Category: Uncategorized

This year has been set aside by the Powers That Be for a “celebration” of America’s role in World War II: America’s political and cultural elites are looking back on that historical moment, sixty years later, with unabashed nostalgia. It was the necessary prelude to yet another “unipolar moment,” as Charles Krauthammer describes the present … Continue reading “FDR UNMASKED”

The sixtieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II has a special significance for the War Party, and particularly for its liberal-left wing. The veritable storm of memorials, movies, documentaries, books, articles, and ceremonies is designed to inculcate, in the public mind, the official mythology of the … Continue reading “LIVING IN INFAMY”

With the end of the cold war, and the implosion of the old Commie empire, there has been a reversal in polarities on the foreign policy question: the Right, formerly aggressive, militaristic, and rabidly interventionist, has done an about-face, and is now the first to question the rationale behind overseas meddling. The Left, which once … Continue reading “BUSH PLAYS THE RUSSIAN CARD”

George W. Bush was once again a beneficiary of what he has called, in another context, the "soft bigotry of low expectations" during his not-so-grand tour of Europe. To the surprise of nobody except the credulous and those who get their information from late-night comics, he uttered only a few Bushisms and managed to avoid … Continue reading “Making the Subgrand Tour”

In 1989, students were at the forefront of the protests that ended in bloodshed in Tiananmen square. The protests called for democracy and reform, but they actually began with a demand for better conditions on Chinese campuses. Crowded dorms without electricity coinciding with high inflation and rampant corruption brought students and urbanites into the streets. … Continue reading “CHINA’S YOUTH REVOLUTION”

When Umberto Bossi, the leader of Italy’s Northern League – now “Minister of devolution” in the newly-installed government of Silvio Berlusconi – described the European Union (EU) as “the Soviet Union of the West,” Europe’s elites went ballistic: Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel spluttered that Bossi and some of Berlusconi’s other coalition partners “spout values … Continue reading “RED EUROPA”

As President George W. Bush arrived in Europe to the sneers and jeers of the Europeans, coverage of his trip was dominated by a focus on the irrelevant: Star Wars missile defense (we’re going ahead with it, whether they like it or not), America’s position on the anti-technology, anti-Western Kyoto treaty (none of the European … Continue reading “THE CONQUEST OF THE BALKANS”

Just when you were wondering what direction George W. Bush’s foreign policy will be taking, Charles Krauthammer has it all figured out: in his Washington Post column [June 8, 2001] and in the Weekly Standard, the secret doctrine that animates our seemingly random and even haphazard foreign policy – on the surface not all that … Continue reading “THE ‘NEW’ UNILATERALISM”

Various loyal acolytes including CNN, most of the newspapers and the major networks worked diligently to make the killing of Timothy McVeigh into something of a solemn religious event that bolstered the power and dignity of the State and the Empire it fitfully tries to run. But I’m not sure it worked as it might … Continue reading “The State’s Dark Underside”

A CLASSIC WORK REVISITED Albert K. Weinberg’s Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963 [1935]) still repays close and careful reading. Already in 1935, this work brought together most of the themes which would inform the later works of Charles A. Beard as well as the postwar works … Continue reading “The Peculiar U.S. Theory of Self-Defense”