What is it with people? Offing themselves like death’s going out of fashion! First Litvinenko poisons himself with green tea in a sushi restaurant in the middle of London and blames radioactive polonium. Then Berezovsky strangles himself with a scarf and drags his own corpse to the bathroom to make some kind of political point....
Year: 2015
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Best of Times or Worst of Times?
Last week, John Kerry seemed to be auditioning for the role of Dr. Pangloss. Despite jihadi violence across the Middle East and ISIS terror in Iraq and Syria, Kerry told Congress, we live in “a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally—less deaths, less violent deaths today...
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Netanyahu’s Welcome Clarity
In his speech to Congress on March 3 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a straightforward, simple, and extreme position on Iran’s nuclear program: there is to be none, or else there should be war. He does not want that program kept limited to civilian purposes, or internationally supervised; he wants it eliminated totally, permanently,...
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Moral Dumbing-Down
In a week when the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page lectures the Republican Congress for tactical stupidity; and Israel’s prime minister lectures the Obama administration, whose insiders lecture him back; and no one can believe Obama has believable plans for anything; and he can’t believe anybody would believe such a thing—with all this going on,...
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Islamic Terror in Paris: To Be Continued
Muslim violence has returned to Paris, after nine years, with the murder of editorial-staff members of Charlie Hebdo. But the jihad of today looks different from the one that took place there in the fall of 2005. The previous jihadist was an aggressive and illiterate teenager with a baseball bat in one hand and a...
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Cultural Cleansing, Phase One
In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley. Cooper property included a pretty peninsula on Lake Otsego that the family had allowed the community to use for fishing, picnics, and boating. ...
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Charlie Hebdo: A Christ Befitting the Modern West
Paris, January 7, 2015: Two men invoking Allah enter the office of a satirical magazine and shoot its staff, employees, and two policemen. Two days later, also in the name of Allah, a black killer opens fire on a kosher supermarket, bringing the total to 17 dead. A planetary uproar follows. Mourners, presidents gather in...
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Quoth the Raven
For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country. In this spasm, as in past...
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People of the Book
Sometimes one opens the morning newspaper and, instead of fires, floods, or declarations of war, finds a parable. This one hit me with the force of a subway train back in January, and I duly rushed it off as a post on the Chronicles blog, but stubbornly the retina refused to let go of the...
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Charlie, Christian, and the Bondage of Freedom
“[R]eligion is apt to provide another loyalty than that claimed by the State . . . ” —T.S. Eliot Two Muslims brutally murdered some French cartoonists for blaspheming their holy man. Have we learned something new from this? Yes, it turns out Muslims—the fundamentalist types, not many, but more than you’d...
Issue
March 2015
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Annus Horribilis
The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject. Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...
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Seized by the Moment
Boyhood Produced and distributed by IFC Directed and written by Richard Linklater Richard Linklater’s Boyhood became the critics’ darling upon its staged release at the end of 2014. From The New Yorker to the Daily News, reviewers have vied with one another to sing its praises. Most of them think it’s a natural coming of...
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His Truth Is Marching On
Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed. That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as...
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Justice for Tommy
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein recently complained that conservatives’ slippery-slope arguments about the left’s latest push to codify and enforce radical equality are intellectually “lazy.” Sunstein and his followers give the example of conservative opposition to gay marriage, which often includes the observation that “the Supreme Court shouldn’t force states to recognize same-sex marriages because, if it...
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A Master Accompanist
Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space. “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...
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A Plague on Both Their Houses
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
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Washington’s Foreign Policy Folly
A basic requirement of a wise and effective foreign policy is the ability to establish priorities and make tough choices. Unfortunately, U.S. officials seem increasingly incapable of accomplishing such a task. That grim reality is all too evident as the Obama administration drifts into confrontational relationships simultaneously with Russia and China. Even Henry Kissinger, hardly...
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Responding to Obscenities
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
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A Jihadist Victory
The claim propagated in the Western corporate media that the “March for Unity” in Paris on January 11 symbolized a victory of “freedom of speech” over “extremism” is wrong. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and particularly the aftermath of those attacks, were a victory for militant Islam and a fresh sign...
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The Battle for the Middle
American politicians love to pretend that they care about the middle class, because they know that the middle class generally determines who gets elected. But once elected, politicians tend to serve those who finance their campaigns, and the interests of large donors seldom align with those of middle-class Americans. This game has been played for...
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Clash of the Iconoclasts
Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? To ask that question even rhetorically seems absurd. Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? To ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and...
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Jihad on the Western Front
It’s a Charlie Hebdo world—a place where “free speech” means the freedom to depict the Pope in drag with the caption “Ready for anything in order to win some clients?” Where “liberty” means crude drawings, of the sort one might see on a men’s room wall, showing the Holy Trinity in a series of sexual...
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Defining Work
This collection harkens back to a bygone era when the essay was a common medium of the literary artist. As one can pick up a volume of essays by G.K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc nearly a century after their first publication and still be enthralled and enchanted by their freshness and continuing relevance, the same...
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Fourth-Generation War Comes to Paris
The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo staffers provides an important opportunity for us to face a new reality: Fourth-Generation Warfare (4GW) has found a home in France, as well as in the rest of Western Europe and the United States. According to theorist William Lind, First-Generation Warfare involves massed manpower, such as the Napoleonic clashes;...
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Good Grief
Poetry has to me never been what I have so often heard called a problem, and that was so for the simplest of reasons: It was never presented to me as a problem until I was advanced in school, after which it was reformulated as a target of incomprehending odium by students whose insensibility had...
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Charmless
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
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GOP Platform: War Without End
If the sadists of ISIS are seeking—with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians—to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding. Repeatedly snapping the blood-red cape of terrorist atrocities in our faces has the Yankee bull snorting, pawing the ground, ready to charge again. “Nearly three-quarters...
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Fifty Shades of Dreck or Homage to a Psychopath
The bestselling Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James (pen name of British authoress Erika Mitchell), which includes the books Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Free became the latest fad in the shabby genre of lowbrow female fiction. Unlike its earlier specimens like Twilight, the novels of E.L. James stood...
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Conservatives Cry Racist
The only thing worse than a leftist screaming “racist” and “hater” because he doesn’t like the facts — oft coming from a conservative source — is a conservative screaming the same thing for much the same reason: facts coming from a liberal source. The latest on this front hit last week, when Vice President Biden...
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Sleepwalkers Awake
The House of Lords European Union Committee is chaired by Lord Tugendhat. I don’t know anything about the man, and it may well be that his is a noble title going back to the Battle of Hastings, but I think most people will agree it’s one hell of a funny name. Then there’s Nigel Farage,...
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A Little List, 1
As Some day it may happen that a victim must be found I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list Of society offenders who might well be under ground And never would be missed, who never would be missed. A recent comment of Robert Peters (a pleasure, as always,...
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Hanging Rudy Out to Dry
Back in 1987, this writer was invited by friends to advise them on a press conference they had called to oppose President Reagan’s signing of an INF treaty to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe. My advice: Deplore the treaty; do not attack the president. The next day, Howard Phillips declared that Ronald Reagan had...
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Bizarre: Tony Blair to Advise Serbia’s Prime Minister
Srdja Trifkovic’s Interview on RT International Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading advocate of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, will be an advisor to Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who was Milosevic’s information minister at that time. Five years later Vucic edited Seselj’s book which referred to Blair as “that English faggot...
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Will the GOP Capitulate Again?
“Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations,” warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892. “Thank God I am not a free-trader,” echoed the rising Empire State Republican and future President Theodore Roosevelt. Those were the voices of a Republican Party that...
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Netanyahu and “European” Antisemitism
The most recent Muslim terrorist outrage took place in Copenhagen this time. The son of Palestinian immigrants (the European liberals’ favorite designated victims) Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein (described with typical accuracy by the NYT as Denmark’s “native son”) shot up first, a free speech meeting, killing a Danish documentary filmmaker, and moved on to shoot...
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Non si muove più
Being consistent has the consequence of being predictable, a quality welcome, perhaps, in husbands and dogs, but somewhat a defect in journalists – at least as far as their readers, desirous of truth yet relentless in pursuit of variety, are concerned. Those who have followed my political commentary in these posts – next Wednesday, as...
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Ukraine: The Debaltsevo Plot Thickens
With the fall of Debaltsevo some interesting military-technical questions are starting to emerge. Is the Ukrainian general staff grossly incompetent, or outright treasonous? “A colonel is a rank,” says my source, a former general officer of a NATO-affiliated army, “but a general is a clinical diagnosis.” Ever since Hannibal’s masterful double-pincer maneuver at Cannae it...
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Renzi Nicht Rienzi
Cue Wagner’s “Rienzi Overture,” YouTube here. My, how cowardly our modern “leaders” are. They’re only good at repressing and robbing the struggling middle-class. This is from the Daily Beast: “ROME — Last weekend in Italy, as the threat of ISIS in Libya hit home with a new video addressed to ‘the nation signed with the...
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Putin Paranoia
Hopefully, the shaky truce between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko, brokered in Minsk by Angela Merkel, will hold. For nothing good, but much evil, could come of broadening and lengthening this war that has cost the lives of 5,400 Ukrainians. The longer it goes on, the greater the casualties, the more land Ukraine will...
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Ukraine Ceasefire: Cui Bono?
There are two incompatible narratives on the meaning of last Saturday’s agreement in Minsk. There is also, as usual, the complex reality which the partisans of the warring sides refuse to recognize, and which escapes the attention of major Western media commentators. The Ukrainian nationalists accused Petro Poroshenko of surrendering to Putin. Kiev’s New Times...
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The President Who Doesn’t Get It
A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don’t care whether you win or lose—an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum...
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A Valentine’s Day Reflection
A year or so ago, I discovered the work of Czech author Karel Capek who died on the eve of World War II. He was very popular in Eastern Europe and is barely known in the West. Most famous for his science fiction masterpiece War with the Newts (the salamanders, not the repulsive Republican politicians),...
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The Ultimate Enemy of ISIS
The president’s request for the authorization to use military force against the Islamic State has landed in a Congress as divided as the country. That division was mirrored in the disparate receptions Obama’s resolution received from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. To the Times, Obama’s AUMF is “alarmingly broad. It does...
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Actually, Obama Backs Defending Borders
Chronicles readers might assume President Obama and his administration favor open borders. Not true. From an actual news story in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Kerry repeated demands that Russia-backed separatists pull back their troops and heavy weapons and that Moscow seal its side of the border.” It’s part of the dissolution of what used...
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The Barren Groves
There once was a minor poet, writing in Russia in the 1920’s, who had been educated at the University of Heidelberg yet never acquired the airs of a German pedant. I recently ran across a short fable of his, and threw together an English version of it because the eight lines seemed such a concise...
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Grammy Anarchy
The late Leopold Tyrmand, an astute observer of culture, once told me that the most important publication in America is Women’s Wear Daily. Style over substance? Yesterday’s Grammy award ceremony revealed that substantive ideas—or what passes for substance when social anarchy exposes itself—are manifest in the style of contemporary music, television, film and stage. I...
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Nuts to You!
It’s been kind of fun, I tell you: a Florida Democratic congressman, one Alcee Hastings, calls Texas a “crazy state.” Texans—e.g., Rick Perry—joyfully, jubilantly acknowledged the craziness that has made our state (yes, I am one of the assorted bedlamites) foremost in the country for economic growth. How come Texas leads in job creation and...
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Rev. Wright’s Star Pupil
“A steady patriot of the world alone, “The friend of every country—but his own.” George Canning’s couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the...
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Trifkovic on Ukraine Peace Prospects: RT International Live
RT: Joining us in the studio now is Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine. Thank you very much for joining us at the studio of RT International. So, we have the new peace plan that includes the greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine. Do you think this is something that can really work in...