In my latest Epoch Times column I follow up on the question of where the feds expect to find $150 billion a year for defence alone by warning that the overall fiscal situation is far worse than they think including, crucially, how little time they have to fix it.

In countries they invaded in World War I “the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument – the idea of Kriegsverrat. According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one’s own nationals. The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this proposition, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers’ arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvaine was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes at its priceless collection of in incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrechlichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France in Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.

“For admirers, the unusual challenge is to popularize a man who didn’t lie, steal or cheat on his wife. What do they say?”

Andrew Cohen about George Washington in Globe & Mail March 3, 1999

“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]

In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that even governments that talk about fiscal prudence are helpless to stem the tidal wave of overspending because they’re secretly convinced it stimulates the economy.

“Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, Gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those for claimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam. Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practice islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’ or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine.... This gave its pronouncement on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [in context of his own saintly though herself childless godmother, a teacher]