Cultural symbols are sources of contention everywhere. In Russia, a squabble over a monument rings a bell with this proud Southerner. The powerful Communist (CPRF) faction in the Duma recently raised the question of returning “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the Soviet Unions first secret policeman, to his pedestal facing the Lubyanka, the one-time home of the...
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Talking Facts: The New Anti-Semitism
In October 1992 Commentary printed an “observation” by David Glasner, “Hayek and the Conservatives,” which abounded in glaring disinformation. The pictures there given of the America First movement as a rallying point for anti-Semitic kooks and of the Old Right as a collection of bigoted psychopaths, pending the arrival of the neoconservatives and their Hayekian...
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Anarcho-Tyranny in Action
In a recent column, Chuck Baldwin (lately nominated as the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate) pointed to something ominous that was largely ignored in the media reporting on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. Spitzer had been found out because of “suspicious” financial transactions his bank reported to the authorities. Dr. Baldwin (who is pastor of a...
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Of Infants and Geezers
Unplanned Produced and distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment Directed and written by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon Cold Pursuit Produced by Studio Canal Directed by Han Peter Moland Screenplay by Frank Bladwin, adapted from the Norwegian film Kraftidioten Distributed by Summit Entertainment The Mule Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay...
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Wings of the Navy
Technology can exalt as well as dwarf the individual. The Great War’s machine guns staged a chattering pageant of impersonal slaughter; yet its warplanes brought forth paladins such as Frank Luke, Billy Bishop, and Baron von Richtofen, their decidedly individualistic exploits providing civilian newspaper readers with a pleasant contrast to the muddy anonymity of trench...
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Deserving Has Nothing To Do With It
The Swamp is indignant, pretending to be outraged that Donald Trump wanted Ukrainian President Zelensky to continue an investigation of the dubious Ukrainian-related activities of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The whole kabuki theater production is ridiculous, of course, as we know that the Democrats sought Ukrainian help in digging up dirt on Trump...
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Importing Jihad—October 2005
PERSPECTIVE Christians Against Terrorismby Thomas Fleming Counterterrorism is hell. VIEWS Promoting Militant Islam Abroadby Ronald L. HatchettU.S. policy blunders. Learning From Canada’s Mistakesby James BissettTerror along the border. Welcoming Muhammadby Scott P. RichertAbandoning that which is our own. NEWS Rivers of Bloodby Richard CummingsImmigration and terror in a time of chaos. The Dishonest Pursuit of...
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The League of Frightened Gentlemen: U.S. Occupation and Iraqi “Sovereignty”
Before the surprise early transfer of power to a “sovereign” Iraqi government on June 28, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that the interim government was “prepared to step up to its responsibilities.” He emphasized that the White House plan would shift the burden of rebuilding Iraq and fighting...
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Playing the Trump Card
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
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The “Suffering Love” of Patriots
The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, himself no lackey of the Soviet regime, once attacked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for having crossed the line where “war against communism became war against . . . Russia.” In Rasputin’s eyes, the prophetic exile had stained Russia’s reputation—not merely that of the communist regime—in his relentless assaults on Soviet power. The...
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Against the Invaders
Roy Beck’s brief against immigration abounds in useful but also familiar statistics: e.g., since the Immigration Act of 1965, 30 million immigrants, mostly from Third World countries, have entered the United States; at least half of our births in the last 30 years are traceable to these immigrants; without them, the current population of the...
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Required Reading
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as...
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September 11: What Has Changed?—September 2011
beyond the revolution Deforming Education by Thomas Fleming views U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy by R. Clay Reynolds Tarzan’s Way by Andrei Navrozov news September 11: Ten Years After by John C. Seiler, Jr. reviews The Monism of Perfection by Chilton Williamson, Jr. The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth ...
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A Case of Russophobia
John McCain does not like the Russians. Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman. Take, for example, this excerpt from his “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” published in the November/December 2007...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Dostoevsky’s great 1866 novel Crime and Punishment reads like a frenetic vision. A compulsive gambler and one-time political radical who was condemned to Siberia and forced labor, Dostoevsky created the novel’s Rodion Raskolnikov, a half-mad dreamer who expressed the radical, nihilistic ideas of the time. Drawing on his own struggles and experiences, Dostoevsky used Raskolnikov...
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Los Diablos Tejanos
A Texas Ranger, it was famously claimed, “can ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennessean, and fight like a very devil.” These days, such a bland presumption of ethnic attributes would merit a visit from the Sensitivity Police, and even respect for martial skills verges on political incorrectness, since progressive...
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The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its...
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The Truth About Afghanistan
If anyone hasn’t heard about it by now, “our” government has been lying about the lack of progress being made in the seemingly eternal war being fought in Afghanistan. In the 18 years of the longest war in U.S. history, more than $1 trillion has gone down the drain, along with thousands of lives, in...
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The Bush Clan at the “Oligarchs’ Ball”
Vladimir Putin reacted swiftly to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s criticism of Russian democracy following the Russian president’s reelection on March 14. The exchange indicated increasing tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, tensions that may have as much to do with the Bush clan’s business interests as they do with the geopolitical interests of the two...
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Hollywood’s War
Are we currently at war with militant Islam? Not in the same way we were with the Germans in World War I and the Japanese and Germans in World War II. In the two world wars, it was a people against a people, tribe against tribe. Our hatred for the enemy was passionate and pervasive. ...
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White Privilege in Action
Mortality rates for middle aged white Americans are rising, as reported by the New York Times: “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling. That finding...
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Wolfs Fang, Fox’s Tail
“War is war. Guns are not just for decoration.” —V.I. Lenin By March 1920, Russia’s whites—an odd and disparate conglomeration of monarchists, anti-Bolshevik socialists, jaded liberals, reactionary clerics, frightened nobles, disinherited landowners, and loyalist army officers and soldiers—had turned what looked like certain victory over the Reds into an ignominious defeat....
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Managed Citizenship
Georgie Anne Geyer is no stranger to the immigration issue. For years her syndicated columns have included spirited criticism of efforts toward the redefinition of American identity. They have attacked what Geyer calls the “citizenship mill,” the thoughtless naturalization of masses of Third World residents (not all of them legally in the United States), bilingual...
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THE PARTY STATE
In Washington, D.C., access and influence go hand-in-hand; they are the stock and trade of the lobbyist, the lawyer, and the political advisor. They are, as well, the biggest “skill” current officeholders and staff members can take with them when they leave the government. —from Pat Choate, “Puppets for Nippon,” May...
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Stumbling Into (Another) War
On August 26, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Washington has sharply criticized Moscow for this, while the European Union has threatened sanctions. Russia and Georgia have signed a cease-fire agreement stipulating that Georgian forces must move back to their bases, while Russian troops are supposed to withdraw to...
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Surfin’ Safari
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to; You would cry, too, if it happened to you. —Lesley Gore, 1963 Mike Love’s churlish behavior at the third Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies should not have come as a surprise to anyone. His outlash against everyone from Paul McCartney to Diana...
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The Silent Invasion
“It is surely arguable that during the third century of American existence the main problem of this nation will be—it already is—that of immigration and migration, mostly from the so-called Third World.” —John Lukacs Last year the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended 1.8 million illegal aliens along our southern border—less than half the number...
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Economic Patriotism
In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain. While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of...
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White Man’s Soul Music
“Country music is white man’s soul music.” —Kris Kristofferson “It doesn’t offend us hillbillies, it’s our music.” —Dolly Parton on the term “hillbilly music” “She sounds exactly like where she’s from.” —Vince Gill on Dolly Parton “The old ghosts are always rising up, refusing to be cast aside.” —Ketch Secor Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison...
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Key Proposals
President Bush announced in September that he would partially support key proposals for intelligence reform made by the September 11 Commission, which, in its final report, recommended a sweeping restructuring of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The commission called for the appointment of a National Intelligence Director (NID) who would have full authority over the personnel...
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What American Business Forgot
Ever since the Sony story, in the form of Akio Morita’s Made in Japan, won a nitch on the best-seller lists, Japanese executives have been turning out memoirs on business success for American audiences. Sadehei Kusumoto’s biography, written with the help of Edmund P. Murray, is a chronicle of Minolta’s rise from the ashes and...
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Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality
It’s summer in your neighborhood. School is out in suburban America. Trees line ponds stocked with fish available for “catch and release,” the “natural” areas abounding with turtles, ducks, geese, cotton-tailed rabbits, and squirrels. Shady parks are equipped with playgrounds with swings and what used to be called monkey bars. Look around you. It doesn’t...
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The Survival of the Fattest
“Pity the man who loves what death can touch.” —Eugene O’Neill Late one summer afternoon, tired and dirty after four days’ camping and a 21-mile ride out of the Wind River Mountains over rough granite trails, 1 swung off the horse and opened the registry book that the National Forest Service places at the boundary...
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Apocalypse Now
We are flying amid fluffy, white cottonball clouds that reach above us to tremendous heights, forming darker mountain peaks lined with crevices and tinged by the pinkish-orange glow of the setting sun. My six-year-old daughter, eyes wide in innocent fascination, whispers, “Is this where God lives?” “Even higher,” I answer. “But His angels are here,”...
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The Murderers of Christianity
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared,...
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From Greeks to Gringos: Why Mexico Lost Texas
Among the terms of endearment applied to Americans who worry about present immigration policy is “xenophobe.” This high-toned word normally precedes lower-toned ones—”racist,” “bigot,” “neo-Nazi,” etc.—which take over as the exasperation level rises. A “xenophobe” is someone who fears foreigners. Fears them why? No dictionary is competent to say. Every xenophobe doubtless has his own...
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The Journeys of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Shukov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep . . . The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. [from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich] The journey is over. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn survived war, the Gulag, and cancer; was exiled from his homeland, only to return, having outlived...
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The Poet Malgré Lui
Over 30 years ago, when I was a seminarian in Rome, one of my professors exclaimed, “John Ford is the Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century.” Fortunately, at Columbia University I had studied under Andrew Sarris, the famed “auteur” film critic, so I knew the context. In any case, Ford’s reputation as certainly one of...
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AIDing Society: Private Vice Versus Public Health
“So the plague defied all medicines; no cure, no help could be possible nothing could follow but death. . . . The strange temper of the people . . . contributed extremely to their own destruction.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1721) Until recently, the United States has enjoyed unquestioned success in public...
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Carrier, Congress, and Cronies
“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States. When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...
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What Globalism Has Wrought
As we ponder the impact of school closures, economic dislocation, panicky shoppers clearing the shelves of toilet paper, and the general disruption of our lives as a result of the coronavirus scare, there are a couple deeper points to consider about how this situation came about. First, the warning signs of what globalism meant for...
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The Promise of American Life—January 2005
PERSPECTIVE Love the One You’re Withby Thomas Fleming Life in occupied America. VIEWS Education and Authorityby Michael McMahonRespect in the marketplace. Honor to Whom Honorby Harold O.J. BrownBelow reproach. America’s Unthinking Militaryby Robert D. HicksonServants of the imperium. Government: Good or Bad? Big or Little?by Thomas StorckReframing the debate. NEWS First Prize, Second Hand, Third...
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Everything Dies
It was one of those winter days in Texas that seem as gray as the surface of the moon and about as hospitable. It’s cool outside, so you wear a jacket. Inside, it’s stuffy. I’m wearing a coat and running the fan at the same time. You can’t quite get comfortable when it’s like that. ...
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Return to Boonville
This is a story of a place, of joy and regret, and of a deed so romantic and so rare as to border on the fantastical. In the early fall of 1955, my father, a physician who had just completed an internship and a year of residency in family practice, moved our growing family from...
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The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...
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Nothing to See Here, Move Along
As Steve Sailer says, you aren’t supposed to notice some things—like rising mortality rates for middle aged, working class whites that I discussed last week: A startling new study that shows a big spike in the death rate for a large group of middle-aged whites in the United States was rejected by two prestigious medical journals, the study’s co-author,...
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Alternative California
It felt as strange flying west—not south, not east—from Salt Lake City as if the earth had reversed its rotation and were spinning in the opposite direction. Basin and range, range and basin: the long barrier mountains were heavy with snow, but now in early March the desert separating them lay bare, dramatizing the topographical...
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What’s Wrong With “Compassionate Conservatism”?
When my family and I moved to Purcellville nearly ten years ago, I was surprised by how much traffic came through our little town. Purcellville had a population of less than 2,000 then, and the Old Colonial Highway, which doubles as the town’s Main Street, began piling up well before 6:00 A.M. on the weekdays,...
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Change is in the Air
Gov. Rick Perry was a star at the Texas “tea parties,” denouncing Washington and mentioning the s-word—secession—in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perry had already made headlines by calling for Texas to reject Washington’s “stimulus” funds and by backing a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives affirming the state’s sovereignty, before he fired up the...
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Reading Swift Straight
“A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.” —Nietzsche Telling truth in the form of a lie is one of the odder things human beings do. It is hard to imagine irony in Paradise, and there can certainly be none in Heaven, where we know even as we are known, and there is nothing to...