In 1918, the United States proved militarily decisive in the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany and emerged as first power on earth. World War II, ending in 1945, produced two truly victorious nations, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin and the America of Harry Truman. Out of the Cold War that lasted from Truman to...

Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution.  In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points. I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church; II He sees the FR ...

Self-made millionaires set the tone for this class, and any scholar or man of letters who has had to raise money among men of wealth and influence will see himself in Eliot’s Prufrock.  These poor fools have to listen, hour after hour, to Dives’ tales of victories on the golf course and of his personal...

There are few movies I am still thinking about several days after seeing them. One such movie is Of Gods and Men, the superb French movie about the martyrdom of seven French Cistercians from the small monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas in Algeria in 1996, in the midst of the Algerian civil war. This...

Barack Obama, who pledged to restore ethical honor to the White House after the Bush years, is now burying himself under an active volcano of lies, mostly but not exclusively concerning the assassination of Osama bin Laden. There was scarcely a sentence in the president's Sunday night address or in the ...

The most significant fact to emerge from the killing of Osama Bin Laden is that Pakistan’s military intelligence service (ISI) had been sheltering him for years. This confirms what we have been warning for the best part of the past decade: that Pakistan is an irredeemably flawed entity, unable to turn itself into a stable...

With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before. The...

beyond the revolution Our Sacred Anticanon by Thomas Fleming views The Triumph of Nice by Philip Jenkins The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost by Aaron D. Wolf news Glenn Beck, the Straight Dope by W. James Antle III A Saint Is Born: An Interview With Roland Joffe by Matthew A. Rarey reviews The Robot’s Focus by Derek Turner A Journey: My Political ...

One annoying old canard, reinserted into the mainstream media reporting of Osama Bin Laden’s death, is the claim that his theology represents a radical break with traditional Islam. The usual propagandists and apologists for “normative Islam”—peaceful and tolerant, and totally at odds with terrorist violence—are back peddling their old wares. CNN had Ebrahim Moosa, a...

Dr. Trifkovic Interviewed on RT by Chronicles • May 5, 2011 • Printer-friendly abc123″>8 Responses<a href="#respond" Add to Favorites

The Rugged Individualist “Who is John Galt?” I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less, but lots of disgruntled young people waste time on the internet asking this question, as pointless as it is pretentious.  John Galt was, of course, the fictional protagonist of Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which he leads a work-stoppage of...

“Justice has been done,” chortles President Obama and his spokespeople.  ”Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye,” chanted the proles on the streets of New York.  There are already T-shirts on sale saying “Obama got Osama.” I am surprised not to have heard of a procession of little people in...

The killing of OBL is a significant event politically and psychologically. It will not have any detrimental impact on the operations of Al-Qa’eda, however, because that amorphous group does not need a leader and has not had a centralized command-and-control structure for a decade. We should not expect a single retaliatory terrorist assault by “Al-Qa’eda.”...

beyond the revolution The Unentitled by Thomas Fleming views Suicide by (Legal) Immigration by Roger D. McGrath The Death Wish of the West by Claude Polin news DOMA’s Fifth Column by William J. Watkins, Jr. reviews A Southern Foison by Ray Olson Chronicles of the South edited by Clyde N. Wilson Vol. 1: Garden of the Beaux Arts Vol. 2: In Justice to so Fine a ...

Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in which...

“Unrest in Syria has discomforted rather than shaken the regime of Bashir Al-Assad,” I wrote in the May issue of Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, p. 6). “On current form it is an even bet that he will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative.” The violence has become far worse since the editorial was written...

The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd.  He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...

I haven't investigated, but I'm sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don't know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something ...

One month before the invasion of Iraq, Riah Abu el-Assal, a Palestinian and the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem at the time, warned Tony Blair,

When I turned on my computer this morning, I got reminders from both Yahoo and Google that today was...Earth Day. I didn't actually expect the lords of Silicon Valley to acknowledge the real significance of today. Still, it is striking that the secular world contrives to ignore a ...

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Zagreb and other Croatian cities over the past week to protest the conviction of two Croatian generals by the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. The ICTY sentenced Ante Gotovina to 24 years in jail and Mladen Markač to 18 years for their role in...

Of our Libyan intervention, one thing may be safely said, and another safely predicted. When he launched his strikes on the Libyan army and regime, Barack Obama did not think it through. And this nation is now likely to be drawn even deeper into that war. For Moammar Gadhafi’s forces not only survived the U.S....

“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed.  And they will eternally prevail . . . ” Jefferson was wrong. His belief that “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was naive. As Patrick J. Buchanan ...

(Inspired by Clyde Wilson) Every human society has had its share of offensive or annoying people: busybodies and bores, poseurs and bullies, cheapskates and  check-grabbers, hypocrites and egomaniacs.  You might even be able to define some societies by the offensive characters they tend to produce or by the qualities they find most offensive. Southerners used to regard Yankees...

Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats who...

The problem with President Barack Obama’s foreign policy is not that it is “too pragmatic,” as recently alleged. The problem is that Obama combines the broad ideological assumptions of liberal interventionists with a leadership style that allows people more doctrinaire than he to dominate the internal debate and decision-making process. Libya is the product of...

The Libyan operation is being quietly aborted, barely three weeks after its ill-conceived onset. There will be no mission creep, no American boots on the ground, and no arming and training of the rebel forces. The impending stalemate is the least of all evils. It is preferable to an open-ended ...

This morning brought the surprising news that, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Donald Trump is running second among GOP presidential hopefuls, at 17%, behind Mitt Romney’s 21%. I am far from a fan of the obnoxious, egomaniacal Trump, but his rise in the polls could be good news: The issue Trump has...

As in the case of Serbia twelve years ago, Canada’s air force is once again bombing a country presenting no threat to the safety or security of our country. In fact, we are at war. There has been no declaration of war. There has been no serious attempt to intervene peacefully to help resolve the...

On March 20, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran

THEY’RE BACK! No, not the demons that terrorized the Freeling family in Poltergeist II. I am referring to the far more menacing demons who are already wasting the TV lives of sports fans and Idol watchers, the presidential candidates.  Barack Obama has already thrown his hat into the ring–though considering his intelligence and manners, it...

Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of ...

1 April 2011 Early Wodehouse A few months ago I decided I would look into some rather early Wodehouse to see how he developed. I read, in no orderly sequence, Mike and Psmith, Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Picadilly Jim, Damsel in Distress,  and The Coming of Bill. They were all ...

In late February, in the midst of the uproar over Live Action's exposé of Planned Parenthood, I wrote a piece about the controversy for the About.com Catholicism GuideSite. Entitled

beyond the revolution The Algebra of Equality by Thomas Fleming views The Other Side of Union by Clyde Wilson The American “Civil War” and the Tower of Babel by Donald W. Livingston news Re-Newtering America by John C. Seiler, Jr. reviews A Convergence of Catastrophes by Jack Trotter Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age by Guillaume Faye Paris Personified by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Parisians: An Adventure ...

There must be some reason or reasons, why the Jerk has become the archetypal American character.  Without going too deep into themysteries of social history, here is a little experiment that might stand in for several hundred pages of tedious social history.   Herewith a little theoretical foundation for my ...

I have so far refrained from commenting on the Libyan fiasco.  I do not understand what is going on, and  the administration has so far not condescended to enlighten us.  We are not taking sides or deciding the future of the country–that is up to the Libyans, we say–but then declare that no outcome is...

As our country plunges into yet another foolish war in the Moslem world and teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, it is easy to be focused on the negative. But today’s news also brought a small reminder of hope. The synod of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, meeting in Lvov, just elected 40-year old Sviatoslav Shevchuk,...

“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks. But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars. America “goes not abroad...

The war on Libya now being waged by the U.S., Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812. Let's start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members ...

“Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated,” The Daily Telegraph headlines a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest diktat. Whoever wants credit must fulfill our conditions, she declared. Her conditions amount to capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and further erosion of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone. For...

Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,

“This will not stand!” declared George H.W. Bush. He was speaking of Saddam Hussein’s invasion, occupation and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait as his “19th province.” Seven months later, the Iraqi army was fleeing up the “Highway of Death” back into a country devastated by five weeks of U.S. bombing. When Bush spoke, the...

On March 3 Ambassador James Bissett had a letter published in Alberta’s premier daily, the Edmonton Journal, taking issue with an “assistant adjunct” professor [sic!] at the University of Alberta who had voiced support for the cancellation of my lectures at UBC and UofA because of my “denial of genocide” ...

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the ...

Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current ...

James O'Keefe scored another victory recently, when his group tricked Ron Schiller, an NPR fundraiser into making statements that were soft on militant Islam and expressed contempt for Middle American conservatives.  As much as I detest NPR and all its works, the attack on the fundraisers is either naive or ...

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, started his congressional hearing on Islamic radicalization Thursday amidst accusations of “Islamophobia” from the Sharia activists and expressions of distaste from most Democrats. In his opening statement King cited recent terror plots against the United States to justify his decision and suggested the hearings...

Robert Spencer is making something of a nuisance of himself these days.  I don’t know much about Spencer. I do not spend a lot of time looking at websites and hardly ever visit Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.  It is not that I particularly disagree with him on the Muslim threat; it is only that he...

The jihadist murder of two American servicemen by a “Kosovar”-Albanian Muslim at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 combines the fruits of the United States’ criminally misguided Balkan policy over the past two decades and of Europe’s suicidal immigration policy since the 1960’s. While it is probably too late ...