In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on February 11, President Bush warned against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and suggested measures to dismantle a growing black market in nuclear fuel and technology. He called the possibility of a sudden attack by weapons of mass destruction “the greatest...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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The End of Another Panacea
Nineteen-ninety-one was an exhilarating year. The simultaneous col-lapse of the Soviet regime and the apartheid system in South Africa appeared an unexpected international bonanza for moral activists, both liberal and conservative. Outstanding accounts were miraculously settled. The gloomy predictions of trade and race wars were swept aside. Old verities were dusted off and promoted as...
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Win or Lose
When Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf thanked President Bush for letting the military fight the Gulf war on its own terms, he was expressing an idea deeply felt in the Pentagon for over twenty years: “No more Vietnams.” Both Schwarzkopf and his boss, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, experienced...
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Lament for a Lost Love
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
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An Unfinished Story
A review of The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia • by Srdja Trifkovic • Chicago: The Lord Byron Foundation • 250 pp., $20.00 Srdja Trifkovic is no stranger to Chronicles readers, many of whom have found his articles commenting on foreign affairs, with particular attention to the Balkans, to ...
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A Suicidal Empire
It is no longer the issue of legality or constitutionality – we are long past that. It is about identity and survival. Obama is the enemy of America, however defined. He is the embodiment of an anti-America, culturally, spiritually and morally, that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of a real country. So we’ll...
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Sacred Encounters
“Time,” R.H. Ives Gammell wrote in The Twilight of Painting, “is a ruthless appraiser of art and, by and large, a very just one.” Gammell addressed his book “to readers disposed to consider the complete deterioration of the older forms of painting a disaster to civilization.” When he published The Twilight in 1946, Gammell’s purpose...
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Staying on the Ground
Donald Trump’s campaign for the Reform Party presidential nomination may never get off the ground, and anyone who has ever visited Trump’s stomping grounds in Atlantic City should not be surprised. The Trump Taj Mahal casino sits alongside the Atlantic City boardwalk, a gaudy reminder of the excesses of its owner. The “Taj,” which ranked...
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On Campus With the National AIDS Quilt
It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon when a section of the national AIDS quilt visited Winthrop University. The sun, slipping low into the tops of the pines, shown red across the sparsely populated campus. With many students still enjoying the waning hours of another weekend spent elsewhere. Rock Hill, South Carolina, was not up to...
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On Correctness and Collegiality
It all began in February, when one disgruntled Vermonter started a blog to attack the Second Vermont Republic, the four-year-old secessionist organization in our state. He was apparently prompted by hearing Rob Williams, then cochair of the SVR, attacking Abraham Lincoln on the radio for the illegal suppression of Southern secession, and his political-correctness genes...
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Liberal Charity
Which is the main bastion of institutional liberalism: government or the corporate boardroom, which in addition to its own leftist philanthropy also funds multimillion-dollar foundations? With a cutback in public spending possible, due to voter disenchantment, the answer may be the latter, for universities and special interest groups intent on spreading secularism and nihilism are...
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Top of the World, Ma
Black Mass Produced by Cross Creek Pictures Directed by Scott Cooper Screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, based on the book Black Mass, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill Distributed by Warner Brothers Ever since The Great Train Robbery flashed on the screen in 1903, Americans have been enthralled by gangster movies. They not...
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A Few Comments on A Strange Liberty
In his new book, former Mises Institute President Jeff Deist writes incisively about the evils associated with the modern administrative state, including an important discussion of the late Murray Rothbard’s views on immigration.
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Back to School, Back to Hell
Both Dr. Fleming’s column “Thinking Outside the Boxes” in the current issue of the magazine and John Seiler’s “Welcome Back to the Slammer…er…School” blog on our website inspired me to share some of my personal experiences with the 12 years of torment known as school. I began my grade school education in the last months...
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Hello, Mr. Clint
As I grow older, I think less and less about trying my hand at fiction. For an old man who has kept his eyes open and made a few mental notes of what he has seen, the great temptation is to write a memoir. Even a good novel may never find a publisher, while even...
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The Surveillance State Turns Twenty
Fifty-three years ago, in the fall of 1968, I was among a gaggle of idealistic first-year students sitting in a classroom at the Harvard Law School, where a crusty old professor advised us to study international law. In that discipline, “the dew was still on the grass,” he said. In those days, when many budding...
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The Phantom Horse
“What does ‘AQHA 1990 gelding, bred Actual Spark’ mean?” “It means someone has a neutered ten-year-old American quarter-horse, sired by Actual Spark, for sale. Why?” Rhonda looked up from the Casper Star-Tribune she held spread in her lap. “I want to buy a horse.” “What sense does that make? You’re moving back to California in...
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Secession Becomes Thinkable
American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup; by F. H. Buckley; Encounter Books; 184 pp., $23.99 When asked whether a state can constitutionally secede from the United States, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brushed the question aside, saying the matter was settled by the Civil War. He was wrong. A Zogby poll in 2018 found that...
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The Making of an Individualist
“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,...
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Fourth Generation War Comes to a Theater Near You
Mobs loot, burn, and vandalize while politicians advocate defunding the police. A commune was established in Seattle and turned into Lord of the Flies while government did nothing. Blacks demand equal treatment from police despite a violent crime rate many times greater than that of whites, and mainstream media will not report honestly the differences in crime rates....
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Prior Reflections
When Chronicles talks, people listen—at least in New Zealand. I have had my allotted 15 minutes of total fame, all because of a couple of paragraphs snatched by the Kiwi press out of a little piece of mine (Letter From Inner Israel, “Sorting Out Jew-Haters“) printed in these pages in March. Readers will recall that...
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Adolf Hitler, Our Contemporary
Hitler is 123 today, and he is alive and well. The Führer is going strong not because a vast neo-Nazi conspiracy is about to take over the Western world, kill the Jews, expel the Muslims and make April 20 the Day of Aryan Rebirth, but because he is an all-time favorite of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly...
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The Silent Killer Crossing Our Border
America's unchecked borders are permitting the spread of tuberculosis.
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A Response to Biden’s Stimulus Letter
At my elbow is a letter from President Biden that came in the mail this past weekend. It’s torn in half, dotted with coffee grounds, and slightly soggy, because I just now retrieved it from my kitchen wastebasket. I rescued this letter from the banana peels, other junk mail, and a chicken carcass to read...
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Not Ours to Give
Gary David Comstock is Protestant chaplain and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. The author cites his “lover/partner Ted” in the acknowledgments, and thus manifestly belongs to the group he describes in uniformly favorable terms. The book is interesting, and in many respects challenging to the traditionally minded reader. A jacket blurb by...
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Chesterton and the Cowardly Cocktail?
G.K. Chesterton famously derided cocktails. Is there any hope for those of us who love both Chesterton and cocktails, or must we choose one and reject the other?
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Post-Modern Muzak
One of the deleterious aspects of enclosed shopping malls is the audible environment–not the sounds of shoppers shouting, scuffling, and struggling about, around, and over imaginary bargains, but the ever-pervasive schmaltz that fills the air. There are the standard packaged long-playing tapes that the large department stores utilize; the always-too-loud FM radio that teen-oriented boutiques...
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Whose Voice Counts?
“I am teaching you to use a tool more deadly than a pistol.” This is the message beginning journalism students hear from an instructor who spoke last year at a conference on “Our Enemies’ Use of the Media,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media. In a world of Goliaths, count Accuracy in Media as one of...
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Theses and Antitheses
American liberals have long been troubled by a sinister force lurking in our society, namely conservatism. Albert O. Hirschman’s motive in writing The Rhetoric of Reaction is to explain this phenomenon to his fellow liberals. He refrains from psychoanalyzing conservatism; instead, he argues that conservatives, regardless of personal quirks, are bound to certain forms of...
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Dining With The Donald
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...
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Christmas: Some Caveats
I endorse enthusiastically my friend and colleague Tom Piatak’s defense of Christmas. As a curmudgeon, however, I am inclined, this time of year, to gloomy reflections. Perhaps they go back Herbert W. Armstrong’s annual diatribe against Christmas, which I never missed in my teens. Armstrong, the founder of The Worldwide Church of God (and...
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Prioritizing Threats
As Donald Trump moves closer to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, the panic of the political class is a wonderful sight to behold. GOP donors meet in secret conclave, plotting various scenarios designed to steal the nomination. A “brokered” convention, a “contested” convention, a last-minute rules change, and a “conservative” third party run by...
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Books in Brief
The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 499 pp., $29.00). This sympathetic, indeed deeply moving, biography of the ill-fated king is dramatic and mostly well written, save in certain instances where I found the presentation of particular events (such as the controversy at the immediate start...
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A Trump Doctrine—’America First’
However Donald Trump came upon the foreign policy views he espoused, they were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border. Yet those views are hemlock to the GOP foreign policy elite and the liberal Democratic interventionists of the Acela Corridor. Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy rooted in...
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The Establishment
We need a word for the forces that govern our lives. Establishment, a term popularized by Henry Fairlie in the 1950’s, is common currency. He meant by it “the whole matrix of official and social relationships within which power is exercised.” Ralph Waldo Emerson is held to be the first to use the word in...
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We Asked For It
For almost two decades, or ever since Tony Blair became prime minister, the British have moaned about a lack of opposition in politics. All our politicians “sound the same,” we say—and they do, it’s true. Our parliamentary system may be designed for confrontation, but so far this century the Labour and Conservative parties seem to...
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Happenstance Phenomena
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
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Aftermath of an Afghanistan Debacle
In Afghanistan, the mission failure appears complete. The trillion-dollar project to plant Western democracy in a Muslim nation historically fabled for driving out imperial intruders has crashed and burned after 20 years, and the Taliban are suddenly back in power. After investing scores of billions in training and arming a force of 350,000 Afghani troops,...
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Tiananmen Moments
On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I—who had seen off Napoleon—his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace. For hours, the czar stood at the end of ...
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Kosovo Crisis Becomes Global
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
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The Celts of the West
The ancient story of early Scotland will not be fully told until much more study has been completed, The face of the land literally is pockmarked with the remains of settlements and dwellings—many unexcavated—raised in an age so remote from our own, we scarcely know the names of the races that inhabited them. Riddles there...
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A Walk on the Dark Side
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
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Cleaning Up
“To write a criticism of one’s self would be an embarrassing, even an impossible task.” —Heinrich Heine This autobiography pretty much confirms the impression left by an occasional reading of Carl Rowan’s columns over the years: a decent enough fellow, earnest but smug, amiable at times but given to portentous and endless scoldings about “hidden...
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Confronting Jihad
Paris (twice in ten months), San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Ansbach, Munich, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray: Hundreds of people blown up, pulverized, shot, knifed. Who is next? That such attacks will continue is certain. That the political class has no strategic blueprint for dealing with the scourge of jihad terrorism is obvious. That all Western security services have...
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A Conservative Tax Code
Few American objects attract more scorn than the federal Internal Revenue Code. When initially drafted in 1914, it contained 11,400 words, about the length of a long magazine article. Today, the Code weighs in at about four million words, with another six million in supportive regulations. Its garbled syntax is easily ridiculed. Tax attorney Joseph...
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On ‘Historical Revisionism’
A correction on Arthur Eckstein’s excellent essay “Caution: Historical Revisionism at Work.” Eckstein says that Noam Chomsky never visited North Vietnam. That is not the case. The following are excerpts from a speech Chomsky made in Hanoi on April 14, 1970 welcoming the 1970 “spring offensive” of the American antiwar movement. (The speech was monitored...
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My Ground, Myself
To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground. And so Catharine Savage Brosman’s title works for a book of essays mostly about journeys away (though she includes a nice piece on New...
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The Rise of Putinism
“Abe tightens grip on power as Japanese shun election.” So ran the page one headline of the Financial Times on the victory of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Sunday’s elections. Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up Japan’s military, asserting her rights in territorial disputes with...
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A New Path to Peace
Israel’s recent siege of Lebanon, which has imposed a crippling humanitarian, economic, and psychological setback on her northern neighbor, may return Syria to the center stage of Middle Eastern politics. Considering Syria’s enduring influence over Lebanon and the Palestinians and her close ties to Iran, ignoring Syria no longer serves America’s (or Israel’s) interests. Even...
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Vivek Ramaswamy and the Propositional Nation
The latest Republican to announce his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election offers a vision of the American identity as a set of ideals rather than a shared historical experience.