Vukota Vlahovic said to his mother, “I am a grown man.” But his mother just smiled. “You are a boy until you marry. Even then you will be my son.” “God be with you,” she said, as he walked away without looking back. His pouch filled with bread and cheese, Vukota Vlahovic went down Trmanje,...
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...
August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire. Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can’t get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can’t go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley. The supposed “nationalist” rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was...
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...
Let us begin with the obvious: sooner or later, everyone dies. Even Bill and Hillary say they know that. No amount of money will head off the inevitable. We cannot “cure” death like we might rebuild our inner cities or clean up the air. At best, we can use modern medicine to cheat death for...
Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in '24. Democrats can see this but there is little they can do to stop it.
On August 19, 1991, the people of the Soviet Union awoke to music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on national television. Swan Lake would play continuously that day as the “hard line” State Emergency Committee staged its coup against the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been arrested at his Crimea vacation...
America in Black and White is an ambitious project, at once a massively detailed review of race relations this century and a provocative manifesto for the future. As such, it demands comparison with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), which did so much to place racial injustice at the center of American politics for decades...
Russell Kirk, a venerated conservative man of letters, weighs in on Nixon’s response to the media-incited campaign against him, from the July 1990 issue of Chronicles.
Every year, the Christian calendar is more and more marginalized by anti-Christian “holidays” and commemorations. In 2013, the first week of Advent, by decree of President Obama and National Public Radio, was displaced by Nelson Mandela Week. Since we were only in December, I could not wait to see what our masters will pull out...
When Thomas Mann joined the West Coast galaxy of refugees from Hitler, he was writing Doctor Faustus—a study of, among other things, national character and demonology. The word meant roughly the same as what Michael Rogin means by it: the countersubversive drives that label, persecute, and sometimes eliminate pernicious forces in the body politic. In...
The mystery of brightness is more profound than the mystery of darkness, and that of stillness perhaps the most profound of all. In the noontime glare the heart of the Gila wilderness in southwestern New Mexico is both bright and still, the sole sound the drone of a circling horsefly, the only breath the imperceptible...
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday. It is to be called Juneteenth Independence Day. Prediction: This will become yet another source of societal...
The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law; By Antonin Scalia; Edited by Jeffrey S. Sutton and Edward Whelan; Foreword by Justice Elena Kagan; Crown Forum; 368 pp., $35.00 Steven Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, maintains that Antonin Scalia was the greatest justice ever...
Chronicles Associate Editor Pedro Gonzalez was accused of being an anti-Semite by The Spectator Associate Editor Douglas Murray on Wednesday of last week. In an article entitled “When the Right Plays With Jew-Hate” in the Substack newsletter of former New York Times op-ed editor Bari Weiss, Murray wrote that Gonzalez “unmasked himself boringly and yet still wretchedly, as an antisemite.”...
So what is objectionable about Game of Thrones? In posing the question, please note that I am assuming that something is objectionable. So let me count the ways. If we are talking about the books, the prose is klonkingly pedestrian—although in fairness it must be said that George R.R. Martin, author of the internationally best-selling...
“Poetry is the language of the state of crisis.” —Stéphane Mallarmé When Cleanth Brooks died at 87 in 1994, a great era of American literary criticism ended. Brooks had been one of John Crowe Ransom’s prize students at Vanderbilt, and when Ransom issued the call for a method of criticism of poetry that would not...
In the latest issue of the Russian magazine Russkiy Mir (“Russian World,” December 10) our foreign affairs editor considers the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for Russia’s geostratigic position in the years to come. (Translated from Russian by the author) In Ukraine the United States presented Russia with its most serious challenge in the...
You don’t have to read far into the story collection Thief of Lives before John Cheever’s name comes to mind, but after so many years of writing, Kit Reed must be used to that comparison. By now she should be replying: “Yes, but I write as well as that man did and occasionally even better....
Westerns have never enjoyed much of a highbrow audience or much literary distinction. Many people tend to sneer at the traditional form, because it seems to represent something obvious and a little dumb. As one of my students responded to my discussion of western historical fiction as a viable and valuable category of popular culture,...
Both ISI and Christopher Olaf Blum, who edited this anthology, deserve our thanks for making available in English the six 19th-century French conservative thinkers whose writings are herein presented. Although these men—François René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Fredéric Le Play, Émile Keller, and René de La Tour du Pin—do not display...
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...
Americans who rely on the mainstream media will, from habit, either go on doing so or choose to believe that the newscasters and reporters were hoodwinked along with everyone else.
Alliances are transmission belts of war. So our Founding Fathers taught and the 20th century proved. When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany in 1914, America sat out, until our own ships were being sunk in 1917. When Britain, allied to France, declared war on Germany, Sept. 3, 1939, we stayed out until...
Overwhelmed by the shame of having a juvenile delinquent for a daughter, Héctor could almost forget that he himself was a convicted criminal and the subject of an investigation by the Immigration and Borders division of the Department of Homeland Security. The entire business had been a father’s worst nightmare, as well as a major...
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...
This election is too tedious a farce to deserve a serious editorial, but since I wake up every morning with a few complaints that I inflict upon my family, I may as well subject my ...
Federal elections rearranged Germany’s 709-seat Bundestag last week in what has been heralded by the mainstream press as the end of an era. In reality, the new governing coalition led by the country’s social democratic and green parities will change little in the country’s foreign and security policy. The new team will remain staunchly opposed to any...
The L.A. Mayoral election has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the national media, which rarely understands the consequences of events taking place in California, a state that functions more like a separate nation. The media portrayed former California Assembly speaker and L.A. city councilman Antonio Villaraigosa’s landslide victory in May as a national example for...
Iraq is the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fertile area around and between the two great rivers, the territory between Baghdad, the ancient capital of the entire Arab world, and Basra, over 500 miles away where the great rivers converge as the Shatt-el-Arab before entering the Persian Gulf. Some say Iraq is...
If anything could make the modern presidency look good, it is the modern Congress. Intended by the Framers, through a misinterpretation of the British constitution, to offer a check to the executive branch, the federal legislature has in fact evolved into merely its partner and more often its lackey. The President now openly intervenes in...
The President and Congress have both promised us a balanced budget in the year 2002. The debt, at that time, will be somewhere between six and seven trillion dollars, which, assuming a seven percent interest rate, will cost close to $450 billion a year in interest. Each year, every year, forever. Is it plausible to...
When I was 15 years old I read a book that shattered me. The book was called SS im Einsatz (“The SS in Action”). It was a nonfiction book, a 600-page collection of documents—memos, orders, dispatches sent to the units of Waffen-SS, reports from the sonderkommandoes in action in Germany and elsewhere. There were some...
“I ask myself again why anyone would find interest in the private dimensions of my own history,” muses Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan in his new collection of personal and intellectual autobiographical essays. The question, embedded in an essay entitled “Country Aesthetic,” which explores the manifold and profound meanings that the concept of country,...
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...
If 1998 is remembered in Australian political history for nothing else—a probable assumption, given the administrative gridlock which otherwise prevailed—it will go down in the annals for two events: Prime Minister John Howard’s upset reelection on October 3; and, of longer-term significance, Pauline Hanson’s failure to retain her parliamentary seat. This latter development eliminated the...
St. Thomas Aquinas is a universally admired philosopher who was able to distill the whole of human discourse. His thought even influenced America's Founding Fathers, as seen in the biblical ordering of the new American nation in the Treaty of Paris.
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
Anybody who has ever watched a home video knows how painful is the passing of unedited time. No matter what or who is the subject of the exposition—sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, deep conversation, one’s own or other people’s children, Osama bin Laden—time in the raw is all but unbearable. Clearly, it is only through...
What (to ask one bizarrely unfashionable question) is civilization? Set aside geography, climate, genetics, and luck. The high classical civilizations are marked by certain indispensible accomplishments: a serious respect for facts; related to this, a steady application of work toward stable wealth; a conception of justice moving in two directions, toward society as a whole...
The Last Castle Produced and distributed by DreamWorks Directed by Rod Lurie Screenplay by David Scarpa Training Day Produced by Outlaw Productions Directed by Antoine Fuqua Screenplay by David Ayer Released by Warner Bros. American film would be poorer without Robert Redford. As an actor and as a director, he has given us some vastly...
White sky, white earth. In the foreground a fenceline: three strands of barbed wire stretched taut between crooked posts cut from a juniper forest growing along the sandstone hogback, the bottom strand running in and out of low drifts of scalloped snow. The brushy tips of sagebrush vibrating on a stiff wind above the snowglaze,...
In a recent column Dennis Prager made an acute observation. “The vast majority of leading conservative writers . . . have a secular outlook on life. . . . They are unaware of the disaster that godlessness in the West has led to.” These secular conservatives may think that “America can survive the death of...
The first day of this year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF, April 3-4), the premium gathering of Russian and foreign business leaders, economic strategists and geopolitical analysts, started with a plenary session reminiscent of the opening of last year’s event. Speaker after speaker complained that President Putin has no coherent strategy for Russia’s comprehensive development, and...
The writing is at long last on the wall for a world-famous migrant utopia that was founded in a tiny medieval town overlooking the Ionian Sea. It has been a con from start to finish. The little town of Riace in Calabria on the toe of Italy has been eulogized by the global left for...
Last year I wrote about the Poppers, Frank and Deborah, the Rutgers University husband-wife duo who theorized that the Great Plains—from Texas to North Dakota and from Oklahoma to Denver—were fit to be nothing more than a “Buffalo Commons.” The couple predicted that the Great Plains, whose largest city is Lubbock, Texas, will slowly dwindle...
The Bush-Obama bailout-stimulus plans are not going to work. Both are schemes hatched by a clique of financial insiders. The schemes will redistribute income and wealth from American taxpayers to the shyster banksters who have destroyed American jobs, ruined the retirement plans of tens of millions of Americans and worsened the situation of millions of...
Last year, just before his 21st birthday, my son Jacob learned of a condition called aphantasia. In its strictest form, aphantasia is the inability to create mental images. Like many such conditions, aphantasia affects those who have it to varying degrees. In Jacob’s case, his mental images are very fuzzy and indistinct. In my case,...
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...