In my latest National Post column I say the bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester should remind everyone, including progressives, that Islamist fanatics do not hate our open society for being repressive or for defending itself. They hate it because it is tolerant. They hate our permissiveness. They hate us for who we are not what we do. And there is nothing we can do to appease them that would not be a fundamental betrayal of ourselves and our ideals.
In my latest National Post column I say it's amazing how little attention we give to cybersecurity given the stakes in today's "connected" world.
In my latest National Post column I praise Prince Philip for his character, modesty and acid wit, three things the modern world needs badly.
"No one can possibly say where the historian’s work ceases, and the journalist’s begins. The present is continuously in process of becoming the past: the frontier of history ends only with yesterday’s newspaper. A good journalist casts anxious and inquiring glances over his shoulder, and a good historian lifts his eyes from the page to look at the world around him…. Thucydides was writing not merely a history but an anguished record of contemporary events, in which he had acted and suffered…. Walter Raleigh, in his History of the World, was directing a gigantic and angry editorial to the subjects of James I." Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
On the eve of tomorrow's anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge it's good to see so much remembrance including the outstanding front portion of today's National Post. It was a pivotal Allied victory in the First World War partly for strategic reasons, partly for tactical ones and partly for psychological ones given how bleak things looked in the spring of 1917. It wasn't just important for Canada's sense of nationhood. The First World War, for all its horrors, was a necessary struggle for freedom and it was very important that the Allies won even if the victory was in significant measure squandered over the next two decades.
A reminder as the anniversary approaches that my documentary The Great War Remembered, which tries to explain and also to vindicate the war despite everything, is available free on YouTube.
Here’s one I do like. On February 27, 1782, the British House of Commons voted to throw in the towel in the American Revolutionary War.
I like it partly because my sympathies are very much with the revolutionaries seeking to uphold their ancient British liberties, not with the King and his ministers trying to suppress them. And I like it partly because I can think of few greater affirmations of those liberties that, in such a difficult and embarrassing situation, it was the representatives of the British people who took the king by his frilly collar and said "Stop!" Once again, Parliament checked an expensive, oppressive hare-brained executive branch scheme which was, in large measure, the point of the British constitution essentially from Magna Carta onward.
This vote was no formality. Far from it. The King remained an important player in the British system even when he was obviously messing up badly. And despite the highly unfavourable state of the military effort in what had recently been the 13 Colonies after the crushing British defeat at Yorktown by a combined American-French force, the February 27 1782 vote was close, 234 to 215. And that narrow 19-vote margin was very important.
It set in motion a highly favourable chain of events leading to quick reconciliation between the former belligerents. Including that the American peace commissioners, the exalted trio of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay, proceeded to make a separate peace with Britain despite pledges to France, which had swooped on her old foe, not to do so.
Within an amazingly short period, and despite the stupid War of 1812, Britain and the United States were tacit allies in maintaining world order, an arrangement that persisted from the 1824 Monroe Doctrine with some bumps and bruises right down to their formal alliance in 1917. And while it took statesmanship to bring it about and maintain it, the structural basis was their shared devotion to liberty under law and to popular sovereignty. With, of course, the usual qualifications about unjust exclusion of some groups from the blessings of liberty, most spectacularly in the United States black slaves and then ex-slaves.
In the Capitol Rotunda in Washington there is a gold replica of Magna Carta that we were kindly permitted to film in 2015, given by the British Parliament in 1976 in powerful acknowledgement that two centuries earlier the greatest devotees of traditional freedom and the rights of the people had been on the west side of the Atlantic. But they were still strongly represented in Britain including in Parliament on that important date.
Liberty is often under siege. But where the roots are deep, it has enormous strength and manages to flourish despite and sometimes even during storms. Including Parliament yanking George III back to his so-called senses on behalf of ordinary Britons on February 27, 1782.