In my latest National Post column I reflect on how far modern race- gender- and even youth-obsessed identity politics progressivism has fallen in the United States from Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiring vision of judging people by character not skin colour.
If tearing down statues of historical figures because they don't entirely meet contemporary standards worries you, come hear author Bob Plamandon and others (including me) at a Hands Off Our History barbeque this Sunday, Sept. 9, at Ottawa's Andrew Haydon Park starting at 3:00.
For details visit https://www.facebook.com/mycanadaincludesmyhistory/
In lecturing to R.A.F. members during World War II “It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about prehistoric man: doubtless because prehistoric man is labeled ‘science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labeled as ‘history’ (which is not). Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection – and for the same reason.”
C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle
“Without memory we are a society suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, tackling each day like a baby with its finger stuck out before the flames…. our self-imposed Alzheimer’s.”
John Ralston Saul in the inaugural LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, reprinted in Globe & Mail March 24, 2000
In my latest National Post column I ask: if this is not the moment to stand on conservative principle, when would be?
“I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day, but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal, that ‘Flower on Lofty Heights’ where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history. There’s no reason why they should; it was a long way away.”
George Macdonald Fraser Quartered Safe Out Here
“Eugene Genovese once remarked that Joseph Schumpeter was ‘that rarest of all human creatures: an economist with a sense of tragedy.’”
Neil Cameron in Policy Options Vol. 21, #2 (March 2000)