In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would help us clean up political discourse as well as understand the Middle East if friends and foes alike could set aside head-banging and acknowledge what Trump has characteristically gotten very right, and characteristically gotten badly wrong, on Iran.

“This [insistence that all people had dignity, and the most wretched especially] was the conviction that in 369, on the outskirts of a Caesarea ravaged by famine, prompted Basil to embark on a radical new building project. Other Christian leaders before him had built ptocheia, or ‘poor houses’ – but not on such an ambitious scale. The Basileias, as it came to be known, was described by one awestruck admirer as a veritable city, and incorporated, as well as shelter for the poor, what was in effect the first hospital. Basil, who had studied medicine while in Athens, did not himself scorn to attend the sick. Even lepers, whose deformities and suppurations rendered them objects of particular revulsion, might be welcomed by the Bishop with a kiss, and given both refuge and care. The more broken men and women were, the readier was Basil to glimpse Christ in them. The spectacle in a slave market of a boy’s sold by his starving parents, the one child sacrificed that his siblings might have some few scraps of food, provoked the bishop to a particularly scorching excoriation of the rich.... Basil's brother went even further. Gregory was moved by the existence of slavery not just to condemn the extremes of wealth and poverty, but to define the institution itself as an unpardonable offence against God. Human nature, so he preached, had been constituted by its Creator as something free. As such, it was literally priceless. ‘Not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.’… Gregory's abolitionism met with little support. The existence of slavery as damnable but necessary continued to be taken for granted by most Christians – Basil included..”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [but you have to start somewhere, and abolitionism more or less started here].

“The president [Ronald Reagan], apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when they commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.”

Dave Barry Greatest Hits [re Iran-Contra mostly].

“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.

“Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval. Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honored conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless and eventually be brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realized it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“You can make your book with roguery, but vanity is incalculable.”

Cecil Rhodes to John Buchan, who met Rhodes and worked for him toward the end of Rhodes’ life, quoted in Roger Kimball, “‘Realism coloured by poetry’; Rereading John Buchan,” in The New Criterion September 2003 online

“Yet there was, of course, in the failure of priests and pastors to live up to their own teaching, nothing new. ‘We are all naturally prone to hypocrisy.’ So Calvin had acknowledged. The flesh was weak. That change – and it was one that had occurred with a startling rapidity – was the readiness of people to accept that the exacting ideals of Christian sexual morality might not be ideals at all. That sexual desires were natural, and therefore good, and that the coming of Christianity had been like a blast of grey breath on the world, had long been a conviction popular with the more aristocratic class of free thinker. ‘Our religions, our manners and customs may easily and indeed must perforce deceive us,’ as the Marquis de Sade had put it, ‘whilst we shall certainly never be misled by the voice of Nature.’ This, over the course of the 1960s, had become a manifesto shared by millions. The summer of love had been a celebration of body as well as of spirit. ‘Make love, not war, the hippies urged. To many, it had seemed that two thousand years of neurosis and self-hatred were being banished upon the weaving of flowers in the hair. Desires natural to men and women, long kept in check, had at last been restored to freedom. Once again, the moving of the phallus in the bright womb of the world was praised as something precious: as ‘the victory of yes and love’. One music journalist, writing in San Francisco as 1967 turned to fall, had cast America as a stagnant swamp suddenly brought to life by the shimmering through its waters of a god. Ralph Gleason, the founder of Rolling Stone, most successful of all the many magazines inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s, had identified its spirit of sexual freedom with that of classical Greece. Society, he had declared, was being ‘deeply stirred by Dionysiac currents’. The ancient gods were back. Except that the freedom to fuck when and as one liked had tended to be, in antiquity, the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: all had been habitual rapists.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World