A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below that. The title is Io Uccido—“I Kill” in Italian. I’ve meant for some time to...
When Donald Trump started making noise about running for president, I knew next to nothing about him. Since I don’t watch television, I’m not sure whether I could even have identified him in a lineup. I knew only that he was a New York-based real-estate mogul and had a series of beautiful wives. So it...
“Don’t give us India,” Samuel Johnson once told Boswell, when the talk was about how widely mankind differed in its view of chastity and polygamy. Montesquieu, he said, the great pioneer of anthropology, was in many wavs a fellow of genius. But whenever he wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice...
This authorized biography of American statesman George Kennan has been 30 years in the writing, its publication being deferred until after Kennan’s death in 2004. The writer was the first to be given full access to Kennan’s voluminous unpublished diaries. Thus, the book devotes many pages to an exploration of Kennan’s inner life, at the...
Will he? Won’t he? Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a serious presidential contender last year, the British have been excited at the thought of his arrival in the motherland. Better yet, we have delighted ourselves with the possibility of denying him a visit to meet the Queen. That sort of thing makes us Brits...
Professor Murray Rothbard’s “Letter From Academia,” (Correspondence, September 1991) begins on a Swiftian tone, but ends disastrously. We learn from the last paragraph that the trouble with our universities is the lack of a “reality check,” in other words, that they are not run on the private, profit-making enterprise model. I have always thought, naively...
Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis, opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic, Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium...
There is only one smell commonly found on earth that is worse than the chemical smell of rotting orange rinds. This, oddly enough, is a woman’s perfume—Chanel ?5. As it recently emerged from World War II archives that Mademoiselle Chanel was, in her spare time, Agent F-7124 of the Abwehr, the Nazis’ military intelligence, I...
One of the problems with treating an event like Watergate as history is that, for most of us, it isn’t. The “third-rate” burglary that became a constitutional crisis leading to the only resignation of a sitting President in our history may be two decades old, but it is still very much with us. In last...
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
Senator Bob Packwood, a left-wing Republican, enjoyed the support of Republican bigwigs, including Senator Robert Dole, until he crossed the path of left-wing Democrat Barbara Boxer, who finally brought him to book for molesting women. Ironically, Packwood was a darling of the feminists. On abortion, he was Mr. Reliable. He supported federal funding for Planned...
Never Rarely Sometimes Always Directed and written by Eliza Hittman ◆ Produced by BBC Films ◆ Distributed by Focus Features These Wilder Years (1956) Directed by Roy Rowland ◆ Written by Frank Fenton ◆ Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer In the guise of a documentary treatment of abortion, Never Rarely Sometimes Always tells us quite...
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...
National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President’s bid to be taken seriously as the “education President.” In fact, educators nationwide celebrated it as a tribute to their profession. But a closer look at the bill indicates that...
One would think that the recent report about sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic Church in Belgium was horrific enough that it did not need any embellishment. But that’s not how Christopher Hitchens thinks. In his most recent column, a call for “simple earthly justice” in cases of clerical sexual abuse, Hitchens claims that...
“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years...
All over Britain and Ireland, including the unpleasing town where I live, which is run by a left-wing junta, there are memorials to those who fought in the International Brigades on the Red Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Even though there are but a few British and Irish survivors of the battles...
Did the Freedom Caucus just pull the Republican Party back off the ledge, before it jumped to its death? A case can be made for that. Before the American Health Care Act, aka “Ryancare,” was pulled off the House floor Friday, it enjoyed the support—of 17 percent of Americans. Had it passed, it faced an...
The recent election of the new Chancellor of Oxford University—or was it the prospect of another July undisturbed by fireworks?—reminded me of the letter I received from a Cambridge friend last summer, when I was living in Oxford. I quote it with minor deletions. “Warm greetings to the Latin Quarter of Morris-Cowley, and happy Fourth...
Only lucky strikes and a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis could resolve the cognitive dissonances of the Clinton administration. One newspaper I saw on March 25 carried a story about hearings on regulating tobacco alongside another story about Dr. Jocelyn Elders’ opposition to banning tobacco products. Since then FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler has been ranting...
Only recently, I learned that the community of Columbus, New Mexico, U.S.A., is home to Pancho Villa State Park, which lies immediately south of town. Since I lived in Las Cruces, 80 miles away by road, for two years in the late 90’s and have paid more than one visit to Columbus and the Mexican...
Pearl Craigie, the long forgotten novelist and playwright “John Oliver Hobbes,” who died in 1906, is due for resurrection. She has haunted me for over 40 years. It was through my study of the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore in the 1940’s (particularly through Joseph Hone’s biography of him), that Mrs. Craigie first came into my...
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...
Last week, Catholic World Report ran an article by regular Chronicles contributor Jerry Salyer on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The piece is well worth reading. Solzhenitsyn’s name will forever be linked to his rigorous denunciation of the evils of Communism. After Solzhenitsyn, no morally responsible person could ignore the tens of millions murdered by Communists, or pretend...
The Bostonians: Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Ghabvala; Merchant-Ivory Production. A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man...
On the Fourth of July near the end of the 18th century, citizens of Boston paraded into the church that gave birth to the first Tea Party movement. The city’s board of selectmen, the executive arm of the town government, had announced that Congressmen John Lowell, a Harvard-educated lawyer and notable of the founding generation,...
One cannot reasonably assume that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a seamless conspiracy. Even a successful plot is not a well-oiled machine, and, whatever the plotting behind the scenes, as Shakespeareans say about Romeo and Juliet, the skyjackings of September 11 were, in some ways, tragedy snatched from the jaws of comedy. Take,...
Some insomniacs do endless sequences of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing. An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers. In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...
Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant. Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media, the leadership of both parties, the entire...
I agree with Srdja Trifkovic (“Time for Arafat to Go,” The American Interest, February) that Yasser Arafat is not the best leader for the Palestinians and may well be an impediment to peace. But Dr. Trifkovic repeats a common misconception when he says, in effect, that the Israeli offer at Camp David was just too...
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
Democracy is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is a huge slice of the leadership and ruling class of the national Democratic Party. Democracy has not failed America, the reigning Democrats have failed America.
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
Jihadophilia (/d??’h??do’f?lj?/) is a mental disorder affecting members of the Western (West European, North American and Anglo-Antipodean) elite class, mostly politicians, journalists, academics and civil servants. J. is characterized by a breakdown of the ability to name Muslims as perpetrators of the acts of Islamic terrorism, by the tendency to systematically ignore Islam as a factor in terrorist attacks...
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
The Amy Wax struggle session shows that the process is the real punishment. And the indignity is the whole point.
The organized, violent, Mexican-flag waving mob that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally in Chicago underscored the desperation of the globalist oligarchy as the Trump campaign advances toward the Republican presidential nomination. The mob was apparently backed by the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org, and a mass media that has spewed propaganda casting Trump as Hitler,...
The Church of England is now a citadel of advanced liberalism. It went over to secularism long ago, and its zealots intensify their hold upon doctrine and practice. The charge sheet includes, but is not confined to, support for the transgender lobby, for illegal immigrants, and for pandenominational movements. The Church smiles upon the “marriage”...
Making Mr. Right directed by Susan Seidelman written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank Orion Pictures Perhaps it’s living in New York that makes me like Making Mr. Right. Susan Seidelman’s latest (she did Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, remember) is just one step up from farce: a lighthearted comedy of manners and sexual politics....
We have it on good authority that the peacemakers are blessed, and that’s only fair, because we sure catch hell in this world. Not long ago I suggested that most Southerners who display the Confederate flag are not bigots and got some hate mail to the effect that only a bigot could believe that. Last...
Short reviews of The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook, by Gary Bullert, and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté.
One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I’m in New York City is to read the New York Times. It’s perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does, its lying based on omission rather than invention, and by the use of the kind...
The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...
The GOP launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to celebrate Kwanzaa this year. “Wishing you a happy and prosperous Kwanza!” tweeted the official account of the College Republicans. It was a theme echoed by numerous other official GOP channels. In wishing his followers a happy Kwanzaa from the balmy state of Florida, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds was simply following...
I was chairman of the Annual Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol in March of 2019 when our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raging demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort for us to exit the surrounded Capitol building. I clearly recall the disfigured countenance, the flaming eyes,...
Ananyo Bhattacharya’s biography of the genius mathematician John von Neumann is rich in details about the man's work but lacking in characterizations of the man himself.
The elitist bureaucracy created during the Carter administration makes nothing more efficient and is at odds with the interests of the American people.
“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists...
Sometimes it seems that I have become the master of a single plaintive note, sung by the disembodied voice of the patron saint of grasshoppers, Marie Antoinette, from somewhere beyond the tomb. And it is true that often, when I reread whatever I have written, I am reminded of Russian dictionaries of fenya, or for...
Back in the day, was there anyone more famous than Arturo Toscanini? Everyone knew who he was, what he did, and what he looked like. He was more famous than Walt Disney and got coverage like a movie star. And even the sight-challenged were aware of his performances and recordings. The first recording I ever...