February 23, 2021

The Oligarchs, the Courtiers, and the Others

Some thirty years ago I watched how flabbergasted parents of a Columbia University freshman, a.k.a., “first year,” reacted with incredulity to their daughter’s shrill peroration about the necessity to remove crosses from all public ...

May 3, 2020

Nationalism, America style

Nationalism is what made us great, argues Rich Lowry in The Case for Nationalism: How It Made US Powerful, United and Free (New York: Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2019). Nationalism tends to sport its particular flavor depending on who c...

February 22, 2020

Life Under ISIS

James Verini’s They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate has gifted us with gruelingly realistic war vignettes of the Islamic State from Iraq’s second most populous city.  Mosul is also one of the oldest human se...

February 9, 2020

Putin’s Auschwitz Disinformation

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his righteous anger at the Poles for having failed to celebrate their “liberation” by the Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War. Symbolically, he anchored his narrative on Auschwit...

December 1, 2019

RIP: Vladimir Bukovsky, the Defiant

One of the first things famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky (1942–2019) told me about himself was that his roots were Polish.  After the crushing of the Kościuszko Insurrection of 1794, his ancestor, Pan Bukowski, was taken pris...

November 15, 2018

Poland Celebrated Nationalism as Macron Derided it

The Europeans are not all alike. The impression we get is that they are self-indulgent, self-loathing freeloaders who won’t pay for their own defense while wanting to impose their religion of global warming on the rest of the world. As Trump...

March 12, 2018

The Holy Cross Brigade Got a Bad Rap

On February 18, 2018, in Munich, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki laid a wreath at a military cemetery to honor the fallen soldiers of the Holy Cross Brigade of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne – NSZ), a Polish war...

February 9, 2018

The Holocaust, the Poles, and World War II Memory

A hurricane of recrimination has erupted between Poland and Israel. It all started because the Poles are sick and tired of hearing the scurrilous slander of “Polish concentration camps.” That’s Holocaust revisionism plain and simple...

December 7, 2015

Washington Post writer bungles Poland

The Washington Post has published an opinion piece on Poland that rehashes and amplifies the usual matrix of invective hitherto reserved for Hungary.  We are informed that Poland’s newly elected government, led by anti-Semites, Europhobes,...

December 23, 2014

Cuba Libre

After a sustained effort in clandestine diplomacy, the White House has recognized Cuba. Yet, the Obama administration has failed to explain convincingly why, for Christmas, it has decided to bless a Communist totalitarian dictatorship, second only in...