Shambles on the Tigris - a general’s complacency and an abject surrender
In the British military cemetery at Kut on the Tigris River 100 miles south of Baghdad, the tops of the tombstones used to be only just visible as they stuck out of a swamp full of small green frogs. A broken cement cross rose over a reed bed in the middle of the slimy water....
Read MorePARIS – Of the many bridges that span the Seine River, none is more beautiful nor majestic than the Pont Alexandre III. Just south of the splendid Grand Palais, this bridge was named in honor of Russia’s Czar, Alexander III. Completed in 1892, the bridge is a monument to France’s Bel Epoque and represents the...
Read MoreThe myth of the rational actor.
I was in England for Remembrance Sunday this year. The wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph was very moving. I had forgotten how much emotion the British invest in this and how high a proportion is imaginatively keyed to WWI. Remembrance Sunday is defined to be the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, November 11, when the...
Read MoreW.E. Johns's tales about the often derided but intrepid fighter pilot have been unfairly maligned
A tidal wave of commentary on the First World War is about to break as we approach the 100th anniversary of its outbreak. Growing up in the 1950s, it was accounts of the Second World War that dominated my reading. I began to pay real attention to what had happened between 1914 and 1918 only...
Read MoreIt was exactly 95 years ago: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the moment when major hostilities in the charnel house that was World War I ended. In 1919, November 11th officially became “Armistice Day” in the United States. As it happened, though, major hostilities were suspended for...
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The Enduring Folly of the Battle of the Somme
[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...
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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 MoreSince neoconservative journalists, at least to my knowledge, have not been lately slamming the “German connection,” I rejoiced at a feature article in yesterday's New York Post (March 20) going after the “series of German outrages” that helped push us into World War One. A commentary by Thomas A. Reppetto, on German saboteurs during World...
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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...
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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 MoreUnfortunately, 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...
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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,...
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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 MoreAlthough Sid Cundiff in a recent blog praises me as someone who recognizes “shades of grey,” I may be losing that capacity when it comes to certain neoconservative journalists. In an article for the Canadian National Post, which was also published on NRO (November 11, 2007), David Frum bewails the fact that Canadians are not...
Read MoreEven a broken clock is right twice a day. Abe Foxman, the head of the Jewish-Masonic thought police misnamed ADL, easily one of the most repulsive men in American public life, is not as good as a clock, but he can be right once in a while; and this time is now. The US Congress,...
Read MoreWorld War I, which came to an end on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, is today but a faint, sinister memory, recalled only by red poppies and barely noticed Remembrance Day and Veteran's Day ceremonies. Lest we forget... The Western Front, December, 1916 After twelve months of...
Read MoreThis month marks the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, perhaps the great civilizational catastrophe of the past half-millennium. (Principal contender: The collapse of Chinese Imperial civilization following the mid-19th-century encounter with the West.) For anyone raised in Britain, WW1 has a powerful emotional pull. I've written about this myself on this...
Read MoreEurope's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, by David Fromkin
The First World War — "the war that was called Great," as the poet Vernon Scannell said — was the most tremendous event of the modern age, a jagged gaping fault line right across Western history. Even at a distance of ninety years it overwhelms the imagination. Sixty-two million men were mobilized; eight million of...
Read MoreThe following response was written to a detailed review of Brian Bond's Trinity College Lectures dealing with the First World War. The reviewer Ted Rawes prepared his commentary for the twentieth-anniversary issue of the Salisbury Review, in which my rejoinder will appear during the summer. Nothing in my remarks should be interpreted as casting aspersions...
Read MoreNow that Taki has said it, perhaps it should be said again. The Western world could not have done worse, and might have done better, if the Central Powers had triumphed in World War One. The suspicion that I had really meant that when in some articles in the 1970s I had blamed both sides...
Read MoreRemembering Remembrance Day.
Veterans' Day, November 11th, is getting some extra respect this year. Not much mystery about why; and there is the coincidence of that now-ominous number 11 to drive home the significance of this day. (How odd, and what a gift to newspaper cartoonists and the makers of memorabilia, is the resemblance of that number to...
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