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.
626 search results for: Forgotten+History
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Still In Saigon—In My Mind
“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...
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Homo Sovieticus Lives On
To the old popular proverb, “The only good communist is a dead communist,” we should perhaps now add: “Once a communist, forever a communist.” Although as a muscled ideology communism is dead, as a way of life it is still very much alive. Similar to any other past and present mass belief or theology, communism...
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Hold the Gush
Like Virginia Woolf and Mary McCarthy, Rupert Brooke and Bruce Chatwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s striking appearance greatly enhanced her literary reputation. Readers were drawn to her poetry by her good looks and notorious sexual behavior. When she lost her health and beauty and became an alcoholic and a drug addict, she lost her following...
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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...
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White Guys and 9/11
Whiteness and maleness lately have been under constant attack. It’s worth remembering that 23 years ago our culture celebrated four white male heroes who stopped a terrorist attack in the skies above Pennsylvania.
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The President’s President
“Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment governs them.” —Chesterfield Richard Nixon’s second term as president ended over two years early with his resignation on August 9, 1974. Someday, when President Reagan’s papers and telephone logs are made public, I think they will reveal that Nixon completed his presidential term in the second Reagan...
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Burying the Hatchet
What now are called “the Indian wars” ended about a century ago, and the participants in those battles are dead without exception. After 1886, when Geronimo and his band surrendered, there were no more off-reservation wild Indians. Native Americans had become an administrative, not a military problem. The reservations would become a policing system where...
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A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant
Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser in the infamous 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has written an unrepentant and incoherent book while showing no remorse for the ordeal she caused others and the nation.
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The Country Writer
I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...
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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 Prospects for Peace
I returned to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) last May and July and noticed that Serbia had changed dramatically since my last visits there in late 1993. The financial reforms of a 75-year-old Serbian university professor, Mr. Dragoslav Avramovic, who has solid banking experiences in Yugoslavia and abroad, had stemmed the soaring inflation rate...
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Gigantic in Everything
When you visit a foreign capital for the first time, sooner or later you are likely to be asked the question: “What do you think of our country?” or “What is your impression of this city?” In St. Petersburg, which I had visited in May, I had a ready answer: Everything there (the worst as...
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Requiescat In Pace Domini
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
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Archduke Otto: Responding to Dr. Trifkovic
I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern. Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...
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The Criminal State
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
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The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler
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...
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The Vanishing Craftsman
The house is barely six months old, but it has already begun to settle. Loose steps creak, doors hang, and cracks appear along the baseboards. If I were a carpenter, as my father was for 40 years, or knew enough of such things, I would have built my own house, as he did. But I...
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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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The Politics of Laughter
Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, is one of America’s most eminent scholars of humor. With this book, he has written another very thoroughly researched study of contemporary American humor, ranging from the “positive humor” and “laughter club” movements that use humor to promote health and efficiency, peace and uplift, to the...
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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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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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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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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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Rediscovering the French in Early Florida
Long-forgotten is the early struggle between the Huguenots and the Spaniards for colonization of Floridian territory, where the Timucuan Indians dwelt.