“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years...
“Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...
Charles Kesler, in an otherwise unremarkable essay in the Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2009), argues that an effective response to the challenges of modern liberalism requires a revolution within conservatism. He says a reformation on the right must involve a “return to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution” as interpreted by...
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...
Politiqueros Pelosi and Newsom ramp up bribes for America’s imported electorate.
After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend. “What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell...
My Downtown is dying. That is perhaps saying too little; Downtown is nearly dead. The neat, grid-patterned, wellpayed streets of the old Baton Rouge, the white hot cement Huey Long pounded Florsheim heel and toe against, the small optimistic stores set up in the 30’s and 40’s and equipped with illuminated signs in the 50’s...
Travel writing in the post-World War II era gradually became the prosaic stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements, nothing more than Baedeker-type guides to fancy hotels and chic restaurants in foreign capitals. Bruce Chatwin revived the classic traveling-by-the-seat-of-your-pants school, a genre historically practiced by worldly wandering Brits as disparate as Lord Byron, Richard Burton, and Graham...
The limited economic changes introduced by Gen. Raúl Castro in Cuba following the decades-long rule of his brother, the revolutionary communist Fidel Castro, encouraged some observers to proclaim the end of communism and the dismantling of the totalitarian system in the island. Notwithstanding Raúl Castro’s own statements that he was not elected to restore capitalism,...
Iraq is conquered; unfortunately, winning the peace is proving far more difficult. Bringing down an unpopular, isolated dictatorship in a wreck of a country is one thing. Creating a liberal, multiparty, multiethnic democracy where one has never existed is quite another. Officially, the Pentagon proclaims that we will stay “as long as necessary” and leave...
With Obama completing the displacement of the American people and the Republicans trying to start a war to detract attention from their uselessness and to revive their collapsed grassroots support, a poor observer barely has time and attention to note the civilizational degradation taking place in Lexington in the old and once-honored Commonwealth of Virginia....
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...
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
I like reading about hate crime: It is such a cheering feature of American life. And while I am always happy to see the excellent news about this kind of offense—ever-rising numbers, more and more crimes in ever-broader areas of the country—I wish we could get those statistics even higher. The reasons for mv satisfaction...
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...
During his debate with Citizen Perot, Vice President Al Gore joined a distinguished list of misinformed public officials when he bashed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Senator Reed Smoot and Congressman Willis Hawley “raised tariffs,” Gore said, “and it was one of the principle causes . . . of the Great Depression.” Predictably, the national press jumped...
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...
While Cold Mountain, the admittedly well-wrought novel about a Confederate deserter, has achieved bestseller status, a story of a quite different sort has gained a modest but devoted readership and demonstrated anew the gifts of one of America’s finest writers. Nashville 1864 is a mere 129 pages long. Still, it is best not read in...
If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message. Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday...
Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...
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....
Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly. In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor. In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. The first line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like...
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...
From the September 2015 issue of Chronicles. Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the...
Pat Buchanan’s new book is another tour de force. Suicide of a Superpower builds on the prophetic warnings first articulated in such earlier books as The Great Betrayal; A Republic, Not an Empire; and, most importantly, Death of the West. The current work exhibits the most famous paleoconservative’s trademark word-crafting verve, encyclopedic knowledge of history...
In a recent Townhall commentary, the young author Michael Malarkey marvels over “the resurgence of refined paleoconservatism.” Supposedly Donald Trump has absorbed quintessential paleoconservative positions and is now putting them into practice. This now triumphant creed is “a political stance that posits the importance of strong borders, economic protectionism, and vehement anti-interventionism.” According to Malarkey,...
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.
“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...
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 306 pp., $26.95 Conservatives have a love-hate relationship with technology. Although we often decry the effects of the usage of new technologies on societal traditions, it is conservative...
“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 ...
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....
“War is the trade of kings.” —John Dryden The single greatest force for consolidation of the national state is war. A truism, but one that American conservatives have been loath to admit. Ideologically committed to anticommunism, the conservative movement fell into lockstep with liberal troops in the Cold War, in the...
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.
“Dr. King was a strong and clear voice for freedom,” declared President George W. Bush during a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day commemoration. His nominee for attorney general, John Ashcroft, proudly proclaimed during Senate testimony that, “By executive order, I made Missouri one of the first states to recognize Martin Luther King Day.” These are...
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...
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...
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...
“Woke” is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities makes one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J....
On May 5, President Joe Biden left out the word “God” in his proclamation on the annual National Day of Prayer. Some critics on the right claimed Biden was the first president in American history to do so. Of course, those detractors fail to mention that the National Day of Prayer commemoration only dates back...
We had been dreaming about Andalusia. But plans sometimes must be altered, and so one August evening we found ourselves instead entering into Ulverston, 1,300 miles from Andalusia, and even more distant climatically, culturally, and historically. The Lake District—“England’s Switzerland,” Manchester’s playground, stamping grounds of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter—is a magnet to millions of tourists,...
At stake in 2016 is the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and, possibly, control of the House of Representatives. Hence, Republicans have a decision to make. Will they set aside political and personal feuds and come together to win in November, after which they can fight over the future of the party, and...
The sacrifices Americans make today do not serve any greater good, such as winning a war, preserving our way of life, or giving their children a chance at a better future. Instead, our government is making us sacrifice to meet the needs of foreign nationals here illegally.
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” —G.P. Morris Readers of Chronicles are familiar with Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s regular contributions under the title The Hundredth Meridian, a rubric launched in the 1990’s. The first two dozen or so of these columns were conceived as chapters in a serialized book. With minor...
“What is the theme of your conference?” asked a potential traveler to Rome. “How republics perish,” I replied. “Don’t you mean democracies?” he persisted, referring to the title of a good but far-from-profound book by Jean-François Revel. I congratulated him on getting the point of the title of our second Rome Convivium. After all, I...
As Chief of the Pentagon’s Criminal Law Division, I tried or supervised hundreds of rape cases, and my aggressive prosecutions earned me a place on the Army General Staff. I demanded that my JAG lawyers prosecute the toughest sex crime cases, regardless of evidentiary challenges. But I also insisted that they firmly believe that each...
III. A social order, being a natural expression of human sociability, should not be undermined, overturned, or rejected on frivolous grounds. A. Man is not a purely natural creature and he never lived in a state of nature. Thus, since there is no such things as universal human rights ...
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
Civil War centers around an imagined conflict within America set in a disturbingly near future or an alternate present.
Last June, the tradition of 157 years at single-sex Virginia Military Institute was changed by the vote of seven Justices in Washington. The statue of Stonewall Jackson still guarded the parade grounds, but the general who stood like a stone wall at Manassas could not prevail against those seven Justices. His slogan is still emblazoned...