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History
Restoring deterrence
Cliff May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. He is a veteran reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor for the New York Times and other publications. Cliff’s current column is “Restoring deterrence” (at FDD, where it is posted with links). Cliff has kindly given us his permission to post his columns on Power Line. He writes at year’s »
Nikki Haley’s Bad Day
Nikki Haley made one of the few real blunders of the GOP primary season when she was asked at a New Hampshire town hall, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” For a Republican, this shouldn’t be a tough question. The Republican Party was founded mostly to oppose slavery. But Haley equivocated, in rather weird fashion: The cause of the deadliest conflict in American history, she said, »
Cheering For Mass Murder
In 1862, Dakota Indians went on a mass murder spree, butchering more than 600 innocent whites, mostly women and children. The Indians murdered babies, beating their brains out and nailing them to trees. They tortured children. They engaged in gang rape on a mass scale. Their rampage was enabled by the fact that many Minnesota men were away, fighting in the Civil War. That slaughter was the worst massacre by »
A Whitaker Chambers Xmas
A friend asked me to recommend a book about Whittaker Chambers as a Christmas gift for her smartly conservative daughter several years ago. Chambers stands at the center of an incredible drama and several fantastic books about him. There is still much to be learned from him and his case. Here I revisit and expand the list with a little help from the eminent historian Harvey Klehr: 1. Witness is »
Robert Wistrich revisited
Robert S. Wistrich was the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of the university’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He may also have been the leading academic authority on anti-Semitism. Witness his histories A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) and From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews and Israel (2012). »
A Collier Reader
RFK Jr. is in the running for president of the United States, the office his father RFK might have won if he had not been assassinated on June 6, 1968. RFK Jr.’s uncle JFK did gain election to the White House before he was shot dead on November 22, 1963. That launched a murder mystery that continues to this day. Readers can get a fresh perspective from Peter Collier, co-author »
Smearing the Hero
Admiral Horatio Nelson is one of the greatest heroes of British history. With the possible exception of Wellington, no one contributed more to winning the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, his greatest victory, holds a place in British history analogous to that of Lincoln at the end of the Civil War. But in recent years, Nelson has come under attack, and activists have urged that statues of him be »
When Edward met Muhammad, take 2
I am grateful to Lloyd Billingsley for his account of Edward Gibbon’s encounter with Muhammad in the pages of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire via Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. This is nothing more than a long footnote to Lloyd’s post for readers who might be unfamiliar with the text of Gibbon’s monument to posterity or interested in a »
Cancel George Washington?
When liberals began their war on public monuments a few years ago, we were told that only statues of Confederate generals would be dismantled. Of course that turned out not to be true. While slavery is the purported justification for these erasures of history, even monuments to Abraham Lincoln have not been immune. Now, New York City–having, apparently, no larger issues to address–is considering tearing down statutes of George Washington, »
Kissinger dies at 100
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at 100. The New York Times obituary by David Sanger is posted here. Sanger’s obituary links to the statement announcing Kissinger’s death by his consulting firm. What a monumental American life he led. Ah, yes, the Times. In 2011 the Times Book Review featured Kissinger’s laudatory review of the new biography of Bismarck by Penn’s Jonathan Steinberg on page one. On my »
A monumental essay
In this morning’s Weekend Beacon email Vic Matus directs the attention of readers to Andrew Roberts’s “monumental essay comparing Hamas with the Nazis. In many ways, Hamas comes out worse.” However, President Biden is doing his best to complicate Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas and impose his “two-state” fantasy on the Israelis despite the glaring absence among Palestinian Arabs of a market for peace. Take Hamas — please: The sheer »
The persistence of Hayek
I was surprised to read what I thought was an exceedingly fair and illuminating review of two new books on Friedrich Hayek in the current (December 7) issue of the New York Review of Books. The review is by the financial historian Edward Chancellor. In “The Naturalist” he takes up Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950, by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, and Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political »
Family Plots: A Kennedy Reader, Part Deux
Sixty years ago this week, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down, but the family’s political odyssey did not end there. JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, who had served as attorney general, made a run for the White House but on June 5, 1968, but Jordanian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK dead. That raised expectations for Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy. In July of 1969, the “boiler »
Subdued JFK?
It is just me, or did the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy pass yesterday with much less commemoration than usual? You’d think an anniversary of this sorry day ending in a zero would have merited special closing segments on the evening network news (NBC Evening News chose instead to run a closing puff piece on a Napa Valley winery), covers or special commemorative editions of the »
America’s first socialist republic
Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship and is one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. His personal site is here. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his subsequent work »
A New State Flag, and What It Means
Minnesota, the North Star State, has long had a state seal and flag that depict a pioneer and an Indian, along with other elements appropriate to the state and its history: The Minnesota flag is simply the seal on a plain background. The seal and flag have come under attack as “racist,” on the ground that the Indian is riding away, having been chased out by settlers. As Bill Walsh »
A Kennedy Reader
“The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys,” reads the Encounter Books profile of The Kennedys: An American Drama, first published in »