“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement...

On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,” contained this pessimistic prognosis: “This European superstate will not endure, but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies...

Christmas is the preeminent musical holiday. As the conductor remarked at a Cleveland Orchestra Christmas concert I attended some years ago, more music has been written for Christmas than any other holiday. And a variety of other songs have become associated with Christmas, sometimes by quite circuitous routes. The story of how some of the...

“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here . . . and . . . around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'” So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate. Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald...

The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Christmas approaches at a time of increasing turmoil in the world and in our own society. The hope, once widespread, that with the end of the Cold War, we would embark upon an era of peace and tranquility, has long since been proven to...

The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including...

“If you’re in favor of World War III, you have your candidate.” So said Rand Paul, looking directly at Gov. Chris Christie, who had just responded to a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as to whether he would shoot down a Russian plane that violated his no-fly zone in Syria. “Not only would I be...

Paul Ryan hasn’t been Speaker of the House long, but he already knows how to get favorable press in the New York Times. Sunday’s edition of the Times pictured Ryan as fighting what the paper terms “polarizing populism” and the “angry insurgent refrain blasting into the winter primaries.” In contrast to all this anger, Ryan...

“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.” So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise. It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964. Sen. Barry Goldwater...

On December 10 Srdja Trifkovic was interviewed by Mike Church—who presents a nationally syndicated radio talk show—about his article “Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action,” published on this site on December 4. We bring you the transcript of that interview. MC: Let’s talk about your essay that you have published on Chronicles magazine website, “Defeating...

Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...

Antonin Scalia has been a public critic of affirmative action since at least 1979, when the Washington University Law Review published his modest proposal of a “Restorative Justice Handicapping System.” Scalia’s position, simply put, is that the government should not engage in racial discrimination, a position reflected in numerous opinions authored by Scalia. There are...

In Sunday’s first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the vote, and came in first in 6 of 13 regions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district. Despite tremendous and positive publicity from his...

For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...

In the feudal era there were the “three estates”—the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution. But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.” Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill—of the...

With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist...

In his latest RT interview Srdja Trifkovic discusses Russian accusations that Turkey is buying large quantities of oil from the Islamic State, with President Erdogan and his family directly benefiting from the smuggling operation RT: We are going live to Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles magazine. Russia has asked Turkey for open access...

President Obama was in Paris yesterday, when 14 people were murdered in San Bernardino. Obama cited the shooting as illustrating the need for stricter gun control, telling reporters that “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in...

As in a number of cases involving minority criminals, mass media initially appeared reluctant to identify the perpetrators in the San Bernadino shootings that left fourteen people dead, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The Los Angeles Times seemed to play down the agency of the shooters, with a by-now familiar description of gunfire...

Democracy is impossible when millions of Americans actually believe in the sincerity of politicians when they say they care about us. Democracy is not possible when there is no debate, ideas, or principles but only marketing. We used to celebrate “democracy,” thought of, somewhat vaguely, as majority rule and freedom. Now it seems to mean ...

It’s said that writers need two lives: one to experience, one to write about experience.  It occurs to me we actually need three, in order to reread in the third life the books we read in the first and second.  What a difference 30 years make as I take up Eric Voegelin again.  Volume 5...

Ever since human societies became a clear and definite field of inquiry, which for Westerners means ever since Greek antiquity, current wisdom holds that the best of imperfect, nonutopian—i.e., viable—human societies have always been those in which predominated what came to be dubbed a “middle class.” Though commonly used, the content of the term remains...

Why is it that every time Muslims kill a bunch of people and declare it is because they are fulfilling their religion, the government tells us Islam is peaceable and we should import more of it? Nobody really believes that, but politicians say it because they think it is what they should say to sound...

The news keeps getting better for Donald Trump’s campaign for president. The latest: Karl Rove is coordinating attack ads. “The mastermind of George W. Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and 2004, Rove has not signed on with any of the presidential candidates this year, though he says he has dispensed advice to a number who...

C.S. Lewis’s classic children’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the ten bestselling books of all time, standing shoulder to shoulder with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in the elite list of world bestsellers. What is it about the genre of fantasy fiction that makes it so...

That old agitator Mahatma Gandhi certainly knew his chops, and one of his aphorisms surely has resonance when we contemplate the Trump phenomenon: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  This is certainly what has happened in 2015, as Donald Trump defies the Establishment, the pundits,...

Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11. About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...

We’ve only just begun . . . Have you ever wondered what it was like to live through a sweeping cultural revolution?  If you lived in France in late 1789, for instance, and you reviewed the events of the previous 12 months, you would have shaken your head in wonderment at all that had happened. ...

This year’s mid-fall was not pretty in Moscow, where I write this column.  Wind, drizzle, and early frost herald a long winter. It won’t be the winter of Russian discontent, however.  Western sanctions and low oil prices have harmed the economy—it contracted by 4.3 percent in the third quarter—but Putin’s approval rating is consistently well...

A few years back I was spending the weekend with the designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife, and they took me along to dinner at a neighbor’s on Saturday night.  We were in rural Connecticut, and the scene and the house we visited were straight out of Norman Rockwell.  The dinner party consisted...

Returning from the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Confederate symbols, I began thinking of all the things I failed to say in my talk on the campaign of cultural genocide waged against the South.  I had addressed my argument to people who already respected the Southern tradition and quite properly resented the program of demonization and...

I am a longtime reader of Chronicles, and of Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column, as well as a couple of his books, and as such I was taken aback—shocked, actually—by the shrill, even hysterical tone of his column “Humanity Lite” (In Our Time, September).  He says that “Homosexual ‘marriage’ is insanity,” and a little later, “gay...

The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Free speech used to be highly valued, particularly on the nation’s college and university campuses. Academic freedom demanded a respect for a diversity of views. During the Vietnam War years, this writer taught at the University of Maryland. The campus was alive with debates...

There is no single explanation for Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian SU-24 bomber over Syria on November 24. That it was shot over Syria (and did not merely fall inside Syria) is by now a matter of record, confirmed almost immediately by U.S. military sources: The United States believes that the Russian jet...

Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act. That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space, crashed and burned—in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A...

In his latest RT interview Dr. Trifkovic considers the ramifications of Turkey shooting down a Russian war plane over northern Syria on November 24. ? RT: For more reaction let’s go to Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles Magazine. Turkey says it’s taking a tougher stand against Islamic State, and yet it downs a jet of...

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrify, the Islamic State had an extraordinary week. Brussels, capital of the EU and command post of mighty NATO, is still in panic and lockdown. “In Brussels, fear of attack lingers” was Monday’s headline over the Washington Post‘s top story, which read: “Not since Boston came to a...

Regarding my last post on working class support for Trump, a Breitbart report on a Reuters poll tells us something important about America’s state of mind:  According to the Reuters survey, 58 percent Americans say they “don’t identify with what America has become.” While Republicans and Independents are the most likely to agree with this...

In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into...

In noting that 55% of Donald Trump’s supporters are working class whites, the Wall Street Journal states the obvious: Although the Trump phenomenon has surprised nearly everyone, it becomes intelligible against the backdrop of recent American history. For decades, white working-class men have been the most volatile element in the American electorate. Changes in the...

In his latest RT interview Dr. Trifkovic considers the state of play following the announcement by Russia’s FSB security agency that the plane crash over Sinai was a terrorist attack. RT: Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine, is in Belgrade . . . What are you thoughts on the new information about the plane...

In the wake of the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris, French President Francois Hollande has asked for extended emergency powers and has promised an intensified assault on Islamic State in Syria. Hollande has further called on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution on combating terrorism as a basis for forming a “unified” multi-national...

Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal: Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS. This criticism, however, sounds strange coming from a party that controls Congress but has yet to devise its own strategy, or even to...

Is Vladimir Putin the new leader of the free world? All we currently know is that the job seems open, and that Putin has seemingly sent in his resume, showing openness to the idea of an anti-Islamic State alliance with British Prime Minister David Cameron. For contrast, see Barack Obama’s demeanor while talking to the...

Liberalism, as the recent attacks on La Ville Lumière have shown, cannot provide the basis for a sustainable society.  By liberalism, I do not mean Democrats versus Republicans, or the ideology of invite the world versus that of bomb the world.  I mean all of it together. There must be some basis for saying no...