“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began: “A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.” Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced...
1128 search results for: Forgotten%2BHistory
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The Logic of the Map
Soon after his election in 1844, James K. Polk sat down with the historian George Bancroft and, before offering him the Cabinet post of secretary of the Navy, sketched the four objectives of his presidency. They were to lower the tariff, restore the independent treasury system, extend American sovereignty over the vast Oregon Country (claimed...
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New and Old Catholicism
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is keeping pace with the rest of the Church in America as it embraces the usual causes and crusades under the banners of “community” and “equality” while all but shedding Catholic inconveniences like Mortal Sin and Sanctifying Grace. Apparently salvation now depends more on the sincerity of your handshake of peace...
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A Louisiana Lesson
If an admiring reviewer’s main purpose is to inspire his reader to run out and buy the book he praises, Professor Randall Ivey has done that for me with his review of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide (“Chansons by the Bayou,” December 2019). Drs. Brosman and Pass could not have asked for a more justly...
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Bandwidth Blues
It is 1923, hot on the heels of the Progressive era and World War I. Radio Broadcast magazine confidently opines that the advent of radio as a popular medium “is destined, economically and politically, to bind us together more firmly.” It might even produce “to some extent at least, unification of the religious ideas of...
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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Academic Afterword: On the Occasion of My Retirement From the Academy
In my institution I have been sharply critical of the public relations attempts at self-justification and self-elevation in the interest of the community’s largess, the larger grants of public money to support a larger and larger institution. I have been particularly critical of my school’s official insistence that its primary concern is with “new knowledge,”...
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Joe Sobran as I Knew
I met Joe Sobran in 1973 when I was working as history editor at St. Martin’s Press and had begun writing for National Review. I don’t remember how exactly, but the occasion must have been one of the open-house cocktail parties at the magazine’s offices at 150 East 35th Street, held every other Wednesday evening...
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The Triumph of Tradition
“When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.” So predicted Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen in one of the opening salvos in the year-long campaign to kill Mel Gibson’s film masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ—a campaign that was, in equal measure, hysterical, disingenuous, ignorant,...
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Tyger, Tyger
To pick up Tales of the Big Game Hunters is to suffer instant culture shock. The book plunges us into a world in which animals are slaughtered for the ivory, the skins, the racks, and the wonderful dangerous pleasure of the chase and kill. The British imperium is at its height, white supremacy unquestioned by...
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Pravoslavophobia
Item: An American of Greek origin calls a congressional office to protest United States policies in Bosnia that would place Christian Serbs at the mercy of a hostile Muslim regime. “So-called Christians,” corrects a member of the congressman’s staff, ignorant of the caller’s religion. Item: A national opinion magazine carries on its cover a harsh...
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The Quintessential Democratic Politician
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
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Dig Deeper
In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is People understand catastrophes. The everyday ebb and flow of history, in their own lives and in the world, is much harder for them to grasp. That thought—hardly...
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Allons, Enfants de la Patrie
It was years ago that I first read the collection of Donald Davidson’s essays called Still Rebels, Still Yankees. In one of them, “Some Day, in Old Charleston,” the doughty Last Agrarian addressed one of his perennial themes, the trashiness of modern civilization and the superiority of the Old Southern regime, by describing Charleston’s Army...
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Twenty Years After the Fall, Part I
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Winter came early in the year after the Fall. All the people’s hopes and dreams and expansive aspirations had not yet faded,...
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Your Hit Parade: A Story
“If Mel Torme is ‘The Velvet Fog,’ shouldn’t I at least be ‘The Elegant Mist’? Surveys indicate that even during station identification, which this is, you enjoy hearing my radio voice. From the studio at the antenna farm, I, Luther Craft (formerly Larry Krabenhoff), read your news, weather, commercials. I take requests, introduce singers, bands. ...
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Dirtiest Campaign in Recent Memory
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
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Repudiating the National Debt
Before the Reagan era, conservatives were clear about how they felt about deficits and the public debt: a balanced budget was good, and deficits and the public debt were bad, piled up by free-spending Keynesians and socialists, who absurdly proclaimed that there was nothing wrong or onerous about the public debt. In the famous words...
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Buchenwald’s Second Life
Even in an age of glasnost, hardly anyone troubles to recall that when the Soviet Union occupied East Germany in 1945 it kept two Nazi concentration camps in full use for nearly five years, till February 1950, and at their old task of death. Soviet Buchenwald comes as a surprise, and that surprise is perhaps...
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Citizen Ed
It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary terms of decades, centuries, and millennia; what is certain is, the dead don’t. Edward Abbey had been deceased just two months short of ten years and I was defunct about four months, entombed that long in the overpopulated, electronicized, ideologized megasprawl...
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Economic Ideology and the Conservative Dilemma
From Edmund Burke’s distrust of “sophisters, calculators and economists” to Calvin Coolidge’s boast that “the business of America is business” on to George Gilder’s “economy of heroes” has been a long journey that conservatism has not weathered well, either intellectually or politically. What was once a robust philosophy concerned with all of humane culture has...
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Paint It Black
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...
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Racially Aggravated Crimes and the New Hate
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.
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Athens and Jerusalem II: A Religion for Sissies?
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, ...
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Bobby Fischer, R.I.P.
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...
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The Specter of History
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...
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In Memoriam: Justin Raimondo, 1951-2019
Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist and a leading member of the paleolibertarian political movement, died Thursday at age 67 after a long battle with lung cancer. An influential champion of anti-interventionist foreign policy within the Libertarian and Republican political parties, Raimondo lobbed broadsides at warmongers left, right, and center from his post...
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Polemics & Exchanges
Letters to the editor on the subject of post-war Germany, "effeminate cruelty," George Santayana, and the competing influences on human behavior of genes and culture.
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Books in Brief: September 2021
Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown & Co.; 368 pp., $28.00). Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” That saying came in handy as I read this book, described on...
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“Bibi” Votes Republican
Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers’ U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors, and when Ike refused to apologize,...
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Muslim Migrants and the Religious Left
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
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Personal Moral Values
Marines are a direct lot, not much given to subtlety. Their simple nature enables them to spot a ruse from the 500-meter line, and, on the issue of sodomites, they have quickly identified as nonsense Mr. Clinton’s doublespeak about “status” and “conduct.” Marines, well known for advertising their “status” by their “conduct,” know that the...
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In Focus – Mixed Drinks & False Faiths
To a world of parched souls, Jesus Christ offered the Water of Life. Unlike club soda, however this Water is not a good mixer: in order to refresh, it must be taken straight, and on the Rock For centuries, men have attempted to concoct heady new “Christianity-and-” brews, but the disappointing result is always temporary...
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Plutomania
“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...
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Whig History and Lost Causes
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,...
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Modern Pyramids and Ancient Squares
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...
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Faith of Our Fathers
“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...
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The Iron Man of Human Rights
“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...
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The Stupid Party Rides Again
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....
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Europe’s Other Terrorists
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...
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Benevolent Global Hegemony
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...
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Is Immigration Our Fate?
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...
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Incalculable Rewards
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...
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Motel California
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...
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A Visual Feast that Fails to Frighten
Though visually dazzling, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" collapses into caricature and fails to give the audience a good scare.
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Moonglade
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...
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Diary of a Peripheral Male
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...
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Conversation in Warsaw
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...
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The Road to Regression
“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...
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A Logical Choice
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...