“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."

General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002

In my latest Loonie Politics piece I say the real question about shrinking Toronto City Council is why people who call Doug Ford an evil rights-hating maniac for invoking the Notwithstanding Clause to protect legislative authority aren’t even slightly concerned about judges routinely invoking Section 1 of the Charter to infringe fundamental rights like free speech.

BTW this particular piece is not behind a paywall. But Loonie Politics depends on subscriber support. So please sign up for their monthly or annual plan to support their work… and mine.

“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.

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