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...
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,...
“What I like best about the Order of the Garter,” Lord Melbourne is reported to have remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Had the Philadelphia Society existed in Melbourne’s day, he would have found damned little merit in it either, though the society is not on quite the same level of...
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...
“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill. Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him. The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel...
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. ...
Is it possible, in 50 words or less, to describe today’s woman, the postfeminist 80’s woman, the woman who will soon become the 90’s woman? I’m glad you asked. The typical American woman in 1989 is divorced, in need of financial guidance, worried about her career, either agonizing about her biological clock or searching out...
The message of the thoughtful and beautifully written articles in Chronicles (December 1990) on “good news” seems to be this: things are very bad and bound to get worse, but if you resign yourself to the inevitable and concentrate on family and friends you may, with God’s help, get through it. If this is “good...
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.
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
Forget the “culture wars” and the assault on Christianity. The real conflict in America is thoroughly secular—between environmental and ecological “religions”—or so says Robert Nelson. He makes the argument, long known to conservatives, that religion never really goes away. Modern secular religions, like these two, borrow heavily from the Christian tradition. As such, they inherit...
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...
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
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...
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.
Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. What everyone knows is not true. Once a venerated American hero, Andrew Jackson has been attacked...
To understand what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee investigation of the Capitol Hill events of Jan. 6 is all about, a good place to begin is with the sentencing hearing last week of Paul Hodgkins. A crane operator from Tampa, Florida, Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to a single count of obstructing a joint session...
Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests. The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely. It is true, of course, that...
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the United States was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy....
My maternal grandfather was a very practical man, an entrepreneur with a self-made fortune, a local mayor, philo-Dixiecrat, devoted to his wife and three daughters. His habitual reading was the Raleigh paper and the local small-town daily (which, by some miracle, still exists). He died when I was very small, and so I never had...
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...
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...
What makes a nation? In the case of Italy, it was a linguistic and cultural nation long before it became a political one.
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
Politiqueros Pelosi and Newsom ramp up bribes for America’s imported electorate.
Why did the Americans win and the Jacobites lose? The classic answer is that the Americans represented the future, a future of liberty, freedom, secularism, and individualism. The Jacobites were the past, reactionary and religious, the products of a hierarchical society motivated by outdated dynastic loyalty. This difference was supposedly reflected in their military methods,...
President Donald Trump does not want to be goaded into war with Iran, which is wise. He does not want to appear weak in the aftermath of the attacks on the Saudi oil installations–for which Iran has been blamed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (“an act of war”), and others–which is understandable. By inviting the...
Donald Trump has refused to go to war with Iran. He has refused to go to war in Syria. He has imposed tariffs to save American jobs. He is capping the number of refugees coming into America–as opposed to all the countries they have to cross to get to America–at a very manageable number. And...
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...
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
As a general rule, democracy does not grow with time. It usually comes into being as the result of some general uprising, and it is supported by the broader and more general popular will. But, with time, and because the larger population docs not usually continually watch for the encroachment of smaller groups, the course...
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....
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
These two volumes shed considerable light on the fateful events of 1945-46, events determinative of much that followed in American foreign relations. The first argues that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, even if for only another year, postwar history would have been altogether different. The second, by an experienced “realist” foreign-service officer, views the postwar developments...
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
The publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936 was a major event in publishing—if not literary—history, compounded by the overblown movie of 1939 and by worldwide sales that continue to this day. Margaret Mitchell was overwhelmed by the reaction, which was complex and multifold. The novel was read by people on both sides in...
A debate unfolded in March last year in American Greatness between Chronicles contributor Mark Pulliam and the Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler, a devotee of Harry Jaffa. According to Erler, Robert Bork and others who adhered to strict constitutional originalism were essentially moral nihilists because they would not apply natural law standards to our governing document....
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...
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that you have just landed at New York’s JFK International Airport after a 15-hour flight from Mumbai. Although you splurged for a business-class ticket, the extra-large seat, constant parade of food, and infinite selection of video entertainment didn’t help you forget you were trapped in a steel tube 35,000...
It’s been some years since Tom Fleming and I have indulged in seven-day mad dashes across the Balkans, speaking, lecturing and giving interviews, meeting interesting people over good food and drink. Last week’s tour, which took us to Belgrade and Banja Luka, had the tempo and feel of the old times, but it was...
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...
Gerald Celente likes to mock “The Brilliant” Larry Summers, top economic guru to the Clinton and Obama administrations, and therefore a primary architect of America’s economic decay, especially of its middle class. Greg Palast detailed Summers’ long and close ties to Goldman Sachs, the primary beneficiary of the 2008 TARP bank bailout of Wall St....
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...
Most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew that a foreign government had built a school in the United States which teaches hatred of Americans and their country. Indeed, most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew a foreign government had built a school here that teaches hatred of anyone or anything. Then again, most...
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
One problem with labeling ideological movements “old” or “new” is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the “new” becomes an “old” and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of “news” and hence “olds” over the past half-century. But what I call the “Old...
On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...
The recent Brown Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the overthrow of the legitimate (if corrupt and bumbling) Yanukovych government, is a triumph of Western Ukrainian nationalism—an ideology characterized by a violent Russophobia and antisemitism. The rabid neo-Nazis of Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda (“Freedom”) party and Dmytro Yarosh’s militant Right Sector are just the latest manifestation of...