PERSPECTIVE Lost in Translation by Thomas FlemingThe art of reality. VIEWS Mind Your Language!by James O. TateA sea of ruined words. Manners, Morals, Languageby Chilton Williamson, Jr.Forsaking the Beau-Ideal. A Trip to Smart-Mouth Collegeby Aaron D. WolfThe loss of sacred words. NEWS Riots in the Suburbsby Claude PolinThe programmed suicide of France. REVIEWS Seasoned Travelsby Catharine...
221 search results for: Wayne+Allensworth
Post
The Brothers Tsarnaev: Assimilating Terrorists
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
Post
White Self-Hatred and the Christian Spirit
At the first Congress on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, held in Washington in May, the Reverend Earl W. Jackson, the black director of the mostly white “Samaritan Project” of the Christian Coalition, told 500 mostly black Christians that, despite many blacks’ warnings that he was selling out to the “religious right,” “our agenda” is “the...
Post
Well Into Spring, Even With Snow
Old now is earth, and none may count her days. Earth may be fair, and all men glad and wise. Age after age, their tragic empires rise, Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep . . . —Old Hundred Twenty-Fourth A white-haired pastor, a white church, a white field. The snow is falling,...
Post
The End of Politics
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
Post
Murder in Politics
Sergey Yushenkov’s murder on April 17 may have been the result of machinations aimed at destroying Russian President Vladimir Putin politically and personally, as well as undermining U.S.-Russia relations, seemingly on track again after the rift over Iraq. Gunned down outside his Moscow apartment, Yushenkov, the leader of the Liberal Russia political party, joins a...
Post
THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH: July 2007
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 ...
Post
The Con Man
“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” —John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Fifty years ago, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold completed the most successful transformation of David Cornwell’s shape-shifting life. The son of a war profiteer and con man became John le...
Post
The Ghosts of Christmas Past
“Now in history,” wrote Chesterton, “there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.” A collective memory, a vague but compelling collection of shadows that bind us to the past, seems to whisper a perennial, bittersweet hymn to the numbed ear of man, particularly modern man. Every nation, tribe, or clan has passed on tales...
Post
Children of a Lesser God?
The plight of Iraq’s Christian community—as followers of the Prince of Peace flee from the country they have lived in since ancient times, their homes and churches burned, their children kidnapped and raped, their priests murdered—has elicited barely any reaction from either the White House or the Muslim government it supports. The destruction of the...
Post
You Had One Job
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
Post
Palestinianization and the Iraq War
As American troops seized the center of Baghdad on April 9, looting, guerrilla warfare, and chaos continued across Iraq. In 21 days, U.S. forces had driven to the capital of Saddam’s Iraq, though arguably Washington had been making war on this long-suffering country for over a decade—a war of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, propaganda, occupation...
Post
YOUR LAND IS THEIR LAND, PART 2: May 2007
PERSPECTIVE Our Fathers’ Fields by Thomas Fleming Weaver, property rights, and conservatism. VIEWS Property Rights and the Founding by Marco Bassani The classical-liberal reading. The War on Blight by Steve Berg You may be next. Where Did Our Property Rights Go? by Steven Greenhut Not in my back yard. Of Landlords, Leases, and Calico Indians...
Post
Silver or Lead: The Reverse Assimilation of the Southwest
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...
Post
Shifting Sands
The grand theme of P.D. James’s work is man and his overwhelming sense of rootlessness, anxiety, and guilt in the knowledge of a crime unknown and a punishment outwardly denied in the post-Christian era, though inwardly anticipated. Especially in the last decade or so, James has moved far beyond Dame Agatha Christie, delving deeply into...
Post
The Day of Conception
In Russia’s Ulyanovsk region, the birthplace of Lenin, the regional government has declared September 12 the “Day of Conception,” throwing in a promise of time off work for couples striving to make that day a success. Such programs have been instituted more frequently since Russian President Vladimir Putin made boosting the country’s birthrate part of...
Post
Against the Barbarians
The 21st century is a return to the Age of Walls. As historian and archeologist David Frye writes in his important new book, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, few have noticed that a new era of wall building is now upon us, driven by mass migration and Islamic terrorism. While the...
Post
The Real War
In a small café in Belgrade nearly 20 years ago, I had a drink with a young man named Michael. He was an architect and, like many people I met there, was no friend of the Soviet regime, which was the subject of our conversation. I had just visited the Soviet Union, passing through Belgrade...
Post
Obama’s Manufactured Border Crisis
This summer’s border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls or security at our southern border, especially in South Texas—was manufactured by the Obama administration as a means of forcing through a mass amnesty, either via Congress or by executive fiat. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens now resident in these United States is the immediate...
Post
To Hell and Back
“Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow / For old, unhappy far-off things. And Battles long ago.” Wordsworth, perhaps, was prompted by recollections of an age before warfare meant the mechanized destruction of all in its path. Yet war, to paraphrase an American precursor of Zhukov and Guderian, has...
Post
A Crackdown On Christians
Nursultan Nazarbayev’s regime in Kazakhstan, a recipient of U.S. foreign-aid funds, is cracking down on religious groups it disapproves of, as the congregations associated with Grace Presbyterian Church discovered firsthand this past August, when the KNB (the Kazakh successor to the Soviet-era KGB) raided churches in Karaganda and Oskemen. Since then, raids, detentions of church...
Post
Ritual, Tragedy, and Restoration
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
Post
Johnny Cash, R.I.P.
John R. Cash went to his reward on September 12. His beloved wife, June, preceded the “Man in Black” in death on May 15. His friends report that Johnny Cash was at peace and ready to meet his Maker. Cash himself had calmly stated, “I don’t have long to live, now,” during his last TV...
Post
The Mendacity of Hope—October 2008
PERSPECTIVE The Audacity of Hateby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Obama Presidencyby Doug BandowThe triumph of (lots of) experience over (a little) hope? Boogaloo Down Broadwayby Tony OuthwaiteThe charade of liberal change. The Revelations of the Obama Planby David A. HartmanChange we can’t afford. Obama on Foreign Policyby Ted Galen CarpenterA mysterious work in progress. ROUND...
Post
An American Tragedy
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
Post
The “Russian” Mafia in America
In October 1996, during testimony before a congressional committee, FBI Director Louis Freeh spent a good part of his time discussing international organized crime. Freeh, pointing to the FBI’s arrest of one Vyacheslav Ivankov—the reputed “godfather” of the Russian mafia who is now serving a ten-year sentence in a federal pen in New York—emphasized the...
Post
Georgians In Londonistan
In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair. Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him...
Post
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...
Post
Managed Democracy
Russia’s parliamentary elections, held December 7, produced a wave of alarmed reactions in the Western press that betray the ignorance and hypocrisy of Western elite thinking regarding Russia and the West’s—particularly Washington’s—relations with Moscow. The Kremlin-backed United Russia party carried the day, winning nearly 38 percent of the vote, while other Kremlin-backed—or created—parties (the Liberal...
Post
Manual Control
Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.” Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...
Post
Preaching to a Strange Nation
“Receive me, then, O Lord and lover of Mankind, even as the harlot, as the robber, as the publican, as the prodigal . . . “ —The Prayer of St. Basil the Great The Law on Religion passed this year by the Russian State Duma restricts the activities of “non-traditional” religions...
Post
Something Big
We passed the hand warmer around on a cold day in December. Matthew, my 11-year-old son, got creative and stuck the thing in his shoe. Rachel, who was spotting for us, didn’t like it much, but she used the hand warmer anyway. It was that cold; our fingers and toes burned. I look through the...
Post
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...
Post
Firing the Government
Vladimir Putin’s surprise firing of the Russian government on February 24 and his appointment of “technocratic” Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on March 1 had Western officials and observers buzzing about another round of “reform” and Russian cooperation with the West, while Western investors were optimistic that the new government would favor them. Nevertheless, Washington should...
Post
DUE PROCESS: FROM JOE FRIDAY TO JACK BAUER—May 2008
PERSPECTIVEBeastie Boysby Thomas Fleming VIEWSFederales, Gringo Styleby Roger D. McGrathThe exponential growth of federal police. Do We Want a Federal Police Force?by William J. QuirkThe Supreme Court and Congress versus the people. Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.by R. Cort KirkwoodAmerica’s most wanted. NEWSThe Surge “Success”by Ted Galen CarpenterTriumph of hope over experience. REVIEWSTowers of...
Post
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...
Post
The Face of Battle
Saving Private Ryan Produced by Steven Spielberg Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Robert Rodat Released by Paramount and DreamWorks SKG If you visit the American cemeteries near the beaches at Normandy—there are two of them—you may pick up a booklet describing the landings of June 6, 1944, as I did over 15 years ago....
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
Strange Bedfellows
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
Post
Commodity Culture—August 2009
PERSPECTIVE Johnny Rocco’s Worldby Thomas Fleming VIEWS “Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”by James O. TateThe commodification of culture. Unpalatable Valuesby Andrei NavrozovCulture as gastronomy. Watching the Moneyby George McCartneyBrought to you by NokiaTM . NEWS The $15 Trillion End Runby William J. QuirkAn “oligarchy of interests.” REVIEWS Decline and Fallby Tom Piatak Theodore Dalrymple: Not With...
Post
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...
Post
Sources of Contention
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...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
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...
Post
An Easter Reflection: The Mystery of Goodness
The sun broke through the thin, whispery clouds, and its reflection in a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain caught my eye. Suddenly the day was bright and the morning as clear and joyful as hope itself. Resurrection Day. It was Easter morning in a year that will surely be marked down...