If you've never read Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Menace of the Herd or Procrustes at Large, consider giving it a shot. It's a work of a bygone era, written by a man who lived in our era (died in 1999). When I read him, I can practically feel the grey matter in my head shifting. Also: He's not afraid to make broad, sweeping statements (often intolerant) that could open him up to buckshot criticism because of exceptions, but that are, nonetheless, true. I find it refreshing. Sample:
Apart from a few poets we see these followers of Calvin contributing very little to the arts and letters. They lacked painters, musicians, architects of originality; hilarity was for them suspect and their humor was limited. In their political activities they displayed strange and disquieting tendencies; in North America they brought the Indians, with the help of bullets, whisky, and infected blankets, almost to a vanishing point. In England they led the first great attack against the institution of monarchy in Christian history, in Ireland they displayed their homicidal talents in the most brutal type of warfare, in South Africa they established republics in which the institution of slavery survived till the threshold of the twentieth century, in Hungary they allied themselves with the pagan Turks and in Japan with the Shintoists against the Catholics.
