Often called “the thinking man’s Billy Graham,” Dr. Henry, along with Harold Ockenga and Graham (his friend from Wheaton College), was one of the architects of the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940’s.  The three concluded that fundamentalism had become too sectarian and anti-intellectual to be able to speak the truth of the Gospel to the neopagan culture that had emerged in the United States following World War II.

Ockenga coined the term neo-evangelicals to describe Protestants who remained committed to the fundamentals of Protestant Christianity but repudiated the cultural isolationism of the fundamentalists.  Using the platform of the mass “crusade”—and, later, the powerful medium of television—Billy Graham quickly became the movement’s figurehead.  Dr. Henry, however, was its chief intellectual force, writing The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947), in which he called for a repudiation of extreme separatism among those who cherish the Gospel.

This was not a mere call to niceness, however.  Fundamentalism, charged Henry, was bereft of a cogent theology and intellectually unprepared to do battle with the forces of modernity.  Holing up in Bible colleges and engaging in increasingly vituperative polemics over relatively less significant doctrinal matters had stultified fundamentalists’ witness before a watching world.  Furthermore, he argued, their dispensational theology (which held, among other things, that, in these, the “last days,” the Church’s primary mission was to guard against apostasy, not to seek unity) not only fostered fundamentalists’ separatist mentality but prohibited them from engaging in any meaningful social action.  This “Christ against culture” mentality (as H. Richard Niebuhr would later term it), in turn, helped to engender hostility toward the Gospel, contributing to the rapid decay of Western civilization on these shores and fulfilling the fundamentalists’ own prophecy of latter-day chaos.  The neo-evangelicals, Henry recalled in a 1996 interview with Christianity Today, needed to bear “the costly burden of creating an evangelical scholarship in a world that’s in rebellion.”

Dr. Henry’s life was devoted to just that.  Chief among his enterprises was the production of his six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority, in which he painstakingly outlined all of the challenges toward biblical inerrancy and authority set forth by liberal and neo-orthodox theologians—and refuted them.  Unlike the fundamentalists, who advocated the barest knowledge of Barth or Tillich, Dr. Henry insisted on intimate knowledge of the spectrum of modernist theology in order that, by contrast, the propositional claims of historic Christianity might be shown to be rational and sound.

Henry aided Ockenga in the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, as a place for inculcating in young evangelical seminarians a deep knowledge of biblical theology.  At Graham’s request, he left his post at Fuller to serve as the founding editor of Christianity Today, which became the standard-bearer for the new evangelicalism and provided an alternative to the liberal Christian Century.  After leaving CT in 1968, he continued to write, lecture, and preach the Gospel, teaching courses at Fuller, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Gordon-Conwell.

Dr. Henry’s erudition and wit were perhaps best illustrated at a program honoring Karl Barth.  When Dr. Henry publicly introduced himself as the editor of Christianity Today, Barth cracked, “Christianity Today, or Christianity Yesterday?”  Henry replied, “Yesterday, today, and forever.”

Sadly, Dr. Henry lived to see evangelicalism develop its own uneasy conscience, as it moved from engaging the dying American culture to embracing it.  Essentially a pandenominational movement, evangelicalism has struggled to establish sturdy theological moorings and, even now, cannot decide whether to allow the advocates of the new “openness theology” within its ranks.  (Last October, the Evangelical Theological Society voted—though not without protest—to allow Clark Pinnock, who teaches that God cannot know the future and is bound, to some extent, by the constraints of time, to retain membership.)  And some of the seminaries in which Dr. Henry invested so much of his life have become theological smorgasbords offering everything from Greek grammar to the slick marketing techniques of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church.

The day before Dr. Henry died, Fuller Theological Seminary was featured in the Los Angeles Times because of its new project, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, to promote mutual understanding with Muslims, which includes restrictions on making “offensive statements” about Islam and prohibits anyone working on the project from proselytizing the followers of Muhammad.  According to the Times, “the project proposes . . . to convene two national conferences of Christian and Muslim scholars to develop parallel peacemaking practices based on the Koran and other Islamic sources.”  Sometimes, as Dr. Henry said decades ago, “it is the theologians who need to be evangelized.”

This article first appeared in the February 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.”  The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the season (formerly St. Stephen’s Day, the Second Day of Christmas) is now “Returns Day,” when consumers swap presents given in love for what they really want.

Everywhere we turn, during Happy Holidays, we are battered by aggressive pitchmen dressed up like Santa and ringing bells for charities other than our churches or showing pictures of starving African children who are being rescued by OXFAM or Save the Children or the even less credible charities whose main effect has been to make matters worse in Third World countries while providing handsome incomes for the global bell-ringers who run them.  (Some of the scams were well documented in Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty.)

Quite apart from the money they waste and the mischief they work upon the world’s poor, nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s) are an international political force that usurps some of the functions of government.  They have also been, since at least the days of the Spanish Civil War, political in the more trivial sense of partisan.  NGO’s, including those that claim to be Christian, are predominantly leftist and have lavished their charity on, for example, the Spanish Communists and anarchists who murdered priests and raped nuns, while denying aid to their victims.  During the Bosnian-Krajina conflict, the Red Cross outdid itself in giving one-sided help to the Muslims, while virtually ignoring the Christian Croats and Serbs.

The political activities of NGO’s are only one symptom of a deeper malaise afflicting Western nations over the past several years: the subversion of the state.  The internal forces undermining the state and diminishing the effectiveness of its government are many: There are ethnic revanchiste groups demanding that American institutions accommodate themselves to the culture and history of Mexicans and Africans, Muslims and Jews, and, in the extreme case, actual surrender of substantial amounts of territory; there are sexual and erotic minorities demanding recognition for the right of women to play football, “marry” other women, and have “gender”-neutral bathrooms in public buildings—it’s so hard to make up one’s mind, they say.  The rainbow coalition of the exotic and perverse plays a minor role, however, compared with the lobbying activities of big money, big labor, and the thousand-and-one other causes whose bribes have blocked the arteries of congressional reform for decades.

Of the foreign threats, the most obvious is the vast network of international agencies that forms a quasiglobal government, from the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to the Hague Tribunal and the labyrinth of U.N. offices monitoring the endless treaties and agreements signed by politicians who are always eager to give away the American store if there is something in it for themselves.  There are also hundreds of pressure groups and misnamed charities, however, that lobby the United Nations and disrupt the economic and moral lives of people around the globe.  The most infamous, perhaps, is George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which is dedicated to the eradication of the last vestiges of Christian Faith and morals on the planet.

The nation-state, for all its flaws and despite the many evils done in its name, is an instrument for human good that is worth defending.  It is, however, only an instrument, not the good itself, and an imperfect one at that.  The state exists, in one important sense, to divert male aggression into socially useful channels, turning schoolyard bullies into warriors and the irritating classroom debater into a statesman.  Essentially male, the state has never done a good job of taking care of the sick and the poor or of educating children.  Yes, when ambitious men turn their hands to these matters, they appear to make brilliant progress at first—setting up agencies, accomplishing goals, projecting five-year plans—but, in the end, the welfare and education of citizens become subordinate to the interests of ambitious men.  This is one of the reasons why most of the tax dollars spent on health, education, and welfare ends up in the pockets of the middle-class bureaucrats and politicians who govern and manage the system.

It was a delusion of classical liberals that a society could function by relying on the laws of the free market and individual competition.  Along the way, they eliminated the sense of noblesse oblige that induced traditional aristocracies to accept responsibility for the poor, and they devastated the Church, which had, for many centuries, played a central role in regulating morality, caring for the poor and the sick, and educating children.  When liberalism died, sometime before World War I, no one thought of looking back across the ruins of the 18th and 19th centuries for some clues as to how to remedy the destruction.  Instead, the reformers turned inevitably to Marx, whose followers (Lenin and Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and the Kennedys) completed the social destruction begun by the liberals.

The only resistance came from the defeated liberals who proclaimed (in the words of Albert J. Nock) “Our enemy, the state”; the enemy, however, has never been the state per se but the modern Jacobin-Marxist state.  Economic freedom and social responsibility are not, in reality, incompatible: They are the indispensable poles of any human social order.  Today, unfortunately, as the state continues to arrogate more and more of the social authority it cannot justly or effectively manage, it is surrendering some of the very responsibilities that justify its existence: the defense of the country; the conduct of foreign policy; the regulation of markets in the interest of fair competition and the national interest.

Economic regulation is increasingly put in the hands of international agencies, and what is left is controlled by the pawns of multinational interests whose relationship to the American people is that of parasite to host.  Even worse, control over our foreign and defense policies has been captured by special ethnic and economic interests.  Big Oil is pushing for the conquest of the Caspian Sea basin; domestic big business wants to punish China, while multinational big business wants to protect its best source of cheap labor; Mexican-Americans, some of whom have citizenship in both countries, are playing an increasingly important role in skewing our policy (including immigration policy) to the south, and the Israel lobby is pushing for nothing less than a massive war in the Middle East that will align Israel and the United States against the entire Islamic world.

The democratic fiction in which our leaders take refuge is that these policies and programs, including the tax money funneled through such destructive agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy, were decided upon by the people’s representatives, but how many of these policies have been the subject of a national debate?  And what effect would such a debate have on congressional votes?  In poll after poll, a majority of Americans have favored curtailing immigration and limiting abortion to cases involving incest, rape, and a threat to the mother’s life, yet the people’s will is never expressed by congressional legislation or executive orders.

The United States, by which I mean the American political class, has decided that moral questions should be left not to the people but to the wise men who rule the state and, where there is disagreement, to the Supreme Court and, ultimately, to international tribunals.  Here, we face the same problems we have experienced in every other moral project undertaken by government.  The leaders in charge, whether Senator Kennedy or Justice Stevens or Carla del Ponte, are driven by their own interests and by agendas set by special interests.  Neither justice nor the interest of any real nation gets a hearing.

In the 19th century, if France conquered German territory or vice versa, the conquered people were subjected to nationalist policies that aimed not at their welfare but at making them more French or German.  That is, as the Germans would say, the way of the world.  Today, the conquered peoples of Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are even worse off: They are run through a process of reconstruction that is aimed at subverting their ethnic, moral, and spiritual identity and turning them all into amoral hedonists, the obedient subjects of the Open Society.

What is the alternative?  Certainly not to restore all social authority to the centralized nation-state, which has made a thorough mess of the welfare and education of the American people.  The traditional alternative was, of course, the Church, and not just the Catholic Church.  In Eastern Europe, the Orthodox clergy were the cultural and moral leaders of their societies, and the same can be said for the early generations of Lutheran and Calvinist pastors, who caressed their congregations with iron hands.  Better to be a sinner in the hands of an angry God than a backslider in Calvin’s Geneva or Knox’s Edinburgh.

In the Middle Ages, the Church was the welfare system and the educational system.  It did not work perfectly, because it was staffed by men, but, even at their worst, these men had one great advantage: They represented the only significant countervailing force against the secular rulers.  Even in England, where the henchmen of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth laid violent hands on the Church’s properties (thus plunging thousands of poor people into absolute want) and turned the monarch into an English pope, much of the social and moral functions of the Church were continued—and for centuries.  The Poor Laws, for example, were administered not by the king’s agents but by the parishes.

By the late 18th century, however, and even before the French Revolution, the political classes were turning against the Church.  In Protestant England, the dominant note (as measured, for example, by fiction) is completely secular by 1800, and the revolutionary governments of the Jacobins in France (including that Jacobin conservateur, Napoleon) and the Piedmontese in Italy stripped the Church of most of Her “secular” responsibilities and confiscated the property that had enabled Her to play so important a role in providing assistance to the poor and educating children.

In the United States, the combination of high tax rates and free public schools spelled doom, not only for the social authority of the churches but for the education and morality of the American people.  As American society went through the degrading process of de-Christianization, a variety of Masonic and quasi-Masonic groups attempted to fill the void, and the generous members of Shrine Temples, as well as the members and brothers of Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, and Moose, worked hard within their communities, feeding the poor and building hospitals.

The lodge brothers meant well, but the proliferation of organizations founded more on Masonic than on Christian principles further undermined the social authority of the Church.  As most of these domestic NGO’s (as we might term them) are in decline, the Christian members of Rotary might seriously consider transferring their time and money to their church communities.  They should also quit wasting their resources on the Red Cross or Médecins sans Frontières and send their money, instead, to their own church’s charitable arm.  Catholic and Presbyterian charities may often waste their money on destructive projects, but there is still a residual sense of Christian charity within the bureaucracy, and church members have a greater opportunity to influence their own religious charities than they would ever have over the gigantic secular corporations that spend all too much of their money on overhead, salaries, and advertising.

So here we are today, a once-and-future Christian people living under a neopagan government that aids and abets Mr. Soros and other enemies of Christendom.  The only choice we are offered is between a federal government that persecutes our religion and offends our morals and an international order that promises to scourge us with scorpions.  To choose the lesser or greater of these two evils is to accept our status as slaves.  Christians have an alternative, at least for the time being, and, if they do not return to their churches, they will have no one but themselves to blame when there are no churches to which to return.

This article first appeared in the February 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

That, however, is clearly not the case with others in the Land of the Great Cakewalk.  “This is a society comprised of [sic] Sunni, Shiites, Kurds, Assyrians, Christians and others,” one member of the “Governing Council,” as the media calls the puppet government set up by Mr. Bush’s viceroys, told the Washington Post.  “The ayatollah is a very important man of the Shiite society . . . but others have an opinion too.  There must be a consensus among all communities.”  Of course, there is no consensus among all communities, which is why there has never been a “democracy” in Iraq in the first place and why gentlemen like Saddam Hussein were able to rule it at all.

Whatever happens in Iraq, the President’s speech to the NED pointed to similar debacles for the apostles of “global democratic revolution” far into the future.  Mr. Bush sang,

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country.  From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle.  We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.  We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty.  And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

At no time, of course, did the President bother to define “democracy” or its relationship to the other sacred cow of his speech, “liberty.”  He spoke of both as more or less indistinguishable, even though both classical political theory as well as the conservative thought of which the President purports to be a more compassionate representative have always distinguished them sharply.  If we are indeed going to embark on the sort of “revolution” Mr. Bush demands, pushing democracy onto non-Western societies at the point of our bayonets, then it would be best if we at least knew what it is we are pushing and what it would look like once we have pushed it.

The high priests of “global democracy,” of course, are the neoconservatives, who have been plotting the war against Iraq for years and who were peddling “global democracy” to President Reagan well before that.  During the Cold War, when not a few of our closest and most dependable allies were distinctly nondemocratic, ranging from such principled statesmen as General Pinochet and Francisco Franco to outright gangsters such as Raphael Trujillo who were only marginal improvements over Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, we simply could not afford to chatter too much about “spreading democracy.”  Serious efforts to promote it by demanding the introduction of such quaint Anglo-American customs as regular elections and letting the opposition out of prison only played into the hands of the communists, who understood how to exploit such superstitions for their own purposes.  Once the Cold War was over, however, the United States enjoyed the leisure to launch its own campaign of political subversion by “democracy” throughout the world, and, today, there is hardly one of our old anticommunist sidekicks, be he statesman or thug, who remains in his saddle.

Whatever democracy as we are engineering it abroad might be, we must look to the neoconservatives to explain it to us.  Thus, in the September issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik (in the article I discussed in this column last month) expatiated on the importance of “democracy” to his neoconservative comrades.  Digressing from his explanation of why anyone who criticizes the neocons must be an antisemite, Mr. Muravchik discussed the question of the relationship between neoconservatism and liberalism:

A final distinction may reflect neoconservatism’s vestigial links with liberalism.  This is the enthusiasm for democracy.  Traditional conservatives are more likely to display an ambivalence toward this form of government, an ambivalence expressed centuries ago by the American founders.  Neoconservatives tend to harbor no such doubts.

Unfortunately, however, Mr. Murav-chik defined democracy no more precisely than Mr. Bush did a month or so later, though his comment remains helpful.  It tells us that neocons disagree with the Framers of the Constitution as well as with today’s traditional conservatives, which is what their paleoconservative critics have been saying for decades and what neoconservatives almost always try to deny, as when they are denouncing paleos as “unpatriotic conservatives” or calling Pat Buchanan a “leftist.”  Nevertheless, given the inadequacies of Mr. Muravchik’s explanations of democracy, we shall have to address the question ourselves.

One reason democracy is difficult to define is that it has come to mean several different things.  First, of course, it means “rule of the people,” and every schoolboy knows that the “people” do not and cannot really and directly rule, so they have to have “representatives” to govern for them, which is what we do in this country and in other democracies such as Great Britain.  But then, democracy is also often used in the sense of a “constitutional democracy,” which is more or less like what the Founding Fathers meant by the term republic and which, in turn, descends from the classical political ideal of the “mixed regime” of Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, and others.  In this sense, it means a government in which the three elements of political society—the One, the Few, and the Many—rule together, either checking one another’s excesses and tendencies to tyranny or contributing their own distinctive virtues to the government and society they establish.  In this sense of the term, a sense with which most paleoconservatives are perfectly comfortable, democracy as the rule of the Many is but one part, balanced by the power of the other two.  By calling the “republic” or “mixed government” by the name of “democracy,” however, those who claim to favor the unchecked rule of the Many are able to promote the erroneous belief that what is really a “republic” is in fact or should become a pure “democracy,” in which aristocratic and monarchic elements are eliminated or unimportant.  That is more or less what has happened to the American Republic, which is why Mr. Muravchik is correct that both the Framers and modern paleoconservatives were and are “ambivalent” about it.  They are “ambivalent” and not outright opposed simply because it usually takes a few minutes to figure out what those chattering about “democracy” actually mean.  Once it becomes clear (if it ever does), there is no ambivalence.  “Democracy” as the unchecked power of the Many is probably the most dangerous, tyrannical, and evil form of government ever imagined, and no paleoconservative advocates or supports it.  Nor, for that matter, do neoconservatives.  Let there be no illusion that such soi-di-sant enthusiasts of “democracy” as Mr. Muravchik and his peers at Commentary harbor any sympathy for the real Rule of the Many in American society, let alone in such societies as that of Iraq.  Not long before the war with Iraq commenced, my old boss at the Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a lifelong expert on Middle East politics, wrote that “There is little realization in Washington that democracy [in Iraq and the Middle East] would make the region even more anti-American than it already is by giving free rein to Islamist fundamentalist extremists.”  Official Washington may not realize this, but you can bet your box cutters the neocons do, whatever “enthusiasm” for democracy they spit up in public.  Nor, of course, do they want anything like the Rule of the Many in the United States, with the specter of what neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer last year called the “white trash vote” actually deciding what happens in Washington.

So if the neoconservatives do not really want “democracy” in the sense of what the Framers and most paleoconservatives call a “republic,” and, if they do not really want “democracy” in the sense of the actual “Rule of the Many,” in what sense exactly do they want or wax enthusiastic for “democracy” at all, and what the hell do they mean when they dangle poor Mr. Bush in front of audiences of grown-ups and make him gabble on about pushing the “global democratic revolution”?

What they mean by “democracy” is nothing more than the system of dominance that came to prevail in the United States and the Western world in the last half of the last century.  That system has nothing to do with elections, opposition parties, civil and political rights, or “liberty,” nor does it have anything to do with political theory, ancient or modern.  “Democracy,” as the neocons and the President and most others who are enthusiastic about it use the word, means the centralized leviathan state under the firm and unqualified control of the managerial bureaucracy and those political forces able to influence it.  It also means a particular kind of social and economic order, one largely stripped of traditional and even natural (sexual and racial) distinctions and identities and traditional moral practices and devoted largely to the mass production of consumer goods and the mass consumption of what is produced, and it requires not only a centralized and increasingly totalitarian bureaucratic state to manage it politically and economically but a sister leviathan to invent and manage a cultural order that explains, accelerates, and animates it.  “Democracy,” in this sense, is largely what neoconservative Ben Wattenberg means by calling the United States today the “first universal nation”—universal, not just because of the mass immigration that has helped erase our cultural and ethnic distinctiveness but because the invented “culture” and economy of Produce and Consume is universal and global and is intended to replace every other real government, economy, and culture on earth.  That is what the “global democratic revolution” means.

Around the world, people tap their feet to American music, watch American movies and television, follow American fashions, are enthralled with American culture, speak American, emulate American economic and political ideas.  We even export political consultants, briefcases chock-full of 30-second commercials.  All this influence is increasing exponentially as the American-driven communications grid spreads everywhere.  It should not be taken lightly; it already won the Cold War for us.

Of course, not one item of the mass-produced garbage of which Mr. Wattenberg is so proud is American at all.  It just happens to have been produced and consumed (at first) in America, and the “Americanization” of the planet that he chirps about is, in fact, not real Americanization but merely the obliteration of the rest of the planet’s civilizations by an apparatus of force and mass manipulation that has long since disengaged itself from any particular nation, race, region, and culture.

It also ought to be clear that “spreading democracy” in this sense is not only entirely possible but entirely likely.  “Democracy” as a balanced and ordered republican system of governance—the historic sense in which most Americans even today continue to use the term—cannot be exported or “spread” at all, because it is indeed culturally unique, the product of a particular race, culture, and historical experience peculiar to Western Europe and North America and not, as Mr. Bush’s speechwriters warbled, “the design of nature” or “the direction of history.”  Attempts to export or even to emulate it very seriously usually end in catastrophes or merely fizzle out and are forgotten, but, since what the neoconservatives really mean by “democracy” is little more than a species of political and cultural imperialism, there is no doubt that it can be successfully exported and that it is being exported, good and hard, to all the places and peoples Mr. Bush and the global democrats have on their hit list.  Like what we are experiencing today in Iraq, it will no doubt be a cakewalk.

This article first appeared in the February 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Charity Begins at Church
by Thomas Fleming

Christian welfare.

VIEWS

George Soros, Postmodern Villain
by Srdja Trifkovic
NGO’s, behold your god.

The Church and NGO’s
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
“Shall I crucify your king?”

NEWS

What Empire?
by Sean Moir
The proliferation of U.S. military bases.

The Tobin Tax
by Cliff Kincaid
The NGO plan to fleece America.

REVIEWS

Shine, Republic
by H.A. Scott Trask

Ruth Sarles: A Story of America First: The Men and Women Who Opposed U.S. Intervention in World War II

plus

Philip Jenkins on Robert J. Stove’s The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims

Greg Kaza on Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec’s The Night of the Barbarians: Memoirs of the Communist Persecution of 
the Slovak Cardinal

Mark G. Brennan on 
William Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 
21st Century

Steven J. Willett on Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why

Karina Rollins on Andrew Hacker’s Mismatch: The Growing 
Gulf Between Women and Men

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From the Tribunal: Truth and Reconciliation
by Brian Kirkpatrick

Letter to the Bishop: Liturgical Flora
by Joe Ecclesia

VITAL SIGNS

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: A Military Encore in North Korea
by Doug Bandow

IMMIGRATION: The Cost of Immigration
by James R. Edwards

HEALTHCARE: Night Moves
by Stephen Moore

COLUMNS

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,
The Last Samurai
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

Veerings (Veere, Zeeland),
Approaching Oblivion (Manhattan)
and Lost Chords (in 4/4 time) by B.R. Strahan

ON THE COVER

Inside illustrations by H. Ward Sterett.