My annual Middle Eastern tour this winter is limited to Egypt, mainly due to the less rigid Corona-related restrictions there than elsewhere in the region. An additional motive is the fact that this country of over a hundred million souls faces an unprecedented geopolitical crisis that is not sufficiently known in the outside world yet...
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” —Neville Chamberlain Persons with roots in Central and Eastern Europe know that to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world...
Upon being congratulated for defeating the Romans at Asculum in 279 b.c. during the Pyrrhic War, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had lost half of his army during the battle, said something to the effect of “Another victory like this, and we’re done for.” Hence the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” which could probably be applied to...
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...
A belated note: Robert Mugabe’s death at 95 (September 6) was some six decades overdue. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His dictum that “the only white man you can trust is a dead white man” has cost his people dearly, arguably even more so than the dispossessed and racially cleansed white farmers...
What makes a nation? In the case of Italy, it was a linguistic and cultural nation long before it became a political one.
A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...
Here’s what I can’t figure out: How in the world did Saint Patrick evangelize all of those Druid priests and clan chieftains without a mission statement? After all, history and tradition tell us that he walked around preaching and performed an occasional miracle. But how did he know what his mission was? And then, there...
Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the...
In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...
Wilhelm Roepke (1899-1966) is one of the most original, yet least recognized, economic thinkers of the 20th century. One of the reasons for his relative obscurity is that he does not fit well into the prevailing capitalist/socialist dichotomy. Roepke borrows from both capitalism and socialism, yet he goes beyond defining economics in abstract terms and...
Trump and his movement are following the path blazed by the Democrats before they became the party of woke: The old FDR playbook.
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
Joe Biden and his cackler henchwoman, Kamala Harris, will run on "Bidenomics." And they will ask you not to believe your own lying eyes, but to believe that the turd sandwich they are offering up is actually a tasty filet mignon.
“Out of the sacred space the sacred text would grow,” says Mr. Boritt. He’s right; those of us who grew up as Yankees know in our bones that our country is sacred ground. I took my wife to Gettysburg on our honeymoon. My uncle Joe (a federal judge appointed by Eisenhower) made a pilgrimage there...
For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, the Indians of North America practiced slavery. Until the 18th century, those enslaved, for the most part, were other Indians. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for example, raided constantly, principally to secure slaves. The populations of some villages were one-third slave. There is even an instance of a...
A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...
In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically. According to a Real Clear Politics average of five polls between mid-March and April 1, four white men—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, “Beto”...
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
Chronicles falls short of its usual high standards by giving so much space to “Faulkner in Japan: The ‘American Century’” in the August issue (Society & Culture). As far as I can tell amidst all the unanchored theorizing, the author wants to make America’s greatest writer out to be a clueless dupe of postwar “American...
Stevie Wonder wants to become mayor of Detroit. He’s had some trouble determining precisely when the election will be held, but no matter. He believes that he can be the mayor of Motown in the 90’s. Now, this is no Sonny Bono and Palm Springs. Bono is decidedly a working-class stiff compared with the Retin...
Blame everything on Trump. Your car won’t start? It’s Trump’s fault. Your dog threw up in the living room? It’s Trump’s fault. The media have lost their collective mind. That’s definitely Trump’s fault. And the blame game seems to get worse by the day. Every politician who won office this past November won only because...
The current, temporary custodians of the executive branch are akin to landlords who took over a safe, secure apartment building and have let it become dangerous and crime infested.
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...
Nearing the third anniversary of their crime, the remaining members of the Jena Six at long last admitted what anyone with any sense knew: They are guilty as charged. The leader of the pack, Mychal Bell, had already confessed to second-degree battery on December 4, 2007, one year to the day after the attack, and...
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
One of the most important reasons for the sweeping victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty in the recent Italian election was concern for public safety, which ranks as the number-one issue on the minds of voters, according to some polls. Berlusconi promised to do whatever was necessary to make people feel safer,...
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
“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...
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
“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...
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...
The death of Jacques Price serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly our institutions have been turned against Americans at every level.
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.
Fourth Generation War theory provides a useful tool to understand the migrant invasion of Europe. 4GW basically is non-state warfare. The people invading Europe are not doing so inside T-34 tanks or Stukas. They’re walking. No government is leading their march, although some governments, such as that of Turkey, are encouraging it. An classic 4GW...
“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 ...
For Texas conservatives, a surprisingly strong showing by Democrats in their deep-red state in November’s midterm election was an unexpected wake-up call. The results also set me to thinking about my own personal history with the Lone Star State. And how, in the absence of vigilance, the long, proud heritage of a particular place can...
On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she...
I must have been 11 or 12 years old before my father put a gun into my hands and told me to shoot. By then, I had been out hunting with him several times a year but I had not ceased marveling at the efficiency and grace with which he handled a shotgun or a...
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.
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...
One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the...
In the autumn of 1909, a troupe of Sicilian actors, led by Giovanni di Grasso, arrived in St. Petersburg to satisfy a refined craving of the Russian intelligentsia, then widely shared in fashionable circles throughout Europe, for the experience of the primitive. Still, only a hundred or so spectators turned up to savor art at...
Hillary Clinton would love Amherst, Massachusetts, a town aptly nicknamed “The People’s Republic of Amherst.” A stroll down Main Street quickly reveals that Birkenstocks and Volvos dominate the landscape. Amherst’s legislative body, the Town Meeting, often votes on the kind of citizen petitions that call on the community (population 35,000) to join the AFLCIO’s “union...