“What convinces mankind of a man’s sincerity is this: that every now and then he should go with his principles and against his feelings.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 10, 1907, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
In my latest Epoch Times column I ponder the battling dispositions in public debate to refuse to believe things can be as bad as they seem, or to refuse to believe anything else, and the characteristic errors each can cause.
“I think Canada’s politics has sunk into deep ruts. I think we need fresh and serious thinking about what kind of country we want to be.... For a decade our political parties, our Parliament, our public service and the other institutions of our democracy have been putting more and more energy into forgetting how to make decisions. Instead they’re all-in for message amplification.... There’s a forced, hollow certainty to too much of our political discourse that barely masks timidity and confusion behind.... We’re building cults of personality around people with unremarkable personalities.”
Paul Wells email/Substack April 10, 2025 [https://paulwells.substack.com/p/what-an-election-wont-fix]
“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask, with specific reference to the Canada Health Act, why mental paralysis is considered an elevated form of patriotism in this country.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the manner in which Liberal MPs, and even cabinet ministers, now simply cut and paste windy PMO banalities into their press releases word-for-word no longer even pretending to think for themselves about how to justify policy let alone about actual policy.
“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
In my latest National Post column I ask what Parliament and MPs are even for if the people we send to keep the executive branch in check holler that its policies are plunging us into catastrophe then cunningly give the Prime Minister the money he needs to carry them out.