Category: Web

At the Summit of the Americas where he met with Raul Castro, the 83-year-old younger brother of Fidel, President Obama provided an insight into where he is taking us, and why: “The United States will not be imprisoned by the past—we’re looking to the future. I’m not interested in having battles that frankly started before...

Late last week, I saw a small piece from AFP reporting that, on a visit to South Africa, Zimbabwe’s de facto dictator Robert Mugabe said, “I don’t want to see a white man.”  Of course, if a European leader had commented, “I don’t want to see a black man,” the international outcry would still be...

Indiana’s shameful surrender to the Gay Mafia, Big Business, the Left, and the Commentariat on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act came as no surprise. Indeed, Pat Buchanan’s most recent column on the whole sorry debacle contains words that must be memorized by every traditionalist: First comes a call for tolerance for those who believe and...

The Republican rout in the Battle of Indianapolis provides us with a snapshot of the correlation of forces in the culture wars. Faced with a corporate-secularist firestorm, Gov. Mike Pence said Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act would not protect Christian bakers or florists who refuse their services to same-sex weddings. And the white flag went...

On a recent trip to Germany I took a day off to visit Sigmaringen, on the upper Danube some 20 miles north of Lake Constance. This town of ten thousand with a massive castle towering over it – or, more precisely, this castle with a town attached – interested me as the site of a...

My two score years in the West have led me to conclude that, of all the factors impeding the political thinking of its elites, few are more pernicious than the set of prejudices amalgamated with the notion of “conspiracy theory.” Last week in this space the estimable Tom Piatak wrote that, in American politics, “being...

Last week’s furor over the version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act approved in Indiana and awaiting only the governor’s signature in Arkansas was illuminating. Once again, the contemporary left demonstrated that it values conformity, not tolerance. Indeed, the left is now committed to using the full power of the state and the culture to...

The day Sen. Ted Cruz launched his Presidential campaign with a speech at Liberty University, media critics used the phrase “Goldwater Cycle” to portray the dilemma of the GOP as it faces the Presidential election of 2016. While in college, I worked on both the 1960 Nixon and the 1964 Goldwater campaigns and have some...

“Pat, sometimes it seems like our friends want me to go over the cliff with flags flying,” President Reagan once told me. Today, it is “Bibi” Netanyahu and the neocons howling “kill the deal” and “bomb Iran” who are shoving the Republican Party toward the cliff. The question, which may decide 2016, may be framed...

Republicans have not been too happy lately looking over the long row of their Presidential wannabes. It is almost  embarrassing—so many outstanding candidates. They all have much to be said for them, but each one seem to have something lacking, to be just not quite right. They are just not “Presidential” enough. But relax Republicans,...

A voracious and eclectic reader, President Nixon instructed me to send him every few weeks 10 articles he would not normally see that were on interesting or important issues. In 1971, I sent him an essay from The Atlantic, with reviews by Time and Newsweek, by Dr. Richard Herrnstein. My summary read: “Basically, (Herrnstein) demonstrates...

Eleven years ago I wrote a column for the print edition of Chronicles under this title. Tom Piatak’s grim reminder of the continued destructive presence of this cabal in what passes for the commentariat in today’s America has prompted me to dig into my old files and recap for our readers the historical and ideological...

One of the many unfortunate trends in today’s American politics is that being wrong on significant matters seems to carry little penalty, while being right on significant matters seems to carry little reward. Consider those who told us that the invasion of Iraq was going to be a “cakewalk,” with American troops being greeted as...

Back in the innocent days of 1967-70, I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Wayne-Westland Community School District in Michigan. District motto: “Absolutely, entirely, completely dedicated to mediocrity.” Like most junior high schools, grades 7-9, it mysteriously has been transformed into a middle school, grades 6-8. In 1967-68, Franklin had a simple dress...

I’ve been watching, spellbound, a German documentary released in the wake of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland. It’s entitled Sudeten Deutschland kehrt heim (“German Sudetes Come Home”), and I’m going to gloss over the debating point – delicious, though I trust a trifle too obvious for my discerning readers’ taste – of this being...

Those of us blinded by white privilege are fortunate to live in this enlightened age. Without PCs, Facebook, Twitter and publications like Salon.com, we’d never know how bad we are. We are thus instructed by this hysterical tweet from Salon’s Twitter feed on March 27: “If you’re white, you’re racist and don’t realize it. http://slnm.us/PtdXyAA”....

In what has been called the “Catholic moment” in America, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Catholics were admonished from pulpits to “live the faith” and “set an example” for others. Public lives were to reflect moral beliefs. Christians were to avoid those “living in sin.” Christians who operated motels and hotels did not rent...

American aircraft went into action against Islamic State positions in Tikrit on March 25 in direct support of a stalled Iraqi offensive. The following day General Lloyd Austin, top commander in the Middle East, told Congress that he would like his forces to protect the Syrian “moderate” rebels who are currently trained and armed by...

The forces that do not want a U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, nor any U.S. detente with Iran, are impressive. Among them are the Israelis and their powerful lobby AIPAC, the Saudis and their Sunni allies on the Persian Gulf, a near unanimity of Republicans and a plurality of Democrats in Congress. Is there a...

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is that things do not repeat themselves. It is not absurd to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately...

Cinematically, as well as politically, we are sort of in a John Wayne moment: which is where Ted Cruz comes in. Things in this town of ours ain’t a-going real good right now. Everything, in fact, seems to be falling apart, save in the eyes of folk who wish America would either drop into the...

Though “Bibi” Netanyahu won re-election last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will still look into whether the State Department financed a clandestine effort to defeat him. Reportedly, State funneled $350,000 to an American NGO called OneVoice, which has an Israeli subsidiary, Victory 15, that collaborated with U.S. operatives to bring Bibi down. If...

Srdja Trifkovic discusses Senate probe of “anti-Netanyahu” U.S. Government funds on RT International. In the final few days before the general election in Israel, it was announced that a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee with subpoena powers was investigating the possibility that the Obama administration has aided efforts to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The investigation...

In November 1956, President Eisenhower, enraged he had not been forewarned of their invasion of Egypt, ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did as told. How far we have fallen from the America of Ike and John Foster Dulles has been on painful display this March. An...

Following the horrendous terrorist attack in Tunis, it is inevitable that I am reminded of my week-long Chronicles assignment to Tunisia in September 2012. In view of the carnage that left 20 Western tourists dead on March 18, it is worth revisiting my notes posted in the immediate aftermath of that trip. “I covered some...

The recent Israeli Knesset elections surprised the world by returning Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party to power. The resounding win put Netanyahu on the path to becoming the longest serving PM in Israeli history and caused some consternation and disappointment both in the White House and Brussels. There are two main reasons for Bibi’s...

Increasingly I find myself in the position of the dissident in an old Soviet joke, protesting against the regime on a street corner by handing out leaflets. A passerby takes one, sees that it’s a blank sheet of paper, and asks why there are no words. “Who needs words?” counters the protester. “Isn’t it all...

With Hillary Clinton scrambling to explain her missing emails, much of America is wailing, “Please don’t make us watch this movie again!” Why, then, would the Republican Party, with a chance to sweep it all in 2016, want to return us to the nightmare days of George W., which caused America to rise up and...

Maybe the question is, who’d want a degree from a university whose administration, on learning of a frat-boy incident on a bus, behaves as though God had personally dispatched the whole academic bureaucracy to wreak revenge. “P-o-o-o-o-or Okies,” as we Texas Longhorns used to chant from the Cotton Bowl stands. I mean, what else do...

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth. Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe? Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the...

As the European Coal and Steel Community of Jean Monnet evolved into the EU, we were told a “United States of Europe” was at hand, modeled on the USA. And other countries and continents will inevitably follow Europe’s example. There will be a North American Union of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and a Latin...

Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest interview with Mike Church on Sirius XM Satellite Radio ST: The decision-makers in the Western capitals do not know history and they do not care about it. They believe that they operate in a totally new environment in which the examples of the past are not relevant to the actions...

For now, several suspects from the Caucasus have been arrested. Let us note that all of the political murder victims of recent years—Markelov, Politkovskaya, and Nemtsov have been somehow or other tied to the Caucasus region. Remember, it was Nemtsov who lobbied Denmark not to extradite the Chechen criminal Ahmed Zakayev. Later he cowardly denied...

Even a seasoned cynic sometimes gasps in disbelief. “President Putin misinterprets much of what the U.S. is doing or trying to do,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a press conference in Geneva on March 2. “We are not involved in ‘numerous color revolutions’ as he asserts. In the case of Ukraine, such assumptions...

Last Wednesday I wrote in this space that Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov put pay to my own feeble attempts at black humor when he said there was “not the slightest doubt” that the assassination of Nemtsov had been the work of the Western secret services. Since then the joke has grown even funnier – so...

America, we have a problem. In the blood-soaked chaotic Middle East, with few exceptions like the Kurds, our friends either can’t or won’t fight. The Free Syrian Army folded. The U.S.-armed Hazm force in Syria has just collapsed after being routed by the al-Nusra Front. The Iraqi army we trained and equipped fled Mosul and...

I used to have a test for when an immigrant is truly Americanized (if such a thing is possible these days): When he starts liking football as much or more than soccer. I reached that point almost five years ago, during the excruciatingly boring 2010 World Cup. However, I found this test to be woefully...

Only government thinks it can move the sun across the sky. Like me, you may be suffering from “jet lag” today because of the “lost” hour yesterday when most of the country – excepting only the sensible states of Arizona and Hawaii – switched to Daylight Savings Time. (Excuse me, now it’s spelled “Hawai’i.” We...

A generation arose and took its place in the life of Russia, which did witness Boris Nemtsov as a political heavyweight. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, vice-premier, who was seen as an heir to Yeltsin, breathtaking ascension in his political career, and an ability to make country-wide policy—all this left Boris Nemtsov together...

Eric Holder’s Justice Department has completed its investigation into whether Ferguson cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in cold blood for racist reasons when he shot the black teenager last August. What did the massive six-month FBI investigation discover? According to the Washington Post, “after canvassing more than 300 homes and reviewing physical, ballistic, forensic,...

Hard as it is to believe, a claim has oozed out of the leftist brain pan that may be more embarrassingly idiotic than the claim that Islamic fanatics needs jobs and midnight basketball to extinguish the burning desire to chop off heads. Mother Jones, a conveyor belt for crackpot leftist theories, says eating three meals...

Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The U.S. perceives the Ukrainian crisis as an opportunity to damage Russia and bring Ukraine into NATO, says Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles Magazine. He says a decision to ship lethal weapons to the Kiev regime has already been made. RT: Despite an improving situation in Ukraine, we...

What is it with people? Offing themselves like death’s going out of fashion! First Litvinenko poisons himself with green tea in a sushi restaurant in the middle of London and blames radioactive polonium. Then Berezovsky strangles himself with a scarf and drags his own corpse to the bathroom to make some kind of political point....

Last week, John Kerry seemed to be auditioning for the role of Dr. Pangloss. Despite jihadi violence across the Middle East and ISIS terror in Iraq and Syria, Kerry told Congress, we live in “a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally—less deaths, less violent deaths today...

In his speech to Congress on March 3 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a straightforward, simple, and extreme position on Iran’s nuclear program: there is to be none, or else there should be war. He does not want that program kept limited to civilian purposes, or internationally supervised; he wants it eliminated totally, permanently,...

In a week when the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page lectures the Republican Congress for tactical stupidity; and Israel’s prime minister lectures the Obama administration, whose insiders lecture him back; and no one can believe Obama has believable plans for anything; and he can’t believe anybody would believe such a thing—with all this going on,...

The bestselling Fifty Shades trilogy by E.L. James (pen name of British authoress Erika Mitchell), which includes the books Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Free became the latest fad in the shabby genre of lowbrow female fiction. Unlike its earlier specimens like Twilight, the novels of E.L. James stood...

If the sadists of ISIS are seeking—with their mass executions, child rapes, immolations, and beheadings of Christians—to stampede us into a new war in the Middle East, they are succeeding. Repeatedly snapping the blood-red cape of terrorist atrocities in our faces has the Yankee bull snorting, pawing the ground, ready to charge again. “Nearly three-quarters...

The only thing worse than a leftist  screaming “racist” and “hater” because he doesn’t like the facts — oft coming from a conservative source — is a conservative screaming the same thing for much the same reason: facts coming from a liberal source. The latest on this front hit last week, when Vice President Biden...

  As Some day it may happen that a victim must be found   I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list   Of society offenders who might well be under ground   And never would be missed, who never would be missed. A recent comment of Robert Peters (a pleasure, as always,...