Friday, August 30, 2019


Endless economic expansion has as its true meaning endless imperialism. 

 The Sun never sets on the global economy.
"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.  They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.

[...] 

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."  



- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"
  






"He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion.  It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.  Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing.  You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house.  He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it.  It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese.  The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not not know what they were doing.  Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other.  His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat"

- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"

Tuesday, August 13, 2019




Hermann Hestenburgh Vanitas, Still Life. 18th century copy attributed to
Cornelis Van Spaendonck .

Saturday, August 10, 2019

"Progress Celebrates Pyrrhic Victories Over Nature" - Karl Krauss

Monday, August 5, 2019

"We are proud of our museums where we display a way of living that we have made impossible." 

- A.K. Coomaraswamy