Free Republic

For forty years critics have attacked Western culture in general and its American brand in particular for an assortment of perceived sins. Minority groups have alleged America was singularly racist. Radical feminist have charged that it is sexist and male-dominated. Gays have complained about homophobia. Hard-core Leftists argued that the United States is exploitive and in thrall to a few elite capitalists. ...First, the charge was that our culture was inordinately dominated by white, heterosexual Christian men, who had systematically oppressed others to maintain their own privilege. Second, the solution was to enact affirmative action, change attitudes, pay fines, create...

Sometimes to understand one’s own era you have to immerse yourself in another. I pick up my copy of Paul Edmonds’ Peacocks and Pagodas as an example. This — though you’ve probably never heard of it — seems the best-regarded book ever written on the people and society of Burma. You may know it as Myanmar. What could be more esoteric, and yet profoundly revealing, about much broader issues? My copy is a first edition from 1924 and in its long life and travels it once belonged to T.N. Jayavelu, Antiquarian Bookseller of Choolai, Madras, India. But now it resides...

For better and worse, Italy has long been the political and cultural laboratory of the Western world. From the glory days of Rome, through the Renaissance and the various nation-states, into the experiment at nation building that is still very much a work in progress, Italy has tried out the best and the worst in us. ‘snip’ Like the rest of us, the Italians have a jihadi problem, and they have it for the usual reason: For a long time they refused to acknowledge the problem existed, and now they are trapped in a political and cultural web of political...