[poconopundit]

Trump's trip to Poland and his defense of Western Civilization harkens back to Dostoevsky's famous philosophical tale.

Includes a CNN meme with a Russian theme...

[Louis Foxwell]

At the heart of every state, of every denomination, of every large organization sits an ogre who accrues power. His role is stark: to control the masses under his authority. Freedom, personal dignity, honor, justice, morality, these are trinkets, baubles dispensed by the ogre as toys to keep his subjects in submission.

[Vision Thing]

Thanks poconopundit! Dostoevsky was a Christian intellectual who wrote about the darkness of power-hungry intellectuals. The Grand Inquisitor was the greatest expression of this, with Raskalnikof of Crime and Punishment coming in as a close runner-up.

I once read a Dostoevesky analyst describe his works as follows: when portraying intellectuals, D makes you feel how twisted and disturbed they were, while when portraying Christians, D made them resonate with mystical experiences. It made for painful reading whenever the scene involved an intellectual, such as the Grand Inquisitor or Raskalnikof, and it made some fascinating reading whenever the scene involved a Christian.

Our fake manipulative media fancies themselves to be intellectuals, whereas we see them as power-hungry control freaks. If D were still with us, he would portray them in the darkest light.