“La plupart de jeunes gens croient etre naturels, lorsqu’ils ne sont que mal polis et grossiers.” La Rochefoucauld’s caustic observation on the false simplicity of young people who mistake crudeness for nature tells us that the cult of the primitive antedates both Rousseau and the Romantic writers who wrought so much mischief. Society...
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From Mothers to Killers
There’s no way a man can sidestep trouble writing about the prospect of women as combat troops. You know, mowing the enemy down with machine guns; blowing up things, not to mention people; cutting, slicing, jabbing, stabbing, whatever it takes. For such is war, the elements little different in a high-tech age from those prevalent...
Not ‘Woke’ and Not Sorry
“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....
The Wheel of Fortune
On the morning after Election Day, the front-page headline of the Philadelphia Daily News said it all, not just about the events of the day, but about the possible future of Philadelphia: Goode Squeaks In Rizzo Won’t Quit Incumbent Mayor W. Wilson Goode won, by unofficial count, by about 14,000 votes (2 percent of the...
Memories: Glimpses of Notables
In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff. It included the daughter of Burke Davis, a well-known writer of the time; the daughter of the historian Richard N. Current;...
The Voice That Won’t Be Silenced
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
Pilgrim’s Progress
Like many black intellectuals of his generation, Julius Lester went searching for his roots. Unlike the vast majority, he found them in a most extraordinary place. A professor in the department of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Lester converted to Judaism in 1983. A metaphysical prodigal son, Lester would say he...
Taxi Drivers and Minority Crime
Driving a taxi in New York City is inextricably linked with the subject of race. While it is true that no subject is more vexatious for society as a whole, the taxi driver is forced to confront the issue in a way few others are. Though few New Yorkers have not been victimized by black...
America, Honor, and Building a Grocery Store from Scratch
A season of manual labor on a construction crew would better prepare American journalists to make observations about our politics than whatever it is they are doing now.
Conversation in Warsaw
Several Nazi concentration camps, as I explained in a recent Chronicles article called “Buchenwald’s Second Life” (July 1989), were used by the Soviet occupying authorities in East Germany for some five years after the war, and for their original purpose. That was once a secret, but we are now in a wholly new age. Some...
The Politics of Causation
There are two popular theories of how the war in Yugoslavia started. Dr. Susan L. Woodward in Balkan Tragedy shows how both are wrong, and gives us a well-documented and convincing history of the causes that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One opinion, widely held in this country, is that the fighting in Bosnia...
Cancel Culture Fights for ‘Dr.’ Jill Biden
A career as a writer offers many thrills as one piece after another gets picked up and published. Today, however, it also offers many nervous chills, as the specter of cancel culture could broadside a writer at any moment. I experienced one of the former thrills of writing when a piece of mine was published...
Annus Horribilis
The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject. Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...
The Myth of the Spanish Civil War
One of the last great leftist myths of the 20th century is that the Spanish Civil War was a struggle of republican democracy against nationalist fascism. In reality, it was a violent mass-collectivist revolution put down by Spanish moderates and conservatives.
Vote Claudius: He’ll Leave Your Sons Alone
When Edmund Burke called perfect democracy “the most shameful thing in the world,” he was not referring to the mixed forms of popular government that had existed in ancient Greece and Rome, much less to the newly liberated English colonies that had been struggling to form “a more perfect union” on the Eastern seaboard of...
Music and the Tooth Dentist
As my many devoted readers have already noticed and let me know, though I do love good music, it’s hard to convey the intensity of that devotion. So it occurred to me to write about abject rather than exalted musical experiences. They’re easier to deal with, yet also productive, particularly as the experience of ugly...
An Englishman in New York
The subway train clanked and screeched out of the darkness at last into stretched autumnal sunshine. I rattled northward in an emptying carriage gazing down on nameless, nondescript streets, and sometimes straight into ex-offices within which the same endeavors had probably been carried on from when the building had been erected in the early 20th...
Choosing Independence
There are those moments in which you travel back to some time and place you visited earlier. A trick of light, a confluence of sounds on a summer evening. Sometimes I am fooled into thinking that I am back in Latvia, where August nights around a white wrought-iron table on the grass lasted the length...
The Goodness of King George
In The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts shows George III to be a much better man and king than the caricature presented by propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic.
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...
The Victimhood Manifesto
Instead of treating mentally ill Audrey Elizabeth Hale, society told her she was a victim and, thereby, fed her delusions. There were dire consequences.
An Epic Bogosity
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
What Do Environmentalists Want?
In a world filled with perplexity, inscrutability, and conundrum, two major mysteries at least are not unfathomable. What do women want? The answer has had human beings stumped from the time of the origin of species, yet the answer is perfectly plain: they don’t know. The question of what environmentalists want is of more recent...
The Center Cannot Hold
The Church of England is made up of three parts: evangelical Protestants, Anglo-Catholics, and liberals. They have long been at war, and soon this war will lead to the final rending of that Church. The Anglo-Catholics will break away when women are ordained bishops, as some already did when the Church of England first ordained...
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...
Biblical Values—or Vegas Values?
Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both. The first was organized by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, and held in Point of Grace Church in Waukee. Dominated by Evangelical Christians, who were 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers in...
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...
Time for Arafat to Go
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...
Moral Impressionism
Vanilla Sky Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Cameron Crowe Screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on Abre Los Ojos Released by Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures In Vanilla Sky, director Cameron Crowe and producer/actor Tom Cruise have created an American version of Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s 1997 feature, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). I have...
What Was, and What Might Have Been
Most Americans appear to have spent their second September 11 anniversary paying tribute to the American ideals of open borders and acceptance of all forms of diversity—religious, ethnic, sexual, moral, and intellectual. I spent it in Novi Sad, attending a conference on Islam and the West. The one-day conference, part of the Rockford Institute convivium...
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...
Caving Into Lunacy
“I’m tired of having to go to the office armed,” my wife said one day last March. She was not alone in going armed—especially not since the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had entered the case of the “Center City Stalker,” a young black man who had committed a series of robberies...
The Untimely Death of Vice President Hobart
Little does history remember the death of Vice President Garret Augustus Hobart at the tender age of 55, barely a month before the beginning of the present century. Yet we have cause to lament that, in the words of the Psalmist, this humble personage was not granted a span of 70, or even 80, years....
An American Life
It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor. Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...
On Diversity
To make an urgent point—the corruption of the representation of history in film by the anachronistic distortions of contemporary politics—Roger McGrath, in his fine and well-argued analysis (“Celluloid Nation,” March), at the outset and at the end uses language that suggests that he holds non-Christians are un-American, the practice of religions other than Christianity marking...
Dope Fiends of the West
Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
Blood Relations
In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...
Memorial Day
We used to go there on every Memorial Day—a small national cemetery off the road a piece in the woods. It was usually warm; the woods, deep, green, and moist. We would walk down a dirt path to the stone wall encircling the graves, sometimes passing others who had just visited there before us. My...
Homing in on England
Michael Wood begins with a quotation from Blake: “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” This line betokens his aim, which is to zero in on one small English place and use its specific saga to tell the wider tale of all England from prehistory to present. The place is Kibworth, an outwardly unremarkable...
Carry On
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with...
Philadelphia Vs. Cleveland: Divided We Stand
Wednesday was the best night of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Barack Obama testified to her greatness and goodness and readiness to be president. And all saw in the Republican Convention in Cleveland a festival of darkness and dystopia. Nor is this unusual. For, as the saying goes, the ins “point with...
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...
Katyn and ‘The Good War’
The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War. From Russian reports, the Polish pilot ...
Speaking as an Irishman
If the best advice one can give an aspiring writer of prose is to study the best models, then Jonathan Swift’s prose, as a lot of people who should know agree, provides the best model of all in English. A sentence by Swift is a miniature work of remarkable art: But when a man’s fancy...
Define “Imperialism”
From the June 1991 issue of Chronicles. Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have...
Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity
Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...
The Education of Everyman
Classical professors looked forward with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety to the recent $40 million version of the Odyssey on NBC. Would the production reveal Homer, or would the Hollywoodification of his poem so distort the plot that we would be spending the remainder of our careers disabusing students and others of false impressions?...
Remembering Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield formulated a political theory of limited liberalism around his Augustinian Christianity, which tempered personal liberty with the recognition of man's fallen nature.
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...
The Real Cost of Electric Vehicles
For all their use in green virtue-signaling, electric cars have enormous hidden costs, both financial and humanitarian.