This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as...
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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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Books in Brief: November 2021
Klara and the Sun: A Novel, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; 320 pp., $28.00). A conservative disposition imposes costs but limits downside surprises. If you always expect rain, you have to lug your umbrella around wherever you go. But you never get wet. Likewise, if you see life through a Menckenian lens, worstcase scenarios sometimes play...
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Syria: No End Game in Sight
The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...
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Putin’s Gamble: Playing the Terrorist Card
When Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Bush shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to express his solidarity, pundits East and West took this as a sign of what one American columnist called the coming “earthquake” in U.S.-Russia relations. Putin was aiming to shift his policy focus westward, away from his previous “Eurasianist” effort...
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America as a ‘Wokers’ Paradise
Distinctions between the First, Second, and Third Worlds have blurred in contemporary America as government competence stretches in odd and tyrannical directions while leaving the basic functions of government untouched. This misalignment of priorities could well serve to delegitimize the government in the eyes of many of its citizens. The post-WWII political landscape was simple....
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Welcoming Migrants Creates War-Rationing Scenario
The sacrifices Americans make today do not serve any greater good, such as winning a war, preserving our way of life, or giving their children a chance at a better future. Instead, our government is making us sacrifice to meet the needs of foreign nationals here illegally.
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Can Poland Be Poland—and Stay in the EU?
“Let Poland be Poland!” That was the call of American conservatives, four decades ago, when the Solidarity movement of labor leader Lech Walesa arose in the port city of Gdansk to demand their freedom of the Communist system imposed upon Poland by the Soviet Union after World War II. A decade later, Poland broke free...
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Seasoned Travels
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” —G.P. Morris Readers of Chronicles are familiar with Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s regular contributions under the title The Hundredth Meridian, a rubric launched in the 1990’s. The first two dozen or so of these columns were conceived as chapters in a serialized book. With minor...
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Credo for Conservatives Part III: Order, Tradition, and Loyalty
III. A social order, being a natural expression of human sociability, should not be undermined, overturned, or rejected on frivolous grounds. A. Man is not a purely natural creature and he never lived in a state of nature. Thus, since there is no such things as universal human rights ...
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The Cardinal Vicar
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish . . . ” —Psalm 2:12 Twenty-one centuries will have passed since He promised to come in His glory, 21 centuries since His prophet wrote, “Behold, I come quickly.” For centuries, then, men had beseeched Him with faith and fervor, “O Lord our God hasten...
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Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
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The Road to Regression
“Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...
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The Case for American Secession
There has always been talk about secession in this country by those variously disgruntled on both the right and left, but, since the last presidential election, which revealed deep-seated divisions in American society over a variety of fundamental issues, that talk has grown exponentially. Such talk is not likely to lead to a dissolution of...
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Gay Marriage, Before the Ruling
Justice [Antonin] Scalia: [W]hen did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? . . . Has it always been unconstitutional? . . . You say it is now unconstitutional. [Theodore Olson, attorney arguing that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional]: Yes. Justice Scalia: Was it always unconstitutional?...
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Yes, We Have Bananas… in All Shapes and Sizes
“Yes, we have no bananas” was a hit song from the 1920s. Here a Greek fruit vendor answers all questions with “yes,” even when the answer is negative. In today’s America, we have lots of bananas. First, of course, are the curved yellow fruits sold in bunches. You may be living in Alaska or Massachusetts, with a...
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The Myth of the Atomic Bomb
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
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California’s September Surprise
Politiqueros Pelosi and Newsom ramp up bribes for America’s imported electorate.
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Horror of Home
Travel writing in the post-World War II era gradually became the prosaic stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements, nothing more than Baedeker-type guides to fancy hotels and chic restaurants in foreign capitals. Bruce Chatwin revived the classic traveling-by-the-seat-of-your-pants school, a genre historically practiced by worldly wandering Brits as disparate as Lord Byron, Richard Burton, and Graham...
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A New European Identity
In Europe today there is a youthful yearning for a new genesis and a desire to overcome the legacy of World War II. While a facile model of one generation rejecting the last is a tempting one to offer as explanation, in fact, the emerging “New Right” seeks both a connection and a rejection to...
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Westerns: America’s Homeric Era on the Silver Screen
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
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Hush! It Is General Lee
With Obama completing the displacement of the American people and the Republicans trying to start a war to detract attention from their uselessness and to revive their collapsed grassroots support, a poor observer barely has time and attention to note the civilizational degradation taking place in Lexington in the old and once-honored Commonwealth of Virginia....
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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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Pardon the Pardons
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
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A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I knew...
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Vigilante Justice: A Case Study
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
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Observing American Decencies
Joe Gould’s Secret Produced by First Cold Press and October Films Directed by Stanley Tucci Screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, from an article by Joseph Mitchell Released by October Films American Psycho Produced by Single Cell Pictures Directed by Mary Harron Screenplay by Mary Harron, from a novel by Bret Easton Ellis Released by Lions...
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The Bit Between Their Teeth
Despite last summer’s brassy pronouncements that the owl had sung her watchsong on the towers of Capitol Hill, the oligarchs of Congress bit the reins in their teeth and lashed their mounts full into the maelstrom of constituents disgusted with pay-raises, privileges, perversion, and pretension. Some 96 percent of the incumbents managed to ride out...
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Kelly Loeffler’s Missed Opportunity in the Georgia Run-off Debate
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
So the anti-Confederate backlash comes to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June, voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman. Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large,...
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The Grass in American Streets
During his debate with Citizen Perot, Vice President Al Gore joined a distinguished list of misinformed public officials when he bashed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Senator Reed Smoot and Congressman Willis Hawley “raised tariffs,” Gore said, “and it was one of the principle causes . . . of the Great Depression.” Predictably, the national press jumped...
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Restoring Island Park
The great Yellowstone caldera, home to Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, last exploded some 600,000 years ago. With a power more than one thousand times greater than Mt. St. Helen’s, it threw boulders the size of Greyhound buses nearly to Kansas. Pressure is building up again. The Yellowstone caldera is bulging in preparation for...
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Beyond All the Shouting
While Cold Mountain, the admittedly well-wrought novel about a Confederate deserter, has achieved bestseller status, a story of a quite different sort has gained a modest but devoted readership and demonstrated anew the gifts of one of America’s finest writers. Nashville 1864 is a mere 129 pages long. Still, it is best not read in...
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Europe’s Migrant Crisis
Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...
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The Serbs of Ozren Mountain
“Let me marry / Or buy me a banjo / For I must pluck / At something!” sings Milosli Dragichevitch, a Serb from Ozren Mountain in Bosnia. Milosh is a 50-year-old whose eyes twinkle darkly as he laughs at jokes about Serbs and Turks, made up by someone diabolical, somewhere in Bosnia. “Two Red Berets,”...
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On Catron County
The first half of Chilton Williamson’s September essay, “Circuit Rider,” is a joy to read. The second half is also well written, but has no reality to it. The idea that Catron County, New Mexico, is fighting for some grounded life against federal interference founders if the facts are known. The facts are that Catron...
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International Community
In April, Condoleezza Rice made a stunning display of her keen analytical mind and verbal agility. During a joint press conference with the Hungarian foreign minister, the secretary of state found herself defending the Bush administration’s decision to abstain rather than veto a U.N. resolution turning over crimes committed in the Darfur region of the...
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The Zoophiles of Gaza
A video, reportedly shot by an Israeli drone over the war-torn Gaza Strip has been circulating on various social networks. The footage shows several Hamas fighters, decked out in kuffiya headscarves, having sexual intercourse with a goat or a sheep. Stunningly revolting, but hardly surprising. After all, zoophilia was always quite common, if not widespread...
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Every State Is a Border State Now
The death of Jacques Price serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly our institutions have been turned against Americans at every level.
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Electoral Franchise Blues
If you want to create and preserve a constitutional republic, you must be careful about who gets to vote. Once this sacred right is granted, it can never be withdrawn.
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Dominating Headlines
The recall election in California has dominated the headlines of late, thanks, in part, to Governor Hiram Johnson, the lion of the Western Progressives. The irony is that today’s alleged “progressives”—in thrall to the special interests (i.e., the public-employee unions)—are horrified by what their ancestors have wrought. The Union Pacific Railroad was a great octopus...
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It Will Be Sudden, It May Be Soon
The Roswell Alien Museum and Research Center is on Main Street, an avenue dotted with trinket shops and ads featuring a big-eyed “alien” hawking hamburgers, gasoline, and the wares of various convenience stores. At the north end of Roswell is the New Mexico Military Institute, while the flat, brown-gray expanse of the staked plains surrounds...
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Educated at Home
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 “This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words ...
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Reforming the Invisible Primary
We have just completed another round in a continuing national experiment in political theory—the primary selection process as it has been revised in several waves of democratic reform. I believe this experiment, filled with noble intentions, has largely been a failure. From the standpoint of democratic theory, the presidential selection process should be both representative...
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Rehabilitating Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a “personality” in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person. As is so often the case with figures of public celebrity, the facts of Poe’s life have been obscured by layers of...
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Ghosts of the Midwest
The decline of the Midwest as a cultural force was well under way by the time Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan, in 1918. Yankee influence in the region had largely been replaced by a more vibrant German-American culture, and now the United States, in the midst of the War to End All Wars,...
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The Right’s ‘Rocky’ Redux: The Tide Is Turning
The June debate between Biden and Trump was that Rocky moment when the opponent was sent bloodied and reeling back to his corner. But the fight is by no means over.
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Britain’s Leftists: Allies of the Islamists
The people of England, after very considerable provocation, have lately come to fear England’s Muslims. Britain’s leftists have shifted in the opposite direction. From an entrenched hostility to the mores of their own country and out of sheer perversity, the leftists have intensified their attacks on the Catholic Church, while making a point of defending...
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The End of the NCC?
The declining National Council of Churches, once the mouthpiece of America’s mainline Protestant denominations, is struggling to find a new purpose. At its May 2002 board meeting, the NCC discussed its latest ecumenical outreach, an attempt to incorporate Roman Catholics and evangelicals. Called “Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.: An Invitation to a Journey,” the...
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High On the List of Priorities
Illegal aliens rank high on any social reformer’s list of priorities. At the very time millions of tax dollars are being spent to patrol our borders and to prosecute the illegals, CUNY—the City University of New York—announced in August that not only will it continue to welcome illegal aliens into its fold, but it will...