Book Review by Al'Qasr Hussein.

This is some truth-telling for those clear-headed enough to fathom the proposition that a devout Muslim is in fact a terrorist.

Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism by James Burnham. Hardcover: 320 pages.

Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism by James Burnham is a trenchant critique of modern secular liberalism, which Burnham characterizes as the ideology of Western suicide. "Liberalism," observes Burnham, "is the ideology of Western suicide." Why? Liberalism presents a false anthropology of human nature, seeing mankind as essentially good, but in need of liberation from social problems rooted in tradition, prejudice and ignorance. Liberalism appealed to the politics of guilt. Its ideological nostrums of egalitarianism and social justice meant the suicide of the West, he postulated, and the inevitable contraction of Western culture, power and social stability.

Don Vito Corleone, Friendship and the American Regime by Paul Rahe

The opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's classic film The Godfather is justly famous, but unjustly neglected for what is tell us about the kind of political society in which we live. Connie, the daughter of Mafia Don Vito Corleone, has just been married, and a celebration is taking place in the ample backyard of her parents' Long Island home. Inside the home, her father is doing business, conferring with a series of visitors who have come to ask for his help. They know that a Sicilian can deny no one's request on the day his daughter is married. In any case, Connie's father is known to be a generous man. As Mario Puzo puts it in the book that inspired the film:

Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe by Martin Merideth. (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2002.) Hardcover: 243 pages. Amazon Price: Available Used.

Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe chronicles the tyrannical rule of Robert Mugabe, from his heyday as a revolutionary guerilla who was captured an imprisoned to a victorious leader in what was initially to be a coalition government in the 1970's with Ian Smith's Rhodesian white colonials, the various black factions, and Mugabe's ZANU party in unity. Recently he said he could be a "black Hitler ten-fold" in a political speech. By the early 1980's, Mugabe eschewed the idea of a coalition government, opting instead for total consolidation of rule by his party. Mugabe through Machiavellian manipulations managed to scapegoat the political opposition in the public eye through deceptive propaganda. Thereafter, he justified bloody purges ostensibly for the purposes of stifling his contrived threat of a coup d'etat. Mugabe's violence obviously only served to swell political opposition—both white and black. Browbeaten white farmers gradually dropped the conciliatory posturing as their farms were confiscated and family members were murdered.

Calvinism and Politics by Abraham Kuyper

MY THIRD LECTURE leaves the sanctuary of religion and enters upon the domain of the State–the first transition from the sacred circle to the secular field of human life. Only now therefore we proceed, summarily and in principle, to combat the unhistorical suggestion that Calvinism represents an exclusively ecclesiastical and dogmatic movement.

Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist (Library of Modern Thinkers by Brad Lowell Stone. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000.) Hardcover: 170 pages. $24.95.

Book Review by Ryan Setliff

Robert Nisbet : Communitarian Traditionalist is a biographical sketch about the life and essentially the ideas of this influential twentieth-century sociologist and social thinker. Sociology has long been the mainstay of statist liberals and radical collectivists, and Nisbet is definitely out of touch with the quixotic or authoritarian mindset of most sociologists. Brad Lowell Stone's research is highly recommended and an excellent overview of Nisbet's social thinking. It is prudent to read Nisbet's books in tandem with Stone's biography. Stone points out some of Nisbet's influences, which are rather fascinating. Nisbet was weaned on the writings of Southern Agrarians like Crowe, Ransom and Tate who penned I'll Take My Stand in the 1930s. Nisbet also gain insight from the late conservative luminary Russell Kirk, having read his book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot in 1953 the same year he wrote The Quest for Community. Since his assent in the 1950s, the late Robert Nisbet has gained recognition from both the Left and Right. Contemporaneously, his appeal is primarily with those on the Right whether traditionalist or libertarians. Nisbet's sociological thinking is aloof from the statist sociologists who often fail to distinguish between state and community. Essentially Nisbet made a dichotomy between monism and pluralism. The thought of Plato, Hobbes, Compte, Rousseau and Marx embodied monism, while Aristotle, Burke, and De Tocqueville represented the pluralist camp.

Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective by John Cobin, (Greenville, SC: Alertness Books, 2003), Softcover: 244 pages. $10.95.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Bible and Government: Towards A Scriptural Understanding of Civil Government

Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective is written by a Christian public policy researcher. The author John Cobin essentially espouses a Jeffersonian libertarian political philosophy while adhering to biblical norms for proper social perspective. Recognizing the tyranny of good intentions and how public policy has gone awry, Cobin looks to alternatives to more state solutions for solving social problems. John Cobin who is presently an Investment Adviser has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University and a Masters in Economics from UC Santa Barbara. Well-versed in the Austrian and Public Choice schools of economic thought, Cobin offers an exceptional Christian perspective on law, government, authority, and public policy considerations. He esteems the vitality of the free-market, private property and constitutionally limited government to civil society. In modern times, the state has tediously concentrated a vast array of power, welding and abusing the power flamboyantly. The state has increasingly displaced and marginalized the traditional non-state institutions of family, church, neighborhood, and voluntary civil associations. Too often, both neoconservatives and statist liberals make the mistake of confusing the state with society (just like the Greeks of antiquity did.) So, Cobin offers a new paradigm to the worn-out status quo which seems posed to evolve into some sort of totalitarian democracy. One of the most prudent public policy considerations often entails not having a "public policy" on particular issue to begin with. By devolving responsibility back to the traditional institutions that have been encroached upon by the State, better solutions to social problems may be mete out. In an age of belligerent statism when more government is always posed as the solution to the various societal ills, Cobin is one of the few prudent policy gurus keen enough to pose civil society and market solutions.

Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America's Culture War by Samuel Francis, Peter B. Gemma, ed., (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2006), 361 pages with index

Review by Ryan Setliff

Samuel Francis—Culture Warrior for the West

The late Samuel Francis gained renown for his trenchant pen, as one of the most provocative paleoconservative writers of his generation. He possessed the trenchant pen of H.L. Mencken and the political predilection Patrick J. Buchanan. In fact, Buchanan has written the introduction to the book. Always caring more about the truth than political correctness, Samuel Francis stuck to his guns, and lost his journalist job with the Washington Times over his politically-incorrect positions on immigration and racial issues in the United States. Francis was the bête noire to the establishment. He kindled the ire of neocon stooges and limousine liberals. His friend, Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles, remarked, “In so many ways he was the opposite of most conservatives. He rarely talked a good game, but he always played one.” Paul Gottfried proclaimed, “Francis was not a conventional movement conservative. He was too smart, too honest, and, as these essays indicate, too ready to state social truths that the media had worked strenuously to conceal.” A vociferous pundit, Francis has condemned “immediate gratification, indulgence, and consumption,” while making a clarion call for a “thunderous defense of moral and decent traditionalism.” This powerful anthology of writings, edited by Peter Gemma, represents some of Francis’ most intrepid writing.

Life in the Old Right by Murray Rothbard

One problem with labeling ideological movements "old" or "new" is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the "new" becomes an "old" and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of "news" and "olds" over the past half-century. But what I call the "Old Right" has an excellent claim to that label; for it was the original, oldest right, and it was in many ways radically different from all the rights that have followed after its demise.

Nationalism Old and New by Samuel Francis

In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislature, the reduction of states’ rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the economy and engineering of social institutions, and an activist foreign policy—expansionist, imperialist, or globalist—that costs money and requires at least occasional wars. Nationalism and its proponents have historically been Anglophiles, emulating the mercantilist dynastic state that flourished in Great Britain from the eighteenth century, and for all their claims of overcoming sectionalism and private interest, they have been identified with the Northeastern parts of the United States and its institutions—New England, New York City, the Ivy League, Big Banks and Big Business, Wall Street and Washington. The national state the nationalists defended and constructed was born with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, reached adolescence in the victory of the North in the Civil War, and grew to corpulent adulthood in the twentieth-century managerial state of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.