Consider these two premises: First, in 1865, the Confederacy is collapsing, and President Davis, concerned about the funds in the treasury, sends a young naval officer out on a wild expedition to hide the gold, to be used some day to help the South. Second, in 2005, knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden gold...
Despite recent improvements in the overall security situation in Colombia, the Bush administration remains worried about that country. Washington’s nightmare scenario is the emergence of a narcotrafficking state allied with extremist political elements and terrorist organizations. U.S. leaders are sufficiently concerned about that possibility that they are ready to continue America’s extensive antinarcotics aid to...
Nights are pitch dark here. Looking up at a wonderfully clear sky, I think of how few places today permit stars. The sickly yellow-brown blur of cities has killed the most glorious God-given beauty of all. With the stars has gone reverence, too, and maybe at least partly as a result of the same. With...
Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá. She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife. My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...
The traditional family is being attacked with an unconventional weapon: children’s story books. As books promoting a pro-homosexual ideology have slipped into public elementary-school libraries across America, unsuspecting children as young as age four have been exposed to immoral themes and content. Such was the case when the seven-year-old daughter of Michael and Tonya Hartsell...
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
In January, this column will celebrate its fifth anniversary. When Tom Fleming and I originally conceived of the idea back in 1998 (as an occasional “Letter From Rockford” to be written by various local activists), we were capitalizing on the fact that our city was considered by marketing agencies and national chains as an ideal...
Tony Blair is mad—really mad. Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it. At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan. The hidden...
Having devoted a major part of my working life over the past four years to researching and writing about terrorism, I am alert to the possibility that there are a few people around me who would like to shut me up—for good, if at all possible. The tragic end of Theo van Gogh, slaughtered in...
This collection of essays, generally short, on some two dozen authors, chiefly novelists, underlines “the delight of great books,” to borrow a phrase from John Erskine. It fits the definition that Anatole France (one of the writers treated) gave of literary criticism: “les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre” (“the adventures of one’s...
After five visits, I still get turned around in Rome, but, in Edinburgh, I consulted a map only on the first day. A quick look around from the summit of any one of the city’s hills is worth more than an hour examining a map. By the end of our Convivium, I’ve climbed all the...
In the 16th century, Spain was the wonder of Europe, with her vast empire in Latin America and the Philippines and her wealthy possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy. She came close to defeating and ruling England and Holland and, for a time, annexed Portugal with her colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Brazil. ...
It was in the spring of 1925 that a young Easterner named Clyde Kluckhohn, on sabbatical from Princeton to spend a year working on a cattle ranch near Ramah, New Mexico, first learned from a Zuñi Indian of the natural phenomenon called Nonne-zoche Not-se-lid (meaning “Rainbow of Stone”), standing at the very end of the...
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
Since they first appeared in the late 19th century, professional academic historians in the United States have been pretty much Establishment men (though, in other days, they did observe some canons of evidence and reasoned argument, and an occasional maverick appeared to remind that historical understanding should be an evolving debate and not a party...
According to a host of news reports, the porous, virtually unprotected southern border of the United States has attracted the attention of Islamic terrorists, as many of us warned it would at the outset of the “War on Terror.” In March, Time, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a ring leader of...
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley What sets Sands of Empire apart from the growing list of books scrutinizing the Bush administration’s foreign policy is its philosophical ambition. Where other authors have contented themselves with estimating the neoconservative influence on America’s strategic posture or describing the nation’s slouch...
After serving for more than three decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on Saturday, September 3, at the age of 80, having lost his battle with thyroid cancer. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent announcement of her retirement, there are now two vacant seats on the Court. Just over a...
Hustle and Flow Produced by Crunk Pictures and New Deal Productions Directed and written by Craig Brewer Distributed by MTV Films and Paramount Classics Bulletin: Pimps and rappers have hearts; they have yearnings; they have midlife crises, for heaven’s sake! Sure, they exploit and abuse women, deal dope, and occasionally shoot one another; but, hell,...
In response to the badgering of reporters during the interregnum about whether the new pope would be a liberal or a conservative, Justin Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia responded that the next pope will be Catholic. With the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, the Church has not only a Catholic pope but...
In “A Place to Stand” (Views, July), Wayne Allensworth asks, “How will our sons become men in the bureaucratized, risk-averse, feminist post-America our elites envision for us?” Certainly, this is a grave concern for anyone thinking clearly about our nation’s future. One can add a concern about how our daughters will become women, and how...
PERSPECTIVE Christians Against Terrorismby Thomas Fleming Counterterrorism is hell. VIEWS Promoting Militant Islam Abroadby Ronald L. HatchettU.S. policy blunders. Learning From Canada’s Mistakesby James BissettTerror along the border. Welcoming Muhammadby Scott P. RichertAbandoning that which is our own. NEWS Rivers of Bloodby Richard CummingsImmigration and terror in a time of chaos. The Dishonest Pursuit of...
“An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may serve the needs of the spirit.” —Susan Sontag “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents,...
On December 19, 1983, a special envoy from President Ronald Reagan stepped off the plane in Baghdad with a handwritten letter from the President to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The letter informed Saddam that Washington was prepared to support Iraq in her war with Iran. The envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld spent another day in...
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s “Iraq: The Way Out” (American Proscenium, August) is the most promising piece I have seen since it became apparent that our initial military victory marked the beginning of our warfare in that country, not the end. For more than a year, I have been advocating to those (precious few) who would listen...
In February 2002, Chronicles’ associate editor Aaron Wolf and I spent a day at the Rockford Iqra School, a Muslim academy in Southeast Rockford. I chronicled the events of that day in “Through a Glass, Darkly,” the April 2002 installment of The Rockford Files. The frank expression of admiration for Osama bin Laden by the...
As the federal Fiscal Year 2005 approaches completion and the 2006 budget takes shape, the lack of fiscal discipline of the George W. Bush presidency continues to enlarge upon the “politics of joy,” which have characterized the Republican Party since the end of World War II. No longer aspiring to be the party of frugality...
Abortion advocates were pleased when reports from the world of medicine suggested that it cannot be shown conclusively that a child in the womb feels the pain of the needle to his heart, the vacuum sucking away his body parts, or the curette that carefully slices him to pieces. However, a careful reflection on such...
President George W. Bush’s recent attempt to generate public support for his Iraq policy comes as even more evidence emerges that the invasion of Iraq was a war of choice. His argument that we must persevere because Iraq has become “a central front in the war on terror” sounds like the man who kills his...
Since his appointment as Canadian ambassador to the United States, Frank McKenna has spent many hours trying to assure Americans that none of the September 11 hijackers came from Canada. This is, of course, true, but it would be wrong to assume that Canada’s “War on Terror” has been error-free. In fact, some of the...
An interfaith education conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Episcopal Church warned that evangelicals and evangelism are potential obstacles to positive relations between Christianity and other religions. Among the featured speakers at the Interfaith Education Initiative was Methodist theologian Wesley Ariarajah, a former official of the World Council of Churches who has denied the...
A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías. His work deals with the youthful thought and career of Salvador Allende, who, between 1970 and 1973, headed the Marxist Government of...
Having sensed in the 1990’s that most European and American reporting about the Balkans was suspect, I find that this investigative study by a young German journalist, associated with the publication Junge Welt, fills in gaping holes in the received account of a controversial phase of recent history. Contributing to my uneasiness over the establishment’s...
You’ve probably heard the one about the boy who murdered his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan. But what if, after being pardoned by the judge, who had taken into consideration his heartbreaking experience, the young kid also demanded that the state provide him with financial assistance to...
It is a truism to note that H.L. Mencken, like his great vitriolic predecessor Jonathan Swift, was a thoroughgoing misanthrope. So perverse was Mencken’s vision of human existence that he preferred to read King Lear as farce rather than as tragedy—since nothing, he was fond of saying, could be more farcical than death. But if...
The U.S. government has a new official program called “Orthodox Christian World Outreach.” Tens of millions of dollars will be spent to counter distrustful perceptions of the United States in Orthodox countries such as Serbia, Greece, and Russia—perceptions resulting, in part, from our policies with respect to Bosnia and Kosovo. Under this new program, American...
Let us now praise famous Queenslanders, in particular the most famous Queenslander of the lot: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, who died, aged 94, on April 26. One of Australia’s most sure-footed and most intuitively brilliant political leaders, Sir Joh, as everyone called him (though he received his knighthood only in 1983, it is now impossible to...
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
Every one loved St Bridget. Even the sunbeams liked to be near her. One day an April shower came on, and, as she entered her cell, she flung her wet cloak over a sunbeam shining through the window, thinking it was a wooden beam. The bright ray willingly held up her mantle hour after hour,...
War of the Worlds Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Koepp and Josh Friedman Holy oxymoron! Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a thoughtful summer blockbuster. While it serves up the obligatory thrills of the school’s-out-let-it-rip subgenre, it also pays surprisingly scrupulous homage to its...
My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience. I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour later, I realized how naive I had been about higher education. I had...
“Japan didn’t fight wars of aggression. Only China now says so,” declared Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan’s wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, in an interview with the Japan Times in late June. Yuko was half right. Although Japan fought several wars of aggression, only China seems to raise the issue today. America dropped...
Several years ago, when the summer blockbuster Independence Day came out, I was told that audiences cheered the part where alien spacecraft destroyed such Washington, D.C., landmarks as the U.S. Capitol and the White House. At least some Americans know who the real enemy is and are willing to cheer publicly at cinematic depictions of...
“We oppose militarism. It means conquest abroad and intimidation and oppression at home. It means the strong arm which has ever been fatal to free institutions. It is what millions of our citizens have fled from Europe.” —Democratic National Platform, 1900 Mention militarism, and names that come to mind probably include men on horseback such...
Gordon S. Wood’s Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a welcome testimony to the renewed interest in America’s Founding Fathers. Although most Americans have a clear idea as to the importance of Washington’s military role and Jefferson’s contribution in writing the Declaration of Independence, few appreciate the pivotal part Franklin played in legitimizing the Revolution among...
As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.” On the one hand, he is on record as saying...
Keith Sutherland is a respected British publisher of such works as History of Political Thought and Polis: The Journal of Greek Political Thought, as well as the executive editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He has also edited such important collections of essays as The Rape of the Constitution? (2000)—of which compendium Margaret Thatcher...
This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.” To do so could be a...
This new consideration of a well-worn subject is altogether justified for two salient reasons. The first is that Red Star Over Hollywood contains new material and judgment fortified by new research and information; the second, that the topic has been distorted not only by failures of interpretation but by continuing exploitation, even today. The Radoshes...
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...