Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, echoing the rhetoric and mindset of half a century ago, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and...
Year: 2011
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Beware the Neocon Advocacy of Egyptian Democracy
It is essential to take William (“Bill”) Kristol seriously. He has been so utterly wrong on so many things (America’s ability to run the world, NATO, Turkey, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Sarah Palin, Russia, Iran, Georgia, John McCain, missile defense . . . ) that his pronouncements merit respect. Being consistently wrong—in the fleeting...
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Beware the Neocon Advocacy of Egyptian Democracy
It is essential to take William (“Bill”) Kristol seriously. He has been so utterly wrong on so many things (America’s ability to run the world, NATO, Turkey, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Sarah Palin, Russia, Iran, Georgia, John McCain, missile defense . . . ) that his pronouncements merit respect. Being consistently wrong—in the fleeting guise...
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Moldova: A Neo-Cold-War Battlefield
Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, echoing the rhetoric and mindset of half a century ago, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and Russophobic...
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Jerks on a Shopping Spree
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without. Twenty years ago, the worst these...
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Jerks on a Shopping Spree
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without. Twenty years ago, the worst these victims of...
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are now mostly unwatched or,...
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Egypt: The Realist Scenario
The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy,...
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Egypt: The Realist Scenario
The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy, freedom,...
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are ...
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And Now the Good News
Kierkegaard recalls somewhere that Caligula wanted to behead all of Rome. One can almost see his point. The news that comes over the transom is so uniformly bleak, so predictably monstrous, that it cannot but produce this kind of response in any number of men of good will. After all, it is mankind itself that...
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Comprehensive Conservatism
One result of the rebalanced political power in Congress and the rise of the Tea Party within the Republican Party is that we are all likely to be spared talk about “compassionate conservatism” for the next couple of years; anyway, until the GOP discovers—as is more than likely to happen in 2012—that conservatism of the...
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Getting Here From There
If you can remember the 1960’s, the old line goes, you weren’t really there. “There,” of course, means the counterculture represented by Woodstock, hallucinogenic drugs, antiwar protests, and Haight-Ashbury. “The 60’s” didn’t actually begin in 1960, but by the “Summer of Love” in 1967 they had clearly arrived. The Beatles eventually became counterculture icons while...
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Europe: Welmacht or Laughingstock
On December 1, 2009, the Lisbon Treaty took effect. Within a year the 27-member European Union was fractured politically and besieged economically. “Euroskepticism” was on the rise. The plan to turn Europe into a Weltmacht capable of matching the United States and China looked almost comical. Europe remained a geographic aggregation, not a geopolitical unit. ...
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Mortal Terror
The Fighter Produced by Mark Wahlberg and David Hoberman Directed by David O. Russell Screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson Distributed by Paramount Pictures 127 Hours Produced and directed by Danny Boyle Screenplay by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy Distributed by Fox Searchlight Mark Wahlberg produced The Fighter and convincingly plays...
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Quo Vadis Fidel
That enormously talented and courageous woman, Yoani Sanchez, summarized the meaning of the forthcoming April 2011 Conference Guidelines for the Communist Party’s Sixth Congress in her biting blog called Generation Y (November 9, 2010): not a single line refers to the expansion of civil rights, including the restrictions suffered by Cubans in entering and leaving...
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Gelded Europeans
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
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Rainbow Camo
The controversy over ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) is a typical modern morality tale, in which the moral always lose. Although a few generals and admirals objected to allowing homosexuals to serve openly, a military led by real men would have seen every general and admiral resign in protest unless the new policy was...
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Our Elitists Forge a Useful Faith
The cynical elites of Ancient Rome, said Edward Gibbon, found the religions of the empire equally false and equally useful. The leftist/corporate elites of our time also agree that religion is false, so much so that they can barely contain their contempt for it. As Barack Obama opined, it’s just something that Middle American losers...
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Politics Against Nature
As I write, the lame-duck Congress is revving up for one last chance to do really lasting damage to the country, in the form of the cloyingly titled DREAM Act, which would grant an open-ended amnesty to illegal aliens who were brought here as children by their parents. As Roy Beck of NumbersUSA warns, this...
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Annus Horribilis
The year 2010 was a depressing one in the foreign-policy world; the decline and fall of a world empire, no matter how well-deserved its fate, should be seen only as a tragedy. The sheer scale of its fatal gigantism portends a Stentorian scream as it falls into the abyss—and we heard the first painful groans...
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It Takes a Crisis
While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists. Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015. In response, Germany...
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Forgetting a Villian
Imagine it is the year 2030, and you are talking to some young adults. To your horror, you find that they have never heard the name Osama bin Laden. As you begin to rant about the ignorance of the young, you find to your still greater astonishment that none of your older friends have any...
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European Union
Sometimes short books on great musicians markedly surpass longer ones. Aspects of Wagner, by British philosopher and ex-parliamentarian Bryan Magee, provides a much better guide in its 112 pages to the Master of Bayreuth than do most other Wagner-related books of seven times the size. Similarly, Edmund Morris’s 2005 Beethoven: The Universal Composer (256 pages,...
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Bedpan Industry
You can tell a lot about the direction in which a city is headed by paying attention to the types of buildings being built, and those being torn down. Here in Rockford, for some years now, the latter have disproportionately been factories, including some which once made Rockford the manufacturing powerhouse of the Upper Midwest....
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Catching a Snake
The Council of Europe published a report on December 15 that identifies Kosovo’s “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specializing in smuggling weapons, drugs, people, and human organs all over Europe. The report reveals that Thaçi’s closest aides were taking Serbs across the border into Albania after the 1999...
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The Pathology of U.S. Diplomacy
A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death on December 13, Hillary Clinton told a group of top U.S. diplomats at a State Department Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Holbrooke’s career embodies some of its least attractive and most deeply flawed traits. Holbrooke started as a...
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Philosophical Arcs
This lovely chapbook by Catharine Savage Brosman, poetry editor of Chronicles, offers a delightful collection of 20 poems from a small south Louisiana press. Many of the poems feature familiar Louisiana landscape and avian life. All in some way address the underlying ties between nature and art, their metaphysical underpinnings: an order perceivable in natural...
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The European Waugh
Ten years after his death, Auberon Waugh still makes me laugh out loud. Here, for example, from the Spectator of June 1985, are his thoughts on British prostitutes: British prostitutes have the reputation for being not only the ugliest and greediest but also the laziest in the world. Few even pretend to enjoy the job,...
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Death Benefits
Having been caught out by the demon memory gene of the sainted editor—I tried to recycle a Paris nostalgia piece—I shall nevertheless return to my brother-in-law’s funeral in Paris a few years ago, which prompted the recycle, and this time write about death. François de Caraman was a marquis whose father, the duke de Caraman,...
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Back to the Garden
Lurking just beneath the surface of every revolutionary movement is the same deceitful dream. Once upon a time, long, long ago, men and women lived in peace and justice and unity, until into this garden entered the snake: the capitalist, the patriarch, the man of war, the bishop. Come the Revolution, we shall all “get...
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Picking Up the Pieces
Great Britain is in trouble—politically, economically, and culturally—and Phillip Blond wants to change this. He blames both the political right and the left for having created an atomistic society in which all pursue self-interest to the detriment of society as a whole. Blond explains how Britain got into this predicament and then gives several chapters...
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Russian Migrants
December was a tense month for Russia’s ruling “tandem.” President Dmitri Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin were confronted with violent protests after “Kavkaztsy” (natives of the volatile North Caucasus) killed Yegor Svidirov, a leading member of one of Russia’s unruly and often violent soccer fan clubs, in a Moscow brawl on December 6. On December...
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Birthright Citizenship
The Romans took citizenship very seriously. Only citizens had the right to vote, marry, make legal contracts, and have a trial and appeal the decision of the lower court. Americans, on the other hand, are in the process of getting rid of the concept of citizenship altogether. We are not controlling the border or making...
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Learning From Mises?
I read with great interest R. Cort Kirkwood’s review of Christopher Ferrara’s The Church and the Libertarian (“Anarcho-Utopia Revisited”) in the November issue of Chronicles. Mr. Kirkwood does a great service by pointing out the pitfalls, from a Catholic perspective, of some of the thinking of some adherents of the Austrian School. While Mr. Kirkwood...
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E.U.S.A.—February 2011
beyond the revolution Back to the Garden by Thomas Fleming views Europe: Weltmacht or Laughingstock? by Doug Bandow Gelded Europeans by John C. Seiler, Jr. news Birthright Citizenship by William J. Quirk and Janek Kazmierski reviews Picking Up the Pieces by Tobias Lanz Phillip Blond, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It Philosophical Arcs by ...
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L’Ancien Régime Book II
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of the Bourbons and the...
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L’Ancien Régime Book II
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of ...
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A Modest Proposal for the Eurocrats
Recently, the European Union published a calendar for school children that noted Moslem and Jewish holidays but made no mention of any Christian holiday, including Christmas. The same principle operates here, in the countless public school “winter concerts” that highlight music for Kwanzaa and Hanukkah but feature no Christmas carols. If the Eurocrats wish to achieve...
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A Modest Proposal for the Eurocrats
Recently, the European Union published a calendar for school children that noted Moslem and Jewish holidays but made no mention of any Christian holiday, including Christmas. The same principle operates here, in the countless public school “winter concerts” that highlight music for Kwanzaa and Hanukkah but feature no Christmas carols. If the Eurocrats wish to...
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Barack Obama’s Reassuringly Vacuous State of the Union Address
President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate considering the magnitude of social, economic and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant absurdity of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. The clichés and the rhetoric were...
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Barack Obama’s Reassuringly Vacuous State of the Union Address
President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate considering the magnitude of social, economic and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant absurdity of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. The clichés and the rhetoric were kitchy...
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L’Ancien Régime Book I
In the first book, AT confronts the mystery of the French Revolution, which no one seemed to understand at the time and which baffled the succeeding generation. In chapter two, he makes a twofold argument, that the FR aimed neither at destroying religious authority nor at weakening the central authority ...
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When the Wolves Get Religion
Letter From Turkey The city of Istanbul reflects Turkey’s transformation over the past decade. Almost eight years after my previous visit I am greeted by an impressive new international terminal at the Atatürk International Airport—Europe’s seventh busiest—and by the massive office towers and apartment complexes surrounding it. According to ...
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Joseph Lieberman’s Long Overdue Departure
Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000 who subsequently broke away from the Democratic Party and won reelection as an independent in 2006, has announced that he will not seek reelection when his fourth term expires next year. Lieberman’s departure will not make much difference to the political scene in...
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Back Again
I had intended, as always, to keep in touch during my brief sojourn in Rome, but the vagaries of my hotel’s WiFi (which healed itself near the end), the usual weariness that attends the noontime devil of winebibbers, were exacerbated by an injured knee-cum-inflamed tendon that made walking five miles a bit more exhausting than...
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Joseph Lieberman’s Long Overdue Departure
Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000 who subsequently broke away from the Democratic Party and won reelection as an independent in 2006, has announced that he will not seek reelection when his fourth term expires next year. Lieberman’s departure will not make much difference to the political scene in Washington...
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L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
This is a call for reading and comments for a discussion of Tocqueville's masterful analysis of the French monarchy and the French Revolution. Since Tocqueville is so clear and explicit in his argument, I intend only to present the briefest of introductions to each section. I hope that, in addition ...
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Who Lost the Middle East?
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, especially today in the Maghreb and Middle East. For the ouster of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has sent shock waves from Rabat to Riyadh. Autocrats, emirs and kings have to be asking themselves: If rioters can bring down Ben Ali with his ruthless security...
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Health Care Debate—At Last
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won’t it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off? Nope. To Obamacare’s...