5 Feet of Fury

Mark Steyn: ‘We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy’

That’ll be tough going for the left, because, as I’ve pointed out too many times to bother digging up the links, the left sees the world almost entirely through the “analogy” lens — the problem being, as Mark Steyn points out here, their analogies are almost always fatally inapt:

These people “could stand to read” a little history, too. But they don’t have time to read history because they’re too busy living it: the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.

When you’re living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit. One of the things I appreciate about, say, Mittel Europeans of a certain age is that, when you meet them in their grand Paris apartments or rambling house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, somewhere deep inside is the memory of the 3am knock on the door or a little boy crouched under the eaves in the attic.