One of the important lessons of Victor Davis Hanson’s riveting new book, Carnage and Culture, is that the only civilization or culture that can defeat the West is the West. “In the long history of European military practice,” Hanson writes, “it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for...
The established church in Washington didn’t know what to make of Billy Graham. By “established church,” I don’t mean the main-line Protestant churches: They were too busy trying to convert their churches into instruments of Democratic foreign policy to care very much about religion. The only established church that counts in Washington, as everyone knows,...
In resurrecting the melting pot as the antidote to multiculturalism, Heycke neglects a better option: the return to American tradition.
The death at age 97 of Prof. Alex N. Dragnich, a leading American expert on Serbian and Yugoslav history, marks the departure of one of the last witnesses to an era in which this country’s involvement in Southeastern Europe was neither contrary to her traditional values nor overtly harmful to the region’s inhabitants. His dozen...
For those who know it, the Huguenot-derived name “Pettigrew” immediately evokes the associated word, “Gettysburg.” Brig. Gen. Johnston Pettigrew was prominent on the first day of that battle, as the commander of Pettigrew’s Brigade, and on the third day, as the commander of Heth’s Division, which included his brigade. Pickett’s Charge might as well have...
“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” So declared Sen. Tim Scott, a Black Republican, in his televised rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress. Asked the next day what he thought of Scott’s statement, Biden said he agrees. “No, I don’t think the American people are racist.” Vice President Kamala Harris also...
On December 1, 2009, the Lisbon Treaty took effect. Within a year the 27-member European Union was fractured politically and besieged economically. “Euroskepticism” was on the rise. The plan to turn Europe into a Weltmacht capable of matching the United States and China looked almost comical. Europe remained a geographic aggregation, not a geopolitical unit. ...
It has become commonplace to observe that the American people are now divided into two distinct camps, roughly approximated by the opposing voters in the recent presidential election. The Blues, concentrated in the Northern tier and Pacific states, are the progressives, marching on into the brave new world of polymorphous hedonism and limitless ethnic transformation. ...
The America First Policy Institute is the latest group of swamp creatures masquerading as America First populists.
“For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth with darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness.”—Ecclesiastes 6:4 “Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?”—Ecclesiastes 8:4 “Our” President says that those of us who blame Islam for terrorism are as bad as...
Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin Basic Books 864 pp., $40.00 This massive tome is more than a new history of World War II. It is above all a depressing confirmation that the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin’s regime, including during the war, were comparable to those of...
“A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” —Mark 4:4 A half-dozen biographical essays or theses have now been written on George Kennan, including John Lukacs’s recent and compelling George Kennan: A Study of Character (2007). This latest endeavor, by Lee Congdon, is...
You could say Parag Khanna is the quintessential “Davos Man.” This silver spoon globe-trotter, a specialist in globalization, wants to change the world forever, openly advocating a mix-and-match “Civilization 3.0” under a decentralized world government. And he couldn’t care less how you feel about it. The term “Davos Man” was coined by Harvard political scientist...
A selective historical motion picture about a 19th-century rebellion aboard a cruel Spanish slave ship rakes in megabucks as a result of media hype, including the notation that white production assistants were forbidden to put the stage-chains on the black actors aboard the replica vessel. No one mentioned that the original chains were first put...
I begin with a flourish of disclosure, which gives me great pleasure as a gesture of wistful recollection. Professor Baldwin was my roommate at university, occupying the bunk above mine. The wall space over that prisonlike fixture of canvas ticking and rude ironmongery was decorated with an enormous portrait of Karl Marx that would not...
Some years ago, I was in Washington, D.C., for the annual convention of the American Academy of Religion, a vast gathering of college professors teaching in the area of Religious Studies, when an astonished cabdriver asked me who all these hordes of people were. When I explained the conference to him, he whistled and said,...
In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver explains different types of argumentation. The most effective type is the argument from definition, which forces one’s attention on values and demands either assent or rejection of those values. In Lincoln’s arguments on slavery, to follow Weaver’s example, the Negro was either a man or not...
Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953. He was not yet 30 when he passed away in the back of a Cadillac. The circumstances of his life and death created the legendary aura that surrounds Williams and virtually guaranteed that he would be the subject of many songs as well as a writer and...
It is not necessarily a bad thing for a national leader to remain at the helm for a very long time, provided that he is successful. Otto von Bismarck’s 28 years as Prussia’s and then the Reich’s chief minister were marked by unification and consolidation internally, nifty diplomacy and overall stability of the European balance-of-power...
“Save your fundraising mailing lists, for the San Fernando Valley shall rise again.” For now, secession has failed. In the November 2002 elections, a referendum to separate the Valley from the City of Los Angeles and to create the City of San Fernando Valley passed 51 to 49 percent in the Valley but lost 67...
This is not an invitation. Frankly, if you don’t live here already, most of us would rather you stay where you are, although we can’t blame you for wanting to come. Oh, some of our businessmen and bankers and ministers and mayors and tourism promoters might, in the prejudicial atmosphere of their workplaces, look down...
The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms. These regulations affect more than three million American blue- and white-collar workers employed in the industry, along with shareholders and other investors, including retirees (and ...
On departure for the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, President Donald Trump canceled his planned weekend meeting with Vladimir Putin, citing as his reason the Russian military’s seizure and holding of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors. But was Putin really the provocateur in Sunday’s naval clash outside Kerch Strait, the Black Sea gateway to...
Saving Private Ryan Produced by Steven Spielberg Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Robert Rodat Released by Paramount and DreamWorks SKG If you visit the American cemeteries near the beaches at Normandy—there are two of them—you may pick up a booklet describing the landings of June 6, 1944, as I did over 15 years ago....
Her mother said she had been brainwashed. Her daughter had never liked who she was and was always looking to become someone else. Mother is quick to reassure reporters she is not prejudiced: “I’m not against Muslims. I married one.” Jihad Jamie, as the press has dubbed her, is only 31, but she has lived...
Mussolini may be a deeply flawed national hero, but he also stands for something necessary in this age: resistance to a socially and culturally destructive left.
The world is broken. There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even. Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it. They did so by their sin. They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in,...
On the day that three members of the punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years’ prison for having interrupted a service in the Christ the Savior cathedral in Moscow in February to sing in front of the altar a blasphemous “prayer”—which included the refrain “Sh-t, sh-t, the Lord’s sh-t”—a group in the Ukrainian...
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
I have seen this woman and her child more times than I can remember. She is the poster mother for illegal immigration. In article after article on illegal aliens in the mainstream press, sympathetic journalists describe her suffering and hardship in a land where people have too little compassion. Another such poster illegal is the...
Nearly every film using Europe as a backdrop for international intrigue, especially those featuring Nazis in black leather trench coats, employs a scene in which the hero is crossing transnational borders on a slow-moving train. As he nervously exhales a cloud of blue smoke from an unfiltered cigarette, the authorities move from berth to berth...
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
Srdja Trifkovic’s contact within the Dutch Ministry of Immigration isn’t the only one who has noticed that the current flood of “migrants” now heading to Europe resembles an invasion. Catholic World News reports that Edward Luttwak has likened the current wave of immigration to the barbarian invasions that doomed Rome. Luttwak charges that the Islamic...
No sooner had at least a dozen or so counterattacks on David Frum’s silly rant against paleoconservatives in the April 7 issue of National Review appeared in print or on the internet than the sole defense of the Frum article of which I am aware popped up under the name of William Rusher. Some paleos...
NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...
Revolutions turn into institutions; revolts that renew the youth of old societies in their turn grow old; and the past, which was full of new things, of splits and innovations and insurrections, seems to us a single texture of tradition. . . . . ...
Waving off the clerics who had come to administer last rites, Voltaire said: “All my life I have ever made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good...
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn. Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home. She and...
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
Past Robles Junction where the road coming north from Sasabe meets Highway 86 we crossed onto the Papago reservation heading west toward the Indian capital of Sells, no lights ahead save the constellation of the Kitt Peak Observatory lifted high against the night sky by the bulk of the Baboquivari Mountains, and almost no traffic....
One way to learn patience is to travel by train from Naples to Palermo. The train is excruciatingly slow, and the traveler seldom has a soul to complain to, but the journey is ideal for basking in the picturesque countryside. It was here that Caravaggio, fleeing the Roman carabinieri after assaulting a man, sought refuge,...
John Milton Cooper, Jr.: The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard University Press; Boston. Lloyd Gardner: A Convenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan; Oxford University Press; New York. There have been many interpretations of Woodrow Wilson done from widely divergent perspectives. Fortunately for Wilson’s reputation, his...
“It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg Branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block.” —Arthur Conan Doyle, The...
The forbearance and ingenuity of Hurricane Helene’s victims should inspire our actions in the event of election-related unrest.
It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists...
Paul Elmer More was one of several notable independent-minded scholars who criticized America from a broadly traditionalist perspective during the first half of the 20th century.
Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...
From the July 2005 issue of Chronicles. Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the...
On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces. The COVID-19 pandemic had reached its apex, infecting a quarter of a million Americans every day. Yet, due to the discovery and distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the incidence...