A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at...
The massive, overwhelmingly Muslim migrant onslaught on Europe is the most important event of 2015. Its proportions are staggering. The Babylonian captivity affected at most 75,000 Jews, and the Völkerwanderung of the late-Roman era numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It is greater, in numbers within the time frame, than the Moorish, Mongol, or Turkish...
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. Lately, those of us who believe in the rule of law and an objective interpretation of the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who framed it (and the people’s representatives who ratified it) have been dealt some cruel blows. The two most prominent are the Supreme Court’s...
Here’s some more good stuff from the “academy” to get 2016 rolling. It concerns Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder who left an Oxford college more than 50 million big ones in today’s money, with the following stipulation: “No student should be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race or...
The main attraction in Ioannina is still the Kastro, the Turkish fortress that served as the Ottoman capital of the territory of Epirus, ruled for 30 years by Ali Pasha, a dashing Albanian warlord who accidentally helped to spark the Greek Revolution. The one thing most Americans think they know about the Ottoman Empire is...
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear. Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...
In the summer of 2014, a “surge” was on at the southern border, particularly in my home state of Texas, stimulated by the Obama administration’s signals that it was planning a mass amnesty and had no intention of enforcing immigration laws. It became painfully obvious that the border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls...
Donald Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration has drawn fire from the establishment right. “It’s a violation of our Constitution, but it also undermines the character of our nation,” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told the Des Moines Register. National Review’s Jim Geraghty opined that Trump’s plan created a forbidden “religious test for...
I enjoyed George McCartney’s review of Bridge of Spies in the December issue of Chronicles (“A Snow Job on Rodeo Drive,” In the Dark). However, Steven Spielberg was not “scrupulous” with the “physical details of time and place.” Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2A, yet in the movie we see a contemporary U-2S. ...
I have been a Chronicles subscriber for two or three years now, and I have never before contacted your office in response to a piece in your magazine. I have just finished reading “The Seven Stairs and AIDS” by Jeff Minick (Correspondence, December). In a publication that puts out many well-written articles, I think this...
The conservative movement is starting to look a lot like Syria. Baited, taunted, mocked by Fox News, Donald Trump told Roger Ailes what he could do with his Iowa debate, and marched off to host a Thursday night rally for veterans at the same time in Des Moines. Message: I speak for the silent majority,...
So far, the presidential campaign has not gone as the experts had predicted. One of the reasons for this is that many Americans are anxious about the economy, an anxiety that those ensconced in the recession-free DC bubble have a hard time understanding. And one of the reasons for this economic anxiety is the damage...
With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump. The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street. Not so long...
This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. In his book Brooklyn, and in the movie based upon it, the Irish author Colm Toibin has told a story which brings life to an America now long gone. It is the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who lives in a small...
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
It’s Jan. 22, 2016, the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that has killed more than 60 million babies here. But this year, let’s turn to Japan. Fortune magazine ran an article titled, “Why Japan’s Economic Troubles Should Worry the U.S.” It warned that the world’s third...
The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement. A “symposium” of anti-Trump...
The lights are burning late in Davos tonight. At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.” Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in...
Two years after Sam Francis’ untimely death, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a long essay about Francis titled “The Castaway.” The title came from an email Francis sent to friends (including me) after William F. Buckley described him as one of the “castaways” from the conservative movement. This was Francis’ response to Buckley: “As I have...
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran’s Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ’s last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with...
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
Angela Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Islamic migrants into Germany won her praise from the press last year, with the Guardian reporting that grateful migrants had dubbed her “Mama Merkel” and TIME naming her Person of the Year. The migrants are still looking up to Merkel—one of those arrested after the mass...
Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble. Polls show her slightly ahead of Socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa, but narrowly behind in New Hampshire. And the weekend brought new revelations about yet more classified and secret documents sent over her private email server...
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
For Xi Jinping, it has been a rough week. Panicked flight from China’s currency twice caused a plunge of 7 percent in her stock market, forcing a suspension of trading. Kim Jong Un, the megalomaniac who runs North Korea, ignored Xi’s warning and set off a fourth nuclear bomb. While probably not a hydrogen bomb...
Like many Americans, I spent Sunday evening watching the beginning of the final season of Downton Abbey. The show has become a huge hit, at least by PBS standards, with some 25,000,000 or so American viewers. At first glance, this success is surprising. A few years ago, The Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that...
The Iowa caucuses are under a month away, and the GOP Establishment is in white-knuckle panic that Donald Trump’s candidacy has not imploded. His rather moderate proposal for a temporary time-out on Muslims’ entry into the U.S. has gone the way of its predecessors in actually boosting his numbers. Allegations of sexist misuse of a Yiddish expression have fallen...
I first wrote about the War on Christmas in 2001, when Chronicles published my essay “Happy Holidays! Bah Humbug!: in the December 2001 issue. Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE.com, republished that essay. Since then, I have written at least one article each Christmas on the topic. What follows is the piece Peter Brimelow asked...
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. While most victims of war and terrorism in the Middle East are Muslims, we have been witnessing a growing assault upon Christianity by ISIS and other Islamist groups. The proportion of Middle Easterners who are Christian has dropped from 14% in 1910 to 4%...
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
Donald Trump has certainly revolutionized American politics. And he did so by a very simple act—mentioning substantive truths that other Republicans fear to utter. Trump is not perfect. But criticism at this point (some from over-fastidious Chronicles writers) is like Titanic survivors complaining about accommodations on the lifeboats. No ordinary man would climb into the...
The patient lies on the table. He’s been beaten badly about the head, and burns show round his neck, as if he had been dragged by a rope. Bright red blood trickles out of one ear. He has lost his trousers, and his shirt is in shreds. He cannot tell you what day it is. ...
My family lived, while I was growing up, at 29 Claremont Avenue between Riverside Drive and Broadway, in an elaborately decorated apartment building of ivory-colored stone directly overlooking the Barnard College campus and the copper roofs, weathered to a lichenous green, of Columbia University beyond. Lionel and Diana Trilling and their son, my schoolmate at...
I’ve been reading and rereading Raymond Chandler’s novels for more than 30 years; also his Letters, the best epistolary volume by an “American” writer (Chandler was an Englishman who arrived in Los Angeles as a young man to work for an oil executive), with the sole exception of Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being. Chandler...
In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism. The original idea had come to him on a crowded train home from work to his house in the countryside east of London on Christmas...
Russian President Vladimir Putin was furious following the late-November destruction of a Russian war plane by Turkish fighter jets over Syrian airspace. The Russians had been bombing “terrorist” positions inside war-torn Syria since September. Less than two weeks before the incident, Putin thought he had reached agreement with his Turkish counterpart, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, on...
To bomb or not to bomb? As I write, that is the question being debated in the Palace of Westminster. The Conservative government, predictably enough, is itching to join the attacks on ISIS in Syria. Prime Minister David Cameron says we cannot leave it to France and America to obliterate terrorists in the Middle East...
Spotlight Produced by Anonymous Content and Participant Media Director by Tom McCarthy Screenplay by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer Distributed by Open Road Films Trumbo Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed by Jay Roach Screenplay by John McNamara Distributed by Bleeker Street Media In 2000, the Boston Globe hires Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to be editor-in-chief. ...
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
In the summer of 2015, thanks to the generosity of friends, ex-students, and parents whose children I now teach, I spent a month in Rome. Since my return to the United States, several friends and family members have asked me to record my general impressions of “the Eternal City.” So here goes. First, Rome offers...
“Quarantine the aggressors!” That line out of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech signaling the beginning of his open road to war with the Axis powers was much criticized by anti-interventionists, who correctly saw that the President was trying to undermine the great principle of neutrality which had, thus far, kept us out of the European war. ...
Each year, The McLaughlin Group, the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year. Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing. As “Person of the Year” and “Biggest Winner,”...
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber over northwestern Syria on November 24 may be a game changer in that strategically positioned Middle Eastern country. Various parties have been forced to declare their true agendas. Strategic clarity is finally emerging, which is the precondition for an eventual solution—even though no solution is yet in...
On the campuses of America, fascism lives, although these modern fascists lack the sartorial brilliance of Benito’s mobs. It started with a swastika applied to a bathroom wall at the University of Missouri, and today our black brethren and their leftist white allies control more than three-dozen college campuses, disrupting student life with a very...
“Why do you go to Ioannina”? Pronouncing the town’s name very carefully in four syllables for our benefit, our driver broke the silence of several hours on the road from Athens during which the entire conversation had been limited to driving time and route information. I wanted to say, “?ληθ?ς, δεν ξ?ρω,” (“Truly, I don’t...
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have written a book entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt on August 29, with the headline “Restoring American Exceptionalism.” In the excerpt, Cheney sought to identify his views on foreign policy with those of Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. That...
In the November issue, Justin Raimondo characterizes Rand Paul as weak-kneed, neocon-appeasing, and spineless (“Who Hates Trump?,” Between the Lines). I’m not sure why Mr. Raimondo does this; however, he does make one observation about Donald Trump that I think is important. He states that Trump “may be . . . a demagogue who will...
The following article by Charles G. Mills appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Christian morality requires that the victors in war show mercy to the losers. Mercy is a form of charity, the greatest of the virtues. If we do not show mercy, we should not necessarily expect it...