On Afghanistan and Failure
By Tom Weiss
Dan Bolger has been on my mind lately. You probably don’t know him. A quiet professional, he’s not a staple on cable news and only writes the occasional op-ed. In the faculty directory of NC State University, he is listed simply as an “Assistant Teaching Professor.”
I, and many others who served with him in uniform, know him for different reasons. When he commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq, we knew him as the guy who spent more time on the streets of Baghdad than he did in his office.
Murmurations, Part 1
A New Weekly Fiction Serial Begins
By Tom Weiss
This is the start of a new weekly sci-fi serial running on Wednesdays
A NEW LIBERTY ISLAND BOOK: The Odds Are Against Us: An Anthology of Military Fiction
Check out the collection’s introduction by editor Oren Litwin
By Oren Litwin
From a Marine in Vietnam trying to get back home, to Roman soldiers facing an Iceni rebellion; from cynical mercenaries in the harsh Chadian desert, to a Yazidi girl fighting for her freedom; from Soviet conscripts trying to survive war in Afghanistan, to American bomber pilots lost at sea.
Experience the triumph of the human spirit even in the face of death.
Includes eight short stories of military fiction from from skilled authors, some of whom are veterans themselves.
Click here to purchase The Odds Are Against Us: An Anthology of Military Fiction
New Fiction: The Last Pistoleer
By David Churchill Barrow
Rancho de San Miguelito, Chihuahua, Mexico – May 14, 1916 – High Noon: “HALT!” yelled the young cavalry lieutenant, as the threehorsemen riding out of the gated archway veered away from the men he had posted on the southeast side of the hacienda and headed at full-gallop towards him. They had apparently been alerted to make their escape by the man skinning a dead cow in the yard that had run into the ranch house as the soldiers approached, and then came back out again, nonchalantly resuming his work.
“Damnit!” The lieutenant dropped the Springfield rifle he held in his left hand – useless with three riders less than twenty yards away and closing fast – and drew the Colt “Peacemaker” he’d picked up on order in El Paso just before deploying south of the border.
Robespierre’s Radical Liberalism: Reflections on Ruth Scurr’s Fatal Purity
Were Robespierre and the Jacobins Proto-Socialists?
By Shant Eghian
Having recently finished Ruth Scurr’s biography on Robespierre, Fatal Purity, I have had my world turned upside down on the actions of Robespierre and the course of the French Revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the French Revolution was a disaster, a massively overblown response to legitimate grievances against the ancien regime. But Scurr’s biography blew apart many preconceptions that I had about what the French Revolutionaries really wanted, the differences between the various revolutionary factions, and the conditions that lead to the infamous Committee of Public Safety that summarily executed thousands of innocent French citizens.
Like any biography, particularly one about a controversial figure such as Robespierre, Scurr’s biography is subject to different criticisms. She seems to me to try to be objective as possible, but of course, no history is perfect, and is always subject to different interpretations. This being said, the book seems to be generally favorably reviewed, and I am no expert on the French Revolution, so I am not going to review the book. Instead, I am just going to make some general observations about things I learned and what some valuable lessons from Robespierre’s life and role in the French Revolution could be.
I think the most important myth that Scurr’s book shatters is that Robespierre and the Jacobins were some kind of Proto-Socialists. This is a view held by both Robespierre’s admirers and detractors.
“Last Best Hope of Earth,” or Mass Graves and the Gulag?
Some Thoughts on Griff’s Cultural Dispatches from the Alamo…
By David Churchill Barrow
I make it a point to read Griff’s “Cultural Dispatches from the Alamo” as soon as I see them pop up on Liberty Island. (But “from the Alamo,” Griff? Are things that bad? Fannon has been massacred at Goliad, no one is coming, and Santa Anna’s band is striking up El Deguello every day?)
Griff repeatedly and accurately traces the roots of so-called “Progressivism” and its attendant cultural paroxysms back to Marxism, but the divergence of classical liberalism (modern American conservatism) from the left actually took place almost a century before Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto came out. It is found in the vast differences between the American shopkeepers and farmers who stood at Lexington and Concord to “fire the shot heard round the world” and the peasants who stormed the Bastille – their respective causes and their leadership.
Faith In Our Fathers
The FBI and Journalists’ Collusion to Throw the Election Will Corrode America’s Soul
By Roy Griffis
One of the best books you haven’t read is called Flags of our Fathers. Written by James Bradley, the son of Corpsman John Bradley, one of the six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, it is a gripping recounting of the little known fates and history of the men on Mount Suribachi in that most iconic of photographs.
As a boy, young James knew that his father was famous and respected in their little town for something, but since his father would neither talk about the mysterious event and even trained his children to deflect the telephone calls that continually came in asking for interviews, it was not until his father died that the boy learned his father was famous.
What You Believe Can Kill You… Or at Least, Kill Your Soul…
By Roy Griffis
Last Thursday (June 6, 2018) was the 74thanniversary of World War II’s , the Allied invasion of Europe that began the final, inexorable push to get the Nazi foot off the neck of… well, the World.
Google (one of the most valuable companies in the world) decided not to feature a remembrance of that day on the splash page of their search engine. Apparently, it wasn’t important enough to note. On Sunday, June 10, 2018, this was featured on their splash page….
A Man, Measured
The newest installment in an ongoing series of essays on culture
By Roy Griffis
Having a birthday this week lead me to some reflection. Not on myself, of course, since I’m already too hip for the room. But I’d just seen the very decent 12 Strong the weekend before and I’d been contemplating why this enjoyable story of duty, heroism, and general smack-down of some very real, very bad guys had performed rather poorly at the box office after receiving the traditional golden shower from a lot of film critics.
To ask the question is to answer it: because it’s an enjoyable story of duty, heroism, and a general smack-down of some very real, very bad guys.
Justice, Inc.: A Global Freedom Manifesto for Libertarian Hawks
Behind J.P. Medved’s exhilarating new sci-fi thriller novel lies an exciting set of ideas
By David M. Swindle
If “politics is downstream from culture,” as a wise man once said, where does one put new innovations and business breakthroughs? Could technology and entrepreneurship be more important and influential than both culture and politics?
