Amazingly good writing. Given the benefit of hindsight, the essays about the US/Iraq war don't stand up as well as the rest, but what can you do? He stuck to his guns.
Quotes:
The three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners.
At almost every point Churchill was allowed by events to flaunt the medals of his defeats.
Is one to be left with no illusions? Is the whole pageant a cruel put-up job?
Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones.
But alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then.
People fight, as Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche have emphasized, for dignity and for “recognition” just as much as for their “real” interests.
We seem to have a need, as a species, for something noble and lofty. The task of criticism could be defined as the civilizing of this need—the appreciation of true decency and heroism as against coercive race legends and blood myths.
It is also why one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment.
Behind her, a large notice read, THIS JOINT IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR DEAR BROTHER RIVER. Did Mr. Phoenix die in here? “No, honey, but he was an investor.”
On the radio, people who are very obviously products of evolution quarrel at the top of their leathery lungs with the verdict.
About 55,000 men were blown to shreds or died of appalling wounds or expired from thirst and neglect on the Gettysburg field,
IT’S A SOUTHERN THING—YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. (Why is it, when I see a Confederate battle flag flapping from the rear of a pickup truck, that I don’t axiomatically make the association with courtesy, gentility, chivalry, and hospitality? Perhaps that’s the bit I don’t understand.)
It was one thing for thousands of men to throw away their lives by marching up a slope under heavy fire and insane orders—that’s glory for you—but quite another to think of it as a blunder committed by a vain and fallible old mortal.
The very reason for the imperishability of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered four months later on the same hallowed ground, is that it departed from conventional bombast and oratory, while managing both to honor the past and to summon a common democratic future. (This, in under 300 words.)
The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.
This is a country rather short on irony and long on euphemism,
Every attempt, in other words, to make this “procedure” more rational, more orderly, and more hygienic succeeded only in calling attention to something that I’m now firmly convinced is inescapable—namely, that it’s irrational, random, and befouled and bemerded with the residues of ancient cruelty and superstition.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.
The greatest triumph modern PR can offer is the transcendent success of having your words and actions judged by your reputation, rather than the other way about.
And, having proposed Zionism as a cure for anti-Semitism, Israel recruits the support of anti-Semitic fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Billy Graham, who see the Jewish state as a prelude to the conversion of the Jews, to be followed happily enough by Armageddon and the consigning of the nonconverts to hell.
I care enough about the issue to keep my hatred pure, and to reserve it for those who truly merit it.
The survival of the Jewish people has for centuries been a means of taking the moral temperature of a society. Those who take that temperature are quite rightly conditioned to notice even a slight elevation.
Smart enough even to see that the Promised Land may be a secular multi-ethnic democracy, none the worse for being a second home to many other wanderers and victims, too. America, in a word. The best hope and, yes, perhaps the last one.
However, there are some moral claims for atheism that may be worth putting forward. First, and most conspicuously, the atheist cannot be entirely happy with his conclusion.
Those who decide to try and lead ethical lives without an invisible authority are also ‘blessed’ in another way, because they do not require a church, a priesthood, or a reinforcing dogma or catechism. All that is needed is some elementary fortitude, and the willingness to follow the flickering candle of reason wherever it may lead.
Religion, however, is not the recognition of this private and dutiful attitude. It is its organized eruption from the private into the public realm. It is the elevation and collectivization of credulity and solipsism, and the arrangement of these into institutional dogma and creed. It is the attempt to decide what shall be taught, what shall be allowed by way of sexual conduct and speech and even thought, and what shall be legislated. And it is the attempt to make such decisions beyond challenge, through the invocation of a supernatural authority.
I discover when I read the claims of even the more meek Tillich-like theologians that I am relieved that they are untrue. I would positively detest the all-embracing, refulgent, stress-free embrace that they propose. I have no wish to live in some Disneyland of the mind and spirit, some Nirvana of utter null completeness.
The “truth” is that religious Christians and Jews could still both be wrong. Jerusalem may not be a “holy city” at all, but just an archaeological site that inspires bad behavior. There could be an afterlife and no god, or a god and no afterlife.
One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.
The new talk is all of “human intelligence”: the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient.
But then, there is a certain hypocrisy inscribed in the very origins and nature of “Pakistan.” The name is no more than an acronym, confected in the 1930s at Cambridge University by a Muslim propagandist named Chaudhri Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, plus the suffix “-stan,” meaning “land.” In the Urdu tongue, the resulting word means “Land of the Pure.”
The country is a cobbling together of regional, religious, and ethnic nationalisms, and its founding, in 1947, resulted in Pakistan’s becoming, along with Israel, one of the two “faith-based” states to emerge from the partitionist policy of a dying British colonialism.
Far from being a “Land of the Pure,” Pakistan is one of the clearest demonstrations of the futility of defining a nation by religion, and one of the textbook failures of a state and a society.
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