At the close of my review of the late David Cesarani’s Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933–1949, I remarked that “the Holocaust,” as a cultural concept, had performed one of the greatest vanishing acts in history — the disappearance of the Jews as active participants during World War II.[1] Faced with an almost […]
This article was completed just before the latest turn in the Russian collusion saga regarding Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with the Russian lawyer. I fear that the coherence of the article will be the least of the fallout from what is perhaps the strangest turn yet in this matter. Ultimately, I still maintain that there […]
Maladaptive Culture: Herodotus on Luxury, Effeminacy, and Decadence The ancients considered the maintaining of martial virtue and hardiness to be a supreme imperative—not surprising given that if any frailty led to defeat, one’s people could not only lose their self-government, but their very existence. Like Homer and Plato, Herodotus has much to say on the […]
Persian Virtue: A Persian Group Evolutionary Strategy? The people described in most detail by Herodotus are in fact not the Greeks, but their enemies the Persians, a fellow Aryan people. Herodotus speaks a great deal about Persian culture, often very positively. (For instance: “the Persians are normally the last people in the world, to my […]
“King Nomos”: The Power of Culture and the Universality of Cultural Chauvinism Herodotus had traveled far and wide across the Mediterranean, thus coming across nations with often radically different cultural assumptions and ways of life. Accounting for this astonishing diversity, he is much impressed by the social power of culture. As noted above, the historian […]
The Summer issue will be posted online for download June 21, and they will be posted to the mail 7/6. As you can see from the cover, it’s a very stimulating issue, with several new writers. I call particular attention to the lead article, by Claire Ellis, based on her dissertation under the supervision of […]
Herodotus (trans. Robin Waterfield), The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) In defense of history, the Roman orator Cicero once said: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child.” In history, we can find the past trajectory of human events and insights into the nature of human existence […]
I hate TV, so I usually hear the news rather than see it. This gives me a lot of chances to put my Evil White Racism to work on predictions. Mostly I’m right, occasionally I’m wrong. When I heard that a disgruntled ex-doctor had shot up a hospital in New York, I assumed that the […]
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