"As a schoolboy, I would supplement my English lessons by buying and reading The Morning Star, a foreign English-language newspaper that was available in the USSR. The Soviets permitted us to read this Communist daily published in London because, in being very critical of the democratic and capitalist world, the paper parroted the ideological line of the party. For me, however, its effect would prove highly subversive. What left a lasting impression was not the content of the criticism but the very fact that people outside the Soviet Union were free to criticize their own government without going to prison. The stronger the criticism, the more impressed I was by the degree of freedom enjoyed elsewhere."
"Preface" in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
In my latest National Post column I say it's easy to criticize Trump's immigration policy, hard to improve on it, and fatuous to do only the easy part
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the CAQ lead in Quebec polls shows, once again, widespread public discontent with politics and government as usual.
"Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison."
Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
“At that moment, and only for that moment, everything fitted into place. Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out. It was a vision of Good and Evil. Heaven and Hell. Life and death. There were two alternatives; and he had to choose. He chose.”
Malcolm Muggeridge "Winter in Moscow" (1934), in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge.