In my latest Loonie Politics column I say since nuclear weapons are a crucial feature of geopolitics including the structure of deterrence that has prevented major wars for three-quarters of a century, it’s asinine or worse to be against making sure they work the way we expect them to.
“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we have indeed broken faith with those who lie in Flanders fields, and all Canada’s war dead, by refusing to defend our country or our civilization practically, intellectually or morally.
“‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zurich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, and uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by the war: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, ‘is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded... it doubts itself profoundly.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask what we, the voters, would like them, the politicians, to do when they think we’re wrong on an issue, pander or debate, because we probably will get what we wish for.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that most politicians and voters across the spectrum seem dangerously complacent in practice even on topics where their rhetoric is shrill and panicky.