The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I has long been anticipated, judging by the publication of dozens of new books on what was called, until World War II, the Great War, although the Ghastly War might be more appropriate. Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis University, has made a scholarly...
The Al Khansa Brigade is the all-female fighting force of the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Al Khansa, we are most unreliably informed, has 60 members, many of whom are British. Their leader is reputedly a privately educated Scotswoman. These amazons are, we’re told, particularly cruel, force captive local women to be...
In November 1972 I voted for the re-election of President Nixon. Granted, it was only an elementary-school straw poll, but I was still thrilled when he carried the student body by a three-to-one margin. On election night, the electoral map was covered in a sea of blue (in those days each party retained its appropriate...
If the best advice one can give an aspiring writer of prose is to study the best models, then Jonathan Swift’s prose, as a lot of people who should know agree, provides the best model of all in English. A sentence by Swift is a miniature work of remarkable art: But when a man’s fancy...
When people speak of a society being “decadent,” they commonly understand decadence in terms of standards of personal behavior and the sense of morality, or want of it, that behavior expresses. For conservatives, personal morality begins with sexual morality grounded in revealed religion; for liberals, with what they call an “ethical” approach to human relations...
I always had the general impression that radio shock-jock Alex Jones was a huckster—basically an entertainer, as opposed to a serious person. I’d never bothered to listen to his broadcasts, and all I knew about him was secondhand. My recent encounter with Jones gave me the chance to find out the truth for myself. The...
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
I have been receiving so many requests lately for lifestyle advice, tips on public relations and media etiquette (not to mention recommendations about health and beauty maintenance), that I just haven’t been able to keep up with them all. And let’s face it, it’s pretty obvious why so many people ask me. That’s why there’s...
Was it fair of Solzhenitsyn to call Peter the Great “a mediocre man, if not a barbarian”? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that history didn’t begin with the Cold War, and that long before Solzhenitsyn, renowned novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed reservations of his own about the historical impact of Russia’s most...
Two months after the beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and one month after President Obama announced his strategy for fighting the group, the area under jihadist control continues to expand. In the east, IS forces have advanced to the outskirts of Baghdad and may soon be able...
Russians have bragged to themselves about their souls for ages, but for the past hundred years or so—roughly since Nietzsche discovered Dostoyevsky, Henry James discovered Turgenev, and the assorted Bloomsbury folk discovered Chekhov—other European nations, Britain foremost, have been pitching in as well. The dubious outcome of it all is that, alongside bast shoes, pinewood...
The late and great Sam Francis famously described the Republicans as the “Stupid Party,” pointing out that its leaders were always shooting themselves in the foot or chickening out and defeating their own declared positions. Actually, although in general not terribly bright, Republican leaders are smart enough to take care of their own power and...
Through books on subjects ranging from wine to hunting, music to environmentalism, British philosopher Roger Scruton has constructed a multifaceted attack on liberalism. In his latest book, Scruton addresses the contention that religion is a byproduct of our culture or our genes, and therefore ultimately some kind of a fantasy projection. Liberals have convinced themselves...
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
The people of Scotland have spoken. Scotland has voted not to secede from the United Kingdom and to remain in her long-standing union with England and Wales. Over two million Scots—more than 55 percent of the 3.6 million who went to the polls—voted against independence. Nearly all the electorate had registered to vote, and there...
As it stands today, Republicans will add seats in the House and recapture the Senate on Tuesday. However, the near-certainty is that those elections will be swiftly eclipsed by issues of war, peace, immigration and race, all of which will be moved front and center this November. Consider. If repeated leaks from investigators to reporters...
What with zombies, Ebola and politicians infecting the Land of the Free, it’s surprising we’ve survived. So it’s time for: Chronicles’ Halloween 2014 Most Horrible Americans List. Put on your masks of these ghouls and scare your neighbors – if you dare! 1. Jeb Bush. He actually believes his fellow Americans – those not born...
For Americans, ebola is the new AIDS. It’s not only the nightmare plague that is supposed to obsess our imaginations, all day long and every day, as we sip the first cup of coffee or the first martini or the first 2000 calorie big gulp of diabetic shock at our favorite fat-food joint, but, wait,...
My mind having regained, in the wake of last week’s contretemps in the airport queue, some of its former suppleness, I turned to the November issue of Chronicles, with its theme of “Politics as Reality TV.” There I was smitten at once by Tom Fleming’s editorial article, which, as one of the speechwriters he derides...
The really troubling point that Joel Kotkin makes in the New York Daily News is that New York can’t figure out how to do the economic equality thing we hear so much about in this and every political season. “Gotham,” writes Kotkin, “has become the American capital of a national and even international trend toward...
During a long and less than spectacular lunch at a tourist joint on the Piazza Brà in Verona today, I could not help overhearing an American couple talking about their trip, their hopes, their dreams. They were dressed regulation Rick Steves, with dangly things around their neck to connect them to their tour guide—this despite...
Srdja Trifkovic interview with RT International on Putin’s foreign affairs speech Broadcast live on October 24, 2014, 19:06 GMT RT: Apart from the very strong rhetoric, Putin said that Russia does not really see a strong menace on the part of the US. Do you think Washington might stop seeing Moscow as a threat? Srdja...
Today I received an email I knew would be coming, telling me that one of my high school theology teachers, Jim Skerl, had died of pancreatic cancer. So ended a thoroughly Christian life, one that deserves to be better known. I liked Mr. Skerl as a teacher—he had us read Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One”...
It was Chesterton, if I’m not mistaken, who said that nothing narrows the mind like travel. As I had to fly to London over the weekend, to collect some money that I was owed – my alleged debtor’s contrary view notwithstanding – I had ample opportunity to be reminded of this bon mot. Airports! Why...
Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman got upset on a recent plane flight when he saw Ron Paul on NewsMax TV on the jet’s telescreen. Krugman wondered, “Who knew there was such a thing? Is it there to serve people who find Fox News too liberal?” Actually, Newsmax, like Fox News, is neoconservative – that is,...
Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park. But, on Oct. 13, there emanated from the Synod on the Family in Rome a 12-page report from a committee...
“(Wendy) Davis is running (for governor) against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is heavily favored to win in a state that remains strongly Republican.” Katie Glueck, in “Wendy Davis and the ever-longer odds,” Politico, Oct. 19. Yes, yes, lady, fine; you got it. But this is barely to scratch the surface of the thing....
Much of the financial support for the sort of “immigration reform” favored by Barack Obama has come from Silicon Valley. The immigration bill that passed the Senate but stalled in the House would not only grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants but also greatly increase legal immigration. Of central importance to Silicon Valley,...
In this month’s issue, Dr. Fleming discusses anarcho-tyranny, Sam Francis’ term for “our bizzare criminal justice system that combines ‘anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws)’ and ‘tyranny – the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes’. Dr. Fleming writes: Formerly, the “right to privacy” was understood as a barrier...
I can’t think of a political speech in recent decades that more rattles around the back of the conscious of the American mind than Pat Buchanan’s “Culture Wars” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. It even overshadows Reagan’s last major speech at the same convention before he slipped into the night of...
Talking to NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, National Security Advisor Susan Rice said the United States would not reevaluate the strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL). “Strategy’s very clear,” she went on. “We’ll do what we can from the air. We will support the...
One day I got myself lost in what was a very small town. It was an afternoon in late spring, and the sun was beginning to bake. I was walking through a labyrinthine part of the town, having followed a twisting road that was taking me nowhere. There was not a living soul in sight....
Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies—oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by...
In 1492, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America. School children in the earliest grades knew the date and the names of the ships on which Columbus and his crew had sailed: the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. They knew his...
Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage? Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes. Moreover, the laws prohibiting same-sex marriage had all been enacted democratically, by statewide referenda, like Proposition 8 in California, or by Congress or elected state legislatures....
Manlio Orobello, one of my oldest and truest friends in Sicily, has dictated his memoirs to me. The result is a book of some eighty stories, written in English and entitled From Round Here: Lays of a Sicilian Life. It occurs to me that it may be diverting to publish, at some future juncture, two...
In Chronicles two years ago I defended the American Legislative Exchange Council against assaults by George Soros-funded groups seeking to shut down debate. ALEC works with local and state legislators to craft “model legislation,” such as for gun rights and voting integrity, that outrage the Left. Now tech oligarchs so rich they make Soros look...
There has never been a war in American history so strategically ill-conceived as the one currently developing against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. The Mexican war of 1846-47 was essentially an aggressive operation to take Alta California and New Mexico, and to cement the status of Texas. It was limited in its...
“The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.” With this citation from Madison, Cong. Walter Jones is calling for a debate and decision on whether America should go to war in Syria and Iraq, when Congress reconvenes after Nov. 4. Last...
There has been much attention given in the media to the Synod of Bishops that began meeting today in Rome. The focus of most media coverage has been on the the supposed need of the Catholic Church to give its blessing to contemporary culture, particularly those ways in which modern men and women ignore or...
Last week I wrote about the tedious process one needs to go through in order to obtain a shotgun/rifle license in the Big Burrito. The passive aggressive bureaucratic roadblocks such as the co-habitant permission requirement, are surely a violation of the Second Amendment, but unsurprisingly, the mayors and the courts upheld them. Only crooks and...
Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president’s family. But what is transpiring in Hong Kong may be of far greater consequence. Last weekend, Hong Kong authorities used pepper spray and tear gas to scatter the remnants of a student protest of...
The granddaddy of the “anti-hate” movement is, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars and ruined the lives of conservatives by using innuendo, guilt by association and outright lies to smear anyone it doesn’t like. And that’s just about anyone to right of, say, Che Guevara. One...
Rick Perry, believe me, is no more going to prison than I’m going to bounce into his office one fine day to sign him up for an Obama fundraising dinner (an occasion prospectively disadvantageous to the health and well-being of both statesmen, should they meet in the receiving line). The ins and the outs of...
I have lost the battle with my garden, the only war I care about these days. The Drought (yes, I mean to capitalize it, to personify it as if it were an angry god) has scorched the yard, and there is no such thing as victory in the face of such an enemy—only the hope...
Our Greek host on Santorini, a young hotelier and newly married tour promoter, is trying to sell us a Mount Olympus excursion. “Half the German tourists frown, they are unhappy, and you wonder why,” he explains. “We Greeks, we drink, we dance, we smile, we enjoy life. When you are on holiday, you should enjoy...
With Obama completing the displacement of the American people and the Republicans trying to start a war to detract attention from their uselessness and to revive their collapsed grassroots support, a poor observer barely has time and attention to note the civilizational degradation taking place in Lexington in the old and once-honored Commonwealth of Virginia....
A Most Wanted Man Produced by The Ink Factory and Film 4 Directed by Anton Corbijn Screenplay by Andrew Bovell from John Le Carre’s novel Distributed by Roadside Attractions John Le Carre has made a career of demonstrating that intelligence agencies are fundamentally untrustworthy. The very nature of their work, he suggests, makes them prone...
Readers who have been following the often-heated debate on Capital in the Twenty-First Century are likely to be astonished by the mildness of the author’s tone, and by his relaxed rhetorical manner. Indeed, Professor Piketty’s book owes nothing to its famous namesake beyond its title, as well as, more substantially, its grounding assumption that economics...