“On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle [Paul] were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could be quite as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that govern the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. And the very heart of the city, the lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’ Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, and their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’, was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest National Post column I say Prime Minister Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand prattling on cue about a “two-state solution” in the Middle East on the anniversary of Oct. 7 demonstrates that they are so clueless they have no clue that they are clueless.

“There is always a temptation to explain great events in terms of great ambitions, but the truth about Stalingrad might be much simpler. In the orders of 23 July Stalingrad was only one among many other targets and aims. It had no obvious priority over the others. It might be that the first failure to capture the city led to reinforcements being sent to make a second attempt, which also failed. More reserves were then fed into counteract the earlier failures. In this way more and more men and resources were pushed in piece by piece until the battle took on a priority of its own, quite divorced from the actual value of the supposed target. Prestige and stubbornness became the reason for the battle to continue, not the capture of Stalingrad itself. It would not be the first time such a thing had happened. The great Battle of Gettysburg that decided the American Civil War was another example. A Confederate regiment had gone to the town to capture a shoe factory, because they were short on footwear. Before they could get the shoes they were driven out by a Unionist division. The Confederates called up reinforcements and counterattacked, causing the Unionists to summon their own support. Before long the two main armies were locked in a deadly combat that neither had foreseen and neither wanted. It seems that much the same thing happened at Stalingrad.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“a high priest of the debunked Davoisie”

Conrad Black in National Post February 14, 2026 [re Mark Carney but the term applies far more widely and as far as I know originated with Black in this column].

“In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aging Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“A decolonized university is no university at all.”

Michelle Stirling  “Dr. Frances Widdowson's Arbitration Review – Phoenix from the Ashes” on her Climate of Hope Substack February 7, 2026 [https://michellestirlingg.substack.com/p/dr-frances-widdowsons-arbitration].

“Up until New Year 1943 Goebbels and his minions had portrayed Nazi Germany as the harbinger of a New Order for Europe, a new social, political and economic system that would sweep away the decadent, failed and discredited wreckage of the Old Europe that had perished in the Great War of 1914-18. Nazism had been portrayed as youthful, vibrant, dynamic and irresistible. But now all that had changed. The 6th Army [trapped and collapsing at Stalingrad] was hailed as being a legion of heroes worthy of the finest traditions of the ancient Teutonic warriors. The spirit of Arminius, who had ousted the Romans from Germany, was invoked, along with that of Frederick the great, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Blücher and many more. This was the reason behind the promotions and the awards. The 6th Army had to be built up to be the finest that Germany had ever fielded. In truth it was good, but it had never been as good as Goebbels now claimed. The message that Goebbels was slowly and carefully crafting was that the 6th Army was heroically sacrificing itself to save the ancient civilization of Europe from the onslaught of the barbaric Asiatic hordes pouring out of Siberia.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“The Red Army’s strength rests above all in the fact that it does not wage a predatory imperialistic war, but a patriotic war, a war of liberation, a just war. The Red Army's task is to liberate our Soviet territory from the German invaders, the residents of our towns and villages who, before the war, were free and lived like human beings and who are now oppressed and suffer pillage, subjection and famine – and lastly to liberate our women from the outrages to which they have been subjected by the Fascist fiends. The Red Army has to annihilate the German Fascist occupationists since they wish to enslave our Motherland, or when they are being surrounded refused to lay down their arms and surrender. The Red Army annihilates them because they seek to enslave our Motherland. The Red Army, like any army of any other people, is entitled to annihilate and bound to annihilate the enslavers of our Motherland.”

The end of a long windy speech by Stalin at a huge parade in Moscow on the 24th anniversary of the day the Red Army first went into battle (23 February 1918) quoted in Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination [and absolutely characteristic of the rhetoric of totalitarians - one cannot imagine Churchill or Roosevelt talking in this way].