SEDUCING BILL KRISTOL

I've always loved needling Bill Kristol and his neoconservative buddies as lefties in conservative drag: their whole "national greatness" agenda is such a dead giveaway that I often wondered how anyone to the right of, say, John McCain, could possibly be taken in by...

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IS ZIONISM RACISM?

On August 31, the UN will convene a conference on racism that has already caused a storm of controversy here in the United States and abroad. We have only to invoke its formal name, the "World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related...

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Eugen Richter on War and Empire

AN ECHT LIBERAL IN BISMARCKIAN GERMANY Somehow, in my last column I wandered into 19th-century Germany. I wish to dwell there long enough to say something about perhaps the most echt ("genuine") of all late 19th-century German liberals, Eugen Richter. Anyone who has...

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THE BALKANS: WHAT IS BUSH UP TO?

A recent New York Post editorial deplored the deepening US commitment in the Balkans and wondered why the Bush administration wasn't following through on Dubya's campaign promise to get us out of that particular quagmire. Noting the President's pronouncement that the...

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Defining Terms Unilaterally

Our political culture – insofar as it is intelligible to speak of such a concept – seems to have a gift for asking the wrong, mostly irrelevant, questions and then obsessing about them at great and usually unhelpful length. Thus in recent weeks we have heard...

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The Chosen Pariah

Life in the Israel is so difficult – and it's not just because of the hot and humid summer. No, it's the neighbours, they are the real trouble. It's so hard to be the only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by all those bloodthirsty Arab dictatorships....

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I’M GOING TO SERBIA!

The Balkans have long been the focus of the War Party, and now here's your chance to experience the consequences of US intervention firsthand – while learning more about the ancient culture and uniqueness of the region. The Rockford Institute is sponsoring a trip...

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Too Much Face

"Bah," spat my buddy Victor. "Chinese love face too much." It seems the $10 million performance was so unpopular that the organizers were giving away tickets at the end just to fill the 30,000 seats – the cheapest of those being 800 yuan, a...

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European Overtures

It is tempting to have a sneaking admiration for the "anti-globalization" protesters who assembled in Genoa, Italy to protest the leaders of the world's industrialized nations meeting at their G-8 summit over the weekend. They showed up and they took the spotlight...

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THEY FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT

For as long as the cold war lasted, the history of the conservative movement before about 1955 – the history of what I call the Old Right – was for the most part ignored: when they talked about it at all, historians of both the left and the right invariably...

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