Author Archives: jimmie

The Curious History of American Exceptionalism

Posted on April 7, 2022 by jimmie

Francois Mitterrand, the longest serving president of France (1981-1985), not long before he died (1996), made this quite extraordinary statement: “France does not know it, but she is at war with America. A permanent, vital, economic war, and only apparently a victimless war. Yes, the Americans are inexorable, they are voracious, they want undivided power Read More

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Ukraine, The Fumes of Madness

Posted on March 16, 2022 by jimmie

In about 50 BC the Latin poet Publilius Syrus said, “By knowing nothing, life is most delightful” (In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est.) And in 1788 English poet Thomas Gray rendered the idea in English, “Where Ignorance is Bliss, It is Folly to be Wise.” The preamble is necessary, I think, for two reasons. I Read More

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Revolutions Then and Now

Posted on March 1, 2022 by jimmie

  Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives, biographies of famous men, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. In a more modest imitation I will draw a parallel between our current historical moment and the phase of the French Revolution called ‘Jacobinism.’ Then I will review some overlooked background of the French Read More

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Germany, Russia and Remembrance of Things Past

Posted on December 23, 2021 by jimmie

Hegel the philosopher demonstrated that all partial truths are falsehoods. For partial truths are all the infinite half-truths that, stated without context and without qualifying their limits, become outright manipulations. Wherefrom it follows that great historical movements and events share, at their root, dynamics quite similar to those involved in the birth of great religions.

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Covid and the Magic Power of 3

Posted on August 21, 2021 by jimmie

The recent and still boiling controversy about the nature, choice, type, assortment, variety, disparity, quality, benefits or dangers of available Covid vaccines shows clearly that the approximation of ideas cannot abate the vehemence of passion. And passion leads men to display behavior remote from the precincts of reason. The whole bears some similarities to fundamentalist Read More

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The Mystery of Things

Posted on July 2, 2021 by jimmie

There is a certain satisfaction, however idle, in finding the seeds and weak beginnings of social phenomena that affect the world at large. And in understanding the orientations and critical directions of the historical process we live in. Even if most of us remain helpless and impotent spectators of public calamities, or witness the vanity Read More

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On Medicine and Dr. Knock

Posted on May 25, 2021 by jimmie

However it might be varnished by imagination or sophistry, the Covid pandemic is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of our times – but it is also the culmination of a mode of thought gradually developed through a long historical gestation. For what originally was (and still is), the natural and necessary need for assistance Read More

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The Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Times

Posted on April 23, 2021 by jimmie

To understand Hegel (the philosopher) the reader must be in perfect health, though sometimes the minds of geniuses deliver compact nuggets of wisdom, understandable by the rest of us. One such instance is the idea of ‘Zeitgeist,’ the spirit of the times. Pedantically speaking, Hegel preferred the form ‘Geist des Zeit.’ It was English poet Read More

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Black Lives Matter and Related Matters

Posted on March 30, 2021 by jimmie

For many or most history is the study of what man did in the past, in different times and civilizations. Yet man is both the protagonist and the writer of history. It is he who develops a historical understanding of the past. And while studying the past man really studies himself. Which brings to the Read More

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Pandemics and Ideologies

Posted on March 16, 2021 by jimmie

A man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’ – Hamlet tells his friend Horatio (1). And Voltaire has a character from one of his novels declare, “… We in a manner begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our Read More

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