The readings for this month:  We will be working our way through the collection of GKC essays entitled, In Defense of Sanity. This month we read/discuss the first two essays which are from Chesterton’s book The Defendent. The link is to the Project Gutenberg website, for anyone that hasn’t been able to procure In Defense of Sanity yet. This month we will be reading the Introduction and the essay In Defense of Skeletons. Look at the Table of Contents and the Titles of the other essays in the book while you’re there. A lot of good stuff there, but we will only be reading the two I mentioned above. The editors of In Defense of Sanity had to be selective.

Here’s a Chesterton passage from his Illustrated London News column for April 7, 1934, which could have been written yesterday:

If anything is new, it is not the ideas which are supposed to belong only to this generation. It is the riots, massacres, wars, military proclamations, and wholesale executions, which were always supposed to belong especially to the past barbaric and superstitious generations. I knew all about the Communist theory of Karl Marx before I was twenty-five. What I did not know was that the Communist theory would ever make ferocious use of the Russian Secret Police, or would shoot down workmen by the score for going on strike. I had heard all about Nietzsche and the Master Mind and the reaction against democracy when I was a young art student. What I did not dream of was that a mob of Master Minds would ever be able to silence the Centrum by force and drive the Jews out of Germany. If bludgeons, bloody sabres, streets swept by artillery or rebels hanged or shot for differences of opinion — if these are new things, then I willingly agree that the situation is entirely new. But I do not see anything particularly new about the notion of a Communist State; and still less about the notion of a Dictator.