For reasons with which I will not bore even more than my usual posts, this has been a tiring week for me, so it was with an enormous sigh of relief that having returned from my last hospital treatment - er, this week! - I was able to sink down into my armchair and read this week's 'Speccie' more or less from cover to cover. In it, as I so often do, I came across a fascinating book review of an archetypal German man and soldier who was, with all his virtues and vices, fairly typical of many men. I refer to the late Ernst Jünger.
Typical German, I hear you mutter and in many ways he was but, as he developed, he became less and less typical. He died in 1998 at the age of 102 having survived two World Wars and winning the prestigious 'Pour le Mérite'. He was courageous but perhaps more noteworthy, he was also intelligent which is not to say he failed to make errors but at least he had the ability to think his way through the turmoil of his life.
It is an excellent review, well done, the 'Speccie' and I would urge you all to 'click on' and read it for a glimpse of a life, a very different life, in the full.
Please note that with a weekend free of 'quacks' I hope to do some more posting - and I heard that!
He'd no doubt have been a Brexiteer had he been English.
Would have served the empire well, exploiting the colonials and abusing the natives, then had a sniffle, but never really said "sorry" or "I was wrong" or "I was part of the problem".
Good riddance.
SoD
Posted by: Loz | Saturday, 19 January 2019 at 13:10
Compare and contrast the scarcely concealed admiration and guilt dodging apologia of the Speccie article with this ...
http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/ernst-junger-practitioner-killing-world-war/
A veritable proto-fascist model, unrepentant.
Aka: a fascist pig.
SoD
Posted by: Loz | Saturday, 19 January 2019 at 13:46
Bob?
http://www.freemarketcentral.com/post/17351/cash-desperate-illinois-is-now-taxing-lap-dances
Isn't anything holy up there where you live?
Posted by: JK | Saturday, 19 January 2019 at 19:41
JK,
One of the more creative solutions over in Illinois is to legalize recreational pot and put heavy taxes on it, which is every bit as realistic as a lap dance tax. Maybe there'll be a street hustler tax too. But to answer your question, yeah, machine politics are holy, and not just in Chicago. The ditch-jumping, clod-throwing set also has an old game. The ball will get back to the 50 yard line eventually.
Posted by: Bob | Saturday, 19 January 2019 at 20:38
SoD, for a 'brainiac' of the first order, you are sometimes exceedingly obtuse! Did you actually read the 'Speccie' article through to the end? The whole point was that Ernst Jünger was absolutely NOT "a veritable proto-fascist model, unrepentant." He was the very opposite, in fact, a man whose powers of observation and critical assessment of his world grew and grew as he grew up! He was virulently *anti*-Nazi! Yes, like all of us he had his faults but he had the intellectual strength to recognise some of them as he grew older and wiser. How many of us can do that?
Posted by: David Duff | Sunday, 20 January 2019 at 13:08
Come Duffers, he was German!
Posted by: Backofanenvelope | Sunday, 20 January 2019 at 16:18
He was probably not aware that the Jews were given free holidays and the buses broke down on the way home.
Posted by: Glesga | Monday, 21 January 2019 at 01:50