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Hitchens On Confidence

Peter Hitchens doesn’t give a rat’s rear end: It’s also that I am proud that I still stand up for the married family, and am not ashamed to do so. So no more of this stuff about being ‘emollient’. Why should I seek to please or appease people who hate everything I stand for, and […]

Peter Hitchens doesn’t give a rat’s rear end:

It’s also that I am proud that I still stand up for the married family, and am not ashamed to do so. So no more of this stuff about being ‘emollient’. Why should I seek to please or appease people who hate everything I stand for, and cannot distinguish between loathing my ideas and loathing me? Do my correspondents truly think that, if I make these concessions, Ms Thornberry and her Twitter friends will soften towards me? I can tell them it is not so.

Lenin, as so often, had it right…though you often have to read him backwards, as if you were using an instruction manual in what not to do, if you want to defeat revolutionaries.

‘Probe with a bayonet’, said that horrible man ‘If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, shove harder ’.

Revolutionaries respect only those who fight them as hard as they fight themselves. They scorn compromise and offer no mercy to those who give in to them.

Hard principle needs to be stated without compromise. If you are afraid of a crowd,  whether physical or electronic, you will never be able to lead , and you are not worthy of any responsibility. If you are ashamed or nervous of your own opinion, then people will wonder if you truly hold it.

He’s onto something. More than I care to admit, frankly.

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