Anthony Weiner is, in the immortal words of one Oscar-winning actress, so five minutes ago. Almost a decade and a half before the instrument of Weiner’s downfall launched on July 15, 2006, that line from one of the most perceptive films of the 1990’s presciently captured the essence of modern social media. Anyone who follows...
Year: 2011
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The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...
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The Oslo Fallout: A Review of Views Unfit to Print
On August 1 The Daily Mail published an op-ed by Melanie Philips (“Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence”) which warns that the baleful effects of Anders Breivik’s recent attacks in Norway have not been limited to the carnage of the day. The atrocity has produced a reaction on the...
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Time for Disengagment
“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Newsweek on June 19. “[F]rankly I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government . . . that’s...
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Drunk at the Same Fountain
I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977, in Corfu. I was on board Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a very smart Englishman whose Ancient Greek is much better than yours.” I knew Paddy, as everyone called him, by sight, because...
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Home Rule
The city-state is the seedbed of civilization, but the concept seems alien to the American tradition. Nonetheless, our cities did once possess, at least before the Revolution, many of the same rights enjoyed by English and European burgs. In the Anglo-American world, the liberties of cities were defined by the charters they received either from...
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Calvinism Without God
Forget the “culture wars” and the assault on Christianity. The real conflict in America is thoroughly secular—between environmental and ecological “religions”—or so says Robert Nelson. He makes the argument, long known to conservatives, that religion never really goes away. Modern secular religions, like these two, borrow heavily from the Christian tradition. As such, they inherit...
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Community Revisited
Congratulations to Ray Olson for his review of Kings Row (“Kings Row Revisited,” Vital Signs, June), book and film, and his insight into how the movie slights the book’s theme of community. There is a big subject here. Community has been central to Southern literature. The community—Yoknapatawpha—is the true central character of Faulkner’s fiction, as...
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The Liberal Tradition I: Introducing a Few Basic Concepts
I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Socialism–and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past...
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Otto von Habsburg: The Facts
Mr. James Bogle denies [“It is ludicrous”] that Otto von Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the jihadist side in the Bosnian war. Since Habsburg’s support of the Muslim side in the Bosnian war is uncontentious, the claim is “ludicrous” only if Bogle denies that Alija Izetbegovic was a jihadist. On that subject the record is...
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Booklog: Liberal Books
I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition. To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek. I do not intend to spend a great deal...
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Apocalypse Nigh?
In these scandal-sodden weeks, it’s been tough to write passionately about the fight here over deficit reduction. I look up from some wearisome bulletin on the latest maneuvers of the Gang of Six, and here’s Tristane Banon’s mother admitting to consensual, albeit “clearly brutal,” sex with Dominique Strauss-Kahn amid the filing cabinets in an...
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Archduke Otto: Responding to Dr. Trifkovic
I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern. Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...
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A Fire Bell in the Night for Norway
“Like a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, “this momentous question … awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri’s entry into the Union, as...
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What “Big Deals” Did to America
Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt. Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama’s “grand bargain,” the “big deal” of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in...
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The Oslo Connection
In his 1,500-page European Declaration of Independence mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik approvingly quotes me and several other authors who have written critically about Islam, including Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The exploitation of the connection followed promptly. “Norwegian butcher a product of Islamophobia” was last Monday’s banner headline in the Zaman, Turkey’s...
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A Crisis—Hooray!
It’s not that this wonderful land of ours has never known political fracases. A war that took place midway through the 19th century comes to mind. There was also, years later, if memory serves, an upheaval known as the New Deal, during whose course all manner of head-butting took place. The redeeming feature...
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What “Big Deals” Did to America
Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt. Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's
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Serbia Arrests the Last Fugitive From The Hague Tribunal
[Transcript and video of Srdja Trifkovic’s RTTV interview] RT: By giving up wartime fugitives President Tadić may win the praise of EU leaders, but as Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine told RT, this will hardly pave Serbia’s way to the EU. On Wednesday Serbian authorities ...
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Peter Stanlis, Requiescat in Pace
Dear Friends: I am sorry to inform you that my long time friend and Rockford Institute board member Peter Stanlis has died from a combination of lymphoma and an untreatable lung disease. Peter and his wife Joan had known for several months that the end was imminent. Gail and I managed to visit him...
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Goodbye to Borders
This morning’s Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a sad headline: Borders, the nation’s second largest bookstore, was liquidating, and its 10700 employees will be unemployed by the end of September. I first became familiar with Borders in law school, when there were only two of them: the first Borders in Ann Arbor, and one other store in...
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Democracy’s Dictionary (With Apologies to Ambrose Bierce)
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it right. Elder...
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Democracy’s Dictionary (With Apologies to Ambrose Bierce)
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it ...
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Otto von Habsburg’s Ambiguous Legacy
Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, became the heir to the imperial crown of Austria and the royal crown of Hungary when his father Charles ascended the throne of the multinational Dual Monarchy in November 1916. In the final decades of his life (1979-1999) he was an influential figure...
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Otto von Habsburg’s Ambiguous Legacy
Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, became the heir to the imperial crown of Austria and the royal crown of Hungary when his father Charles ascended the throne of the multinational Dual Monarchy in November 1916. In the final decades of his life (1979-1999) he ...
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More and More Ugly Questions
How much “diversity” can the West absorb before it is no longer the West and thus ceases to be a haven for people escaping their own non-Western “cultures”—which they bring with them? When and why did the critical shift occur in American mentality that caused “scholars” and journalists to stop reporting facts, events, and...
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The Green, Green Arab Summer: II
The magnitude of Western self-deception and ignorance about the future of Egypt was exemplified by a feature article in The Washington Post last week (Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood could be unraveling, July 7). The influence and organizational abilities of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have raised fears in the West and among Egypt’s secular and liberal groups that democracy may...
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Even More Ugly Questions
Does television corrupt American morals or do American morals corrupt television? If there had never been any racist, sexist, homophobes, would the United States exist to give affirmative action to minorities? Does anyone in a position of authority or influence care that the American middle class, and therefore the country, is being demoralised and...
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An Establishment in Panic
By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like “fanatics,” writes David Brooks of The New York Times. Anti-tax Republicans “have no sense of moral decency,” he adds. They are “willing to stain their nation’s honor” to “worship their idol.” If this “deal of the...
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The Green, Green Arab Summer: I
In the U.S. mainstream media the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously under-reported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. (as we’ve warned, repeatedly, that they would). The turmoil has undermined the region’s...
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From JKF to DSK
When you ask a Russian of my generation or older about conspiracy theories, Kirov is the name that wanders into his mind as readily as the name Kennedy springs to yours. Thirty years and an ocean separate these deaths, whose aim, in both cases, was not so much the elimination of a political rival as...
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Beyond Democracy
Prophets like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood that the 20th century was the substance of which prophecy is made. Its history is a poetic saga, the poetry written in God’s own fierce verse. The first decade of the 21st century was inclined to look back at its immediate centennial predecessor with a degree of self-satisfaction amounting to...
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That Wedding
“She’s such an inspiration. She’s class.” That’s how 17-year-old Bianca, in her gold-lamé miniskirt, summed up Kate Middleton, 90 minutes before the British royal wedding. Like many others, Bianca was positioned alongside the Mall in central London, but unlike most she had the advantage of a view. She was being carried on the shoulders of...
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Society Before Government: Calhoun’s Wisdom
John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman. A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not. A politician, which is all we have now, says and...
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At the Moral Front
Michael Burleigh’s new history of World War II is the latest in a seemingly endless procession of works on that subject. Antony Beevor, Max Hastings, Norman Davies, and Rich Atkinson have all produced well-written and well-received histories of the war, and the reader is justified in questioning whether there is need of yet another one. ...
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Shouldering On
Atlas Shrugged: Part I Produced by The Strike Productions Directed by Paul Johansson Screenplay by John Aglialoro and Brian Patrick O’Toole from Ayn Rand’s novel Distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures Now we know: When it comes to celebrating the virtues of unbridled capitalism, it does not pay to skimp. The ten million dollars producer...
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Late in the Day
This fine first collection of poems from William Bedford Clark, the renowned Robert Penn Warren scholar who, as the back cover announces, “abandoned poetry as an undergraduate” and returned to it “in late middle age,” is a triumph of elegant formalism. This volume—which ranges widely in form and motif, from the sacred to the profane,...
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The Hidden Stability of Oil Prices
Every guy remembers the day he got his driver’s license. Pop, a little warily but proudly, handed him the keys to the family car, and the road was open to drive anywhere in the 48 continental United States. Of course, most guys were just happy to take a girl on a date without Pop chauffeuring....
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Ideology and Everyday Life
I’m a libertarian, as perhaps some of my readers know. My late mentor, Murray Rothbard, practically founded the movement in his living room, and I’ve been an activist since my teenage years—a long time ago. I wear my libertarianism like a comfortable old shirt. Yet ideology and everyday life don’t always mesh. In my youth,...
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The Rebirth of States’ Rights
When John Randolph of Roanoke looked at the America of 1806, into Thomas Jefferson’s second and disastrous term as President, he could have been describing today: “Everything and everybody seem to be jumbled out of place, except a few men steeped in supine indifference, whilst meddling fools and designing knaves are governing the country.” He...
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Burning Fries in Hell
Ronald McDonald had better look into renting Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout. Several national newspapers recently published a letter, signed by over 1,000 health professionals and two-dozen institutions such as the Chicago Hispanic Health Coalition and the Inpatient Diabetes Program at Boston University, imploring McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner to “stop marketing junk food to children.” ...
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Adiós, Interloper
A recent headline read “Dividing forces are mounting in Europe.” A more charitable version might have said “Sovereignty Returning to European Countries” or “Self-Preservation on the Rise.” “Until just a few weeks ago the European world seemed to be in order,” reports Handelsblatt. “The freedom of travel [between E.U. countries] guaranteed by the Schengen Agreement...
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Killing No Murder
Don’t they wish they had listened to her! Back in 2003, when the United States was planning to lead the invasion of Iraq, my elderly Welsh aunt was appalled by the prospect of war: “I hate all the violence. I’m not an educated woman; I don’t understand politics. I just hate to think of all...
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Thunderbolt Kid
With this book, Chronicles’ capable executive editor contributes to a series for teenagers—seventh grade and older, says the publisher’s website—on successful contemporary writers who have some literary cachet. Since his style in the book is as limpid and straightforward as that of his monthly column, The Rockford Files, it seems that at least one children’s...
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New Tricks
Steven Farron, who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University and was a professor of classics for many years at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, has produced a masterly volume on the thorny subject of what is euphemistically termed affirmative action. It doesn’t seem that an article, a book, or a collection...
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Experiencing the Horse
As coincidence would have it, I was rereading Historical Reason, a collection of lectures by José Ortega y Gasset, for the first time in over a decade and a half when John Lukacs’s latest, The Future of History, fell onto my desk. While Lukacs’s debt to Ortega has always been clear (indeed, I first read...
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A Speech of No Consequence
All too many speeches by major political figures are heralded as historic in advance of delivery yet prove to be irrelevant in the grand-strategic scheme of things. Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” address in the wake of Dunkirk, for example, and his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton six years later were rich in...
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Celebrating Diversity
The very first day I spent at a prestigious prep school—I was ten—I was punished for breaking the rule that no new boy was allowed to walk on the grass. “Rhinies,” as we were called at Lawrenceville, had to stick to the paths, and the only time we could walk on the grass was during...
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Home for Political Animals
Visitors to Charleston sometimes take note of the Latin inscriptions on historical plaques: Collegium Carolopolitanum, Diocesis Carolopolitana, and, most commonly, Carolopolis, the Latin version of Charleston’s name, which sounds like one of those Greek cities created by Alexander the Great and his successors somewhere in the hinterlands of Bithynia or Afghanistan. Charleston has always been...
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One Civilian Casualty
In 1942, I had never met my Aunt Ann or my four first cousins. They’d moved in the 30’s from Jacksonville to Los Angeles, where Uncle Stuart worked for Walt Disney. Among other things, he provided the voice for the hunter in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Every so often, Aunt Ann would send...