From the November 1988 issue of Chronicles. In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern...
People who know me realize that in the United States I move largely in conservative circles. I write for conservative publishers and periodicals and lecture largely to conservative audiences. I feel at home with them and usually share their views. The vast majority of my friends in America consider themselves to be conservatives, and thus...
Is the foreign policy of the United States her Achilles’ heel and the cause of endless dissatisfaction? Without doubt, if we remember the words of Clausewitz: wars are nothing but the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Yet wars are very costly because they involve not only money but, above all, human lives. Foreign relations...
People who “think ahead,” like Prometheus, have always constructed Utopias which are the outflow of their reflections and ideas—in other words, of their ideologies. On the other hand, most Americans who call themselves “conservatives” manifest a hostility towards ideologies and even more towards Utopias. “Ideology” as a term was invented by Count Destutt de Tracy,...
In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern France), the Near East became the Middle...
“The trouble with people is not their ignorance. It is the number of things they know that ain’t so.” —Mark Twain During 1986, the fury of the left’s outrage with human rights in Chile abated globally and was redirected against South Africa. The reasons given were the vestiges of the apartheid system and an alleged...
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
“Then unbelieving Priests reform’d the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation.” —Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism On April 22, 1950, I published in the London Tablet an article entitled “The American Catholics Revisited,” which provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor, wildly protesting against my observations. Nearly all of them came...