Unraveling modern confusion about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. There is still a remarkable amount of confusion about one of the last acts of World War II: the use of the atomic bomb. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrible, but not more so than many other episodes of the war. To keep...
The Vast of Night Directed by Andrew Patterson ◆ Written by Andrew Patterson and Craig W. Sanger ◆ Produced by GED Cinema ◆ Distributed by Amazon Studios Shirley Directed by Josephine Decker ◆ Written by Sarah Gubbins based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell ◆ Produced by Los Angeles Media Fund ◆ Distributed by...
The Unconventional Tory In an age beset by anxiety over the survival of the nation-state and social traditionalism, the Canadian thinker George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) is an indispensable guide to making sense of the modern predicament. Although he contributed to the field of political philosophy, his major works feel more like the stuff of prophecy. In...
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann; Translated by Daniel Steuer; Belknap Press, Harvard University; 928 pp., $39.95 All states need a strategy, however rudimentary, in order to survive. Great powers need much more: a viable grand strategy for war and peace is called for to endure in the never-ending struggle for power, land, and resources. As A.J.P. Taylor...
It has been said ad nauseam that when Uncle Sam sneezes, the English bulldog catches the flu. Emulating American rioting has caught on over here with a bang, pun intended. As Douglas Murray wrote in The Spectator, riots are one import “we can do without.” It wasn’t always this way. In tumultuous 1968, the U.S. rioted after...
A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be included in a group meeting with a former adviser to President Trump. At one point, this former adviser asked me what I thought conservatives needed to do to win over younger Americans. I replied that the most important step conservatives could take was to make sure...
Bringing Up Buckley In his response to Jack Trotter’s essay on William F. Buckley, Jr. (“Defense of Bill Buckley,” Polemics and Exchanges, June 2020), Tom Pauken writes that Ronald Reagan as president “orchestrated an effective strategy that won the Cold War and dismantled the Soviet Empire.” This is a common misconception among both the right and...
Like many historical questions, critical reassessments of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki 75 years ago have moved generally from right to left. In the 1950s and even later, when National Review was unmistakably on the right, challenges to this decision were almost the orthodoxy of the day. The first time I saw...
Overwhelming force is war’s only mercy Alan J. Levine must be praised for his courage in discussing the United States’ atomic bombings of Japan without the tears, whining, and pleas for international forgiveness that are now requisite. The “confusion” discussed by the author was, of course, present in 1945, but it is now a largely artificial,...
Too many conservatives get Thomas Hobbes wrong. In a recent piece for The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer argues that the famed 17th century English philosopher is responsible for supplying the recipe for “a collectivist horror.” He credits Hobbes with having “inspired countless tyrants,” and says that “his collectivist nightmare…is not just the stuff of George Orwell[’s] and...
Stendhal was the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, who adopted it from the name of a German town he had seen with Napoleon’s army. His 1839 novel of the Napoleonic era, La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), was welcomed by a favorable and important review by Honoré de Balzac, and André Gide, an astute critic, included...
There is a real possibility that, this coming week, Joe Biden will be selecting the 47th president of the United States. For the woman Biden picks—he has promised to exclude from consideration all men, black, brown, white, or Asian—has a better chance of succeeding to the presidency than any vice-presidential nominee in U.S. history, other...
A Chronicles website reader self-identified as “bigfish92672” took exception to my statement (“Back to the Mosque,” July 22) that “[i]n the awful annals of the 20th century, two instances of genocide stand out,” the Nazi mass murder of European Jews and the Ottoman mass murder of Armenians. “No Holodomor, comrade?” commented he (or she) with...
With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building. The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is...
Have you seen the polls lately? I’m referring to those surveys which the media tout as predictors of how Donald Trump will fare in the November election. If you look at these polls and support the President’s reelection bid, a feeling of doom and gloom has probably set in. If this is how you feel,...
How great a burden can even an unrivaled superpower carry before it buckles and breaks? We may be about to find out. Rome was the superpower of its time, ruling for centuries almost the entirety of what was then called the civilized world. Great Britain was a superpower of its day, but she bled, bankrupted,...
Just after 1 a.m. on July 22, 2019, Tyler Wingate, a 24-year-old white male, was driving on Livernois in Detroit when Lawrence Davis, a 24-year-old black male, bumped into him. The two pulled into a gas station to resolve the minor fender bender. Both got out of their cars. Wingate took one step when Davis...
(This is part three of Prof. Trifkovic’s three-part series, “Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia.” Read part two here.) In a speech at Blackheath in 1876, Britain’s former Prime Minister William Gladstone told the Ottomans, “You shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but never again, as the years...
(This is part two of Prof. Trifkovic’s three-part series, “Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia.” Read part one here.) The Ottoman zenith was reached in the 16th century, when the Turks controlled Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, held Persia at bay, and pushed into central Europe after defeating the Hungarians at Mohács. The decline...
Is her racial diversity America’s greatest strength? So we are told. Yet, even before America becomes a majority-minority nation, 25 years from now, recent changes in the composition of the country are going to impact both parties in 2020. According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, between 2010 and 2020,...
In the Great Church where the holy gifts were revealed, the King of all, there came to them a voice from heaven, from the mouth of the angels: ‘Leave off your psalter, put away the holy gifts. Send word to the land of the Franks to come and take them: Let them come and take the...
I’ve suspected that the America First mandate perished sometime in early 2017. The Alabama Senate GOP primary runoff between Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville, where Trump endorsed the latter and mocked the former when he lost, is something like a nail in the coffin. Sessions, regardless of what Trump’s most devoted followers have to say about his...
Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing’s claims to the rocks, reefs, and resources of the South China Sea? For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week. “The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South...
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
I had to double-check recently that the Civil War actually did end in 1865. I wondered whether this was still the case after hearing Republican spokesmen and Conservative Inc. celebrities demonizing Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other 19th century Southern leaders. American history seems to grow more hateful to our establishment conservatives as the...
On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over Vice President George W. Bush. Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the election. He had lost 25 points in one...
Before our Black Lives Matter moment, one had not thought of the NBC networks as shot through with “systemic racism.” Yet, what other explanation is there for this week’s draconian personnel decision of NBCUniversal chairman Cesar Conde? According to Conde, the white share of NBC’s workforce, now 74 percent and divided evenly between men and...
Now that a federal appellate court has ordered the dismissal of the case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and outgoing intelligence chief Rick Grenell has released classified documents which cast the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a horrendous light, the depth of corruption within our nation’s chief domestic intelligence agency is abundantly clear....
Speaking at Mount Rushmore on Friday, and from the White House lawn on Saturday, July 4, Donald Trump recast the presidential race. He seized upon an issue that can turn his fortunes around, and the wounded howls of the media testify to the power of his message. Standing beneath the mammoth carved images of Presidents...
During the last few days, those of us who have questioned Conservatism Inc.’s willingness to stand up to the cultural left seem to have received new allies. David Marcus at The Federalist, Thomas D. Klingenstein at the Claremont Institute, and the commentator Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson’s program have all been taking shots at the...
On the Fourth of July near the end of the 18th century, citizens of Boston paraded into the church that gave birth to the first Tea Party movement. The city’s board of selectmen, the executive arm of the town government, had announced that Congressmen John Lowell, a Harvard-educated lawyer and notable of the founding generation,...
The Seattle Commune is no more. Declared three weeks ago by radical leftists as CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, rechristened CHOP, the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, the six-block enclave inside Seattle ceased to exist July 1. The cops shut it down. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. If...
The ideological trajectory followed by the first generation of neoconservatives, from their early fascination with Marxism during the Great Depression to their embrace of Cold War anti-communism and subsequent takeover of the Conservative movement, is by now a well-known chapter in American political history. The life and career of James Burnham followed a similar trajectory,...
If I recall correctly—always a dangerous way to start a sentence—it was sometime in the early to mid-’70s that John D. Berry wrote in his fanzine Hitchhike about a line of thinking that placed value on having “a sense of place.” My memory hasn’t retained where he got this notion from—possibly from an issue of Whole Earth Catalog—but the...
[The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr by Harvey Klehr; Encounter Books, 2019; 288 pp., $25.99] A distinguished professor of history at Emory University, Harvey Klehr has in a number of books exposed the workings of foreign communists and their American counterparts and fellow travelers in academia, government, the media,...
The Hunt (2020) Directed by Craig Zobel ◆ Screenplay by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof ◆ Produced by Blumhouse Productions ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures The Most Dangerous Game (1932) Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Shoedsack ◆ Screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman ◆ Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures The Candidate (1972)...
In the last weekend of May, I was horrified and astonished that my hometown and current residence of Minneapolis became the locus of a wave of violent rioting, fires, and property destruction that soon spread to the rest of America and throughout the Western world. I’m in my forties now and living relatively safely in...
The United States unemployment rate reached nearly 15 percent in April, with more than 40 million people out of work. Despite signs that the economy is getting ready to reopen after its long battering by the coronavirus, more than 20 million people have lost their jobs due to the virus as of the last week...
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
How Dead Languages Work, by Coulter H. George (Oxford University Press; 240 pp., $25.00). If, like University of Virginia classics professor Coulter George, you find dead languages an “endless source of intellectual delight,” then perhaps it’s time to explore Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Welsh. Admittedly, that esoteric list won’t help...
I have a passing interest in a first-century rhetorician and Hellenized Egyptian named Apion, who is the target of a famous polemic by Flavius Josephus, a member of the Jewish priestly class who became the court historian of the Flavian emperors. Published in Greek but known by its Latin name Contra Apionem, Josephus’s diatribe faults Apion for...
Socialism is cool again in America, but it’s not your father’s socialism. It is no longer “the rival but the patsy of state capitalism,” as Nathan Pinkoski writes in a penetrating article in Law & Liberty entitled “The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism.” The villain of this new socialism “is not the bourgeois but the...
[The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin; University of Missouri Press; 254 pp., $40.00] The intellectual roots of the American founding and in particular the Declaration of Independence have long been a matter of debate. Over the years, several major interpretations emerged. The first and most venerable...
In 1882 Congress took steps to control Chinese immigration with the passage of “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.” The act later became known misleadingly as the Chinese Exclusion Act. In high schools and colleges it’s taught that the act was simply another example of American racism. The real story is more...
If there is anything that we should have learned from the 20th century, it is that socialism turned out to be a colossal failure. That was not, however, obvious to large numbers of Americans at the time. Though they might not have bought into full-blown socialism, many 20th-century American intellectuals, economists, and politicians insisted that...
The United States finds itself at a geostrategic crossroads. The moment is comparable to the period between the dispatch of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 suggesting a new strategy for relations with the USSR, and the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, pledging U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to...
Solitude can offer a blissful disengagement from the horrors of modern-day life, even if it’s forced upon us by a government lockdown. Enforced solitude could even be a spiritual blessing, but for the escapism of television, that medium of absolute rubbish, vulgarity, and violence that Hollywood calls entertainment. As long as we avoid sabotaging diversions, we...
[Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark by Alva Noë; Oxford University Press; 208 pp., $21.95] I artificially altered my body to become a better baseball player. No, I didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs, though PED use was rampant during my time in professional baseball in the early 2000s. Anabolic steroids, human growth hormone,...