Whenever Washington targets some poor, misbegotten country for “regime change,” references to that unfortunate nation’s media by Western journalists are usually preceded by the modifier state-owned or state-controlled. The inference is clear: These guys are shills, not real journalists. Yet the West has its own state-owned and controlled media: The Brits have the BBC, and...
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An Anniversary Remembered
On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she...
Call Me Simple
Call me simple, but I just can’t understand why I have to pay the banks’ losses but I don’t get a share of their profits. I know that the music business is very profitable, but I am still cautious about investing in CDs. I am sorry to admit it, but I may have been wrong. ...
François Furet, R.I.P.
François Furet’s death on July 11 in Toulouse at age 70 ended the career of a truly iconoclastic historian. Despite Furet’s association with the political left, as a youthful communist and middle-aged social democrat, his scholarship went against the grain of the French and American academic establishments. In Penser la Révolution and in other revisionist...
Tuberville Showed Courage in Facing Down Pentagon Abortionists Despite Little Help From the GOP
While Sen. Tuberville failed in his effort to curtail the Pentagon’s new plan to subsidize soldier abortions, his willingness to stand alone in opposition to the deep state juggernaut is inspiring.
A Quota Queen for the Court
If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court. Because that is what Sonia is all about. As the New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin. “Judge Sotomayor, whose parents...
Virtue-Signalers in a Snit
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
Celestial Sights
It is a November evening in 1572. The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe is returning to his uncle’s house. As he notes that the clearer sky bodes well for resuming his observations after dinner, a strange, brilliant star suddenly catches his attention. In amazement, he watches it for some time, then: When I had...
The Ghost of Islam in the Balkans
In the historical memory of Central and Eastern European peoples, the words “Muslim” and “Islam” often evoke images of terror and violence. Derided by leftist and liberal intellectuals as “xenophobic,” these negative images are still associated with the Turks and their centuries-long military incursions into the heart of Europe. Even the verbal derivatives of the...
War, Medicine, and Propaganda
I attended two symposia in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in October and December 1993, and clearly Belgrade and Serbia had changed since my last stay there. The famous cafes in Belgrade were almost empty; most shops had almost nothing to offer. The people were out of money; the sanctions had practically made a...
Are Liberals Anti-WASP?
“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.” CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would...
What the Editors Are Reading
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
The Real World Reasserts Itself
Since the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, the nation has been instructed by its cultural elites that this is the daily reality that a racist America has too long ignored. Our nation, it was shouted in our faces, is a place where white cops harass,...
America Steps Back Into the Syrian Quagmire
It didn’t take long. Barely five weeks after assuming control, the new foreign policy team in Washington confirmed its interventionist credentials by bombing “Iran-backed militias” in Syria. The “defensive precision strike” on Feb. 26, according to the Pentagon statement, was supposed to send “an unambiguous message” that, acting to protect American and Coalition personnel, “we have acted in...
Risking Life and Limb
American soldiers have, for more than 200 years, risked life and limb for their country. The politicians who recruited and sometimes conscripted the soldiers routinely painted military service in glorious terms: You are protecting America—even the entire world. President George W. Bush continued in this tradition last Veterans Day. The Iraq occupation “is vital to...
The Telegraph and the Clothesline
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden Communication, in the abstract, is easier today than it has ever been before, largely because of the advance of technology. From the telegraph to the...
9-11, Six Years Later
On Sept. 7, National Public Radio reported that Muslims in the Middle East were beginning to believe that the 9-11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were false flag operations committed by some part of the U.S. and-or Israeli government. It was beyond the ...
Laborious Hedonism
In America, speaking out against work was once like saying nasty things about motherhood. Even now that attacks on motherhood have become common. Perry Pascarella makes it clear in The New Achievers that work is still sacred to the yuppie mentality. No longer, however, is work the spiritual exercise it was in Calvinism; restraining the...
Haunted by Yesterday
“In literature, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails.” —George Santayana Nothing is more dangerous for the critic than taking a book cover at face value. But when the blurbs compare the author to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Saul Bellow, the challenge is irresistible. And since these are the claims with...
Federalism vs. Secession
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” —The Tenth Amendment Following the passage of the national gun ban wrapped in pork, Representatives Gingrich and Gephardt congratulated each other for their bipartisan cooperation and remarked...
What 9/11 Wrought: The Bush Legacy
In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan...
A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
Five Minutes With Governor Bush
Through the good offices of a friend who is a large contributor to Republican causes, Chronicles was able to secure a brief exclusive interview with George W. Bush—the likely next President of the United States. We caught up with Governor Bush in Des Monies a few minutes before he was to address the annual joint...
No One Has the Right To Come to America
For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...
Call It ‘Gender Insanity’
The girls aren’t signing up for combat roles in the Marines Corps as fast as the sisterhood would like, NPR reports. The Marines will begin training the first women for ground combat jobs in June. But it could be a challenge because so far no women recruits have signed up for armor, artillery or infantry...
The Quran at Fahrenheit 451
By the end of this week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones, mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to toss those Qurans in the burn barrels outside his Gainesville church in Florida and ...
The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
America’s Lengthening Enemies List
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle. “As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to...
Opera Near & Far
My relationship with Barnes & Noble is fraught with emotion simply because it is a big bookstore, among other things. And I am one of those types—an inveterate reader—who is easily hooked. I was once embarrassed when a lady told me that she had caught herself reading soup-can labels: As one who had done the...
The Elites’ Abuse of Average Americans
When I went to pick up my laundry last week, one of the employees, who had just finished folding my clothes, began weeping. “This is the last load I’ll ever do here,” she said in a choked voice. “They’re letting us all go.” That one little stifled sob described more than just one woman bemoaning...
Hot Rod Lincoln
He knew that he was destined for greatness. The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer. From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power. Through his political connections, he got himself elected to the Illinois House...
In Praise of Inexcellence
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” said G.K. Chesterton. All that talk about being the best is Olympic fever, ad hype. If everyone were the best, where would the rest of us be? In sports this is obvious. Perhaps not so much so in advanced nuclear physics. The guy next...
Who Hates Trump?
From the November 2015 issue of Chronicles. 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 First Victim of Any War
Truth, the saying goes, is the first victim of any war, but as NATO’s “action” in the Balkans has demonstrated, truth is under even greater attack in the “information age.” Today, history is not written by the victors once the smoke has cleared, but constantly evolves; each day’s truth is revealed by CNN, the ubiquitous...
Capitalism the Enemy
By a margin of 63-56, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted on May 10 to pull down the Confederate battle flag that has fluttered above the state’s capitol dome since 1962 and to remove it to “a place of honor” on the capitol grounds. The vote was the grand (or perhaps the petty) finale...
Mission Impossible
Persuading a libertarian that a negotiation between one worker and a huge corporation is not a simple free market transaction. Persuading a libertarian that the Lord gave us the earth for our use, not for our maximum exploitation. Persuading a Republican that tariffs were NOT responsible for America’s past prosperity. (Tariff “protection” did not create...
Immer Drummer
Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance. Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song: Illegitimum non carborundum that...
Catholic Synod on Synodality Flames Out
The Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality looks like a flop and may be the last gasp of the same failed approach that has destroyed the Protestant mainstream in the West.
Light at the End of the Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent...
On Fire
Christopher Check’s review of W.G. Simms’ A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia (“Total War,” September) was an excellent consideration of that volume’s importance in current topical terms. If Southerners were allowed to know the true story of the invasion and burning of the civilian South by U.S....
Mentor to Chesterton
Encountered in the right circumstances, Belloc’s prose can become a lifelong addiction. Fortunately, the craving can be as readily satisfied as a thirst (if that is the right word) for cocaine in Hollywood. He wrote so much that one cannot easily run out, and the best of his works (Hills and the Sea, The Cruise...
The Truth About Impeachment
Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions...
Good Manners, Good Literature
For this very welcome and unexpected award, I thank The Ingersoll Foundation and all concerned. When I was in high school, there were certain books that I carried around in order to impress people with my literariness. One was the Collected Poems of Hart Crane, whom I didn’t altogether understand, but whose words made me...
Postwar Oxford
It was an interesting time. The Second World War had gone on two years longer than the First, with resultant fatigue in England’s industrial north, which gave the Labour government its 1945 landslide. Such is admirably explained in Corelli Barnett’s The Audit of War, which shows how the appeal of the shadow Attlee government, particularly...
Patriarch Aleksy, R.I.P.
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79. Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his ...
Something Amis
There is nothing else like the careening prose of Sir Kingsley Amis. Somehow his syntax, his diction, and his tone have a way of collapsing in sync, so that the reader is left lurching in an air pocket of laughter. I have long thought Amis to be the funniest writer in the English-speaking world, and...
The Center Cannot Hold
The Church of England is made up of three parts: evangelical Protestants, Anglo-Catholics, and liberals. They have long been at war, and soon this war will lead to the final rending of that Church. The Anglo-Catholics will break away when women are ordained bishops, as some already did when the Church of England first ordained...
I Gave it Up for Lent
My good friends at Catholic Answers in San Diego invited me to be a guest on their excellent radio program last Monday to discuss the tensions between being a “good” American and “good” Catholic. You can listen to the show at their website, although in one short hour, ...
Darkness on the Edge of Town
I became aware of it as I was walking our dog in the neighborhood around our new home in Arkansaw, Wisconsin: the utter silence around me under the shroud of a clear winter’s nighttime sky. The darkness on the edge of town where my home is located underscored the reasons we had chosen to live...
Immigration Deform
I suppose there’s no point in writing in advance about “comprehensive immigration reform,” since by the time this magazine reaches your hands the point may be moot. The Gang of Eight may well have tossed Congress the perfect bipartisan plan, and President Obama may have run down Pennsylvania Avenue, pen in hand and surrounded by...