“As a busily growing animal, I am scatterbrained and entirely lacking in mental application. Having no desire at present to expend my precious energies upon the pursuit of knowledge, I shall not make the slightest attempt to assist you in your attempts to impart it. If you can capture my unwilling attention and goad me...
In Britain, the late 1940’s and early 50’s were probably the hardest years of the 20th century. For millions of people, the postwar decade was one of icy nights in gaslit rooms, interminable queues, and meals composed of whale fat and tinned beef—the comically vile ingredients of a serious sacrifice that particular generation is unlikely...
Since 1945, democracy’s reputation has climbed so high that, by the beginning of the 21st century, democracy itself had become nothing short of an idol throughout much of the world. This makes it difficult to imagine a time when democracy was widely regarded by political philosophers, writers, and artists not as the best but rather...
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
Over the weekend of March 11, our daughter, Virginia, was married in the Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. She said she wanted to be married in a place surrounded by natural beauty, well away from trite tourism. After some web-surfing, she picked the Delicate Arch (one of the most photographed natural arches in the...
Welcome to Britain. The day I arrived, just as London’s mayor officially declared the city open for the Olympic Games, there were two-hour lines to pass through border controls at Heathrow, and that was just for us lucky British passport holders. Earlier that morning, police had been forced to intervene to deal with unrest after...
Bodie, July 1881—The early morning hours found deputy constables Richard O’Malley and James Monahan patrolling the streets of the mining town of more than 5,000 residents in mountains immediately east of the Sierra. Bob Watson and George Center happened by. A young miner, Center was “quiet when sober,” said the Daily Free Press, “but when...
Vote for Chicagoland politics, get Chicagoland politics. Inspired by President Obama’s slash-and-burn tactics on his opponents, Democrats, radical labor, and left-liberal activists have begun full Saul Alinsky-Bill Ayres-style assaults on conservative and libertarian groups. Media Matters for America is the barking brigade leading the charge. A battalion in the war is another website called Color...
As a confirmed member of the Ninety-Nine Percent, I do not believe that the One Percent has too much money. I think that it does not have money enough. Even President Obama is unclear about his reasons for wanting to raise taxes on the well-to-do (the people with an income of $250,000 he regards as...
Americans have been captivated by the February incident in Sanford, Florida, that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman. If the case could be resolved today, Trayvon Martin’s family would still be without a son, George Zimmerman—even if exonerated—will never live a normal life, Sanford Police...
It has been seven years since Sam Francis died. But the years since his untimely death merely show the accuracy of his insights. Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not...
“A crocodile has been worshipped,” wrote John Taylor of Caroline, “and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by the crocodile.” Such was his final judgment on the central government of the United States and the advocates of its power. This prophecy, if such it may be...
Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted. “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . . . A youthquake hit Britain,” and so...
Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator last March, asked why we should be concerned with stopping several thousand homosexuals from getting married when heterosexual marriage is so threatened by dysfunction and divorce. The social conservatives’ obsession with the subject is, he argued, simply “a stupid distraction from the main war,” like the battle of Stalingrad. ...
For the last several years Texas farmers and ranchers whose lands butt up against the Rio Grande have complained about cross-border raids by thugs of Mexican drug cartels. “It’s a war. Make no mistake about it,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples. “And it’s happening on American soil.” Staples thinks the bountiful productivity of the...
According to family records, ten of Great-Grandma’s twelve sons died in the Civil War. Thus it was that Allie Johnson Puett, the girl who became my Grandma Evetts, learned the lessons of self reliance, the duty of the defiance of illegitimate authority, the comforts of firearms, and the necessity of knowing how to shoot—wherein...
At a recent dinner party, a Republican senator in the Wyoming legislature remarked that the most common personal call she receives from her constituents begins with, “I’m a Republican, but . . . ,” and ends with a request for some or another government benefit or service. Americans are fond of complaining that their political...
The question of war with Iran over her nuclear program has been around for a decade. In October 2005 Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at the World Without Zionism conference in Asia, in which he allegedly said, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” The propaganda war, with mutual demonization, was initiated. ...
A theory about the mafia that was advanced in these pages by the late Samuel Francis about 15 years ago explains how Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot drive out your corner grocery, the local pharmacist, and Joe’s Hardware. The national expansion of these blights isn’t free enterprise. It’s more akin to the nationwide expansion of...
“Economy, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.” —Ambrose Bierce “That was the summer of seventy-three,” writes Forrest McDonald. “Remember it well, and cherish the memory, for things will never be that good again.” This is from his little book...
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had a rough time of it lately, and I won’t say they don’t deserve it. Barack Obama is their President, after all, when it comes to most political issues; for example, immigration and immigrants’ rights, tax policy, economic inequality, “social justice,” peaceful internationalism, and national healthcare. The exception,...
Partisan. That’s the complaint many Americans have with the state of politics. The country would be better off, we are told, if only the Republicans and Democrats could put aside petty differences and work together. Can’t the left and right find some common ground and build on it? Unfortunately, when it comes to the power...
When novelist Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in a Florida nursing home in 1960, she was buried in a charity cemetery in an unmarked grave, an ironic resting place for a talented American writer and folklorist who, by all accounts, was a dazzling and memorable personality. Though her success had never been more than modest,...
In January, I was tasked by the London Daily Telegraph to track Rick Santorum through the wilds of New Hampshire. Following his impressive gains in Iowa, many were giving Santorum good odds for winning the Granite State’s presidential primary. His appeal was a mix of religion and class war. At an Elks Lodge in Salem,...
At least one historian has noted that democracy is inherently inflationary. The phenomenon of inflation is not restricted to money and finance. Too much of anything reduces the value of that thing, and others with it. Political inflation, or extreme democracy, degrades the political system, as well as the economy it is tempted to inflate...
In 1861 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln launched a war of conquest against the South, and legend claims it was all for the abolition of slavery, officially declared by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Yet exactly 101 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the forcefully reinstated Union, signed the Civil Rights Act...
Apologists for industrialism, as well as its critics, agree that the industrial mode of economic production, and industrial society itself, do not have the choice of arresting their growth at a desired level, or even to slacken momentum. Like the cancer cell, when the system stops growing, it dies. A carcinoma perishes only after it...
Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003). Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago...
This issue of Chronicles commemorates what I suppose is an anniversary, of sorts. It has been nine years since the February 2003 issue questioning the legitimacy of the war in Iraq was published, an anniversary which also roughly corresponds to the planning leading up to and including the prosecution of the war. Aside from the...
The Russian powers that be (vlast) had been nervously preparing for the December 4 elections to the Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) for months. A command decision was made not to overuse “administrative resources” in amassing a victory for the “party of power,” United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya, ER), and its unofficial leader, former...
“War is hell,” and war is our permanent reality. War has been the companion of man since the beginning of recorded history, together with the need to justify waging it. Centuries before jus ad bellum was imperfectly codified in late-medieval Europe, the desire to make one’s cause seem righteous had become a regular companion of...
Democracy has meant so many things over the past 2,500 years that it is really impossible to make any comprehensive statement about it that applies to all of its usages. The historical record shows that what people called democratic government and democratic society existed for millennia before the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the...
The saga of Europe’s debt crisis can be dispiriting for anyone interested in the future of the Old Continent. There is, however, another, perhaps larger story lurking beneath the tales of billions and bond yields, and that is the story of Germany’s changing role. Although French President Nicolas Sarkozy gladly rushes toward any camera or...
To survey the state of the American right—its friends, its enemies, its controversies—is to be nearly convinced we are living in Nietzsche’s nightmare world of “eternal recurrence.” The current battle for the soul of the “Stupid Party” is an eerie reenactment of the battle that engulfed the GOP in 1963-64, with a different Romney as...
Greek writers, and writers coming after them for the next 2,000 years, attributed the short life and violent end of democratic governments to democracy’s infallible tendency toward demagoguery and the dispossession of the wealthy and educated by the poor and ignorant. Tocqueville thought democracy’s fatal weakness to be uniformity of thought and opinion, and the...
Can anything be done to stop Europe and the United States from becoming Third World countries? Is the West doomed? Considering that it doesn’t look as if things are going to get better any time soon, it is tempting for conservatives to write finis on Christendom and view the fall from a place of cynical...
According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time. He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews. A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself. ...
Everyone hails democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but very few realize—or dare realize—that democracy actually represents one of the most perfect forms of tyranny, because it is one the average citizen is loath to acknowledge as such. It is indeed very simply a matter of taking...
By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise. In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer an “enforcement priority” of the...
While the majority of the columns printed on the New York Times’ op-ed page seem intended to energize the reader by alerting him to some impending social, economic, or political evil shortly to be foisted on the country or the world by the Republican Party or some other sinister force on the right, the contemplated...
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...
The vampire, possibly the most enduring mythic figure of the modern age, emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment. To be sure, folkloric accounts of lamiae, strigae, and incubi predate the Christian era and continued to haunt the European imagination throughout the Middle Ages, when vampirism was generally associated with witchcraft. But early in...
The world has always been a place of unexamined terms. Probably it has never been so full of them as it is under modern democratic industrial capitalism, which—depending upon the rigor with which one defines the word democratic—is actually a contradiction in terms. Industrialism, which essentially is applied natural and human power on a large...
On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park. The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them. The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks. In front of the drummers...
The killing of 8 people by a bomb in Oslo, placed by the Norwegian berserker Anders Behring Breivik, followed by his gunning down of a further 69 on the island of Utoya, is a horrible reminder of the potential for evil inherent in human nature. That he deliberately chose to gun down children in Utoya...
Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of technology over nature. A moment’s reflection, however, would have neatly reversed the...
The modern conflation of democracy with the welfare state to the contrary, there is, in fact, a vast, actually unbridgeable, gulf between these two things. Democracy had previously assumed a citizenry independent enough—socially, financially, intellectually, and morally—to be able to form fair, balanced, and informed opinions concerning public matters and issues of state. The welfare...
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
Most college and university professors know that even though students may successfully complete remedial courses and even a full slate of freshman and sophomore classes, many will still be unable to use proper language mechanics or to work with complex math formulas at an advanced level. It’s an observable fact that many graduate students, some...
More often than not, current events offer an opportunity for meditation. This is the case today: The friends of a politician turned international financier, now to be tried for rape, have rallied round him, claiming his privacy has been invaded. Though in this case the claim is downright preposterous, by appealing to the right to...