“The whole motif of liberation, which has become so central to our century – be it the emancipation of women, homosexuals, proletariat, youth, appetites, peoples – comes into view at the turn of the century. The term avant-garde has usually been applied simply to artists and writers who promoted experimental techniques in their work and urged rebellion against established academies. The notion of modernism has been used to subsume both this avant-garde and the intellectual impulses behind the quest for liberation and the act of rebellion. Very few critics have ventured to extend these notions of the avant-garde and modernism to the social and political as well as artistic agents of revolt and to the act of rebellion in general in order to identify a broad wave of sentiment and endeavour. This book attempts to do so. Culture is regarded as a social phenomenon and modernism as the principle urge of our time. The book argues in the process that Germany has been the modernist nation par excellence of our century. Like the avant-garde in the arts, Germany was swept by a reformist zeal at the fin-de-siècle and by 1914 she had come to represent both to herself and to the international community the idea of spirit at war. After the trauma of military defeat in 1918, the radicalism of Germany, rather than being subdued, was accentuated. The Weimar period, 1918 to 1933, and the Third Reich, 1933 to 1945, were stages in a process. Avant-garde has for us a positive ring, storm troops a frightening connotation. This book suggests that there may be a sibling relationship between these two terms that extends beyond their military origins. Introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and mythmaking in the arts, and introspection, primitivism, abstraction, and mythmaking in politics, may be related manifestations. Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns. Our century is one in which life and art have blended, in which existence has become aestheticized. History, as one theme of this study will try to show, has surrendered much of its former authority to fiction. In our postmodern age a compromised may, however, be possible and necessary. In search of this compromise our historical account proceeds in the form of a drama, with acts and scenes, in the full and diverse sense of those words. In the beginning was the event. Only later came consequences.”

End of Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era.

In my latest National Post column I urge Canada’s federal Conservatives to tackle their electoral and image problems by leaning into them, being the reality party instead of trying to be Liberal lite and having it fail for the umpteenth time.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that NATO meeting in Turkey instead of expelling it indicats a collapse of faith in the Western civilization NATO was created to protect.

“We will either find a way or make one.”

“HANNIBAL” as header quotation on unnumbered chapter 7 “Tactics” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would help us clean up political discourse as well as understand the Middle East if friends and foes alike could set aside head-banging and acknowledge what Trump has characteristically gotten very right, and characteristically gotten badly wrong, on Iran.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.

“Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval. Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honored conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless and eventually be brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realized it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Surrounded by masked men during a phosgene attack at Verdun, Pierre de Mazenod was reminded of a ‘carnival of death.’ For many, gas took the war into the realm of the unreal, the make-believe. When men donned their masks they lost all sign of humanity, and with their long snouts, large glass eyes, and slow movements, they became figures of fantasy, closer in their angular features to the creations of Picasso and Braque than to soldiers of tradition. Dorgelès called the gas mask ‘this pig snout which represented the war’s true face.’ British comment on the German gas attacks included the following: ‘With used by the Germans of poison gas the war took a more bitter turn and horror followed horror until the soldier of civilization had to rise to a height of courage putting altogether in the shade that of the Knights of old, who went out to fight loathly dragons which breathed fire and mephitic vapours. In this mortal struggle with a race of scientific orang-outans, it requires a shutting of the eyes to externals and a looking inward to see the nimbus shining from the brow of the soldier... But how much more splendid than that of any beplumed, caparisoned soldier of old, is his courage as he rides, or squats in mud or dust, swathed in his chemical bandages so that all human likenesses is lost, awaiting not only shot and shell and steel, but flammenwerfer, asphyxiating gas, lachrymatory gas, stink gas, and other instruments of German warfare!’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era