Hillary Clinton’s visit to Africa in late March, which was billed as a “goodwill tour” to strengthen America’s ties with developing nations, combined business with pleasure. In between meetings and photo-opportunities with African heads of state, Mrs. Clinton and her daughter Chelsea did a little taxpayer-funded sightseeing in the wilds of Uganda, Tanzania, and other...

Education is today’s political buzzword, and, like any issue involving children, it is quickly becoming a trump card. Following President Clinton’s cue, Jesse Jackson is traveling the country, raising support for an “education summit.” And despite George Bush’s claim to be the “education President,” Clinton has put more of a mark on the American educational...

Albania has descended into the Hobbesian state of utter anarchy, which seldom happens to a European country. Armed mobs have ransacked stores, unruly soldiers have stolen cars at gunpoint, foreign nationals have been evacuated by helicopter from embassy compounds, and rebels have stolen some 100,000 light arms from government arsenals. The sinking in March of...

Bill Clinton, in David Brinkley’s estimation, is a bore, and the majority of the American electorate probably agrees. Moralists deplore a nation that seems willing to indulge an administration ridden by scandal and characterized by every sort of personal vice and immorality. Commentators have suggested that had President Clinton been accused of two or five...

Archbishop William Levada, the Roman Catholic ordinary of San Francisco, and the city’s leftist mayor, Willie Brown, squared off last February, and though the debate may continue over who drew more blood, it’s clear who was left staggering at the bell. Archbishop Levada sought an exemption for his diocese from San Francisco’s new ordinance (which...

The National Front’s mayoral victory in the southern French village of Vitrolles, on February 9, was front-page news in Europe and is important for Americans. The NF candidate had been its brilliant deputy chief, Bruno Mégret, who barely lost the 1995 election to Socialist Jean-Jacques Anglade. Vitrolles has a large North African population and 19...

So Deng Xiaoping has joined Saint-Just, Molotov, Himmler, Djilas, et al., in that niche of the nether regions reserved for the Unrepentant Accomplices of Ideology-Driven Mass Murderers. One hopes that the place is only a little less unpleasant than that inhabited by their bosses, Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Tito, and Company. The fact has been obscured...

Boerne, Texas, is an unlikely location for a contest over religious freedom, but in 1996 the local Catholic Archbishop decided to sue the city for refusing to allow him to expand a church situated in a zoned historic district. The Archbishop based his case on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids religious persecution and...

Legal immigration, in the opinion of Senator Spencer Abraham (Republican-Michigan), is something we shouldn’t do anything “more” about “until we have a fuller debate on the benefits of immigration.” The new chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee insists that he is “not trying to badmouth the other side, but they’ve had the chance to make...

Imperial Washington in the 90’s is the gaudiest political theater since the Emperor Elagabalus went to his reward, and Clinton’s second inauguration was as sophisticated as an Arkansas high school prom, complete with theme—”An American Journey”—and decorations: a mock-up of the President’s Bridge to the 21st Century. The celebration stretched out for a week, with...

James Dickey, one of the stars in the American firmament, died this past January. For certain of us, he was the most powerful, the most loved, poet from the 1960’s onward. By the time I met him in ’67 or ’68 he had brought out Poems 1957-1967, which included Buckdancer’s Choice, winner of the 1966...

The Confederate battle flag is in the news again—specifically the one that has flown from the state capitol dome in Columbia, South Carolina, by legislative resolution, every day since 1962. A combination of leaders of civil rights organizations, out-of-state-owned mass media, and big business powers has been trying to get the flag down for years....

Leon Todd is the bravest man in Milwaukee. While Afrocentric “education” has always had its white conservative critics, Todd is perhaps the first black school official to seek to cut the explicitly Afrocentric content from his district’s curriculum. A member of the Milwaukee School Board, Todd believes that black children would best be served not...

The Mexican-American border is under siege, and the latest attack has come from the Mexican government. In December, the Mexican Senate unanimously approved a constitutional amendment which allows Mexicans to become United States citizens without losing their Mexican citizenship. A few days later, the Mexican Congress approved the same amendment, 405-1. This was Mexico’s second...

The “Defense of Marriage Act” was making its way through Congress as these lines were being written. Having passed the House, the debate was turned, by the “good” offices of Senator Edward Kennedy, into a joint defense of marriage and homosexual rights bill. Gay activists were exultant that their concerns were getting a hearing in...

Terrorism in France has usually come—in recent years—from clandestine Muslim groups engaged in a perpetual jihad against the West. But recent attacks attributed to Corsican separatists provide another example of a violent nationalism rearing its head at precisely the time when Europe’s policy elite is proclaiming a new era of unity and cooperation. The immediate...

The recent death of Robert Nisbet has removed from our midst one of the premier social thinkers of the century. His works, particularly The Quest for Community (1962) and The Sociological Tradition (1966), will be read as long as literate people consider the nature of human relations. Nisbet brought to his discipline both a rich...

Okinawa’s Governor Masahide Ota has learned what it means to be governor of a Japanese prefecture; precious little. When Mr. Ota stood up for Okinawans who no longer wish to lease their land to the American military, he was asserting an ancient Okinawan belief in private property: “It’s yours, do with it as you see...

Personal bankruptcies are being filed at a rate 25 percent higher than in 1995, and if the current rate is maintained, the absolute numbers, estimated at 1.1 million, will surpass the record of 900,000 set in 1992. The situation surprised the New York Times (August 26, 1996) because normally high bankruptcy rates occur during recessions....

Basque nationalists are on the move. Despite the vigilance of the French and Spanish authorities, the Basques have carried out a fierce summer offensive, the latest stage in a clash between nationalism and federal police power. But there is no sign that Europe’s leaders can cope with this latest nationalist upsurge. Following a couple of...

Saddam Hussein has proved, once again, how easy it is to make fools of the American leadership. Five years ago President Bush, after bombing much of Iraq into the Stone Age, decided that discretion was the better part of valor and pulled our troops out before they had accomplished the only objective that would have...

The Fukuyama-decade continues on—history has ended, all is well in the cosmos, and the New World Order is functioning well. We had, some 30 years ago, an advance confirmation of our smooth sailing in Senator Fulbright’s book on The Arrogance of Power. The United States, he wrote, is not an empire and rejects all imperialistic...

He died on June 18, his devoted wife of six decades, Eleanor, at his side. Soft-spoken, humble, ever polite and generous, Henry was also a man of indomitable courage. In an era of accelerating centralization in the book trade, he launched the Henry Regnery Company in 1947 as an independent publishing house. From the beginning,...

Officer Laurence Powell is off the hook, at least for now. Dealing a severe blow to the civil rights establishment and federal police power, the Supreme Court has overruled the Ninth Circuit Court’s motion to stiffen the sentence handed down in the federal trial of Powell and Stacey Koon, who were found guilty of violating...

John C. Salvi III has been convicted of killing employees at two abortion clinics and sentenced to two consecutive life terms by Judge Barbara Dortch-Okara. The judge refused to let Salvi read a statement about his religious beliefs—or delusions, as his attorney pleaded—and the jury rejected the insanity plea. Yet it really ought to be...

Robert Hussein, a Kuwaiti citizen, may be wishing for another Iraqi occupation. After converting to Christianity, Hussein was put on trial for apostasy in an Islamic court, which quickly found him guilty. Although Kuwait’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, it imposes no penalty on a Muslim who kills a man found guilty of apostasy. While...

Boris Yeltsin’s recent electoral triumph over his Communist riyal was hailed throughout the West as a victory for democracy and reassuring evidence that Russia will continue on the path of progress and peace. In Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, the leaders of the United Nations of the Free World breathed a sigh of relief. Absent from...

Republican Congressman Steven Gunderson of Wisconsin, who hosted the homosexual “circuit” party called the Cherry Jubilee at a federal building in Washington last April 13, was upset by our article about the event written by Marc Morano (“Sex, Drugs, and a Republican Party,” July 1996). When Congressman Robert Dornan (R-CA) read the Chronicles article into...

Childcare is back in the news, thanks to a new study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Preliminary results of the study, which has been touted as the “most far-reaching and comprehensive” examination of the effects of childcare to date, were released...

The Anti-Gang statute of Harvard, Illinois, which has served as a model for similar statutes in many Chicago suburbs, was recently struck down by an Illinois appellate court. The Harvard law made it a crime to display gang colors and symbols—such displays lead to frequent clashes, violence, and murder. The challenge came from an admitted...

Holland has a dirty little secret. In the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, there is a prison where you can be indefinitely incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad hoc “court” that sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests have been made. The court is ten...

Christopher Hitchens and Vanity Fair get the Connie Chung Award for May. “Thanks for your help,” read the letter inserted in my complimentary copy of the May issue of Vanity Fair. It seemed like a polite gesture, a pat on the head for sharing my research (published and unpublished) on plagiarism. The irony—if you can...

Hillary Clinton probably deserves all of the hostile criticism she has received for her silly new book, It Takes a Village. Her ghostwriter, Barbara Feinman, has the prose style of Barney the dinosaur, and, as reviewer after reviewer has noted, much of the book consists of dumbed-down versions of all the nanny-state policy proposals—socialized medicine,...

The partial birth abortion of late-term fetuses is the most odious form of abortion, known as “dilatation and extraction” (D & X). The procedure, fully and gruesomely described in the major media and on the floor of Congress earlier this year, when President Clinton vetoed the bill that would have banned D & X, involves...

Hate crimes—what are they? In Newport, Rhode Island, a mixed-race couple complained that threats from their white neighbors had driven them from their home. Generous contributions from strangers helped the family to find a new place and to pay the rent. Local police, however, were suspicious from the first and eventually charged Tisha Anderson with...

The Confederate battle flag continues to be a source of conflict and controversy. One year ago, Michael Westerman of Elkton, Kentucky, a 19- year-old father of twins, was murdered by black teens who took offense to the Confederate flag hung in the back of Westerman’s truck. When one of the black teens, Freddie Morrow, was...

The heinous crime that was perpetrated against a 12-year-old girl by three American marines on Okinawa has harmed many people: the young girl and her family; the three men, whose lives will be blighted by the consequences of their crime; the reputation of the American forces overseas; Japanese-American relations; and indeed the American people. But...

Michael New, the 22-year-old Army medic who faces a bad conduct discharge for refusing to wear the United Nations uniform, may well lose his fight to clear his record. He was court-martialed and convicted in January, and it seems unlikely the Army court will reverse that decision. At issue is his refusal to wear the...

When Christians invite Muslims into their homes, it sometimes happens that the guests wish to perform their ritual prayers at the specified “prayer time.” This may be intended as a witness of their Muslim commitment, but it is not a religious obligation as such, as the prayers can be made up later, at home. This...

The Civil War and Hollywood have been a pair ever since Ken Burns—because of potential profits, of course. But most of these recent pictures, with their emphasis on marketing rather than script or acting, have had more in common with Nintendo than any real war. For the pittance of $500,000, independent filmmaker Robby Henson has...

Joe Occhipinti continues to be denied justice. As Greg Kaye reported in the October 1993 Chronicles, Occhipinti was the highly decorated undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who was framed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for doing his job too well. Fluent in three languages, Occhipinti had distinguished himself as an expert...

Accusations of racism, unlike protestations of patriotism, are the first, not the last, refuge of scoundrels. In today’s world the charge is the ultimate rhetorical weapon, the H-Bomb of public discourse. Even without accurate aim or effective delivery, it is guaranteed to destroy not only the intended target but associates and bystanders for miles around,...

Andrew Lytle died on his couch at his log cabin home on December 12, 1995. Such a passing was and will be known as it can only be known by family and friends who shared with him a wealth of love. The intimacies of privacy were qualified as they must be by the ritual of...

The “Imperial Presidency” was a charge the Republicans used to make against FDR, JFK, and LBJ, and a few of them have begun to use similar language against Mr. Clinton’s personal crusade against Bosnian Christians. Asked by Dan Rather if there was a problem of “perception” in a draft-dodger sending men into a combat zone,...

Wendell Berry’s new essay collection, Another Turn of the Crank, gives definition to broad political views that the author has previously left obscure. Regarding foreign trade, for example, he asks: “How can any nation or region justify the destruction of a local productive capacity for the sake of foreign trade?” Berry indicts both the liberals’...

With impeccable timing, I interviewed Eisenhower biographer and Colin Powell booster Stephen E. Ambrose just days before Powell’s Noble Renunciation of Ambition. But before our chat disappears into that void (de?)populated by Milton Shapp’s Inaugural Address and the Oscar acceptance speech of Pauly Shore, I retrieve this exchange: Me: One way to look at Eisenhower...

Sir James Goldsmith in Le Piège (Paris, 1993) eloquently defended the nation and regional free trade against internationalists advocating global free trade. He provoked a formal answer from the European Commission in October 1994. A month later the English version of The Trap appeared, followed by a torrent of contradiction and polemic from various academics,...

Aunt Jemima, the jovial and plump woman who for decades graced the pancake mix cartons, was replaced a few years ago by a younger, slimmer figure, who was nevertheless identifiable as someone who could have been the niece of the original. Now Betty Crocker, the blonde, blue-eyed cook of cake mix fame, is to be...

Alabama’s reintroduction of chain gangs has provoked the predictable cries of outrage. Howell Raines (formerly of Alabama and now of the New York Times) described Governor Fob James as “Alabama’s current genius of bumpkin publicity.” The politest expressions used to describe Governor James’ decision usually include words like “barbaric,” “reactionary,” and “racist.” Reactionary they may...

Sir James Goldsmith’s The Trap (New York, 1994) is the clearest introduction to the arguments against global free trade and its consequences for the nation. The English translation adds helpful notes and bibliography to the French original, Le Piège (Paris, 1993). In some places, however, rearrangement and omission change Goldsmith’s message. The last chapter of...