Year: 2014

Recent events in the United Kingdom, show that moral Britain is not only dead, in the words of our own Christie Davis, but buried and forgotten. Consider the following two news items.  First, the funeral of Tony Benn, the godfather of the hard Left in Britain, darling of that Midwestern socialist blowhard Michael Moore and...

The English/American household was more than a fortified building with locks and bars to keep out unwanted intruders: It was also an autonomous community, whose existence antedated the state. This was the teaching of both philosophers and jurists, who cited approvingly Cicero’s famous statement that the family was the seed-bed of the commonwealth. This was...

When President Obama met with Pope Francis, I was expecting a Walk to Canossa. It turned out the latest in a long line of reactionary disappointments. Afterward, the media people of pope and president conflicted on how much America’s latest church-vs.-state contretemps du jour was discussed. We fight a lot over religion for a country...

So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...

I’d long wanted to see more Raoul Walsh movies. Renowned as an action specialist and he-man director without peer, Walsh made every kind of adventure film—war, western, swashbuckler, gangster, fantasy (the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad), naval, bandit (Carmen twice!), even biblical—during his 51-year career. The restless son of a successful immigrant Anglo-Irish clothier in...

A recent Gallup poll interviewed more than 178,000 people to determine which state is the “happiest”. Residents of each state were asked various questions about work, social life, the availability of food, shelter, and healthcare, as well as physical and emotional health. The poll showed that residents of the Midwest are the happiest in the...

The on-air resignation of RT (the station formerly known as Russia Today) anchor Liz Wahl (I guess young journalists are too hip to use their full names anymore) made tsunami waves in the American media. The mainstream networks and journalists, caught up in a perfect storm of anti-Russian hysteria, were ecstatic. She was interviewed by...

It was the invasion of property more than the taxes and confiscations themselves that annoyed the Americans and prepared them to resist the Stamp Act. It was not money per se, but the sacred rights of property that were at stake. If a man cannot be secure in his home, he cannot be comfortable in...

Friday, March 14 – The afternoon Aeroflot flight from Belgrade to Moscow takes a surprising route: due north over Hungary, Slovakia and eastern Poland, then turning east-northeast over Belarus, and into the Russian air space just east of Smolensk. In more normal times the flight path would have taken us across Romania, Moldova and Ukraine,...

“You are a stubborn bastard,” a Yale classmate of mine writes from the wilds of Virginia, where he, an Englishman, has been thrown by the hand of fate and now lives what I imagine as the life of an early colonist. “Your writing remains as difficult to penetrate as ever. Though,” he adds benevolently, “I admire...

There was some things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. —Mark Twain Those who are still addicted to the useless and indeed pernicious vice of following U.S. politics—let me urge you to go into recovery now. The habit of abstinence must be well-established soon  or you will be tempted by the hoopla...

Let’s skip worrying about democracy in Ukraine, Crimea and Russia for a few minutes. And concentrate on democracy right here in America. Yet another federal judge overturned state laws banning the absurdity of same-sex “marriage,” in this case in Michigan. AP reported: “Federal Judge Bernard Friedman on Friday overturned Michigan’s constitutional ban, the latest in...

Barack Hussein Obama’s triumphal progress to the presidential mansion was fueled by   the utopian sentimentality that dominates the political thinking of large segments of the U.S. population. Here was a dream combination—dark (but not too dark) skin with the manners and platitudes of a classic Midwestern liberal. It was like lackluster Hubert Humphrey or George...

Everyone has heard the expression: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” The most memorable expression of this proverb was given by the elder William Pitt, the future Lord Chatham: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind...

In an LA Times op-ed (“Ukraine’s threat from within”), University of South California professor of international relations Robert D. English describes the ugly essence of the Brown Revolution. His take on the neo-nazi dominated rebellion is much needed and sorely lacked in the American media. I already picture the pro-Maidan hacks at NYT, National Review,...

Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Crimean referendum om Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. He appears at the 9:55 and 20:08 mark in the video. 

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling,...

Readers of Chronicles know well the name Srdja Trifkovic. Dr. Trifkovic has served for many years as our foreign affairs editor and is an invaluable resource for fresh information and incisive commentary on matters pertaining to Serbia and most recently the crisis in Ukraine. Currently his expertise is finding broader exsposure among some mainstream news...

Sen. John “Invade the world, invite the world” McCain recently treated American television viewers to another of his trademark hysteric attacks on Russia. He told CNN’s Candy Crowley: “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country . . . Look at Moldova and Georgia, both of whom are occupied by Russian troops as we...

Srdja Trifkovic interviewed by Mike Church on SiriusXM Patrot Radio: Mike: I have been enjoying your writing for years at Chronicles, including your ruminations about our modern demonization of monarchy and how you’re trying to figure out: How did this greatest and oldest form of government get to the station in life where it’s regarded as...

Tony Benn, the politician formerly known as 2nd Viscount Stansgate, died last week at the reasonably ripe age of 88. He was one of the last honest men in a country regarded by her foes as perfidious and by her own people as steadfast, and lately described by a Russian cad as “a small island...

Crimea and Kosovo have much in common: an autonomous status, military bases of other countries on their territories, and a longing for independence among the majority of the population. Crimea’s ethnic composition and Western policy towards Ukraine could create a Kosovo-like scenario. The Voice of Russia talked to Serge Trifkovic, writer on international affairs and...

Several days ago, in conversation with Financial Times journalist Guy Chazan, Mustafa Dzhemilev, a Soviet-era Crimean Tatar dissident and the former chairman of the Crimean Tatar representative body warned that a bloody jihadist uprising will erupt if Crimeans dare to join Russia in the upcoming referendum:  “We have Islamists, Wahhabis, Salafis, groups who have fought...

Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the Ukraine “crisis” – after nearly 100 years of Russian misrule in Europe, one may think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s clubmen circa 1855 discussing the latest from Balaclava – one again becomes conscious of the political...

With the Brown Revolution running into a war of Russian resistance in the Crimea, the pleasant Peninsula, forgotten for two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union is all of the sudden at the top of all media headlines and is being discussed by talking heads on both sides of the Atlantic. As to...

Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...

On March 6 President Obama said in Washington that the Crimean authorities’ plans for a referendum “violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law.” “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected...

“Un pere, une mere, c’est elementaire.” This is the batte cry of La Manif Pour Tous, the French group that mobilized in opposition to gay marriage in France. Although the Hollande government did legalize gay marriage last spring, La Manif Pour Tous made a name for itself by organizing two mammoth rallies in Paris before...

A recent BBC article on the “far right” in Ukraine by David Stern is a perfect example of the mainstream media’s effort to obfuscate and distort events in Ukraine to make the neo-nazis that dominated the anti-Yanukovych forces seem legitimate.  This is first seen in the title of the article itself (“Ukraine’s Revolution and the...

The Crimean parliament’s proposal to exit the Ukriane and join the Russian Federation has raised the question of the legality and morality of secession.  Inevitably, most of the discussion is based on the short-sighted and tortured reasoning of modern and postmodern political theory. A good example is Ilya Somin’s, “Crimea and the Morality of Secession“—a...

Remember Nick and Nora Charles, the movies’ Thin Man and wife? Of course, you do. How about Larry and Kay Wilson? Embodied by the same actors, William Powell and Myrna Loy, they’re a bush-league Babbitt and his divorce-bent wife in 1940’s I Love You Again. Larry’s pretty insufferable, alright, but after a conk on the...