Year: 2015

The following article by Charles G. Mills appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Christian morality requires that the victors in war show mercy to the losers. Mercy is a form of charity, the greatest of the virtues. If we do not show mercy, we should not necessarily expect it...

“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement...

On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,” contained this pessimistic prognosis: “This European superstate will not endure, but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies...

Christmas is the preeminent musical holiday. As the conductor remarked at a Cleveland Orchestra Christmas concert I attended some years ago, more music has been written for Christmas than any other holiday. And a variety of other songs have become associated with Christmas, sometimes by quite circuitous routes. The story of how some of the...

“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here . . . and . . . around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'” So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate. Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald...

The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including...

The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Christmas approaches at a time of increasing turmoil in the world and in our own society. The hope, once widespread, that with the end of the Cold War, we would embark upon an era of peace and tranquility, has long since been proven to...

“If you’re in favor of World War III, you have your candidate.” So said Rand Paul, looking directly at Gov. Chris Christie, who had just responded to a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as to whether he would shoot down a Russian plane that violated his no-fly zone in Syria. “Not only would I be...

Paul Ryan hasn’t been Speaker of the House long, but he already knows how to get favorable press in the New York Times. Sunday’s edition of the Times pictured Ryan as fighting what the paper terms “polarizing populism” and the “angry insurgent refrain blasting into the winter primaries.” In contrast to all this anger, Ryan...

“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.” So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise. It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964. Sen. Barry Goldwater...

Antonin Scalia has been a public critic of affirmative action since at least 1979, when the Washington University Law Review published his modest proposal of a “Restorative Justice Handicapping System.” Scalia’s position, simply put, is that the government should not engage in racial discrimination, a position reflected in numerous opinions authored by Scalia. There are...

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...

On December 10 Srdja Trifkovic was interviewed by Mike Church—who presents a nationally syndicated radio talk show—about his article “Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action,” published on this site on December 4. We bring you the transcript of that interview. MC: Let’s talk about your essay that you have published on Chronicles magazine website, “Defeating...

In Sunday’s first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the vote, and came in first in 6 of 13 regions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district. Despite tremendous and positive publicity from his...

For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...

With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist...

In the feudal era there were the “three estates”—the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution. But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.” Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill—of the...

President Obama was in Paris yesterday, when 14 people were murdered in San Bernardino. Obama cited the shooting as illustrating the need for stricter gun control, telling reporters that “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in...

In his latest RT interview Srdja Trifkovic discusses Russian accusations that Turkey is buying large quantities of oil from the Islamic State, with President Erdogan and his family directly benefiting from the smuggling operation RT: We are going live to Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles magazine. Russia has asked Turkey for open access...

As in a number of cases involving minority criminals, mass media initially appeared reluctant to identify the perpetrators in the San Bernadino shootings that left fourteen people dead, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The Los Angeles Times seemed to play down the agency of the shooters, with a by-now familiar description of gunfire...

Democracy is impossible when millions of Americans actually believe in the sincerity of politicians when they say they care about us. Democracy is not possible when there is no debate, ideas, or principles but only marketing. We used to celebrate “democracy,” thought of, somewhat vaguely, as majority rule and freedom. Now it seems to mean ...

Why is it that every time Muslims kill a bunch of people and declare it is because they are fulfilling their religion, the government tells us Islam is peaceable and we should import more of it? Nobody really believes that, but politicians say it because they think it is what they should say to sound...

Ever since human societies became a clear and definite field of inquiry, which for Westerners means ever since Greek antiquity, current wisdom holds that the best of imperfect, nonutopian—i.e., viable—human societies have always been those in which predominated what came to be dubbed a “middle class.” Though commonly used, the content of the term remains...

This year’s mid-fall was not pretty in Moscow, where I write this column.  Wind, drizzle, and early frost herald a long winter. It won’t be the winter of Russian discontent, however.  Western sanctions and low oil prices have harmed the economy—it contracted by 4.3 percent in the third quarter—but Putin’s approval rating is consistently well...

We’ve only just begun . . . Have you ever wondered what it was like to live through a sweeping cultural revolution?  If you lived in France in late 1789, for instance, and you reviewed the events of the previous 12 months, you would have shaken your head in wonderment at all that had happened. ...

That old agitator Mahatma Gandhi certainly knew his chops, and one of his aphorisms surely has resonance when we contemplate the Trump phenomenon: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  This is certainly what has happened in 2015, as Donald Trump defies the Establishment, the pundits,...

It’s said that writers need two lives: one to experience, one to write about experience.  It occurs to me we actually need three, in order to reread in the third life the books we read in the first and second.  What a difference 30 years make as I take up Eric Voegelin again.  Volume 5...

Returning from the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Confederate symbols, I began thinking of all the things I failed to say in my talk on the campaign of cultural genocide waged against the South.  I had addressed my argument to people who already respected the Southern tradition and quite properly resented the program of demonization and...

A few years back I was spending the weekend with the designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife, and they took me along to dinner at a neighbor’s on Saturday night.  We were in rural Connecticut, and the scene and the house we visited were straight out of Norman Rockwell.  The dinner party consisted...

C.S. Lewis’s classic children’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the ten bestselling books of all time, standing shoulder to shoulder with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in the elite list of world bestsellers. What is it about the genre of fantasy fiction that makes it so...

The news keeps getting better for Donald Trump’s campaign for president. The latest: Karl Rove is coordinating attack ads. “The mastermind of George W. Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and 2004, Rove has not signed on with any of the presidential candidates this year, though he says he has dispensed advice to a number who...

Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11. About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...

I am a longtime reader of Chronicles, and of Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column, as well as a couple of his books, and as such I was taken aback—shocked, actually—by the shrill, even hysterical tone of his column “Humanity Lite” (In Our Time, September).  He says that “Homosexual ‘marriage’ is insanity,” and a little later, “gay...

The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Free speech used to be highly valued, particularly on the nation’s college and university campuses. Academic freedom demanded a respect for a diversity of views. During the Vietnam War years, this writer taught at the University of Maryland. The campus was alive with debates...