“Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the ‘cultural revolution’ and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [imagine quoting Alinksy to rein in modern radicals not encourage them... but I do]

“As my Dad used to say, ‘you don’t plant cabbages and pick roses.’”

Reform Party of Canada’s Victoria candidate, Christian Arla Taylor, on why Christians must not expect non-Christians to represent their views, quoted in British Columbia Report June 2, 1997

“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]

This week on Forum Daily News with Hal Roberts, I discussed the JCCF petition against Bill C22 that I personally delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office in the admittedly remote hope that they’ll reconsider this Draconian and mistargeted bill.

“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

In my latest National Post column I urge media, observers and citizen-voters to devote less attention to partisan ephemera and more to deep structural problems that will bring self-government crashing down if not addressed and fairly soon.

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