Vladimir Bukovsky remarked that without a guide through the “labyrinths of the Soviet soul,” studies of socialism “are simply useless—or worse, they make the subject even more obscure. “ Were it not for the fact that Adam Ulam has been interpreting the Soviet Union since long before Bukovsky made his comment, one could suspect that...
“Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” —Acts, 20 The Big Board’s 508-point market meltdown was investigated by presidential commission, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges. Each of these bodies concluded that stocks fell because they were already much too high....
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...
One of the more annoying gaucheries of the British tabloid press is that of always referring to the Kennedys as “American royalty.” Back in 1963, with JFK still alive and in the White House, I escorted C.Z. Guest, a true American patrician, to a Park Avenue party given by Sam Spiegel, producer of Lawrence of...
Uit die blou van onse hemel uit die diepte van ons see, Oor ons ewige gebergtes, waar die kranse antwoord gee. When in 1918 Cornelis Jacobus Langenhoven wrote “Die Stem” (“The Voice”), the poem that became South Africa’s pre-1995 national anthem, by “our everlasting mountains” he meant the Drakensberg range that separates Transvaal from Natal. ...
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....
Gordon Brown may have torpedoed his last chance to be prime minister in his own right when, in the privacy of his limo, he called 66-year-old Gillian Duffy that “bigoted woman.” What had widow Duffy done to deserve the slur? After taking the Labor Party leader to task for several minutes, Mrs. Duffy raised the...
Few decisions require more prudence and judiciousness than when a country’s leaders determine whether to go to war. They must weigh the cost in lives, national treasure, and security against the price of inaction. Morality may enter their calculations through the application of just-war theory. They will listen to, if not necessarily heed, diverse voices...
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...
We were ambushed last Christmas Eve by a gang of politicians disguised as Presbyterian clergy and elders. The scene was a sanctuary; the occasion a candlelight service. The weapons our assailants used were so subtle: newly printed orders of service with the lyrics to all those familiar Christmas hymns set forth where they were to...
So I spurred my mule, and I went riding on down the road Minding my own business, ’n’ I wasn’t bothering a soul. So finally I rode into town, And I seed the man standing at the window, pulling off his clothes. Every time he’d pull off a piece, he threw it out the window....
Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman Doubleday 336 pp., $28.95 Aristotle’s observation that philosophy begins in wonder has, for many, conjured up an image of a curious child, bright-eyed and fascinated with the world around him. Similarly, in this book about the philosophical...
As though in memory of those antediluvian Playboy “pictorials” in which the hapless young lady posed with whatever attribute of her metier the photographer had unearthed in the props room—an alleged student of architecture with a carpenter’s wooden compass, a presumed graduate of the police academy with a sheriff’s badge, a putative nurse with a...
Turkey is currently negotiating to join the European Union, with the full support of the British government and of U.S. President George W. Bush. If she does join, it will be a disaster for Europe and for Britain. Turkey has 70 million people, nearly all of whom are Muslims and, by European standards, poor. She...
When people speak of a society being “decadent,” they commonly understand decadence in terms of standards of personal behavior and the sense of morality, or want of it, that behavior expresses. For conservatives, personal morality begins with sexual morality grounded in revealed religion; for liberals, with what they call an “ethical” approach to human relations...
“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...
There’s a sucker born every minute. For just $99.00 and a used ticket stub for Wonder Woman, if you order by midnight tonight, you can enroll in a course on Healing Toxic Whiteness. It is taught by a young woman named Sandra Kim, a person of “multiple marginalized identities,” as she describes herself; with what...
Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran. President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...
Garry Wills identifies himself as a Christian. He says he accepts the creeds, along with prayer, divine providence, the Gospels, the Eucharist, and the Mystical Body of Christ as the body of all believers. He thinks it a bad thing that “article by article, parts of the Creed are fading from some churches.” He also...
William Mills was right about so much in his account of Ecuador (“Down Ecuador Way,” Part I and II, December 1996 and January 1997) that it is unfortunate that his only reference to Gabriel Garcia Moreno was a passing one having to do with this “ruler of the country during part of the 19th century”...
Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...
A friend says her secret wish is for some very old distant relative, who she’s never met and won’t miss, to die and leave her a fortune. Waiting for rain this summer is a lot like that—only less realistic. In what threatens to be our third virtually rainless summer, I watch the ten o’clock news...
In his splendidly sardonic Devil’s Dictionary, that old gringo Ambrose Bierce defines pessimism as “a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.” Bierce would have smiled—or, rather, frowned—kindly upon John Derbyshire’s new book, an often droll demolition of the...
PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...
I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition. To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek. I do not intend to spend a great deal...
Everything old is new again. The corruptocracy of the Obama administration is back with a vengeance in the White House. Once more, the “S” in “DHS” stands not for security—but for sleaze. Our nation is back for sale to the highest foreign bidders and their “America last” cronies. Last Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee...
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...
HARD RIGHT The Suicide of the West by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Everlasting Frontier by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Wilderness democracy. The Curious Career of Billy the Kid by Gregory McNamee The man behind the myth. Westerns by Roger D. McGrath America’s Homeric era on the silver screen. The Death of the Western by Clay Reynolds Back-trailing for affirmation. REVIEWS He ...
Our “Letters From Prison“ (Correspondence, May 1992) elicited a number of requests for an update. The letter ended with “Frank,” a 26-year-old black man imprisoned in Illinois, in solitary confinement at a medium-security prison. He had been placed in isolation for his own protection, because the gang he had once belonged to, the Black Gangster...
Wilsonian meddling in world affairs produces a corollary that other nations must abhor. American citizens not only take an active and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the “old country”—whether England or Poland or Haiti—they also insist on instructing the uneducated folk who stayed home on how to conduct their affairs in accord with the...
In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together. But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart. The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite....
Boris Yeltsin, so the conventional wisdom goes, is an impulsive Slavic peasant whose motives are as inscrutable as the enigma that is Russia. Some, probably most, observers also think Yeltsin is crazy. Not crazy like the holy fools of old Russia or the smug suits who make NATO policy. No, Yeltsin is simply considered senile...
We can’t seem to have a news event (and everything that happens in our capital city is a capital-E event these days) without the searing cry in the background, drowning out all other discourse: “Impeach! Impeach!” You might call it an echo of the old exhortation, “Hey, somebody get a rope!” One thing must be...
With the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, as announced to the world by President Barack Obama, we can all sit back and smile, right? Not too big a smile, if you please. The war in nearby Afghanistan goes on, no path to victory yet discernible save the path of patience. Meanwhile the...
Thanks to Britney Spears’ court battles over her hard-earned fortune, more Americans than ever before are learning about how predatory lawyers, judges, doctors, conservators and guardians collaborate to defraud and destroy the lives of innocent victims. The 39-year-old Spears went public last week with her 13-year-long struggle against her father and court-appointed guardian Jamie Spears—who...
Michael Moore, the leftist director of Fahrenheit 9/11, got one thing right when he proclaimed at a June 24 press conference that, despite the Republican control of the White House and Congress, America is liberal. It is a fact. The Republican Party, the only home conservatives have at election time, does not remotely resemble the...
While Ted Galen Carpenter makes some valid points about the situation today in Afghanistan (“America’s Other War,” News, August), his attempt to blame everything on an alleged shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq is nonsense. This is an old, tired charge made mainly by antiwar Democrats in the last election but abandoned when it...
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
Ed Ramsey never aspired to be a hero. He was only 12 years old when his father committed suicide. He was a natural-born hell-raiser; bootleg whiskey and fighting were his passions. His mother thought the Oklahoma Military Academy might salvage him. He loved horses and all things martial. The academy had both. Ramsey thrived at...
Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone? An eight-year-old boy could answer that question correctly, but many adults apparently cannot. Here in Rockford, Illinois, on December 3, just as the “holiday shopping season” was in full swing, Derrick (a.k.a. “Talib Abu Salam Ibn”) Shareef was arrested by the FBI in...
“[They] assemble before daylight and recite by turns a form of words to Christ as god. I discovered nothing else than a perverse and extravagant superstition.” –Pliny the Younger The New Testament is not a book. In common with the Old Testament, to which it can in some ways be regarded as an appendix, like the Apocrypha,...
When the new guru of the Grand Old Party waddled up to the Speaker’s chair and took his oath, the clock began ticking. The GOP had 100 days to fulfill a good measure of its “Contract with America.” Since House Speaker Gingrich has been planning his takeover of Congress for more than two decades, just...
Monday, 9: 30 A.M.—Arose after an evening of drinking, soft-shell Jazz and mainstream crabs: oops—dyslexia margarita. My sister’s cleaning lady arrives with an armload of Tito Puente records and an Electrolux without a muffler: I decide to skip coffee and head right to the train station: looking forward to a leisurely trip back to Boston...
Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It’s hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls...
Between the two world wars, Robinson Jeffers watched as the old American Republic settled into empire. Jeffers was an honest man, a patriotic Democrat who knew that the extension of American hegemony into Europe and Asia could only mean an “empire.” Since candor has never been an American virtue, American imperialists prefer kinder, gentler expressions,...
[Credit: By Roman Harak (North Korea – Kumsusan) [CC BY-SA 2.0]] As President Trump makes his UN General Assembly debut this week—the body he has rightly called weak, incompetent, bad for democracy, and no friend of the United States—North Korea still dominates the headlines. It presents a problem in need of sober management. While it is...
By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president...
Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...