“Innocent Louis [XVI] bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
In a piece in C2C Journal that I forgot to post at the time, I argue that social licence sounds good, or did until we discovered you couldn’t get one. But in fact it’s just another way of saying “tyranny of the majority” which is bad in principle and worse in practice because it means mob rule by a fanatical minority
On Wednesday I was on with John Gormley on CKOM 650 in Saskatoon to discuss my National Post column on setting rational priorities in fighting terrorism.
“Researchers have identified ‘structural’ historical concepts that provide the basis of historical thinking. The Benchmarks project is using this approach, with six distinct but closely interrelated historical thinking concepts. Students should be able to:
* establish historical significance…
* use primary source evidence…
* identify continuity and change…
* analyze cause and consequence…
* take historical perspectives…
* understand the moral dimension of historical interpretations…
Taken together, these tie ‘historical thinking’ to competencies in ‘historical literacy.’”
Excerpted from “Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: Framework for Assessment in Canada, by Peter Seixas, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness” in The Beaver April-May 2009
In my latest National Post column I say there’s nothing racist about calling Islamist terrorism a far bigger threat than the white nationalist kind… especially when most victims of Islamist violence aren’t white.
“Some apparent advantages followed for a season from a rule which had its origin in a violent and perfidious usurpation, and which was upheld by all the arts of moral corruption, political enervation, and military repression. The advantages lasted long enough to create in this country a steady and powerful opinion that Napoleon the Third's early crime was redeemed by the seeming prosperity which followed. Not often in history has the great truth that ‘morality is the nature of things’ received corroboration so prompt and timely.”
John Morley On Compromise