If I See A Door Ajar, I

If The Decline Of Christianity Created The Modern Political Zealot - And His Crimes - So The Evaporation Of Religious Faith Among The Educated Left A Vacuum In The Minds Of Western Intellectuals Easily Filled By Secular Superstition. There Is No Other Explanation For The Credulity With Which Scientists, Accustomed To Evaluating Evidence, And Writers, Whose Whole Function Was To Study And Criticize Society, Accepted The Crudest Stalinist Propaganda At Its Face Value. They Needed To Believe; They Wanted To Be Duped.

Every Good Historian Is Almost By Definition A Revisionist. He Looks At The Accepted View Of A Particular Historic Episode Or Period With A Very Critical Eye.

Marxism, Freudianism, Global Warming. These Are Proof - Of Which History Offers So Many Examples - That People Can Be Suckers On A Grand Scale. To Their Fanatical Followers They Are A Substitute For Religion. Global Warming, In Particular, Is A Creed, A Faith, A Dogma That Has Little To Do With Science.

The Study Of History Is A Powerful Antidote To Contemporary Arrogance. It Is Humbling To Discover How Many Of Our Glib Assumptions, Which Seem To Us Novel And Plausible, Have Been Tested Before, Not Once But Many Times And In Innumerable Guises; And Discovered To Be, At Great Human Cost, Wholly False.

To Many, Heathrow In August Is A Paradigm Of Hell.