So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir’s film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated… The Great War was a catastrophe for Europe. [...]
Hordes of people are descending on Europe, destroying local cultures and straining infrastructure. They are descending upon picturesque villages and public squares. Locals are moving out. Some might think that this invasion refers to the immigration crisis. However, these new invaders do not stay. Unlike conquering Caesar, they come, they see, and they leave. They [...]
Why doesn’t the United States do what Europe does when it comes to students and college? Why isn’t a college education free? Fall is here. That means many things are on their way down, including bank accounts as parents write tuition checks. Is anything going up? Maybe interest in “free” college. How often are we [...]
The world has been and will continue to be overwhelmingly traditionally religious, whatever intellectuals like Nietzsche might have expected to the contrary, thus confirming those philosophers who contend that all civilizations must be supported by such moral frameworks… San Diego State University recently announced what it called perhaps the largest ever study of American [...]
But all is not well between the nation state and empire: centre and periphery have their rules which at times collide, as witnessed of late. Are there any possible guiding principles that could minimize the force of collision?… In 1887 the optometrist Ludwik Zamenhof published the fruits of his passion for constructing an artificial [...]
Leon Battista Alberti’s work remains a guidebook for those who value the traditions of both classical and post-Renaissance European architecture. To read Alberti today is to discover an essential link in that long and living tradition… Like a signal from the past, Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria—On the Art of Building, completed in [...]
President Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue—the Third World invasion of the West—he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future... “It is cruel. It is immoral. And it [...]
Many Hungarians clearly perceive their way of life and their country as under threat and sense that influential individuals like George Soros would like them fundamentally transformed. This is a fight between nationalists and anti-nationalists… The victory of Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz in the Hungarian elections last month elicited the predictable flurry [...]
In the case of the now-deceased toddler, Alfie Evans, the British government, through its Royal College of Pediatrics and its courts, had legal authority. Alfie had legal “interests,” which the government defined in his case, but he did not have any “rights.” Alfie’s parents only had a right to be heard; they had no substantive rights [...]
How does it happen that in the eyes of workmen, of publicists, and statesmen, abundance should appear a thing to be dreaded, and scarcity advantageous? I propose to trace this illusion to its source… Which is best for man, and for society, abundance or scarcity? What! you exclaim, can that be a question? Has [...]
As revolutionary as they claimed to be, the French Revolutionaries were as old as sin, Edmund Burke assured his readers. “Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences,” he argued, and “you can find nothing at all that is new…” Roughly four-fifths into his spectacular Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke [...]
We should respond to the question of whether the West is worth defending by first asking the more important question of which West it is that we are being asked to defend… There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be [...]
Racial ideology helped Europeans to make sense of their world. Like all ideologies, it did not provide them with a true picture of the world, only one that satisfied them for a time because it provided a workable interpretation of reality… The question of race has long constituted a troublesome aspect of modern Western [...]
It would be difficult to find a more beautiful republican thought in all of Edmund Burke’s writings than this: “A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the [...]