Articles by Jeff Cox

“Irredentism” is the philosophy by which a state advocates the annexation of another state’s territory because of a common ethnicity or because of former possession of that territory. Perhaps its most infamous instance, albeit by no means its most recent, was Adolf Hitler’s use of it to justify his invasion of Poland as a way to reclaim the Baltic seaport of Danzig with its majority German population. More recently we saw it in former Yugoslavia. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had used Serbi...

A famous ancient Greek legend holds that Dionysius II, the tyrant of the Sicilian Greek city of Syracuse (at a time when Sicily was ruled by Greeks and Carthaginians, and a time when the word “tyrant” was merely a term of art and not a pejorative), had a rather obsequious servant named Damocles. Damocles told the tyrant that as a great man of power and authority surrounded by magnificence, Dionysius was truly extremely fortunate. Perhaps suspecting that his servant was a little too flattering, ...

If one wants to get a slight taste -- just a slight taste -- of those worried, hopeful days of 1989 when the Berlin Wall was coming down, murderous communist leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu finally got their just desserts from the people they had tortured for so long, and we all wondered when these leaders’ patrons in Soviet Russia would put an end to it all with the hammer of the Red Army, as they had in Hungary and Czechoslovakia before, just watch the unfolding events in Ukraine. The dispute ...

You don’t need to be a highly-paid, highly-respected political analyst like Michael Barone or James Carville to understand basic truths about a particular election. In fact, it might actually be better if you’re not part of the political class. Then you pretty much can’t help, but see the forest, as opposed to the individual trees on which most political types focus. So, it was just after Democrat Terry McAuliffe was declared victor over Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the Virginia governor’s rac...

Reichstag in 1926 // Credit: German Federal Archives The Muslim Brotherhood are the bad guys. It’s a story that is now well-known. In 1932 the people of Germany were starving, gripped by hyperinflation, wracked with mass unemployment, crushed under the Great Depression, and crippled by punitive sanctions for a war that, arguably, they did not start. Their government was hapless and almost completely ineffective at remedying the situation. But someone had a plan to fix things: Adolf Hitler and...

Credit: cpsc.gov I have a lot of libertarian friends, including some of the extreme variety who believe that government should not even be providing things like police, fire, roads, and sewers. Because, in their view the competition of the free market could provide such services better, more cheaply, and without the coercion and corruption that often comes with government. At that point, I have to tell them the story of Marcus Crassus. Marcus Licinius Crassus was the richest person in ancient...

USS Enterprise at Supic Bay // Credit: Dual Freq via Wikimedia Commons The 20th Century began with a rising power in Asia whose nakedly expansionist aspirations and increasing belligerence produced dark clouds over East Asia and winds that reached across the globe. So has the 21st Century. In 1901, Japan was still in the convulsions of the “Meiji Restoration,” by which in the aftermath of Japan being forcibly opened up to the world by the 1853 visit by US Commodore Matthew Perry, this land of ...

Egyptian citizens voting, many for the first time, in 2012 // Credit: Jonathan Rashad via Flickr It was 1864. The armies of the Confederacy were under heavy pressure. Having helped liberate Chattanooga, Union armies under William Tecumseh Sherman were now driving on Atlanta. Rebel armies under Joseph Johnston were blocking their way. The rebels were badly outnumbered and outgunned, but Joseph Johnston was a wily character. He understood that a rebel army would always pose a threat to the feder...

Former Senator Rick Santorum // Credit: unitedliberty.org In a shining example of how even a blind squirrel can occasionally stumble across ACORN, former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum offered a rather insightful critique of the unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney. Santorum basically said that making Barack Obama’s (in)famous “You didn’t build that” comment the centerpiece of the campaign was, well, stupid. Remembering the parade of business ow...