Tag Archives: Cancel Culture

Peace, Long Sought and Fought For

“Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
    preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
    from the throng of evildoers,
who whet their tongues like swords,
    who aim bitter words like arrows,
shooting from ambush at the blameless,
    shooting at him suddenly and without fear.” (Ps. 64:1-4 ESV)

Israel: Israel has fought for peace for decades. Here’s one story of the life-long war:

The occupation of Gaza was a burr, not a territorial benefit. In the decades following the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis moved themselves to the West Bank, to the ancient provinces of Judea and Samaria, the historical home of the Jewish people, where they formed the “settlements” that have caused such controversy. But Jews do not hear the same mystic chords of memory from Gaza, and so efforts to settle them in Gaza to create geopolitical “facts on the ground” never really took root. By the early 2000s, 8,500 Israelis had moved to 21 tiny settlements, in a situation so dangerous that those 8,500 Jewish Gazans had to be guarded by 24,000 Israeli soldiers.

Israel’s enemies: Will the real neo-Nazi please stand up? “Contemporary Marxism is not some secret conspiracy. It is right there in the open telling us what it is and what it wants.”

Novels: Author Richard Russo “discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call ‘deplorables.’” 

Un-cancelation: Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music theory, seems to be winning his fight against those who would censor him.

Family of C.S. Lewis: What happened to Warnie Lewis after his brother Jack’s death? A new book focuses on his correspondence with a missionary doctor in in Papua New Guinea.

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

They Drag Us into Trouble, But What Can We Do?

No one believes he is living by lies. We think a particular disagreement is inconsequential or that it isn’t our issue. We think we aren’t the ones to speak out, because reasons.

A voice from 1974 calls to us and everyone in our century:

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat [banned literature distributed in secret] and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

This is how Solzhenitsyn begins “Live Not by Lies,” which he released the day he was arrested, a day before his exile. “We are approaching the brink,” he says, “already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”

He says maybe civil disobedience is beyond us. Maybe how the Czechs stood up to their government is too much. What we can do, at the very least, is to reject lies.

“Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

Sufficiently Courageous to Defend His Soul?

I like Mumford & Sons, a British folk rock band with a hard-driving sound that will stomp a foot numb. I haven’t looked them up in a long while, but that cave song of theirs has seeded my ears. I remember it regularly.

Banjo player Winston Marshall posted a few paragraphs today on why he is leaving a group he loves. It boils down to the reaction the band got over one of his tweets. He tried to address it, only to earn more backlash. And though the reaction was both ridiculous and typical of current political foolishness, he felt he needed to step away from the band to cause the others musicians the least damage.

So why leave the band?

On the eve of his leaving to the West, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled ‘Live Not By Lies’. I have read it many times now since the incident at the start of March. It still profoundly stirs me.

“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.”

I gather the band has talked about it fully. I hope they support Marshall even while letting him leave. For the rest of us, let’s consider ahead of time how to defend our souls when the time comes.

Baen Books under attack

As you may be aware, I have been and am one of Baen Books’ authors (in electronic form in recent years). Going back to the time of the late Jim Baen himself, Baen Books has always honored the classic view of First Amendment freedom — they publish authors who run the political gamut from me (a Christian conservative) to Eric Flint, who is a Communist. All Jim ever cared about was telling a good story, and his successor Toni Weisskopf has carried on that tradition, in a way every American should approve.

Today we learned, via bestselling author Larry Correia, that Baen has come under attack as a threat to national security. (Cautions for language.) The precise target of the attack was Baen’s Bar, a free-wheeling online forum in which readers and authors interact. The Bar has always been an unrestrained sort of place, where people felt free to engage in hyperbole and “hold my beer and watch this.” Today, of course, you’re only allowed to hyperbolize if you have a government-issued Hyperbole Permit, so an effort is being made to close it down.

Because nothing is more offensive to a Leftist than any talk of revolution.

Anyway, if you’d like to stand up for free speech, you might want to buy a book from Baen. One of my e-books, even.