Category: Under the Black Flag

Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs.  He also said that only a man without a brain tweets. (Well, he would have said it, were he around today.)  The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with...

If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life.  (Just kidding: I shall wait for the...

Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then?  School would be out in early June, and by the time horrid September rolled around, it seemed three years had passed. What fun it was to be young, and for it to be summer!  No homework, no need to stay in shape,...

If you thought comedy was dead, think again.  There’s always John Podhoretz, the ferociously bellicose neocon who makes Patton and Rommel sound like popinjays when he thunders away, urging Uncle Sam to attack and crush his enemies wherever they might be hiding.  Beating the war drums is very old hat here in the good old...

I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers—starting with the New York Times, of course—as typical American teenagers.  Some Americans, is all that comes to mind.  Why is it that after every outrage family members and friends of the perpetrators are...

OK, the tenth anniversary of the worst foreign blunder Uncle Sam has ever committed has come and gone, but the post-anniversary headlines remain the same: “Explosions in Baghdad kill dozens and wound scores” (International Herald Tribune, March 20); “For Iraqis, no time for reflection, only desperation” (op. cit., March 19); “Iraq War Intelligence Was a...

In a tiny hamlet next to where I live, high up in the Swiss Alps, two gay friends of mine have set up house, and a beautiful old chalet it is.  One, a German, is straight out of central casting of a Panzer commander; the other, an Englishman, more P.G. Wodehouse than John Bull.  Both...

The latest school massacre  has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played.  His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...

This is the best news I’ve had since both the governor of the state of New York and a congressman from the depraved city of New York had to resign because of sex scandals.  The latest good news is that Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer.  Unfortunately, the kicking...

Back in 1839, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted Hume: “Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature.”  So...

Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey who is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village that once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled, now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveau riche and vulgar.  I’ve often written about Bernie because, for a very short...

Here we go again!  Scary sofa-samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon foreign-policy “scholar,” is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies.  Kagan says that, if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election would be over—he would win overwhelmingly.  Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing...

Nicholas Soames is Winston Chur­chill’s grandson—his mother being Winny’s only living child—a Conservative member of Parliament since the mid-70’s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble (but the less said about that the better).  Soames has...

Back in September 1970 I found myself in Damascus, as charming a city as it is ancient, the natives friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab from two days before.  My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the...

Greece is certainly female.  Like the fair sex, she changes her mind nonstop.  One day she sleeps with the German suitor; the next she decides to declare her independence from the Kraut and go it alone.  Finally, she chooses both—the moneybags and her freedom.  After all, she’s Greek, and she thinks that rules do not...

In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family’s midst by posing as the college son of Sidney Poitier who has lost his credit card and wallet.  The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up with the predictable results.  The family is almost...

Here we go again, sports fans!  During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms.  The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times. ...

I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the E.U. Nazis.  The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ochre-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by...

No matter how one looks at it, it wasn’t Italy’s finest hour.  Not even Gabrielle d’Annunzio, poet, patriot, propagandist, and protofascist, could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the behavior of the passengers and crew became an adverb, as in cowardly.  This much...

When I was last in the Big Bagel, as I call Noo Yawk, an heroic policeman with countless commendations for bravery and 22 years of front-line service was murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer, La­mont Pride, the latter having previously been let loose by a black female judge who ignored a warrant...

I haven’t seen J. Edgar, the Hollywood movie about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don’t plan to, even though I have loved all of Clint Eastwood’s films, especially those he’s directed.  Yet J. Edgar does not do it for me, as they say.  It’s based on a lie, and a monstrous one at that: Hoover...

A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige.  Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son, Geoffrey, who lives 50 yards away from me in Gstaad.  British...

The black American fugitive who was recently caught after 41 years on the lam brought back lots of memories.  No, I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, and the memories are quite pleasant, because I met all those so-called Black Liberation Army con men in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from...

On September 1, 1957, a pretty French girl by the name of Patricia and an Italo-French couple, Feruccio and Ellen, joined me in the old harbor of Cannes waiting to board the super-new luxury liner Cristoforo Colombo.  Our destination was Capri, and we had decided to go on the spur of the moment.  Capri’s season...

I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977, in Corfu.  I was on board Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a very smart Englishman whose Ancient Greek is much better than yours.”  I knew Paddy, as everyone called him, by sight, because...

The very first day  I spent at a prestigious prep school—I was ten—I was punished for breaking the rule that no new boy was allowed to walk on the grass.  “Rhinies,” as we were called at Lawrenceville, had to stick to the paths, and the only time we could walk on the grass was during...

Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride.  She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist anti­semite and left the house in a fury.  P.J. apologized and followed his bride out.  To this day I haven’t figured...

It sounds presumptuous, but I wish I had written this column in October 2002, and some eagle-eyed George W. Bush assistant would have noticed it and shown it to his moron boss.  Let’s just play the What If game for a minute.  Had the moron read it and taken what I’m about to write into...

It is the rise of people-power all over the Muslim world, and I’ve got news for you.  The people—or the street, as it’s called in places like Cairo, Manama, Sana, and Amman—are united by two things only: A loathing for the autocratic crooks who have been keeping them poor and lording it over them since...

What is it with the wives of despots?  Leïla Ben Ali (Baba), ex-first lady of Tunisia and a former hairdresser, makes her escape from the country her hubby and her relatives raped, but not before a brief stop at the bank where she demands and receives one-and-a-half tons of gold—worth 67 million big ones—which she...

Having been caught out by the demon memory gene of the sainted editor—I tried to recycle a Paris nostalgia piece—I shall nevertheless return to my brother-in-law’s funeral in Paris a few years ago, which prompted the recycle, and this time write about death.  François de Caraman was a marquis whose father, the duke de Caraman,...

Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change.  During the last week of November, in Portland, Oregon, the FBI arrested a Somali-born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in a public square full of mothers and children.  The...

The only time I saw Bill Clinton in the flesh was four years ago in the London Ritz.  I was having lunch with Leopold and Debbie Bismarck and the mother of my children, as I call Princess Alexandra Schoenburg-Hartenstein, my wife.  There were Krauts galore plus some English friends, and we were celebrating Alexandra’s birthday,...

“People were very happy seeing this” was the quote in the New York Times report about a couple being stoned to death after they tried to marry without permission.  About 200 villagers took part in the stoning in the Kunduz Province of Afghanistan, including the man’s brother as well as other relatives.  It was a...

The Trinity College Historical Society, the debating arm of Trinity College, Dublin, kindly invited yours truly to open the debate season by defending the motion “This House would get high.”  Alas, I had to refuse, as I was leaving for America, but the motion did sound interesting.  Once upon a time I was the greatest...

His writing these last 40 years amounts to little more than a succession of malicious ad hominem attacks on people he disagrees with.  His appeal is to those with a dirty mind, who want society to be as dirty as he is, and who are glad to erode barriers of decency.  There is a coy...

As everyone knows, Greece became a member of the eurozone on the back of a lie.  The colonels’ regime had collapsed, Greek politicians were nervous, and that pseudo-French aristocrat Giscard promised entry to a country that is more Middle Eastern than European, but with olive oil.  Entry meant no more tanks surrounding Parliament at midnight—rather...

My birthplace has been in the news lately—this time not for tragic plays, philosophy, or wartime gallantry, but for cheating.  In cahoots with Goldman (Ali Baba) Sachs, the Greeks cooked the books, took E.U. money, and ran.  Once caught, they rioted and even managed to murder a pregnant woman who—unlike the rioters—was working at her...

Like the songs tell us, June is busting out all over, and love is in the air.  Unlike humans, dolphins can never get enough of love.  They are constantly nuzzling and staring into each other’s eyes.  And they are known to make love—up to 43 times in half an hour.  That beats Tiger’s record by...

“The only thing missing is the sign Arbeit Macht Frei,” said an English friend as we watched a British-made documentary on the children of Gaza.  My wife, a German, winced.  I did not.  Watching a Palestinian father break down and cry while an Israeli official refuses him an exit permit so his seven-year-old son can...

Watching the finals of the Austral­ian Open was a revelation.  The worthy loser, Andy Murray, praised the winner, Roger Federer, by saying that he, Murray, could cry like Roger, but as yet could not play as well.  He then broke down and wept in front of thousands.  The crowd loved it and cheered Andy to...

Thirty-nine years ago this spring I was in Vietnam, busy sending nonstop dispatches back home about how well the war was going for the good guys.  When the North Vietnamese took Quang Tri in the north a year later and were about to attack Hue, Bill Buckley sent me a cable asking for 1,000 words...

The story thus far: Not content with plunging the world’s economy into the worst crisis since the 30’s, the avaricious and reckless bankers have been saved from ruin—momentarily—by our taxes, yet they continue to treat us with breathtaking contempt.  Far from feeling any remorse or humility, they pay themselves annual bonuses larger than what most...

A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include Mel Gibson and Britney Spears.  The owner of this mega-structure is one Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name. Obiang Junior is 38 years old and...

Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business.  No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...

I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war criminal par excellence.  Then I heard the sirens outside my house and was deafened...

He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined.  He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond.  He...

By the time you read this the U.S. Open will be in full cry.  Tough, unsmiling professionals will be hitting balls back and forth with machine-like regularity, and Cyclops, the mechanical eye that overrides human decisions, will be resolving close matches.  It is Aldous Huxley come true, with a little Orwell thrown in for good...