Taki's Magazine

Ron Paul Won’t Dance With the Smear Bund

by Justin Raimondo

Continuing my discussion of the howling coming from the neocon-leftist anti-Paul...

Barack’s Hawks

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Having savaged each other for a year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have now formed...

Causes for Hope

by Paul Gottfried

As Tom Piatak discusses over at Chronicles, David Frum hastened to the defense of his...

Afghanistan—Where Empire Goes to Die

by Michael Scheuer

Because U.S. political leaders are ignorant of history, don’t give a hoot about it, or both, Washington’s post-9/11 Afghan adventure was based on a plan for occupation and nation-building that history had long ago shown to be the road to defeat. Adding poignancy to the coming disaster is the last chance Washington was offered on the eve of war by the eminent British historian, and great friend of America, Sir John Keegan. Writing on 14 and 20 September in London’s Daily Telegraph, Sir John told Washington that Afghanistan was unconquerable and that the only viable option for U.S. military action was a punitive expedition—like that of LG Roberts in 1880—to destroy as much of the Taleban and al-Qaeda as possible. In essence, Keegan advised Washington to get into Afghanistan quickly with overpowering force, kill everyone who needed killing without much concern for collateral damage, and then get out more quickly than it entered. This splendid historically informed advice went unheeded, and seven years on America and its allies are on the edge of defeat in Afghanistan.

High Life

Marked Men

by Taki Theodoracopulos

Last week I ventured down to Geneva for a meeting with my banker, a gentleman of the...

The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right

by Paul Gottfried

For years I’ve belabored acquaintances with the observation by stating that the paleoconservatives who had spent their lives butting their heads against the American conservative movement, were becoming less and less useful. Note that I do not excuse myself from this judgment entirely, for what I’m describing is my own generation and those with whom I’ve been associated. Paleoconservatives did an enormous service in the 1980s when they kept the neoconservatives from swallowing up entire the intellectual and political Right. They had performed something roughly analogous to what the Christians in Asturias and Old Castile had done in the eighth and ninth centuries, when they had whittled away at Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula. But unlike the rulers of Castile and Aragon, the paleos never succeeded in getting the needed resources to win back lost ground. Unlike the medieval Spanish monarchs, they also didn’t have the space of several centuries in which to realize their goals.