Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003). Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago...

“War is hell,” and war is our permanent reality.  War has been the companion of man since the beginning of recorded history, together with the need to justify waging it.  Centuries before jus ad bellum was imperfectly codified in late-medieval Europe, the desire to make one’s cause seem righteous had become a regular companion of...

This issue of Chronicles commemorates what I suppose is an anniversary, of sorts.  It has been nine years since the February 2003 issue questioning the legitimacy of the war in Iraq was published, an anniversary which also roughly corresponds to the planning leading up to and including the prosecution of the war. Aside from the...

To survey the state of the American right—its friends, its enemies, its controversies—is to be nearly convinced we are living in Nietzsche’s nightmare world of “eternal recurrence.”  The current battle for the soul of the “Stupid Party” is an eerie reenactment of the battle that engulfed the GOP in 1963-64, with a different Romney as...

Can anything be done to stop Europe and the United States from becoming Third World countries?  Is the West doomed?  Considering that it doesn’t look as if things are going to get better any time soon, it is tempting for conservatives to write finis on Christendom and view the fall from a place of cynical...

According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time.  He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews.  A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself. ...

Everyone hails democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but very few realize—or dare realize—that democracy actually represents one of the most perfect forms of tyranny, because it is one the average citizen is loath to acknowledge as such. It is indeed very simply a matter of taking...

Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...

The vampire, possibly the most enduring mythic figure of the modern age, emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment.  To be sure, folkloric accounts of lamiae, strigae, and incubi predate the Christian era and continued to haunt the European imagination throughout the Middle Ages, when vampirism was generally associated with witchcraft.  But early in...

On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park.  The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them.  The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks.  In front of the drummers...

Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of technology over nature.  A moment’s reflection, however, would have neatly reversed the...

Most college and university professors know that even though students may successfully complete remedial courses and even a full slate of freshman and sophomore classes, many will still be unable to use proper language mechanics or to work with complex math formulas at an advanced level.  It’s an observable fact that many graduate students, some...

“For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?” —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel Dryden’s question, posed more than 300 years ago, supposes a just distinction but also a connection between one kind of rights, which he calls “private,” and another, “sovereign sway,” or legitimate public order.  The...

More often than not, current events offer an opportunity for meditation.  This is the case today: The friends of a politician turned international financier, now to be tried for rape, have rallied round him, claiming his privacy has been invaded.  Though in this case the claim is downright preposterous, by appealing to the right to...

John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman.  A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not.  A politician, which is all we have now, says and...

When John Randolph of Roanoke looked at the America of 1806, into Thomas Jefferson’s second and disastrous term as President, he could have been describing today: “Everything and everybody seem to be jumbled out of place, except a few men steeped in supine indifference, whilst meddling fools and designing knaves are governing the country.” He...

I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl.  Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year.  We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO).  Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...

Imagine reading an interview with the founder of a new Christian church.  As the interviewer points out, new denominations are scarcely a surprising story, so what makes yours so different and noteworthy?  Well, explains the prophet, we have a totally different attitude toward the Bible.  Our focus groups tell us that many modern people do...

Speculation about the possible decline of the West has been going on for the better part of a century, if it may be considered as originating in Spengler’s or Valery’s famous reflections.  Obviously, the fratricidal nature of World War I triggered pessimism, but I think the very nature of our societies constitutes a reason for...

I was fortunate to grow up before the Immigration Act of 1965 began an incremental and insidious change in the ethnic composition of America.  I had friends whose parents were immigrants.  I thought nothing much of it because the parents had all come from countries in Northern or Western Europe and almost immediately became indistinguishable...

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern States.” —Charles Dickens, 1862 “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.” —Gov. Joel Parker of New Jersey, 1863 In 1931, sixteen...

The whole truth about Lincoln’s war to prevent 11 American states from forming a federation of their own cannot be understood unless it is seen as an extension of a brutal process of centralization that had been going on in Europe since the 13th century. Medieval Christian civilization contributed to political philosophy by  introducing a...

Newt Gingrich is back!   In fact, it’s his fourth or fifth comeback.  He has his third wife in tow, two new DVDs, that old gift for the flabby-gabby, and presidential ambitions.  With the former wunderkind turning 69 in 2012, and a Republican considered a likely winner for the presidency that year, it will be his...

“As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt Have you been to a toy store lately?  Barbie’s got some heavy competition these days.  The Bratz collection, for instance: Yasmin, Sasha, Cloe, Jade—all household names for several years now.  Check out that hot little number Sasha in her...

On December 1, 2009, the Lisbon Treaty took effect.  Within a year the 27-member European Union was fractured politically and besieged economically.  “Euroskepticism” was on the rise.  The plan to turn Europe into a Weltmacht capable of matching the United States and China looked almost comical.  Europe remained a geographic aggregation, not a geopolitical unit. ...

From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division.  If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...

When I first read in a Soviet history book of Prou­dhon’s famous dictum that property is theft, I thought there had been a mistake in the typesetting.  Obviously, the author had meant to say that property was not theft, but the proofreader goofed, making an interesting and valid observation into a gross and vulgar absurdity. ...