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...
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Jinping Takes Up the U.S. Challenge
Is the U.S. up for a second Cold War—this time with China? What makes the question newly relevant is that Xi Jinping’s China suddenly appears eager for a showdown with the United States for long-term supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and the world. With the U.S. consumed by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 Americans and...
Can Japan Rise Again?
We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan’s dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not...
The Neoconservatives’ Latest Purge
The recent neoconservative attack on Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson shows what happens when conservatives dare question U.S. support of Israel.
The Long Retreat
“The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops. “I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means.” “(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates....
Republic of War
For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars. Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...
Polemics & Exchanges, September 2022
A note from our new Publisher, Robert Roach, and a letter on 'staying sane' during these crazy times.
All Talk, No Action
By Monday, interestingly enough, the Russian invasion of Syria was receding as a topic of public concern. Apparently there no longer seemed anything explosive in the tidings of Vladimir Putin’s slam-bang entry into that remote theater of conflict. This was notwithstanding those Russian airstrikes against the anti-Assad rebels whom the United States, supposedly, has been...
Dilbert’s Tips for Separating Fact from Propaganda
Dilbert cartoonist, Scott Adams, dedicates much of his daily podcast to educating listeners about the way to consume the news skeptically. Americans should take heed.
A Latter-Day Munich
Kosovo has become a latter-day Munich. Over the past decade, it has been stylish for advocates of American intervention in the Balkans to justify their trigger- happy meddling by invoking “Munich.” The argument runs roughly like this: Unless the “international community” (i.e., the United States under the guise of the U.N. or NATO) acts resolutely...
Hooters Against Misogyny: The Paradox of Femen(ism)
First came the whirlwind Pussy Riot American tour. And now the Boobish Invasion continues, with the Eastern European “topless sextremists” known as Femen threatening to descend on the United States like a Satanic Swedish Bikini Team. The picture that accompanies this article in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast is a little “NSFW,” and the interview that...
What Trump Has Wrought
Should Donald Trump fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot (1,237), there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But Washington, the city of self-delusion,...
A Conservative Self-Critique
The Up From Conservatism anthology contains some insightful, biting critiques of the conservative establishment, but its contributors are part of an elite class themselves, with their own sacred cows and taboos.
Alfred Rosenberg: The Triumph of Tedium
A few months after the outbreak of war, in January 1940, Nazi leaders held a merry meeting. They had plenty to be cheerful about. Poland had been crushed in a few weeks, and the new Soviet alliance had been “sealed in blood,” as Stalin put it. By a secret agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of...
The Ghost of Hitler in the 21st Century
Today marks the 133rd anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler, and this year also coincides with the English-language publication of Hitler’s National Socialism, by Rainer Zitelmann, a distinguished German historian and free market economist. Reprising material from his German scholarship of more than 30 years ago, Zitelmann presents his provocative, well-founded interpretation of the Nazi...
Belarus: Still No Country For Sold Men
Alexander Lukashenko has won the fourth presidential election in Belarus, taking 79 percent of votes cast in the turnout of over 90 percent, according to official figures. The opposition staged a protest rally in the central square in Minsk after polling stations had closed on Sunday, claiming that the election ...
Will War Cancel Trump’s Triumphs?
Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.” Donald Trump can make the same boast. No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as...
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’...
Italy’s Donald Trump
Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye. In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order. Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar. Neither...
A Consoling Disorientation
Maybe we need the pressure of loss close at hand in order to catch glimpses of things as they really are.
Europe’s Hollow Socialism
With the victory of the Social Democrats in Germany, a year and more after Labour finally managed to win a British election, 11 of the 15 states in the European Union now have governments in the socialist tradition. That is surprising. Socialism is yesterday’s idea, after all, and since the Soviet collapse of 1989-90, hardly...
A Little List, 1
As Some day it may happen that a victim must be found I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list Of society offenders who might well be under ground And never would be missed, who never would be missed. A recent comment of Robert Peters (a pleasure, as always,...
The Misguided System Without Historical Precedent
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has pushed neoconservative party lines on foreign policy for decades; the last time I read a dissenting view on that subject in the Journal was when I wrote an editorial for it in 1989. Although my caustic remarks on a global democratic foreign policy were published on the editorial...
Who Commissioned Us to Remake the World?
U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so. In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has been tied to color-coded...
MTG’s Admirable Pugnacity Needs a Reality Check
Republicans should hammer the border issue but otherwise keep a low profile right now and wait to see if they can pull out a November win.
Swan Song From Our Second Worst President
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
Sam Francis: Prophet of America’s Decline
Luminary paleoconservative, Chronicles' own Sam Francis, foresaw how the vast managerial state would increase its stranglehold over its citizen-subjects. But there are signs that Leviathan is losing its grip.
Ain’t It the Truth?
The Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of—Lord have mercy—shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know—putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according to an internal...
Too Many Wars. Too Many Enemies.
If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history. Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded. Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S....
VE Day, A Time to Reflect
The Moscow-based International Conservative Club (founded by the Party of Action) published an essay in Russian by Srdja Trifkovic, The Day of Victory – A Time to Reflect, in which he “ponders why the victory over Nazism has not marked the end of the ‘civil war’ in Europe.” We bring you the English translation of...