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.
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.
“‘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
In my latest National Post column I say too many people focus on federal budget minutiae when the big picture is fatuous, deceitful and dangerous Liberal lack of fiscal discipline.
“From the sublime to the ridiculous in a single step.”
Napoleon “with a shrug as he departed Moscow and began the famous retreat after the Russians burned their capital under him”, quoted in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history – which is to illuminate the present through the past – were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing church, and which the church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“But when it comes to a fight for private property – you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tales of the Long Bow, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies – e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates – would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed – the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ