A NEW CRUSADE TAKES FORM In March 1947, President Harry Truman announced his Doctrine of "containing" communism by giving aid to all nations, anywhere, resisting it. The proposal he set before Congress was an aid package to defeat the Communist-led...
RANDOM THOUGHTS, MOSTLY ON BOMBING
BOMBING: IS THERE ANY AMERICAN CONSCIENCE AT ALL? Every year in August, someone is moved by the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to say this or that about the morality of the first – and only – use, by anyone, of the Americans’ very own patent...
POLITICS AND THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
If the truth is the "first casualty of war," then the honest use of language must be "collateral damage." George Orwell rather famously dealt with some of the details in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1945). My topic is...
MERE “ISOLATIONISM”
One of the "old causes" embraced in this column – perhaps the most important one – is that of the "isolationist" Old Right. As used by the late Murray Rothbard among others, the term Old Right refers to a loose coalition opposed to the...
EMPIRE AS A WAY OF DEATH
OVERVIEW Pericles' Funeral Oration is widely seen as a noble statement of core Western values. Noble, doubtless, but the rest is arguable (Western Civilization having had a bad day or two). Pericles – the Athenian FDR? – saw the Athenian Empire as the great...
SOCIOLOGY, INDO-EUROPEANS, AND THE DESTINY OF THE WARRIORS
In 1987-91 I must have had too much time on my hands. I actually did an informal survey of what was going on British sociology. It wasn't pretty. British sociology was "eat up" with Structural Marxism, that French imposture made up by Louis Althusser...
“WAR POWERS “: VAGUE, UNDEFINED, AND POST-CONSTITUTIONAL?
About a year ago, I took part in a heated debate over U.S. foreign policy on a historians' e-mail list to which I belong. One side, whom I unkindly dubbed "the militarists," took the Goldwater/Buckley/etc. position that Presidents can pretty much do whatever...
CAUSES – LOST AND OTHERWISE
It has been said that "there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes." Whether this is true or not will not detain us here. Matthew Arnold called Oxford University "the home of lost causes," referring in particular, one assumes, to...