THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU WRITES:

Here is a story that points to the arrogance and destructiveness of the American Left. 

More than a decade ago, when I served for a year as executive director of then newly constituted Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, I came into contact with John Harris of Tyler, Texas, who already for some years had been issuing a print journal, called Arcturus, from his small press of that name. John sent me samples of Arcturus and asked whether I might mention it in the ALSC newsletter, which I did. At the time, the ALSC had no journal of its own and in my judgment Arcturus, with its policy of running articles adequate to their topics (rather than imposing mechanical word-limitations), was already doing what a conservatively oriented literary and philosophical quarterly ought to do. I became a fairly regular contributor to Arcturus and then to its successor Praesidium, when Dr. Harris established the Center for Literate Values and began constructing its eventually rich website. I experienced deep disappointment in the flashy ALSC, but have continued my association with the Center. 

The archive of Arcturus and Praesidium articles – and ultimately there were hundreds of them – was a significant resource for conservative and traditionalist thinking about art, literature, culture, and politics. There were hundreds of articles on literacy, on academic politics, on popular culture, as well as substantive discussions of the classics. There was also a good deal of poetry and fiction. 

Within the last month, an unknown party hacked the Center’s website and effectively annihilated it, destroying more than a decade’s worth of hard work, chiefly by Dr. Harris. I write “unknown,” but one can make some reasonable guesses about the hacker’s identity. The most important of these is that the motive can only have been political. The perpetrator must have found the conservative, but largely and deliberately apolitical character of the Center’s website intolerable, sufficiently so to justify in his (or her) mind an act of nihilistic vandalism. 

The contemporary Left screams ceaselessly about the so-called extremity of the right, but can anyone name a Leftwing website that has been hacked and annihilated by, say, the Tea-Partiers? 

Dr. Harris is slowly rebuilding the Center’s online presence, including a restoration of the Praesidium archives. The endeavor has taken a new name, “Literate Freedom.” Interested parties may examine the results here.

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