In my contribution to the National Post “Woke Museums” series I describe how the “history” now on display at the Canadian Museum of History is, as C.S. Lewis wrote of what was taught in Narnia under the usurper Miraz, “duller than the truest history you ever read and less true than the most exciting adventure story.”
“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 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.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the Canadian habit of windy high-minded speeches and empty measures in a dangerous world.
“People forget how fast you did a job – but they remember how well you did it.”
Howard Newton quoted in Cliff Chadderton Excuse Us! Herr Schicklgruber
“That history bore witness to a war between light and darkness, aeons old, and demanding from those on the side of good an unstinting watchfulness against evil, was a conviction that Tolkien shared with the Nazis. Admittedly, when articulating the mission of National Socialism, its leaders tended not to frame it in such terms. They preferred the language of Darwinism. ‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’ So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In a piece for the Aristotle Foundation in the Epoch Times I assess claims that the extent of open anti-Semitism in Canada today resembles the period right before World War Two, and conclude that it’s actually worse now.
“Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death came to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a God that there has ever been…. The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.”
Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World