Category: Cultural Revolutions

In late January, I led a nine-member congressional delegation on a whirlwind trip to Switzerland, Poland, Rumania, Kosovo, and Morocco.  In Bern, at the Embassy Country Team Briefing, we were told that 90 percent of the Swiss were opposed to our occupation of Iraq.  In Morocco, our ambassador happily told us that pro-American feelings had...

Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending.  Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...

India, during the Cold War, was officially nonaligned.  She was closer to the Soviet Union, which saw her as a natural “anti-colonialist” ally and also wanted a regional counterbalance for China—and accordingly assisted India militarily and politically, especially during U.N. debates over the Kashmir conflict.  Later, in 1998, India’s continued refusal to sign the 1970...

Fr. Andrea Santoro, who was murdered in February in Trabzon, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, was a victim of jihadism. An Italian missionary priest who had served in Turkey for ten years, Father Santoro was shot twice at point-blank range in his church by a youth who shouted “Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is great!”) before fleeing...

Stephen Harper, a 43-year-old politician from Calgary, became the leader of the newly formed right-wing Canadian Alliance in 2002. One year later, he managed to unite his party with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the Conservative Party of Canada. On January 23, 2006, Mr. Harper—against all odds—brought an end to 12 years of Liberal...

After Hamas, the radical Islamic and anti-Western movement and terrorist organization, achieved victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I was invited by a leading think tank in Washington to debate with another Middle East analyst the implications of that stunning development for U.S. policy in the Middle East and the moribund “peace process.” I found...

Christians in Iraq have faced continuous attacks since the U.S. invasion. On January 29, three people died and more than twenty were injured when bombers targeted six churches in coordinated attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk as Sunday evening services ended. In Baghdad, Patriarch Emmanuel III missed the bombings by minutes as he was held up...

The Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court decision has brought the abuse of eminent domain to the forefront of the public’s awareness.  In Florida, private-sector developers and their allies in municipal-planning and economic-development departments are moving ahead on a number of projects that will force hundreds of retired mobile-home dwellers, and residents in...

The Oscar buzz this year is, in large part, about the prospects of Brokeback Mountain, the “gay Western” that has already won four Golden Globe awards and been nominated for eight Academy Awards.  A month ago, Brokeback Mountain had all the momentum, but that is now slowing as some have acknowledged that the film is,...

George W. Bush, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, gave a series of speeches seeking to justify his policy in Iraq.  The opening shot came at the Naval Academy in Annapolis on November 30, when he outlined the new “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” and declared that there is no alternative to a complete...

Eugene McCarthy, R.I.P.  When famous people die, they are usually overpraised in fulsome superlatives, well meant but losing all proportion.  I’ve complained about this before, and I try to resist the temptation.  I’ll try to resist it today; it won’t be easy but respect for the man himself forbids exaggeration of his virtues.  He wouldn’t...

Intelligent design had its day in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the result was sadly predictable.  So was the reaction to it. The evolutionist and atheist left ballyhooed the decision as another victory for science over superstition, and for the separation of Church and state.  The intelligent-design crowd vowed to continue fighting, and talk radio...

American soldiers stumble upon a secret dungeon and discover dozens of emaciated prisoners—173 of them, to be precise—who had simply vanished from the face of the Earth over the previous weeks and months.  Horrified GIs walk wide-eyed through the stinking chamber of horrors whose inmates grasp with difficulty that their ordeal is over.  Most of...

The riots in France were occupying my thoughts at the end of a long day, when the telephone rang.  It was a friend who lives in Metz, a quiet town that is a long train ride away from Paris.  “I’m looking out my window,” he said, “watching an apartment building going up in flames.  A...

American soldiers have, for more than 200 years, risked life and limb for their country.  The politicians who recruited and sometimes conscripted the soldiers routinely painted military service in glorious terms: You are protecting America—even the entire world. President George W. Bush continued in this tradition last Veterans Day.  The Iraq occupation “is vital to...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slate of fairly modest governmental reforms went down to stinging defeat on November 8, 2005, leading Californians to ponder a future in which their flawed celebrity governor has little power and the public-sector unions—the targets of most of the governor’s failed initiatives—are more brazen than ever. Following the election, I spoke...

Ralph Reed long ago proved that he is no conservative.  After Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in 1996, Buchanan had a legitimate chance to overtake Bob Dole and emerge as the Republican presidential nominee.  One of the major reasons he did not was the active (though largely behind-the-scenes) opposition of the Christian Coalition,...

George W. Bush bailed last September’s parliamentary election in Afghanistan as “a major step forward” for the country’s democratic process. When the results were published at the end of October, however, it became obvious that the Wolesi Jirga (Lower House) will be dominated by warlords, veteran jihadists, and former Taliban officials. The new legislature will...

Christopher Wilson was arrested in October in Polk County, Florida, on obscenity charges. Mr. Wilson’s pornographic website contains pictures of the wives and girlfriends of his paying customers posing and engaging in sex acts, and he claims that about a third of his reported 160,000 customers are in the U.S. military. When some of those...

Dennis Rader, the disgusting, twisted pervert who flattered himself with the moniker “BTK” (for “bind, torture, and kill”), is a living witness to the existence of the Devil. On August 18,2005, he was sentenced to 175 consecutive years in prison for ten grisly murders—the harshest sentence that Judge Gregory Waller of the Wichita district court...

As America drifts away from orthodox religious belief, God becomes less and less personal and more and more political.  The secular world surrounds and absorbs the spiritual.  In the 21st century, the Lord joins political parties, circulates petitions, stumps for candidates.  The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in a Chicago Sun-Times column, tells us that “[a] conservative...

Bill Clinton has summoned “his own mini-General Assembly of presidents, prime ministers, kings and other pooh-bahs” to devise plans for “addressing poverty, global warming, religious conflict and better governance.” The inaugural meeting of what the perjurer in chief modestly calls the Clinton Global Initiative has brought together 800 bigwigs who paid $15,000 each for a...

George W. Bush was lauded in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2003 by Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, for promoting a new brand of “conservatism.”  According to Barnes, President Bush is a “big government conservative,” and his administration believes “in using what would normally be seen as...

Oil prices have been soaring, yet the U.S. media has overlooked one of the chief reasons why.  The 2005 Department of Defense report on “The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China” cites Beijing’s growing need for foreign sources of metals and fossil fuels as a “driver of strategy,” noting that these account for...

The traditional family is being attacked with an unconventional weapon: children’s story books.  As books promoting a pro-homosexual ideology have slipped into public elementary-school libraries across America, unsuspecting children as young as age four have been exposed to immoral themes and content. Such was the case when the seven-year-old daughter of Michael and Tonya Hartsell...

Abortion advocates were pleased when reports from the world of medicine suggested that it cannot be shown conclusively that a child in the womb feels the pain of the needle to his heart, the vacuum sucking away his body parts, or the curette that carefully slices him to pieces.  However, a careful reflection on such...

Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media.  A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...

Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whom President George W. Bush has nominated to take the place of retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, is what we used to call a “lawyer’s lawyer.”  He comes from  Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Harvard Law Review, a...

The death of Adm. James Stockdale on July 5 robs America of one of the best men of our time.  A soldier and a patriot, Admiral Stockdale also possessed the kind of inquiring mind and thirst for virtue that is the mark of a true philosopher. Born and raised in Illinois, Stockdale attended Monmouth College...

As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.”  On the one hand, he is on record as saying...

Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88.  An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William...

Two women marines and a female Navy petty officer were killed, and eleven were wounded, when their convoy was ambushed on the night of June 23 in Fallujah.  The Pentagon took several days to confirm the casualties, and media coverage was thin.  If Americans took note of the tragedy at all, it was not to...

Whenever Washington targets some poor, misbegotten country for “regime change,” references to that unfortunate nation’s media by Western journalists are usually preceded by the modifier state-owned or state-controlled.  The inference is clear: These guys are shills, not real journalists.  Yet the West has its own state-owned and controlled media: The Brits have the BBC, and...

Guantanamo Bay is the subject of continuous debate.  Can the United States detain indefinitely members of the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda insurgents captured in Iraq, at our military base in Cuba?  What sort of interrogation measures are permissible by international law in order to obtain information to protect Americans from the continuing...

The Downing Street Memo, a British-government document on Iraq leaked in May to the Sunday Times, may be as close as the American public will get to a “smoking gun” implicating the Bush White House in manipulating this country into war.  A July 23, 2002, memo (actually, the minutes of a British cabinet meeting) written...

The French and the Dutch rejections of the proposed E.U. constitution by referenda (May 29 and June 1, respectively) shook the European neoliberal federation—though it was unwilling to concede defeat: The European Union’s Luxembourg presidency and the leaders of France and Germany immediately declared that the process of ratifying the charter should proceed in other...

The L.A. Mayoral election has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the national media, which rarely understands the consequences of events taking place in California, a state that functions more like a separate nation.  The media portrayed former California Assembly speaker and L.A. city councilman Antonio Villaraigosa’s landslide victory in May as a national example for...

Embryonic stem cells are always a controversial topic, especially when politicians wrangle over whether the government should support the practice of harvesting them.  Some argue that only embryonic stem cells are valuable, while others have shown that research employing adult or umbilical-cord-blood stem cells has greater success.  This debate is not about facts, however, but...

Some republicans object to using the term nuclear option to describe their plan to end filibusters on the Senate floor during confirmation hearings, but the image of total war is a fitting one for the possible direction of the “upper chamber” these days. The 11th-hour compromise between the squishes in both parties will only serve...

Pope Benedict XVI, in an appeal to the sheep newly his own on the day of his enthronement, said, “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”  We can be sure he knows who these wolves are after a quarter-century as head of the Holy Office. Here are some of...

The “scandal” surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) has all the earmarks of a Washington feeding frenzy—which means, in short, that most ordinary Americans couldn’t care less.  Financial shenanigans in the Imperial City?  I’m shocked, I tell you—shocked!  Yet there is a lesson here, albeit not the one the Democrats and other “good government”...

Iraq’s Christians may be on their way to extinction, thanks to the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.  Today, Iraq’s mostly Catholic and Orthodox Christians are fleeing the country, with their destination of choice being, ironically, Syria, another target for “regime change” on the neoconservative hit list. More than two years ago, Chronicles...

Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination by President George W. Bush as the new president of the World Bank has caused a storm of protests from abroad, but the news is good.  At his new post, Wolfowitz will not be able to do nearly as much damage as he has done at the Pentagon. That damage has been...

George Frost Kennan died on March 17 in his home—one year and one month and one day after his 100th birthday.  I am now 81 years old.  He was the greatest American I have known. He was (and remains) A Triumph of Character.  His obituaries recorded his many achievements adequately, often with the praise that...

The neoconservative ideology of Western (preferably American) democracy and free markets is a form of secular religion.  The door to this secular church begins to open to the sinner when he starts surfing the internet, watching CNN, eating at McDonald’s, and reading the gospel according to Tom Friedman.  And he (“or she”—adding that is itself...

By any standard, the life of Pope John Paul II was extraordinary.  Born in a small town in a country that had been the plaything of dynasts for centuries before his birth, and which became the target of history’s bloodiest tyrants during his adult years, Karol Wojtyla became the first non-Italian pope in nearly five...

The Michael Jackson trial is underway, and the media is licking its chops each day in anticipation of all of the lurid details that will continue to surface over the next several months.  Jackson, who is 46, has been charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy who was, at the time of the alleged incidents, a...

President George Bush has encouraged Arabs and Israelis to “lay down the past.”  “Territorial compromise is essential for peace,” he said.  “We seek peace, real peace.  And by real peace I mean treaties.”  Israelis praised President Bush for promising not to railroad them into any agreements, while the Palestinians believed he showed support for their...

The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year.  Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory.  At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading.  England,...

President Bush, in his State of the Union Address, repeated a campaign promise: “Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be re-defined by activist judges.  For the good of families, children, and society, I support a Constitutional Amendment to protect the institution of marriage.”  The President must know,...