In my latest Loonie Politics column I take aim at the 20th-anniversary Harper revisionist rationalizations that he never intended to implement conservative policies, just build a winning party… which he didn’t even do anyway.
“To paraphrase Japanese Emperor Hirohito after the detonation of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, in the light of this week’s events, it is time for the ‘unthinkable.’ (The Japanese emperor acknowledged that the war had not gone ‘entirely as we had hoped.’)”
Conrad Black in National Post June 28, 2025 [re Gaza and Iran]
In my latest National Post column I say the Canadian state has become so profoundly incapable that when politicians and bureaucrats don’t do something they claimed they were going to, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether they didn’t want to, couldn’t, or both.
“Pilot, you’ll never get anywhere in this life if you only do what is wise.”
Lt.-Cmdr. Ninian Scott-Elliot, who had a distinguished wartime career with the Royal Navy (and uttered this phrase when warned that his plane was pursuing a U-boat too close to shore) before moving to the Solomons where he died age 86, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 19, 1998
“Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to the daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. It represents ‘fun’ and ‘excitement,’ energy and spectacle and above all ‘beauty.’ Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. Kitsch is the mask of Death. Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Naziism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of ‘kitsch men,’ people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. Their sensibility was rooted in superficiality, falsity, plagiarism, and forgery. Their art was rooted in ugliness. They took the ideals, though not the form, of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and of the German nation in the Great War, and by means of technology – the mirror – they suited these ideals to their own purpose. Germany, the home of Dichter und Denker [Poets and thinkers], of many of the greatest cultural achievements of modern man, became in the Third Reich the home of Richter und Henker [Judges and hangmen]: the incarnation of kitsch and nihilism.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the American withdrawal from liberal global policeman isn’t some weird departure from their geopolitical traditions, it’s a return to business as usual pre-1945. It was the intervening 80 years that was extraordinary and if people valued it they should have been more helpful to and less unpleasant about the Pax Americana.
“… to reassure us generally of the good intentions of the average German. Eulogies are pronounced on his good-humour and domesticity, and the warlike house-burners are praised as peaceful householders. It is, perhaps, admitted that there was something tactless in torturing the Belgians. But it is regarded as the exuberance of a young nation; and an indulgence is asked for such pastimes of Prussian officers on the principle that boys will be boys. That dark and watchful enemy, the sower of tares, is represented as having merely sown his wild oats.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1916, quoted in “The Golden Key Chain GKC on Scripture Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
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.