In my latest Epoch Times column I contrast our supposed new strategy for dealing with Communist China’s aggression with the iconic American Cold War strategy document NSC-68 and ours comes off looking mentally, verbally and morally feeble.
IIn my latest Loonie Politics column I urge everyone to consider the long-term consequences for our political culture if the authorities get away with smirking their way through an inquiry and a national security scandal.
“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”
Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask what history has to say about the possibility of the United States breaking apart, and find the answer troubling.
Speaking of the fatuous appeal of radicalism to the young “I must include myself, since I was a young Marxist.” But “What forced me to change my mind [away from radicalism] was discovering over the years that things were even worse than I thought. People did awful things, not just here but all around the world, not just now but across thousands of years of history…. History was especially disillusioning. It showed that some of my pet ideas had already been tried, and had blown up in people’s faces.”
Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Winston Churchill again, and again from Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html
In my latest Loonie Politics column I urge all politicians to ponder, if their adversaries are as awful as they claim and they are so marvelous, why it is that voters do not elect them in a landslide at every opportunity.
“‘It was the nation,’ Churchill would afterwards demur, ‘that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.’…. In addition to giving the lion voice, he allowed he might have ‘sometimes suggested to the lion the right place to use his claws.’”
Andrew Coyne in National Post September 19, 2001