In my contribution to the National Post “Woke Museums” series I describe how the “history” now on display at the Canadian Museum of History is, as C.S. Lewis wrote of what was taught in Narnia under the usurper Miraz, “duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story.”
“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask, with specific reference to the Canada Health Act, why mental paralysis is considered an elevated form of patriotism in this country.
“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest National Post column I ask what Parliament and MPs are even for if the people we send to keep the executive branch in check holler that its policies are plunging us into catastrophe then cunningly give the Prime Minister the money he needs to carry them out.
“There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible... To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens sharply...”
G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 biography of G.F. Watts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
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)