In my latest Epoch Times column I say various judicial, academic and activist claims that the Canadian state does not exercise legitimate sovereignty over Canadian territory, including granting valid “fee simple” land titles, are a recipe for confusion, bitterness and disaster.
“Democracy as a failure is better than Dictatorship as a success.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the modern habit of judging budgets by how much boodle we personally pocketed rather than how well or poorly it safeguarded the national finances, as if our own narrow self-interest were self-evidently the national interest.
“Comfort over everything”
Subject line on MEC email touting new camping gear June 19, 2024 [and what a slogan for our gormless hedonistic era].
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we have indeed broken faith with those who lie in Flanders fields, and all Canada’s war dead, by refusing to defend our country or our civilization practically, intellectually or morally.
On Juno News with Kris Sims I denounce the mendacious and feckless extravagance of the Carney Liberals’ budget.
“‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zurich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, and uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by the war: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, ‘is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded... it doubts itself profoundly.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era