“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].
“Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see [the Marquis de] Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognize, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”
G.K. Chesterton as standalone manuscript-illustration style image in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
“Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion – which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea – you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.”
Lemony Snicket The Vile Village
In my latest National Post column I say Mark Carney’s “Investment Summit” was classic Carney blarney, windy and impractical.
The late Francois Furet, a French historian of totalitarianism, “copiously illustrates this thesis: that people believe what they want to believe, as long as it is possible to believe it; and that they generally return to believing it, once the crisis has passed. For how else can we explain the dogged loyalty to radical socialism, in the face of repeated butcheries?”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen May 28, 2000 [the trouble being that if “people” do it and the author is a person presumably he does it too and truth collapses]