Free Republic

Fascism. It’s the ultimate political epithet, the atomic blast that ends calm and measured debate. This makes those who seek to be reasonable and persuasive understandably reluctant to use the word… and those who aren’t interested in either reason or persuasion eager to hurl it at their opponents. There is nothing surprising about the visceral emotions conjured by the mention of its name. The history of fascism is written in the blood of innocents, on a scale that challenges the limits of human imagination. Our natural repulsion from the concept of fascism, coupled with the way it has been cheapened...

A highly influential Shi'a religious leader, with whom Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly consults, apparently told followers last month that coercion by means of rape, torture and drugs is acceptable against all opponents of the Islamic regime. ... Warning: The imam's question-and-answer session, partially reproduced here, contains disturbing descriptions of the sanctioned brutality. According to Iranian pro-democracy sources, the gathered crowd heard from Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi and Ahmadinejad himself regarding the issue... Mesbah-Yazdi is considered Ahmadinejad's personal spiritual guide. ...The ayatollah gave the identical answer when asked about confessions obtained through drugging the prisoner with opiates or addictive substances....

This Sunday Telegraph column generated a lot of mail a decade ago, and we've had a lot of requests for it over the years. I regard the "right" to defend one's property not merely as a right but as a moral obligation. Remove it and an awful lot of civic life crumbles in its wake, as it has in Britain: Let's take a hypothetical situation: I'm up late working on a Sunday Telegraph column at home. I hear a noise downstairs and cautiously investigate. It's a fellow I've never seen before, hunched over my stereo. What do I do? I...

A man arraigned in Associate Circuit Court today on charges of felony assault and burglary is accused of biting off a love rival's left ear lobe, said Cpl. Adam Glueck, spokesman for the Cape Girardeau Police Department. Christopher A. Beal, 23, of 909 Hackberry St. Apt. 210, appeared before Associate Circuit Judge Gary Kamp for initial arraignment. Shortly before midnight Tuesday, officers responding to a report of a possible stabbing arrived at the Hackberry Apartments and observed Beal chasing the victim around some cars in the apartment complex parking lot, Glueck said. According to statements from Beal and his victim,...

A 26-year old Greek woman has become an overnight national hero after setting fire to the genitals of a 23-year old drunken Briton who allegedly tried to sexually assault her in a crowded bar. The unidentified woman from the fiercely proud island of Crete won herself even more praise by doing the right legal thing – turning herself over to police and the courts to be put on trial for what she claimed was her "right to self-defence". ..According to a police statement issued last night the incident occurred at a club in the notorious coastal resort of Malia, which...

Once the lure of communism seduced the idealistic. Today’s environmental ideologues risk becoming just as dangerous Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls. Blunt talks of “the religious quality” of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in today’s developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green. His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx....

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history,...

The posing pouches and rippling muscles are back, but Bryony Gordon wonders why men - including Peter André - are so keen to objectify themselves If you want a laugh – and goodness knows, we could probably all do with one – may I suggest that you head straight to the website of the Chippendales? Yes, the Chippendales, those oiled hunks who gyrated and stripped their way into the hearts and minds of housewives across the globe during the Eighties, are back, back, back. Turns out, they never really went away. They've just been quietly gyrating on chairs in a...

... Every half-millennium or so an event occurs in our history that changes the basis of society. The Romans come, the Romans go. The Normans come; and between their arrival in 1066 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 there is one seismic event after which society sets off (after a false start or two) on an entirely new course: the Reformation in England. When the Convocation of Canterbury of the Church in England agreed in March 1531 to accede to Henry's demands about church governance that included the clergy's recognition of him as head of the English...

... (After discussing the fame and glory the Founders earned for themselves.) But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it...

Not so long ago, there were heroes on Wall Street. Wall Street, or what remains of it, has dealt a catastrophic blow to its reputation in the past eight months of bonuses, bailouts and bankruptcies. What its current leaders, and the young who are lucky enough to be entering business, have to do now is begin rescuing and restoring that reputation. This will, in fact, be the great work of a generation of American business leaders. More is at stake than their standing. At stake is the standing of a free-market system that has flourished since America's founding and made...

Summary Each cause of global warming heats up the atmosphere in a distinctive pattern - its signature. According to IPPC climate theory, the signature of carbon emissions and the signature of warming due to all causes during the recent global warming both include a prominent hotspot at about 10 – 12 km in the air over the tropics. But the observed warming pattern during the recent global warming contains no trace of any such hotspot. Therefore: 1. IPCC climate theory is fundamentally wrong. 2. To the extent that IPCC climate theory is correct in predicting a hotspot due to extra...

Why the latest assault on Bush antiterror strategy could make us less safe. Suppose al Qaeda branched out from crashing airliners into American cities. Using small arms, explosives, or biological, chemical or nuclear weapons they could seize control of apartment buildings, stadiums, ships, trains or buses. As in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, texting and mobile email would make it easy to coordinate simultaneous assaults in a single city. After 9/11, we had a responsibility to consider all possible threats.

A retired space cowboy takes on a neutered age. If you’re a man of a certain age, it’s impossible not to harbor affection for actor Dirk Benedict. While he is a veteran of a number of serious films and impressive stage productions, he’s best known for two roles — Lt. Starbuck, the roguish, cigar-chomping space cowboy always ready with a quip on the original Battlestar Galactica; and Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck on The A-Team — not coincidentally, a roguish, quip-ready soldier-of-fortune who had one arm wrapped around the waist of a different babe every week. Neither show lasted very long,...

A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was "distasteful". The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of "the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences". Students were urged to "Party like it's 1899" and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies and 19th century Hong Kong. But anti-fascist groups said the theme was "distasteful and insensitive" because of the British Empire's historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation. The ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the...

The institutions run by our elites aren’t trustworthy, so why should we put any faith in them? Most historians agree that earthquakes, droughts, or barbarians did not unravel classical Athens or imperial Rome. More likely the social contract between the elite and the more ordinary citizens finally began breaking apart—and with it the trust necessary for a society’s collective investment and the payment of taxes. Then civilization itself begins to unwind. Something like that has been occurring lately because of the actions on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. The former “masters of the universe” who ran Wall Street took...

In September 1862, Otto von Bismarck, the new prime minister of Prussia, went to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies to confront the Budget Committee. His face still sunburned from a trip to the south of France, he urged the lawmakers not to waste time in political debate while Germany remained ununited. “It is not to Prussia’s liberalism that Germany looks,” he said, “but to its power. . . . It is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by Eisen und...

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a little about Dick Cheney’s image. This stems from a lunch a group of us had with him last week (and I wrote about it here). Cheney is an unusual person: very sensible, very measured, very trustworthy. No wonder he has been entrusted with so many sensitive government positions. He is a calm person, and he has a calming effect on others. He is the kind of man you want in public service — party or partisanship quite aside. In the course of our lunch, he said that the recent Democratic victory...

Several smart observers have described the root cause of the ongoing battle between Israel and Hamas in the exact same phrase: "irreconcilable differences." America and Europe are warned not to press for pointless negotiations, because the parties are irreconcilable. Israel and the Palestinians both want the same piece of land and can't both have it; Islam and Western democracy or Islam and Zionism can only be antagonists. Warning the world against pressuring Israel is timely and important, as governments everywhere respond to Israeli self-defense by celebrating the usual worldwide Hypocrisy-Fest (complete with street demonstrations, U.N. resolutions, and the customary savage...

A Gore victory in November would, of course, have many consequences for the nation and the world. It would also, however, have a larger historical meaning—in the sense that people looking back on it a hundred years hence might say: "Ah, that represented ..." What? What larger trend would be embodied in a Gore victory? We have all internalized the consequences of past elections. Andy Jackson—the dethroning of the old coastal gentry elites; Teddy Roosevelt—victory of Progressivism; FDR—dawn of the welfare state; and so on. We know roughly what a Gore victory would mean in particulars; what would it be...