Political Correctness As 'War By Other Means'

Angelo Codevilla in The Federalist (definitely a must read):

Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media, backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. [...]

Our Progressive ruling class’s war on our scale of values climaxed in 2016 with a campaign in favor of “transgender rights”: a demand that Americans accept that someone with a penis can be a “woman” while another with a vagina can be a “man.” Object to that mandate to take leave of your senses, insist that sex-specific public bathrooms be used exclusively by persons with the requisite personal plumbing, and be expelled from polite society. Next to this, Big Brother’s demand to call four fingers five is small, mild stuff.

Read the rest.

Angelo M. Codevilla is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations, Hoover Institution Press, 2014 (click here for a review by David P. Goldman in The Federalist). He served in the US Navy, the US Foreign Service, and on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Also very interesting by Angelo M. Codevilla: "America’s Ruling Class — and the Perils of Revolution," published in The American Spectator in 2010. Codevilla enlarged this article into a small book, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.

The Silent Life

Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting.



~ Thomas Merton, The Silent Life.

Thomas Merton, or Father Louis by his monastic name, knew that only the true contemplative experience teaches the discipline of silence, which needs to exclude any noises and unnecessary chats, because they would profane those spaces of silence. But all true wise men—as a Camaldolese monk, Father Franco, once told me—speak few words and their words are often “silence” at the same time. Their words spring from a deep meditation. True silence keeps us away from narrow mindness. The word is a great thing, but it is not what is greatest: if word is silver, as the old proverb goes, silence is gold. Hi who aims at the higher levels of spiritual life needs silence as much as he needs his daily bread and rest for his body.