“Making predictions is very difficult,” said Niels Bohr, “especially about the future.” We live in uncertain times, and they have been chronically uncertain, oftentimes acutely so, ever since July 1914. As we enter 2014, it is apt to remember that a hundred years ago the civilized world greeted the new year with the complacent belief, bordering on arrogance,...
Year: 2013
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January in Tuscany
January is not the best time of year to live in Tuscany–though August, with its swarms of tourists, may be worse. Pisa is hardly any warmer than Florence, but to me it seems warmer, perhaps because of the proximity to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is also true that when I got up this morning, the...
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Pope Francis and the Liberal Delusions II
Beatitudes, Not Platitudes According to one interpretation of the scene, Judas went away from this encounter disgruntled with Jesus’ failure to lead a social revolution. It is certainly true that Jesus’ answer remains a powerful rebuke to those who would confound the gospel with one or another form of state-imposed socialism. The poor,...
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Pope Francis and the Liberal Delusions
Pope Francis has been under attack from many directions. Perhaps some day his enemies–most of which are self-described traditionalist (as opposed to traditional) Catholics–will find some dirt to stick on the poor man, but so far they appear to be missing their target by more than a mile. The most ridiculous charge–made among others...
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Options for Syria
Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...
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Nelson Mandela, RIP or RIH?
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum is a good rule to follow, especially when the dead person is a stranger in land one has never visited. I am perfectly happy to believe all the nice things said about Mr. Mandela’s character by his friends, colleagues, and admirers. Nonetheless, it is not clear to me that a...
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Ukraine: Orange Revolution Redux?
The scenes in Kiev over the past few days have been reminiscent of the “Orange Revolution” in the fall of 2004, which paved the way for Viktor Yushchenko’s eventual victory in the disputed presidential election. There are several significant differences, however, which make a similar outcome unlikely. The first is that the trigger for...
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Japan’s Prelude to Pearl Harbor
Was Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor out of character for the chrysanthemum nation? Her actions at Port Arthur, nearly 38 years earlier, suggest otherwise. In 1898 Russia began leasing the Liaotung Peninsula, which juts into the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean Peninsula, from the Chinese. On the southern tip of the Liaotung...
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Too Big to Jail
“Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge people will follow.” So said Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to the Washington Post on November 19, 2008, just about two months after TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed through...
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It’s Always World War II
They call it the “Good War,” I suppose, in order to differentiate it from all the really bad wars we’ve been fighting—and losing—lately: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the future conflicts our political class has up its collective sleeve. I call it the Worst War, because it fathered all the ones to come. It was...
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The Case Against Political Consensus
Jeffrey Bell is perhaps the most experienced conservative political advisor in Washington, D.C. Once a key Reagan campaign advisor, Bell later became a political candidate himself, scoring a stunning primary upset against a seated Republican senator in New Jersey only to lose in the general election to Democrat Bill Bradley. Bell, a graduate of Columbia...
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Planning to Fail
“What did Republicans get for 16 days of a government shutdown with people being hurt? We have absolutely nothing to show for it, other than a damaged brand.” This is how second-term Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) described the events of October. And the young Tea Partier is right. Polls show that eight in ten Americans...
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The Past Is Always Prologue
Rodric Braithwaite is a former British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s Russia and a specialist in Russian history. Utilizing his extensive personal contacts with Afghan War veterans (known as afgantsy in Russian) and his fluency in the Russian language, Braithwaite has written an account of the Soviets’ involvement in Afghanistan that is detailed,...
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Returning to Reality
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . . On February 28, as Pope Benedict...
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Where’s Kafka When You Need Him?
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of parliament, charging them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the...
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O Captain, My Captain
Captain Phillips Produced by Trigger Street Productions Directed by Paul Greengrass Screenplay by Billy Ray Distributed by Columbia Pictures Captain Phillips, the film, has come under fire since its opening, as has the eponymous captain of the Danish container ship Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009. Complaints against Richard Phillips have...
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Return to Boonville
This is a story of a place, of joy and regret, and of a deed so romantic and so rare as to border on the fantastical. In the early fall of 1955, my father, a physician who had just completed an internship and a year of residency in family practice, moved our growing family from...
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The Making of Books
When I came to Chronicles, I looked forward to the arrival of a steady stream of books for review: new fiction and poetry, histories and biographies, and the occasional works of popular scholarship or science. From the first I was disappointed in the quality of the books sent in “over the transom,” and I turned...
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An Observer of Men
This selection from around 65,000 pieces of correspondence, edited by Learned Hand’s granddaughter, a professor emerita of English at the Claremont Graduate School, could not have been better done. Both Hand’s letters and the letters of his correspondents are included; some of the most notable exchanges are with Bernard Berenson, Philip Littell, Walter Lippmann, and...
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The Night the World Didn’t Change
Most sober historians have little respect for counterfactuals, those extrapolations of alternative worlds where matters developed differently from the world we know. Yet such alternatives are actually hard to avoid. How can you claim that Gettysburg was a significant battle unless you contemplate the other paths that American history might have taken if the South...
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Eve of Destruction?
Like some of you, I’ve been on the receiving end of an e-mail bombardment from friends who have expressed their shock and dismay over the recent shutdown of the U.S. federal government and the entire political and legislative impasse between the White House and congressional Republicans. I’ve been told by my British, French, and Chinese...
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Stairway to Heaven
There is, or at least there used to be before the days of Nestlé in every pot and a Nissan in every garage, the idea of a stairway to Heaven. Jacob’s ladder, which the biblical patriarch famously dreamed about during the flight from his brother Esau, is a locus classicus, of course, but the idea...
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An Uncertain Asian Pivot
Nicholas Spykman died 70 years ago, more than two years before Japan’s defeat, but his analysis of America’s role in the world, and the challenges she will face in the Far East, sounds almost prophetic today. The Dutch-born Yale professor caused a scandal when he wrote in 1942—only months after Pearl Harbor—that America’s chief regional...
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Conservatism at Midwinter Spring
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
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The God With Feet of Clay
Liberty: The God That Failed is Christopher Ferrara’s second 90-caliber salvo against liberalism, left and right. His first, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy, and State, smashed the anti-Christian dogma of Austrian economics. This 699-page tome goes further. It will send the neocons into the corner...
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Along for the Ride
I thoroughly enjoyed Roger D. McGrath’s account of the Southern California Norton Owners Club journey along Old Route 66 (Correspondence, September). He mentions that his home is near the Rock Store, which immediately brought up memories of my old stomping grounds. I grew up in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, in Woodland...
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Tyranny in Our Time
There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of the most quotable sentences as space allows. ...
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The Neopagan No-Rule Book
Paganism? You bet I remember paganism, as any man with white hair ought to. The movies used to be full of it—Yul Brynner calling pharaonically on the gods of Egypt to bring back his son to life; Jay Robinson, as the emperor Caligula, turning Richard Burton (of all people) into a Christian martyr. There was...
Issue
December 2013
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A Decent Deal
Iran’s nuclear talks with the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany) in Geneva resulted in an “interim” agreement last Saturday. It obliges Iran to verify the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, and to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium under international supervision, in return for limited sanctions relief....
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Forlorn Hopes
Writing your Congressperson. An unindicted Illinois governor. The American people ever understanding that government debt does not exist to cover necessary expenditures but to provide risk-free, tax-free income to capitalists. American leaders ever understanding the difference between defense and aggression. American leaders ever understanding the concept of “blowback,” that what goes around comes around. President,...
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Oh Well, Life’s Not All Bad…
What a week it has been for the ambulance-chasing media! Anticipated highs in their schedule were anniversaries of the Gettysburg address and the Kennedy assassination. What that pair really should be remembered for are cheap rhetoric to camouflage mass murder and cheap idealism to camouflage not just the libido dominandi but plain old raw libido. I well...
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Obamacare: Marxism not Charity, the conclusion
I don’t put much stock in attempts to date Paul’s epistles, but he must have been writing under one of two less than splendid rulers, the chuckle-headed Claudius and the egomaniacal Nero, who would burn the Christians. People of Paul’s social station were not going to meet the Emperor, and it would have been...
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Armistice Day, 95 Years Later
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War ended 95 years ago today. The most tragic event in the history of mankind, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A fundamentally decent and well-ordered world was shattered for ever. The floodgates of hell in which we live now were opened....
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Latest Massacre of Syrian Christians Covered Up in the West
When a false-flag atrocity occurs of which Muslims are the purported victims, the United States goes to war to save them—the January 1999 stage-managed “massacre” at Racak, in Kosovo, being a classic example. When all-too-real massacres of Christians by Muslims take place, they are unreported in the Western media and uncommented upon by Western politicians....
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Obamacare: Charity or Marxism, II
This part two of a series. If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I. I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man. In Part III, I’ll...
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Obamacare: Charity or Marxism? I
Part I: What it Is Obamacare’s enrollment fiasco has provided endless opportunities for pointless blather from the unwashed masses of the American “right.” Talkshow celebrities and the delicate young men who blog for magazine websites cannot contain their outrage. One of them yesterday, the editor of an actual print magazine of moderately large circulation,...
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Jean Raspail’s New Warning
Forty years after publishing his prophetic dystopia Jean Raspail is still with us, ever more resigned that our civilization is on the “road to disappearance.” As he explained in an interview published in Valeurs Actuelles on October 25 (transl. by ST), he has no desire to join the big circle of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration...
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The Pope, the “Poor”, and the World
A reader not of the Faith who happened, since the installation of Pope Francis, to glance through almost any issue of L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s official newspaper, might well conclude that the conclave that met in the Sistine Chapel last spring elected a social worker instead of a cardinal as the successor to Benedict XVI. ...
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Attachment and Loss
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
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Trading Liberty for Security
Attacks on constitutional liberties, including the erosion of due-process protections for the rights to life, liberty, and property, tend to soar in wartime. The most egregious assaults have occurred during the Civil War, the two world wars, and, most recently, in the so-called War on Terror. Courageous individuals spoke out against the abuses during and...
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A Silver Pen in His Mouth
“When I began work on this biography, I intended it to be a very favourable portrait,” began a book on Graham Greene, published amid great controversy some 20 years ago. Alexander Cockburn quotes this phrase to expose Michael Shelden’s duplicity, suggesting it had all along been Shelden’s intention to do a hatchet job on Greene,...
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The Muslim Invasions of Europe
In May Pope Francis canonized the 800 martyrs of Otranto, a city in Apulia in Southern Italy, who were slaughtered by the Turkish invaders of 1480. Their invasion across the narrow seas between Albania and Italy was a sequel to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the advance of the Turkish armies up the...
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An Unexpected Sea Change
One minute we were just waiting for the bombs to drop on Syria. The next we were listening to the President tell us why it was a good idea—but never mind! What in the heck happened? The American people rose up, that’s what happened. They called their representatives in Congress and told them, in no...
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Nidal Hasan’s Rivival
When Nidal Hasan arrived at the Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas after receiving his death sentence on August 28, he was wearing an Islamic beard. The Koran is sketchy on the exact requirements for facial hair, but many imams, past and present, have argued that shaving the face is haram. (Whereas trimming the mustache...
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Moderate Islam?
“Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which killed 46 students in a boarding school on July 6 (Time, July 19). Willingly or...
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Of Locks and la King
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons for dishonesty and lies recently claimed he overheard a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. According to the Clinton-wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in...
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Syria: Too Much “Intelligence”
Only a few weeks into the latest round of horrors in Syria, we are getting used to the debasement of “intelligence” to serve the crudest political ends. In September, President Hollande showed the U.N. secretary general and journalists round the French military intelligence HQ at Creil north of Paris, where the amazed visitors admired the...
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One Big Thing
This book’s heart is in the right place, but its head needs, as they say, to wrap itself around that heart. Devouring Freedom is substantially a useful history of the spending wars between America’s two main political parties since 1932, culminating in the years since 2009 when Barack Obama became president of the United States. ...
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A Highly Acceptable Man
Conscience and its Enemies is a collection of Robert George’s recent writings for a general audience. In addition to the title topic, it includes chapters on the defense of natural marriage, the protection of life from conception to natural death, the nature of moral reasoning, and the need for limited government. Overall, the pieces in...