“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years...
Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” In brief, to strengthen the hand of...
Mr. Greider is a hopeful man. Although he believes the United States is in deep trouble, “deeper than many people suppose and the authorities want to acknowledge,” he also believes the country is on the cusp of a second populist uprising, which will force elites to confront the perils of globalism, militarism, economic inequality, ecological...
“French aircraft were due to begin their first reconnaissance flights over Iraq,” France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on September 15. Britain is already flying reconnaissance missions over Iraq. Several other countries – Arab ones included – say they are willing to support the air campaign. None seem interested in pledging any ground troops, however....
The obscene carnival of digging up an American hero who died 141 years ago has come to an end. No arsenic was found in Zachary Taylor’s remains, proving that he was not poisoned, which any competent and sensible historian could have told you without this grotesque and impious exercise. (Even if significant traces of arsenic...
Former President Barack Obama took a bold step the other day when he suggested that calls to defund the police might alienate a number of voters. “You lost a big audience the minute you say it,” Obama noted in a Snapchat interview, “which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes...
As a conservative “anarchist” and non-interventionist with anti-vocational views on education, Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) can seem paradoxical. His influence was lasting and he took unconventional stances on many topics. He viewed conservatism as primarily cultural, anarchism as radical decentralization, education as a non-economic activity, and foreign policy as a noninterventionist endeavor. Raised in Brooklyn...
The Reader Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by Stephen Daldry Screenplay by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink’s novel In 2005, Miss Kate Winslet (Mrs. Sam Mendes) appeared on Ricky Gervais’s Extras as a comedic version of herself, sporting a 1942 nun’s habit on a film set. She was supposed to be...
What could a world-famous multibillionaire Hollywood star like Mel Gibson have in common with an unknown, cash-strapped, freelance journalist based in Rome? Virtually nothing, it would seem. Yet there is a common denominator: We are both Catholics and cherish the traditional Latin Mass, the primary liturgy of the Church before its post-Vatican II transformation into...
To the rector of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland: Dear Sir, it has been brought to my attention that your university and office have seen fit to reprimand Professor Ryszard Legutko for not supporting your efforts to introduce feminist ideology into your curriculum. Although I do not know all the details of this daring experiment,...
Barack Obama has a problem, and if it were not for this one problem, he would easily be elected president. As it is, because of this problem, the impossible John McCain actually has a chance. The problem is white people. Yes, it is true that the majority of Obama supporters are white people, but most...
“Politics and abuse have totally corrupted our tastes,” Horace Walpole complained to a correspondent in 1771. “Nobody thinks of writing a line that is to last beyond the next fortnight.” Politics in Great Britain in the late 18th century was as agitated as that of America early in the 21st, although the divisions it reflected...
The recent videotaped beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the bloodthirsty savages of ISIS bring to mind a story which took place in Lebanon almost 30 years ago. On September 30, 1985, a group of gunmen seized four Soviet diplomats and embassy workers (Arkady Katkov, Valery Myrikov, Oleg Spirin, and Nikolai...
The grotesque charade in Pristina on Sunday, February 17, crowned a decade and a half of U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia that has been mendacious and iniquitous in equal measure. By encouraging its Albanian clients go ahead with the unilateral proclamation of ...
“On the whole, the home remains the supreme cultural achievement of women.” -Georg Simmel Elisabeth Griffith: In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Oxford University Press; New York. Kathleen Brady: Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker; Seaview/Putnam; New York. Near the turn of the century Charles Peguy, alarmed by the advance of secularism in the modern...
The story of one man’s intellectual and personal friendship with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, stretching across the last decades of the 20th century, and the lessons it might impart for us today.
The recent passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on May 19, has resulted in feverish alarums across the land. These came after the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block the law in late September, following an emergency application made by over a dozen Texas abortion providers and their...
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the Statler Brothers in their 1974 country hit. ...
What was meant to grow separately cannot last long as an artificial whole. This prehistoric wisdom seems to be forgotten by advocates of multiculturalism—which is just a misleading euphemism for polyethnism and multiracialism. The unpredictable side of multiracial conviviality seems to be deliberately overlooked by political elites in multiethnic and multiracial Belgium, a miniscule country...
Among the advancements in AI applications are those popularly known as “deadbots,” which allow users to speak to the dead without secret rituals, mediums, Ouija boards, or cryptic table-tapping. The proliferation of deadbots poses serious ethical questions, and their growing acceptance is a measure of our desperate, post-human secularity.
“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.” So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider...
I applaud your interest in property rights in the April 2001 issue, “Your Land Is Their Land.” I was especially interested in the article “For Keeps! A Christian Defense of Property” by Scott P. Richert (Views), since I have come to know and work with two of the four families who are used as examples...
If Noah Webster was the father of English-language spelling reform, H.L. Mencken was the strong son making good his inheritance. Mencken’s claim was to be the father of the American language. He named it. As with mountains and planets, the one who names is honored with immortality, and The American Language, first published in 1919,...
The capitulation of Germany’s elite to the Woke Empire led by the U.S. could mean a dark future of deindustrialized insignificance for the country.
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.” (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...
Somebody recently did a “study” purporting to discover that at-home mothers spend hardly any more time daily with their children than mothers who work full-time outside the home. This is a neat trick on the part of the at-home moms surveyed, and I would like to know how they manage it. They must have superb...
The really troubling point that Joel Kotkin makes in the New York Daily News is that New York can’t figure out how to do the economic equality thing we hear so much about in this and every political season. “Gotham,” writes Kotkin, “has become the American capital of a national and even international trend toward...
Though some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does...
Batman Returns–as much as Easy Rider, Saturday Night Fever, and Wall Street-is both symbol and symptom of its cultural time. Fans looking for anything like Jack Nicholson’s psychotic comedy will be disappointed, for this sequel is all too serious and somber. The entire movie is cast in an eerie purple blue, and this time the...
When Sigmund Freud took his children hunting for mushrooms he always insisted that they follow a certain ritual. Part of the ritual consisted of placing fresh flowers every day at the shrine of the Virgin near the wood. Although he publicly attacked religion as an illusion, Freud seems to have had a private preoccupation with...
“In these days a great capitalist has deeper roots than a sovereign prince, unless he is very legitimate.” —Benjamin Disraeli Appearing just in time for the Enron and WorldCom scandals and the ensuing stock-market plunge, Kevin Phillips’ harsh new scrutiny of the trends toward the concentration of wealth and power in the emerging American social...
The right leaning AfD is now the second-largest party in Germany, according to recent polls. No one expected this level of success when AfD was founded 10 years ago by a small band of dissatisfied conservatives.
Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it . . . as soon as possible. . . . under oath, absolutely.” On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room...
The sun is no longer the hot buttered pancake worshipped by the ancient Slavs: It has been reformed into an altogether more Christian, Lenten, and distant figure. The sea is still beautiful, though it too no longer moves with the same pagan frankness, its orgiastic, by turns manic and depressive, barometrically motivated summer feasts and...
First Man Produced by Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner, and Damien Chazelle Directed by Damien Chazelle Screenplay by Josh Singer from the biography by James R. Hansen Distributed by Universal Pictures Black 47 Produced by Fastnet Films and the Irish Film Board Directed by Lance Daly Screenplay by P. J. Dillon Distributed by IFC...
I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl. Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year. We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO). Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...
George Balanchine died a year ago April. Last July the Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, John Taras, was finally persuaded by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater. In a recent interview with Dancemagazine, Taras observed that with Balanchine gone “things will not be the same.” How right he was. The...
Every election cycle, we are told that “this” might be the most important ballot we ever cast. What if this time it turns out to be true? Maybe this election isn’t like the Super Bowl or the World Series, where fans of the defeated team can console themselves with “Wait ‘til next year!” What if...
It has been amazing to see the number of very smart people who stumble over explaining exactly what Trump was convicted of doing.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) received a letter on March 23 from a gaggle of organizations representing the financial industry. The group included the American Bankers Association, the Bankers’ Association for Finance and Trade, the Investment Company Institute, the Securities Industry Association, the Bond Market Association, the Financial Services Forum, and the Financial Services Roundtable. They...
The Supreme Court’s closely watched October 1999 term came to an end on June 28, and its themes finally became clear: inconsistency, incoherence, and arbitrariness. On that last day, the Court released important decisions on abortion, aid to religious schools, and homosexual rights, and refused to intervene in the Elian Gonzalez case. The Supreme Court’s...
The presidential games of 1992 are well more than a year away, but wouldbe Republican gladiators are already measuring George Bush for a quick thrust in the belly. Their plans may be premature. Though the President came close to wrecking his party by breaking his promise against new taxes and may yet make a fool...
Political scientists say presidential elections are referendums on the incumbent. If that’s the case next year, none of the Biden team’s grounds for optimism will matter.
Yawning in the Aisles by Stephen Macaulay Stranger Than Paradise; A film by Jim Jarmusch; Samuel Goldwyn. Stop Making Sense; A film by Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads; Cinecom/Island Alive. All the praise that has been heaped on these films might lead you to suppose that Jarmusch and Demme — and the assembled...
Filming an execution at San Quentin Prison is what San Francico’s KQED has asked the U.S. District Court in California for permission to do: it wants the unedited tape to run nationwide over the Public Broadcasting Service network. KQED is not doing this merely to get higher audience ratings. It thinks that once people see...
The invitation to the first symposium came from my old alma mater, the Free University of Brussels, founded by liberals, freemasons, and socialists, all united in their opposition to the Catholic Church, embodied by the 15th-century University of Louvain. Nostalgia drove me to the once well-known quartiers, or rather what remains of them now that...
Barcelona is one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, and Barcelona’s most noted architect is Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. It is worth visiting Catalonia and the cities of Barcelona and Reus just to see Gaudí’s work. Eager visitors head for his masterpiece, Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Holy Family), which the...
War of the Worlds Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Koepp and Josh Friedman Holy oxymoron! Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a thoughtful summer blockbuster. While it serves up the obligatory thrills of the school’s-out-let-it-rip subgenre, it also pays surprisingly scrupulous homage to its...
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters; by Abigail Shrier; Regnery Publishing; 276 pp., $28.99 You’ve seen the yard signs. “We believe…Black Lives Matter; No Human is Illegal; Love is Love…” The tone is pure emotive posturing, until you get to this statement: “Science is real.” This is the foundational rhetorical trick of the contemporary...
Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...