Unca Darrell

AUGUST 28, 2020 / If you prefer Mideast peace over Mideast war, President Trump has earned your vote

HIS MOST IMPORTANT accomplishment is what he has not done: He has not started another inconclusive, never-ending American war in a distant land. Instead he is withdrawing troops from conflicts started by other presidents. If he had done nothing else, that would have been enough for many of us.

But he has done much more. Earlier this month . . .

JUNE 28, 2019 / A primer that helps explain . . .

. . . President Donald John Trump's foreign policy better than he understands it himself.

REALISM, long associated with authoritarian European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Klemens von Metternich, has been consistently portrayed as antithetical to American democratic traditions. During the Cold War, statesmen such as Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski were depicted as amoral or even harboring, in the case of the latter, loyalties to Poland rather than America. But in one form or another, no matter what . . . detractors may claim, realism is at the very heart of American foreign policy. It is what helped America . . . emerge as the dominant power after World War II and during the Cold War.

The realist approach served as a bipartisan foundation for Washington's approach to the world, providing a common framework for identifying and defending American interests abroad. Everyone from Harry Truman to Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger to George H.W. Bush and James Baker . . .

February 6, 2019 / Yergin on Maduro

NICOLAS MADURO'S REGIME in Venezuela has been waging economic warfare against the country it rules. The result has been an almost unfathomable million-percent inflation rate coupled with . . .

AUGUST 4, 2017 / Everything you need to know about . . .

. . . the French people, from a 1944 Army booklet for American servicemen:

MANY of you are no doubt wondering what kind of people the French are. You will soon see for yourselves. You will find that aside from the fact that they speak another (and very musical) language, they are very much like . . .

AUGUST 3, 2017 / Fact-check this

FROM A TELEVISION review by David Wiegand in today's Houston Chronicle about a new Amazon series on detectives from Romania ("Cold War spoof 'Comrade Detective' goes poof"):

There are some brief moments making fun of American capitalist values and extolling the thin virtues of life as a Soviet Socialist Republic . . . .

A problem that apparently escaped the notice of the writer, his editors in San Francisco, and the editors in Houston is that . . .

MAY 22, 2917 / Theodore Dalrymple on secularization and transcendence

THE SECULARIZATION of Europe is hardly any secret. Religion's long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur.

     In France, the oldest and most important daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of amusement and derision . . .

MARCH 3, 2017 -- Goodbye, and thanks, to Thomas Sowell

THOMAS SOWELL, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of America's most important public intellectuals, retired from column-writing at the end of 2016. Here are snips from his last piece, "Random Thoughts, Looking Back: Avoiding the fatal mistake of disregarding the record of the past," nationalreview.com, December 27, 2016.

Not everything about the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden . . . 

JANUARY 4, 2017 / Unca D's totally inspiring photo exhibit . . .

. . . continues through January at Czech Center Museum Houston, 4920 San Jacinto Street.

 

I shot it in early May in Pilsen, Czech Republic. The exhibit documents the seventieth anniversary celebration of  the liberation of western Czechoslovakia by General George S. Patton, Jr.'s, Third Army in 1945. 

Why is it inspiring? Because . . .  

NOVEMBER 27 / Here are some words and ideas that belong, some or all . . .

. . . in any honest "Castro is dead" editorial:

Communist. This one stands alone. An editorial that cannot call him a communist is, on its face . . . 

NOVEMBER 16 / Meet Unca Darrell in the flesh . . .

. . . at Czech Center Museum Houston, 6:00 p.m. Saturday, November 19.  

The event opens my photography exhibit -- "Day of the Lilacs: The Liberation of Western Czechoslovakia by the U.S. Third Army."

I will also lecture on Czechoslovakia's place in the history of World War II.

• How France and Great Britain surrendered the county to the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (the "Nazis") in 1938. 
• The brutality of the occupation by the German Waffen Schutzstaffel (the "SS"). 
• How on May 6, 1945, Czechs ran into the streets to greet their American liberators with gifts of food and beer, with kisses, and with armloads of lilacs.

The liberation was militarily insignificant. The war in Europe would end two days later. So why did . . .