Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war. “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...
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The Strange Origin of the Word ‘Nazi’
It is commonly assumed that the word “Nazi” is the contraction of Adolf Hitler’s political party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But if that were true, then why did the Nazis hate being called “Nazi?” When the Nazis came to power, William Shirer notes in his Berlin Diary,...
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Clearing Up the Confusion on Leo Strauss
Lately I’ve been hearing from colleagues and friends that Leo Strauss helped birth neoconservatism and that Straussianism and neoconservatism belong together rhetorically and conceptually. Supposedly neoconservatism would not have existed in the form in which it took over the conservative movement in the 1980s if Strauss had not provided its essential ideas. Thus, so goes...
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Slavery’s Inconvenient Facts
I learned firsthand how disturbing facts could be when teaching a U.S. history course at UCLA in 1987. One of my teaching assistants, a politically correct young woman, became terribly upset after listening to my lecture on slavery. “He shouldn’t be saying such things!” she exclaimed to another teaching assistant. When asked by the other...
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‘War Between the States’
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
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The Economic Realities of U.S. Immigration
Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives. Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary? In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...
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Blindsided
Poor Denny’s. The South Carolina-based company, with 1,600 “always-open” family restaurants, has been blindsided. After years of serving cheap, decent meals to working Americans, it is under a politico-racial attack. The aggressors are the usual suspects: the central government, the national media, civil rights leaders, and a lawyer, Guy Saperstein, from Oakland, California. A New...
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In the News Again
The Confederate battle flag is in the news again—specifically the one that has flown from the state capitol dome in Columbia, South Carolina, by legislative resolution, every day since 1962. A combination of leaders of civil rights organizations, out-of-state-owned mass media, and big business powers has been trying to get the flag down for years....
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Raw Bits
Some undigested odds and ends this month. Let’s see—let’s start with some survey research on regional differences, real and perceived. From California comes word that the Stanford Research Institute has come up with a typology of Americans based on their (excuse the expression) life-styles. Not surprisingly, the types are not distributed uniformly across the U.S....
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Learning From the Fate of the American Indian
The plight of American Indians provides a cautionary tale on what happens when you can’t or won’t stop those who have come to replace you. Middle Americans and conservatives should take notice.
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Benevolent Global Hegemony
Every once in a great while, an article appears in a mainstream publication that lets the eat out of the bag, by spelling out ideas that have long been dominant in public life but are usually seen only in vague or implicit form. One such appeared in the July/August 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs. Entitled...
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Shelby Foote, R.I.P.
Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88. An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William...
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Imperial Dusk
Whether it ends with a whimper or a bang, the American Empire is ending. WikiLeaks shows that the empire can no longer control the dissemination of information. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen show it can no longer militarily defeat insurgencies. Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and even Bolivia show it can no longer dictate the foreign...
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Rainbow Fascism at Home and Abroad
Some years ago, when I was a consular officer in the once-notorious border city of Tijuana, I spent a few days in Mexico City on my way back from a temporary assignment in Matamoros, another border town just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. At a social function, I was cornered by a typically...
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Updike’s Grandfather
“Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.” —President James Buchanan, 1860 A poll of American historians, not long ago, chose James Buchanan as “the worst”...
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National Enormities
Seed From Madagascar, first published in 1937 and now printed for the third time, is an agrarian memoir. Its author was one of the last rice planters of coastal Carolina, from a family who had been in the business for two centuries. Duncan Heyward details the methodology of rice planting as only one well acquainted...
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I’ll Take My Sit
Because it’s reasonable to assume that Gerald Russello (“The Agrarian Burden,” Reviews, October) is highly knowledgeable of his chosen subject, the Southern Agrarians, I must conclude that his avoidance of their intellectual hypocrisy (or worse) is by choice and not by accident. I’ll Take My Stand was written by a dozen academics, most comfortably ensconced...
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Making It Close
Following the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, whispered speculation commenced among the novelist’s relatives, who wondered how an innocent Catholic girl from a genteel Southern background could have acquired the worldly experience to write the early scene in which Hazel Motes enters a stall in the men’s room at the local train station, reads...
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The Wall: Moral and Good
President Donald Trump’s predecessors have circumvented Congress before on issues the legislative branch had tried to stop. They have redirected resources appropriated by lawmakers. They have resorted to the same National Emergencies Act that Trump is invoking in order to build the Wall along the country’s southern border. None of their actions triggered a reaction...
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What the Editors Are Reading: Lanterns on the Levee
Once upon a time I mentioned William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941) in a history seminar. The professor rolled his eyes: not that damned moonlight and magnolia again! A fellow student leaped to Percy’s rescue: Lanterns was a serious, thoughtful memoir for serious, thoughtful people. It is. And it is a portrait of a certain kind of Southerner...
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Books in Brief
Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center by Tyler O’Neil (Bombardier Books; 240 pp., $16.99). Journalist Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media has been busy. From roughly around the time of the Charlottesville racial conflagration in 2017 to the filling of the inkwells that were used to print this book, O’Neil has...
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Reconstructing the Bostonians
The Bostonians: Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Ghabvala; Merchant-Ivory Production. A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man...
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Reconstructing the Bostonians
Reconstructing the Bostonians A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man who falls in love with a beautiful feminist preacher who...
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A Jug of Wine, A New Zealand Trout
With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his...
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The Saga of Esteban Solarz
Not long ago, during the glory days of the Gulf War, Stephen J. Solarz, ferret-faced little Democratic congressman from southern Brooklyn, was riding almost as high in the saddle as our Commander-in-Chief. For it was Solarz who played the major role in dragging his often- reluctant liberal colleagues away from their traditional dovish stance into...
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What Matters Most to Nations and Peoples?
Speaking in Conroe, Texas, last weekend, former President Donald Trump accused his successor of allowing millions of migrants to enter the country illegally across our Southern border. “The most important border … for us is not Ukraine’s border but America’s border,” thundered Trump. “Before Joe Biden sends any troops to defend a border in Europe,...
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The Trojan Chicken
Albany, Kentucky, has a stay of execution for at least a little longer. But more than a few townspeople are preparing to mourn her passing—and leave before the funeral. Albany is a town of 2,000 in the rolling limestone hills of southern Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee line. Founded in the early 1820’s, it...
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Influx of Illegal Aliens
The European Union will set up rapid-reaction teams to deal with an increasing flood of illegal African immigrants on Europe’s southern flank. The decision was made by the European Commission at a July 19 meeting spurred on by complaints from Spain, Italy, and Malta. Illegal immigration to Spain via the Canary Islands has increased sharply...
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Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man’s papers are to be housed. What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is...
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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...
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Mondo Quasimodo
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
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The Lincoln Worshippers Strike Again
The “resignation” of Rand Paul’s aide Jack “Southern Avenger” Hunter was another broadside cannon shot fired in the war between us paleos and the liberals and neocons over Abraham Lincoln, a war that started with the attack on the late M.E. Bradford. The mainstream howled in outrage over Hunter’s 2004 column “John Wilkes Booth Was Right”. Now,...
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Bible-Belt Baroque
For some time, my friends Jeff and Rebecca Calcutt (a pair of Southern patriots sans pareil), had urged me to pay a visit to Bob Jones University in Greenville. I have no interest in driving to Greenville, I told them. I don’t like mountains, not even little ones. I don’t like Clemson fans, with those...
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The Union as It Was
A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves. That, in...
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Singing Our Song
In the summer of 2014, a “surge” was on at the southern border, particularly in my home state of Texas, stimulated by the Obama administration’s signals that it was planning a mass amnesty and had no intention of enforcing immigration laws. It became painfully obvious that the border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls...
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Middle American Mellow?
Since the 1960’s, American politics at the national level has primarily consisted of an endless search for a new majority. The Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil-rights movement kicked off the quest by undermining the New Deal coalition that combined white Southerners with white, ethnic, Northern union members, allowing the Republican Party to invade the...
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SPLC Spreads More Hate, This Time With A Twist
You wonder what took so long. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels any group or person even a smidgen to the right of Al Sharpton a “racist,” “hater” or “right-wing extremist,” is now terrorizing those who indirectly fund “hate groups.” Last week, World Net Daily reported that SPLC is moving against websites through which...
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Lincoln’s Other War of Aggression
Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
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Before You Bet Against the Market . . .
“They’re wiping out our industries,” said my southern California friend, staring moodily out across the Pacific ocean beyond which They—the Japanese—presumably lurking even as he spoke. “They’re buying up all our land,” confirmed his wife. “Of course, we’re so stupid, we just let them.” “They need another earthquake over there,” her brother-in-law joked darkly. “That...
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Tame Monster
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California. He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman. Encouraged by Allen...
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The American Spectrum
There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, “between preserving the language and securing a civil polity,” a credo which, embedded in “What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” provides the subtext for the work as a whole. Not only does a relationship between language and polity exist, it...
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Afghanistan South
Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border? Prediction: After...
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Community Revisited
Congratulations to Ray Olson for his review of Kings Row (“Kings Row Revisited,” Vital Signs, June), book and film, and his insight into how the movie slights the book’s theme of community. There is a big subject here. Community has been central to Southern literature. The community—Yoknapatawpha—is the true central character of Faulkner’s fiction, as...
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Bashing the Baptists
“Who are these people?” someone asks about evangelicals in the early pages of Redemptorama, a book billed as an exploration of Christ and contemporary culture. Despite years of research and her own Southern Baptist upbringing, the author, Carol Flake, offers only caricatures in response to the question. The book is supposed to help sophisticates bewildered...
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Exercising Our Rights
The murder of Michael Westerman, age 19, of Elkton, Kentucky, allegedly by four young black males, should alarm anyone who publicly displays pride in his Southern heritage. Westerman, the father of infant twins, was gunned down as he drove with his wife between Guthrie, Kentucky, and Springfield, Tennessee, on January 14. According to Robertson County...
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A Classic Smear Tactic
Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center retailed another smear using its classic tactic: attach the “hate group” label to a conservative Christian group, then claim others tolerate “hate” if they refuse to to disassociate themselves from the “hate group.” This one came from Heidi Beirich, chief propagandist of the group’s smear publishing arm. Here...
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Of the Baptists and the Modern World
I live in amity with the Southern Baptists, whose general tolerance for my fellow “Whiskeypalians” I take kindly. I wouldn’t dream of joining the media whoop-de-do over who among the Baptist faithful did what to whom, and when, and what to do now. You have read it all; I will not recount the imputations of...
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The Populist Rainbow
It is June 1994, and Anthony Hilder is attending a Southern California gathering called “The New World Order.” Two overhead projectors beam book-covers alleging Masonic conspiracies onto the walls. Hilder, white and middle-aged, is the host of two syndicated talk-radio shows, Radio Free America and Radio Free World. He has brought tapes to sell to...
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Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed. What's interesting about our country, if you ...
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A Reluctant Revolutionary
Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion. Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious. At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work. Once we consider...