I would like to wish all Chronicles readers a Very Merry and Blessed Christmas. And, as a Christmas present, here is a link to a piece I wrote two Christmases ago for Takimag, about some of the things I like about Christmas, including Polish Christmas carols. Since the piece is two years old, most of...

A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services....

Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has since...

On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”  Perhaps the story is true.  After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the class...

WikiLeaks documents reveal that Russian operatives may have been tracking the assassins of rogue intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko well before he was poisoned in London in November 2006. The agents apparently wanted to prevent his murder not because they cared for him, which they did not, but because they knew that Moscow would be blamed...

What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery? A week ago, CNSNews’ Penny Starr reignited the culture war with an arresting story about the staid old museum that began thus: The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing an...

An interesting batch of WikiLeaks documents—probably the most disquieting to date—was published by the Guardian earlier this week. Some concern the decision, made by NATO’s Military Committee less than a year ago, “to expand the NATO Contingency Plan for Poland, Eagle Guardian, to include the defense and reinforcement of the Baltic States.” Others indicate that...

Over two thousand four hundred American sailors, soldiers and airmen were killed in Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Had we had an equivalent of WikiLeaks back in 1941, however, the course of history could have been very different. FDR would have found it much more difficult to maneuvre the country into being attacked in...

Nearly everyone in his right mind complains about cell phones going off in church or the people who shout into their phones in airports or on the plane, but those Jerks are for the most part anonymous strangers whom we shall never see again.  Any attempt to correct them might backfire.  But what about abuses...

Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million...

When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries. Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run by...

The USA regime will soon recover from the embarrassments created by the massive release of diplomatic documents onto the Internet.  There will be investigations and prosecutions.  There will be ironic attempts by Madame Clinton and her colleagues to pretend that personal attacks on heads of state and foreign diplomats are de rigueur in the business...

The full title should be: Jerks, How to Spot them and How to Deal with them without becoming one of them yourself. The Jerk is the defining character of postmodern America.  What the Man of Faith and the Man of the Sword were to the Middle Ages, the Jerk is to our own age.  To...

I recently came across an item in the Catholic press describing a Mass of Reparation offered in Britain for the 12,000 Slovenian Catholics handed over by the British to be murdered by Yugoslav Communists in May 1945. This piece caught my eye for personal reasons: The fathers of two very close friends were among the...

Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks.  The mere  fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious.  This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane. Over the past three or four decades,...

Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences. In substance, New START has none of the historic significance of Richard Nixon’s SALT I or ABM treaty, or Jimmy Carter’s SALT II, or Ronald Reagan’s INF treaty removing all intermediate-range...

North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island on Tuesday was the latest in a series of Pyongyang’s aggressive moves over the past year and a half. They started with ballistic missile tests in April of last year, soon followed by a nuclear test in May. Kim Jong Il, who may be mad, upped...

On November 21 Ireland formally applied for a rescue package worth $90 billion, having failed to control its financial crisis with austerity measures and strict budgetary planning. European Union officials quickly agreed to the request, which follows an agreement negotiated last week in Dublin by a joint EU and IMF team. They hope that the...

Alarming newspaper headlines greeted me at London’s Heathrow Airport on my arrival from the Balkans yesterday. The Daily Mail led with the EU President’s warning that “Ireland’s debt crisis could kill the European Union stone-dead.” The Independent’s front page (“Ghost estates and broken lives: the human cost of the Irish crash”) was accompanied by a...

Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East. So states a new report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, adding: “Saturation missile strikes could destroy U.S. air defenses, runways, parked aircraft, and fuel and maintenance facilities. Complicating this scenario is the...

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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, they...

According to a seasoned observer of Moscow’s political scene, the Russian political class cringed last Wednesday morning on learning that Obama had suffered a humiliating political defeat. The Russian leaders don’t think much of Obama personally, but they are worried over what the Republican control of the House might mean for the fledgling “reset” in...

Barack Obama’s dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term? Why would the most liberal president since...

“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men….And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.”  The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. As Chesterton points out,...

This is politics in America. Item One:  NBC’s Matt Lauer asks the the California gubernatorial candidates if they will stop negative ads, and when Meg Whitman declines, she is booed by women.  This is supposed to mean something, when feminists and lesbians boo a Republican woman.  But feminists hate women and to the extent they...

Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.” Backing up her rueful admission are surveys...

After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time. It is a feminist truism that women have always worked.  Even...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...

On October 2, 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran an article detailing the results of the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The article was entitled “Americans Sour on Trade,” but what Americans are really souring on is free trade: 53% of Americans now say that free trade agreements have hurt the United States, with...

Food Stamp Nation by Patrick J. Buchanan • October 8, 2010 • Printer-friendly “The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human...

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 ...

In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on...

I met Joe Sobran in early 1997 at a conference near Chicago on the American intervention in the Balkans. It was not his area of primary interest, but he understood all of the key issues because he understood U.S. foreign policy and its domestic roots. His diagnosis, which applied then, in Bill Clinton’s second term,...

In the 1940’s, Americans experimented on the inmates of Guatemalan jails and medical hospitals by infecting them with syphilis.  Similar experiments were performed on black Americans.  While I fully agree with the horror and disgust expressed by  liberal politicians, journalists, and “bioethicists” like Arthur Caplan at such atrocities and would like to believe that they...

We are sad to announce that Joe Sobran has passed away.  In the comments attached to this post you will find some brief remembrances of our friend and colleague from the editors of, and contributors to, Chronicles.  Grant to your servant, O Lord, blessed repose and eternal memory. —The Editors Add to Favorites

In the Anglo-American tradition of Common Law, the status of wives was defined by the principle of coverture, which meant that the wife’s legal identity was merged with that of her husband. [i] When Hamlet is taken to task for addressing his stepfather as “mother,” he replies: “Father and mother is man and wife, man...

Tom, you must be joking.   Whatever else Nolan is, dreary he’s not.   His films have refreshed and elevated popular entertainment.  Employing the tool box made available by contemporary filmmaking technologies, he never settles for what other directors so often do today: spectacle for spectacle sake.  His films from Memento onward challenge the audience...

The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex.  Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in such...

Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who...

Assuming, no doubt, our anxious world could use a good laugh, Stephen Hawking undertakes to provide one. He says the universe created itself. The theory itself isn’t the joke. The joke is the dogged persistence of atheists trying in the face of common sense to persuade the world as to the wisdom they see in...

“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...

“Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. “The American way of life needs to be rebalanced....

Is the Republican establishment losing it? Is the party leadership capable of uniting a governing coalition as Richard Nixon did before Watergate and Ronald Reagan resurrected in the 1980s? Observing the hysteria and nastiness of Karl Rove and the GOP establishment at the stunning triumph of Tea Party Princess Christine O’Donnell, the answer is no....

Tea Party candidates–or at least candidates with support from Sarah Palin and/or Jim Demint–continue to knock off “establishment” Republicans.  Party hacks are disturbed:  These aspiring populist leaders are unseasoned and will go down in defeat against the Democrats.  Why can’t we all just get along?  (I am not going to bore you with quotations from...

One would think that the recent report about sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic Church in Belgium was horrific enough that it did not need any embellishment.  But that’s not how Christopher Hitchens thinks.  In his most recent column, a call for “simple earthly justice” in cases of clerical sexual abuse, Hitchens claims that...

The Rev. Terry Jones may just have exposed the ultimate futility of America’s war in Afghanistan. Consider the portrait of frustrated impotence America presented to the world last week. Our president and the secretaries of state and defense deplored Pastor Jones’ plan to burn 100 Qurans but could do nothing to stop him, other than...

I finally saw Inception. After seeing it, I can definitely state that I would much rather have seen Despicable Me for a third time. Of course, Hollywood produces mountains of immoral garbage, but even many Hollywood films that aspire not to be immoral garbage tend to be dreary or self-indulgent. Maybe the people who know...

perspective Break out the Booze? by Thomas Fleming views Academic Sins by John Willson The Uses of a Liberal Education by Catharine Savage Brosman news Okinawa Occupied by Allen Mendenhall reviews An Unfinished Story by James Bissett [Srdja Trifkovic, The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia] Sustained Magnificence by Derek ...