“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)
“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)
“To hear some critics talk now you would think there are only two kinds of writers in the world – popular writers who are bad, and unpopular writers who are good.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Observer Feb. 26, 1911, quoted in “The Writer’s Work” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the modern habit of judging budgets by how much boodle we personally pocketed rather than how well or poorly it safeguarded the national finances, as if our own narrow self-interest were self-evidently the national interest.
“Comfort over everything”
Subject line on MEC email touting new camping gear June 19, 2024 [and what a slogan for our gormless hedonistic era].
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we have indeed broken faith with those who lie in Flanders fields, and all Canada’s war dead, by refusing to defend our country or our civilization practically, intellectually or morally.