is nothing more romantic than the idea of living in a castle.

But if you talk to someone who actually does live in a castle — as we did when we spoke to Cosmo Linzee Gordon a while ago — you'll find that as well as being dramatic and wonderful, it's can also be cold, damp, ruinously expensive, and a constant stream of problems to solve. Not for nothing did we headline that particular Country Life Podcast as 'Epic beauty, sweeping grandeur and water pouring through the ceiling.'

Just occasionally, though, a castle comes up for sale which shows that it doesn't always have to be this way. Bellister Castle, set beside a sweep of the River Tyne on the edge of the Northumberland village of Haltwhistle, is just such a castle — and it's for sale through Knight Frank at £2.5 million. From afar, Bellister is the very image of the medieval castle: a towering, castellated and imposing presence that looks over this green and rolling landscape, almost exactly half-way along Hadrian's Wall. And more than that, Hadrian's Wall is actually a part of the castle in a very literal way: the early portions are believed to have been built using stone that was, er, 'borrowed' from the wall itself. (Read more.)

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America’s Silent Socialist Shift

 From Sharyl's Substack:

The United States was founded as a democratic republic with a Constitution that explicitly limits federal power, protects individual liberties, and restrains government from overreaching into private life and the economy.

The framers emphasized enumerated powers, separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances to prevent the concentration of authority that could lead to tyranny.

Yet over time, particularly since the Progressive Era and accelerating through the New Deal, Great Society, and subsequent expansions, American society has adopted numerous features of socialism and communism.

These include centralized government control over key sectors, heavy redistribution of resources from producers to non-producers, expansive regulatory bureaucracies, and a cultural shift toward viewing the state as the primary solver of social and economic problems.

While the U.S. retains capitalist markets and democratic elections, these developments represent a gradual drift toward collectivist principles—state ownership or heavy direction of production, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—that contrast with the founders’ vision of limited government. (Read more.)

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Joseph de Maistre as a Neoplatonist

 From Philip Diaz-Lewis at Rationis Fines:

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) looms as a dark figure over European philosophy. Writing during the Wars of the French Revolution, and in opposition to everything which that Revolution stood for, the Savoyard count is seen as the father of reactionary thought. Isaiah Berlin rather infamously characterises him as an obscurantist, authoritarian, and a precursor to Fascism.2 Maistre is the thinker who, after all, praises the executioner as the man who holds society together with just violence3, and who writes in the St Petersburg Dialogues that, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death”.4

I’ve lately been reading two scholarly works that challenge this picture, both from this century. The first is Cara Camcastle’s The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre (2005), and Joseph de Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (2011). The latter especially interests me, because it makes a sustained case that Maistre should be read as a Christian Platonist.

First, a quibble with the sources to frame the context. Douglas Hedley says that, “The Romantic period was the age of a revival of Neoplatonism”, in order to characterise Maistre as part of this Romantic revival.5 This is true, but incomplete.

To see the continuity between Maistre and earlier Platonism, it’s important to understand the profound grip that Neoplatonism had on conservative thinking in 18th century France. Yes, this was the era of the philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, who challenged religious and spiritual notions with an empiricist worldview. However, this was also the era in which Augustinianism was prominent in French Catholicism. (Read more.)

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Helen of Troy

Abduction of Helen by G. Hamilton

 

 

 

 

 

 

The face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium. 

 —From The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Marlowe

 From Ancient History Encyclopedia:

Helen of Troy (sometimes called Helen of Sparta) is a figure from Greek mythology whose elopement with (or abduction by) the Trojan prince Paris sparked off the Trojan War. Helen, considered the most beautiful woman in the world, was the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and he persuaded his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, to form a great army to besiege the mighty city of Troy in order to recapture Helen. Following the Greek victory in the war, Helen returned home with Menelaus but she became a despised figure in the ancient world, a symbol of moral failure and the perils of placing lust above reason. Despite the poor standing of the literary Helen, she also had a divine form and was the centre of cults at several Greek sites, notably Rhodes, Sparta, and Therapne. 

In Greek mythology, Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the queen of Sparta and the wife of Tyndareus. Zeus disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda, and Helen was the result of their amorous engagement. In another version of the myth, Helen's mother is the goddess Nemesis, the personification of retribution. Whoever is the mother, in both versions, Helen is born from an egg in Sparta. Helen's siblings included the hero twins Castor and Pollux (aka Polydeuces) and Clytemnestra, the future wife of King Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. One day, Tyndareus offered sacrifices to all the gods but forgot Aphrodite and the goddess, angered at the slight, then promised that all of the king's daughters would become infamous for their adultery. (Read more.)

 

From The New Republic:

Ruby Blondell’s insightful study of ancient Greek representations of Helen of Troy notes the close connections between her subject and the Pandora myth. Both, she argues, spring from cultural anxieties about female beauty and female sexuality, centered on the figure of the parthenos—the girl at marriageable age, a liminal figure who must cross from the world of childhood in her father’s house to the house of her husband. “She must be sufficiently reluctant to suggest that she will not stray once she is married, but she must also actively desire her new husband”—a balance that constantly threatens to tip over. Helen, the most famous adulterous wife in the Western tradition, is figured as a woman who is constantly in this liminal state, and who repeatedly crosses over from one household to another: “many-manned Helen,” as Aeschylus calls her. She was (and is) the locus for exploring the questions of whether beautiful women are always necessarily bad, and whether female sexual desire is always a force of destruction. She is also—unlike modern versions of the promiscuous or adulterous woman—always presented as at least semi-divine, the ever-young, ever-beautiful daughter of Zeus, worshiped at cult centers all over Greece, especially in her native Sparta. Modern versions of misogyny usually do not account for the possibility that “bad” women might also be goddesses.

The best-seller about Helen of Troy by the television presenter Bettany Hughes, from 2007, bizarrely claimed to tell, and to celebrate, “Helen as a real character from history,” while acknowledging that her existence is only “a possibility”—as if the biography of a mythical character from three thousand years ago could possibly be reconstructed. Blondell has almost none of this naïveté: she notes explicitly that her subject is a set of cultural tropes, not a historical person. Helen was a construction of the Greek male imagination, and the myths and literary treatments of Helen can teach us nothing about the lives even of women in classical Greece, let alone women in Sparta in the Bronze Age: she is “a concept, not a person.” But these myths can teach us a great deal about the complex attitudes of ancient Greek men, mostly ancient Athenian men, toward women, female beauty, and male desire.

The story goes that Zeus wanted to reduce the human population, so he arranged for the birth of the two characters who would make the Trojan War inevitable: Achilles and Helen, representing “seductive female beauty and destructive male strength.” They have in common an extraordinary self-awareness and concern for their future reputations in myth and legend. Both were half-human, half-divine, Achilles being the son of the mortal Peleus by the sea-goddess Thetis, and Helen the daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan and of the Spartan queen Leda. Owing to this parentage, she hatched from an egg—the first mark of her unusual, not-quite-human status. Helen is the only female child of Zeus by a mortal woman, an exceptional woman in this as in every other respect. Other versions of the myth suggest that she was the daughter of Nemesis, or “Destruction.”

Helen’s beauty is not subjective. A key premise of the myth is that she is beautiful in some absolute and total way that defies description, and hence can be represented only by entirely conventional means. Helen, like any other beautiful woman in the Greek literary tradition, has lovely cheeks, neat ankles, and pretty accessories. She is equally irresistible to any and every man. As Blondell neatly puts it, “a beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.” 

From a young age, Helen was prone to getting abducted. When she was still a young girl the Athenian hero Theseus swiped her, but she was retrieved by her magical brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux. A little later, suitors from all over Greece began to court her, and took an oath that they would all fight together for her eventual husband. Menelaus of Mycenae, whose main claim to fame was his wealth, won Helen as his wife. But some time afterward, a Trojan prince named Paris was appointed to judge between three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. He chose Aphrodite, goddess of love, because she promised him Helen as a reward—the only problem being that Helen was married already. The abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War. (Read more.)

The Hatching of Helen

More HERE.

Helen with King Priam watching Menelaus fight Paris

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The New York Times: A Century of Failure

 From Insurrection Barbie:

There is a temptation to treat what the New York Times has done since October 7, 2023, as a modern phenomenon, a product of social media pressure, activist newsrooms, and the politics of a particular cultural moment. That framing is too charitable. It lets the institution off the hook for something that is much more sinister.

The New York Times has a documented, academically established record of editorial decisions that consistently minimized, buried, distorted, or suppressed the truth about atrocities committed against Jewish people, in the 1930s and 1940s when six million were being murdered, and again in the years since October 7, 2023, when the world’s oldest hatred has taken on new institutional garb in the form of human rights NGOs, UN mechanisms, and international courts. Why should you care?  (Read more.)

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A Generation Praised for Toughness

 From Indian Defence Review:

A generation praised for toughness may have been shaped by something far less comforting: the everyday absence adults rarely admit mattered. They were the kids who walked to school alone, settled their own playground disputes, and heard “be back by dinner” as the only rule. That kind of childhood has largely vanished, replaced by a world where parents can track their children’s location down to the driveway. Now a comprehensive meta-analysis published in Development and Psychopathology has put hard numbers behind what many have suspected: when parents hover too closely, their children’s mental health may pay a price. The study, led by Qi Zhang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wongeun Ji at Handong Global University, examined 52 separate research articles spanning tens of thousands of participants. The researchers found small but statistically significant links between overparenting and depression, anxiety, and broader internalizing symptoms. The average age of participants was roughly 20 years old, meaning the findings largely reflect the mental health of teens and young adults. (Read more.)

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Highest of All Kings

 From A Clerk of Oxford:

The idea that gods dwell in the heights, in the sky and on the mountains, is one of the most ancient religious impulses. It's hardly difficult to see a connection between that and Christ's Ascension, and going on about 'rockets, haha!' feels like a deliberate attempt not to see it. Those silly people of the olden days found poetry in the feast rather more easily than their clever modern descendants do: in Ascension Day folklore there was 'a strong connection between the day and all things pertaining to the sky, such as clouds, rain, and birds' (Roud). Rain which fell on Ascension Day was said to be blessed - 'neither eaves' drip nor tree-drip, but straight from the sky'. The day was connected with holy water in other ways, including the custom of well-dressing and visiting sacred springs. This expresses a sense that the heavens and the earth are interconnected at the most essential level - as of course they are, whether you think of that power as physical or spiritual or both. The kind of preacher who apologises for Ascension Day is likely to call that faith superstitious, but it's infinitely grander, really, than a worldview which finds no wonder in the heavens. We are earthbound, tied to this sublunary world and its many sorrows - but this is one day when the imagination can soar to the sky. (Read more.)

More HERE. 

(Image source.) 

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