RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/identity-islam-and-the-twilight-of-liberal-values-a-review/

After the collapse of the totalitarian Communist regimes in 1989-91, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote in The End of History and the Last Man that “we may have reached the end of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.” Terri Murray begins Identity, Islam and the Twilight of Liberal Values by arguing that Fukuyama’s optimism was premature, because the rise of religious fundamentalism—especially radical Islam—has become a powerful bulwark against the spread of liberal democracy. Rather than exposing and opposing the damage done by Islamism in the West, soi disant liberals, leftists, and progressives have acted as its supporters and cheerleaders. Murray instead labels them as “pseudo-liberals” and the “regressive Left” as a result of their abandonment of bedrock liberal principles, and progressive and secular values.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/vladimir-bukovsky-conversation-nazis-communists/

Editor’s Note: Jay Nordlinger recently interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky, the legendary Soviet-era dissident, at Bukovsky’s home in Cambridge, England. For the first two parts of this series, go here and here.

Talking with Bukovsky, I ask him to give me a comment or two on Yeltsin — Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the new Russia. He does.

“He was a tragic figure. He was kind of half born — I don’t know how to put it. He was part and parcel of the Communist regime, and he suddenly realized that the whole thing was wrong — and then he was on both sides at the same time. That was the trouble with Yeltsin. That’s what made him a tragic figure. He couldn’t decide what to do with his life. He couldn’t go all the way against the Communists. He went against them, but did not finish it. Yes, he was a tragic figure.”

• Bukovsky’s book Judgment in Moscow: Did he mean it to be a Nuremberg? A partial Nuremberg? A mini-Nuremberg? “Theoretically, that’s what I tried to achieve, but there is nothing like an actual trial, a real trial. We all know the difference: One is moral, the other actual.”

Along with many others, Bukovsky would have liked to see an actual trial, in any form. “Someone asked me — a member of Yeltsin’s entourage — ‘Well, who’s going to be the judges?’ A very tricky question. I said, ‘Look, I don’t care. Choose twelve people off the street, and that would be okay with me.’”

I think of the old phrase, about juries: “twelve good men and true.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/vladimir-bukovsky-dissident-conversation-echoing-words/

Editor’s Note: Jay Nordlinger recently interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky, the legendary Soviet-era dissident, at Bukovsky’s home in Cambridge, England. The first installment in this series is here.

When Bukovsky was released to the West in 1976, he was in his mid-thirties. He wanted to continue his education, which had been rudely interrupted by the Soviet authorities, who confined him to the Gulag for twelve years.

Bukovsky got invitations from two universities, he tells me: Leiden in Holland and King’s College, Cambridge. He wished to study biology, and, in particular, neurophysiology. Leiden had a program that lasted five years, and King’s had a program that lasted three.

For Bukovsky, every minute counted. Or, as he puts it, “Every year meant a lot to me.” He felt the need to get on with life. He opted for the three-year program over the five-.

There was another reason to choose King’s, not Leiden. Instruction at Leiden was in English, but “the everyday language of communication,” says Bukovsky, “was Dutch, and Dutch is an impossible language to master.” He was loath to begin this language in his mid-thirties.