“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."
General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John McCain's willingness to rock the boat politically even on some issues where I think he was wrong, because we need more mavericks and less partisanship.
“I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day, but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal, that ‘Flower on Lofty Heights’ where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history. There’s no reason why they should; it was a long way away.”
George Macdonald Fraser Quartered Safe Out Here
"It was said that the noble Don Quixote de la Mancha had been the last of the true knights. After his death, his trusted sword and his armour were sold to pay his debts. But somehow or other that sword seems to have fallen into the hands of a number of men. Washington carried it during the hopeless days of Valley Forge. It was the only defence of Gordon, when he had refused to desert the people who had been entrusted to his care, and stayed to meet his death in the besieged fortress of Khartoum. And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War."
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind
In my latest National Post column I suggest that a habit of counting our blessings on Canada would help preserve them.
In my latest National Post column I say that, while Justin Trudeau didn't cause the disaster that is Donald Trump, our Prime Minster needs to find more adult and less conceited ways of limiting the damage.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (quoted on https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/679-war-is-an-ugly-thing-but-not-the-ugliest-of)
In my latest National Post column I provide Canada's Prime Minister with the independent inquiry he demanded into Israel's use of force to protect its borders against Hamas terrorism.