Irony has been in the news these past few days, when a couple of guys not only refused to share a Frenchman’s joke at the expense of the Prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him, but actually gunned down the joker– along with a dozen of his cronies, for good measure. For comparison I...
Year: 2015
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A Triumph of Terrorism
Western media are declaring the million-man march in Paris, where world leaders paraded down Boulevard Voltaire in solidarity with France, a victory over terrorism. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Unfortunately, the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, its military-style execution, the escape of the assassins, and their blazing end in a shootout Friday was a triumph...
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Muslim Terrorism in Paris
Muslim Terrorism in Paris, Michel Houellebecq’s Cowardice, and the Islamization of France: An Interview with Russian writer Elena Choudinova, author of The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque. Translated from Russian by Eugene Girin Eugene Girin: Elena, you are the author of the sensational, politically-incorrect bestseller, The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque, published in 2005, which...
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More On Noir and Two Additional Silents You Should See
One responder to my previous post, “Notes on noir”, asked why so many movies are called film noir when, by my lights, they’re not. The simple, somewhat cheeky answer is “brand creep”: film noir is a bankable label for a crime movie, so it’s come to be liberally applied. More to the point is that...
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The Predictable Media Reaction
This random collection requires a strong stomach. Let’s start with The New York Times (January 9): “M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, sought to quantify the correlation between Islam and violence . . . ‘Is Islam violent? I would say absolutely not,’ Mr. Fish said in an interview. ‘There...
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Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo
Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? Even to ask that question seems absurd. Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? Even to ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and...
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Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. —William Blake Some thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris: 1. Maybe gun control isn’t such a great idea. The killers somehow got AK-47s and possibly...
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France’s Malaise
“You can feel that this can’t continue,” Michel Houellebecq declared two weeks ago following the publication of his novel Soumission, imagining a Muslim-ruled France a decade from now. “Something has to change. I don’t know what, but something.” The carnage in Paris on January 7 has the potential, slim yet real, to trigger off that...
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Reaping the Whirlwind With Charlie Hebdo
A handful of Muslims brutally murdered some French cartoonists for blaspheming their holy man. Have we learned something new from this? Yes, it turns out Muslims (well, the fundamentalist types, not many, but more than you’d think, although not the majority, but a significant number, in no way “all,” but in some sense “all”) don’t...
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Allahu Akbar, Indeed!
France is going to be transformed after today’s horror, or France will die. Having spent the holiday season in the South of France I can aver with some authority that the plutocrats are worried. They know that the chattering classes in the nation’s capital – led by the idiots of Bernard Henri Levy’s ilk –...
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Will Republicans Blow Another Opportunity to Stand Up for the Middle Class?
The big political news this week was that 25 Republican members of the House of Representatives did not vote to re-elect John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Most of those voting against Boehner were conservatives, and the principle source of dissatisfaction was Boehner’s pushing through the House a massive spending bill that provided funding...
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A Party at War with Itself
For the third time, the cops of the NYPD have turned their backs on the mayor of New York. The first time was when Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived at Woodhull Hospital where mortally wounded officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu had been taken on Dec. 20. The second was when the mayor spoke at...
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Stock Taking
Today, as it happens, is Christmas Day in the Orthodox calendar, and so, instead of carrying on with the holiday marathon of Manlio Orobello’s Lays of Sicilian Life, I thought I would pause and take stock. A new year has just wafted in, after all, to whispers of the first snowfall in Palermo since 1956,...
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Pope Francis: Man of the Year?
In the midst of the cold war declared by the NYPD against our ultra-liberal mayor, the hot wars in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, I could not help but notice a well-written and hard-hitting piece by traditionalist Catholic attorney Christopher Ferrara for redoubtable Remnant newspaper. Now, why is Ferrara’s “The Remnant’s Man of the Year” article,...
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Is War in the Cards for 2015?
“If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” said Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the Reagan White House. Among the dispositions shared by the two conservatives was a determination to stay out of other...
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2015: A Global Assessment
It is futile to make any but short-term predictions on world affairs: there are just too many variables in the equation, too many unknown-unknowns. The escalation of the Ukrainian crisis and the rise in U.S.-Russian tensions could have been forecast a year ago, in general terms at least, but the explosive rise of ISIS could...
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A Helluva Good Universe Next Door
Interstellar Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Nightcrawler Produced by Bold Films Written and directed by Dan Gilroy Distributed by Open Road Films In their latest film, Interstellar, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan have tried to revive a tired science-fiction premise about the world’s...
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Church, Immigration, and Nation
In the realm of the spirit, there are few prospects more terrifying than meeting God—the Father, the Creator, the unconditioned Absolute Whose essence is His existence. Even Moses, the appointed mediator for his people, could not view God face to face; so God granted him a burning bush as an icon. God’s spirit or shadow...
Issue
January 2015
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Tongues of Fire: America’s Phony Religion of Immigration
One year ago, House Republicans were girding their loins to introduce legislation that would amnesty millions of illegal aliens. The “path to citizenship” was reportedly off the table, as GOP leaders, in an effort to please everyone (meaning no one), prepared to veer off onto the “path to legalization,” kicking the can of citizenship down...
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A Book That Needs to Be Read
There are many reasons why one might conclude that the United States is in a spiral of self-destruction and is in fact no longer a Christian country. One of the most obvious—apart from 40-plus years of legalized abortion—is the current effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. But this is just the latest in...
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Insecure Liberalism
As I was reading my monthly Bible—guess what that is—I came across an enthusiastic review of a book, written by a French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, entitled Metamorphoses of the City. I rushed to buy a copy. The book purports to be an account of the evolution of European political systems from the days of...
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Is Immigration Our Fate?
Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say. This is just plain ridiculous. A small group of people leaving their country to found their...
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The Revenge of the Confederacy
The American political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, religionists and secularists. It is between roughly two halves of the country, each of which would be perfectly happy to see the other wiped, by violence if necessary, from the face of the earth. That was not how the North and...
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Adrift in Eminent Domain
I begin with a flourish of disclosure, which gives me great pleasure as a gesture of wistful recollection. Professor Baldwin was my roommate at university, occupying the bunk above mine. The wall space over that prisonlike fixture of canvas ticking and rude ironmongery was decorated with an enormous portrait of Karl Marx that would not...
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The Exterminator
As John McCain and Lindsey Graham hector us to invade the Middle East once more, we might pause to reflect on a 2001 article published by Zev Chafets, an American-Israeli journalist who is currently the Likud Party’s unofficial spokesman. (Chafets, as you may know, is the author of A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews,...
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The Practice of Politics
This is a history of liberalism as it appears to an intelligent, well-informed, and thoroughly convinced English liberal who worked for many years as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. It is useful as a sympathetic exploration of the stages through which the political outlook that rules us today has advanced. The book is...
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Boris at Home
I enjoyed Emma Elliott Freire’s very thorough chronology of the life and times of London Mayor Boris Johnson (“The Exceptional Rise of Boris Johnson,” News, December). May I offer just two brief additional points, including a mild correction? Mrs. Freire writes, “Only MPs are eligible to become prime minister.” Such has certainly been the convention...
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Who Is One to Judge?
I found myself aghast that, after more or less favorably reviewing Calvary (“Vocation,” In the Dark, November), which sounds like a disgusting and anti-Catholic movie, George McCartney takes the opportunity to declare that “mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic clergy is a benighted institution that’s done much harm to the Church.” He credits the recent...
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Aliens and Strangers
“Pope Francis: Caring for the Poor Doesn’t Make You a Communist,” screamed the headline the day before Halloween. Perhaps not, I thought when I read the story, but why is it that caring for the world’s poor always seems to involve massive national and international programs of wealth transfer that might have been copied directly...
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Political Liberty and the Classical Tradition
When people ask me, “Why study the classics?”, I give the same answer that has been given for past 2,500 years or more: So as not to end up a stupid barbarian. As G.K. Chesterton remarked nearly 100 years ago, in any generation those who count will be talking of Troy, and since today, few...
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Stomaching ISIS
I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...
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Benjamin Franklin’s American Dream
Today’s preferred way to think about immigration and the nation-state is exemplified in the title of a 1964 pamphlet that the Anti-Defamation League published posthumously under the name of John F. Kennedy: A Nation of Immigrants. The next year, the martyred President’s brother Teddy had his name put on the 1965 immigration act of such...
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Rudderless at the Pentagon
Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan...
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A Guilty Elite: Immigration Beyond Economics
America’s immigration enthusiasts, which is to say her entire ruling class, have such untrammeled access to the mainstream media that they are able to launch obviously absurd memes in shamelessly coordinated fashion. Thus, in the wake of the Republican triumph in the 2014 midterm elections—which of course had no effect on them at all; being...
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Living With Foreigners
My grandfather, Nicola Raimondo, came from a little town called Torre di Ruggiero, at the tip of the Italian boot. It was a poor place then, and it looks to be even poorer today, from what I can tell, with half the place for sale and the other half in ruins. He was 15 years...
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The States Fight Back
What if the states started to fight back against federal refusal to protect American borders? What if they started challenging, even nullifying, federal actions that promote illegal aliens coming and staying here? Despite the centralization of America since at least 1865, the 50 states retain a surprising amount of autonomy. And oddly enough, the flood...
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After Strange Gods
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
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A Racial Revolution
“My tradition is not to remark on cases where there still may be an investigation,” declared President Obama as he upstaged New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio on December 3, speaking from the White House Tribal Nations Conference. His statement was not difficult to evaluate for its truth content, but remarkable—even from him—for its revelation of...
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A Cynic’s Dictionary: D-E
cynic (’sin-ick) n.—One who no longer believes in the comforting illusions and protective half-truths that others use unreflectively to get through their lives. D debt, n.—An ingenious device cooked up in the early days of capitalism to promote the work of bankers and others of wealth by convincing people of the counterintuitive truth that owing...