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

“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”

Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.

“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“the phrase that I use, which is – it’s not original – ‘You can love your job but your job is not going to love you back.’”

Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, “the woman who sold Oprah Winfrey on the idea of starting a magazine”, former president and publisher of USA Today and author of the book Basic Black: The Essential Guide for getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), in an interview with Kenneth Whyte in Maclean’s December 31, 2007

“Weak if we were and foolish/ Not thus we failed, not thus;/ When that black Baal blocked the heavens/ He had no hymns from us.”

The introductory poem in G.K Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“The drivers ahead of us appear to be descended from monkeys who weren’t making it as monkeys.”

Me in traffic on the afternoon of December 17, 2024

In my latest Epoch Times column I discuss the vexed question of where the government is going to find more than $100 billion extra to meet the defence spending commitment the Prime Minister blithely made.