According to the latest available figures, no fewer than two million Iraqis, many of them Christians, have been chased out of their homes by the militiamen of the Islamic State, and now their tragic plight may fall into oblivion amid the indifference of international public opinion, especially in the West. But there are men who...
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Appomattox. In recent times, academics studying the Civil War have reached a striking degree of consensus about how that war should be understood, and its practical implications today. Sadly, that consensus has one enormous omission. Overwhelmingly, scholars agree that the war was about the defense and preservation of...
If a Muslim prays in a mosque and nobody sees her, does Allah still hear her prayers? That question might seem more urgent than rhetorical for a certain Bosnian immigrant after Dr. Arshad Shaikh, the president of the Muslim Association of Greater Rockford (MAGR), told the Rockford Register Star on February 9 that “It would...
On April 1, 1815, Otto Eduard Leo pold von Bismarck was born on the family estate at Schönhausen near Berlin, in what used to be Prussia. He came into this world at the end of a quarter-century of pan-European crisis, which started with the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Bismarck’s bicentennial...
The week after the murdering scum of ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya—their crime was being Christian—the European Commission opened an investigation of Christian schools in Britain for allegedly “discriminating” against nonreligious teachers. In other words, the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels want to force Christian schools to stop giving preference to religious staff while...
The late Jean-François Revel wrote a once-famous book with the title Comment les démocraties finissent. Revel was not a stupid man, and I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon “we tired the sun with talking,” but as a political philosopher, he was a prisoner of the leftist ideology that treats terms like equality and democracy as substantial...
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
In mid-February, U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued an injunction enjoining the Obama administration from implementing the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program (DAPA). Under DAPA, over four million illegal aliens present in the United States would be shielded from deportation and would be eligible to receive work permits,...
I thank Robert Charron for his kind words (“Wealth Transfer,” Polemics & Exchanges, February), most welcome in the rather discouraging intellectual environment of France. I’m sorry to have given the impression I was falling for the Robin Hood fallacy. The main idea I was trying to convey is that the typical democratic politician (with notable...
I pretty much devoured the “Minority Cultures” issue (February) in one sitting. Every issue is stellar, but the great thing I find again and again is that reading all these fine writers is like loving so many different works of a particular composer that it is hard to make up one’s mind as to which...
F flag, n.—A piece of cloth of no particular value or interest, that, when it comes to symbolize a nation, regardless of that body’s importance, significance, affluence, or influence, takes on uncommon and indeed unnecessary grandeur and symbolism; in American terms, the “Stars and Bars,” the addressing of which requires from military personnel a salute...
I’ve been a libertarian activist since the age of 16 or so—long before the term libertarian became known and widely used by the general public. Indeed, when I announced my conversion to parents, friends, and associates I distinctly recall a number of them saying something to the effect of “Gee, I didn’t know the librarians...
The flyleaf of this book sports a quote (“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original”) from an enthusiastic notice in the New York Times Book Review of a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which the Pevear-Volokh onsky tandem unleashed upon the English-speaking world a quarter of a century ago. As the author...
No one excels at polemics as the French do, save for the English at certain periods of their history (the 17th and 18th centuries, for example), and Le suicide français is a masterly specimen of the genre by Éric Zemmour, the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction and a columnist for Le Figaro. ...
You know within a few moments of meeting him whether a “celebrity” is going to be a regular guy. It’s not just the winning smile, or his willingness to pose for endless selfies; it is whether or not he’s matured around a recognizable value system, the presence or otherwise of a due sense of modesty...
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
A successful War of Independence established 13 free and independent states in North America in 1783. This was followed, unfortunately for us, by the French Revolution and then by the 19th century, preeminently a time of violent government centralization. Subsequent events, as well as nationalist emotion and propaganda, have seriously damaged our ability to see...
Philip Larkin, the poet-librarian of Hull University, died December 2, 1985, over 29 years ago. In the years since Andrew Motion published the first biography (1993), and Anthony Thwaite published both the first complete edition of the poems (1989) and the first collection of letters (1992), a small industry has grown up devoted to the...
American Sniper Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Screenplay by Jason Hall Directed by Clint Eastwood We’re told that during his later career director John Huston frequently preferred reading a good newspaper while his actors performed a scene before the camera. He believed in leaving them to their own devices, among which he trusted thespian...
Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night dreaming of a song, but mostly I don’t. Mostly I don’t, because the nightingale doesn’t tell his fairy tale unless he hopped a ride on the Cunard or the White Star Line. No, the real problem is what does happen every day or night, and Jon...
G.K. Chesterton had a low opinion of his own abilities as a novelist. “[M]y real judgment of my own work,” he confessed, “is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time”: I think The Napoleon of Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure...
