Sydney Poitier’s films were mature examinations of blackness in American life. Unlike those who followed him, he demonstrated that acting civilized way is not a class or race privilege, but a human obligation.
1118 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory
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The Last of the Royals
When historians survey Europe’s 20th century, rarely do they question the fundamental evil of the old irrelevant monarchies and aristocratic regimes, and the obvious necessity of replacing them with progressive socialist and nationalist substitutes. A strong case can in fact be made that those ancien regime states disappeared some decades too early, and that had...
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The Attempt to Hoodwink the U.S. Into a Cold War With Russia
For years conservative movement figures have engaged in “value talk,” a rhetorical means of winning acceptance for pet causes that often have little to do with conservatism or traditional morality. Such value talk has often been used as a way of prodding Washington into foreign entanglements. Leon Aron’s recent article for The Dispatch, “Welcome to the new Cold War”...
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On Anti-Orthodoxy
James Jatras has attempted to define the nature and cause of anti-Orthodox sentiment among opinion-makers in the West in his February article “Pravoslavophobia.” There is certainly a degree of prejudice in the mundane sense of a bias based on ignorance, and this is compounded by the tendency of journalists and politicians to frame the complexities...
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The Rise and Fall of a Paleoconservative at the Washington Times (Part II)
Less than two months after Washington Times editor-in-chief Wes Pruden in June demoted me to the rank of editorial writer and cut my salary by 25 percent, yet another cloud began to form on my horizon. In May 1994, I had given a speech at a conference on “Race and American Culture” in Atlanta sponsored...
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Putin and the West’s Suicide
The town of Penza lies 12 hours southeast of Moscow by train. I had barely heard of it before I went there last December. The town’s broad streets were busy yet strangely silent because of the thick carpet of snow that dampened all sound. On the river Sura, fishermen sat huddled in the dark over...
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In Rose City, the Dream Has Wilted
Springfield's history provides important context for Donald Trump's wild tales of pet-eating Haitian emigres.
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Fading Into Arabian Nights
As the shock of American cluster bombs and the distinctive rumble of Abrams tanks fade from the Arabian nights, we world-citizens must begin to sort through the events of the last eight months. Many lessons could be drawn. Allow me to suggest two. First, it seemed clear by the sixth week of open combat that...
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In Praise of Toughness
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow....
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Back in the Locker
As I write, it’s already been three weeks since the Academy Awards broadcast on March 7, and I’m still surprised that the judges for Hollywood’s annual ceremony of self-love named The Hurt Locker Best Picture of 2009, awarding it six Oscars in all. The pooh-bahs of mediocrity voted for art rather than commerce, and so...
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The Angry Summer
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
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On the Death of Newspapers
This past week, word came to me that a close friend and book-review editor of a major daily newspaper had been laid off after 16 years of service. The book page, one of the nation’s best, would be reduced by half, and his “replacement” would be a youngster from the city desk, a competent young...
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Come Into the Garden, Maud
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
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Living With Lenin
An interesting sidelight on our current ruling regime is its changed attitude toward Russia. From the time of the Russian Communist takeover until quite recently, American leftist “intellectuals” sympathized with the Russian regime and gave it every benefit of the doubt. During the Cold War leftists pushed for unilateral Western disarmament, beating down those who...
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Epic But Forgotten: Peleliu
Few Americans today know of Peleliu, a speck of an island in the southwest Pacific. A part of the Palau group of the Caroline Islands, Peleliu is only six miles long and two miles wide. It lies 550 miles due east of the Philippines in splendid isolation. Covered with dense green vegetation and surrounded by...
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Hungary: Steady as She Goes…
Upon his return from a week-long stay in Budapest, Srdja Trifkovic provides an assessment of Hungary’s current political scene in his weekly roundup of world affairs for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network. He also looks at the central European country’s role in EU politics, which occasionally may appear disproportionate to its modest size and resources....
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On the Chesterton Review
The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year. Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory. At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading. England,...
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The End of Strong Government?
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
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Government of the People
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
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A Historic Presidency
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
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Legends of the Four-Lane Road
The interstate highways, John Steinbeck complained in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley, “are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. When we get these thruways across the country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” When...
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Twelve Westerners?
“The Sahara of the Bozart,” more than anything else Mencken wrote about the South, won him the undying hatred of the former Confederacy and its spokesmen. The essay, which first appeared in 1917 as a newspaper column and was subsequently expanded for inclusion in the next volume of the Prejudices series, was attacked at the...
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New Criticism, Old Values
It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase “The New Criticism” by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and R.P. Blackmur. But actually, he was criticizing the critics...
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Communication as Manipulation
In her chosen role as doting public grandmother to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, columnist Mary McGrory is ever on the alert for opportunities to whip from her journalistic handbag her favorite images of those two extraordinary kids. In true grandma-like fashion, she is transfixed by their every utterance and sees their failures as simply...
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New England Against America
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner…. His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
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Bomb Iran—July 2008
PERSPECTIVE Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions by Thomas Fleming VIEWS John McCain on Foreign Policy by Ted Galen Carpenter Even worse than Bush. Neo-McCainism by Leon Hadar The highest stage of neoconservatism? The Dream Ticket by Srdja Trifkovic The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world. A ...
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Compassion, Inc.
April 19, 1995, is a date etched in the minds of all who live in Oklahoma City, because it was on that day at 9:02 A.M. that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Just as most Americans alive at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination remember where they were when they...
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Reason Can’t Prevail Against an Irrational Opposition
“Mandalorian” star Gina Carano made headlines this week when she was fired from Disney. Her crime? Authoring a social media post comparing the censorship of conservatives to Nazi persecution. Disney’s decision set off a salvo of justified attacks on the company. But while the self-righteous anger is gratifying to fans both of Carano’s acting and...
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A Valentine’s Day Reflection
A year or so ago, I discovered the work of Czech author Karel Capek who died on the eve of World War II. He was very popular in Eastern Europe and is barely known in the West. Most famous for his science fiction masterpiece War with the Newts (the salamanders, not the repulsive Republican politicians),...
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Writing Without Letters
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
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Greater Than the French Revolution
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
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Opposing the Disneyfiers
Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...
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On Saving Private Ryan
Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...
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The Ruling Class
One of the ironies of American political discussion in the last generation or so— indeed, of the last century—has been that, for all our boasting and braggadocio about being a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, it is almost impossible to find any significant American social thinker who really believes...
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Aborted Economy
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
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Why the Right Needs Trump to Win
Right-wing critics of Trump are foolish if they think there is any future for the issues they care about without a Trump win in November.
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Henry Regnery, R.I.P.
He died on June 18, his devoted wife of six decades, Eleanor, at his side. Soft-spoken, humble, ever polite and generous, Henry was also a man of indomitable courage. In an era of accelerating centralization in the book trade, he launched the Henry Regnery Company in 1947 as an independent publishing house. From the beginning,...
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Well-Regulated Militia
Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...
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The First and Final Command
Of Gods and Men Produced by Why Not Productions and Armada Films Directed and written by Xavier Beauvois Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men quietly, one might say austerely, meditates on the faith and courage of nine French Trappists who faced death at the hands of Muslim fanatics...
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Treasure Mountain
In the elation and excitement produced by Héctor’s interview with the curandera, he and Jesús “Eddie” could barely resist the impulse to start at once for Ladron Peak. A late-winter storm of unusual force for central New Mexico restored them to their senses, blanketing the peak and the mountains to the southwest and east in...
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“Tech Totalitarians” vs. the Right
The “tech totalitarians” of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google have been joined by financial services corporations like Paypal in not only “de-platforming” and censoring alternative voices on the Right but “de-financing” them by blocking access to their services. Paypal is teaming up with the leftist, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who to ban...
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Where the South Meets the West
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel, That’s just what I am. And for this damned Republic, I do not give a damn! I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon, For anything I done! —Maj. James Randolph, CSA Not long ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...
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First Hearings
Some years ago a fellow told me that I should put my money in CDs, and I did, to my regret in one sense. I thought he meant Compact Discs. Silly me! But maybe not altogether. Since those days, things have changed, but even so, some things never change. I mean that acquisitions have a...
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The Idea of Socialism
The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency. Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...
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The Forgotten Secret War
This past December, the United States commemorated the 75th anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Most commentators rightly played down any conspiratorial suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately provoked that particular attack, although they agreed that the U.S. had been putting heavy diplomatic pressure on Japan in the months leading up to it. ...
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Hitler vs. the Anglo-Americans
On April 20, Adolf Hitler turns 131. Ten days later comes the 75th anniversary of his earthly demise in the ruins of Berlin, but he is still our contemporary par excellence. He continues to haunt and fascinate. Hitler’s countenance, his very name, seem to get indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of each new generation....
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More Than an Inkling
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...
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The Arrhythmic Heart of England
The city of Leicester is about as far from the sea as one can get in England. But one sweltering August day, when everyone else was heading down to the beaches, we were driving in the opposite direction so that I could fill in a long-troubling gap on my mental map of England. I had...
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Go Figure
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare In preparing my review of this riveting biography, I gathered samples of what has recently been written about Richard M. Nixon, and I must say they make a bewildering collection. Here are a few: “A monster of a million disguises.” Andrew Kopkind, the...
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Unholy Dying
“In the midst of life we are in death.” The old Prayer X Book’s admonition has never been more true or less understood than it is today. Modern man, despite his refusal to consider his own mortality, is busily politicizing all the little decisions and circumstances that attend his departure. Death penalty statutes, abortion regulations,...