A chain is as strong as its weakest link. In President Bush’s “War on Terror,” that weak link is not in the Middle East or North Africa or the Subcontinent but in Europe. For years, Chronicles has been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would turn the Balkans from a “protectorate of the New World...
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Sons of Jacob
“I pray you think you question with the Jew.” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule has already appeared in German and Hebrew editions by the same polyglot author who has now produced the English translation. Avi-Yonah has mined Greek, Hebrew, and Latin sources and puts into his footnotes...
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Science and Religion
I gather that the Texas Board of Education has done something commendable, but I don’t know exactly what because the Washington Post (my source) was too busy deploring it to describe it. I assume it was something great because it reduced the Post to stammering incoherence. “Unbelievable” was only the beginning; “worse than silly ....
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Slender Threads of Liberty
Although Paul Craig Roberts, a nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover Institution fellow, and Lawrence M. Stratton, a fellow of the Institute for Political Economy, are trained in economic and legal analysis, they have written a book that seeks to appeal to civic virtue at the popular level. They do so mainly by weaving together dozens...
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Messalina’s Revenge
What a nasty lot of female would-be Masters of the Universe imperial America is turning out in these latter days! Messalina was the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, and she was not only notoriously lewd but an active, behind-the-scenes power manipulator. She ended badly—executed by order of the senate. Historians still debate how many...
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The Romantic Streak
A review of an early Blackford Oakes novel referred to Mr. Buckley’s handling of a sex scene as the Hardy Boys go to a bordello. In this, the ninth book in the series, Buckley demonstrates a surer grasp, one might say, of such matters. There is a sense in which Oakes’s missions for the CIA,...
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On Enumerated Powers
My thanks to Stephen B. Presser for his review (“Sacred Texts ’98,” October) of my book Reclaiming the American Revolution. I certainly appreciate such a distinguished legal historian finding the work to merit his attention. One issue raised in Professor Presser’s review is the constitutionality of the Sedition Act (which made criticism of the national...
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The Best Government Money Can Buy
All of our history is now “indoctrination by historical example.” The academicians who write the officially approved, politically correct distortions of it have failed history, and us. They are of two types: the courtiers, smiling sycophants such as “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss and the insufferable Doris Kearns Goodwin; and their envious colleagues, politically correct pedants,...
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Bleeding Red, Feeling Blue
When I started this column back in January 2001 (as a “Letter From Rockford”), the United States had just emerged from a presidential election that made this country look anything but united. Red and Blue, until then simply convenient colors used by the television networks to designate which party’s candidate had captured the electoral votes...
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Florida Challenges the Feds on Election Monitoring, Huey Long Style
The future of the Republican Party will require more than merely asking people to vote in person on election day and hoping for the best.
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Memo to Trump: ‘Action This Day!’
“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...
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Radical Populism on the Volga
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
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Judicial Taxation Without Representation
There is an unattributed quotation that says, “The average taxpayer is the first of America’s natural resources to be exhausted.” The American people have turned away from a big, activist federal government because they feel they have been forgotten; in fact, taxpayer resources have long been exhausted. Today, average Americans, forgotten by the bloated bureaucratic...
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The Death of the Amateur
When college athletics abandons the spirit of play for the reality of pay.
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Comment
Democracy, its failures, weaknesses, and sins not withstanding, is the only political system in which the entire social body is to decide on who should conduct its affairs in its name. By the electoral process the majority’s opinion is consecrated as a source of legitimate political power. Annals record many variations of democratic societies in...
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Of Apes and Yahoos
Instinct Produced by Spyglass Entertainment and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Jon Turteltaub Screenplay by Gerald Di Pego and Daniel Quinn Released by Buena Vista Pictures Pushing Tin Produced by Art Linson Productions, 3 Miles Apart Productions Ltd., et al. Directed by Mike Newell Screenplay by Darcy Frey and Glen Charles Released by 20th Century Fox...
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How I Single-Handedly Spiked a Hollywood Hit Job
Think one pissed-off conservative can’t take on leftist Hollywood and win? Read on.
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Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
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Vengeance Is Mine, Saith Ms. Jeong
In Europe some time during the 17th and 18th centuries the class of people who were known after 1789 as “the left” made the shocking discovery that the world is not perfect: not even all it might be but should be and, indeed, can be. To the leftist mind, this imperfection was unnatural, and therefore...
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Phonic Booms
In Forked Tongue, her important new public policy study-cum-expose whose proposals seem as likely to create new problems as to solve some old ones, Rosalie Pedalino Porter doesn’t get down to root causes. That is, she nowhere notes that when activist judges create new opportunities for turf-hungry bureaucrats the result is similar to what it...
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Wrongful ‘Rights’
“Men ambitious of political authority have found out the secret of manufacturing generalities. “ -Sir Henry Sumner Maine Donald Lambro: Washington—City of Scandals; Little, Brown; Boston. Richard E. Morgan: Disabling America; Basic Books; New York. The contemporary American political scene does not encourage optimism. Donald Lambro, author of Fat City, documents in minute detail the all-too-numerous Washington scandals....
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China: Xi in Charge
In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...
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Fool’s Mate: America’s Strategic Failures—June 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Suicide Strategy of the Westby Thomas Fleming Turkish bizarre. VIEWS The Emerging American Empireby Douglas WilsonMammon versus Allah. The Rise of Chinaby William R. HawkinsSeeing is believing. Transforming the Middle Eastby Ted Galen CarpenterWashington’s high-stakes gamble. Getting Europe Straightby Srdja TrifkovicSlouching toward Eurabia. NEWS Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bombby Wayne...
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The Unbearable Bulldozers of Walmart
A theory about the mafia that was advanced in these pages by the late Samuel Francis about 15 years ago explains how Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot drive out your corner grocery, the local pharmacist, and Joe’s Hardware. The national expansion of these blights isn’t free enterprise. It’s more akin to the nationwide expansion of...
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The American Covenant
“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.” So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots...
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Copperhead Road
I grew up in Alden, New York, a small town about 20 miles east of Buffalo. My parents still live there, and they (especially my mother) are very active in the town historical society and its museum. In that museum is a worn old wooden desk, unremarkable except for the sign that explains that it...
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Learned Liars
Let us at the outset dispose of one of the major criticisms of Sovietology and Sovietologists: their failure to predict the end of Soviet communism and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It is one of the strange curiosities of Soviet history that the communist leaders could not predict events in their own backyard, either....
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American Empire
Developed nations should assist poorer states by doing no harm. Washington should end government-to-government assistance, which has so often buttressed regimes dedicated to little more than maintaining power and has eased the economic pressure for needed reforms. The United States should stop meddling in foreign affairs which matter little to America; the result is usually...
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Downsizing Detroit Motown’s Lament
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
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A Palace Coup Is Hard to Do: A Fix for the Broken 25th Amendment
Now is the moment for all Americans to join arm-in-arm to oust Biden by embracing an idea Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin hatched to get Trump.
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Who’s Wearing the White Hat?
In the heartland’s fiercest modern-day shoot-out—farmers versus lawyers and bankers—it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Charles Niska, farmer and father of eight, is serving two consecutive one-year sentences in the North Dakota State Penitentiary for illegal practice of law and jumping bail. Niska got into trouble helping his neighbor Richard Schmidt...
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The Duke Lacrosse Hoax Is Not an Aberration
The media refuses to acknowledge it, but the Duke Lacrosse story wasn’t the first time they created a moral panic with no evidence, and it won’t be the last.
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Nazi Russians and “Basic Morality”
A burbling controversy of Olympic proportions has found its way to Moscow via Lausanne. On one side the forces of evil are arrayed behind the stallion-riding Vladimir Putin and his “anti-gay” law (which sailed through the Duma in June). On the other are the forces of absolute equality, led by the bribe-swilling International Olympic...
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The Lion of Idaho
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...
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The Judgment of History
Satire is a difficult form these days. Reality keeps calling, and raising. Let me tell a story that illustrates the difficulty. Last November, when President Reagan’s Teflon began to wear thin, pundits began to write about how his “place in history” was being jeopardized. My buddy Tim, a historian, casually suggested that a President really...
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A New Logic of Human Studies
Consider the following paradoxes. A welfare system designed by well-meaning politicians guided by the advice of the wisest sociologists and economists available, costing billions of dollars, whose net effect is radically to increase the numbers of the poor, especially women and children, and to deepen their misery, incapacity, and despair. A stock market which rises...
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You Should Have Been Here Yesteryear
California was imagined and named before it was discovered. In 1510 in Seville there appeared a novel that would have Fabio on the cover today. Written by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián is a romance of chivalry that vividly describes the adventures of a fictitious Christian knight, Esplandián. In defending Constantinople against...
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On Liberty and the Grand Idea
For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...
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Traveler’s Tales
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
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Is It Time to End Prohibition?
The lessons of history are never quite definitive. History repeats itself, but not exactly, and the trick is to know where the differences come in. Nevertheless, in the case of drug abuse and its control we have as good a lesson and as close an analogy as history ever provides—Prohibition. Unfortunately, our politicians have no...
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Three Strikes and You’re Out
April 2005 will mark the third mayoral election since I arrived in Rockford at the end of 1995. In that first election in April 1997, Rockford’s first (and, so far, only) black mayor, Democrat Charles Box, was running for his third term. For eight years, the city had been under a federal court order to...
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The Pygmies Squeak … Again
Neocon intellectual midgets continue to smear Sam Francis long after his death because his writings represent an effective opposition to the ruling class.
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American Delusions
“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie . . .” —2 Thessalonians 2:11 American public life thrives on delusions treated as facts: *That you can have a First World economy and military with a Third World population. *That the U.S. government, which has almost unlimited access...
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Big Tech as Big Brother
Conservatives more than anyone else view with a gimlet eye the rise of the Internet and the gigantic tech companies that are taking over ever larger parts of our lives. Even the place where most of these companies dwell, Silicon Valley, is a bastardization of its real name, Santa Clara, or St. Claire of Assisi,...
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Trifkovic on Ukraine Peace Prospects: RT International Live
RT: Joining us in the studio now is Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine. Thank you very much for joining us at the studio of RT International. So, we have the new peace plan that includes the greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine. Do you think this is something that can really work in...
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Trying Saddam
Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending. Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...
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James Bond, Luddite
The World Is Not Enough Produced by MGM-UA Directed by Michael Apted Screenplay by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The World Is Not Enough (hereafter TWINE, as its promoters have dubbed the film) is the 19th official James Bond feature. As if that weren’t enough, it is also the first genuinely interesting...
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The Wasted Century
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
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Democrats Are Stuck with Joe Biden as Their Presidential Nominee
Democrats have no choice but to take a deep breath, pray to the deity they probably don't believe in, and roll the dice with their impotent current ticket.
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Victims of Blunt Force Trauma
Even before the end of the trial of Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman for the crime of white racism, the percentage of black Americans who believed that Officer Fuhrman’s most celebrated victim was innocent had risen from 60 percent before the trial to a whopping 78 percent by the time the prosecution rested. It...