Category: Web

When you hear of something happening in the art world, what comes to mind? What vision does that combination of words, “art world,” conjure up? I will frame my next paragraph as the classic four answers to a multiple-choice quiz, if you don’t mind. A. A bunch of HIV-positive inverts, stuffing their faces with coke...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...

[A Continuation of the interview between Srdja and Elena] ST: One worrying aspect is that Russia has allowed almost uncontrollable immigration from former Soviet Central Asia and this may, in view, of the low birth rates of the Orthodox Russians, change the demographic picture of the country in only a few decades. EC: I always...

Elena Chudinova is a Russian traditionalist conservative author and publicist who is Russia’s leading critic of Islam, mass non-European immigration, and a dedicated proponent of Russia’s engagement with the European Right. Chudinova’s famous bestseller “The Notre Damme de Paris Mosque” – a fast-paced dystopian novel about a 2048 Western Europe taken over by Wahhabi Islam...

As I was still reeling from Tax Day, the Heritage Foundation just emailed me a copy of a letter sent to the IRS by former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. Heritage also linked to a tweet by Rummy that also attached the letter. He seems to have written it all himself. In the 1960s, Rummy represented a...

At a hastily convened meeting in Geneva last Thursday the foreign ministers of Russia, the Kiev interim regime, the European Union and the United States worked out an agreement on the principles that are supposed to defuse the crisis. It is a flawed document, open to conflicting interpretations and devoid of verifiable benchmarks. The agreement...

Srdja Trifkovic’s Voice of Russia interview posted April 19, 2014 (excerpts) Trifkovic: [ … ] It is obvious from Crimean episode that the gap between the artificial reality created by the western media machine and the tangible reality on the ground is growing by the day. That is what we have seen with the coverage...

American churches cannot make up their minds. Do they serve God or an Uncle Sam who for a long time has been looking a great deal like Mammon? On patriotic holidays the choirs sing that bloodthirsty and nonsensical anthem to war and slaughter ironically titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and pastors give sermons...

With the upcoming Easter in mind, I could not help but to share a Twitter observation reposted by Scott Richert: “Advertisers now call an Easter ham a “holiday ham”. You know, so as not to offend all those celebrating Passover with a ham” Funny? Of course. Sad? Even more so. As someone who actually observes...

Twice a year, at least, during Christmas and Easter, some Conservative Christians must feel like the hero of “I Led Three Lives,” a 1950’s television series starring Richard Carlson. The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Herbert A. Philbrick, the American double-agent who infiltrated the Communist Party, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,”...

Every civilization is measured not by the culture it offers its denizens, but by the one it imposes upon them. So, though the Soviet 1920s harboured a Boris Pasternak, or, say, the American 1990s a Tom Wolfe, this will mean less to a future historian than, say, collective farms or electronic games. Electronic games had...

The recent rebellion against Brown revolutionary rule in the eastern, Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine erupted in bloodshed today, with four pro-autonomy activists killed in the small city of Kramatorsk. After Russian-speaking activists, with the approval of local authorities, took over administrative and law enforcement buildings in the Donetsk region, the Banderovites began an “anti-terror” operation...

Another year, another April 15 when the government gouges us to the bone. The excuse often given is Oliver Wendell Jr.’s “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” Except history shows taxes and inversely proportional to civilization. Back before 1913, when the dreaded income tax first was imposed (except for during the...

The “range war” in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada between hardscrabble rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government appears to have ended. The Bureau of Land Management has retreated, having seized Bundy’s cattle and tasered and arrested his son. Bundy and the BLM are fighting over his refusing to pay fees to use federal lands for...

I am back from Russia’s capital, where I presented a paper at a conference on World War I at Moscow’s Lomonosov State University. Regarding Ukraine, the consensus of my numerous interlocutors of various persuasions and backgrounds is clear: 1. Russia will not invade. She will support demands for federalization in the east (Kharkov), southeast (the...

Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Ukraine energy crisis, RT live, April 10, 18:06 GMT RT: Ukraine’s economy is in a shambles and its people are suffering. Is it morally justified to turn the taps off? Srdja Trifkovic: Talking about “moral justification,” let’s remember the first OPEC oil crisis in the winter of 1973-74, after the Yom...

JavaScript computer programming language inventor, founder and later, CEO of Mozilla free software community Brendan Eich was forced out of his job. And what was Eich’s crime or misdemeanor? Was he caught using narcotics, possessing child porn, beating his wife, or abusing his pets? Nope, the hapless executive donated a measly thousand dollars to a...

My sole-begotten son, who is midway through Oxford, is visiting me over the Easter holidays. He has brought along a friend from Brown, a classical archaeology major, and basically what the boys do all day long is get plastered. Which is as it should be, of course. When sober, the future archaeologist tells me about...

Recent weeks saw an increase of media attention to events in Syria, shifting away from Ukraine after the Crimean referendum. The main reason for the flurry of Syrian-related activity on the Internet was the ubiquitous #SaveKessab campaign on social media websites Twitter and Facebook. Kessab is a small town in the Latakia region of northwest...

First, a quick summary of all of the positive reviews by Christian thinkers of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, starring Russell Crowe: The movie Noah is a great conversation starter [shot!]. Like all Hollywood biblical epics, including the Mel Gibson one, the film gets a few things wrong [shot!], but it offers us a great opportunity to...

Sunday, March 16 – the referendum day – started with a morning visit to three polling stations. By 10 a.m. mainly the elderly turned out to vote in large numbers, some of them very frail and most visibly poor. While those approached outside insist that their vote to join Russia is not affected by material...

The Southern Poverty Law Center, or the $PLC, as they call it at VDare.com, has finally found a black murder suspect they dislike. Indeed, such was their distaste, the “hate-watchers” published his mugshot on their website. Normally, SPLC covers only white “haters” collared by the long arm of the law. They include crackpot supremacists, separatists...

Recently, American Jewish naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard who is serving a life sentence for espionage in favor of Israel has reentered the news. Apparently, the Obama administration is strongly considering his early release in exchange for Israeli concessions in the “peace process”. Israel only admitted that Pollard was their agent in 1998, thirteen whole...

Eminent Domain confiscations are a direct threat to private property but perhaps even more sinister are the flagrant violations of the 4th Amendment that Americans have grown to tolerate, much as the English learned to tolerate general writs. State troopers may routinely set up roadblocks, not to search for felons when a crime has been...

The duplex apartment overlooking the Trevi Fountain in Rome, where I spent a year in the 1990s, belonged – I say this without so much as a droplet of irony – to a very kind man by the name of Ernesto Diotallevi. It was only some months after I had terminated my tenancy that I...

Recent events in the United Kingdom, show that moral Britain is not only dead, in the words of our own Christie Davis, but buried and forgotten. Consider the following two news items.  First, the funeral of Tony Benn, the godfather of the hard Left in Britain, darling of that Midwestern socialist blowhard Michael Moore and...

When President Obama met with Pope Francis, I was expecting a Walk to Canossa. It turned out the latest in a long line of reactionary disappointments. Afterward, the media people of pope and president conflicted on how much America’s latest church-vs.-state contretemps du jour was discussed. We fight a lot over religion for a country...

The English/American household was more than a fortified building with locks and bars to keep out unwanted intruders: It was also an autonomous community, whose existence antedated the state. This was the teaching of both philosophers and jurists, who cited approvingly Cicero’s famous statement that the family was the seed-bed of the commonwealth. This was...

So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...

I’d long wanted to see more Raoul Walsh movies. Renowned as an action specialist and he-man director without peer, Walsh made every kind of adventure film—war, western, swashbuckler, gangster, fantasy (the Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad), naval, bandit (Carmen twice!), even biblical—during his 51-year career. The restless son of a successful immigrant Anglo-Irish clothier in...

A recent Gallup poll interviewed more than 178,000 people to determine which state is the “happiest”. Residents of each state were asked various questions about work, social life, the availability of food, shelter, and healthcare, as well as physical and emotional health. The poll showed that residents of the Midwest are the happiest in the...

There was some things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. —Mark Twain Those who are still addicted to the useless and indeed pernicious vice of following U.S. politics—let me urge you to go into recovery now. The habit of abstinence must be well-established soon  or you will be tempted by the hoopla...

The on-air resignation of RT (the station formerly known as Russia Today) anchor Liz Wahl (I guess young journalists are too hip to use their full names anymore) made tsunami waves in the American media. The mainstream networks and journalists, caught up in a perfect storm of anti-Russian hysteria, were ecstatic. She was interviewed by...

It was the invasion of property more than the taxes and confiscations themselves that annoyed the Americans and prepared them to resist the Stamp Act. It was not money per se, but the sacred rights of property that were at stake. If a man cannot be secure in his home, he cannot be comfortable in...

Friday, March 14 – The afternoon Aeroflot flight from Belgrade to Moscow takes a surprising route: due north over Hungary, Slovakia and eastern Poland, then turning east-northeast over Belarus, and into the Russian air space just east of Smolensk. In more normal times the flight path would have taken us across Romania, Moldova and Ukraine,...

“You are a stubborn bastard,” a Yale classmate of mine writes from the wilds of Virginia, where he, an Englishman, has been thrown by the hand of fate and now lives what I imagine as the life of an early colonist. “Your writing remains as difficult to penetrate as ever. Though,” he adds benevolently, “I admire...

Let’s skip worrying about democracy in Ukraine, Crimea and Russia for a few minutes. And concentrate on democracy right here in America. Yet another federal judge overturned state laws banning the absurdity of same-sex “marriage,” in this case in Michigan. AP reported: “Federal Judge Bernard Friedman on Friday overturned Michigan’s constitutional ban, the latest in...

Barack Hussein Obama’s triumphal progress to the presidential mansion was fueled by   the utopian sentimentality that dominates the political thinking of large segments of the U.S. population. Here was a dream combination—dark (but not too dark) skin with the manners and platitudes of a classic Midwestern liberal. It was like lackluster Hubert Humphrey or George...

Everyone has heard the expression: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” The most memorable expression of this proverb was given by the elder William Pitt, the future Lord Chatham: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.  It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind...

In an LA Times op-ed (“Ukraine’s threat from within”), University of South California professor of international relations Robert D. English describes the ugly essence of the Brown Revolution. His take on the neo-nazi dominated rebellion is much needed and sorely lacked in the American media. I already picture the pro-Maidan hacks at NYT, National Review,...

Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Crimean referendum om Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. He appears at the 9:55 and 20:08 mark in the video. 

Readers of Chronicles know well the name Srdja Trifkovic. Dr. Trifkovic has served for many years as our foreign affairs editor and is an invaluable resource for fresh information and incisive commentary on matters pertaining to Serbia and most recently the crisis in Ukraine. Currently his expertise is finding broader exsposure among some mainstream news...

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9 This is true even in politics. Maybe especially in politics, where the recycling of bad and good decisions reflects the recycling,...

Sen. John “Invade the world, invite the world” McCain recently treated American television viewers to another of his trademark hysteric attacks on Russia. He told CNN’s Candy Crowley: “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country . . . Look at Moldova and Georgia, both of whom are occupied by Russian troops as we...

Srdja Trifkovic interviewed by Mike Church on SiriusXM Patrot Radio: Mike: I have been enjoying your writing for years at Chronicles, including your ruminations about our modern demonization of monarchy and how you’re trying to figure out: How did this greatest and oldest form of government get to the station in life where it’s regarded as...

Crimea and Kosovo have much in common: an autonomous status, military bases of other countries on their territories, and a longing for independence among the majority of the population. Crimea’s ethnic composition and Western policy towards Ukraine could create a Kosovo-like scenario. The Voice of Russia talked to Serge Trifkovic, writer on international affairs and...

Tony Benn, the politician formerly known as 2nd Viscount Stansgate, died last week at the reasonably ripe age of 88. He was one of the last honest men in a country regarded by her foes as perfidious and by her own people as steadfast, and lately described by a Russian cad as “a small island...

Several days ago, in conversation with Financial Times journalist Guy Chazan, Mustafa Dzhemilev, a Soviet-era Crimean Tatar dissident and the former chairman of the Crimean Tatar representative body warned that a bloody jihadist uprising will erupt if Crimeans dare to join Russia in the upcoming referendum:  “We have Islamists, Wahhabis, Salafis, groups who have fought...

Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the Ukraine “crisis” – after nearly 100 years of Russian misrule in Europe, one may think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s clubmen circa 1855 discussing the latest from Balaclava – one again becomes conscious of the political...

Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...