Back in 2008 Patrick J. Buchanan published his volume Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War. Although it was reviewed and discussed at the time, perhaps because it dealt with world history on such a vast, scholarly scale, or because the subject matter seemed to be more the province of academic specialists (which Buchanan isn’t), it... Read More

About how America became involved in certain wars, many conspiracy theories have been advanced -- and some have been proved correct. When James K. Polk got his declaration of war as Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil," Rep. Abraham Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where it had happened. And did... Read More

I recently received an unexpected gift from American historian and political theorist Barry Alan Shain, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context, a 600 page collection of documents from the era of the American Revolution, with accompanying commentaries and a long introductory essay, published by Yale University Press. It would be marvelous if Barry’s ambitious... Read More

The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I is upon us. Well we should mourn this cataclysmic event and continue to draw lessons from it. As a former soldier and military historian, I’ve always felt that WWI was the most tragic conflict in modern history: a totally avoidable madness that wrecked Europe’s glittering... Read More

In Part 1 of this article, I provided an account of the Jewish role in the events leading up to World War One, with an emphasis on their influence in the UK and United States. Woodrow Wilson was shown to be the first American president elected with the full backing of the Jewish lobby, and... Read More

[The illustrations in this piece come from Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme with the kind permission of its publisher, W.W. Norton, and the slightly adapted text, which also appears in that book, comes originally from Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story... Read More

In 2006, an inebriated Mel Gibson allegedly said this: “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” There followed the predicable storm of anti-anti-Semitism, ad hominem attacks, and various other slanders against Gibson’s character. But virtually no one asked the question: Is he right? Or rather this: To what degree could he... Read More

A vastly underexplored topic is the British government’s role in greasing the skids for World War I. Until recently it was hard to find scholars who would dispute the culturally comfortable judgment that “authoritarian Germany” unleashed the Great War out of militaristic arrogance. Supposedly the British only got involved after the Germans recklessly violated Belgian... Read More

On August 1, 1914, as dreadful war was breaking out in Europe, the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky paid a visit to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Dr Rudolf Steiner commented as follows upon this meeting – in a 1916 lecture which he gave in Switzerland: At that meeting, he averred that, with just one... Read More

Unfortunately, I can’t resist pointing out minicon stupidities, and the latest example of this problem came to my attention in a recent syndicated column by Rich Lowry. In what is intended to be a discourse on American exceptionalism, Lowry goes through the anti-democratic evils of continental countries and then gets to England, which is awarded... Read More

A frequently heard complaint on the Old Right is that American foreign policy has changed for the worst because of the neoconservative ascendancy in public affairs. Supposedly there was a time when sober white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or other staid types were running Foggy Bottom, or wherever US foreign policy was made. These embodiments of prudence,... Read More

The latest issue of The American Conservative (July 14) includes a provocative symposium on whether World War II should be considered “the good war” and, no less significant, whether Winston Churchill deserves the adulation that the media have accorded him as “man of the century.” The contributions are all well documented and boldly framed, and... Read More