Author: H. A. Scott Trask (H. A. Scott Trask)

The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....

Reading Ann Coulter’s newest polemical masterpiece brings to mind one of her previous ones.  I don’t mean her sparkling In Trump We Trust, published just before the 2016 election (and reviewed in this magazine), in which she predicted that the unthinkable would happen.  Rather I refer to her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob...

The first thought that occurred to me upon receiving a review copy of David Garrow’s hefty biography of our former president was, besides its weight (four pounds), how the jacket photograph perfectly expresses what is revealed in 1,084 pages of text.  It was taken in 1990 while Obama was at Harvard Law School, three years...

Historians of our day have long debated whether ideas or interests are the prime drivers of human decisions.  The Hegelian school, which includes neoconservatives and neoliberals, believes the answer is ideas—freedom, democracy, and equality.  Marxists say material interests alone.  We may dismiss both groups as crude simplifiers.  What’s more, the debate ignores what from a...

Who would have thought that, 20 years after Pat Buchanan’s failed presidential bid, a billionaire New York real-estate developer and reality-television star would win the Republican presidential nomination running on the same issues Buchanan campaigned on in 1996, and with the same unifying theme of putting America (and Americans) first?  Yet it has happened.  Not...

John Derbyshire is among the most prominent and prolific of writers of the paleo or nationalist right.  I think of him as a Tory, and his writing as Swiftian.  Some readers of this magazine are likely regular readers of his online essays, a selection of which, all culled from the year 2013, have been reprinted...

By any reasonable measure, the policies carried out by the U.S. government since 1990 toward the Muslim countries of the Middle East (democracy promotion, regime change, political stabilization, “peace process,” antiterrorism) have failed disastrously.  Not only is nothing better over there, but everything is worse over here, the home of the not-so-brave and ever-less-free.  Every...

In November 1972 I voted for the re-election of President Nixon.  Granted, it was only an elementary-school straw poll, but I was still thrilled when he carried the student body by a three-to-one margin.  On election night, the electoral map was covered in a sea of blue (in those days each party retained its appropriate...

When I was younger and precociously interested in politics (I subscribed to National Review and looked forward to Firing Line every Sunday), I knew who George Kennan was.  He was the brilliant author of the Containment Doctrine who had later gone soft on communism and become a liberal.  If someone had told me, “No, it...

The latest, and perhaps the best, book to be written in the wake of the Great Recession raises an important question: Why is it that America’s self-appointed elite refuses to learn from its long record of failure and futility in economic management that its ideas and policies are all wrong? The answer is provided by...

“What am I doing here?”  That was not the question that Paul Theroux expected to be asking himself not long after he returned to his beloved Africa and exclaimed that he was “happy again.”  His last African journey, chronicled in Dark Star Safari (2003), was south by land from Cairo to Cape Town.  This time,...

The recent flood of secession petitions in the wake of the re-election of President Barack Obama has raised secession to something more than the curiosity or esoteric joke that it has been heretofore.  In the 1990’s an occasional newspaper article appeared about the League of the South or the Vermont independence movement, treating them as...

John Lukacs saw it as the great chasm dividing two centuries.  George F. Kennan called it “the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century.” The adjective in the title of The Lost History of 1914 refers to the five ways in which the Great War might not have happened—five lost paths leading to peace.  Though...

What is the Mexican drug war but a parable for our times?  Here is the blighted and poisoned fruit of the very policies that our rulers promised us would bring growth and development, prosperity and peace, justice and the rule of law to the whole world.  Those policies were free trade, unregulated capital and labor...

Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892.  They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God” were not added until 1954.  But they...

It is the contention of William McGowan that the once august New York Times, our “newspaper of record” (for lack of an alternative), has become a politically correct sheet.  He blames the nepotistic reign of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who inherited the publishing mantle in 1991 upon the retirement of his legendary father, Arthur O. “Punch”...

Of the making of Civil War books there shall be no end.  There are so many, most of which cover the same bloody ground in much the same slogging way, without any new insight or contribution.  To make matters worse, American historians have rewritten the war as a simplistic moral melodrama between the forces of...

Most of what we see and read from the government and its media organs are variations on a tired but persistent theme of irreversible progress toward utopia.  (William Pfaff has a new book arguing that secular utopianism, even more than war profiteering or career advancement, is what drives U.S. foreign policy, making it impervious to...

North-central Idaho is rugged can­yon, mountain, and ranch country.  Its dominant culture is that of the British and American borderlands.  Its people are descendants of 19th-century pioneers and homesteaders (some of them Missouri Confederates who went west after the war).  They are fiercely individualistic, but they also take care of one another.  They know how to...

Soon after his election in 1844, James K. Polk sat down with the historian George Bancroft and, before offering him the Cabinet post of secretary of the Navy, sketched the four objectives of his presidency.  They were to lower the tariff, restore the independent treasury system, extend American sovereignty over the vast Oregon Country (claimed...

Mr. Greider is a hopeful man.  Although he believes the United States is in deep trouble, “deeper than many people suppose and the authorities want to acknowledge,” he also believes the country is on the cusp of a second populist uprising, which will force elites to confront the perils of globalism, militarism, economic inequality, ecological...

In his essay on “self-reliance,” Emerson wrote that “travelling is a fool’s paradise.”  He was referring to those who travel to escape the boredom or sadness of their lives, and who hope to return home somehow transformed.  Yet we may add those who travel to boast (“Look, here I am at the Parthenon!” or “I...

The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age.  The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...

The long-suffering and largely ignored paleoconservatives might be forgiven for taking some satisfaction in the recent bursting of so many bubbles of avarice and pride, the sudden exposure of so many highly leveraged speculations in stupidity.  Let us recount some of the failed millennial assertions by the ruling party: that history has come to an...

All of our history is now “indoctrination by historical example.”  The academicians who write the officially approved, politically correct distortions of it have failed history, and us.  They are of two types: the courtiers, smiling sycophants such as “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss and the insufferable Doris Kearns Goodwin; and their envious colleagues, politically correct pedants,...

The title of Chalmers Johnson’s latest book, the last in his trilogy of empire, invokes the Greek goddess of retribution.  He named the first book in his trilogy after the CIA term for the harmful unintended consequences that sometimes result from the agency’s covert policies.  “Blowback,” he wrote, “is but another way of saying that...

The- Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia.  The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run.  The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full of rocks, with open spaces so small that vegetable gardens...

We do not hear much about the Armenian genocide of 1915.  Even less well known is the Turk’s expulsion of the Greeks of Western Anatolia and the Pontic coast in the years after World War I.  At Smyrna, Greek and Armenian Christians were literally driven into the sea or massacred.  Shockingly, nearly 20 British, French,...

This book will surely be widely denounced.  Its merit, which is considerable, is suggested by the vast coalition who will want to deride it: the corporate elite, Republicans, Clinton Democrats, neoliberals, the politically correct lobby, libertarians, neocons.  Any author who can provoke such an array of enemies must be onto something. Walter Benn Michaels’ argument...

“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...

To be published by a university press, one must demonstrate originality of scholarship.  In a forgetful age, that is not hard to do.  It is easier still when a constant rewriting of history is required to meet the ever-changing dictates of empire.  This latest biography of Edgar Allan Poe promises to emphasize “as never before”...

McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union by Ethan S. Rafuse Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 525 pp., $35.00 Walt Whitman remarked after it was over that “the real war will never get in the books,” and, despite all the volumes that have been written since then, his prediction remains largely...

The contrast between the importance of the subject of Richard Buel’s new book—New England’s defiance of federal authority during the years of commercial embargo and war with England—and the dullness and conventionality of the narrative reminds us that history is too important to be left to the current occupants of the academy. To enter the...

There is a scene in Oliver Stone’s powerful and haunting antiwar film Born on the Fourth of July (1989), in which Ron Kovic’s mother is bending down before the television (this is B.R.—before the remote) and wincing.  It is the Fourth of July, 1969, and long-haired antiwar protesters are surging through the capital with angry...

“This book tells a story about the twentieth century, which has in it a lesson for the twenty-first—one that I would think unlikely to be learned, since it is a moral lesson, concerning the role of virtue in human existence, and we know about moral lessons.”  Thus begins William Pfaff’s incisive and bracing study of...

For those of us who love the Old Republic, a new book by David Hackett Fischer is a cause for celebration.  His newest will not disappoint the high expectations created by his previous work.  Washington’s Crossing is really a successor volume to Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), about the battles of Lexington and Concord and the...

Brenda Wineapple’s new biography of the most brilliant flower of the New England Renaissance reminded me that it was time to reread Hawthorne.  She delineated the man very well, got his politics almost right, but barely did justice to his work. Writing in 1847, ten years after the publication of Hawthorne’s first collection of stories,...