The ancient cache discovered in Qumran's caves consists of some 981 ancient Jewish religious manuscripts along with many thousands of fragments -- on that all who have been involved over more than seven decades of rivalries, secrecy, subterfuge and bitter theological dispute can agree. Beyond that, the fraught and fiercely contested question of their authorship remains

Aleksandr Dugin has been little known outside the West's cadre of specialist Russia-watchers, but his influence on Vladimir Putin's thought and actions is now impossible to ignore. When it was put to him that his “dream is of death, first of all the death of Russia”, the prophet of a spiritualised neo-fascist imperialism responded that his critics failed to appreciate death's 'positive significance'

Michel Foucault's rapacious appetite for small boys should greatly disconcert proponents of cancel culture, of which he might well be described as a founding father. Will they demand the burning of his books, or will they reveal their true colours and apply the excuse of the blind eye to one of their own? On well established form, the answer to that question is self-evident

The peril of ignoring history's lessons needs hardly be stated. But what must be driven home is how precious and vulnerable civilisation is, and how easily it can be destroyed if leaders lack resolve and competence and the people prove unable or unwilling to protect a way of life they have been allowed to take for granted

Stalin understood his workers' paradise could not tolerate the existence and influence of the Judeo-Christian legacy and murdered millions to achieve that end. The motive and goal of so-called progressives remains unchanged: the humbling of any rival system of belief that challenges the State creed of secular, humanist values

The University of Notre Dame's Professor Tracey Rowland just been awarded 'the Nobel of theology' by Pope Francis, which might strike some as tinged with a delicious irony, given one of her laments is that not every senior cleric these days accepts all the tenets of the Catholic faith. 'One can’t always assume this of people on the Church’s payroll,' she says.

Only George Harrison stood firm and agreed with the original Sixties sentiment that, yes indeed, ‘all you need is love’. Such ethereal notions soon came to seem naïve and passé. The Idealism of Love made way for the Paranoia of Power as the defining dynamic in inter-personal relationships, to shape the world we live in today

Ultimately, it was feminism, the Pill and the ageing process that dissolved the Push, but not before it provided the ideological and psychological foundations for the resolute individualism that came to characterise the culture of Sydney. For all its flaws and excesses, this may still be favourably compared to the collectivist state-idolatry that has delivered Melbourne into the hands of socialist apparatchiks and their grossly incompetent nomenklatura

The Left’s determination to demonize Australian history and to portray Western Civilisation in general as a long dirge of wickedness plays increasingly into the hands of a new generation of theorists on the radical Right who can readily embrace such iconoclasm as they conjure up their own anti-liberal and authoritarian ideologies.