Category: Web

The most interesting part of President Vladimir Putin’s two hours long state of nation address on March 1 was his announcement—accompanied by a video presentation—that Russia has developed a hypersonic state-of-the-art missile 20 times faster than the speed of sound, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile, both supposedly safe from interception. Putin claimed that...

“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in the Washington Post. “Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence. America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would...

Gee, this is the worst news I’ve had since the defeat at Stalingrad.  More than 80 former ambassadors to African nations sent a letter of protest to The Donald.  Even worse, Botswana, Ghana, Haiti, Namibia, Senegal, and the African Union have all protested Mr. Trump’s calling them shitholes. I also protest.  Shithole is a term...

Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease.” —from “Henry King,” by Hilaire Belloc I’ve spent the last few months hobbling around Manhattan, one of America’s last walkable cities.  In keeping with New Yorkers’ well-deserved stereotype...

After reading Aaron D. Wolf’s “Prince of Darkness” (Heresies, January) I can see that the author knows very little about Muslims.  In every Islamic country, the strong rule.  That is what the caliphate was and will always be.  The rulers are and will always be ruthless.  They follow their prophet in this regard.  If you...

From the late 19th or early 20th century down to the present day, liberalism has been progressively oriented to psychology and therapeutic technique.  Yet advanced liberalism in the 21st century is as materialist a creed as classical liberalism was in the 19th, and liberal psychology remains as firmly grounded in a materialist philosophy as it...

If you will forgive my dampening of Chilton Williamson’s Schadenfreude slightly (“The Job of Sex,” Editorials, January), I feel a need to note that there were women in the workplace long before the feminist movement insisted on putting them there.  These women were usually in service roles—secretaries, stenographers, and the like.  The feminists hated this...

The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, by David B. Woolner (New York: Basic Books; 368 pp., $32.00).  The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College. ...

Darkest Hour Produced by Perfect World Pictures  Written by Anthony McCarten Directed by Joe Wright  Distributed by Focus Features  The Shape of Water Produced by Scott Rudin Productions  Written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor Directed by Guillermo del Toro  Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures  Toward the end of Darkest Hour, we watch Gary...

I took the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (Stage 4) quite well, I thought.  Except for occasional bouts of hysterical self-pity and thankfully rare gestures of melodrama. Oh, I’d resisted it, denied it, although I knew all along that I had it.  I ignored the warnings of my hapless local doctors, and when I...

The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which Defense Secretary James Mattis presented on January 19, envisages aggressive measures to counter Russia and China and instructs the military to refocus on Cold War-style competition with them, away from terrorist threats and “rogue nations.”  This is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called...

Several years ago, aided by the wonders of modern technology and the principle of fair use, a number of people independently produced remixes of It’s a Wonderful Life as a horror movie.  That this worked brilliantly is really no surprise, since the dystopian world of Pottersville in Frank Capra’s masterpiece foreshadowed such later classics of...

Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking.  That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...

At Midsummer 1631, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided the Irish village of Baltimore, and took several hundred local people into lifelong captivity.  Such a distant projection of Islamic power might seem extreme and even bizarre, but it was no such thing.  Forgotten today, the danger of Arab and Turkish assault remained a nightmare for...

In his latest interview for the Iranian English-language TV network, live from their studio in Beirut, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the developments surrounding the Korean peninsula. [Watch interview here.] Q: Foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine Srdja Trifkovic joins us via satellite from the Lebanese capital Beirut . . . First of all, what are your...

The British, like everyone else, enjoy feigning horror at President Donald Trump.  Deep down, however, we know we need him, and we like him a lot more than we let on.  The United Kingdom is in a difficult diplomatic position as it seeks to extricate itself from the European Union, and the transatlantic alliance with...

Dick’s Sporting Goods is using 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz’s evil act of killing 17 innocents and wounding many others in a child warehouse known commonly as a “public school” in Parkland Florida to boost its flagging sales and brandish its liberal bona fides. On Wednesday, the retailer issued a press release that could’ve been written by...

In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3. But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the...

From the September 1994 issue of Chronicles. “The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the...

Something for Everyone (in the Military-Industrial Complex) Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine? Back in 2008, some of us...

In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together. But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart. The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite....

According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election. On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Donald Trump, and...

“For thousands of years, the land that carried the mountains of Lebanon and hugged the Mediterranean Sea was restless,” says painter Antoine G. Faddoul of his Phoenix as a metaphor for his native land. “Those who inhabited the very first civilized cities suffered numerous invasions destroying their cities time and again [but] the survivors always...

For years, National Review has been relentless in its criticism of conservatives who questioned the benefits of free trade, even though the conservative tradition in America has historically been skeptical of free trade. “Protectionist” was one of the most common epithets the magazine hurled at Pat Buchanan during his runs for the White House. In...

“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!” These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before. Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such...

Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed. Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran’s hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan...

In his latest interview with the Iranian English-language Press TV network, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the latest developments on the Korean Peninsula. The first question was whether we are seeing a positive development in the relations between the North and the South, in the aftermath of the visit of Kim Jong Un’s sister to the Winter Olympics and...

President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party. Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart. Who,...

Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...

From the December 1993 issue of Chronicles. “Modern liberty begins in revolt.” —H.M. Kallen In 1943, in the midst of the dark years of World War II when collectivism seemed to be sweeping all before it at home and abroad, three fiercely independent and feisty women, all of them friends and libertarians devoted to what...

That memo worked up in the Intel Committee of Chairman Devin Nunes may not have sunk the Mueller investigation, but from the sound of the secondary explosions, this torpedo was no dud. The critical charge: To persuade a FISA court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page, the FBI relied on...

Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally. A network of 800 military bases spread across...

“All the News That’s Fit to Print” proclaims the masthead of the New York Times. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” echoes the Washington Post. “The people have a right to know,” the professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hammered into us in 1962. “Trust the people,” we were admonished. Explain then this hysteria, this...

Had she claimed to be 100-percent African-American, or to be a lesbian, transgender, or simply bisexual, the adoration would have been even more pronounced.  If she had a criminal record, the perverse New York Times would have gone bananas, praising her to the skies.  Not to mention the British politically correct media, like the BBC,...

In June 2017, the European Union fined Google a record-breaking €2.42 billion for abusing the dominance of its popular search engine while building its online shopping service.  Brussels found that Google illegally and artificially endorsed its own price-comparison service in searches.  (In plain English, Google’s search results were biased in favor of its own services.) ...

The Church of England is now a citadel of advanced liberalism.  It went over to secularism long ago, and its zealots intensify their hold upon doctrine and practice.  The charge sheet includes, but is not confined to, support for the transgender lobby, for illegal immigrants, and for pandenominational movements.  The Church smiles upon the “marriage”...

Aside from its sheer incomprehensibility, the U.S. federal tax code is immoral, by design.  Its 75,000 pages exceed its 1917 length 187-fold.  Paradoxically, even though the tax code contains more than four million words, the United States effectively has no tax code.  At that absurd immensity the tax code says whatever your team of lawyers...

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Produced by Blueprint Pictures  Written and directed by Martin McDonagh  Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Lady Bird Produced by Scott Rudin Productions  Written and directed by Greta Gerwig  Distributed by A24  Three Billboards is hilarious; yet it could hardly be sadder.  How can it be both at once?  That’s director...

As we gathered in the gazebo, sitting on the hard white benches with the paint peeling off in strips, nursing Marlboros—the girls wielding cigarette-holders, like scepters—we decided then and there who and what was the main obstacle to our goal.  Sheryl called it the “Marshmallow Conspiracy,” and of course we didn’t need a translation, although...

From the July 2014 issue of Chronicles. William Ball was just shy of 19 and living in the town of Souris on the prairies of Canada when war erupted in Europe in August 1914.  The region was still something of a frontier, devoted to trapping and trading with Indians, and inhabited by hearty, adventurous types,...

For Part I of “The Klondike Stampede,” see Sins of Omission in the December 2017 issue. The 250 Indians who inhabited Dyea on the eve of the gold rush were Chilkats, members of the Tlingit tribe.  They were short and stocky, and excellent packers.  They commonly carried packs of 100 pounds or more.  They charged...

For many Americans at or near the mid-century mark of their lives, Frank Capra has shaped their understanding of the meaning of Christmas in a way that only Charles Dickens could possibly rival.  Of all of his films, It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s personal favorite, but even though it was nominated for Best Picture...