Years ago, as an angry young man, I was a leading member of a white supremacist organization in my native England. I am no longer young, nor am I angry, and in my book Race with the Devil I have endeavoured to tell the story of my journey from racial hatred to rational love. This [...]
The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation in a television broadcast [...]
Dugway Proving Ground, UT Like an emerald dropped by Sinbad’s roc into the Valley of the Serpents, Camp James Wilkinson, amidst the sand, sparkled from the red sun that was setting in Nevada across the salt flats. The serpents were literal enough, since rattlesnakes crushed by wheels of military trucks lay dead every [...]
If a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, a great prophet is not without honor save in the whole world. Pope Benedict XVI bent under that mantle in 2006 when he spoke in Regensburg. His only miscalculation was to assume that civilization might still be civil enough to respect reason. There [...]
In The Duel, a riveting account of Churchill’s confrontation with Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940, John Lukacs wrote that Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was [...]
Brad Birzer was thinking, the other day, about intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. He asked me if I knew Gerhart Niemeyer’s story. I told him that I do, from Gerhart’s son Paul’s loving and very competent biography of [...]
The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
6/6/84 President Reagan giving speech on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day at Pointe du Hoc Normandy France This morning I had one of those startling moments when time folds back on itself, as I remembered a convergence of events that all took place in this sunny week of June, albeit in different years. [...]
(Part 1 here) . . . . The failure begins when children enter kindergarten. There are four sins of public education: equalitarianism, technicalism, progressivism, and egotism. That leveling spirit, that democratic movement which, although often termed particularly American, really is the spirit of this age throughout the world, is not to be resisted. Although there [...]
In 1944, Kirk published his third academic article, a beautifully transcribed and edited Civil War journal. While the soldier's experiences in the civil conflict are fascinating, more so is Kirk's summation, quoted below. It's worth remembering, Kirk had already spent two years as a conscript in the U.S. Army at the time this edited diary [...]