Antiwar.com

GLOOM AND DOOM From time to time, writers fret about the decline of the west. Some of them worried about it so prematurely that today they stand dismissed as dreary fellows, who just weren’t up to enjoying the radiant future upon which we have entered. Oswald Spengler, after all, was ponderously Teutonic and pro-Prussian and … Continue reading “Declines, Untergänge, and Other Unpleasant Matters”

America, we are told endlessly, is a “shining city on a hill,” to use the Reaganite phrase. We are a “beacon of democracy,” whose shining light is supposed to inspire the peoples of the world to throw off their shackles and usher in a global golden age. There are even those who say that we … Continue reading “A Mockery of ‘Democracy’”

GONE ABOUT AS FAR AS THEY CAN GO I begin with the WSJ of January 1, 2000. Mr. Thomas Petzinger tells us that everything’s up-to-date in Cyber City. Well, not exactly, and yet his article is not lacking in truth. It is true that communication costs and transaction costs are being reduced. It is true … Continue reading “Futurism, Fukuyama, and Folksong Hermeneutics”

My blood ran cold when I heard the news, right before the new year, that the tiny republic of Montenegro will hold a referendum on the question of independence from Yugoslavia. The NATO-crats are not through with the Balkans, not by a long shot. Mad Madeleine Albright and her claque of militant “humanitarians” will not … Continue reading “The Next Balkan War”

The talks between Israel and Syria in the isolated rural college town of Shepherdstown, WV, watched over by U.S. mother-hen facilitators, might one day be seen as the first step toward a lasting peace between the two countries. It is more likely, however, that they represent yet another premature effort by President Clinton to create … Continue reading “SHEPHERDSTOWN”

The campaign to destroy Patrick J. Buchanan, politically and personally, continues unabated, and is now accelerating as the official presidential campaign season gets underway. The reason for the escalation is because, incredibly, his somewhat quixotic guerrilla campaign to take the White House, as vastly under-funded as it is, has managed to mount a credible challenge … Continue reading “Fulani, Buchanan and the Smear Machine”

Many Western commentators have remarked on the similarity of the post-cold war international landscape to that of 1919, the latest being Norman Podhoretz, who writes in the December 1999 Commentary:”. . . there are two things about which I do feel certain. The first is that we are in a situation resembling the one that … Continue reading “Weimar Russia and the Chechen War”

I checked in a few standard quote books and in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible and was shocked. There is very little in what is widely viewed as our common cultural heritage that describes and celebrates the benefits of peace. That should be one of our tasks in the New Millennium. (Yes, I know, … Continue reading “GIVING PEACE A CHANCE”

POST NO MILLENNIA This whole millennium business is a bit wearing. Leaving aside the open secret that the new millennium begins in 2001, there’s all the Y2K hype and fear-mongering, only some of which comes to us courtesy of caring governments and organs of state security. This has something to do with the “complex of … Continue reading “Time, Millennia, Empires, and Everything”

I don’t want to read too much into it, but I think it is just possible that some of the guardians of the Warfare State at the neo-conservative Weekly Standard (but the two articles I’m discussing are not available online; there is, however, a rather good David Gelernter piece on Rembrandt) are a bit worried … Continue reading “FEAR AND TREMBLING IN THE IMPERIAL CAMP?”