Andrzej Duda Will Poland’s new President, Andrzej Duda, come to a practical appreciation of the fact that the Western enemies of the “dictatorship” of Vladimir Putin are screaming with equal alarm about the “fascism” overtaking Hungary and the “anti-democratic” character of the vision of the dearly-departed former Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, of [...]
The Russian philosopher S.L. Frank is not someone whose name comes up often among conservative cultural commentators anymore–if it ever enjoyed such currency. Indeed, I suspect that even when his works were more current, he was overshadowed in the Anglophone world by other more prominent contemporaries, such as Nicholas Berdyaev. That’s a shame. In [...]
This article was first published by Sputnik News/The Voice of Russia in December 2014 in the Polish language. It is a practical foreign policy reflection on Polish-Russian relations and a blueprint for their improvement. Americans often consider foreign conflicts as impossible to mend without American intervention (be it diplomatic or military). This thinking leads to many [...]
All around us, we see the horrible fires of the global democratic revolution. The flames from this blaze have scorched Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. A trait common to all these revolutionary wars is democratic rhetoric, lethal action, and the collapse of imperfect regimes in favor of perfect chaos. The “Color [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The conservative, by definition, is an opponent of utopia and utopianism. His bedrock is tradition. His thought, though certainly abstract by the practical standards of capitalist democracy, is rooted in history and recognizes that even if it were desirable to lift one foot forward, in order to do it, our second foot must first [...]
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 [...]
“The patriotic Englishman is largely unconscious that about three quarters of his native prejudices were taught to him by a German spy,” recounts G.K. Chesterton in his introduction to Charles Sarolea’s Letters from Poland. Along the same train of thought, in Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss notes that never had a regime suffered [...]
Russell Kirk did more than any American in the twentieth century to revive and refine British conservative thought and make it relevent to the political challenges facing both the United States of America and the world. Dr. Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot is the foundational work for contemporary conservative thought in [...]
“It was with great pride that Leon Gruca proclaimed that morning to Martyniak that following a long night of reflection, he had decided that the two of them would go and sign a loan for twenty five Polish zloties a piece towards the Polish State…” [Mietek:] “You see, they’re doing a good job at [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]