The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Letter From Australia: America Down Under
Vietnamese gangs shake down proprietors of small businesses for protection money. Blacks have enormously high rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and out-of-wedlock births. Pakistanis, Lebanese, and Nigerians drive cabs. Japanese buy up downtown highrise and choice beachfront properties. Chinese and Koreans take control of sections of the intercity. East Indians and Arabs run small...
Moldovan Elections: A Deadlock on Europe’s Periphery
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million...
Electoral Map Chaos
As of this writing, Texas is the only state in the union whose citizens have no earthly idea when, or if, they will hold a primary election for the two major parties this year. The primaries depend on a reapportionment map of the state, which doesn’t exist. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that “Representatives ....
Yankee Slavers
“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.” —Edmund Burke The better part of a century ago, the great scholar A.E. Housman observed that most of the new books that came across his desk served no purpose whatever “except to interrupt our studies.” This is certainly the case today...
Israel Rules
On Christmas Eve, when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, THE New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at...
Mexico Way
Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...
The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
Kosovo Crisis Becomes Global
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
Caring More for Palestine than East Palestine
Even in Ohio, it seems the activists motivated to get out in the streets are more concerned for people in faraway destinations than those in their own backyards.
The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
The Way It Was?
“The nation must be grateful that millions of Americans . . . are being taught night after night lessons that may help them live more amicably with their fellow citizens.” That’s Walter Goodman, writing in the New York Times. “Goaded by minority groups,” he says, “commercial television has become a leader in the movement to...
The Dictatorship of Victims Strikes Back
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
Hanging With Our Friends
A year and a half ago, Umberto Bossi delivered a brilliant speech in t:he Italian parliament. Describing Italy’s political system as organized corruption, the leader of the Lega Nord declared that left and right showed two faces but were joined into one body. A new Italian regime had to be born, but this two-headed monster,...
We Were Right About Immigration
There was little critical discussion of immigration in the pre-Trump era save in the pages of paleoconservative publications such as Chronicles and VDare. We were right and it's time to say so!
Death Before Dishonor
The 46-year-old veteran frontiersman lay in bed, desperately ill. He was suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound that he had received in a fight. But duty called. The state legislature asked him if he would lead an army of volunteers to engage the rampaging Red Stick Creeks. Though scarcely able to sit up...
Greatheart!
“The ‘Tycoon.'” —J.G. Nicolay and John Hay (Secretarial nickname for President A. Lincoln) In the foreword to Brother to Dragons , Robert Penn Warren writes “historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth...
Poets and the Art of Interior Design
“I too dislike it” —Marianne Moore The sculptress Malvina Hoffman found the poetry of her friend Marianne Moore hard to understand and would sometimes ask her to read a poem aloud. “Then I would say, ‘I really don’t know what that’s all about, because of my own ignorance, I’m sure, but just possibly you might...
Sinkin’ Down in Youngstown
If you really want to know what’s going on in a city, consult the motel clerk working the graveyard shift—not the clerk at the chain motel, but his counterpart at the inn that advertises the cheapest rates at the interstate exit with the truck stop. The kind of inn where you find cars patched with...
The Business of Escape
Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts...
Liberal Elites Against Democracy
One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy's would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself.
Marse Robert and the Lynch Mob
From across my small office I winked at Marse Robert. He winked back—so his 7-by-6-inch portrait seemed to suggest—white-bearded, gray-uniformed, arms folded serenely and confidently. When the nation whose future military leaders you trained at West Point mauls and mutilates the cause in which you trusted, serenity comes hard. Only a Robert Edward Lee type...
Why Tell It Straight?
Matewan written and directed by John Sayles Cinecom Entertainment Group In 1920 Matewan was a little town on the western edge of Mingo County, West Virginia, right on the Kentucky border. It was a town owned and run by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, and when the miners tried to bring in the union, the...
“Nothin’ Could Be Finah Than to Be in Carolina”
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
Birth of a Non-Nation
In the United States, liberation from foreign domination and liberation from the past (the republican and democratic features of government) were largely the result of the American Revolution, which was spontaneous in origin, successful, moderate in its outcome, and—above all—supported by a considerable part of the population. This fortunate historical experience may lead many Americans...
Trump’s Public Opinion Coup on Immigration
Kamala Harris’s contrived photo-op visit to the border demonstrates how Trump’s immigration nationalism has become the norm.
Old Route 66
Now, I’m a poor Oakie and I’m heading out west. I’m pulling a long trailer and my car’s doing its best. We hit a long mountain and she began to boil. She blew a head gasket and it started dripping oil. The wheels is out of balance, she shimmies and she shakes. But it keeps...
The Emerging Existential Crisis at the Border
During a Democratic debate in 2020, the candidates were asked if their health care plans would cover “undocumented immigrants.” Each raised his or her hand, including front-runner Joe Biden. From that stage, the message went forth: If the Democrats win this election, then it is amnesty for all and open borders in America. The message was...
The Hollywood Ten(nessean)
Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...
True Tar-Heel Tales
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
Limits to Litigation
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
Sarajevo Today, Chicago Tomorrow
The War Crimes Tribunal going on at The Hague is the first test of one of the great principles of postwar politics—the Nuremberg Doctrine, which makes individuals liable to international prosecution for actions committed during a war. In the old days, military personnel and police officers were expected to do as they were told. In...
The State of Union
“I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with,” anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. “My family’s farm, although dating only to the early 1940’s, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied.” Her book describes this loss, serving both as indirect autobiography and scholarly...
Free Men of a Republic
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi. I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...
Taking the Kwannukah Out of Christmas
A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to ...
The Children of Eden
All of us, I imagine, are granted from time to time moments of uninvited insight that will, for years to come, provide a basis for reflection and a more penetrating glimpse of the forces that shape the realms in which we live and labor. Such a moment was granted to me back in the early...
What We Are Reading: March 2025
Short reviews of "A Worthy Company" by M. E. Bradford, and "Intelligence in Danger of Death" by Marcel De Corte.
Hate, Inc.
No sooner had victory in Afghanistan by the forces of Truth, Beauty, and Global Democracy been announced and the still uncaptured and undeceased Osama bin Laden declared by President Bush to be “unimportant” (no doubt the reason the administration put a $25-million reward on his head last fall) than the top-ranking officials of the U.S....
The Left’s True Target
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
Christmas in July
The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...
Answering the Call
Brand New Strings by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Recorded and mixed at Skaggs Place Studios Produced by Ricky Skaggs When Lester Flatt’s health began to decline in 1979, he was sure of one thing: All those years, when he was playing Gospel songs with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, he had been an unbeliever. ...
Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
Do We Not Have Enough Enemies?
Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.” Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.” Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny...
Lincoln and God
Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord. But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, and inevitable deaf power which...
Kansas Bleeds Again
The politically correct are breathing a sigh of relief. A proposed piece of Kansas legislation that would permit businesses not to provide services to same-sex “married” couples has been pronounced “dead in the water.” At least we’ll be spared another round of mindless name-calling between the “libtards” and “wingnuts” who prowl the internet seeking the...
A Story of the Days to Come
Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed...
The State That Didn’t Forget
The Confederate battle flag still flies every day over the capitol building of South Carolina. Readers may remember that I have several times reported in these pages on the attempts to remove this lonely anti-imperial symbol from public view. One discussion a few years ago even elicited a complaint to Chronicles from then-Governor David Beasley....
Vol. 2 No. 4 April 2000
The fruits of NATO’s splendid little war in Kosovo are becoming apparent. Russia has revised its defense doctrine to make it easier to press the nuclear button. The new national security strategy promulgated by Acting President Vladimir Putin calls for “expanded nuclear containment” while pledging to resist Western attempts to dominate the globe. This policy...
Lone Star Rising
The development of a uniquely Texan conservatism has occurred over the last quarter century. A central figure in this transition was the late M.E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas, literary essayist in the tradition of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and prominent critic of the political Lincoln. In 1972, Bradford rallied to the...
Options for Syria
Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...