Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an “Oreo,” a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new; they were made by black Americans in earlier generations, dramatically in the ease...
625 search results for: Forgotten+History
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Exploring Beyond the Internet
The only certainty is that uncertainty is one of the best prompts for asking what it means to be human.
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Whispers From Kirk
Stan Evans has described bodies of thought as having “lifecycles”; they emerge, thrive for a while, and, unless continually nourished, eventually hollow out and pass away. Having reached the end of its lifecycle, liberalism, as a coherent body of thought, is dead. There are still liberals, of course. But the tradition derived variously from John...
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Radical Populism on the Volga
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
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The Republic We Betrayed
A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin. Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...
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Ireland’s Forgotten Genocide
Despite much handwringing about British colonial misdeeds in Africa and the Caribbean, the systematic, purposeful extermination of more than a million Irish during the potato famine of the 19th century gets little attention.
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Outside the Law
“This is a wonderful country, my boy, but our legal system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” —Harold Smith, in Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins America’s “major” film critics have been very busy—and very worried— lately. They have a lot to worry about; the movies just aren’t going their way anymore, which ought to...
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Solid Strategy, Limited Vision
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann; Translated by Daniel Steuer; Belknap Press, Harvard University; 928 pp., $39.95 All states need a strategy, however rudimentary, in order to survive. Great powers need much more: a viable grand strategy for war and peace is called for to endure in the never-ending struggle for power, land, and resources. As A.J.P. Taylor...
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Old Love
My Downtown is dying. That is perhaps saying too little; Downtown is nearly dead. The neat, grid-patterned, wellpayed streets of the old Baton Rouge, the white hot cement Huey Long pounded Florsheim heel and toe against, the small optimistic stores set up in the 30’s and 40’s and equipped with illuminated signs in the 50’s...
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Getting Medieval on Middle Age
I turned forty-one this year. I left a psychological plateau (a crisis would have been way more exciting) and a legal career behind. I suppose an alcohol-fueled bender or an illicit affair broadcast on social media would be what most “folks” (as Barack Obama says) my age might do nowadays, but I opted for sobriety...
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Remembering T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot was a traditionalist, but he was also an aesthete, one who defended the independence of art and lauded the highly individualistic work of various modern poets. The caricatures never do him justice.
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Vol. 1 No. 2 February 1999
Plundering the treasures of conquered lands has always been a fair game, from Neolithic herds and Sabine women to works of art: Byzantine statuary adorns St. Marco’s in Venice, and Elgin’s marbles are in London to stay. But moving a land itself across an international frontier is a novel concept, one which is being tried...
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Comment
Democracy, its failures, weaknesses, and sins not withstanding, is the only political system in which the entire social body is to decide on who should conduct its affairs in its name. By the electoral process the majority’s opinion is consecrated as a source of legitimate political power. Annals record many variations of democratic societies in...
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A Weekend With O’Keefe
Investigative journalism of the kind that James O'Keefe practices is not for normal people. But it is necessary nonetheless.
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Escape from Grub Street
Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is “father of the English Novel.” Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that “We really know almost as little of Fielding’s life as of Shakespeare’s.” Lives of Fielding, or important essays about him, have been written by distinguished men of letters—Arthur Murphy, Walter...
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The TSA and Security
Many Americans today are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner. Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law. Some of the amendments in...
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From a Front Box
Only the most devoted students of Henry Adams are likely to have bought and read the six-volume Complete Letters that Harvard University Press produced between 1982 and 1988. More’s the pity, since it was an excellent work of scholarship disclosing an American epistolary artist of the highest order. But the editor and biographer, Ernest Samuels,...
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Ressentiment: He Hates, Therefore He Is
A few days ago, rioters in Boston defaced the Robert Shaw Memorial, a masterpiece in high relief wrought by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom I consider to be, alongside Frederic Remington, the most distinctly American of our sculptors. I am supposing that the attack on the memorial was no mere act of vandalism, no instance of “rioting mainly...
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Eternal Memory
As we round the curve, the driver pulls up short—at least, as short as you can when you’re only going five miles per hour in the first place. As the minibus shudders to a halt, we all shift in our seats to get a better view out of the windshield. There, up ahead on the...
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Kamala Harris, Hollywood, and the ‘Aaron Sorkin Democrat’
Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee means the age of the Aaron Sorkin Democrat may have reached its end.
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Vol. 2 No. 12 December 2000
As Slobodan Milosevic fought for his political life in Belgrade, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright condemned him and expressed support for his opposition—while at the same time acting as if the State Department would do everything in its power to help Milosevic survive. “Kostunica not Clinton administration’s man,” reported UPI’s Martin Sieff on September 25,...
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Letter From Russia Orthodoxy and Nationalism
Early in my first Russian-language course, our professor noted that the word for “Sunday” is the same as the word for “resurrection.” Somebody asked her how that word had managed to survive under 70 years of totalitarian atheism. She replied that Russian is so permeated with Christian images that it would be impossible to remove...
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Escape from Grub Street
[This review first appeared in the October 1990 issue of Chronicles.] Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is “father of the English Novel.” Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that “We really know almost as little of Fielding’s life as of Shakespeare’s.” Lives of Fielding, or important essays about...
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Teaching Children To Be Unbiased Is Impossible
A comic from NPR caught my eye the other day. Promising to tell parents “how to raise informed, active citizens,” the scrawled images and text stressed the importance of civics and made several recommendations on how parents can work instruction of this topic into everyday life. The suggestions range from using fun and games, to...
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Foreign Policy for the Post-Cold War World
Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of great joy for lovers of freedom everywhere. For it was the “revolutionary” year in which totalitarian communism, throughout Eastern Europe and perhaps even in the Soviet Union itself, suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Many of our pundits, equating complexity and permanent quasi-gloom with profundity, sternly warned us...
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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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Boethius and Lady Philosophy
As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
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Wreckers and Builders
Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation. And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and...
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Lament for a Lost Love
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
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Old Times There Are Not Forgotten
I’m sure some readers of these letters are tired of hearing what a special place the South is. So I’ll warn you: I’m going to say it again. And I’m going to quote all sorts of other people who say it, too. Come back next month if you can’t take it. The South is a...
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Just Win, Baby
In 1968, George Wallace said that there wasn’t a “dime worth’s of difference” between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Implicit there was the suggestion that Americans were not satisfied with echoes and preferred choices. As it happens, Wallace was the last third-party presidential candidate to win Electoral College votes. Besides 14 percent of the popular...
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The Western Way of War From Plato to NATO
When I first began reading of the ancient world as a child, I was mystified by the collapse of the Greek city-states and the fall of Rome. How could such a thing come to pass? It seemed perfectly reasonable that Egypt, Sumer, and the Hittite kingdom should have come and gone, but not Periclean Athens...
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Wyndham Lewis and the Moronic Inferno
Looking back today at the achievements of the heroic modernists, we must do so with at least some degree of ambivalence. The presence of those colossi has receded with the passing of the years; and we no longer regard them as they themselves taught us to do. Yet they still loom on the mental horizon,...
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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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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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Idling, Week 1
Idling: A Public and Entirely Self-Serving Diary 1 September 4,2011. A few words by way of justification for wasting time, mine as much as yours, on talking about nothing. I have always been by inclination an idle man, the sort who is too lazy to balance his checkbook or do his taxes until the...
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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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The Gospel of Pluralism
“I esteem . . . Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church.” —John Locke It is fitting that the most confused and confusing legal tradition in America today is First Amendment case law regarding religious liberty. It is confusing because at the Founding a young nation composed principally of strongly religious...
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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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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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The Crusade to Nowhere
My last conversation with Edward Thompson, the Marxist historian, was at the gates of Durham Castle. That, on reflection, was how it should have been. There was always something slightly grand about him, as if a castle, or at least a country mansion, might be a natural place for him. Durham Castle is now a...
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Tocqueville, Santayana, and Donald Trump
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...
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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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The Publishing Industry
Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weakly in my book), though it is one of the most depressing magazines in America, obviously considers itself a sprightly, thoughtful, and somewhat “irreverent” publication, gifted with the insight to see that the emperor has no clothes on and blessed with the courage to stand forward and say so. In the bold...
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Best of British Conservatism
“Hail, happy Britain! Highly favored isle, And Heaven’s peculiar care!”—William Somerville British conservative circles are awash with books at the moment. Apart from the usual think-tank reports and surveys, we have seen recently John Major’s and Norman Lamont’s memoirs, John Redwood’s Death of Britain, and the latest miscellany from Daily Telegraph...
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Forgetting China
I am unusual among American conservatives in feeling quite positive about the rise of a strong and prosperous China. Not long since, I was exploring Beijing’s thronged Wangfujing Street, which is consumer heaven, and it was sobering to realize that the ancestors of virtually all those prosperous customers would have been permanently hungry peasants who...
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Back to the Stone Age: a Primer for Palaeoconservatives 1
Chapter One: Some Basic Concepts, Part One I have never been very good with dates, but it was some time in the mid 1980’s. Paul Gottfried, who was teaching at Rockford College, had come to my office, and we were discussing, as was our wont, the sad state of conservatism. (I do not recall...
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Five Plays in Search of a Character
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
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Blood at Eastertide
Europeans from Cortes to Graham Greene, and Americans from Ambrose Bierce to the contemporary tourist who is offered sugar-candy skulls to buy on the Day of the Dead and has his car stopped by men in anonymous uniforms toting guns, have discovered Mexico to be a country characterized by a ferocious reality that very often...