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
“Normal people generally take normal things for granted; even when they are no longer there.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 19, 1932, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
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.
“Erasure is as important as writing”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ [with more on how to get rid of the junk]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the manner in which Liberal MPs, and even cabinet ministers, now simply cut and paste windy PMO banalities into their press releases word-for-word no longer even pretending to think for themselves about how to justify policy let alone about actual policy.
“BY his very success in inventing labour-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”
“Lewis Mumford in The Conduct of Life (1951)” – as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail Feb. 21, 2002
“The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 25, 1911, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)