These theories are interesting and valuable, although it is possible to stray too far along the road of geographical determinism. —John Davies A socialist firebrand could rapidly become a jingoistic warmonger. . . . —John Davies [T]he sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or bribe the powerless majority. —Gore Vidal We...
Year: 2008
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America’s Moronic Iraqi Policy
According to all accounts, the United States faces its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with $2 trillion in near-term financing needs for bailouts and economic stimulus. This is an enormous sum for any country, especially one that is so heavily indebted that it is close to bankruptcy. If the money can’t be borrowed...
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Thanksgiving 2008
Thankful for … what?! The question is bound to surface the moment heads incline in reverence at the Thanksgiving table, over pre-dinner drinks, post-dinner drinks, kitchen clean up, trash take out. Answers will vary. What won't vary is the ...
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India, Jihad’s Permanent Battleground
Teams of heavily armed terrorists carried out seven coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital
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Meeting Medvedev Halfway
The morning after Barack Obama's election, the congratulatory message from Moscow was in the chilliest tradition of the Cold War.
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The Price of Hillary
No secretary of state will come to that office with stronger pro-Israel credentials or closer ties to the Jewish community than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Douglas Bloomfield assures his readers in The Jerusalem Post. Good for them, and for Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians; but for the rest of us Mrs. Clinton’s appointment as the third...
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The No-Think Nation
“The prospects of a government rescue for the foundering American automakers dwindled Thursday as Democratic congressional leaders conceded that they would face potentially insurmountable Republican opposition,” reported the New York Times last Friday. Wow! The entire country is steamed up over the Republicans bailing out a bunch of financial crooks who have paid themselves fortunes...
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Who Killed Detroit?
Who killed the U.S. auto industry? To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUVs no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans and Koreans prepared and built for the future. I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government...
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Calling Things By Their Right Names
The placard in the photo of a recent rally favoring gay marriage asks, bluntly, “Family. Isn’t It About Love?” Well, hmm. You might indeed incline to such a view. Then, again, you might wish to broaden the perspective, in keeping with normative modes for understanding the foundational human structure we call family. You’d want to...
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To Bail or Bail Out, That is the Question
“What do you think about the bailout?” The old philosopher sighed. Xanthippe had been getting market gossip again from the slave girl she sent to the agora. How many times did he have to tell her to pay no attention to these rumors? News, he snorted to himself. Those people were right in Thurii who...
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As GM Goes, So Goes the GOP
Understandably, Republicans are seething. When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs—assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk—they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout. The Dow quickly sank...
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Call Me Simple
Call me simple, but I just can’t understand why I have to pay the banks’ losses but I don’t get a share of their profits. I know that the music business is very profitable, but I am still cautious about investing in CDs. I am sorry to admit it, but I may have been wrong. ...
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Giving the Devil His Due
Over at Takimag, Chronicles contributing editor Tom Piatak has a thought-provoking piece on the proposal to extend $25 to $50 billion in government-backed loans to the Big Three automakers. Among other points completely ignored by those who reflexively shout “Let them die!” whenever the American auto industry is mentioned are, as Tom notes, that as...
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Conned Again
If the change that President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that...
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What Is History? Part 14
The collective knowledge gained over time includes an awareness of mankind’s tendency to miscalculate. —Wiley Sword History tells us where we have been. Our minds define where we are going. —Wiley Sword In every economic boom and bust there are winners and losers. —Gary North What goes up must come down. —Proverbial I’d like someone...
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Further on the Way We Are Now
I find that local radio gives me a good view of the state of American consciousness, or unconsciousness. Just today I learned that the government is studying how to help “ailing mortgages.” Defaulters, it seems, have been struck by an unfortunate epidemic. Anyone can get sick, and sick people have to be helped. I also...
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Love in the Ruins–More Final Thoughts
I was leaving for Ft. Worth early Wednesday morning and, although I did not turn on the radio, watch television, or buy a newspaper, “the news was out all over town” and impossible to evade, even though I have avoided the media ever since. Yesterday, my wife asked me to listen for the weather on...
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NR Ignores “The Insidious Wiles of Foreign Influence”
Imagine the reaction at National Review and in other neocon precincts if Barack Obama had indicated that his chief of staff would be someone who had volunteered for the military of a foreign nation, but had never volunteered in the American military, if his father had been a member of a terrorist organization,and was unrepentant...
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The Way We Are Now—Continued
“In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish—what is happening in America?” —Gov. Orval Faubus, broadcast to the people fifty years ago as the city of Little Rock was occupied by bayonet-wielding paratroopers and swarms of...
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Donating the Rope
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor after the corporate Germany decided to bet on him – in spite of his radical rhetoric – because it believed it could control him. On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the United States in large part thanks to gigantic contributions from corporate...
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Our President-Elect
Driving out from town to feed my horses the morning of November 5th, I passed a house in West Laramie with the Stars and Stripes waving from the front gate. The flag hung upside down. A fitting salute, surely, for the most radical candidate ever to become president-elect of the United States. The election of...
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President Obama: Thanks, George
So Americans have elected another president who is in not in any visible way a real American. He is from Hawaii and Chicago. From Kenya and Indonesia. From nowhere and everywhere. He‘s
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Right From the Beginning
Chronicles contributing editor Tom Piatak wishes Patrick J. Buchanan a happy 70th birthday. [Link courtesy of VDare.com.] Share This
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Pro-Choice Christians: Shattering Nature’s Glass Ceiling
After eight years of George W. Bush’s “culture of life,” which included well over 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and an estimated 1.25 million Iraqi deaths, abortion is back on the front burner, thanks to the presence of Sarah Palin on national television. Few were “energized” about John McCain before she entered stage right...
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Elective Abortion
Flip-flopper. Like racist or isolationist, it’s not a word that you’d like to have attached to your name. In recent years, it has been used to whap the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney over the head. It means that your finger is in the wind, that you are not a Decider, that, like...
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A Sicilian Visit
In Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, an aging billionairess returns to the provincial town where she was born and announces to the townsfolk that she will leave them all her money, on one condition. They must kill the man, himself now aging, who deceived her years ago. The townsfolk noisily reject the lady’s proposition as immoral, but...
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La Plus Belle France
“If I were God and had two sons, the eldest would have to be God after me, but I’d make the second King of France.” —Ascribed to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor The subtitle of this handsome illustrated volume, “A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War,” usefully indicates the book’s historical dimension,...
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The Hobbyist
The joyous return to Rancho Juárez was dampened, but in no way spoiled, by a certified letter awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Héctor Villa on their arrival. Mailed from the Belen Municipal Court, it threatened their daughter with juvenile detention if she did not return within ten days’ time to complete her court-ordered work with Darfur...
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Get Big and Get Out!
Many news stories from the first half of 2008 read like a page out of the Book of Revelation. Rising grain prices were already leading to food riots in developing countries when a one-two punch, in the form of Cyclone Nargis and a series of tornadoes and floods, devastated the rice crop in Burma and...
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Bailout Mania
We might live in the postindustrial era, but economic booms and busts have not disappeared. Unfortunately, these days the taxpayers seem to get stuck with the losses. The current crisis results from expanded mortgage lending, much of it financed by subprime loans secured through “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) by private investors and the government-sponsored enterprises...
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The Burden of Racial Guilt: A New Declaration of Independence
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America As I write I am sitting in Pitt County, North...
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Those Dying Generations
Elegy Produced by Lakeshore Entertainment Directed by Isabel Coixet Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer from a novel by Philip Roth Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Burn After Reading Produced by Relativity Media and Studio Canal Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by Focus Features Elegy, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s...
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Desperado
The Western setting of this closely focused narrative is a confirmation of the author’s identification with a region, as we know from his Western novels Desert Light and The Homestead and other nonfictional books relating to the West and to the border with Mexico. The text itself, however, insists that this Western setting is more...
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Election Hangover
Your Excellency, I don’t know about you, but I am ready for this campaign season to be as dead as Scrooge’s doornail. For the last month, political commercials have crowded television screens and websites, interrupting even Mayberry reruns and the latest scoop on Paris Hilton. Despite their promises to avoid negative campaigns, all candidates have...
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Spain Embraces Change: Canceling the Past
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
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The Guest Who Stayed Forever
I wish I had a dollar—oops, better make that a euro—for every recent obituary marking the political death of neoconservatism. I would have been able to bail out the grand financial house of Lehman Brothers and avert the tragedy of one more Wall Street fat cat being forced to lay off another maid in his...
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Paradise Lost
“Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.” —President Jimmy Carter On a Sunday afternoon late in June, Tony Bologna was driving home with his sons, Michael and Matthew, from a family barbecue. In San Francisco’s Excelsior district Bologna got stuck in an intersection, temporarily blocking a car from making a left-hand turn. ...
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The Audacity of Dopes
No one expected the vote to be so close. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Republicans were certain they had found a rock star to compete with Barack Obama. They could ride the crest of Palinmania all the way to the Oval Office. All they had to do was keep the hockey...
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Catholics and Sarah Palin
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their sudden race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s “theology of the...
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More (Local) Government
A 1992 Wisconsin law limits the revenue a school district can raise through property taxes. When operating costs exceed that limit, districts have to ask voters to make up the difference. The idea behind the law was to control skyrocketing teacher salaries and benefits by holding annual increases to 3.8 percent per year. The state...
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Unstable Multipolarity
It is professionally vexing and personally alarming for a world-affairs analyst in today’s America that neither rationality nor consistency can be taken for granted among the foreign-policy community in Washington, D.C. That much has become obvious from the crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia. This crisis heralds a particularly dangerous...
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Before the Cacophony
Can anyone today imagine a clarinettist as a superstar the size of, say, Mick Jagger? Or God forbid, the ghastly Madonna? Well, 60 years or so ago, the biggest star in Hollywood, as well as the biggest stud, was Artie Shaw, whose combination of good looks, extraordinary musical talent, and great intelligence made him the...
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Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
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The Burden of History
Peter Green is one of the rarest birds in the academic chicken coop, a popular historian who combines careful scholarship and original opinions into a coherent account that respects its sources and yet attempts to go beyond them. In a long career he has achieved considerable renown for such varied books as a translation of...
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The Promise and Peril of Identity Politics: Hope in a Dismal Season
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
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On Chronicles History
I greatly appreciated Dr. Clyde Wilson’s fine article in the September issue (“Beginning With History,” Views) and located all of the works cited on the War Between the States. They should be arriving at my politically incorrect home (I have a full-service shooting range out back and harvest deer and turkey on my property regularly)...
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Defamation vs. Poor Jurnalism: My B92 TV Interview
On the last day of October I appeared to have been libeled on B92, a leading “pro-Western” TV network in Serbia, in a live program in which I appeared as an invited guest. It subsequently transpired that the network used an unpleasant quote from an article published under my name – but without my knowledge or authorization – in a leading...
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Together in Perfect Harmony—November 2008
PERSPECTIVE Whither the Republic?by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Paradise Lostby Roger D. McGrathThe white minority. The Promise and Peril of Identity Politicsby Tom PiatakHope in a dismal season. The Burden of Racial Guiltby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A new declaration of independence. Pro-Choice Christiansby Aaron D. WolfShattering nature’s glass ceiling. NEWS Spain Embraces Changeby José Javier EsparzaCanceling the...
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Ignorant Armies: Final Thoughts on the Election
This election is too tedious a farce to deserve a serious editorial, but since I wake up every morning with a few complaints that I inflict upon my family, I may as well subject my ...