Americans are perennially tempted to believe that Soviet armament is a reaction to American armament, and therefore reversible by American disarmament. For years we allowed that hope to guide our military policy: beginning in the late 1960’s, the United States exercised unilateral restraint in nuclear construction for more than a decade. American-produced IGBM warheads were...
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The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
The United States of Surveillance
There’s a monster on the loose It’s got our heads in a noose And it just sits there—watching. —Steppenwolf (the rock group) Big Brother is watching you; he’s also listening, sniffing, recording, and analyzing. His private little brothers—everyone from major corporations to your doctor and your local grocer—are also snooping on...
Watch This Space
That I could order my Apple Watch Sport from my iPhone while walking down the Corso Italia in Milan, and pay for it on the phone with just the touch of my thumb, is as much of a technological marvel as the Watch itself. With the exception of my thumbprint, not a single element in...
Against a Clockwork God
Western civilization dare not rest on its laurels, warns Professor Molnar, because its laurels are laced with philosophical and religious errors that threaten to topple it. The “pagan temptation”—the ancient pantheism, monism, and mysticism largely displaced by the Christianization of the West—now threatens to “repaganize” the Western world. And, ironically, if Christianity cannot alter its...
What Is America’s Cause in the World Today?
After being sworn in for a fourth term, Vladimir Putin departed the Kremlin for Annunciation Cathedral to receive the televised blessing of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. The patriarch and his priests in sacred vestments surrounded Putin, who, standing alone, made the sign of the cross. Meanwhile, sacred vestments from the Sistine Chapel...
The Death of the Amateur
When college athletics abandons the spirit of play for the reality of pay.
Robert Hanssen and the New Meaning of Treason
A year ago, Robert Philip Hanssen apparently felt the need to explain to the Russians his motives for supplying them with thousands of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents over the preceding decade and a half. The veteran FBI agent wrote them a letter, confessing that he is neither insanely brave, nor merely insane, but “insanely loyal”...
The Distributist Alternative: A Voluntary Safety Net
As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Belloc’s Servile State (1912) recognizes that...
How I Single-Handedly Spiked a Hollywood Hit Job
Think one pissed-off conservative can’t take on leftist Hollywood and win? Read on.
What Atheists Know
“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” —Flannery O’Connor In response to the charge of obsession with a “single issue,” pro-life activists contend that the abortion debate is really paradigmatic. As Joseph Sobran suggested...
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...
The Candidate
She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...
Dynastic Nostalgia
The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War by Luke A. Nichter Yale University Press 544 pp., $37.50 Even before the Kennedys took center stage in American mythology, Americans have had their share of legendary families, the decline and fall of which have been staples of both history and...
Biden’s Inexplicable Victory
Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis. The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination...
On the Terror of Tribunals
Dr. Samuel Francis is an outstanding scholar, and he is usually right on target, but, speaking as an attorney, I’m afraid his article “Tribunals for Terror” (Views, March) is seriously flawed. Supporters have argued that tribunals are necessary, in part, to avoid potential intimidation of jurors. Dr. Francis, however, believes that Timothy McVeigh and the...
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...
The World Turned Upside Down
A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
US Out of Dixie
Browsing at a local newsstand the other day, I spied a startling comic book, issue #11 of Captain Confederacy. Its $1.95 price was even more startling (the last comic book I bought, back about aught-56, cost something like 15 cents), but I had to take this one home, and did. Let me tell you about...
Mr. Wilson’s Wars
“National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Woodrow Wilson’s words, recorded in the New York Times on February 12,1918, defined the 20th century and...
Paz
“Amazed at the moment’s peak, flesh became word—and the word fell.” —Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert music. Broad prairies of cadenza enclose a garden patch of melodic theme, an orotund thunder of...
Has Trump Found the Formula?
Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...
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....
The Establishment’s Hatred Can’t Stop Boris Johnson
“The necessary man” is the term that explains everything in British politics. Boris is the target of all the focused loathing of the Establishment, a force so powerful and widespread that no man can say who drives it. But in a myriad outlets—BBC, The Times, the Platonically-named Guardian, the City of London, academe high and...
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.
When Duty Doesn’t Call
Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies—oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by...
The Liberal Tradition I: Introducing a Few Basic Concepts
I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Socialism–and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past...
Two Skeptics
H.L. Mencken has been given a fairly free ride by his various biographers. That ride is now officially over. It might have ended even sooner, had Terry Teachout been able to make up his mind about his subject. For years, Teachout has advertised himself as being “at work” on a biography of Mencken. Now, the...
Crime Story
Probably not since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has a popular novel influenced Americans as deeply as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Appearing in 1969, the book remains, according to the inflated come-on of its publisher’s blurb, “the all-time best-selling novel in publishing history.” If true, that claim in itself is no mean accomplishment, considering...
The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
A Fatal Failing of Establishment Elites
In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944. The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God. A miffed...
George Gissing in Rome
The Greek and Roman classics had a great influence on George Gissing, not least because the literature and history of antiquity provided him with a kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world. Gissing was a highly cultivated man who was at home in several foreign languages—French, Italian, Spanish,...
Obama’s West Point Address
President Barack Obama’s commencement address at West Point on May 28 managed to displease pretty much everyone in the nation’s commentariat. Before making an overall assessment of its significance, it is necessary to examine the validity and implications of Obama’s individual statements. “[B]y most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of...
Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
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...
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,...
Can Humanity Forget What It Knows?
Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their...
Cajuns Uncaged
While many modern historians, liberal politicians, and media elites would like to think that the very concept of “state sovereignty” died when Robert E. Lee offered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the people of one state recently gave state sovereignty a ringing endorsement at the ballot box....
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.
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...
Selling the Golden Cord
Free trade, according to the usual pundits, is an issue that divides the right. The usual pundits are, as usual, wrong. Free trade, which has never been more than an undocumented alien on the right, is an ideal that does unite much of the left. It is a point on which socialism converges with both...
Suicide State
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
Our Little War in Kosovo
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...
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...
How to Win the War Against Christmas
In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas. My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War...
Roman Spies and Spies in Rome
In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces reached Italy, U.S. Army counterintelligence warned GIs, “You are no longer in Kansas City, San Francisco, or Ada, Oklahoma, but in a European country where espionage has been second nature to the population for centuries.” That “second nature” extends all the way back to early Rome and...
Serial Killer
The New York Times, in a 2,128-word obituary (nearly three times the length of this article), fondly recalled Jack Kevorkian as “A Doctor Who Helped End Lives.” Kevorkian, 83, the Michigan pathologist turned assisted-suicide activist, died in a hospital, a more dignified locale than the 1960’s-era Volkswagen microbus where he uncorked the Thanatron, his suicide...
Democracy and Adultery
A bill proposed in Turkey that would have made adultery a punishable offense was retracted shortly after its introduction. Hailed as a decisive move by the European Commission, this resulted in a proposal to open negotiations on the entrance of Ankara into the European Union. This attitude befits the ideology of the fundamental rights of...
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.
Greek Diary II
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...