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...
Year: 2015
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Whose Job Is It to Kill ISIS?
Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity? While the video might firm up the faith of fanatics, would it not evoke rage and revulsion across the Islamic world? After all, this was...
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French Lessons
The French government has approved a budget of some half a billion dollars to finance new initiatives against terrorism. Among the early fruits of this campaign is an “infographic,” or poster in plain English, headlined “Radicalisation Djihadiste, les premiers signes qui peuvent alerter” (“Jihadist Radicalization: First Warning Signs”). A top telltale sign of a person’s...
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U.S.-Russia Clash in Ukraine?
Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence. In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in...
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Reading The London Spectator in Kishinev
In segments of the black community, particularly among the urban poor, being pursued by the police is a badge of honour, a sign that you have stood up to ‘the man’. Many black voters in Washington thought the police entrapped Marion Barry because he was getting too ‘uppity’. Barry won nearly every vote in poor...
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The Sleazy Bowl
Every year I vow I’m not going to watch the next one, but inevitably end up watching it anyway. The commercials pushed in yesterday’s game were so gross, so vile, even so blasphemous it should have been called the Sleazy Bowl. I won’t describe the ads, which I avoided the best I could by switching...
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Baying for Broken Glass
The December 4 issue of Rolling Stone includes an article entitled “A Rape on Campus,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Miss Erdely tells us about a University of Virginia coed (“Jackie”) who claims to have been raped by seven fraternity boys two years ago. The piece could hardly be more urgent, inflammatory, and, under closer investigation,...
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Dealing With the Devil
Ralph Sarchie exudes an aura of intense strength when he walks into a room. A fit, middle-aged man with heavily tattooed arms (pictures of his daughters and tough cop tattoos, like one that reads New York Untouchables) and a buzz cut, who speaks with a Queens accent straight out of Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas, Sarchie has...
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Idealists Without Illusions
Like all relationships, the special transatlantic one is in a state of constant flux—warmer or cooler at different times, enhanced by empathy, marred by misunderstandings, riven by reality—but always affected by the personal qualities of the incumbents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. For a short but eventful span between January 1961 and...
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The Way of All Flesh
The Confidence Trap is a book that, in spite of its many penetrating insights, peripheral as well as central to its thesis, on further examination is less striking and original than it promised to be. Runciman begins with an introductory chapter about Alexis de Tocqueville’s early contribution to understanding how democratic nations cope with crises...
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Everyman’s Poet
Jared Carter, who has retired from a career in publishing, is a Midwestern poet of stature. He won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Poets’ Prize; he has had a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is profiled in the Dictionary of...
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Unquantifiable Differences
The biggest mystery and conundrum of our time is not whether Stalin died a natural death, or why the CIA had Kennedy killed, but the difference between the types of individual that rise socially in the West and, respectively, in Russia or China. In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the problem of the...
Issue
February 2015
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Putin’s Uneasy Balancing Act
“Putin, the master of the game, controls all the pieces on the chessboard and carefully divides up the areas of power,” writes influential French columnist Christine Ockrent in her most recent book, Les Oligarques. Her view is shared by most Western analysts and media commentators, regardless of their position on the person and policies of...
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Groovy Solipsism
Inherent Vice Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon Birdman Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed and written by Alejandro González Iñárritu Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures You never know what you’ll learn at the movies. Watching the two films under review this...
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Mongrels All! or, Slaves With New Masters
Of late, our demographic soothsayers have been assuring us that by 2040 or thereabouts America will no longer be a Caucasian-majority country, and that with the eclipse of the white majority there will be, to belabor the obvious, no majority culture. For many this is cause for celebration. Among minorities, or at least those who...
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The Future of Minority Culture(s)
Two challenging words of the title of this essay stand somehow between us and ourselves, so that we will have to get around the distortions unnecessarily presented by minority and culture in order to see the freedom and even the substance that is closer than we are ordinarily able to perceive. The lesser is minority,...
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Wealth Transfer
I just finished reading Claude Polin’s “The Quintessential Democratic Politician” (Vital Signs, November), and it was a gem. Yet even in this brilliant analysis of politics in a democracy the author brings up the Robin Hood chestnut, that in a democracy the numerous poor can rob the wealth that the rich have worked so hard...
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Education Reform
I enjoyed Christopher Sandford’s “It’s a Drag” (Cultural Revolutions, December). With memories of a teaching career beginning in 1960 in Zion, Illinois, and continuing through Montana, Indiana, Manitoba, Washington, and ending in New Hampshire in 2001, including secondary and elementary school and a passel of college English classes, I have a slightly different take on...
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Blame Bushmaster
The families of nine of the 26 people killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. The killings were carried out by Adam Lanza, a mentally disturbed 20-year-old living with his mother, Nancy. On the morning of the incident, Lanza shot his mother while she slept, took various unsecured...
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Two Ways of Dying
In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More states, when his interrogators threaten him with death, Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth,...
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A Different Drum
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
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Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
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Epiphanies of Grace
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” —Oscar Wilde, from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde wrote several first-rate plays, on which his literary reputation principally rests, and a number of mostly...
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LBJeb
You knew Jeb Bush was going to run for president; after all, assuming the worst is really the essence of conservatism. And, sure enough, he’s “actively exploring the possibility”—a half-measure that prefigures the weakness and tepidity of another Bush presidency. Conservatives tempted to glom onto an alleged winner might want to contemplate the wisdom of...
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Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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Justice for All
Five years before Michael Brown and Eric Garner would become household names, there was Mark Barmore. On August 24, 2009, Rockford, Illinois, police officers Oda Poole and Stan North were patrolling in a prisoner-transport van when they received a notice from a dispatcher that 23-year-old Mark Anthony Barmore was wanted for questioning in a domestic...
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Derail Fast Track!
Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP’s declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president. Give us powerful new majorities, said John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and we shall halt these usurpations of Congressional power. And, so,...
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Another Politician Abandons The Unborn
Earlier this week, Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio wrote an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal announcing that, after much soul-searching, he no longer considered himself pro-life. Ryan wrote that listening to constituents who have had abortions convinced him “that we must trust women and their families—not politicians—to make the best decision for...
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Je Suis Charlie Baudelaire
We men of good will had a little scare last week when it was announced that the Sun – a venerable British newspaper whose prose style makes America’s National Enquirer sound like an excerpt from a late Henry James novel read by a young Laurence Olivier – would bow to political pressure and axe Page...
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‘Greece-EU clash over anti-Russia statement: others may follow Athens’ suit’
Srdja Trifkovic on RT published January 28, 2015. A strongly worded anti-Russian statement, which was issued on January 27 by European Union heads of governments, did not have the consent of Greece’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, according to Greek officials. They insist that the European Council, the body which issued the statement, did not follow...
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Mencken-Barnum Awards Announced
For months there have been rumors circulating about the establishment of a set of annual prizes, commemorating two great American geniuses, H.L. Mencken and P.T. Barnum. The prizes are inspired by a single sentence from each genius: Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every...
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The Brooklyn Museum and the Triumph of Non-Art
In the current issue of Chronicles Thomas Fleming writes: Surrealists, communists, and Dadaists did not merely embrace the death of meaning and civility; they positively exulted in the death of the West and everything Western. They hated Christianity, especially the Catholic Church; they hated Europe, France in particular; they hated the classics; they hated white...
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The Persians Are Coming!
“The Iranians are on the march,” warned John McCain Sunday. “Iran is building a new Persian Empire,” echoed Col. Ralph Peters. So alarmed is Speaker Boehner, he invited Bibi Netanyahu to come and challenge U.S. policy toward Iran from the same podium where the president delivered his State of the Union address. Bibi will make...
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A Classic Smear Tactic
Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center retailed another smear using its classic tactic: attach the “hate group” label to a conservative Christian group, then claim others tolerate “hate” if they refuse to to disassociate themselves from the “hate group.” This one came from Heidi Beirich, chief propagandist of the group’s smear publishing arm. Here...
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MUHAMMAD N’EST PAS CHARLIE
The intention of Charlie Hebdo’s surviving editors in publishing another provocative front-page cartoon a week after the attack, this time of a teary Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie placard under the words Tout est pardonné (“All Is Forgiven”), is obscure and unimportant. One thing is clear, however: the historical Muhammad would never shed tears...
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Against Terrorism—But for What?
Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that France “is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism.” This tells us what France is fighting against. But what is France fighting for in this war on terror? For terrorism is simply a tactic, and arguably the most effective tactic of the national...
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Blowing Up the Base: An Abortion Strategy Revealed
The new Republican Congress already looks like a bunch of incompetent boobs. The legislatively meaningless vote for the perennial “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), which would prohibit abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy, was scheduled for a vote today, on the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. (I...
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57 million babies and counting, RIP
Something died in America 42 years ago today. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 edict, Roe v. Wade, forcing all 50 states to almost completely legalize abortion on demand – even those states that already had legalized it. About 57 million babies have been killed since. But something more died: Maybe...
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Parable of the Day
Begun in 1879 under the auspices of the University of Oxford and published in 1928 by Oxford University Press, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, now better known as the Oxford English Dictionary, is one of the greatest events in the history of Western civilization. What is not widely remembered is that the lexicographer...
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Suspicion
Along with scare quotes, the left frequently uses another deceptive tactic to prove that “hate” causes the problems of minorities, particularly blacks: Publishing conspiracy theories about the “suspicions” among blacks that racist mischief is afoot when something bad happens to a black person. A case in point: Salon‘s piece about the “memorial” to Eric Garner,...
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What MLK Day Says About Today’s America
In one of his most famous quotes, Winston Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Today’s America could be described as a country led by a plagiarist, with the help of another plagiarist, which celebrates a holiday in honor of a third plagiarist: Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, and Martin...
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Selma, 50 Years On
On Martin Luther King Day, 2015, how stand race relations in America? Selma, a film focused on the police clubbing of civil rights marchers led by Dr. King at Selma bridge in March of 1965, is being denounced by Democrats as a cinematic slander against the president who passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965....
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Tom Piatak Named Rockford Institute President
ROCKFORD, Ill., Jan. 14, 2015—After several months of successful work as Vice President, Thomas Piatak has been named President of The Rockford Institute by the Institute’s Board of Directors. Former President Thomas Fleming will continue to guide the Institute’s flagship publication as editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Mr. Piatak has been writing...
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A Day to Remember
Today, January 19, is a memorable date, the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans. Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of...
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To Die for Charlie Hebdo?
“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.” That maxim of Voltaire was among those most invoked by the marching millions in Sunday’s mammoth “Je Suis Charlie” rally in Paris. This week, in the spirit of Voltaire, French authorities arrested and charged...
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A Quiet European
Lt. Col. Dr. Mark Obrtel is a 48 year old officer of the army of the Czech Republic who has served with distinction in his country’s missions under NATO command in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. We would never know of him were it not for the fact that on December 30 he returned all...
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Pre-Born Pain and Political Cowardice
RedState.com is suggesting that the 114th Congress “may be the most pro-life Congress Washington has ever seen.” Exhibit A is the reintroduction of the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (HR 36). The bill, which has had many incarnations, most recently was passed by the House in the previous Congress, before dying in the Senate Judiciary...
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Welcome to the United States of George Soros
My wife keeps asking me how so many people seem to have the time to go out and demonstrate against the brutality of “racist white cops.” She asked a similar question, when there were regular marches against violence in the “community.” In both cases, I explained that they are paid to demonstrate, much as the...