If you live long enough junk becomes antiques, and cast-offs are classics. It’s pleasant to think that the popular culture of only a few decades ago is now revered, but it’s also scary. A recent visit to a clothing store flashing lime-green and neon-yellow polyester revivals of the 70’s was enough to remind me that...
The social justice warriors are at war against Western civilization. They rail against “white supremacy” because they see white people as inextricably bound with that civilization.
If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, ...
Bobby Fischer, the reclusive, troubled, and often unpleasant chess genius from Brooklyn who single-handedly crushed the myth of Soviet invincibility, died of kidney failure in Iceland on January 17 at the age of 64. Robert James Fischer was born out of wedlock to a prominent Hungarian atomic physicist, Pal Nemenyi, who was involved with the...
There are ghosts in this house. Yes, more than one, I think. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts—except that I can hear them. Every house emits noises, especially late at night. Or, perhaps, it speaks during the daylight hours, only to be drowned out by the drone of traffic, lawn mowers, barking dogs, and...
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
“I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.” So said Nadine Collier, who lost her mother in the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, offering forgiveness to Dylann Roof, who confessed to the atrocity that took the lives of nine churchgoers at that Wednesday night prayer...
Embracing both, and rejecting the United States of Now. Allen Tate, in 1952, argued that the first duty of the man of letters in the postwar world was to purify the language from the corruptions introduced by ideology and the destruction, more than physical, wrought by the recent world war. He was not the only...
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
The Politics of Interpretation (University of Chicago Press; Chicago), edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, contains essays and responses to them by some of the leading literary theorists of our time–Booth, Bruns, Graff, Hirsch, Kristeva, Said, and others. One of the more lively controversies that emerge in the text has little to do with deconstructing,...
Be not deluded, just because the United States goes to war with Iraq, that our leaders will not also extend to the entire Middle East the jihad on which President Bush and his court of neoconservative gurus and Zionist Weltpolitikers have embarked us. Well before any public announcement of whether we would actually make war...
It is totally misleading to present history as if its course was inevitable. The past cannot be understood if the elements of chance and contingency are ignored. To assume that what happened was bound to happen—the teleological interpretation of history—takes away the options facing individuals, groups, and governments in the past. It is analytically suspect,...
We were driving past the Pavilion de Flore, which punctuates the southwestern extremity of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, when my neighbor suddenly gripped my arm and exclaimed, “Mira! Estos techos! estas chimineas! Hombre! Estupendo!” (Look! Those roofs, those chimneys! Man alive! Stupendous!) Such was the reaction of the famous Spanish cartoonist, Antonio Mingote, to his...
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” —Psalm 8:4-5 Ellis Sandoz’s new book is of such importance to us in our intellectually disoriented day as...
“We don’t like it when someone from outside teaches us how to live.” Thus spake Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov in reaction to President Reagan’s emphasis on human rights this summer in Moscow. The Soviet leaders were displeased by Reagan’s decision to meet with dissidents during his free time away from the summit meetings with General...
On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9. Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....
The recent attack on New York City’s World Trade Center has once again reinforced in Western minds that terrorism is a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon, and that terms like “Palestinian,” “Shi’ite,” and “Muslim fundamentalist” are virtual synonyms for “terrorist.” There is no room here to discuss the damage that such a view has had on...
Every once in a great while, an article appears in a mainstream publication that lets the eat out of the bag, by spelling out ideas that have long been dominant in public life but are usually seen only in vague or implicit form. One such appeared in the July/August 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs. Entitled...
Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say. This is just plain ridiculous. A small group of people leaving their country to found their...
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. —Romans 12:2 While Mother Teresa was still alive, few who knew of her doubted that she would eventually...
Folks keep asking me when I’m going to write about California. (They generally lick their chops when they ask it. They seem to think I’m going to trash the place. I wonder why?) Anyway, yeah, it’s true that I’ve been living in the Golden State for several months now, and I haven’t said much about...
Though visually dazzling, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" collapses into caricature and fails to give the audience a good scare.
When Frank Bronkowski, my father, was alive, he’d read and reread his Polish newspapers, the Gwiazda Polarna, the Nowy Dziennik. He’d speak no English on Sundays and drink a Polish beer. His pocket watch—brought from the old country—stands in its place of honor on the dining-room table. Next to it, Ma has fresh peonies in...
Midatlantic It has been a long day for this straight European male. O’Hare Airport is a decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline; the gauntlet of guards at the X-ray machines, none of whom is able to speak English; and...
Several Nazi concentration camps, as I explained in a recent Chronicles article called “Buchenwald’s Second Life” (July 1989), were used by the Soviet occupying authorities in East Germany for some five years after the war, and for their original purpose. That was once a secret, but we are now in a wholly new age. Some...
“Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...
Machiavelli, in answer to the question of whether a prince should prefer gold or arms, replied that arms were the logical choice since gold could not always buy a strong military but a strong military could usually acquire wealth. This answer had not changed three and a half centuries later when Kipling wrote, “Gold for...
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 thing is to squeeze the last drop out of the medium you have learned to use. The aim is not essentially different from the aim of Greek tragedy, but we are dealing with a public that is only semi-literate and we have to make an art out of a language...
John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman. A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not. A politician, which is all we have now, says and...
At the Heart of Darkness by Samuel Francis • September 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.”—Cotton Mather H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography by S.T. JoshiWest Warwick, Rhode Island:Necronomicon Press; 704 pp., $20.00 H.P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous WritingsEdited by S.T. JoshiSank City, Wisconsin:Arkham...
The literature in the English language on various long-established communities eradicated by the horrors of the 20th century is largely dominated by the Jewish holocaust. Accounts of other disappeared communities—of Italians in today’s Croatia, the Poles of Galicia, the Serbs of the former Habsburg Military Border, or Germans everywhere east of the Oder-Neisse line—are available...
“I don’t just renovate,” says Nicole Curtis, the 36-year-old star of Rehab Addict. “I restore old houses to their former glory.” She’s a willowy blonde with the body of a pinup model and the determination of a drill sergeant—and she can wield a nail gun as well as any man, if not better. That may...
The following speech critical of the conservative establishment is one that I did not give at The Charleston Meeting, in Charleston, S.C., whither I was invited by its organizer Gene d’Agostino, as a speaker for the evening of April 14. After espying copies of my book on antifascism for sale on a table in the...
“To conquer tumult, nature’s sodin force, War . . . was first devis’d.” —Sir William D’Avenant Grenada’s Communist interlude has become the subject of an intense postmortem by scholars of varying ideological hues. Historically, the small island is destined to be a symbol of the Reagan years. However much the US intervention of October 25,...
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...
The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....
Joe Biden's latest fall demonstrates again that he is a massive liability as president. It also shows how America is suffering from gerontocratic rule, with aging Baby Boomers in their 70s and 80s dominating leadership positions.
Perhaps it was in retaliation for those fried potatoes that are served up in little bags and cartons at McDonald’s that they did it, that they performed an act which is so horribly outlandish. The French, those in question, have always been a very proud people; nowadays, the word French in English seems to be...
Before any serious work can be done to correct America’s border policy failures, we must dispel the false narratives about immigration that too many Americans still accept as fact.
It is no longer news that 2020 saw a collapse of political discourse and public behavior in the United States. Trends that developed over many years intensified last year. One major political party had as its candidate for president a magnetic figure who can also be nasty and lacking in verbal self-control. The other party...
Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...
It would be easy to view the recent spate of movies and documentaries that side with Amerindians against the white man as no more than a long-delayed surge of racial revenge, and of course that emotion is openly expressed in all of them. I refer to the cycle, begun by Dances with Wolves, that includes...
Posters around town said there would be a meeting about Nicaragua at the local senior center. The speaker, “Director of the Municipal Art Gallery” in a large California city, was going to show slides taken during her recent two-week tour of Nicaragua. It, of course, turned out to be a propaganda session. She had gone...
People forget, in an age of promotion, self-promotion, publicity, advertising, the internet, and social media, that personal privacy is essential not only to civility but to civilization. Today, as never before in history, the maintenance of privacy depends on the moral fortitude to resist intrusion by others and the self-restraint and tact not to intrude...
“All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now long recognized as just and final.” —Thomas Carlyle Both Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative...
As long as there have been Christians, they have searched for the “real Jesus.” In the last two centuries, this search has been directed toward discovering the authentic historical personality who supposedly lies behind what are seen as mythical accretions, a quest that has inevitably led to conflict with fundamentalists who resent the application of...
Some years ago, when I was a consular officer in the once-notorious border city of Tijuana, I spent a few days in Mexico City on my way back from a temporary assignment in Matamoros, another border town just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. At a social function, I was cornered by a typically...
Like death, suffering is inescapable. It represents the burden of being. But too often today, Americans are trying to escape it with therapeutics and chemicals, neatly packaged as happiness in a bottle.