After Hamas, the radical Islamic and anti-Western movement and terrorist organization, achieved victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I was invited by a leading think tank in Washington to debate with another Middle East analyst the implications of that stunning development for U.S. policy in the Middle East and the moribund “peace process.” I found...
Year: 2006
Post
Methodists and Sex
The United Methodist Church, having declined from 11 to 8 million members in the United States, spent millions on a television and newspaper ad campaign called “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Those millions were probably wasted, however. The ad campaign has been overshadowed by unwanted publicity over increasingly routine battles about homosexuality. Last fall,...
Post
The Two Faces of Marxism
I have one major problem with Paul Gottfried’s The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium: The title does not really fit the book. Professor Gottfried describes how Marxism as an economic theory has lost its appeal, even on the left, since World War II. Today’s leftists no longer advocate nationalization...
Post
Mending Wall
The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...
Post
Home, Sweet Home
The Rockford Institute sits on the northern edge of Rockford’s downtown, at the upper end of a stretch of North Main Street that local boosters have dubbed “the Cultural Corridor.” The corridor is not much even by the standards of modern cities—a few museums, the Coronado Theatre, the New American Theater, the Rockford Woman’s Club,...
Post
Hell in Panonia
The siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944-45 was not as militarily significant as that of Stalingrad or as colossally wasteful of human life as Leningrad, but it was still a human tragedy of the highest order. For the Germans and their (often reluctant) Hungarian allies, Hitler’s order to defend the capital of Hungary...
Post
Muslim Rage and American Folly
The U.S. State Department has effectively sided with militant Islam by condemning the decision of newspapers in Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe to publish cartoon drawings depicting Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On February 3, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus told reporters, “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable....
Post
Victim of Jiihadism
Fr. Andrea Santoro, who was murdered in February in Trabzon, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, was a victim of jihadism. An Italian missionary priest who had served in Turkey for ten years, Father Santoro was shot twice at point-blank range in his church by a youth who shouted “Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is great!”) before fleeing...
Post
China and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
Since the North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002, Washington has believed that China is the key to solving the problem. The Bush administration has indicated repeatedly that it expects the PRC to exert whatever diplomatic and economic pressure is needed to get North Korea to abandon her nuclear ambitions. From time to time,...
Post
Where the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers Meet . . .
Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence—...
Post
Christians in Iraq
Christians in Iraq have faced continuous attacks since the U.S. invasion. On January 29, three people died and more than twenty were injured when bombers targeted six churches in coordinated attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk as Sunday evening services ended. In Baghdad, Patriarch Emmanuel III missed the bombings by minutes as he was held up...
Post
On Textual Errors
Aaron D. Wolf’s defense of the Byzantine or Majority Text of the New Testament, which he calls the Ecclesiastical Text (“A Trip to Smart-Mouth College,” Views, February), was thoughtful and well written. There are errors in the Alexandrian tradition and unique true readings in the Majority Text. For in- stance, the two standard critical editions,...
Post
On Matters Ecclesial
Once again, Joe Ecclesia has written a “Letter to a Bishop” (Correspondence, January) that resonates on the other side of the Atlantic. English parishes have been warned that they can no longer assume that they will have a resident priest. English Catholics have been told to be prepared for the number of Masses cel- ebrated...
Post
The Vanishing America—April 2006
PERSPECTIVE Where the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers Meet…by Thomas FlemingLife among the tombs. VIEWS Importing Prosperityby Clyde WilsonOut-Babbitting Babbitt. An Invisible Borderby Chilton Williamson, Jr.Defending fausses communautés. Anywhere But Hereby Aaron D. WolfThe dark imaginations of eSlavery. NEWS China and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis.by Ted Galen CarpenterCarrots and sticks. REVIEWS Enemies Right and...
Post
On the Road Again
Actually, I can very easily wait to get back on the road again. I have been back from Serbia for a bit more than week and am now on the way to our conference on the Scottish Enlightenment. At least I am flying direct to Glasgow and taking a short train ride from there to...
Post
Ugly Lessons from Katrina
What are Americans thinking these days? So many seem surprised by what is happening in New Orleans. How could they be? Last year, when hurricanes raked the Gulf Coast, a rural store offered free ice and water and a serious riot erupted in the parking lot where people refused to wait in line. Or take...
Post
Farewell to Spare Oom
Just before the December 7, 2005, premiere of Walt Disney Pictures’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tiny bomb was dropped on Christians in America and Great Britain who were desperate to see the film. Val Stevenson posted the text of a brief letter on her literary website, Nthposition.com,...
Post
Civis Americanus Sum
“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.” —Daniel Webster In the spring of 1963, my sister and I were invited, along with my parents, to a dinner party given by White Russian friends at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan, whose tall mahogany-framed windows overlooked lower Central Park. ...
Post
The Draftee
Héctor Villa did not feel disposed to take phone calls this morning. He was at work outdoors, gilding a large piece of driftwood he and Jesús “Eddie” Juárez had retrieved from a sandbar in the Rio Grande between Contreras and the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and brought home in Jesús “Eddie”’s pickup truck for display...
Post
A Fight for French Sovereignty
After years of running smoothly along its predetermined path, the drive toward a United States of Europe seems to have lost wind, especially in France, the place it more or less originated. It looks as if another trend is gathering strength in the country; it points in exactly the opposite direction, as if it were...
Post
Dynamic Paralysis
Appearances, as we all know (or should know), are often deceptive, just as one’s memory is often fallible and by no means a sure guide as to what one has really and truly observed. It may be that I was not sufficiently observant when I first visited Moscow in the summer of 2003. I must...
Post
Latter-Day Beggars
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
Post
Keeping the Promise
Munich Produced and distributed by DreamWorks and Universal Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner Munich is Steven Spielberg’s account of Israel’s retaliation against the Palestinians who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of 11 of their athletes during the 1972 Olympics. He has brought all the enormous resources of his...
Post
Oyster Supper
As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial. Another way to understand the weather in this part of the South is through the eyes of a ubiquitous inhabitant: the mosquito. They bite in February; aerial insecticide spraying commences in May;...
Post
The Virginian
To be published by a university press, one must demonstrate originality of scholarship. In a forgetful age, that is not hard to do. It is easier still when a constant rewriting of history is required to meet the ever-changing dictates of empire. This latest biography of Edgar Allan Poe promises to emphasize “as never before”...
Post
Oscar Buzz
The Oscar buzz this year is, in large part, about the prospects of Brokeback Mountain, the “gay Western” that has already won four Golden Globe awards and been nominated for eight Academy Awards. A month ago, Brokeback Mountain had all the momentum, but that is now slowing as some have acknowledged that the film is,...
Post
The State as Rabble-Rouser
Michael Mann has long been the most interesting exponent of what might be called British post-Marxist sociology. In his essays in the Archives européennes de sociologie, his Sources of Social Power (two volumes), and other writings, Mann has applied a four-power model (ideological, political, military, and economic) to historical studies, seeking thereby to overcome Marxist...
Post
Goodbye, Greater Israel; Hello . . . What?
My name and title (“global-political and economic-affairs analyst”) appears on a few rolodexes on the desks of the young ladies, a.k.a. “schedulers,” who are in search of pundits—that is, pompous think tankers and retired foreign-policy types who are willing “to do Iraq” or “to do Iran” (in Washington lingo) or some other international crisis. So...
Post
A New Solidarity
The victory of Lech Kaczynski of the Law and Justice Party (with around 54 percent of votes cast) over Donald Tusk of the Civic Platform Party in the second round of the presidential election on October 23, 2005, augurs well for Poland. The socially conservative Kaczynski had claimed to represent the ideals of Catholic social...
Post
Later, Not Better
The work of a longtime author on social problems, on the deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews, and on Philadelphia civic life who also served as a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Murray Friedman’s history of the neoconservative ascent to power is neither scholarly nor balanced. Nor is it a book I...
Post
Zebra Killings
Whenever whites commit crimes against blacks, the dastardly deeds make headlines and are featured on nightly news programs. The president wrings his hands and makes speeches about racism. The Promise Keepers hug one another, cry, and confess to a newly minted transgression, the “sin of racism.” Western Europeans look down their long noses at us. ...
Post
Unjust Compensation
Twenty-five years ago, the village of Machesney Park, Illinois, did not exist. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the state: This spring, the village will pay $143,000 for a special census to determine how far the population has risen above its 2000 Census level of 20,759. Village officials estimate that 1,400 people...
Post
Profiling and Spying: A Necessary Evil
Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.” After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China. But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...
Post
Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?
Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people. It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...
Post
Bringing to Light Eminent Domain
The Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court decision has brought the abuse of eminent domain to the forefront of the public’s awareness. In Florida, private-sector developers and their allies in municipal-planning and economic-development departments are moving ahead on a number of projects that will force hundreds of retired mobile-home dwellers, and residents in...
Post
Property Rights Redefined
Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
Post
The Royal Prerogative
The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...
Post
On Limiting Leviathan
For the most part, the flourishing of self-governing cities of the kind Prof. Donald W. Livingston describes in “Aristotelian Worms in the Leviathan” (Views, January) took place in northern Italy, central and western Germany, and the Netherlands, where the absence of a strong central authority was decisive, but the rights of the cities in Germany...
Post
On Eminent Domain
The articles in the January 2006 issue of Chronicles (“The Promise of American Life: Small Is Beautiful”) concerning eminent domain and corporate development in the name of public good are characterized by political acumen and cogent cultural observations. Their strong criticisms are warranted. I recall Charles Péguy’s reply when someone quoted to him the Gospel...
Post
The Supreme Court v. the American Dream—March 2006
PERSPECTIVE The Royal Prerogativeby Thomas FlemingIndispensable means. VIEWS Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?by Stephen B. PresserLife, liberty, and takings. Latter-Day Beggarsby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A lesson in apocalyptic economics from the City on Seven Hills. Unjust Compensationby Scott P. RichertWhat’s not to love? NEWS Property Rights Redefinedby Steven GreenhutA new kind of blight. REVIEWS...
Post
A Trip to Smart-Mouth College
“If the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me!” Over the years, there have been many errors identified in the various printings of the so-called Authorized Version (it was never officially “authorized” by anyone) of the Bible, the most beloved translation of the Scriptures into English. H.A....
Post
Return to Manor Farm
The protagonist of a novel I’m now writing speaks in the voice of George Orwell, except that he uses the manly, tobacco-and-gin accents of reason, detachment, and persuasion to discuss love, rather than politics. The novel is called Earthly Love, and it will be the ninth book I’ve written, which is a painful thing to...
Post
The Mulberry Graveyard
Spain is a country with strong regional identities. The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan. The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language. In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent. At...
Post
Seasoned Travels
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” —G.P. Morris Readers of Chronicles are familiar with Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s regular contributions under the title The Hundredth Meridian, a rubric launched in the 1990’s. The first two dozen or so of these columns were conceived as chapters in a serialized book. With minor...
Post
Manners, Morals, Language
Excepting deconstructionists, who believe there really is no such thing to begin with, most people who are at all conscious of language are in agreement that it exists in degraded form today. Similarly, those who do not make a point of being self-consciously “of the people” (as the British used to say), or do not...
Post
Riots in the Suburbs
By now, most have heard—sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with delight—of the latest fashion in the working-class suburbs of France: setting fire to cars at night. There is a lot more to this than a nocturnal rite for rival juvenile gangs. It is probably exaggerated to forecast a civil war: Two sides are necessary to make...
Post
How Cosmopolitan Can One Become?
A friend of mine who worked for more than 30 years for the ILO (International Labor Organization) in Geneva was standing in a post-office queue one day when he noticed that the man just in front of him was in a curiously agitated state. “Mais c’est impossible, intolerable!” he kept muttering. He turned out to...
Post
Out of Gas
Syriana Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan George Clooney wants you to know that he’s got gravitas. To prove it, he packed on an extra 35 pounds for his latest roles. In Good Night, and Good Luck, a film he directed, he plays Fred Friendly, the portly television producer...
Post
The Path Not Taken
McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union by Ethan S. Rafuse Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 525 pp., $35.00 Walt Whitman remarked after it was over that “the real war will never get in the books,” and, despite all the volumes that have been written since then, his prediction remains largely...
Post
Mind Your Language!
One of the fascinations of language, and one of the charms of the English language in particular, is the playful resourcefulness, the lexical richness, and the ambiguous suggestiveness of words themselves. And as the English language is the most agglomerative of them all, we are constantly aware of new vocabulary and usage, some of which...