Category: Web

The House of Lords European Union Committee is chaired by Lord Tugendhat. I don’t know anything about the man, and it may well be that his is a noble title going back to the Battle of Hastings, but I think most people will agree it’s one hell of a funny name. Then there’s Nigel Farage,...

Back in 1987, this writer was invited by friends to advise them on a press conference they had called to oppose President Reagan’s signing of an INF treaty to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe. My advice: Deplore the treaty; do not attack the president. The next day, Howard Phillips declared that Ronald Reagan had...

Srdja Trifkovic’s Interview on RT International Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading advocate of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, will be an advisor to Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who was Milosevic’s information minister at that time. Five years later Vucic edited Seselj’s book which referred to Blair as “that English faggot...

“Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations,” warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892. “Thank God I am not a free-trader,” echoed the rising Empire State Republican and future President Theodore Roosevelt. Those were the voices of a Republican Party that...

The most recent Muslim terrorist outrage took place in Copenhagen this time. The son of Palestinian immigrants (the European liberals’ favorite designated victims) Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein (described with typical accuracy by the NYT as Denmark’s “native son”) shot up first, a free speech meeting, killing a Danish documentary filmmaker, and moved on to shoot...

With the fall of Debaltsevo some interesting military-technical questions are starting to emerge. Is the Ukrainian general staff grossly incompetent, or outright treasonous?  “A colonel is a rank,” says my source, a former general officer of a NATO-affiliated army, “but a general is a clinical diagnosis.”  Ever since Hannibal’s masterful double-pincer maneuver at Cannae it...

Being consistent has the consequence of being predictable, a quality welcome, perhaps, in husbands and dogs, but somewhat a defect in journalists – at least as far as their readers, desirous of truth yet relentless in pursuit of variety, are concerned. Those who have followed my political commentary in these posts – next Wednesday, as...

Cue Wagner’s “Rienzi Overture,” YouTube here. My, how cowardly our modern “leaders” are. They’re only good at repressing and robbing the struggling middle-class. This is from the Daily Beast: “ROME — Last weekend in Italy, as the threat of ISIS in Libya hit home with a new video addressed to ‘the nation signed with the...

Hopefully, the shaky truce between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko, brokered in Minsk by Angela Merkel, will hold. For nothing good, but much evil, could come of broadening and lengthening this war that has cost the lives of 5,400 Ukrainians. The longer it goes on, the greater the casualties, the more land Ukraine will...

There are two incompatible narratives on the meaning of last Saturday’s agreement in Minsk. There is also, as usual, the complex reality which the partisans of the warring sides refuse to recognize, and which escapes the attention of major Western media commentators. The Ukrainian nationalists accused Petro Poroshenko of surrendering to Putin. Kiev’s New Times...

A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don’t care whether you win or lose—an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum...

A year or so ago, I discovered the work of Czech author Karel Capek who died on the eve of World War II. He was very popular in Eastern Europe and is barely known in the West. Most famous for his science fiction masterpiece War with the Newts (the salamanders, not the repulsive Republican politicians),...

The president’s request for the authorization to use military force against the Islamic State has landed in a Congress as divided as the country. That division was mirrored in the disparate receptions Obama’s resolution received from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. To the Times, Obama’s AUMF is “alarmingly broad. It does...

Chronicles readers might assume President Obama and his administration favor open borders. Not true. From an actual news story in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Kerry repeated demands that Russia-backed separatists pull back their troops and heavy weapons and that Moscow seal its side of the border.” It’s part of the dissolution of what used...

The late Leopold Tyrmand, an astute observer of culture, once told me that the most important publication in America is Women’s Wear Daily. Style over substance? Yesterday’s Grammy award ceremony revealed that substantive ideas—or what passes for substance when social anarchy exposes itself—are manifest in the style of contemporary music, television, film and stage. I...

There once was a minor poet, writing in Russia in the 1920’s, who had been educated at the University of Heidelberg yet never acquired the airs of a German pedant. I recently ran across a short fable of his, and threw together an English version of it because the eight lines seemed such a concise...

It’s been kind of fun, I tell you: a Florida Democratic congressman, one Alcee Hastings, calls Texas a “crazy state.” Texans—e.g., Rick Perry—joyfully, jubilantly acknowledged the craziness that has made our state (yes, I am one of the assorted bedlamites) foremost in the country for economic growth. How come Texas leads in job creation and...

“A steady patriot of the world alone, “The friend of every country—but his own.” George Canning’s couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the...

RT: Joining us in the studio now is Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine. Thank you very much for joining us at the studio of RT International. So, we have the new peace plan that includes the greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine. Do you think this is something that can really work in...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will...

Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity? While the video might firm up the faith of fanatics, would it not evoke rage and revulsion across the Islamic world? After all, this was...

The French government has approved a budget of some half a billion dollars to finance new initiatives against terrorism. Among the early fruits of this campaign is an “infographic,” or poster in plain English, headlined “Radicalisation Djihadiste, les premiers signes qui peuvent alerter” (“Jihadist Radicalization: First Warning Signs”). A top telltale sign of a person’s...

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence. In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in...

Every year I vow I’m not going to watch the next one, but inevitably end up watching it anyway. The commercials pushed in yesterday’s game were so gross, so vile, even so blasphemous it should have been called the Sleazy Bowl. I won’t describe the ads, which I avoided the best I could by switching...

In segments of the black community, particularly among the urban poor, being pursued by the police is a badge of honour, a sign that you have stood up to ‘the man’. Many black voters in Washington thought the police entrapped Marion Barry because he was getting too ‘uppity’. Barry won nearly every vote in poor...

Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP’s declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president. Give us powerful new majorities, said John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and we shall halt these usurpations of Congressional power. And, so,...

Earlier this week, Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio wrote an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal announcing that, after much soul-searching, he no longer considered himself pro-life. Ryan wrote that listening to constituents who have had abortions convinced him “that we must trust women and their families—not politicians—to make the best decision for...

We men of good will had a little scare last week when it was announced that the Sun – a venerable British newspaper whose prose style makes America’s National Enquirer sound like an excerpt from a late Henry James novel read by a young Laurence Olivier – would bow to political pressure and axe Page...

Srdja Trifkovic on RT published January 28, 2015. A strongly worded anti-Russian statement, which was issued on January 27 by European Union heads of governments, did not have the consent of Greece’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, according to Greek officials. They insist that the European Council, the body which issued the statement, did not follow...

For months there have been rumors circulating about the establishment of a set of annual prizes, commemorating two great American geniuses, H.L. Mencken and P.T. Barnum. The prizes are inspired by a single sentence from each genius: Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every...

“The Iranians are on the march,” warned John McCain Sunday. “Iran is building a new Persian Empire,” echoed Col. Ralph Peters. So alarmed is Speaker Boehner, he invited Bibi Netanyahu to come and challenge U.S. policy toward Iran from the same podium where the president delivered his State of the Union address. Bibi will make...

In the current issue of Chronicles Thomas Fleming writes: Surrealists, communists, and Dadaists did not merely embrace the death of meaning and civility; they positively exulted in the death of the West and everything Western. They hated Christianity, especially the Catholic Church; they hated Europe, France in particular; they hated the classics; they hated white...

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center retailed another smear using its classic tactic: attach the “hate group” label to a conservative Christian group, then claim others tolerate “hate” if they refuse to to disassociate themselves from the “hate group.” This one came from Heidi Beirich, chief propagandist of the group’s smear publishing arm. Here...

The intention of Charlie Hebdo’s surviving editors in publishing another provocative front-page cartoon a week after the attack, this time of a teary Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie placard under the words Tout est pardonné (“All Is Forgiven”), is obscure and unimportant. One thing is clear, however: the historical Muhammad would never shed tears...

Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that France “is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism.” This tells us what France is fighting against. But what is France fighting for in this war on terror? For terrorism is simply a tactic, and arguably the most effective tactic of the national...

Something died in America 42 years ago today. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 edict, Roe v. Wade, forcing all 50 states to almost completely legalize abortion on demand – even those states that already had legalized it. About 57 million babies have been killed since. But something more died: Maybe...

The new Republican Congress already looks like a bunch of incompetent boobs. The legislatively meaningless vote for the perennial “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), which would prohibit abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy, was scheduled for a vote today, on the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  (I...

Begun in 1879 under the auspices of the University of Oxford and published in 1928 by Oxford University Press, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, now better known as the Oxford English Dictionary, is one of the greatest events in the history of Western civilization. What is not widely remembered is that the lexicographer...

Along with scare quotes, the left frequently uses another deceptive tactic to prove that “hate” causes the problems of minorities, particularly blacks: Publishing conspiracy theories about the “suspicions” among blacks that racist mischief is afoot when something bad happens to a black person. A case in point: Salon‘s piece about the “memorial” to Eric Garner,...

On Martin Luther King Day, 2015, how stand race relations in America? Selma, a film focused on the police clubbing of civil rights marchers led by Dr. King at Selma bridge in March of 1965, is being denounced by Democrats as a cinematic slander against the president who passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965....

In one of his most famous quotes, Winston Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Today’s America could be described as a country led by a plagiarist, with the help of another plagiarist, which celebrates a holiday in honor of a third plagiarist: Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, and Martin...

ROCKFORD, Ill., Jan. 14, 2015—After several months of successful work as Vice President, Thomas Piatak has been named President of The Rockford Institute by the Institute’s Board of Directors. Former President Thomas Fleming will continue to guide the Institute’s flagship publication as editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Mr. Piatak has been writing...

Today, January 19, is a memorable date, the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans. Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of...

“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.” That maxim of Voltaire was among those most invoked by the marching millions in Sunday’s mammoth “Je Suis Charlie” rally in Paris. This week, in the spirit of Voltaire, French authorities arrested and charged...

Lt. Col. Dr. Mark Obrtel is a 48 year old officer of the army of the Czech Republic who has served with distinction in his country’s missions under NATO command in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. We would never know of him were it not for the fact that on December 30 he returned all...

RedState.com is suggesting that the 114th Congress “may be the most pro-life Congress Washington has ever seen.”  Exhibit A is the reintroduction of the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (HR 36).  The bill, which has had many incarnations, most recently was passed by the House in the previous Congress, before dying in the Senate Judiciary...

My wife keeps asking me how so many people seem to have the time to go out and demonstrate against  the brutality of “racist white cops.”  She asked a similar question, when there were regular marches against violence in the “community.”  In both cases, I explained that they are paid to demonstrate, much as the...

Irony has been in the news these past few days, when a couple of guys not only refused to share a Frenchman’s joke at the expense of the Prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him, but actually gunned down the joker– along with a dozen of his cronies, for good measure. For comparison I...

Western media are declaring the million-man march in Paris, where world leaders paraded down Boulevard Voltaire in solidarity with France, a victory over terrorism. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Unfortunately, the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, its military-style execution, the escape of the assassins, and their blazing end in a shootout Friday was a triumph...