Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric, if not utterly insane or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream.” The trouble is that normal people do not take madmen seriously enough. This works to the advantage of politicians—an inherently insane breed—and their subjects’ attitude of “they can’t be serious” allows them...
Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...
How could I possibly know as much as I do about popular entertainment? I mean, I almost never go to the movies anymore. The big multiplexes annoy me with the stink of their sprays, their even more vexing segmentation of the audience, and their usurious popcorn prices. At home, I have no time for television,...
A television ad: Single girl “Heather” has come to be videotaped for a dating service. Haltingly, she blurts out facts about herself—she’s got a Lab, a “great” job, an “out-of-control shoe fetish”—while sipping the diet soda which is supposedly the raison d’être of the ad. The interviewer comments, “Sounds like a pretty good life.” Taking...
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
“Spectacular fiasco for the organizers . . . a damning verdict on globalization that ignores its own consequences” was Le Monde‘s assessment (December 2) of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Dozens of dailies all over the world concurred. But the reporting of this event, its background, and the accompanying protests in the “mainstream”...
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
In our fact-free news, concocted and presented by the products of our fact-free educational system, the lies have reached the point where only foreigners dare speak their name. That’s certainly true of the most outrageous lie of the year, and perhaps of the decade: the “Kosovo genocide.” It did not happen, period. The cat may...
Religion is a very sturdy creature. For two centuries, various atheist regimes have tried to eliminate religious practice in their societies and, without exception, have ended up restoring the forms of the old worship, but with newer and far lamer excuses. The French revolutionaries who tried to free their subjects from the curse of Christianity...
During the Indonesian crisis in September, the American media faithfully toed the U.S. government line. “East Timor is not Kosovo!” declared Albright, Berger, and Cohen; “Amen!” responded the Fourth Estate. But commentary on America’s hypocritical diplomacy was abundant abroad. In the Toronto Sun (September 14), Lorrie Goldstein wrote: If East Timor was [sic] Kosovo, we...
What was the most important story unfit to print in 1998? No, it wasn’t Kosovo: Chronicles may have been among the first to expose the Clinton administration’s many lies, crimes, and misdemeanors in the Balkans, but that particular cat is now out of the bag. There is a story still largely unknown, however, and so...
Twenty years after being exiled from the Soviet Union, Alexander Zinovyev—one of the most prominent living European authors—has decided to leave his adopted homeland, France, and to return to Russia. His reasons are summarized in the title of a long interview in Le Figaro Magazine: “The West has become totalitarian” (July 24). While he was...
“To be merely queer is no achievement, but to be brilliantly individualistic is a fine art which Geneva brought to perfection,” wrote Warren Hunting Smith, who died last November at the age of 93. Mr. Smith lived something of a double life. He was an editor of the Yale Edition of the Horace Walpole correspondence,...
What is individualism? John Stuart Mill answered this question with a theory of rights. Mill looked for a “simple” theoretical principle that could distinguish the liberty of the individual from that of the state. Not only is there no such principle, but we miss the full character of individualism if we try to grasp it...
When I was growing up, the nuclear-war nightmare and other end-of-the-world scenarios weighed heavily on filmmakers’ minds. From radioactive giant lizards trashing Tokyo to the ironic Planet of the Apes, from On the Beach to Dr. Strangelove, the movies made it clear that our social order was on the edge of extinction. The Terminator series...
A few years ago, before my son was born, I spent a weekend in the Hamptons at the country house of a moderately hip American investment banker. There were about 20 of us to dinner that evening, with all the usual cosmopolitan strains amply represented. Boring and predictable as the whole business was, by about...
We open this, the final Signs of the Times to be devoted entirely to Clinton’s war in Kosovo, with an eloquent summary of the war by Canada’s answer to Pat Buchanan, David Orchard. In an op-ed in the National Post (June 23), the prominent Tory declared the idea that NATO attacked Yugoslavia to solve a...
In his article “A Just and Necessary War,” published in the New York Times on May 25, President William Jefferson Clinton summarized the case for his war against the Serbs. He elaborated on his “vision,” arguing that the bombing of Serbia was the response to “the greatest remaining threat to that vision; instability in the...
Regular readers of this column are acquainted with the exact terms of the Rambouillet “peace” accords, which Serbia refused to sign, and for which reason it got bombed. The details of this American-sponsored plan are still unfit to print in the “mainstream” media in the United States, but the cat is out of the bag...
If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...
In The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his trilogy on Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Friedrich von Hayek confessed that, “as a result of long endeavors to trace the destructive effect which the invocation of ‘social justice’ has had on our moral sensitivity,” he had “come to feel strongly that the greatest service”...
As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...
The crisis in Kosovo continues to illuminate the glaring gap between the quality of reporting in America and in the rest of the world. In Western Europe, in particular, the tragedy in the Balkans has come to be seen as the defining moment of our civilization and of its chances for survival in the coming...
At the Alamo, Davy Crockett either: A. Died while swinging old Betsy; B. Came radically disconnected when he torched the powder magazine; C. Surrendered to the Mexicans, who tortured, then killed him, along with six other Anglo survivors of the siege. Does it matter immensely which of these versions of Crockett’s death commends itself to...
America went to war against the Serbs in March, ostensibly because of their refusal to sign the so-called peace agreement put forward by the United States and its allies at Rambouillet, France. Many other reasons were subsequently advanced, but this was the original one. President Clinton told us that the Albanians “chose peace” by signing,...
The 46-year-old veteran frontiersman lay in bed, desperately ill. He was suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound that he had received in a fight. But duty called. The state legislature asked him if he would lead an army of volunteers to engage the rampaging Red Stick Creeks. Though scarcely able to sit up...
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
The best commentary on the Clinton affair predictably came from abroad. Writing in the Daily Telegraph (London) on February 10, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard lamented the fact that the Republicans were too timid, or too enmeshed in Clintonian intrigue themselves, to pursue the real charges against Clinton. The counts concerning Lewinsky were bound to be misconstrued as...
Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy. Call them what we will—fiends or psychopaths, ghouls or serial killers—this type is by no means new to the later 20th century, however much the...
Family policy is strangely absent from debates in Europe (the word “family” plays no part in the treaty of European Union signed at Maastricht). In France, however, it has become the object of numerous controversies. From these debates, several lessons can be drawn which would enable policymakers to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past....
Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...
Back in 1994, a major news item proved unfit for publication in any “mainstream” media outlets in the United States. It concerned the possibility—which turned into a virtual certainty—that the Bosnian Muslim government staged the infamous “marketplace massacre” in Sarajevo, killing 66 of its own people. The U.S. government promptly blamed the Serbs. In subsequent...
While many modern historians, liberal politicians, and media elites would like to think that the very concept of “state sovereignty” died when Robert E. Lee offered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the people of one state recently gave state sovereignty a ringing endorsement at the ballot box....
Can a ten-year-old girl successfully sue a local school board for failing to prevent the sexual harassment of the young lady by an elementary-school classmate? Should an Alabama state court judge be able to display his hand-carved copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom? Can the people of a state decide that no state...
As we approach the end of this century, and indeed of a millennium, there is more than the usual tendency to reflect on things human and divine. One thing we should ponder is that the 20th century, often praised as the most enlightened, progressive, and humane period in history, has in fact been the most...
Four years ago, when I made a trip to Naumburg to attend a philological symposium devoted to Nietzsche, I was told by one of the participants that, until recently, West Germans traveling from Frankfurt on the main west-east railway line had been forced to dismount when the train reached the “frontier town” where the Federal...
On day two of “Desert Fox” last December, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that she was “gratified” by the “solid” support that the U.S. action against Iraq had received from statesmen around the globe, including those in the Arab world. Her counterpart at the British Foreign Office, Robin Cook, suggested that most Arab regimes...
The timing of Nature magazine’s “expose” of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings received a great deal of press attention, coming as it did just before elections which were expected to determine a modern philandering president’s fate. At the same time, Joe Ellis, the author of the article, signed a full-page newspaper...
The cultural schism between the Western and Eastern halves of European Christian civilization—marked principally by their respective religious traditions, Roman Catholic and Protestant in the West and Orthodox in the East, may or may not prove fatal. One issue stands above all others in determining the outcome: the Islamic resurgence that has rapidly come to...
In late summer last year, two United States embassies in East Africa were the target of murderous bomb attacks by Islamic terrorist groups. After ordering two retaliatory missile attacks on installations presumed to be connected with militant Islamic extremism, President Clinton hastened to assure the American people that he has nothing against Islam, which he...
Plundering the treasures of conquered lands has always been a fair game, from Neolithic herds and Sabine women to works of art: Byzantine statuary adorns St. Marco’s in Venice, and Elgin’s marbles are in London to stay. But moving a land itself across an international frontier is a novel concept, one which is being tried...
“Some say there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have—even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful, grants...
Poor Augusto Pinochet! Try to imagine Fidel Castro flying to England on private business and getting arrested for alleged crimes against humanity. Within hours, every talking head on this planet would be up in arms, demanding British blood and Castro’s freedom. It hardly needs stating that Fidel would be better suited to incarceration at Her...
By the end of 1998, it was no longer possible for any informed and honest person to claim that the massive immigration experienced by the United States since the 1970’s was not significantly altering the culture, economy, and politics of the nation. Last summer, the Washington Post, long a zealous opponent of immigration restriction, published...
Among the significant changes on the American intellectual right in the last 50 years is the growing emphasis on equality. From the speeches of Jack Kemp and the collected works of Professor Harry V. Jaffa to the arguments advanced for Proposition 209 in California, it seems that equality is not only a principle worthy of...
On the evening before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed what is known as the Great High Priestly Prayer. It is recorded for us in John 17. In that short chapter, addressing the Father in the presence of His disciples, He prayed four times “that they may be one.” This petition extended not merely to those disciples...
“Receive me, then, O Lord and lover of Mankind, even as the harlot, as the robber, as the publican, as the prodigal . . . “ —The Prayer of St. Basil the Great The Law on Religion passed this year by the Russian State Duma restricts the activities of “non-traditional” religions...
In August 1994, I was happy to be one of the many Latin clerics who over the years, in divisa or in borghese, have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain of Athos, the Garden of the Mother of God. On the Feast of the Lord’s Transfiguration, I was able to set foot on that...
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition is the title of Michael Wreszin’s 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald (1906- 1982). It is a very good title, by which I mean something more than a “handle”; it is a precise phrase, a summary properly affixed to the memory of an extraordinary man. The emphasis of Wreszin’s biography...
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...