“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

“Lest we forget an at least over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology lives off and leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

“Saul Alinksy” quoted as 3rd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [from the “so you admit it” file]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the prideful inability of people in public life to admit an error and apologize even though, weirdly, it would be better PR than their flailing efforts at spin control, as well as better statecraft and soulcraft.

“What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted – a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are – a chance to strive for some sort of order.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“Henry James referred in January 1915 to the ‘baseness of demonism’ that lay behind the destruction of Ypres, but the first systematic use of asphyxiating gas on the Western Front by the Germans, on April 22nd, 1915, at Langemarck near Ypres, against French and Canadian troops, removed any doubts in the Allied populations about the satanic nature of the German threat and about German ‘guilt’. That event in the spring of 1915 was the most spectacular act in what Pierre Miquel has called ‘the terrorist war.’”

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

Angela “Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belong in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history then were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man’ was the necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularized that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims to Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“The young, talented, and already greatly respected historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote in the early months of the [First World] war that what the foreigner calls brutality in German behavior, the German himself must call simply honesty. After all, if the cathedral at Rheims was being used by French observers, it had to be bombed. It was as simple as that. For the French and British to call the German a barbarian in these circumstances was pure hypocrisy. Meinecke was relatively moderate. Another German historian expressed similar ideas in shriller tones: ‘Better than a thousand church towers fall than that one German soldier should fall as a result of these towers. Let’s not have any whining from humanists and aesthetes among ourselves. We have to assert ourselves. Those are such simple truths that it becomes tedious to have to repeat them to people who don't wish to hear.’ Rather than such unequivocal assertions about the pre-eminence of life force over history, one might have expected from Meinecke and his confrère, given their professions, a greater respect for the dependence of the individual and the nation on their historical context. Yet the emphasis in their comments is on the Dionysian act of self-assertion. In the course of the war, thirty-five of forty-three holders of chairs in history in German universities were to aver that Germany had become involved in the war only because she had been attacked.”

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

“Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in playwriting; The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the place drives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a flare up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played – if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’ What is the alternative to working ‘inside’ the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about ‘Burn the system down!’ Yippie yells of ‘Do it!’ or ‘Do your thing.’ What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of ‘murdering fascist pigs’ when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide?”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals