During the Cold War, outrage at the idea of "moral equivalence" animated the neoconservative critics of non-interventionism. How dare those leftists hold up the Soviet occupation of Hungary and all of Eastern Europe and equate it with, say, the American occupation of...
In a recent Chicago Tribune article, Michael Lev discussed the question that every foreigner in China finds himself asking after his first trip to the market: Which is better – the free market or the supermarket? After taking a stroll through a muddy, crowded...
The Framework Agreement for Peace is due to be signed this week by the government of Macedonia and someone who allegedly represents the Albanian rebels. I say "allegedly" because the rebels are not present at the negotiating table and it is not known whether...
The Kitty Genovese of the Balkans The settlement due to be initialed August 13 by both sides in the Macedonian-Albanian conflict has got to be the strangest "peace agreement" in recent history. "War Looms despite Signing of Macedonia Peace Deal," the Reuters headline...
My last column, "Hiroshima Mon Amour: Why Americans are barbarians," has provoked a storm of protest from the clueless and the humorless – reinforcing my own conviction that Americans, for the most part, are indeed barbarians, without the ability or the desire to...
It is a symptom of the consensus disease in American politics that veteran Justice Department bureaucrat Robert Mueller was confirmed as head of the FBI without a single dissenting vote in the U.S. Senate. Despite a good deal of posturing in the Judiciary Committee,...
The idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled by the orgy of self-congratulation and rationalization that accompanies the dual anniversaries of Harry Truman's decision to atom bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Want...
In the Golden Age of the exploring colonists, the trailblazers were anthropologists, botanists, soldiers and, later, benevolent trading companies. These fine gentlemen categorized and conquered, bringing glory, wisdom and riches back to the motherland, but little...
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...
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...
