Israel’s Grand Design

Israeli Leaders Crave Area from Egypt to Iraq by John Mitchell Henshaw From the Spring, 1968 issue of The American Mercury. John Henshaw wrote this article shortly after Israel’s conquests in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TINY Israel from a midget to a giant is in the making. The grand design of Judaic-Zionist expansionist doctrine is to seize Continue Reading →

What is Poetry?

Poetry is an art much neglected — or mangled — by the anti-Western ideologues that dominate what remains of our culture today. But it is an integral part of our civilization, and we are incomplete without it. by Martin Wright Sampson, Professor of English Literature, Cornell University I REMEMBER that as a small boy I used to wonder what there Continue Reading →

H. L. Mencken at Full Throttle

Honeyed and abrasive: the irrepressible journalism of the ‘Sage of Baltimore’ and American Mercury founder by Michael Dirda H.L. MENCKEN (1880—1956) is often smilingly referred to as the Sage of Baltimore (especially in Baltimore), but during the first third of the twentieth century he was the most outspoken, irrepressibly contrarian literary and political journalist in the United States. As the Continue Reading →

Italian Court Increases Sentences for 23 CIA Agents

AN ITALIAN COURT UPPED the sentences for 23 CIA agents convicted in absentia of abducting an Egyptian imam in one of the biggest cases against the US “extraordinary rendition” programme. The 23 CIA agents, originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison, had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal in what one Continue Reading →

America Needs a New Ingersoll

Robert Ingersoll (pictured) was a lantern of reason in a nation of fools by H.L. Mencken WHAT the country lacks is obviously an Ingersoll. It is, indeed, a wonder that the chautauquas have never spewed one forth. Certainly there must be many a jitney Demosthenes on those lonely circuits who tires mightily of the standard balderdash, and longs with a Continue Reading →