“Happy Counterterrorism Day” is an article in Harper’s Magazine that, if you haven’t read, you must. I think this one’s going on my imaginary bookshelf with Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
Remember: sooner or later, we’re all subject to the iron boot. If you don’t stand up for your neighbors, they won’t be able to stand up for you. Religious fanaticism, political ideologies, and handwringing about what will happen to our children are tools of the powerful to gain more power. They’ll use flags and icons to get us to oil their machinery with our blood.
Interesting to read alongside Orwell’s My Country, Right or Left.
Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia.
I am not, in general, a particularly sentimental man. But Orwell always makes me drip a bit.
Piece of advice, don’t ever trust anything written by someone with the last name Horton.
They’re all pompous idiots and they’re incredibly clumsy when it comes to computers.