Our 1000th Post!

This post, the one you are reading now, has the honor of being our 1000th post! I began this blog at the request of Dale Ahlquist on December 8th (a Feast Day) 2005, and we're still going strong.

In honor of the 1000th post, I give you.......G. K. Chesterton!

Bolshevism will never be answered as it should be so long as people are always talking about the bad Bolshevist. They will only really see through it when they understand the good Bolshevist And he, being truthful and transparent, is really rather easier to see through.

Only I fancy that he, like some other modern things, is seen through so easily that he is not seen at all. He is like a pane of glass - a thing that people forget until they try to put their heads through it; then they get their throats cut, and they are quite surprised.

I mean by this transparency a sort of truism which the idealist accepts and remembers,
while the realist accepts and forgets. One of these truisms is that comradeship is a natural and noble thing; and along with this comradeship there goes a certain case for communism, in the sense of certain things held in common. The young Bolshevist is a great bore when he says this for the thousandth time; but even at the thousandth repetition it is still a truism, and therefore a truth.

And our trouble is that we also treat our own truths too much as truisms. I mean that there are certain obvious things to say about the young Bolshevist, and we say them. We do not always mean them; and we scarcely ever really know what they mean. We very seldom know how true our own words are, and still less how subtle they are.

For what we say carelessly as a simple truth is often a very subtle truth. For instance, one very obvious thing to say about the young Bolshevist is that he is
young. But too often we mean by this nothing better than a sneer at youth for being restless, or a far baser sneer at youth for being idealistic. But the real case against him is not so much that he is restless as that he is only too much at rest in an incomplete cosmos of comradeship. It is not so much that he is idealistic as that he has not yet been disturbed by a newer and more intense ideal.

What is the matter with the young and honest Bolshevist is that he does not yet know anything about private property. He knows all about what he calls Capitalism, a gross disproportion in property which he is right to despise; but he does not know the meaning of private property.

Now when we say this to him, he thinks we mean that he has not settled down into a stuffy and stagnant conservatism, as we have; but I for one mean the very contrary. When I was a young Bolshevist, I thought that older men liked pottering in their private gardens because they were timid or tired out. I liked sharing anything anyhow with my comrades; but I felt like this, not because I was a young Bolshevist, but because I was a young man. What I did not know then, and what I do know now, is that the garden of private property is not a refuge, but rather a new world - as much of a new world as learning to read or to play the piano.
[GKC ILN Feb 25, 1922 CW32:328-9]

Let us proceed into the bold new world of Chesterton together for another 1000 posts! Thanks for being a part of this.

I meant to suggest having cake and ice cream in honor of the 1000th, but at our house, we made a pumpkin cake with cream cheese icing, which was quite delicious; so I give you permission to celebrate in whatever style you would prefer.