Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from...
Year: 2011
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Whose Country Is It, Anyway?
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...
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A Grim Christmas
This Christmas let us spare a thought and say a prayer for countless Christian victims of Muslim brutality, over the centuries and in our own time. An explosion ripped through a Catholic church during Christmas Mass near Nigeria’s capital Abuja on Sunday morning, killing at least 25 people. A radical Muslim group, Boko Haram, claimed responsibility...
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Kim Jong-il, the Leader from Hell
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...
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Iraq: Countdown to the Coming War
Day Six December 23, 2011. Thousands of Sunni Muslims in Samarra, Ramadi, Baiji, and Qaim have taken to the streets. Many of them carry signs and banners protesting the Shi’ah-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and expressing support for threatened Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi. Day Five December 22, 2011. Dozens of people were killed as bombs...
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And Was the Mission Accomplished?
For the Army and Marines who lost 4,500 dead and more than 30,000 wounded, many of them amputees, the second-longest war in U.S. history is over. America is coming home from Iraq. On May 1, 2003, on the carrier Abraham Lincoln, the huge banner behind President George W. Bush proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished!” That was eight...
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Plato’s Apology
After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning. Let us turn to the Apology. You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology. It is Plato’s reconstruction (or imaginative recreation) of the speech Socrates made in...
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Plato’s Apology
After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning. Let us turn to the Apology. You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology. It is Plato's reconstruction (or imaginative ...
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A Balkan Travelogue
It’s been some years since Tom Fleming and I have indulged in seven-day mad dashes across the Balkans, speaking, lecturing and giving interviews, meeting interesting people over good food and drink. Last week’s tour, which took us to Belgrade and Banja Luka, had the tempo and feel of the old times, but it was...
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David Cameron’s Finest Hour
Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to veto Germany’s demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence. With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU: “British surrenders of sovereignty come to...
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David Cameron’s Finest Hour
Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to veto Germany's demand for a new European fiscal union will define his premiership. More than that, Cameron has raised a banner for patriots everywhere fighting to retain their national independence. With his no vote on fiscal union, Cameron declared to the EU:
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Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day,...
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Despair, Detachment, and the West
Can anything be done to stop Europe and the United States from becoming Third World countries? Is the West doomed? Considering that it doesn’t look as if things are going to get better any time soon, it is tempting for conservatives to write finis on Christendom and view the fall from a place of cynical...
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Devil’s Mama
The rockets that, according to Khrushchev, were coming off his production line “like sausages” ran on kerosene and liquid oxygen. So did Soviet foreign policy. The kerosene was operational secrecy, an ingredient virtually unchanged since the 1920’s, whereby the regime concealed its expansionist aims. The oxygen was maniacal braggadocio, which persuaded the West to see...
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Pragmatic Destruction
Greek writers, and writers coming after them for the next 2,000 years, attributed the short life and violent end of democratic governments to democracy’s infallible tendency toward demagoguery and the dispossession of the wealthy and educated by the poor and ignorant. Tocqueville thought democracy’s fatal weakness to be uniformity of thought and opinion, and the...
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A New Church and a New Country
Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles tirelessly advocates for illegal aliens. A native of Mexico, he has an ardent love of his homeland and his people. He testifies frequently on Capitol Hill in favor of various amnesty-related issues, always in the name of the Catholic Church. He promotes the same theme before various groups of...
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Myth and Phobia
Orlando Figes’ new book does much to shed light on a conflict long neglected by contemporary historians and is likely to become the preeminent work on the Crimean War. However, the book suffers from serious shortcomings that prevent it from becoming a military history of such caliber as Antony Beevor’s and Max Hastings’ works. Figes...
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Of Candidates and Clowns
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
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Immoral Triumphs
Clyde Wilson once remarked that, if one were to distill multiculturalism to its essence, one would be left with nothing at all. As he put it, multiculturalism means many fashions, mutable and discardable, but no culture. An unintentional corroboration comes from a recent article dismissing “declinism” in our northeastern magazine of empire, The New Yorker. ...
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The Other America
Remembering, as I often have cause to do, the late Samuel Francis’s formulation “anarcho-tyranny,” I have an enhanced respect for the wonder that is our nation, for the wisdom of the government, and for the phonetic ambiguity of the word mandate, particularly as related to the blow for freedom and equality struck by the latest...
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Duty
Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty. We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...
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Gardasil Rick
Texas Gov. Rick Perry enjoyed one month as the heartthrob of the Republican Party. He announced his presidential bid on August 13, overshadowing Rep. Michele Bachmann’s narrow victory over Rep. Ron Paul in the Ames Straw Poll. By September 15, a Bloomberg National Poll showed him leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Eastern establishment...
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China’s Lord of Heaven
I have been spending my spring sabbatical in China. As I am a sinologist, specializing in traditional Chinese poetry, there is nothing surprising in that, except that I have not been here since 1981, when I led a tour group for less than three weeks. Most of my work has been that of the classicist,...
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Confessions of a Serial Homebuyer
I’ve bought three houses in as many years, and sold two of them. Having been excluded from participating in the housing bubble by extreme poverty, I suppose I’ve been making up for lost time. In 2008, when my mom died, I inherited what was—by my modest standards—a considerable sum, and there was no doubt about...
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Celebrating Defeat
“That is what we honor on days of national commemoration—those aspects of the American experience that are enduring. . . . It will be said of us that we kept that faith; that we took a painful blow, and emerged stronger. ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’” So said...
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Bombing the West Coast
The “Battle of Los Angeles,” or the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, occurred during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. It has been portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 slapstick comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The farcical movie is about all younger generations today know of the Battle of Los Angeles...
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Picking Apples
When I sat down to write my Virtual Realities column for October (“Success(ion)”), I was fairly certain the end was near for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. I had privately told some friends (and fellow Apple stockholders) a few months earlier that I thought he would not make it to the end of the year. His...
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Russian Reset in Peril
For all its many faults, the Obama administration has scored one notable success: It has done significantly better than its recent Republican and Democratic predecessors in normalizing relations with Russia. Washington’s visceral antagonism toward Moscow needed to be replaced by a more pragmatic, mutually beneficial relationship. The “Reset” has been imperfectly applied, but its conceptual...
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No More Ladies and Gentlemen
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son, Geoffrey, who lives 50 yards away from me in Gstaad. British...
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Rome and Jerusalem
I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my mind Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. William Blake was quite mad, even madder than most Swedenborgians—and that is saying a good deal—but Christians less insane than Blake have dreamed of building a new Jerusalem where...
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Communities and Strangers
According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time. He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews. A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself. ...
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Just Say No to the Kool-Aid
With the able assistance of Jack Hunter, Sen. Rand Paul has written a must-read book for conservatives wondering why we continue to send Republicans to Washington, D.C., who say all of the right things when running for office and then quickly fall in line with the “inside the Beltway” political elites who have controlled the...
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On Blinkeredness
The Cold War rages on for Christie Davies (“Islam and Breivik’s Bombs,” News, October). He even referenced the “evil” Russian/communist in drawing a bead on the “evil” Muslim. And what evils are the Muslims of Europe guilty of? Davies is upset that women are expected to wear headscarves (read: act modestly) in Muslim neighborhoods, a...
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Multicultural vs. Stereotypical
Srdja Trifkovic’s paper on Russia and the European Media, delivered at the conference “Russia and Europe: Issues of Contemporary Journalism,” Paris, November 24, 2011 Most West European media professionals tend to subscribe, consciously or not, to a neoliberal world outlook in general and to the tenets of multiculturalism in particular. In other words, they...
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Angela Merkel’s Bid for a Tighter European Union
Addressing the annual congress of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Leipzig on November 14, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for further political integration within the European Union as a means to ending the sovereign-debt crisis. “The task of our generation now is to complete the economicand currency union in Europe and, step by step, create a...
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Plato’s Euthyphro: Introduction
It has been a while since I posted a Booklog entry. It is not for lack of reading, on my part, but most of my reading has been either rather technical–Sicilian history, Pre-Socratic philosophy, the history of marriage–or too light to merit discussion. In preparing for our own Sicilian Expedition, though, I reread Plato’s...
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Plato’s Euthyphro: Introduction
It has been a while since I posted a Booklog entry. It is not for lack of reading, on my part, but most of my reading has been either rather technical--Sicilian history, Pre-Socratic philosophy, the history of marriage--or too light to merit discussion. In preparing for our own Sicilian Expedition, ...
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Return of the War Party?
Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war? Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq? Mitt says that if elected he will move carriers...
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The End of the Berlusconi Era
Silvio Berlusconi has been around for so long that it is hard to imagine Italian politics without him occupying the center stage. The end of his era is nigh, however, to the relief of his opponents as well as many of his erstwhile supporters. Berlusconi announced on Tuesday night that he would resign as...
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Voting in America
I went to vote this morning, at a new polling place. I was directed to the polling place by a sign that was in both Spanish and English. When I was handed the ballot, I saw that it, too, was in both Spanish and English, with both languages appearing together in a confusing jumble....
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The McQuearing of America
Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Coach Joe Pa (who continued to employ him). But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State? According to the grand jury report,...
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It Can’t Happen Here!
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the Russians!” marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were...
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It Can’t Happen Here!
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring,
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A Kinder, Gentler Amnesty
By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise. In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer ...
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Papandreou’s Coup de Main
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s decision to call off the referendum on the EU-brokered rescue plan may look like a sign of weakness. Not so. The wily Socialist has forced the opposition to get off the fence and declare its support for his policies. He has seriously scared, rather than merely “infuriated,” his European...
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A Little Rebellion
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote ...
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Bulldozing Arcadia
Thirteen years ago I marched in one of the largest demonstrations in Britain’s history. The Countryside March had brought together environmental activists and critics of transnational business, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and leftover beatniks, peers and paupers. Today, if the ongoing Coalition versus the Countryside debate is any indication, it’s time to march again. In Greece, Megalopoli...
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The Aphid on the Machine
While the majority of the columns printed on the New York Times’ op-ed page seem intended to energize the reader by alerting him to some impending social, economic, or political evil shortly to be foisted on the country or the world by the Republican Party or some other sinister force on the right, the contemplated...
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Christian Democracy? No Such Thing
Everyone hails democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but very few realize—or dare realize—that democracy actually represents one of the most perfect forms of tyranny, because it is one the average citizen is loath to acknowledge as such. It is indeed very simply a matter of taking...
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A Little Rebellion
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...