Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, echoing the rhetoric and mindset of half a century ago, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and...
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Variations on a Theme
I pretty much devoured the “Minority Cultures” issue (February) in one sitting. Every issue is stellar, but the great thing I find again and again is that reading all these fine writers is like loving so many different works of a particular composer that it is hard to make up one’s mind as to which...
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Think Again
This book would have been better entitled “A Time to Think.” It contains some good thinking but not much fight. Doubtless the author and publisher knew that Fighting is a better sell than Thinking. Barack Obama will have chosen his running mate by the time this review reaches readers. At the time of writing there...
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Uncommon Properties
Pick up any newspaper at random, and you will come upon story after story of children being murdered, beaten, and molested. I begin this chapter on Monday, October 19, 1992, and looking over the Chicago Tribune I discover: a frontpage story on Chicago schoolchildren venting their grief over the murder of their friends, a headline...
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In Defense of Italian Nationhood
What makes a nation? In the case of Italy, it was a linguistic and cultural nation long before it became a political one.
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A Big Deal
“This is the biggest contract in the history of the gas sector of the former USSR,” Vladimir Putin said after the $400 billion agreement to supply Russian natural gas to China was signed in Shanghai on May 21. It is much more than that, Putin went on: It is an “epochal event.” China’s President Xi...
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The Pros and Cons of Immigration: A Debate
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
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The Business of Souls: When Experts Attack, Part II
Here’s what I can’t figure out: How in the world did Saint Patrick evangelize all of those Druid priests and clan chieftains without a mission statement? After all, history and tradition tell us that he walked around preaching and performed an occasional miracle. But how did he know what his mission was? And then, there...
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Nationalism and Secession
With the collapse of communism all across Eastern Europe, secessionist movements are mushrooming. There are now more than a dozen independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union, and many of its more than 100 different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups are striving to gain independence. Yugoslavia has dissolved into various national components....
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“A Clear Voice for Freedom”
“Dr. King was a strong and clear voice for freedom,” declared President George W. Bush during a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day commemoration. His nominee for attorney general, John Ashcroft, proudly proclaimed during Senate testimony that, “By executive order, I made Missouri one of the first states to recognize Martin Luther King Day.” These are...
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Trump, Vance, and FDR
Trump and his movement are following the path blazed by the Democrats before they became the party of woke: The old FDR playbook.
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No One Has the Right To Come to America
For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...
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‘Bidenomics’ Gaslighting Reveals POTUS’s Impotence Lead-Up to 2024
Joe Biden and his cackler henchwoman, Kamala Harris, will run on "Bidenomics." And they will ask you not to believe your own lying eyes, but to believe that the turd sandwich they are offering up is actually a tasty filet mignon.
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The Flamingo Kid
It is a truism to note that H.L. Mencken, like his great vitriolic predecessor Jonathan Swift, was a thoroughgoing misanthrope. So perverse was Mencken’s vision of human existence that he preferred to read King Lear as farce rather than as tragedy—since nothing, he was fond of saying, could be more farcical than death. But if...
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Trump’s Road Still Open
At stake in 2016 is the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and, possibly, control of the House of Representatives. Hence, Republicans have a decision to make. Will they set aside political and personal feuds and come together to win in November, after which they can fight over the future of the party, and...
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What Civilization Remains
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
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Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
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Peace in the Land of Sojourn
When Ariel Sharon, facing strong international pressure, proposed a withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, the settlers’ response was predictably hostile. For some, the motive is predominantly economic—the settlements represent affordable housing; for others, nationalist politics is the driving force: Israel, they say, is Israel, and no part should be subtracted. These arguments can be countered...
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Mr. Kennan’s America
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
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Kavanaugh Hearings Have Become a Farce
As Chief of the Pentagon’s Criminal Law Division, I tried or supervised hundreds of rape cases, and my aggressive prosecutions earned me a place on the Army General Staff. I demanded that my JAG lawyers prosecute the toughest sex crime cases, regardless of evidentiary challenges. But I also insisted that they firmly believe that each...
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Let’s Stop Equating Slavery and Abortion
Frequently, pro-life leaders draw a parallel between slavery and abortion. “You Say Abortion Is Legal? The Supreme Court Also Legalized Slavery,” reads one popular bumper sticker. The motivation for this comparison is understandable, since slavery and the Civil War occupy central places in the American historical imagination. By gesturing toward one of the issues associated...
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Rumors of War
“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years...
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Trail Life: A Christian Answer to the Boy Scouts
When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s troop, like many other churches across the country, revoked their BSA charter, leaving Waning’s son and...
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White House Sets Border Fire, Sues States for Trying to Put it Out
The current, temporary custodians of the executive branch are akin to landlords who took over a safe, secure apartment building and have let it become dangerous and crime infested.
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Iran: The Score, the Options
In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...
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World War III With China: How It Might Actually Be Fought
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...
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Does Our Diversity Portend Disintegration?
After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend. “What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell...
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Gianni, Get Your Gun
One of the most important reasons for the sweeping victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty in the recent Italian election was concern for public safety, which ranks as the number-one issue on the minds of voters, according to some polls. Berlusconi promised to do whatever was necessary to make people feel safer,...
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The Case for Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
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Macedonia unrest: ‘Warning to Skopje against new Turkish pipeline’
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
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An Appeal from Thomas Fleming
Your mind is a terrible thing to waste—which is what will happen if Chronicles and its web go under because of lack of support. The election is over, and the Republicans have won their much predicted victory. It was only a matter of days before GOP legislators began to run away from the big issues:...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
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Our Little War in Kosovo
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
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Texas Gov. Abbott Fumbles on Border Security
Two Texas National Guardsmen sat in a “non-tactical” vehicle near the Mexican border and south of Laredo, Texas on the morning of Jan. 18. The Army Times reported that the men got out to assist Border Patrol in stopping a Chrysler 300 after it was seen picking up six migrants. As they approached, the driver, a suspected smuggler,...
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Digging For Truth in Pravda
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
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Nonconformist Historian
Eugene Dominick Genovese, r.i.p. Gene Genovese, 82, one the more important and controversial American historians of the 20th century, passed away quietly at his Atlanta home on September 26. A dockworker’s intellectually precocious son, who came up through Brooklyn College and Columbia University, Genovese embraced Marxism early in life, almost inevitably. And there was a...
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Synthetic Syntheses
Sam Francis’s most enduring, as well as trenchant, political insight may have been his perception of what he caustically described as “the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era.” Francis dubbed this “anarcho-tyranny”—“a kind of Hegelian synthesis of two opposites,” he explained, in which the failure of the state to enforce protective...
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Guns, Matrimony, and Jihad in San Bernardino
The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws. It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American. Farook...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. ...
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A Vast White-Wing Conspiracy?
I like reading about hate crime: It is such a cheering feature of American life. And while I am always happy to see the excellent news about this kind of offense—ever-rising numbers, more and more crimes in ever-broader areas of the country—I wish we could get those statistics even higher. The reasons for mv satisfaction...
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Living in a Glass House
In January of last year, Chilean actress Danielle Tobar made international news by moving into a glass house in downtown Santiago. During the short course of “Project Nautilus,” the intimate details of her daily life were open to the (largely prurient) curiosity of onlookers. After only six days, Tobar abandoned the house, claiming security concerns....
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Exploits of the Noble Savage
Modern grievances are, at heart, about competition for resources, prestige, and power. All that has changed are the myths used to mask the claims and obscure reality.
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Transatlantic Rifts
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Europe was closer to America, politically and emotionally, than at any time since World War II. For a moment, the threat of Islamic terrorism had rekindled a dormant awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of just how much the Old Continent and the New World have in...
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The Unbeliever
Suppose you are tired of hearing about roulette. Suppose the very thought of gambling, despite the metaphorist’s efforts to depict it as the great commonwealth of epochal disillusionment and hence universalize the experience, strikes you as tedious. Suppose you are the sort of man who insists that the only thing duller than watching people take...
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Mixing Oil and Water
The Common Problems of Assimilating Immigrants in Israel and the United States Parts of the United States are currently undergoing a radical cultural transformation. Demographers have documented that as a result of large-scale immigration, California—the country’s most populous state—will be composed of a majority of minorities by the first decade of the next century. Moreover,...
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Democrats’ America: The Heart of Darkness
If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message. Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday...
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The Season of Rain and Death
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
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The Unmet Mentor
Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly. In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor. In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. The first line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like...
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Democrats’ Open Border Trickery: Gaming the Census
The raw political interest of Democrats is at work in gaming the census numbers to increase the headcount in America’s leftist cities to maintain the political power.
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The Wrongs of Women’s Rights III: Violence
In the Russian novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a family feud breaks out when a young Cossack intervenes to prevent a neighbor from beating his wife to death. He suspected her of adultery, but he had been beating her systematically from the first day to punish her for being raped before getting married. ...