The death of a social movement is an instructive and sobering phenomenon. After years of greatness and influence, an idea eventually sickens and dies, until its adherents are reduced to a pathetic handful. Somewhere in history, there must have lived the last Albigensian, the last Ranter, the last native practitioner of ancient Egyptian religion. Somewhere...
8955 search results for: Post-Human%2BFuture
Federalizing Funerals
The Westboro Baptist Church and its bizarre octogenarian pastor, Fred Phelps, won a major victory at the Supreme Court in March. In an 8-1 decision, the Court reversed a multimillion-dollar award to the family of Marine L.Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed while serving in Iraq. In 2006, Westboro members showed up outside the fallen...
Germany’s Right-Wing Political Miracle
The right leaning AfD is now the second-largest party in Germany, according to recent polls. No one expected this level of success when AfD was founded 10 years ago by a small band of dissatisfied conservatives.
Are Obama and Hillary Clinton Really Bumblers?
Are they really bumblers? The opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election presaged a substantive shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case. It’s...
The Zhirinovsky Phenomenon
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, one of President Yeltsin’s most formidable opponents, is not well known in the West. In the former Soviet Union, though, he is despised and feared by both political camps: the reformers and the “patriots.” Even Leonid Kravchuk, president of the Ukraine and a former communist, considers Zhirinovsky extremely dangerous. “Do you want to...
Duty
Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty. We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...
10,300 Nights in the Gulag
The memory of the victims of communism has been honored with various initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. To that end, a spate of symposia and panel discussions were held in November and December 2003 in Italy, mostly in Rome and Milan. The symposium “Memento Gulag—Communism in the history of the XIX century,” jointly...
Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York. Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a decade of relentless Soviet arms acquisition, righteous notables in the West chant for a (virtually unilateral) freeze...
Pigs Is Pigs
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
The Zhukov-Sintez Affair
Aleksandr Zhukov’s April 7 arrest in Sardinia was played up by the Italian DIA (an anti-Mafia investigative unit) as having eliminated an important arms-trafficking channel to the war-torn Balkans. The most intriguing aspect of the story, however, involves NATO, the struggle between Russia and the West for influence in the former Soviet republics, and the...
Will Depression II Dictate Trump’s Fate?
As of April 30, the coronavirus pandemic has killed 61,500 Americans in two months and induced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. And if history is our guide, the economic crisis, which has produced 30 million unemployed Americans in six weeks, may prove more enduring, ruinous, and historic than the still-rising and tragic death...
The Impact of Islam on the Arab-Israeli Dispute
The role of Islam in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a contentious subject with two main schools of thought. One, broadly sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view, treats the conflict in geopolitical and social, rather than ideological or religious, terms. The other, emanating mostly (although not exclusively) from pro-Israeli sources, maintains that the Palestinian cause—even...
Maxine Waters’ Anti-Cop Rhetoric is Getting Black People Killed
In June 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., publicly exhorted her supporters to harass cabinet members of the Trump administration. At an outdoor rally in Los Angeles, Waters, with microphone in hand and amplifiers nearby, shouted: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet...
The Present Climate
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
On Pulling the Trigger
My friend (and onetime fellow Episcopalian) David Mills speaks dryly, slyly, of the Episcopal Church’s “usual irrelevance” in “Pulling the Trigger” (Vital Signs, March). Well, you know, the question is: “relevant” to what? In this present case, to the received Christian Faith? Ha and double-ha. Stand Christian morality on its head, as did the Episcopal...
Birth of a Non-Nation
In the United States, liberation from foreign domination and liberation from the past (the republican and democratic features of government) were largely the result of the American Revolution, which was spontaneous in origin, successful, moderate in its outcome, and—above all—supported by a considerable part of the population. This fortunate historical experience may lead many Americans...
Adieu, France
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment. Macron is...
Sinclair Lewis
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or...
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...
Top—Heavy Schools
It was another day, you know—back when President James A. Garfield could define a university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” Which was to say, a great teacher—Hopkins being the renowned president of Williams College—needed only the opportunity to sit down, unencumbered, and teach. You know,...
Kissinger’s Legacy
One of Henry Kissinger’s greatest virtues was his political realism and his resistance to America’s messianic urge, relentlessly promoted by both neoconservatives and neoliberals, to dominate the world as global hegemon.
Doing Well by Doing Evil
The revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts from children that they have aborted in their clinics is shocking, even though it is hardly surprising. Pro-lifers have argued for years that Planned Parenthood is less concerned with the lives of the women that they claim to “help” than they are with making a profit....
Manlio on Conflict Resolution
“The problem with having a car is that one gets into accidents. However trifling, these may have unexpected consequences. “One bright winter day my bumper grazed a pedestrian, who promptly fell to the ground. I got out to make sure he was all right, which he said he was, but all the same I offered...
Reluctance at Reveille
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. The global industrial revolution being engineered by multinational firms and the dismantling of international trade barriers have produced wrenching social changes and will unleash more. Rolling Stone National Editor William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (on the Federal Reserve) and Who Will Tell the People (on...
Letter From Cork: The Polonization of Ireland
Recently, I returned to dear old Cork after exactly ten years’ absence. What 50 years ago had been a poor town on the periphery of Ireland is now a big, thriving, growing, wealthy city. As I was conveyed from the airport to the city center, I asked the driver, “Anything changed round here recently?” “Immigrants,”...
Florida, the New Capital of Red State America
Republicans need to simply let Florida and its transformational governor show them the way. The future of the GOP is here in the sunshine state.
Let’s Go Poland
Conversations with those who have traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc reveal that group tours, not solo travel, are the rule rather than the exception. For a hefty fee, vacation moguls will relieve the prospective tourist of three major brain drains: consular relations (visas), hotel accommodations, and transportation. Group tour-guides will provide the serious history enthusiast...
Kidnapped
This book was first published in England as The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. Neither title describes the book very accurately. It is really an extended meditation on Browne’s life and interests as they strike a 21st-century science writer who likes to ride a bicycle and who, like Browne, lives in...
George Garrett Talks
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
Lincoln’s Slaves
A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying: “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....
Stakhanovism in Reverse
Last April, Claude Imbert, editor in chief of the moderately conservative weekly Le Point, dared to make an astonishing mea culpa. In a minor masterpiece of melancholic irony, he confessed the awful truth that he was a “liberal”—which, in present-day French parlance, means someone who believes in free enterprise as a necessary antidote to socialistic...
2020: The Year ‘Expert’ Credibility Died
If there were ever a time to “question authority,” as the old counterculture slogan of the 1960s urged, the authoritarian age of COVID-19 is that time. Two thousand twenty will go down in American history as the year that public health “experts” got everything wrong. It’s not just that their judgment...
Learning, Larning, and Schooling
“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” —Sir Walter Scott Educate, educare, Latin, from educere “to lead out.” Education is thus, etymologically, a leading out of young minds from inherited prejudices and superstitions. That, or something like it, has been included...
The Ruby Ridge Saga Continues
The Ruby Ridge saga continues. Five years to the day after 14-year-old Samuel Weaver and United States Marshal William Degan were killed in the initial confrontation at Randy Weaver’s residence, prosecutors in Boundary County, Idaho, indicted Weaver’s friend Kevin Harris on charges of first-degree murder. Weaver’s supporters were rightly outraged, with some claiming that the...
George Washington, Call Your Office
Over at NRO, Mona Charen announces that she will be attending a rally to support Israel in front of the Israeli embassy today, and she asks NRO readers to “please come and help demonstrate that millions of us passionately support Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.” One wonders how it would be possible...
The End of American Exceptionalism?
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have written a book entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt on August 29, with the headline “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” In the excerpt, Cheney sought to identify his views on foreign policy with those of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. That...
Guilt by Association
Reading over my last letter from Venice, I spot the word “improbable,” which has somehow slipped in through the barbed wire fence of watchful Russianness I have been building in order to keep all manner of tripe out of these monthly communications. I am sorry, and promise that nothing of the kind will ever happen...
Following Affirmative Action’s Demise, Slay the DEI Leviathan
Following the Supreme Court's overturning of higher education affirmative action, there have been a rapid succession of righteous pushbacks against the academic commissars who collectively comprise America's DEI regime.
Croatian Generals Sentenced at The Hague
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Zagreb and other Croatian cities over the past week to protest the conviction of two Croatian generals by the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. The ICTY sentenced Ante Gotovina to 24 years in jail and Mladen Markač to 18 years for their role in...
The Authority of Pain
In April 1970—between the fall of Prince Sihanouk’s government and the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia—the young Sean Flynn, war photographer and son of Errol Flynn, deliberately drove into a Vietcong roadblock in Cambodia. He wanted to report the war from the communist side but was captured and accused of spying for the...
Racist Cops—or Liberal Slander?
We have found the new normal in America. If you are truly outraged by some action of police, prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, you can shut down the heart of a great city. Thursday night, thousands of “protesters” disrupted the annual Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, conducted a “lie-in” in Grand Central, blocked Times...
Walking Distance
This is an age in which news of a tragedy garners a response such as this: “Well, our thoughts are with you.” Happy thoughts full of Pelagian grace. It is therefore with some reservation that I now examine Rocky Twyman’s direct and public prayer to the Almighty, a supplication he no doubt offers with full...
A Ukrainian Tragedy
Having designated a traditionalist, conservative, overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox Russia as the enemy, the rulers of an Orwellian "Great Reset" West will be free to cancel conservatives of all stripes even more radically than before.
Diagnosing the Diminishing Dollar
Holding a green piece of paper decorated with patriotic symbols as a proxy for economic value is an act of faith. To do so with the currency of your own country is a necessary act of faith, since daily life requires it in order to make economic transactions. But to hold sizable amounts of the...
Revolution
Times of crisis are not distinguished by respect for rights—although, paradoxically, all revolutions claim to be mounted in the name of rights. During our War of Independence, criticism of the patriot cause was an invitation to a lynching, and Jefferson defined the Tory as “a traitor in thought, if not in deed.” In 1773 George...
George Bush, Protectionist
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.” Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout...
Arms and the Man: Clint Eastwood as Hero and Filmmaker
A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens decide what they are and admire. In...
My Ground, Myself
To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground. And so Catharine Savage Brosman’s title works for a book of essays mostly about journeys away (though she includes a nice piece on New...
Uncle Sam’s Obituary
Prick up your ears and listen to the violins: beyond the dreamy adagios and thrilling arpeggios the fat lady has sung. On stage Uncle Sam has been laid to rest, but unlike Don Giovanni, the good uncle’s corpse has not descended into hell. European pundits are lesser liars and hypocrites than American ones, yet they...
Home Movies
In a recent letter I mentioned the circuitous route my wife and I drove last summer on our way from California back home to North Carolina. The first day it took us past Bakersfield, where I’m told the children and grandchildren of Okies have imposed something resembling Southern culture on a part of California. (I’m...