The Devil's Pleasure Palace

Оглавление

Michael Walsh. The Devil's Pleasure Palace

Отрывок из книги

Praise for The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

“Ranging over the centuries and across the continents, from high culture to war to American society today, Michael Walsh has written a dazzling, exhilarating, and thought-provoking book. Whether we end up liberating ourselves from The Devil’s Pleasure Palace or not, Walsh has made clear what’s at stake.”

.....

A world at peace, absent the arrival of the Second Coming, would surely be a very dull and unproductive place, perhaps possible only through a universal tyranny. While no one wishes war, sometimes war must come; war is an inevitability, and peace is the outcome of its successful, if temporary, sorting-out. Hobbes was right, although he failed to allow for man’s nature, divine as well as human. Though red in tooth and claw, nature occasionally calls for, and sometimes obtains, a temporary state of balance, out of which the world promptly spins and begins the cycle again. This is not pessimism, this is realism. Free, we differ, argue, fight, and sometimes kill. Enforced peace ends in slavery and the grave—as one of the world’s major religions promises and, in its Dar al-Islam (house of Islam), tries to practice. Trying, testing, questioning, pushing: These are man’s true natural attributes, and trouble, his natural state.

A world without conflict, or post-conflict, however, is exactly what various all-encompassing political systems have promised. But the path to this utopia has been paved with much misery and death. In our time, the main retailer of such a myth has been socialism, in two forms: German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism—especially the latter.

.....