By Cynthia Chung As discussed in part two of this series, the war in Vietnam did not start on its official date, November 1st, 1955, but rather 1945 when American clandestine operations were launched in Vietnam to “prepare the ground”. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy…
The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today
By Cynthia Chung In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special…
RTF Review of “Seven Days in May”
John Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May” (1964) may be a Hollywood movie but it is also an incredibly insightful account of the problem with Cold War thinking, based off of the book by the same title. At the time it was meant to be a lesson and warning to those who allowed themselves to be…
Pulling Back from the Brink of Self-Annihilation: MLK’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Revisited
This Easter Sunday, April 4th marks a solemn day as we recall the sacrifice and immortal living spirit of Jesus Christ and also a man who lived his life in the model of Christ… Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. It was 54 years ago, on April 4, 1967 that King delivered one of his boldest…
Leaping from Despair into Hope: The Lesson of Rembrandt’s Resurrection for Today’s Troubled World
By Matthew Ehret Today, the world finds itself moving through a turbulent transformation between two systems. Collapsing at a faster rate every day are the foundations of a failed imperial world order defined by zero-sum thinking, consumerism and materialism which has defined our existence for decades. The question is now: will the new world system…
Why the Study of Ancient History Must Be Reformed
Our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and how it came to be is the result of centuries or even millennia of scholarship and dedicated inquiry. But what happens when an intellectual heretic arises, one whose ideas or theory threatens to undermine humanity’s most essential understanding of itself? Is the heretic and his or her…
Clarity vs. Obscurity V: Eliot’s Masks
By Adam Sedia Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV to this series. T.S. Eliot means many things to many different people. Like Yeats he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the academy he numbers among the titans of twentieth-century poetry, with The Waste Land hailed as the epic of our…
Escaping the Brave New World: Defeating the Culture of Zeus
This week, the New Lyre Podcast’s David Gosselin sat down with RTF’s Matthew Ehret in order to discuss the important matter of art, science and politics. It is taken as self-evident that humanity transmits its ideas, discoveries and passions across countless generations via the power of culture. But what is this thing called “culture” and…
On H.G. Wells’ ‘The Shape of Things to Come’
By Cynthia Chung “It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric,…
The Historic Clash of Two Opposing Paradigms: Gilpin’s Landbridge vs. Mahan’s World Maritime Empire
By Matthew Ehret Compared the great initiatives taken on behalf of freedom and anti colonialism throughout the past 260 years, today’s America appears to be a strange and foolish creature running roughshod over the dignity of people and nations in a race for mass nuclear extermination. Such is the image projected by Mike Pompeo’s anti-China…
