Article Archive
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The Neocons and Charles Maurras
Is there a useful comparison to be drawn between Maurras, a monarchist and religious skeptic who enlisted French Catholicism for political purposes, and the Straussian boosters of American global democracy? Are the Straussians, who appeal to a certain notion of transcendence in order to teach “democratic” virtue and to fuel foreign military incursions, replicating the exploitation of piety that French nationalists had committed a century earlier? The global democratic Straussians wish us to believe that Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, Aquinas, etc. , were all precursors of Abraham Lincoln, as read through the lenses of Harry Jaffa. [Read More]
Two New Myth-Busting Books
I’ve just finished two books written by promising young scholars, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution" by Kevin A. C. Gutzman and "33 Questions about American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Refreshingly, neither of the authors seems interested in sounding like the staff of the Republican National Committee. [Read More]
Is Europe Waking Up?
A demonstration against the “Islamicization of Europe” scheduled to take place in Brussels on September 11, 2007 and put together by the umbrella organization Pax Europa has been prohibited by the socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans. The intended demonstration, which was supposed to march by the headquarters of the European Union, has been declared to be a hostile gesture against the city’s growing Muslim population. [Read More]
Firing Foxman
Judging by the leftist pattern of American Jewish voting and by Jewish responses to Gallup polling on social issues, one would have to conclude that Abe Foxman’s nuttiness is a widely shared phenomenon among American Jews. It also resonates well among liberal Christians and non-Jewish secularists here and in Europe. With few exceptions, every time I pick up a Western European newspaper, I have the impression that the editorial page was produced by a clone of the ADL’s National Director. Foxman stands in the cultural Marxist mainstream and as such, bears a stunning resemblance to the types of self-hating European and American journalists and intellectuals I have written about... [Read More]
Addicted to Guilt
A Fourth of July Washington Post-syndicated column by W’s former speechwriter and the author of his Second Inaugural, Michael Gerson, struck so many Republican, neoconservative, and not least of all Evangelical themes that his words should be archived as illustrating self-induced illusion. The column is decorated (or at least it was in the New York Post) with a picture of Martin Luther King, who is quoted to the effect that the US stands for a “universal right” to equality. According to Gerson, who cites the left-liberal journalist Nicholas Lemann, our government reneged on its founding purpose not only by protecting racial slavery but also by not pushing on the South Reconstruction hard enough after the Civil War. But we can apparently redeem ourselves, by making democracy available to the entire planet. [Read More]
Neocons and the Left: Know Your Enemies
To whatever extent there is an establishment conservative voice in the United States and in much of Western Europe, it sounds unmistakably neoconservative. Whether the topic is spreading “human rights,” favoring a “democratic capitalist welfare state,” opposing xenophobia and anti-immigrationists from the standpoint of “universal democratic values,” the side represented by the media that is not officially leftist can be characterized as “neoconservative.” Those on the right of this allowable opposition are targeted as “extremists.” [Read More]
The German Disease
As the former German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has stated multiple times, “Auschwitz is the founding myth of our German democracy.” And in line with this morbid obsession, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in the international press is deceptively characterized as a “conservative,” wants to use Germany’s succession to the EU’s presidency to impose on its members the speech controls that are the proud accomplishment of her country’s managed democracy. (Pleading their nation’s shame as an aggressor people, German politicians will not allow their countrymen to vote on the EU Constitution that would surrender what remains of German national sovereignty to the Union.) In Merkel’s peculiar understanding of “democracy” as a way of life, any European “trivializing” the Holocaust will have to face criminal charges before an international tribunal. For those who celebrate our success in bringing the defeated Germans a “democratic political culture,” it may be necessary to point out the difference between citizens of a republic and PC laboratory mice. [Read More]
Wolfe’s Howl
If Russell Kirk is guilty of reading too much of European conservatism into the American founding, Allan Wolfe goes even farther in the other direction, by assuming that the American Constitution from the beginning prepared the way for the kind of left-liberal regime that he fancies. But the alternative for Wolfe may be too unsettling to think about, a country of disgruntled gentiles sitting around in drugstores in places like Mecosta, Michigan and venting their “bigotry” and “small-mindedness.” Thank Heavens for broadminded, worldly intellectuals like Wolfe occupying endowed chairs at Boston University! [Read More]
“Islamophobia” and “Anti-Fascist” Frauds
A recent exchange held on WDAY’s Hot Talk with Scott Hennan between Serb journalist and author of Sword of the Prophet, Srdja Trifkovic and best-selling neocon celebrity Dinesh D’Souza underscores the silliness of what today passes for high-toned political discussion. In a widely discussed book, The Enemy Within (Doubleday, January 2007), D’Souza, a John M. Olin Scholar at American Enterprise Institute,” contends that orthodox Islam and “American conservatism” (whatever that may mean at the present moment) are eminently compatible. Traditional Muslims, we are told, object not to Christianity or to traditional Western values but to American pop culture. But Trifkovic, a multilingual critic who seems to know some Arabic and a great deal of Near Eastern history, revealed in less than a minute of questioning that D’Souza had no idea of what was in the Koran. He also reproduced the radio conversation (which I actually listened to) for the May issue of Chronicles. Any fair judge would have to conclude with Trifkovic that “D’Souza has not studied the Koran, and that he may never have even held one in his hand.” [Read More]
Puritans or Habsburgs
Among its idiosyncrasies, the neocon imperial idea, which according to Gamble is especially tempting for Protestant Americans, assumes the inherent depravity of the Habsburg Empire, a regime that that paradigmatic neocon hero Woodrow Wilson had hated as authoritarian, and Teutonic. This hatred came to the fore in Wilson’s letter sent to the Empire’s “subject nationalities” on June 24, 1918, in which the American president looked forward to the “dismemberment” and “partition” of a structure that did not deserve to exist: “The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was organized on the principle of conquest and not on the principle of self-determination.” Moreover, by fighting with the German Empire, it added insult to injury by becoming “vassals of the Hohenzollerns.” Needless to say, the “peace treaty” that Wilson signed on to denied “self-determination” to all the historical nationalities that had bet on the wrong horse in the War. It also typically placed those minorities, including my Central European relatives, under far more oppressive regimes than those nationalities who had lived under the Empire. [Read More]