He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius, and this is why the floor of my study is made concave by the aggregate weight of all the newspapers and magazines I have acquired since moving to Cambridge: I simply cannot bring myself to throw away a single page of newsprint. In...
228 search results for: Solzhenitsyn
The Country Writer
I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...
Politics Is the New Religion
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
They Were the World
Most people are unconcerned about the plight of the very poor because they have their hands quite full enough providing for the health and safety of their own families. But then there are “the fashionably concerned,” those who are very concerned that they appear concerned about the poor. One thinks of certain entertainment personalities, religious...
Rev. Wright’s Star Pupil
“A steady patriot of the world alone, “The friend of every country—but his own.” George Canning’s couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the...
A New Bottom Line
In his provocative book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver offered some poignant observations regarding modern times. Western man, he wrote, has fallen prey to a “falsified picture” of the world, characterized by materialism and an egotism which assumes that “man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual...
Something of Art
In Something of Myself, his 1935 autobiography, Kipling remembers that when he was a young man, working for the English newspaper in the Punjab, “I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or—I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks.”...
Be Sensitive—or Else!
Horror stories about punishments for insensitive behavior on college campuses are old news. But leftist hypersensitivity has permeated everyday life in the real world as well. In Manassas, Virginia, a white woman called 911 at 3:08 A.M. to report that some black men—whom she referred to as “niggers”—were trying to break into her house. According...
Alone Perhaps, but Is Trump Right?
At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid?...
The Uses of Diversity: Recovering the Recent Past
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
History as Paranoia
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
The Oligarchy is Losing Its Grip, But Its Death Throes May Prove Fatal – to Us
“How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice” Several weeks ago the mainstream media (MSM) gave saturation coverage to a picture of a little boy pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after his home and family were crushed in what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,”...
Russia Baiters and Putin Haters
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
Nunc Est Bibendum
Or Now That Poetry Is Dead, I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink A new battle of the books is in progress. This time, the lines are not being drawn between modern and ancient but between the present and the recent past, and the antagonists are not Homer against Milton or Aristotle vs. Bacon,...
Genetic Roulette
Once, a long time ago, when, as a result of one of those complex misunderstandings that cast long shadows over the course of my life, I was getting married in a small town in Connecticut, my father showed up at the church stuffed with promotional literature. This consisted of leaflets describing his new organization, donation...
Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern France), the Near East became the Middle...
What’s Really behind the State Department’s Meddling in Ukraine?
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On March 31 the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election was held. In line with all polls, the top spot (with about 30 percent of the vote) was taken by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comic actor who played President of Ukraine in a popular TV series, making him the leading candidate for the...
So Far From God
The poor United States of America: so far from God, so close to Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his First Inaugural Address, announced what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy. “In the field of world policy,” Roosevelt said, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects...
The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
From the November 1988 issue of Chronicles. In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern...
Preaching to a Strange Nation
“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...
Horrors & Hope
Paul Johnson: Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties; Harper & Row; New York. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe rose to give his address. The year was 1905. “We are witnesses to the greatest moment of summing-up in history,” he declared: in the name of a new and unknown culture,...
Obama and the Bishops
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had a rough time of it lately, and I won’t say they don’t deserve it. Barack Obama is their President, after all, when it comes to most political issues; for example, immigration and immigrants’ rights, tax policy, economic inequality, “social justice,” peaceful internationalism, and national healthcare. The exception,...
Love and Death
Perhaps it is inevitable that Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman has been compared to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There are obvious parallels. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy book on the unsuccessful Napoleonic invasion of Russia, while Grossman wrote a lengthy book on the unsuccessful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Both works also deal...
The Pathology of Postmodernity
“[W]e may expect,” Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, “that one day someone will venture upon . . . research into the pathology of civilized communities.” This statement directly follows Freud’s suggestion that, if it is true that the evolution of a civilization proceeds similarly to that of an...
The Revenge of History
History has a way of taking its revenge on those who would violate it. It does not forget. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich are some of the few Soviet-born intellectuals who have studied how much current Soviet policies and propaganda abuse Russian history. Their book is an eloquent effort to set straight the historical record...
LEISURE, THE BASIS OF CULTURE: August 2007
PERSPECTIVE Connoisseur of Chaos by Thomas Fleming Worth doing badly. VIEWS Liberality, the Basis of Culture by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. The ultimate homeschool. Wall of Sound by Aaron D. Wolf Noise as the basis of culture. Social Security’s War on Families by Doug Bandow A current crisis and a coming disaster. REVIEWS A Humble Love...
Live Not By Lies, But Turn Your Back on Reality
Accounts from individuals, many unknown to Americans, who gave their treasures and lives to defy totalitarianism fill Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Their stories should inspire all of us in the age of fear and fraud we now inhabit. But there’s one problem—a huge problem—with Dreher’s take on...
Dead Cows and Mangled Translations
Fyodor Abramov was awarded the State Prize of the U.S.S.R. in 1975 for his trilogy of life on a rural commune, The Pryaslins, of which Two Winters and Three Summers is the second volume. “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop,” was the King’s advice to Alice, but Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
Who Went Nazi?
When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective...
Nostradamus I’m Not
“And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth,and it grieved him at his heart.”—Genesis 6:6 It doesn’t matter, since right or wrong, no one will remember, but here are my predictions for 2008 and after. Clinton and Obama will be the Democratic nominees for President and V-P, and will be...
Good News
Good News Blues What I started to say, my original impulse, was wrong. Not all wrong, but, anyway, riddled with error and inconsistency. I started to say this: that in many ways, speaking (as we one and all must) from my own limited angle, my assigned point of view, the times we seem to be...
What “Terrible Lesson” Can Russia Teach Us?
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that . . . exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.” —Pyotr Chaadayev Chaadayev’s words came to mind in the aftermath of a blizzard in Vladivostok, snowy peaks ringing the port city, the sky still obscured by thick clouds. It was November 1992. The...
Comment
History, in the end, remembers a society more by its culture than by its politics. If a modern American knows little about the dramatists and poets and sculptors of ancient Greece or Rome, he knows even less about their political leaders. The point is well put in an anecdote told in the Soviet Union: a...
Rasputins at Home and Abroad
Before his trip to Rome in February, Boris Yeltsin promised everyone who would listen that he would personally invite the Pope to visit Russia. Yeltsin frequently rattled on in front of reporters, like a football player still sprinting after he is out of bounds. For example, he claimed that the youngster Clinton was pushing the...
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
The Soviet Union in 1964 was about the last place on earth where anyone could find respect for traditional ways and reverence for ancestors. For the most part, the thuggish bureaucracy controlling that unlamented establishment exuded an almost eager desire for drabness that was downright studied in its gleeful love ...
Swan Song
“Did you hear what happened to the swan?” Tucked away in the residential area along suburban Philadelphia’s main line lies the idyllic campus of Eastern College. For the last four years this Christian academic institution has sponsored the Evangelical Roundtable: an attempt to find definition in the ideologically shattered realms of Evangelical-land. “The Roundtable,” says...
Putin’s Valdai Speech
In the lands of “Real Socialism,” four or five decades ago, it was a standard practice to denounce the “enemies of the people” without actually quoting their incriminating statements. I remember the final major press campaign against Milovan Djilas, when I was a preteen in Tito’s Yugoslavia. It consisted of ritualistic slanders that asserted his...
What is History? Part 37
It is said, and it is very true, that the moment when vice becomes the custom marks the death of a republic, for the dissolute persons cease to be regarded as loathsome, and all baseness becomes normal. —Arturo Perez-Reverte “Hell” ain’t cussin’, it’s geography. —Harry Carey, Jr. in Wagon Master History has the cruel reality of...
Old Possum
Thirty years ago, in the fall of 1957, the Fugitive-Agrarian poet Donald Davidson delivered the first Lamar Memorial Lectures in a small auditorium usually reserved for piano recitals on the campus of Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Those three lectures, published in a slender volume bearing the legend Southern Writers in the Modern World, have...
Your Future as a Terrorist
The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...
Eyes on the Prize of Central Asia
In August, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan announced that the capitol of the country would be moved several hundred miles north, from the green city of Almaty, where the presidential palace stands against a background of snow-capped mountains, to the bleak and windy steppes of north-central Kazakhstan, to the present city of Akmola. The official...
Scrambling the Schools
“With the same cement, ever sure to bind, We bring to one dead level ev’ry mind.” -Alexander Pope John Dewey: Types of Thinking; Philosophical Library; New York. William C. Ringenberg: The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America; Christian University Press/William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, ML As easy as...
The Essence of Evil
Susan Jacoby: Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge; Harper & Row; New York. Joe McGinniss: Fatal Vision; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. These two very different books are linked by a common theme—coping with evil. Jacoby presents a philosophical-historical view of revenge, and a case for its utilization under certain guarded conditions. McGinniss tells...
Our Demographic Destiny
If dispassion is the tone best suited for writing about contentious ethnic and demographic issues, this lucid survey of the numbers question across much of the Northern Hemisphere deserves every plaudit. With palpable restraint and sometimes maddening equivocation, demographer Michael Teitelbaum and historian Jay Winter survey the intertwined issues of birth rates, immigration, and other...
The Way We Are, No. 2
Shine on, O perishing Republic. —Robinson Jeffers If Western man in the future should recover his analytical ability, our times will be known as the age in which trivia replaced culture and bureaucracy replaced life. Economic stimulus: On the face of it, the proposition that we can borrow and spend ourselves into prosperity is lunacy....
Russia, Ukraine, and the Return of Nationalism
The Russia-Ukraine War has become a proxy fight between American-led globalism and the alternative: a multipolar world of nation-states free from American hegemony.
The War Against the West
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” —Tennyson In our day the mere mention of imperialism is enough to provoke paroxysms of moral outrage. Except in derision, no one any longer dares to speak of the white man’s burden, and few possess the courage to say that it was Europeans who created...
Partial Prognoses
Paul Fussell has written an interesting entertainment that examines the American class structure. It is basically descriptive and impressionistic and espouses no cause. It is filled with keen insights and amusing anecdotes and is consequently a relaxing, nontaxing book. In essence, it meshes with a vast Western literature—both scholarly and pedestrian—that enthrones class as the...
Revolution on the Right: The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...