Vera Drake Produced by Thin Man Films and Studio Canal Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by New Line Cinema Birth Produced and distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s socialist directors, begins and ends his latest effort, Vera Drake,...
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Angela Delenda Est
Having written dozens of articles on the subject of Islamic terrorism and Europe’s ongoing suicide, following the latest jihadist carnage in Berlin I find myself lost for words—unable to think of anything useful that has not already appeared on this blog. Let me explain . . . In August of last year I wrote that...
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A Week of Mondays
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson What helps set this study apart is its still largely verboten subject. Joseph Scotchie devotes his attention to that part of the American right that Lee Edwards, Jonathan M. Schoenwald, and William Rusher...
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Scandalizing Uncle Ez
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him...
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America’s Grand Strategy
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. “Robbing, slaughtering, pillaging they misname sovereign authority, and where they make an empty waste they call it peace.” Tacitus puts this accurate if one-sided summation of Roman imperial strategy into the mouth of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain, urging the Celtic warriors to resist...
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The Fellowship of Joking
Besides regaling Chronicles readers with dismaying reports on “the strange death of moral Britain” (the title of the immediate predecessor to the present book), Christie Davies continues his professional pursuits, chief among which is the study of humor. Jokes and Targets is his fifth book concerned with the subject. It focuses on six joke cycles,...
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David Horowitz and the Ex-Communist Confessional
The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol’s “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal—Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials,...
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A Trip Back to the Fifties
Please hop into my time machine, and I’ll give you a short tour of Boonville, North Carolina in the summer of 1959, before bringing you back to the present day. Strolling around this small hamlet of 600, note the town’s most historic building, the old brick bank founded long ago by Mr. Shore. Take in...
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Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...
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Up From the Ice Age
“Nature knows no equality.” —Luc de Varvenargues For about four years before the publication of The Bell Curve last fall, occasional news reports dribbled out tidbits of information about the book and its coauthor. The stories were often pegged to Charles Murray’s departure from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute in 1990 because of the institute’s discomfort...
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Out With the New
On March 12, I was kneeling at the back of the vast 11th-century abbey church of Fontgombault, France, where I formed exactly one third of the congregation at a mid-week, mid-Lent, mid-morning Mass. At the other end of the nave, the monastic community had processed in with identifiably Benedictine decorum, taken their places in the...
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Only Diverse Cartoonists May Critique the Regime
Apparently one major problem facing the mainstream media today is the lack of editorial and political cartoonists from diverse backgrounds. In the wake of the successful transition to a Biden-Harris presidency, The Washington Post recently interviewed a number of female and minority cartoonists to get their perspective on this pressing cultural issue. “Fewer than 30 staff newspaper jobs...
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How to Keep From Getting Deported
In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an illegal alien, although properly found to be a danger to the community, should not be removed from the United States because he considers himself to be a transgender woman. Finding that Mexico is not in the progressive vanguard in embracing transgender identity, the court...
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The Politics of Education and the Metaphysics of Emptiness
The president of a prominent liberal arts college recently conveyed to its philosophy department (and to other constituencies) that regulations may soon be in place which would influence, if not altogether control, the conferring of bachelor’s degrees. Mandated by the federal government, these “guidelines” would have a strongly utilitarian bias. However supportive this might be...
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George Kennan: A Great and Good Man
The results of rejecting Kennan’s counsel have been disastrous, and the ongoing failure to draw upon his wisdom is a tragedy.
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On ‘Clarence Thomas’
I sure wouldn’t want to cross Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. In his semihysterical, mean-spirited diatribe (Cultural Revolutions, January 1992), he manages to charge Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with perjury, perversion, and racial opportunism. And that’s just for openers. Although I probably lost count, there are some twenty-five negative references to Thomas’s character, ideology, or...
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Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
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Australians All, Let Ostriches
“Australians all, let ostriches, / For we are young and free”—the attempt by an expensively educated Australian schoolchild to notate the first two lines of Australia’s national anthem (the first line of which is “Australians all, let us rejoice”). Bill and Hillary not surrealistic enough for your jaded tastes? Alarmed by passing signs of incipient...
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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 Wolf Week in Review: Race to the 90’s
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream. And...