Altermedia UK » Biography

Winnie the jerk

troy — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 03:40:27 +0000

According to Holmes, Churchill bullied his widowed mother for cash unmercifully, even charging to her the cost of his wreath on the grave of his beloved nursemaid Mrs. Everest. At 19 he nearly accidentally killed his 13-year-old brother Jack while out rowing on Lake Lausanne, and afterwards made himself out to be the hero of the incident. As a young Hussar officer he took part in the vicious and hypocritical ostracism of a fellow second-lieutenant, who was forced to resign his commission because he only had an income of £500 a year (when Churchill’s own was £300).

Holmes charges that, soon after that unpleasant incident, Churchill was possibly involved in a race-fixing scandal over the Subaltern’s Cup jump race and that, in the Boer war, he escaped from the Pretoria prisoner of war camp without his colleagues, after having arranged to go over the wall as a team. He is also accused of loving power more than valuing freedom, and of leaving the trenches of the Western Front (”when it suited him”) in order to rebuild his shattered post-Dardanelles career. As Holmes caustically comments: “Over five million of his countrymen did not have that option.”

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Profile: William Butler Yeats

troy — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 03:14:06 +0000

Yeats grew up in County Sligo and London. In 1884, while studying art in Dublin,Yeats met the poet George Russell, and together they founded the Dublin Hermetic Society, dedicated to the study of magic and ritual. Simultaneous with the beginnings of his exploration of the occult,Yeats also embraced the cause of Celtic nationalism. England had banned Gaelic, attempting to absorb Ireland more completely into its empire, but Yeats envisioned an Irish literature with its roots in Irish history, mythology, and folklore.

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Profile: Michael Oakeshott

troy — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:24:41 +0000

At times like this my mind wanders back to Michael Oakeshott, the greatest British political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born over a century ago now, and lived until about the age of 90. An old friend of mine is writing his biography.

Oakeshott was a skeptical conservative, not a partisan. He usually voted for the Tories on the simple grounds they “they are likely to do less harm” than the Labor Party; but I can well imagine him voting, at times, for the Democrats here, if the Republicans posed a more immediate menace.

Oakeshott didn’t have a political program and never trusted those who did. His bête noire was what he called “rationalism in politics” (the phrase became the title of a book of his elegant essays) — the desire to use government for ends it could never achieve, at least not without sacrificing the good it might achieve. He described this as “making politics as the crow flies.”

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Profile: Roger Scruton

troy — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:18:09 +0000

Roger Scruton is perhaps the most prominent conservative intellectual in the United Kingdom and since his groundbreaking study “A Defense of Conservatism” was published 25 years ago, his influence has grown in the United States as well. A philosopher by training, Mr. Scruton has written widely on topics ranging from a defense of fox hunting to aesthetics to sex; more recently, he has written a provocative defense of Western culture against Islamic fundamentalism. [...]

Mr. Scruton parts company with many American conservatives in his rejection of individual freedom as an end in itself in the social order. Rather, freedom is a consequence of the society in which it occurs, and therefore it can be limited and shaped. Nor is he a strong devotee of free market capitalism. Having traveled much in communist Eastern Europe, and having seen the destruction of so much tradition in Britain by central planning, he is no fan of socialism. But he knows that beauty is not produced solely through the free market. The free market can be understood only through the organic growth of the society around it, which itself rests upon non-market values.

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Carlo Terracciano, RIP

troy — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 09:19:55 +0000

Carlo Terracciano, the Italian New Right philosopher and political scientist, has died. Some of his work, translated into English, can be found here:

Eurasian Movement

St. Mugg

troy — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 10:12:33 +0000

Critics seemed even more threatened by Muggeridge’s passionate, unapologetic stands against the reigning ideologies of the modern west: communism, socialism and liberalism. In the 1950s, long before others came to the same conclusion, Muggeridge wrote that modern liberalism led to these more radical forms of government and therefore nurtured the decline of the west. He scorned this unquestioned political orthodoxy for its inquisitorial, totalitarian nature and, most offensive of all, traced the source of its rise, alongside modern crises, to the debunking of Church authority.

Thus, he thought that the twentieth century’s unprecedented death and destruction stemmed from the modern cult of scientific rationalism and its heretical belief that men could make of this world “a materialist promised land.”

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