Author Archives: Dr. Robert Hickson
Hilaire Belloc’s Canterbury Tale
In 1905, just before he entered the House of Commons for four discouraging years (1906-1910), Hilaire Belloc published a variegated and copious book, entitled The Old Road, about his eight-day journey afoot from Winchester to Canterbury, the latter also being the place where, on the 29th of December in 1170, Saint Thomas à Becket was martyred. Click here to VIEW full size, DOWNLOAD as PDF … More →
‘And You Cannot Build Upon a Lie’
In 1920, ten years after Hilaire Belloc had stepped down from his four maturing years of publicly elected service in the House of Commons, he published a lucid book-length essay, entitled, The House of Commons and Monarchy. It is a forthright and equitably proportioned work with a clearly stated thesis; and the development of Belloc’s presented evidence and argumentation will help us still better understand … More →
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Hilaire Belloc and a High Mass
In October of 1927 Hilaire Belloc first published his book, Towns of Destiny, which contains his grateful depiction of a unique and unrepeatable event that so unexpectedly manifested itself to him in southern France on the High Feast of the Holy Ghost: a sacred action in a very special setting. In my view, this book often reveals to the attentive reader some of our beloved … More →
Restoring a Catholic Memory
On How to Develop a Catholic Sense Without a Catholic Culture To restore to his people a true memory Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accepted almost unspeakable sacrifice and loss, and especially the cross of patience. Solzhenitsyn has attempted to draw his people forth from an asphyxiating rubble of distortion just as he has himself been drawn forth: trusting and contending, marked and transfigured by grace, an … More →
Hilaire Belloc’s View of a Pilgrimage
When Hilaire Belloc was a rumbustious young man in his mid-thirties, and only a few years after he had completed his journey afoot to Rome, he wrote an essay entitled “The Idea of a Pilgrimage,” which first appeared in his memorable 1906 collection of essays Hills and the Sea. In this essay are some insights — even about “the heart of a child” — which … More →
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On Hilaire Belloc and a Great Wind
When Hilaire Belloc was a vigorous forty years of age, and three years before his life was shaken and shattered by the death of his wife Elodie on Candlemas 1914, he wrote an intimately evocative essay, entitled “On a Great Wind.” This brief and vivid piece—characteristically combining concrete intimacy and sacred mystery in his inimitably poetic “sacramental prose”—leads us also to the contemplation of God’s … More →
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Complacent Sentries and the Sloth of Roaming Unrest
This essay is an act of thanksgiving, not only a deeply humbling acknowledgment, to two non-Catholics, James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers—both of them long-suffering, wholehearted men —who saw more clear-sightedly and more deeply into the historical reality of the 1950s and early1960s than many professed Catholics of the time, to include many of the leading Ecclesiastics of the day. And they tried to warn us. Click … More →
Louis Blanqui and the Leninist Concept of ‘Enlightened Terror’
On 4 June 1960, one month before I was to enter the United States Military Academy as a seventeen-year-old New Cadet, an article was published that was later to illuminate much reality for me as a military officer—especially about the strategic and tactical manipulation of mobs by well-trained, disciplined cadres who sought “command of the streets.” The 1960 article was entitled “Student Riots and Blanqui’s … More →
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Honor in Foreign Policy
After some recent historical writing on Vietnam and its strategic milieu during the years 1962-1965, I became, perhaps for the first time, much more deeply aware of the presence or absence of Honor in the conduct of modern Foreign Policy. [Buy James Burnham's classic, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.] Honor in Foreign Policy (on Scribd)
Giving a Free Hand to the Assassins
Robert Hickson’s thoughtful reflections on U.S. complicity in the assassination of Vietnam’s Catholic President, Ngo Dinh Diem. It introduces Marguerite Higgins’ 1965 book on Vietnam, Our Vietnam Nightmare. The photos used came from the Ngo Dinh Diem Webpage. Giving a Free Hand to the Assassins
The Isolation of the Soul
Examining the theme of loss and the isolation of the human soul through the thinking of Chesterton, Belloc, and Baring, this paper considers some of the theological, moral, and psychological matters — both the causes and the effects — while always remaining rationally and resolutely convinced of their finally irreducible mysterious nature: mysteries of human free will and divine grace and of the purity and … More →
New Methods of Modern Oligarchs
The inhuman state we humans are living in at this point of history is getting clearer every day. It gets more and more obvious that the ruling elites are detached from the people they are ruling and that even these elites are ruled by other, mostly financial, elites. The citizens often feel powerless in the face of social, moral, financial and even natural disorder. Money … More →
Belloc, Chesterton, and the French Revolution
This is an essay written in 1988 for Aportes, the prestigious Historical Journal in Spain. Professor Miguel Ayuso y Torres asked the author to submit an article for an edition dedicated to the French Revolution 200 Years Later. The essay was translated into Spanish by Professor Miguel Ayuso y Torres. It came out in early 1990 in Spanish, but was never published in English. Professor … More →
The Presentation of Malitia and Guile in Melville’s Billy Budd
Through the kindness of the author, Professor Mitchell Kalpakgian, I was unexpectedly invited to comment on his own recent article in the April 2012 issue of New Oxford Review. What he wrote was a trenchant literary essay concerning Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella, Billy Budd, and its vividly counterpointed depiction of Elemental Invidious Evil, and of a much subtler form of Evil Sophistry that corrupts … More →
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Mandeville, the Frankfurt School, and Yves Simon on Authority and Liberty
A Counterpoint to Bernard Mandeville’s Deceitful Doctrine of Man and to the Frankfurt School’s Irrational Dialectical Anthropology: The Frigid Equivocations, Psycho-Cultural Subversion, Seductive Despair. A Commentary on Two Revolutionary and Neo-Sophist Texts of the Frankfurt School and the British Tavistock Institute, Respectively: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, 1947); and The Dialectics of Liberation (1967, 1968, 1969) – Considered in the Longer Light of Bernard Mandeville’s “Fable … More →





































