While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists. Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015. In response, Germany...
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Oh, What a Stupid War!
The war on Libya now being waged by the U.S., Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812. Let’s start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members of the coalition, arguing...
Wars, Rumors, and Geopolitical Logic
When nations put ideology before real-world geopolitics in formulating grand strategy they embark upon a sure path to failure.
Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
Up to Our Eyeballs in Gaza
I listen to Rush Limbaugh about 15 minutes a day, which is the time it takes by car to go to and from my house for lunch. Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to get the gist of what any “on air personality” will say, over and over repeating himself and ringing the changes...
What the Editors Are Reading
I’m rereading large portions of Ed Abbey’s books (of course) as Chronicles goes to press: Desert Solitaire, Black Sun and The Fool’s Progress (both novels), Abbey’s Road, One Life at a Time, Please, Down the River, Beyond the Wall, The Journey Home . . . the record of a full, busy, and productive lifetime in...
A Tragic Loss
A Washington Post story earlier this year began, “Gunfire erupted among a group of teenagers in a hallway at Dunbar High School.” Here was yet another tale of teenagers and guns in our nation’s capital, of shootings at school, of another day when class ended not with the ring of a bell but with the...
The Company Town
The city of Arcadia, Wisconsin, population 2,400, recently became the town that roared in the immigration debate. Its new mayor, John Kimmel, barely four months on the job, made several proposals in a letter to the editor of the Arcadia News-Leader. The letter brought so much notoriety to this place, nestled in the Trempea-leau River...
The Democratic Crusade
In The Hollow Men Charles J. Sykes resumes the brief against American higher education that he began in his widely publicized Profscam, published in 1988. Sykes argues in both books that our best universities, most conspicuously in their humanities faculties, have betrayed their true educational mission: instead of challenging students to think, professors parrot prescribed...
Thoughts On Mikhail Bulgakov
I always think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness, as if he were my relative, and a very close and dear one at that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. I was not even fortunate to know him personally—he died a few years before I was born. Once, in a conversation with the editor...
You Can Go Home Again
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
An Unhinged World
A few years after he was removed from office in 1890, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.” At present, the Iron Chancellor’s dictum is applicable to the entire planet. The most important event by far this year has been Europe’s...
The Filthy Rich
I haven't investigated, but I'm sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don't know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something ...
Future Shock?
This won’t be easy. But, it may be the future, at least according to a number of science-fiction writers collectively known as the “cyberpunks.” More disturbingly, there seems to be a number of scientists and researchers who agree. Hang on. The first part of the word cyberpunks comes from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert...
A Postmodern Yahweh for Episcopalians
I had expected to find a small gathering of eccentric Episcopalians in a basement lecture hall. Instead, the National Cathedral was overflowing with a Christmas Eve-sized crowd. The draw was not a holiday but a debate between “Jesus scholars” Prof Marcus Borg of Oregon State University and the Rev. N.T. Wright of Litchfield Cathedral, England....
Waste of Money
An Empty Shell Game A.P. Foulkes: Literature and Propaganda; Methuen; New York. The cover of Literature and Propaganda, the proverbial warning notwithstanding is very telling about the book’s contents and about how perverse the image of America is in the offices of Methuen. Indeed, the cover makes an impression with such a magnitude of force...
Dead Souls
Barack Obama’s second presidential triumph has left many American conservatives feeling stranded. It is as if they have become aliens in their native land. Are conservatives simply sore losers, or does their sense of alienation correspond to a seismic disturbance in America’s political terrain? It is hard to say, but this much seems clear: When...
The Reminiscences of Earl Wild
I was thinking recently about Earl Wild for several reasons: his achievement as a pianist; his substantial and extended contribution to the “Romantic Revival” through his performances and recordings; and my own memories of exchanges with him after three of his appearances in New York City. When I beheld him backstage, standing far away from...
Mistress of Deceit
Oxford University Press advertises its Past Master series (of which this book is one) as being “a noble encyclopaedia of the history of ideas” in which “lucid and authoritative” modern critics introduce us to the best of what has been thought and written. Oxford seems to have dropped a brick on this one. Lucid? Here...
Role Models and Poetry
Societies, as much as individuals, need role models. For good and for ill, our cultural tradition has been influenced by the figures of Achilles and Odysseus, placed at the center of our moral imagination by Homer almost three millennia ago. The shaping power of the tradition is clearest where there has been no direct influence,...
The Dating Crisis Is Really a Maturity Crisis
Excessive insecurity and widespread aversion to commitment are driving our country’s toxic dating culture off a cliff.
The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
End Game
The latest, and perhaps the best, book to be written in the wake of the Great Recession raises an important question: Why is it that America’s self-appointed elite refuses to learn from its long record of failure and futility in economic management that its ideas and policies are all wrong? The answer is provided by...
The Price of Globalism
It is paradoxical that, having led the Western world to triumph over fascism and then communism, the United States is now the vanguard of yet another world socialist order. This American Empire, based on the benevolent neoconservative principles of borderless free enterprise, trade, and migration and consisting of multicultural social democracies enforced by U.S. military...
A Master Accompanist
Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space. “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...
Will ‘Ukraine-Gate’ Imperil Biden’s Bid?
With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land. But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how...
On Beslan
Srdja Trifkovic’s conclusion to his piece on the Beslan tragedy (“After Beslan,” The American Interest, November) hits the mark precisely. Orthodox Christians have had it proved to them over and over again that the West will prefer the friendship of the Mohammedan to ours, unless we volunteer to forsake our convictions and identity to become...
In This Number
I write with bittersweet excitement to reveal the new interim editor in chief of Chronicles. As our readers know, Aaron Wolf was to become the editor in chief this year, but passed away suddenly on Easter Sunday. Aaron was an exceptional man and a wonderful, loyal editor for Chronicles, serving the institution for 20 years....
Professions and Professors
You know what you hardly see around anymore? Professions. Professors—hell, yes, one sees professors around, even in backward Italy, pinched, untidy, jealous of beauty, suspicious as cuckolds in Molière, speaking with the forked tongues of p.c. texts. But surely “professor” is a title or rank, not a profession or vocation. At the dawn of the...
Buchanan and Churchill
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan. New York: Crown. 544 pp. $25.95 A Review published in The Wanderer . Since this is my unedited text, any errors are the fault of the author and not ...
Where Euroregulation Meets Socialism
John Major lost the British election in 1997 not because Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party had stolen the Conservatives’ policies but because the Conservatives adopted socialist ones. The last ten years have seen an explosive rise in levels of bureaucratic regulation in Britain, which have particularly hit small business and also professional people, especially those...
Germans in the Dock
“The German may be a good fellow, but it is better to hang him.” —Russian Proverb This is a disturbing book: not simply because the author, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, points an accusing finger at the German people whom he implicitly accuses of having been Hitler’s willing accomplices in the implementation of...
Journalism
These are conflicting notions: warm feelings, no matter from which spiritual or emotional fount they emanate, must end in a bit of unfairness. The only human construct that firmly believes in and widely proclaims its ability to be exempted from this rule is, of course, the New York Times. For many years, the Times succeeded...
Wall Street Imperialism
Parallels between the British Empire and the New World Order are striking. The principal difference is that the British crown relied on brute force to achieve its objectives, while the NWO elite mostly use financial terrorism (except for occasional raw power demonstrations, such as in the Gulf War or in Bosnia). The Great Asian Banking...
Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
Land of Obama
“A corrupt society has many laws,” observed the Roman historian Tacitus. The Founding Fathers knew this aphorism, and their work reflects it, from the Articles of Confederation to the Federalist to the Tenth Amendment. They designed these documents to save this country from the plague of “many laws.” And the inaugural addresses of nearly all...
The King Hearings: Necessary in Principle, Unlikely To Provide Answers in Practice
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, started his congressional hearing on Islamic radicalization Thursday amidst accusations of “Islamophobia” from the Sharia activists and expressions of distaste from most Democrats. In his opening statement King cited recent terror plots against the United States to justify his decision and suggested the...
October 7, 1571
Today we give special thanks to Our Lady whose intercession led the armada of the Holy League to victory over the Ottoman fleet on October 7, 1571, at the mouth of what the Venetians called the Bay of Lepanto but what we today call the Gulf of Patras. My good ...
Mercy Is Courage
The Hobbit Produced by New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Wingnut Films Directed by Peter Jackson Written by Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures For this month’s column, I’ve enlisted my son Liam to write the review, since he knows far more than I do about J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s film...
Books in Brief
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, by Zachary Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 784 pp., $40.00). This is the second volume of the author’s biography of Saul Bellow, a massive and no doubt definitive work, minutely researched and very well written. Nevertheless, the patience required of the reader to pursue such...
To Defeat the Islamic State
The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known. For the Kaiser’s Germany, it was the “blank cheque” to Austria after Sarajevo. For Great Britain, the 1939 war guarantee to Poland. For the Third Reich, it was the June 1941 invasion of...
The Big One Is Nigh!
“The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault: You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it,” I wrote in the print issue of Chronicles seven months ago (“Waiting for the Big One,” March 2008). “When a tremor occurs, you often fear...
Clap & Trap
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to...
Digging For Truth in Pravda
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
Roe at 43: Defy It
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
Encyclopedia Britannica
Paul Johnson has done it again: he has written a book so huge in scope that it fairly begs to be challenged by academics as a cursory treatment of history. In the course of one thousand pages, The Birth of the Modern: World Society covers subjects as diverse as the treatment of animals by human...
Twilight of the Meritocrats
“The liberal idea is obsolete,” said President Putin in a recent interview with the Financial Times (27 June 2019), “it has outlived its purpose. When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be considered.” Of...
Fueling Culture Wars
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
It’s Trump’s Party, Now
Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life. And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display. Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer...
Are You Ready for War With Demonized Iran?
How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan ...