Free Republic

ow that we’ve done our cheery “Happy New Year” greetings, it’s time to get more serious. I’m a boomer. In my lifetime, I can’t remember a new year beginning with such dire warnings and grim outlook. This morning, the UK’s The Telegraph reports that Americans bought record numbers of guns last month amid an apparent surge in popularity for weapons as Christmas presents. Another UK paper, Daily Mail, is grimmer still. Dominic Sandbrook writes that a “loss of faith in politicians and democracy could make 2012 the most frightening year in living memory.” Sandbrook goes as far as to compare...

The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.

Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.... For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932. Then as now, few people saw much to mourn in the passing of the old year. It was in 1931 that the Great Depression really took...

Exactly 80 years ago, international capitalism stood on the verge of meltdown. The collapse of the banking system in the summer of 1931 sent shockwaves through Europe, bringing governments to their knees and thousands out onto the streets. In the United States, an increasingly careworn president and his congressional critics fought a bitter battle over government spending and tax rises.

For one group of London expats, next Monday will be particularly special. Following a weekend of Independence Day celebrations, hundreds of Americans are expected to gather in Grosvenor Square to unveil the statue of a man who became the incarnation of the special relationship. Thirty years ago, when Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 40th President of the United States, there were many who mocked him as a washed-up Hollywood has-been. With his country traumatised after Vietnam and Watergate, with inflation soaring, oil prices rocketing and the Middle East in flames, American prestige seemed at its lowest ebb. Yet on Monday,...

Even by the repressive standards of Middle Eastern autocrats, Colonel Gaddafi has long cut a brutally capricious figure. But while nobody who remembers the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher or the appalling slaughter at Lockerbie will mourn Gaddafi’s downfall, this year’s tumultuous events in North Africa could mark a shocking and seismic shift in the balance of power. We are at a hinge moment in world history. As the Arab revolutions have shown, the old certainties are cracking apart. People power: Libyans shout anti-Gaddafi slogans during demonstrations in the town of Derna yesterday. But while many look forward to the...

In many ways, though, what drove Cromwell was his burning religious passion. Around 1630, when his financial woes were at their worst, he went through a dramatic religious conversion, becoming convinced that God had marked him out for eternal salvation. ‘Oh, have I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light,’ he wrote a few years later. ‘I was a chief, the chief of sinners . . . I hated godliness; yet God had mercy upon me. O the riches of His mercy!’ But Cromwell was not merely exceptionally religious. He belonged to a particular religious group — the Puritans —...

With only ten years to go until the much-anticipated 400th-anniversary celebrations of the Pilgrim Fathers, it is no wonder Prime Minister Barack Obama spent much of this week locked in planning meetings with Buckingham Palace. Whether the Whig-Labour coalition will still be going in 2020 is a moot point. Some even wonder whether the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North America will still exist at all. More and more, it seems, critics look back to the failed rebellion of the late 1770s and wonder what might have been. That so few schoolchildren today learn the details of those tumultuous...

They are the luckiest people in history: the richest, most secure and most powerful generation the world has ever seen. While their parents scrimped and sacrificed through the Depression and World War II, they basked in the long boom of an affluent society. ....................................................... Brought up in an age of surging living standards, they were not prepared to wait for jam tomorrow. They wanted it today, tomorrow and forever - and they raised their children in their own image. It was the baby boomers, with their 'me generation' values, who spearheaded the sweeping social changes of the late Sixties and...

The first tank phalanx receives inspection in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing China today celebrated its wealth and rising might with a show of goose-stepping troops, gaudy floats and nuclear-capable missiles in Beijing, 60 years after Mao Zedong proclaimed its embrace of communism. Tiananmen Square became a hi-tech stage to celebrate the birth of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, with President Hu Jintao, wearing a slate grey 'Mao' suit, and the Communist Party leadership watching the...

The bunting is out, the streets have been cleared, the troops are making their final preparations, and even the massive portrait of Mao on the Tiananmen Gate seems to wear a more self-satisfied expression than usual. Today, China will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule with flowers, fireworks, performances and a huge military parade which will celebrate the country's new-found military might. The regime has come an enormously long way in six decades, from a society of peasant collective farms, hidden from the world behind a veil of secrecy, to the world's fastest-growing economy, an industrial and military...

The Media Myth Of Gene McCarthy By Jason Maoz Eugene McCarthy died last week at age 89, and should anyone have been surprised by the highly selective memory demonstrated by many in the media who eulogized the former Minnesota senator best remembered for his 1968 antiwar presidential candidacy? How many Americans, for example, are aware that McCarthy, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, said that U.S. foreign policy — i.e., our being closely aligned with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians — was at least partially responsible for the atrocities? “You let a thing like...

Eugene McCarthy The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95 OVER THE PAST YEAR, as Howard Dean's Children's Crusade emerged from the dorms and classrooms and ecstasy raves of America's colleges, and the young crusaders began tilting their wooden (and very sharp) swords toward the heart of what remains of the Democratic party establishment, some of us turned our thoughts to the first Children's Crusade in American politics--the one led against the party establishment in 1968 by the improbable figure of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Hoary ruminations on McCarthy may well become...

OVER THE PAST YEAR, as Howard Dean's Children's Crusade emerged from the dorms and classrooms and ecstasy raves of America's colleges, and the young crusaders began tilting their wooden (and very sharp) swords toward the heart of what remains of the Democratic party establishment, some of us turned our thoughts to the first Children's Crusade in American politics--the one led against the party establishment in 1968 by the improbable figure of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Hoary ruminations on McCarthy may well become unavoidable in the next few weeks with the appearance of a new biography by a British historian...