...such views of history are quite widespread... Exactly. And if you are familiar with this blog, you will know that I am at war with this kind of unhistorical arrogance and vanity (what CS Lewis called chronological snobbery). If you think you are smarter than Beethoven or Thomas Aquinas, prove it.
I say it's hate speech because I think it's hate speech. I am not going to retract it. And to be quite frank, I suggest that you reflect on a sentence from that mine of wisdom and quotations, GK Chesterton: "Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up," said Father Brown. "I told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea - tables, you had got used to the face of a fiend." Very little, after all, is easier than to get used to constantly-repeated vicious talk from people who do not themselves immediately seem vicious; only to wake up one day and find that the secret police is abroad in the land, and that people are vanishing with disquieting regularity, and that the pleasant colleague who believed in the revolution or in restoring order did, in fact, believe exactly what he said.
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Re: controversy
Date: 2008-04-29 09:27 am (UTC)Exactly. And if you are familiar with this blog, you will know that I am at war with this kind of unhistorical arrogance and vanity (what CS Lewis called chronological snobbery). If you think you are smarter than Beethoven or Thomas Aquinas, prove it.
I say it's hate speech because I think it's hate speech. I am not going to retract it. And to be quite frank, I suggest that you reflect on a sentence from that mine of wisdom and quotations, GK Chesterton: "Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up," said Father Brown. "I told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea - tables, you had got used to the face of a fiend." Very little, after all, is easier than to get used to constantly-repeated vicious talk from people who do not themselves immediately seem vicious; only to wake up one day and find that the secret police is abroad in the land, and that people are vanishing with disquieting regularity, and that the pleasant colleague who believed in the revolution or in restoring order did, in fact, believe exactly what he said.