In my latest Epoch Times column I say the chronic resistance to systemic principled thought in Canadian public policy means we have protectionist politicians who think they’re for free trade, as they’re censors who think they favour free speech.
In countries they invaded in World War I “the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument – the idea of Kriegsverrat. According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one’s own nationals. The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this proposition, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers’ arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvaine was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes at its priceless collection of in incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrechlichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France in Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”
G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I use the stream of meaningless vainglorious press releases from the G7 summit to indicate the trap our political class has fallen into, becoming so good at soothing vapouring that it has become a habit of mind rather than merely of tongue.
In my latest National Post column I argue that our government’s, and our chattering classes’, material and moral feebleness on the Middle East conflict stems as usual from mental feebleness, in this case a lack of clarity or concentration either on geopolitics or Israel’s place in history.
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that we must rearm intellectually before we can rearm materially or do anything with our Armed Forces if we somehow conjure one up.
“Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a gleaming future. From the fusion of ancient and modern, mounted by the white-hot genius of his leadership, there was to emerge a new Italy. Whether greeting the massed ranks of his followers with a Roman salute or piloting an aircraft, Mussolini posed in ways that consciously sought to erase the entire span of Christian history. Although, in a country as profoundly Catholic as Italy, he had little choice but to cede a measure of autonomy to the Church, his ultimate aim was to subordinate it utterly, to render it the handmaid of the fascist state. Mussolini’s more strident followers exalted nakedly in this goal. ‘Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be from morning to evening, without distracting thoughts.’”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“To [the Marquis de] Sade, of course, it had all been folly. There was no brotherhood of man; there was no duty owed by the weak to the strong. Evangelicals, like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance: their belief in progress; their conviction in the potential of reform; their faith in humanity might be brought to light. Yet it was precisely this kinship, this synergy, that enabled Castlereagh, faced by the obduracy of his fellow foreign ministers, to craft a compromise that was, in every sense of the word, enlightened. Unable to force through an explicit outlawing of the slave trade, he settled instead for something at once more nebulous and more far-reaching. On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. The language of evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French Revolution. Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that slavery, as an institution, was an abomination. The twin traditions of Britain and France, of Benjamin Lay and Voltaire, of enthusiasts for the Spirit and enthusiasts for reason, had joined in amity even before the first cannon was fired at Waterloo. The irony was one that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as international law a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World