To calculate where a cannonball will land, it is necessary to know its initial angle of trajectory and the amount of force that propels it. It is the persuasive thesis of W. Bruce Lincoln that the Russian Civil War was the historic explosion that ever since has determined the direction and velocity of the Soviet...
Correspondence on "More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right," by Paul Gottfried and "A Fork in Europe's Road," by Srdja Trifkovic.
Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia makes it imperative to analyze the situation in the Caucasus dispassionately and comprehensively. The mainstream media (MSM) treatment of the crisis has been predictably monolithic, however -- almost as biased (“bad ...
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a...
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...
“It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance,” under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. “Disgraceful,” adds Dr. Franklin Graham. “We need to be . . . a country that governs...
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
Christian distributism celebrates the small and the human. It rests on strong home economies and demands the widest possible distribution and ownership of productive property. It favors worker ownership through cooperatives of necessarily larger machines and enterprises. It seeks and reinforces local communities, bound together by ties of kinship, faith, and trade. It welcomes lifelong,...
Over a decade ago, Don Livingston organized a Liberty Fund Colloquium in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the sessions examined whether any movement toward political decentralization was possible without at least the threat of secession to back it up. On that subject, most of the attendees agreed: Whether one regards secession as good in itself,...
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
Nigel Biggar's sophisticated history of British colonialism does not ignore the many benefits reaped by the recipients. His work is relevant to all Western nations, now threatened by faux radicals.
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, echoing the rhetoric and mindset of half a century ago, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and...
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
When Alan Blinder first proposed the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), commonly referred to as the Cash for Clunkers program, in a July 2008 New York Times op-ed, he foresaw benefits to the economy and the environment, and a “more equal income distribution.” The program has fallen rather short of its intended mark. Most of...
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
—“If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.” —Friedrich Nietzsche When the Cold War ended in 1991, American conservatives rejoiced over the triumph of democratic capitalism, which had struggled for over half a century, first against the rise of fascism, and then against the Soviet bloc and...
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...
With the collapse of communism all across Eastern Europe, secessionist movements are mushrooming. There are now more than a dozen independent states on the territory of the former Soviet Union, and many of its more than 100 different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups are striving to gain independence. Yugoslavia has dissolved into various national components....
With that kumbayah moment at the Capitol in South Carolina, when the Battle Flag of the Confederacy was lowered forever to the cheers and tears of all, a purgation of the detestable relics of evil that permeate American public life began. City leaders in Memphis plan to dig up the body of Confederate General Nathan...
Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who,...
In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.” He orders a servant to pack his bags, calls a cab, and stops in...
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
I had sworn I would not buy any carpets, and, in the end, I did keep that promise, but then one scorching hot day my friends finally came to pry me loose of the snug little corner of the hotel bar. Before I knew it, I was in the market, buying a preternaturally heavy wrought-iron...
Germany’s defeat in World War II was accelerated by Hitler’s unwillingness to accept reports at odds with his increasingly fantastical view of reality. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the Führer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”). The same diagnosis applies to the establishment Right, both in...
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
The struggles of the Middle East cannot be summarized or dismissed in chalking it all up to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There’s much more at play in the region.
The boy choir of Duke University has been done away with, apparently at the behest of one of the campus ministers, a woman who had never even attended any of the services at which the choir performed but who complained that the group was one of the “subtle and not so subtle vestiges of male...
“Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.” —Stephane Mallarme One of the most important things to say about George Garrett is that his is a generous talent, not limited or confined by a narrow point of view. It is as though he has been searching for the meaning of...
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus: “The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict...
Recently, a younger acquaintance of mine, an actor on stage and screen, mentioned with disgust the circus-like atmosphere that pervaded the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife. I noted that early on in the trial, Judge Lance Ito simply lost control of the proceedings, and the “Dream Team” of defense attorneys...
When Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced their decision to welcome and validate openly homosexual boys six years ago, Cub Scout mom Theresa Waning saw the writing on the wall. Shortly after BSA’s announcement, the church chartering her son’s troop, like many other churches across the country, revoked their BSA charter, leaving Waning’s son and...
Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
Is President Joe Biden prepared to preside over the worst U.S. strategic defeat since the fall of Saigon in 1975? For that may be what’s at stake if Biden follows through on the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1—just two months from now. ...
“No womman of no clerk is praised.” —Chaucer An old-fashioned historian can be forgiven for feeling a touch of empathy for the bewildered Egyptians upon whom Yahweh emptied the vessels of wrath some 3,500 years ago. The Hebrews’ God plagued the Egyptians for a matter of days, but the stern Minerva who reigns over academe...
On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...
“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace,” declares the LORD, through his prophet Isaiah, “and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.” So great is God’s provision for His people that even “the Gentiles shall see...
The Left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx's calls for a global revolution of the proletariat—and the French Revolution even before that.
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....
A comic religious novel, North Gladiola treats the same region of southeast Louisiana and some of the same characters that James Wilcox introduced to his readers in his first novel, Modern Baptists (Doubleday, 1983). The protagonist of the first novel, bumbling Mr. Pickens, plays a minor role in the second, as do meddling Donna Lee...
One of my history department chairmen had the habit of hiring at whim as instructors various unqualified people, lacking appropriate degrees and without the vetting that was usually done. A new, more professional chairman decided, rightly, to get rid of them. One was a radical African-American preacher, notorious for complaints and a cavalier attitude toward...
In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics. This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment. It is also...