“Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” cried the craftsmen of Ephesus. They had heard of the threat to their occupation posed by Paul (Acts 19: 24-29), who was violently against the making of images. Demetrius, a silversmith, had made a just complaint: “So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set...
I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake. Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective...
Barack Obama’s words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” have come to stand as the motto of his presidency. (Their author was actually the black Caribbean bisexual poetess June Jordan.) Similarly, “This is the one we’ve been waiting for” is a succinct representation of the issue of climatic change the international left has...
Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural-gas company, Saudi Aramco, recently announced plans to go public in 2018. Dating back to the fuel shortages of World War I, Saudi Aramco came into existence largely as a result of Standard Oil’s frustrating search for oil on the Arabian Peninsula. But after a successful 1932 strike in Bahrain,...
A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd. Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland. The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions. A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the...
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
I have attended many professional sporting events, and I have no memory of any of my fellow spectators failing to stand for the National Anthem. Standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner” is widely recognized as a matter of common courtesy. It also represents a moment of unity, even between fans who will be cheering for different...
When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it. Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was...
From the October 2012 issue of Chronicles. He was an all-American boy who became an American hero in World War II. Born in 1920 to a father who, at the age of five, had immigrated to the United States with his family from Sweden and an American-born mother of Irish, Scottish, and English descent, Dick...
Let’s not stress out, shall we, while endeavoring to make sense of the fuss and foolishness over mass NFL boycotting of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That would be because the fuss and foolishness themselves make no sense: save as a window for viewing the lunacies of 21st century life. Are we a nation or a holding...
As Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson, Jr., noted, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times has written an editorial in praise of (and perhaps blaming) our late colleague and friend Sam Francis for accurately describing the American proscenium and providing profound structural analyses of the cultural and economic plight of Middle Americans. Dr. Francis shared...
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac One of President Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office was his Executive Order of January 25, 2017, instructing the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) to deny federal grant money for local law enforcement activities to cities and counties refusing to cooperate with the federal government in dealing with...
German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any...
David Brooks devotes his column in the New York Times today (22 September 2017) to a generous appreciation of Sam Francis, whom he calls “one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years.” Francis’s name surfaced unexpectedly during the presidential campaign last year when the media took note of the role he and his...
If a U.S. president calls an adversary “Rocket Man . . . on a mission to suicide,” and warns his nation may be “totally destroyed,” other ideas in his speech will tend to get lost. Which is unfortunate. For buried in Donald Trump’s address is a clarion call to reject transnationalism and to re-embrace a...
From the October 2013 issue of Chronicles. One striking feature of the U.S. Constitution is the number of procedural rights guaranteed to individuals accused of criminal behavior before they can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The overall guarantee of due process of law contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments constitutes the basic...
Harking back fondly to the standards of half a century go—aah, weren’t those the blithe, happy days?—won’t get you much of a hearing from today’s self-appointed arbiters of college and university moral questions. I don’t care. Let’s do it anyway. The standards of half a century ago concerning male-female relationships were infinitely better—galactically better—than the...
“The Barbarian cannot make . . . he can befog and destroy but . . . he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.” Hilaire Belloc’s depiction of the barbarian is recalled to mind as the statues honoring the history and heroes of...
[Credit: By Roman Harak (North Korea – Kumsusan) [CC BY-SA 2.0]] As President Trump makes his UN General Assembly debut this week—the body he has rightly called weak, incompetent, bad for democracy, and no friend of the United States—North Korea still dominates the headlines. It presents a problem in need of sober management. While it is...
“Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the ‘Dreamers’ in return for funding for border security?” The answer to that question, raised in my column a week ago, is in. Last night, President Donald Trump cut a deal with “Chuck...
From the December 2015 issue of Chronicles. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European...
When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets. Ground troops who find...
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” was my title, and the column began: “In turning a...
Mongol airships fire disintegrator rays to destroy America. (Buck Rodgers, 2429 A.D., 2-9-1929, Roland N. Anderson Collection) [This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper...
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with...
From the December 1998 issue of Chronicles. “Mine is better than ours.” —Benjamin Franklin Tom Bethell, here as often before, uses sturdy common sense to challenge experts in their own field. In a controversial article many years ago, he dared to suggest that evolutionary biologists have exaggerated the evidence for Darwinism. Though...
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention. What else does he want? Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed...
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...
History not only repeats itself but inverts itself. When these things happen simultaneously, the result is precisely what is happening today, as conservatives return to their “isolationist” roots and progressives return to their warmongering ways. That’s the repetition. The inversion comes into play with the current anti-Russian hysteria, which we haven’t seen since the icy...
This Fall marks the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although few commentators today are likely to glorify that event or its aftermath, most will assume that the revolution was a regrettable necessity, which swept away a repressive and stagnant ancient regime. Such a view is false. Culturally and spiritually, that lost pre-revolutionary Russia was...
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together. In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. On display this week...
Albert and David Maysles’s classic documentary Grey Gardens provided a disturbing snapshot of 1970’s American upper-class life, replete with mentally ill dowagers, feral cats, and a crumbling estate. In early 1971, the Maysles brothers started filming the daily activities of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” the...
You might say it has not been much of a month for the human race. I might myself contend that signs of life float on the flooded streets of Houston, Texas. People are acting the way people used to act, back before we were all required, seemingly, to stake out a political position and hate...
The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was...
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
From the August 2008 issue of Chronicles. In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick. Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Things did not go well. Selznick was among...
Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement. Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Expropriating the biblical mandate, “Go forth and teach all nations!” they divinized democracy and made the conversion of mankind to...
[Adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of...
Was it for this That on that April day we stacked our arms Obedient to a soldier’s trust? To lie Ground by the heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, impugned? —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” There are times when I feel as though I’ve awoken in a madhouse, a madhouse that cannot possibly...
President Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Afghanistan was carefully crafted and well delivered. It did not provide a blueprint for winning the war, however, which remains his stated objective. Trump has settled for a compromise between all-out escalation, advocated by some of his generals, and the disengagement he had favored on the campaign...
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942. True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation. When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945,...
The past week or so has been a sad one in American political life. The reason for this, of course, is Charlottesville, where a woman lost her life and people proudly carried flags no Americans ever should, the swastika of the Nazis and the hammer and sickle of the Communists. The emotions unleashed after Charlottesville...
“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! . . . No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.” So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial The Oxford History of the American People in 1965. First...
Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life. This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations...
From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I...
When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson. Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between...
For many scandal-plagued politicians there comes a turning point after which the downfall becomes inevitable. In Richard Nixon’s case this happened on March 1, 1974, when he was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an indictment against seven former presidential aides. Two months later, impeachment hearings commenced before the House Judiciary Committee. Charles Haughey’s illustrious career as...