“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“Like Nietzsche, the Islamic state saw in the pieties of western civilization – its concern for the suffering, its prating about human rights – a source of terrible and sickly power. Like [the Marquis de] Sade, they understood that the surest blow they could strike against it was a display of exultant and unapologetic cruelty. The cross had to be redeemed from Christianity. In the Qur’an it served as it had served under the Caesars: as an emblem of righteously sanctioned punishment. ‘The penalty for those who wage war against God and his messenger, and to strive in fomenting corruption on the earth, is that they be killed or crucified...’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Dorgelès called the [World War I] trenches ‘this huge confessional’”

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

“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”

G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.”

Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) [emailed by a friend and quoted for instance at https://www.azquotes.com/quote/966702]

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.

“As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continue to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du Printemps.”

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

In my latest National Post column I ponder the gulf between the economic deregulation Canada needs and the inexplicably popular wordy but vacuous dirigisme of the Carney administration.