I have never seen Ireland, but, anchored decades ago aboard R.M.S. Saxonia in a foggy night redolent with the odor of burning peat off Cobh while the tender came and went between the ship and the dockside several miles portside, I have scented her. Queen Mary 2 does not call at Cobh, and so on...
Category: Web
A Plane by Any Other Name
I enjoyed George McCartney’s review of Bridge of Spies in the December issue of Chronicles (“A Snow Job on Rodeo Drive,” In the Dark). However, Steven Spielberg was not “scrupulous” with the “physical details of time and place.” Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2A, yet in the movie we see a contemporary U-2S. ...
What the Editors Are Reading
“Why, I pray, do you accuse me of a weak character? It is an accusation to which all enlightened men are exposed, because they see the two, or better say, the thousand sides of things, and it is impossible for them to make up their minds upon them, with the result that they stumble sometimes...
Taking Up the Pen
I have been a Chronicles subscriber for two or three years now, and I have never before contacted your office in response to a piece in your magazine. I have just finished reading “The Seven Stairs and AIDS” by Jeff Minick (Correspondence, December). In a publication that puts out many well-written articles, I think this...
Panic on the Left
It is no exaggeration to describe the Western left as living in a state of panic in these days of the mass invasion of Europe from the Islamic Middle East, jihadist violence on the Old Continent and now the New one, the nationalist risorgimenti in the member countries of the European Union, and the enthusiasm...
SCOTUS: What to Watch in 2016
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. Lately, those of us who believe in the rule of law and an objective interpretation of the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who framed it (and the people’s representatives who ratified it) have been dealt some cruel blows. The two most prominent are the Supreme Court’s...
A VP For Trump?
If Trump should actually get the Republican presidential nomination, then the question arises of his Vice-President-to-be. Of course, we should not count our chips before the last hand. The Republican Establishment is sure of its divine right to rule, has money out the kazoo, employs plenty of talent expert at manipulating elections, and has a...
Not So Far Away, Not So Long Ago
Brooklyn Produced by Wildgaze Films and The Irish Film Board Directed by John Crowley Written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Toibin Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Star Wars: The Force Awakens Produced by Lucasfilm Ltd. Directed by J.J. Abrams Written by J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Brooklyn...
Against the Community Organizers
San Antonio, Texas, America’s seventh-largest city, has always owed its troubles, as well as its glory, to its geographical situation within the state, and not just because it is the nearest large city to Mexico. The city sits on the Balcones Escarpment, the line separating the hot, semiarid lowlands to its south from the beautiful,...
Who Defines America?
A country is a land and a people. A people, in turn, are constituted by interlocking networks of common ways, memories, and understandings, together with symbols that serve as rallying points, all of which enable them to carry on life together and look forward to a common future. So who are the American people? The...
Neocons in a Lather
With Donald Trump continuing to rise in the polls, the neoconservatives are in a lather. Bill Kristol, who initially declared he was “anti-anti-Trump”—in the same sense that his departed father declared he was “anti-anti-McCarthy” (Joe, that is, not Eugene)—recently tweeted, “Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP...
Europe Under Siege
The massive, overwhelmingly Muslim migrant onslaught on Europe is the most important event of 2015. Its proportions are staggering. The Babylonian captivity affected at most 75,000 Jews, and the Völkerwanderung of the late-Roman era numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It is greater, in numbers within the time frame, than the Moorish, Mongol, or Turkish...
First Hearings
Some years ago a fellow told me that I should put my money in CDs, and I did, to my regret in one sense. I thought he meant Compact Discs. Silly me! But maybe not altogether. Since those days, things have changed, but even so, some things never change. I mean that acquisitions have a...
The Cheap Trick of Whiteness
A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at...
The Nationalist Moment
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear. Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...
Excluding Muslims: Facts and Fictions
Donald Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration has drawn fire from the establishment right. “It’s a violation of our Constitution, but it also undermines the character of our nation,” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told the Des Moines Register. National Review’s Jim Geraghty opined that Trump’s plan created a forbidden “religious test for...
A Visit to Ali Pasha, Part 2
The main attraction in Ioannina is still the Kastro, the Turkish fortress that served as the Ottoman capital of the territory of Epirus, ruled for 30 years by Ali Pasha, a dashing Albanian warlord who accidentally helped to spark the Greek Revolution. The one thing most Americans think they know about the Ottoman Empire is...
The Civil War of the Right
The conservative movement is starting to look a lot like Syria. Baited, taunted, mocked by Fox News, Donald Trump told Roger Ailes what he could do with his Iowa debate, and marched off to host a Thursday night rally for veterans at the same time in Des Moines. Message: I speak for the silent majority,...
Dogmatism Masquerading As Science
So far, the presidential campaign has not gone as the experts had predicted. One of the reasons for this is that many Americans are anxious about the economy, an anxiety that those ensconced in the recession-free DC bubble have a hard time understanding. And one of the reasons for this economic anxiety is the damage...
The Rejection Election
With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump. The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street. Not so long...
Letter from Spain: Post-Election Imbroglio
This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...
Brooklyn In The 1950s: An America That Lives Only In Memory
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. In his book Brooklyn, and in the movie based upon it, the Irish author Colm Toibin has told a story which brings life to an America now long gone. It is the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who lives in a small...
Why Is Japan Dying?
It’s Jan. 22, 2016, the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that has killed more than 60 million babies here. But this year, let’s turn to Japan. Fortune magazine ran an article titled, “Why Japan’s Economic Troubles Should Worry the U.S.” It warned that the world’s third...
Roe at 43: Defy It
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
Is the Spectre of Trump Haunting Davos?
The lights are burning late in Davos tonight. At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.” Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in...
Revenge of the Castaway
Two years after Sam Francis’ untimely death, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a long essay about Francis titled “The Castaway.” The title came from an email Francis sent to friends (including me) after William F. Buckley described him as one of the “castaways” from the conservative movement. This was Francis’ response to Buckley: “As I have...
In Clear Violation
The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement. A “symposium” of anti-Trump...
Is Iran Taking the China Road?
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
US, Iran Step Back From the Brink
To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran’s Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ’s last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with...
Swan Song From Our Second Worst President
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
Opposition to Merkelism Grows
Angela Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Islamic migrants into Germany won her praise from the press last year, with the Guardian reporting that grateful migrants had dubbed her “Mama Merkel” and TIME naming her Person of the Year. The migrants are still looking up to Merkel—one of those arrested after the mass...
What Bernie & The Donald Portend
Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble. Polls show her slightly ahead of Socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa, but narrowly behind in New Hampshire. And the weekend brought new revelations about yet more classified and secret documents sent over her private email server...
Horror in Europe
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
Why Is North Korea Our Problem?
For Xi Jinping, it has been a rough week. Panicked flight from China’s currency twice caused a plunge of 7 percent in her stock market, forcing a suspension of trading. Kim Jong Un, the megalomaniac who runs North Korea, ignored Xi’s warning and set off a fourth nuclear bomb. While probably not a hydrogen bomb...
Farewell to Downton
Like many Americans, I spent Sunday evening watching the beginning of the final season of Downton Abbey. The show has become a huge hit, at least by PBS standards, with some 25,000,000 or so American viewers. At first glance, this success is surprising. A few years ago, The Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that...
Will the GOP Establishment Opt for President Hillary?
The Iowa caucuses are under a month away, and the GOP Establishment is in white-knuckle panic that Donald Trump’s candidacy has not imploded. His rather moderate proposal for a temporary time-out on Muslims’ entry into the U.S. has gone the way of its predecessors in actually boosting his numbers. Allegations of sexist misuse of a Yiddish expression have fallen...
War on Christmas 2015
I first wrote about the War on Christmas in 2001, when Chronicles published my essay “Happy Holidays! Bah Humbug!: in the December 2001 issue. Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE.com, republished that essay. Since then, I have written at least one article each Christmas on the topic. What follows is the piece Peter Brimelow asked...
Is Christianity Coming to an End in the Middle East?
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. While most victims of war and terrorism in the Middle East are Muslims, we have been witnessing a growing assault upon Christianity by ISIS and other Islamist groups. The proportion of Middle Easterners who are Christian has dropped from 14% in 1910 to 4%...
Will Mideast Allies Drag Us Into War?
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
More Annals of the Stupid Party
Donald Trump has certainly revolutionized American politics. And he did so by a very simple act—mentioning substantive truths that other Republicans fear to utter. Trump is not perfect. But criticism at this point (some from over-fastidious Chronicles writers) is like Titanic survivors complaining about accommodations on the lifeboats. No ordinary man would climb into the...
A Visit to Ali Pasha
“Why do you go to Ioannina”? Pronouncing the town’s name very carefully in four syllables for our benefit, our driver broke the silence of several hours on the road from Athens during which the entire conversation had been limited to driving time and route information. I wanted to say, “?ληθ?ς, δεν ξ?ρω,” (“Truly, I don’t...
Protest Too Much
On the campuses of America, fascism lives, although these modern fascists lack the sartorial brilliance of Benito’s mobs. It started with a swastika applied to a bathroom wall at the University of Missouri, and today our black brethren and their leftist white allies control more than three-dozen college campuses, disrupting student life with a very...
Effeminate Synod
The patient lies on the table. He’s been beaten badly about the head, and burns show round his neck, as if he had been dragged by a rope. Bright red blood trickles out of one ear. He has lost his trousers, and his shirt is in shreds. He cannot tell you what day it is. ...
Buried in History
In the summer of 2015, thanks to the generosity of friends, ex-students, and parents whose children I now teach, I spent a month in Rome. Since my return to the United States, several friends and family members have asked me to record my general impressions of “the Eternal City.” So here goes. First, Rome offers...
The Future of Publishing
In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism. The original idea had come to him on a crowded train home from work to his house in the countryside east of London on Christmas...
That Demagogue
In the November issue, Justin Raimondo characterizes Rand Paul as weak-kneed, neocon-appeasing, and spineless (“Who Hates Trump?,” Between the Lines). I’m not sure why Mr. Raimondo does this; however, he does make one observation about Donald Trump that I think is important. He states that Trump “may be . . . a demagogue who will...
Grey Lady in Rainbow Panties
My family lived, while I was growing up, at 29 Claremont Avenue between Riverside Drive and Broadway, in an elaborately decorated apartment building of ivory-colored stone directly overlooking the Barnard College campus and the copper roofs, weathered to a lichenous green, of Columbia University beyond. Lionel and Diana Trilling and their son, my schoolmate at...
What the Editors Are Reading
I’ve been reading and rereading Raymond Chandler’s novels for more than 30 years; also his Letters, the best epistolary volume by an “American” writer (Chandler was an Englishman who arrived in Los Angeles as a young man to work for an oil executive), with the sole exception of Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being. Chandler...
The Politics of Air Strikes
To bomb or not to bomb? As I write, that is the question being debated in the Palace of Westminster. The Conservative government, predictably enough, is itching to join the attacks on ISIS in Syria. Prime Minister David Cameron says we cannot leave it to France and America to obliterate terrorists in the Middle East...
Compromised Fidelities
Spotlight Produced by Anonymous Content and Participant Media Director by Tom McCarthy Screenplay by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer Distributed by Open Road Films Trumbo Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed by Jay Roach Screenplay by John McNamara Distributed by Bleeker Street Media In 2000, the Boston Globe hires Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to be editor-in-chief. ...