Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Steve Kloves, from J.K. Rowling’s novel I took my son Liam to the first Harry Potter movie ten years ago, so I thought it only proper to let him take me to the...
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No More Perpetual War
With Republicans increasing social spending and Democrats upping military outlays, Washington is devoid of serious debate over any important issue. Despite the President’s attacks on GOP “isolationism,” both parties largely favor foreign intervention. As a result, America finds itself entangled in almost every international conthet and potential conthet: Bosnia, the Caucasus, China, Colombia, East Timor,...
Misallocated Infamy
For the past 67 years America has commemorated over 2,400 sailors, soldiers and airmen who were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Every such anniversary reminds us that all history is to some extent contemporary history: Almost seven decades after the event, the myth of FDR’s goodness and greatness—revived for...
The Celebration of Chagall
Whimsy—clumsy or fantastic—fills the minds of those viewing the art of Marc Chagall. Two hundred oil paintings, gouaches, etchings, stained glass, and theater designs, chosen for their quality and their significance in the artist’s career, drawn from public and private collections throughout the world (including generous loans from the artist’s family), were on display at...
Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...
Remember the Texas Revolution
“Chicano Studies” departments at American universities portray the Battle of the Alamo as the triumph of the lawful rulers of Texas over a rowdy, drunken band of illegal aliens. Such a portrayal has a delicious irony to it, though it is mostly false. Almost always omitted from the Chicano version of events are several unsettling...
Abraham the Unready
(This column is based in part on an address delivered at a “Colloquium on Lincoln, Reagan, and National Greatness” sponsored by the Claremont Institute in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 1998.) L’affaire Lewinsky was the obsession of the headlines and conversations of Washington throughout February, obscuring even the jolliness promised by another airborne stomping of...
Diana
“Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” cried the craftsmen of Ephesus. They had heard of the threat to their occupation posed by Paul (Acts 19: 24-29), who was violently against the making of images. Demetrius, a silversmith, had made a just complaint: “So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set...
The Strange Case of Julian Assange
Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. What, after all, is the point to entering into any public discussion of controversial matters? Each side of the question has made up its mind before the facts are in, and the respective champions of the issue or debate are, depending on who has washed your brain,...
The Right Kind of Spy
In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret mission to Cuba (Project Alligator) aimed at exploring with Che Guevara possibilities for easing tensions...
Crossing a Street in Manila
The creative writing students in the small seminar room at Ateneo University in Metro Manila were answering my question about the relation of language to politics in the Philippines. With that youthful energy that is each generation’s greatest natural resource they talked about the “feudal system” Filipinos have lived under, about the centrality of village...
Remember the Red October?
Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, today would have been a festive day in Moscow. The 90th anniversary of the October Revolution (“October” since in 1917 Russia was still using the Julian calendar) would be marked by a big military parade, with Western correspondents and military attaches on the lookout for new types of ICBMs...
Nature’s Pope
Pope Francis recently said he believes the coronavirus epidemic is “nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to address human-induced climate change. Asked by British journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh if the current crisis provided an opportunity for an “ecological conversion,” the pontiff repeated his previously stated belief that humanity had provoked nature by not responding adequately...
A Well-Preserved Woman
My wife is president of our county’s landmark society, and though my inability to tell a cornice from a frieze renders me a hapless consort in matters architectural—more Denis Thatcher than Hillary Clinton—I am nonetheless proud of her. For preservation seems to me far less an aesthetic ruffle than an emotional and spiritual necessity. “Preservation”...
Globaloney in the Classroom
The longer one observes American public schools today, the more comprehensive and deep-rooted the globalist infection appears. The erstwhile revolutionary-leftist underground has become the establishment, in public education and every other institution. Educators now call themselves “change agents,” in Timothy Leary’s radical parlance. No lie is too big (“Diversity = Excellence”) and no trick too...
Criticism With Character
This book presents essays written by George Panichas, which initially appeared from 1962 to 1980. Panichas’s essays take the measure of a generation. What is their verdict? It is not a happy one. Panichas finds modern conditions to be those defined by technology and Benthamism, by empiricism and quantification, and everywhere “humanistic values . ....
The Incredible Lightness of Being Liberal
John Taft’s book is a history of American foreign policy from World War I through the Vietnam War, as exemplified by the careers of prominent “liberal internationalists” who dominated the policymaking process: William Bullit, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Chester Bowles, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Dean Acheson, David Bruce, John Foster Dulles, Herbert Hoover, Ellsworth Bunker,...
Islam’s Conquest of Europe
“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote James Burnham in his 1964 Suicide of the West. Burnham predicted that the mindless magnanimity of liberals, who subordinate the interests of their own people and nations to utopian and altruistic impulses, would bring about an end to Western civilization. Was he wrong? Consider what is happening...
Oh, Canada!
Canada’s government and its premier, Justin Trudeau, betray their true nature in the blunders of the past few weeks.
Peace in the Promised Land
Almost three years have passed since the unseasonably warm day in June 2002 when a number of the authors who have contributed to this issue of Chronicles met near O’Hare Airport to sketch out one of the most ambitious projects that we at The Rockford Institute have ever undertaken. We approached the project with a...
Letter from South Tyrol: Austria’s Crimea
There are many arbitrarily drawn borders in the world, none more so than the one on the Brenner Pass (4,500 ft) between Austria and Italy. As you drive south along the Brenner Autobahn, the Alpine landscape does not change. Only the bilingual signposts indicate that you have crossed from Austria into Italy. Most people speak German, and all local stations...
Flannery Flummery
“[I]f I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything . . . I feel myself that being a Catholic has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning to write.” —Flannery O’Connor...
The Hind and the Panther
No one expects to discover in a drug dealer the character of Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus, overflowing with compassion and the milk of human kindness, scattering sweetness and light wherever he goes. On the other hand, I suspect even the most hardened undercover cop in his local antidrug unit would be shocked to witness...
The Rise and Collapse of Fox News
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
The Costs of War
I first learned of the improbably named Smedley Darlington Butler while attending Marine Corps boot camp in South Carolina. At Parris Island, we were taught that Butler was, along with Dan Daly, one of two U.S. Marines to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice. Along with five-time Navy Cross recipient Louis B. “Chesty” Puller,...
Party of One
Herbert Hoover once praised the “American system of rugged individualism.” (This was the same Hoover who gave Americans a trial run of New Deal socialism.) The ideology of individualism is a classic piece of 19th-century claptrap. Once upon a time, people could speak of freedom and liberty without erecting an “ism” or “ology,” but as...
From Hobbits to H-bombs
Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941 by Alan Allport Knopf 608 pp., $35.00 “The Second World War,” says Britain at Bay’s flyleaf, “was the defining experience of modern British history. It is our founding myth, our Iliad.” It is also the inspiration for a continued outpouring of national self-congratulation,...
The Brothers Tsarnaev: Assimilating Terrorists
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
Little Rocket Man Wins the Round
After a year in which he tested a hydrogen bomb and an ICBM, threatened to destroy the United States, and called President Trump “a dotard,” Kim Jong Un, at the gracious invitation of the president of South Korea, will be sending a skating team to the “Peace Olympics.” An impressive year for Little Rocket Man....
The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The grand strategy of the Democratic Party has become to exploit the growing diversity of the American electorate to construct a Coalition of the Fringes. One result has been the cultural acceptance of anti-white racism.
WikiLeaks
The diversity and overall quality of U.S. diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks on November 28 is breathtaking. A quarter-million confidential communications between 274 missions and the State Department will eventually be released—16,000 of them marked “Secret”; 100,000, “Confidential.” The trove’s 261 million words exceed the entire Foreign Relations series, packed with almost two centuries of...
Richard Holbrooke, RIH
On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” Perhaps the story is true. After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the class...
A Threat to Integrity
Like Satan in Dante’s Inferno, the forces threatening the integrity of the American nation and its culture have three faces. The “global economy” and political one-world.ism jeopardize the historic character, independence, and the very sovereignty of the United States. The third threat, the mass immigration that this country has endured for the last fifteen years...
On Catron County
The first half of Chilton Williamson’s September essay, “Circuit Rider,” is a joy to read. The second half is also well written, but has no reality to it. The idea that Catron County, New Mexico, is fighting for some grounded life against federal interference founders if the facts are known. The facts are that Catron...
Political Passions, Part II
American churches cannot make up their minds. Do they serve God or an Uncle Sam who for a long time has been looking a great deal like Mammon? On patriotic holidays the choirs sing that bloodthirsty and nonsensical anthem to war and slaughter ironically titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and pastors give sermons...
The Show of Shows
Say what you will, there is no dame like an Italian grande dame. Though based on my own experience, this claim is easily supported by any amount of independent observation as the number of subjects to whom it applies, given that the history of the aristocracy in this country resembles schematic representations of nuclear fission...
Barack Obama’s Ongoing Fundamental Transformation
The former president’s fingerprints are all over our current year of living dangerously.
Words Like Quartz
If even a rough correspondence between poetic accomplishment and public reputation existed in America today, R.S. Gwynn would be one of our most widely read and highly honored poets. The publication of his selected poems, No Word of Farewell, would be an occasion for readers to measure the arc of a 30-year career. Today, however,...
Losers Double Down
The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November. This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban Atlanta. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running in Georgia’s Sixth District, raised over $23 million by...
Think Again
This book would have been better entitled “A Time to Think.” It contains some good thinking but not much fight. Doubtless the author and publisher knew that Fighting is a better sell than Thinking. Barack Obama will have chosen his running mate by the time this review reaches readers. At the time of writing there...
Get in Deep
Although music doesn’t have an obvious link with golf, I say it does, so that I can contradict myself immediately. The late Sam Snead was and still is well known for his beautiful swing, which he related explicitly to waltz-time, and more than once. Tempo and rhythm were aspects of motion, as he saw the...
Electric Logocentricity
In the beginning was the Word. Not verbum, the written word, thought Erasmus, but sermo, the spoken word. Whatever its validity for understanding St. John’s Gospel, literature that matters seems to split along the lines of that dichotomy. There are exciting and important books that dance on the page, wheeling and turning at the command...
Remembering Eric Voegelin: Anti-Gnostic Warrior
That political ideology and activism have become a new religion is something the average individual sees signs of nearly every day. A black man is killed in an altercation with police and his face instantly becomes an icon to be carried in protests, his name a phrase to be repeated with adoration. A slogan such...
Lenin’s Tomb
Vladimir Lenin, by his confidence and cunning, left his impression on history and remains relevant 100 years after his death.
Race Politics, Part Two—Clinton for President, Petty for King
Welcome to Darlington. The cradle of Southern stock car racing. The sport was born near here the first time a U.S. Revenue agent figured that he could catch a moonshiner running along a twisty hack road with a car load of booze. No way. . . . Darlington is tradition. First of the big tracks...
A Peek at the Post-COVID World
In the third week of April, the nation remained absorbed by the epidemic and its immediate effects, to the exclusion of most other concerns at home or abroad. This does not mean that the struggle for power and resources in the great, wide Hobbesian world has been suspended. It continues, just as the Hundred Years’...
Two Kinds of People
The media told us that “critics warn bombing alone won’t budge Milosevic,” so when bombing alone did budge him, the media told us ’twas a famous victory. “It worked!” gushed Mara Liasson of National Public Radio as the G-8 peace accord was announced in early June. “Clinton is vindicated, and Gore is looking good again....
The Uvalde Massacre Shows the Uselessness of Gun Control and Police Protection
Politicians are trying to use the Uvalde school shooting to introduce new gun control measures, but the horrible event actually shows how useless government is at protecting the vulnerable.
The Way Forward Is With a Broken Head
Symptoms: Health fine until reads Walker latest. Immediate somatic distress of all systems inch pulmonary; digestive crisis, upper, middle, and lower; cardiac irregularity; low and high blood pressure; skin rashes and lesions; emerging hyperallergenic reactions to paper, ink, reading process. Psychosomatic reactions: delusions of persecution, fears of apocalypse, entropic anxieties, all leading to reaction formation...
Billy, The Fabulous Moolah, and Me
When I first heard that V.S. Naipaul was writing a book about the South, it made me nervous. What would the author of Among the Believers make of Jim and Tammy? Could we look for Louisiana: A Wounded Civilization? Well, I’ve been reading A Turn in the South, just out last winter from Knopf. I’m...