George Bush chose a risky moment for launching his New World Order. World stock markets have reacted to the vicissitudes of war with all the stability of a manic-depressive who won’t take his medicine when he’s feeling up and doesn’t see the point of taking it when he’s down. The mere rumors of war were...
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Vol. 1 No. 11 November 1999
What was the most important story unfit to print in 1998? No, it wasn’t Kosovo: Chronicles may have been among the first to expose the Clinton administration’s many lies, crimes, and misdemeanors in the Balkans, but that particular cat is now out of the bag. There is a story still largely unknown, however, and so...
Adventure Fiction: The Machinery of the Dark
Adventure fiction is vigorously alive. Although virtually ignored by critics outside specialist newsletters, the genre has long been a dominant force both in bookstores and in Hollywood. Such adventure films as Die Hard, Jaws, and the Indiana Jones epics draw millions of viewers. Tom Clancy’s technological thrillers and Robert Ludlum’s volumes of struggle and terror...
Once More Beyond the Pale
“A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust.” —Lord Byron Few antiliberal writers are disliked and distrusted so much by mainstream “conservatives” as John Lukacs and George Kennan. Like most movements that achieve a degree of success, intellectual “conservatism” in America has petrified into an establishment...
The Price of Hillary
No secretary of state will come to that office with stronger pro-Israel credentials or closer ties to the Jewish community than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Douglas Bloomfield assures his readers in The Jerusalem Post. Good for them, and for Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians; but for the rest of us Mrs. Clinton’s appointment as the third...
Beacon to the Nations
A few months ago and despite my better judgment, I spent some time watching the NFL playoffs. Seeking relief from rather than in work, I soon was reminded that the tube is a conduit of malaise and of pop cultural propaganda. For every glimpse of the tenacious gifts of Dan Marino, there were hours of...
London’s Postmodern Riots
As a former resident of Winchmore Hill I am well familiar the surrounding areas of north London—Wood Green, Ponders End, Enfield…—affected by three successive nights of rioting and looting which has now spread to other parts of the capital. Burglaries, car thefts and vandalism started being a problem in our N21 neighborhood two decades ago, but the Hobbesian mayhem of...
Stir-Fried Scholarship
There is a fairly long gestation period for alumni wrath, which does not fully come into being until the end of the year. That’s when every organization in the world calls or sends letters asking for a tax-deductible donation. With the chirpy dunning notices and billets-doux come the hard choices: do I send money to...
The Caribbean
For Albert Camus, the French Revolution initiated the modern age, killing God in the person of His representative on earth, the monarch. After which “Utopia replaces God by the future,” as Camus nicely phrases it in L’Homme Revoke. God’s anointed could no longer justify arbitrary action in this world by divine transcendence, and man (read...
Back to Barbarism
Much of the bioregional vision should appeal to conservative sentiments. As the pitiful remnant of America’s agrarian culture again falls victim to drought and depression, the bioregionalists call for a return to the land, a reconstruction of self-sufficient farm life, and a reverence toward the soil as the organic bond of human generations. As Ortega...
Inheriting a Mess
President Putin is inheriting a mess. After almost a decade of Boris Yeltsin, Russia is reduced to a neocolonial wreck with collapsing birthrates, moribund industry, and a fractured body politic. A narrow stratum of robber barons, who do not give a hoot for the country or its people, are busy squandering Russia’s still ample resources...
Collegiate Bread and Circuses
Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...
John-John Is My Co-Pilot
Aside from the non-resignation and non-ruin of President Clinton and the non-campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the biggest non-event of 1999 was undoubtedly the non-survival last summer of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who, true to the traditions of his family, managed to seize international headlines when his own recklessness and incompetence led to disaster—this...
Books in Brief
The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 499 pp., $29.00). This sympathetic, indeed deeply moving, biography of the ill-fated king is dramatic and mostly well written, save in certain instances where I found the presentation of particular events (such as the controversy at the immediate start...
Toxic Western Wokeness Exacerbates Middle East Conflict
The West will come to regret dismissing the foundations of civilized society as “social issues” and exporting radical, woke ideologies as a means of combatting the pathologies that already exist abroad. Instead of offering liberation, we have only pushed these peoples toward additional grievances and inspired more violence.
America’s Defense Bleeds—Out
In the run-up to the November elections, Republicans comforted themselves by passing around an analysis by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office showing that spending on the Iraq war so far has been “only” $709 billion. They pointed out that President Obama’s wasteful stimulus actually cost $100 billion more. And they touted the $709 billion number...
George Garrett: 1929-2008
A few years ago, an editor at The Oxford American telephoned to request that I write a piece for that journal about the Calder Willingham-Fred Chappell feud. I struggled to recall the brief episode wherein I corresponded with that screenwriter (The Graduate) and pop novelist (Eternal Fire) about some obscure detail. By an equally obscure complication,...
An American Tragedy
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
Saintly Thugs
Reservoir Dogs Produced by Lawrence Bender Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino Released by Miramax Films The Bad Lieutenant Produced by Edward Pressman Written by Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund Directed by Abel Ferrara Released by Aries Films The way the camera turns an actor’s body into an objet d’art is wonderful. Some faces—Bogart’s, for...
Gearing Up for the Third Gulf War
Will Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Tehran Face Off in a Future Cataclysm? With Donald Trump’s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American...
Bring Back the Iron Duke
The United States was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and became the political, economic, and military leader of the free world under their guidance. The conscience, industry, practicality, antisensualism, and sense of civic responsibility that characterizes the classic WASP became definably American characteristics. When immigrants entered the melting pot, they were to come out looking...
Books in Brief: April/May 2021
The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...
Snowden’s Asylum
“We’re extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. He added that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral...
Merle Haggard and the Culture War
Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953. He was not yet 30 when he passed away in the back of a Cadillac. The circumstances of his life and death created the legendary aura that surrounds Williams and virtually guaranteed that he would be the subject of many songs as well as a writer and...
The Perpetual Family
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn. Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home. She and...
Shifting Ground
Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Boston University, has produced a beautifully written work. His book is intended to refute every objection to the more or less universally accepted doctrine of evolution, to discredit its opponents, and to assert the compatibility of strict evolutionary doctrine with religion. Ever since Darwin—and especially since the rise...
Vol. 2 No. 2 February 2000
“Spectacular fiasco for the organizers . . . a damning verdict on globalization that ignores its own consequences” was Le Monde‘s assessment (December 2) of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Dozens of dailies all over the world concurred. But the reporting of this event, its background, and the accompanying protests in the “mainstream”...
Voting for Monarchy
Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests. The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely. It is true, of course, that...
Forgive My Nausea!
Allow me to express my displeasure bordering on nausea over the predictably gutless way in which Conservative Inc. and its most prominent representatives have responded to the riots in American cities. Although our authorized conservatives have indicated that vandalism, mayhem, and killing should not be tolerated on our streets, and although they generally accept President...
The Chauvin Verdict and Life Lessons on Police Stops
The jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of all the charges. No surprise. Many others are now writing about the intimidation of the court and the jury by the politicians, media, and rioters who have been enforcing their distorted view of justice on the country for at least the last year. The thing that has occupied...
Passage to India
Though he never came here, Walt Whitman knew India was more than a country: a subcontinent, madhouse of religions, seedbed of civilizations, primordial and immemorial. “Passage to more than India.” How to cope with this vital mess, this messy multiplicity? These hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of villages? I have learned...
The Road to Cascadia
They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...
Not Even Migrants Want to Live in America’s Dying Cities
America has taken on financial and social debts it cannot pay as a result of excessive immigration, and the consequences of those decisions have adversely affected all but the wealthy elites among us.
Nor Shall My Sword Rest in My Hand
When the United States government was seeking to retaliate for the terrorist attacks last year, it was not too difficult to name the obvious targets: Afghanistan (of course), Iraq, Somalia, and the rest of the world’s bandit states. Opponents of military intervention could make few effective arguments, but one point that was quite widely raised...
Is Putin’s Russia an ‘Evil Empire’?
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
NATO After Libya: A Threat to European Stability
Address given on Monday, August 29, at the international conference Central Europe, the EU and the new Russia at the Czech Parliament in Prague. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is an obsolete and harmful anachronism. It has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American...
The New Reality
The Washington Post calls it “The New Reality.” Today, women aren’t just flying fighter aircraft or serving on ships, away from action on the ground: They fight in ground combat units, lose limbs, and die in battle. Amputee Lt. Dawn Halfaker, the main subject of the Post’s article (“Limbs Lost to Enemy Fire, Women Forge...
The Intransigent Uninvited
Today the United States takes in annually more than twice as many immigrants as all other countries in the world put together. Many Asian countries permit no immigration at all, and openly despise foreigners. The top U.S.immigrant exporter last year, Mexico (with 95,039), is also a vigorous deporter, sending back an average of 150 Central...
The American Myth of World War I
In 1917, two revolutions engulfed war-ravaged Europe. The first was America’s military intervention in France on June 26, which prolonged World War I and, thus, made possible the second: the communist seizure of power in Russia on November 7. To win maximum public support for their respective revolutions, the two rivals, Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir...
Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue
President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preacing radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny. OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who...
Big Soft Daddy Walz
Don’t trust the men promoting progressive ideology to tickle women’s imaginations by reversing the expected sex roles. They offer little besides corruption.
Corruption and Contempt
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of...
Another Brown Scare
In the run-up to World War II, when FDR was locked in a political struggle with his conservative Republican opponents, Roosevelt’s “brain trust” came up with a scheme to win the war of ideas and get rid of the President’s bothersome critics. Today, we call it the “Brown Scare.” It was a campaign of vilification...
A Long History of Leftist Hatred
James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who aspired to end his life as a mass murderer of Republican Congressmen, was a Donald Trump hater and a Bernie Sanders backer. Like many before him, Hodgkinson was a malevolent man of the hating and hard left. His planned atrocity failed because two Capitol Hill cops were at...
Unfit for Command
Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years—by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians—the question comes to mind: Does this generation have the maturity to lead America? About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the...
Circles of Hell
Dr. Bernard Nathanson has written an important book that in time will rank with Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time as books which our descendants, familial and spiritual, will examine closely in the 21st and 22nd centuries in order to understand both man’s inhumanity to humanity and to his personal...
Solzhenitsyn and the Religion of Revolution
The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
A City-State on a Hill
Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent...
Give Us Your Huddled Masses
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
Dixie Choppers
The Confederate flag, which had been in a place of honor (though not sovereignty) above the South Carolina capitol for almost 40 years, was removed in the stealth of the night of June 30/July 1. The removal was made possible because all but a handful of Republicans in the legislature, who had pledged not to...