"In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk." Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
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.