Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
On October 25, 2000, central Sydney’s traffic stood still for hours, for the first time since the Olympiad. Inside the late-Victorian Town Hall, approximately 2,000 pilgrims witnessed the Aboriginal faith’s latest canonization: the state funeral of Charles Perkins, who had died on October 18 after 29 years of daily medical dependence on the “whitefella” culture...
The empire was beset by foreign invaders and war in the Middle East. Far-flung wars meant more taxes for the provinces and an increase in poverty. Some men had to choose between feeding their families and paying for medical care. Some couldn’t afford either. In the large urban ...
General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway were among the names of great Americans I listed in a London Spectator article quite a long time ago. Needless to say, if one were to mention these names today in an American publication or news program, all hell would break loose, and the name-dropper would instantly become a...
On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo). It was a sunny and rather hot day. The town, which currently has...
Rumor has it that the Brookings Institution is a well-regarded think tank staffed by highly educated experts, whose opinions are treated with great respect by the nation’s policymakers. Unfortunately, these experts do not inhabit the same spiral arm of the galaxy as the rest of us. I base this conclusion on a widely publicized report...
Angela Merkel’s unprecedented 16 years in power came to an end on Dec. 8 when Olaf Scholz was sworn in as the new German chancellor, symbolically breaking with tradition by omitting “so help me God” from the oath. Scholz steered his Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the dominant position in last September’s general election by presenting...
The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001. Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces. President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...
Looks like the British government will finally be able to rid its long-suffering citizens of the Muslim terrorist preacher (what a string of redundant adjectives!) Abu Qatada. After almost a decade of trying to throw out this troublemaker, who called for the murder of Jews and apostate Muslims and their families, Britain and Jordan...
In Campus, a newsletter of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a letter last spring from a student subscriber questioned comments about Martin Luther King found in the preceding issue’s feature essay, “A Rage for Merit.” This article portrayed King as a passionate critic of affirmative action, and this, according to the student, does not square...
Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.” After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China. But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have successfully passed the American Rescue Plan, with its $1,400 stimulus checks and its $1.9 trillion price tag. In total the federal government has now spent enough on COVID stimulus and relief to fund key moments in American history, such as world wars and moon landings, many times over....
Yesterday I was tapping away on the laptop when through the window I saw a young man walking up the drive toward the house. He was shirtless, wearing jeans and brogans—do they still call work boots by this name?—and I correctly assumed he was one of the crew repaving the driveway of the house across...
President Clinton’s fall tour of South America raised an important question: What has happened to the adversarial role of White House television journalists? ABC’s John Donvan reported that the President’s photo-op tour of Caracas left Venezuela glowing. He said the President was greeted warmly and that his speech was an overwhelming success. There was a...
Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus. Russia is...
Jesus’ words to his followers about the city on a hill, coming between references to salt without savor and the futility of hiding a light under a bushel, are admonitory, not congratulatory. Those upon whom the light has been bestowed are not to regard themselves as elevated, nor are they instructed to build a city. ...
American aid worker Kayla Mueller was regularly raped by the head of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the months between her capture by ISIS in August 2013 and her death last February. The Western media have been quick to claim that the 26-year-old’s ordeal was due to a particularly perverted, un-Islamic ideology of...
After two years of desperate pretense that the Bush administration is but the long afternoon of the Reagan era, many of Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters now begin to suspect that morning in America is fast lurching toward chaos and old night. The President’s apparent willingness to consider tax increases, despite his best-known campaign promise, and...
It must surely embarrass John Miller and the other Francophobic neocons to realize that one of the quintessential American institutions was founded by an intrepid French missionary, who offered this vision for his action: “I have raised Our Lady aloft so that men will know, without asking, why we have succeeded here.” And it is...
I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war ...
Lewis was fond of referring to himself as an Old Western Man, one of a soon-to-be-extinct species: a veritable dinosaur. As a classically educated member of the Anglo-Irish middle class, one born at the turn of the century, his opinions to most modernists must certainly appear Paleolithic. He was not a political man, seldom read...
The stars of the dance floor, a bantam couple, whirl to the “EE-II-EE-II-OO Polka,” a tune that would be obscure to almost anybody but the Mellotones. Their feet, tiny to start with, push each between the other’s with the precision of a sewing-machine needle working a button foot. Around and around they twirl, not with...
With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building. The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is...
Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness. A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry. He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...
My local newspaper is now unreadable, and I’m damn mad about it. In order to understand the earthshaking significance of this turn of events and its emotional impact on me, you have to understand the role my paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, plays in my life. It is the centerpiece of a long-standing ritual, one...
Ever since I can remember, John Wayne has been the actor the left most loves to hate. While the left’s criticisms of him are many, the one that seemed to have the most validity was his failure to serve his country during World War II. “He’s a big phony,” I was told by leftist classmates...
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...
beyond the revolution The Five Good Reasons by Thomas Fleming views In Defense of Private Property by Claude Polin Proudhon, Beauty, and Lego by Andrei Navrozov news A Linguistic Dilemma by Tom Landess reviews A Self-Contained World by James Kalb Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism The Coming North American Order by H.A. Scott Trask Charles Bowden, Murder ...
This is a state-of-the-art British political biography. D.A. Thorpe has written biographies of Home, Eden, and Selwyn Lloyd, as well as shorter studies of Lord Curzon, “Rab” Butler, and Austen Chamberlain. His knowledge of the principal political actors, particularly on the Conservative side, is prodigious; he convincingly claims to have interviewed “all the prime ministers...
Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs. Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...
It is often said that former Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, the man credited with setting fire to the tinderbox that became the First Great Awakening, was a fiery preacher. His message was certainly incendiary, but by modern standards he was nothing of the sort. According to minister Victor Shepherd, Edwards may have “thundered like a...
I live in amity with the Southern Baptists, whose general tolerance for my fellow “Whiskeypalians” I take kindly. I wouldn’t dream of joining the media whoop-de-do over who among the Baptist faithful did what to whom, and when, and what to do now. You have read it all; I will not recount the imputations of...
“I saw that book.” Are we likely to hear this more and more from the next generation? A reviewer recently described a book by Joan Didion as “a novel that doesn’t have to be filmed to make you feel you’re watching it, not reading it.” Television adaptations of fiction are notoriously common these days, and...
“A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.” —Matthew 5:14 How many Americans are aware that Abraham Lincoln was well known for telling dirty stories, engaged in antics (like playing with his feet) when he did not want to answer questions, and was flippant when his attention was called to Union soldiers’...
As traditional as a Chinese restaurant, as homegrown as a Subaru, as agrarian as a fax machine, as Celtic as a computer, as handcrafted as cable television, as hospitable as an eight-lane expressway, as Baptist as a drug deal, as Presbyterian as neo-pagan worship, as Episcopalian as a lesbian sermonette, and as pious as an...
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.” Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone? We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur...
I read Goethe’s Faust in college and had not looked into it again until the other day when, prompted by curiosity roused by Willi Jasper’s new book Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, I pulled a copy of the play off my shelf and began rereading with the idea of forming a better sense...
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of Machiavelli’s precepts with...
Sodomy and the lash, according to Winston Churchill, were the outstanding features of the British Royal Navy. The United States Navy will be at least half-British, if the American courts have their way. The homosexuals’ battle plan to gain acceptance, which includes taking dates to the Officer’s Club, now involves 100 or so discrimination claims...
Once again, Church historian Aaron D. Wolf slanders evangelicals with his essay “The Christian Zionist Threat to Peace” (Views, May). Using the classic ploy of quoting from a dictionary-type source in his introduction allows him to set up his own dispensationalist straw man to knock down in the rest of his polemic. Mr. Wolf does...
Did Robert Gibbs let the cat out of the bag? Last week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the world that Iran, unable to get fuel rods from the West for its U.S.-built reactor, which makes medical isotopes, had begun to enrich its own uranium to 20 percent. From his perch in the West Wing, Gibbs scoffed: “He...
This is the kind of novel that inspires slick reviewers and writers of publisher’s blurbs to new outrages in inflated but tacky description: “lusty,” “brawling,” “pulsing with ambition,” “passion and greed,” “an epic saga.” The story begins in Mexico in 1927, with flashbacks going back to the turn of the century, and ends in 1982....
NATO’s new “Strategic Concept” (SC), adopted at the summit in Lisbon on November 20, is neither new, nor strategic, nor much of a concept. The 11-page document avoids issues of high strategy and refrains from conceptual daring. It is worth pondering mainly for what it does not say. Its six enumerated goals are largely conventional. ...
Before going on the Eumenides , let us reflect a little on the theme. The Greeks regarded homicide with awe. Like Montenegrins and Albanians until recently, the brother or father of a murder victim felt a physical burden. The would-be avenger could not eat or sleep until revenge had been ...
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
That hysterical reaction to the travel ban announced Friday is a portent of what is to come if President Donald Trump carries out the mandate given to him by those who elected him. The travel ban bars refugees for 120 days. From Syria, refugees are banned indefinitely. And a 90-day ban has been imposed on...
The lives of the babushkas in Chernobyl are evidence that God exists everywhere, and that while destruction can often reign supreme, creation, however small, affirms our propensity for the good.
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
Whether a full-scale nuclear war between modern superpowers would last quite as long as the three-week blitzkrieg among this year’s candidates for the Republican presidential nomination is an intriguing question that neither military nor political scientists seem to have asked, but whatever the answer, a duel with nuclear weapons might well be less bloodthirsty than...