Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Professor Henry Kamen of Oxford was one of the fiercest detractors of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (currently known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). Then Pope John Paul II allowed him into the Secret Vatican Archives which led to the publication of The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New…

In his synthetically magisterial The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (New York: Basic Books, 2017), Victor Davis Hanson estimates that some 65 million people perished as a result of this apocalyptic conflict. The greatest number of victims, some 15 million, were Chinese. Then there was the Holocaust, a very…

Douglas Smith’s magisterial Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016) is a story of mass hysteria that resulted in a murder most foul. The object of the hysteria was Grigori Rasputin, hypnotically spiritual, if increasingly debauched, Siberian peasant, who weaseled his way into the confidence of…

With the West’s acquiescence, Soviet propaganda continues to dominate the official Russian line on World War II. To liberate means to make free. In the Second World War, Stalin no more liberated anyone than Hitler did. But Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to acknowledge this verity. The lord of the Kremlin periodically regurgitates Soviet propaganda…

A shorter version of this article was published in The American Thinker.  James Verini, They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), has gifted us with gruelingly realistic war vignettes of the Islamic State from Iraq’s “second or third most populous city (depending…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his righteous anger at the Poles for having failed to celebrate their “liberation” by the Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War. Symbolically, he anchored his narrative on Auschwitz. This is not only the most recognizable of all German Nazi death installations, but happens to be…

In The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018), Israel’s leading right-Zionist intellectual Yoram Hazony has taken a forerunner of modern liberalism, John Locke (1632-1704), to task for the latter’s insufficiently commodious idea of a social contract. Individual freedom and voluntarism that aim to guarantee prosperity and private property are not the only formula for…

Fr. Paul Lester Stenhouse, MSC (1935–2019), passed away of cancer recently. I initially learned about him through the good offices of his dear friend, a contributor to his publications and fellow Aussie, Wanda Skowronska, who was kind enough to share some stories about him. She also encouraged our cooperation. Fr. Stenhouse was truly a Christian universalist…

Why should we continue to talk about the Katyn Forest massacre of spring 1940, when over 25,000 Polish POW officers and other prisoners were slaughtered on the orders of Joseph Stalin? Indeed, why talk about the past at all? It is because nothing has changed: Historia magistra vita est. This includes the utility of Katyn to…

An abbreviated version of this article was published by American Thinker. One of the first things famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky (1942-2019) told me about himself was that his roots were Polish. After the crushing of the Kościuszko Insurrection of 1794, his ancestor, Pan Bukowski, was taken prisoner by the Muscovites and shipped off to…