In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas.  My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War Against Christmas Competition that I analyzed in The American Conservative in Christmas 2003.  The Columbus, Ohio, schools banned a performance of Handel’s Messiah, which for the previous nine years had been the highlight of the year at a specialized school for the arts.  The performance would have violated the district’s religious-music policy, which came into being as the result of an ACLU lawsuit.

Share This

The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington.  It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended.  Washington simply shifted focus to the newly independent Russian Federation and continued its Cold War policy of “containment.”  Because of Russia’s size, both geographic and demographic, and her natural resources and nuclear weapons, Washington believed that Russia had to be kept politically and economically weak through containment or she would again emerge as America’s rival and a constraint on U.S. foreign policy.  The Soviet regime had translated containment as strangulation.  Given the nature of the policies pursued by the Bush administration toward Russia over the last seven years, the latter is perhaps a more appropriate term.

Share This