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You can’t help but love your Motherland; if you don’t love it, this means that you haven’t found it and that you really don’t have one. You must seek out your Motherland with your soul… with an unbound soul, full of the love of beauty; you can’t see it without knowing it, but if you do find it and know it, it’s impossible not to fall in love with it.
I A Ilyin
On the Essence of Justice
1919
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In the midst of a raging Civil War, Ilyin stipulated that the “Sense of Justice” was an intrinsic property of the human soul, which manifests itself as a feeling of respect for the law and the rule of law. Ilyin posited that the person has a special moral sense… of righteousness, justice, responsibility, and freedom. The absence of such feelings generates a civic void, one that inevitably becomes an uncivil morass. If one finds the Motherland, one finds the strength to take upon themselves this burden of responsibility… ergo, if one refuses to find the Motherland, if one refuses the Sense of Justice, one has no strength, no reality, and no moral compass. One sees this in Rush Limbaugh, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rod Dreher. The last-named is particularly egregious… he refuses to settle down and to have a real objective Motherland, ergo, he not only has no Sense of Justice, he has no standard of humanity whatsoever (where is he from? Is he from Brooklyn, Texas, the District, or Louisiana? He’s a rootless and soulless avatar of his own making… a figure more to be pitied than hated). If you don’t have a Motherland, you can’t have the World, either. Before you can love the Abstract, you must love the Concrete… and that is always a specific place, a Homely Home, as the Brits say. I live in the Northeast, and the only way I’ll leave it is in a box, toes up… I mean it. It gives me grounding and nurture. That’s why I pity those like Dreher… he’s sold off his real inheritance for mere and fleeting financial gain. Silly wabbit… there’s no place like Home… when will he realise that and stop his peripatetic wandering (not only in geography, but in spirituality, too)?
BMD
Voices from Russia 
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