The defeat in June of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the GOP primary by a conservative challenger with little money was one of the most encouraging developments in American politics in a long time. This week’s announcement that Cantor now has a $3.4 million job with a Wall Street investment bank, however, is a...
Year: 2014
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Popping Balloons
In one of my posts earlier this month, Pasternak’s Zhivago came up, a scandal from the late 1950’s that resulted in the poet, by then long extinguished as the once-in-a-millennium genius he had been, receiving the Nobel Prize for a trivial and pusillanimous novel. The other day, coincidentally, a book sent to me for review...
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At Least They Have Cell Phones
Over the weekend, I caught some of Raymond Arroyo’s interview with Paul Bremer, George W. Bush’s envoy to Iraq after our invasion. Bremer admitted that Iraqi Christians are worse off now than before the invasion, but he maintained that other Iraqis are “much better off.” In support of his claim that Iraqis are better off,...
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How to Deal With Hostage Takers: Soviet Lessons
The recent videotaped beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the bloodthirsty savages of ISIS bring to mind a story which took place in Lebanon almost 30 years ago. On September 30, 1985, a group of gunmen seized four Soviet diplomats and embassy workers (Arkady Katkov, Valery Myrikov, Oleg Spirin, and Nikolai...
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Last of the Romans
Andrew Crocker did not attend his commencement exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the awarding of two honorary doctorates. Shirley Weis, a graduate of MSU’s College of Nursing, received a doctorate of science as the first woman and first nonphysician...
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The Silence of the Gila
The mystery of brightness is more profound than the mystery of darkness, and that of stillness perhaps the most profound of all. In the noontime glare the heart of the Gila wilderness in southwestern New Mexico is both bright and still, the sole sound the drone of a circling horsefly, the only breath the imperceptible...
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An Interwar Odyssey
In 2011, Patrick Leigh Fermor became Patrick Leigh Former, and hundreds of thousands of devotees were doubly bereft. The first loss was the man himself, at 96 an antique in his own right, one of the last links to what feels increasingly like an antediluvian Europe, in which advanced civilization could coexist with medieval color...
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Spooking the Left’s Hobby Horse
Based on reactions from the political left to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., one would think that American women have been stripped of fundamental constitutional protections. Gone are the franchise, free speech, and the right to serve on a jury. The Washington Post’s blog averred that the “Hobby Lobby case is an attack on...
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A Thing in Itself
My Sicilian friend Manlio has something in him of the late Curtis Cate, who was a mutual friend of mine and Tom Fleming’s and a frequent contributor to these pages. When Curtis died in 2006 aged 82, I did not think to write an obituary. For some reason, one whose perennial argument with the heart...
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A Very American Hotel
Forty years is a long enough stretch, but it seems far less than half a lifetime ago when, as a surly British teenager, I found myself clutching an all-day pass to the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington. I was there on my summer vacation from Cambridge, and it seemed to me an almost satirically...
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Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
Issue
September 2014
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Not a Pro
There was a remarkable oversight in the otherwise wonderful piece by Eugene Girin (“Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth,” Vital Signs, June) on the work of the Russian novelist, when the author states that Madam Chudinova wrote her royalist novel to counteract the “pro-Jacobin novels of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.” Balzac never wrote any...
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Class Allegories
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Produced by Chernin Entertainment Directed by Matt Reeves Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Rick Jaffa Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Snowpiercer Produced by Opus Pictures Directed by Bong Joon-ho Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson Distributed by The Weinstein Company As titles go, Dawn of...
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The Left’s Long March
On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama. Their discussion ended with Bob Beckel, the program’s voice from the left, wondering why so few conservatives went into college teaching, and...
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Subgroup Strife in the Golden State
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not decreasing, as the state becomes even more diverse. And public universities are at the...
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Anniversary of Lies
August 10 marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Congress had passed three days earlier. The resolution gave a green light to the Vietnam War’s “escalation,” what in today’s Pentagonese is called a “surge.” In March 1965, two Battalion Landing Teams of the 9th Marine Expeditionary...
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Foreigners No More
They are coming: on trains, on buses, on foot, all the way from Central America, where they meet up with smugglers who take them across our nonexistent border. This has been happening for decades, but there’s one big difference in the recent wave of illegal immigration: These are children, many under ten years of age—50,000...
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A Just and Honest Man
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
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(Not) The Age of Aquarius
I may be stereotyping Chronicles readers unfairly, but I suspect that not many read witches&pagans. If your subscription has lapsed, I draw your attention to a recent feature that actually has far-reaching consequences for more mainstream believers of all kinds. In an interview, well-known pagan author Diana L. Paxson complained that The generation that founded...
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Confiscating Liberty
I first came upon Stephen P. Halbrook in 1984 when the University of New Mexico Press published his first book,That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right. Since Halbrook had both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a law degree, my expectations were high. I was not disappointed. Moreover, by the time I...
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Not Crazy
In “Borderlines, Part 2” (News, June), Mr. Hugh Prysor-Jones takes on a great deal in covering a vast section of Europe. Apparently, his understanding of some of the background is, at least in some places, a bit shaky. To wit, he writes of “various Polish/Lithuanian empires.” There most certainly was a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which just...
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The End of the United Kingdom?
Of course Scotland won’t leave the United Kingdom. That was the conventional wisdom when the referendum on Scottish independence was announced two years ago. But today no one is quite certain what the outcome will be. The referendum is scheduled for September 18, and polls indicate that a majority of Scots favor staying in the...
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Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
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Thinking Outside the Boxes
And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same . . . In “Little Boxes” Malvina Reynolds was protesting against the conformity of the 1950’s, when core requirements and a limited number of majors still ensured some measure of common...
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Achtung, Spooks!
Boo to the CIA! It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home. What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty? Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...
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Strategic Blunders
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
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Stereotyping Europeans (I): Poland
Having turned 60 last month I should start taking stock of my life, making the reasonable assumption that the best is behind me (infantile baby-boomer assertion that “sixty is the new forty” notwithstanding). Yes, I am doing that, but such musings are not to be shared. A byproduct, which may be of some interest to...
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A Europe of Mohammeds
According to Norway’s The Local English-language news website, Mohammed became the most common male name in Oslo, surpassing Jan and Per, which are in the second and third spots respectively. Apparently, for the last four years in a row, Mohammed was at the top of the list of male names in Oslo. The city itself...
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A Voice from Internal Exile on the Evil Party, the Stupid Party, and the Futility of Elections
Rabbi Mayer Schiller was a close friend of Thomas Molnar, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. I described his life and views in a VDARE column some years ago. Rabbi Schiller is a staunchly paleoconservative Hassidic rabbi living in internal exile in the manner of Soviet dissidents in upstate New York and teaches at a prestigious...
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Nations at Sea
I spent last weekend in Tuscany in what was once an abandoned seaside resort, now a glittering showcase for everything that is repugnant about global tourism. I leave out its name because the locals, though no less greedy and unprincipled than other people elsewhere on this venal planet, are hardly to blame for the discovery...
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‘Bless You’ Banned in Georgia College
Last week I blogged about a Tennessee high-school classroom banning students saying, “Bless you!” Now the repression has spread to college. According to CBS Atlanta: “BRUNSWICK, Ga. – One professor at the College of Coastal Georgia has banned students from saying ‘bless you’ in his class. “Campus Reform reports that Dr. Leon Gardner, assistant professor of chemistry at...
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To Defeat the Islamic State
The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known. For the Kaiser’s Germany, it was the “blank cheque” to Austria after Sarajevo. For Great Britain, the 1939 war guarantee to Poland. For the Third Reich, it was the June 1941 invasion of...
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The Madmen of Benghazi
French author and unabashed rightwinger Gerard De Villiers who passed away last fall at the age of 84 was hardly a household name in this country. The former journalist who became a spy novelist was famous for his 200 pulp fiction novels about the exploits of CIA agent, the Austrian aristocrat Malko Linge. What made...
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Race-Based Justice
Among the demands of the “protesters” in Ferguson is that the investigation and prosecution of police officer Darren Wilson be taken away from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch is biased, it is said. How so? In 1964, his father, a St. Louis police officer, was shot to death by an African-American. Moreover, McCulloch...
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Trouble in Rome
“Many of us non-RC traditionalist all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation,” I wrote here on March 7 of last year. “In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis’… election is a compromise which will keep most traditionalists contented, if not exactly enthused, while giving...
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The Recovery That Wasn’t
According to economists, the US economy began recovering from the recession back in 2009. However, last week brought further confirmation that there has been no economic recovery for many Americans. The United States Conference of Mayors released a report showing that the average wage in the sectors of the economy devastated by the last recession,...
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Confronting the Islamic State
The horrendous murder of James Foley by the Islamic State (IS) is more than just another display of jihadist savagery, reminiscent of the death of Daniel Pearl in 2002. Its strategic purpose is to provoke a wave of indignation at home, and to get the United States directly involved in yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern...
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Functionally atheist government schools
A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...
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Madame Claude’s Forebears
“She was vicious,” commented the Paris Match journalist Dany Jucaud. “She reduced the entire world to rich men wanting sex and poor women wanting money.” Jucaud was speaking of a famous brothel keeper, Madame Claude, to whose life and times the sycophant’s bible, Vanity Fair, devotes hagiographic attention in its September issue. “Her client list,”...
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Assyrian Genocide: Ongoing and Forgotten
The recent massacres and expulsions of Iraqi Christians are only the latest chapter in the genocide of the ancient and exclusively Christian Assyrians, a continuation of the bloody campaign that took place in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Iraq throughout the 20th Century. The Chaldean Catholics who are bearing the brunt of IS attacks in...
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Is Ferguson Our Future?
“America is on trial,” said Rev. Al Sharpton from the pulpit of Greater St Mark’s Family Church in Ferguson, Missouri. At issue, the shooting death of Michael Brown, Saturday a week ago, on the main street of that city of 22,000, a neighbor community to Jennings, where this writer lived in the mid-1960s. Brown, an...
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The Islamic State Consolidated
A week ago American planes were used for the first time to bomb Islamic State (IS) targets in northern Iraq. President Obama’s decision to authorize limited airstrikes has not changed the military balance, however. The IS army of some ten thousand fighters is an easily dispersible, highly trained light infantry force. There are no valuable...
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Fear and Loathing in Ferguson
The recent riots in majority-black Ferguson, Missouri have seized the attention of the world. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, universally described by the media as an “unarmed Black teenager” was shot and killed by a police officer. According to the police, he participated in a violent convenience store robbery and then resisted arrest, attacking a police officer...
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Why I write
Why do I write? The first answer that comes to mind is: “I don’t know.” On reflection, a second answer emerges with a gravelly croak, like a fat, patriarchal frog among pond lilies: “Because they pay me.” Even though, as anybody with half a brain will tell you, the money in the business of writing...
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Summer Reading, Part III
The last three summers (2011-2013), I indulged in a genre of books, which my Catholic friends found to be curious. As longtime Chronicles reader and fellow New York attorney Fred Kelly said: “You have an interesting reading list for a traditionalist Jew”. What they were referring to was my interest in the topic of exorcism,...
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Is ISIS ‘An Existential Threat’?
U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan. The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two...
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Rockford Institute Welcomes VP Tom Piatak
The Rockford Institute has taken a bold step forward in its mission to defend traditional conservatism by appointing Thomas Piatak as Executive Vice President. A veteran of the Culture Wars and a tireless advocate of restoring American jobs and economic prosperity, Mr. Piatak is perfectly poised to raise the Institute’s profile among current and new...
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The Gutsy Ann Coulter
My old compatriot from law school Ann Coulter has a habit of writing columns not designed to advance her interests as a columnist. When Coulter’s friend Joe Sobran died, she wrote a column praising Joe without reservation. Given the relative power of Joe’s friends and Joe’s enemies, some wondered if this was wise. Indeed, another...
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Who Owns the Future?
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the “end of history” where “Western liberal democracy” becomes “the final form of human government.” A quarter century on, such optimism seems naive. Consider the United States, the paragon of liberal democracy. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds...