Wordsworth sang* to Milton, “thou shouldst be living at this hour,” and the same goes for G. K. Chesterton, the connoisseur of paradox. Weighing nearly four-hundred pounds at the end, today he would float like a dirigible over modern foreign affairs; plucking choice paradoxes at every hand and drawing as many lessons from our globalised Divine [...]
I was brought up to believe in exceptionalism. To be precise, I was brought up to believe that there are only three types of people in the world: there are Englishmen, those who would like to be Englishmen, and those who don’t know any better. Such a formulation, no doubt shocking to the sensibilities of [...]
In the music of Shostakovich, the two sides of the twentieth century are revealed—the absurd and the tragic. It is impossible to tell in his works whether the absurd is the tragic or the tragic is the absurd, just as the events of The Century made it impossible to distinguish between the two. Whatever hope [...]
“If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” said Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the Reagan White House. Among the dispositions shared by Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge was a determination to stay out [...]
Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government. Last month, the House passed such a resolution 411-10. As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House Resolution 758 is so “full of war propaganda that it [...]
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed to be permanent fixtures of the political landscape of Europe after 1961. But to everyone’s surprise, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989. This stunning event triggered a chain reaction throughout Eastern Europe, accelerating a process that had begun a decade earlier. Using a little poetic [...]
In a large part of the Western mindset, Russian culture only really existed in the nineteenth century. Before Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy and before the horrific purges of the Soviets, Russia was, we are led to believe, a somewhat backwards land that nevertheless managed to produce great works of art. Undoubtably, Russia in the nineteenth century [...]
It was once observed, long ago, that “opinion governs the world.” And while that may be overstating things, it is true that the West’s opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin has wholly governed its policy throughout the ongoing Ukrainian crisis by allowing personal animus and a distaste for his brand of atavistic nationalist politics to [...]
What is most striking about the Ukraine crisis is how much the Washington debate lacks any sense of how the issue might look to other interested parties, particularly Russia. Putin is analysed of course—is he, as Hillary Clinton suggested, following Hitler’s playbook? Consider an analogy to get a sense of how Russia might perceive America’s [...]
In his Kremlin defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond. Crimea, said Putin, “is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the [...]
Episcopal priest, professional baseball player, college instructor, lecturer, and prolific writer, Albert Jay Nock (1872-1945) had a varied life and a profound effect on the nascent American conservative movement in the decades preceding World War II. Largely known by libertarians as the first editor of The Freeman and the author of Our Enemy, the State [...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was many things. A fearless champion of freedom in an age of totalitarianism. A fearless critic of Communism. A fearless critic of the modern hedonistic West. A great historian. A great novelist. A Nobel Prize winner. A prophet. Regarding the last of these, Solzhenitsyn prophesied, at the height of the Soviet Union’s power, [...]
Julias Evola’s Passport Photo, 1940 Defining “Right-wing” is not an easy task. While Russell Kirk’s definition of conservatism is the rejection of ideology (which is materialist and, as Bradley J. Birzer puts it in “Russell Kirk on the Errors of Ideology,” falsely “promises mankind an earthly paradise”), the basic and general catch-all of [...]
In the last stanza of “The Battle of Blenheim,” Robert Southey writes: “But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why, that I cannot tell,” said he; “But ’twas a famous victory.” What did it really matter? The poet was asking of the triumph of the Duke of Marlborough — “Who this [...]