In my latest National Post column I argue that Barack Obama's malevolent parting shot at Israel casts a harsh light on his entire disastrous record in foreign policy.

In my new video for Canadians for Energy East, a project of the Economic Education Association of Alberta, I explain why Energy East is the right practical answer to the actual choices we face in energy policy in Canada.

On January 5 Felix Manz was drowned. Which might seem like bad luck and maybe the occasion for a safety campaign. But I’m afraid it’s considerably more unpleasant than that. You see, he was drowned on purpose, in Zurich, on January 5 of 1527, as what I can only assume is a grimly ironic punishment for advocating and practising adult baptism.

Manz was an Anabaptist, part of an extreme wing of the Protestant Reformation, theologically speaking. Among other things they argued that infant baptism was just wetting a baby and that the ceremony could only have spiritual effect if performed on someone who understood it and did it willingly.

I grant that they could be annoying in a mild way, because they also tended to refuse to take oaths, defend the state or go along with civil authorities. They based this conduct on a very literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount and what strikes me as a wilful disregard of the injunction to render unto Caesar that which is rightly Caesar’s in this troubled and sinful world.

However that may be, Manz was not drowned for refusing to take an oath. He was drowned by the state because on March 7, 1526 the very Protestant Zurich council, whose members included the leading theologian Huldrych Zwingli whose ideas had a major influence on John Calvin, had declared adult rebaptism punishable by drowning. Which ought at least to dispel any notion that Protestants were better than Catholics on the topic of freedom of conscience and on separating Church and state. In fact Zwingli himself was killed in battle trying to force Protestantism on Catholic parts of Switzerland.

I’m not very sympathetic to Anabaptist doctrine or behavior in a lot of areas. I And I can see legitimate grounds for jailing people who will not pay a parking ticket because Jesus told them not to. But it’s the behaviour, not the belief, that matters, and it’s the behaviour of refusing to do something necessary to public order.

I don’t have freedom of conscience to run a red light or refuse to testify truthfully in court about seeing someone else do it. But holding a man under water until he dies for wanting to be held under water until God is happy is surely so grotesque that it’s hard to believe anyone would do it, let alone do it proudly.

"There are few words which are used more loosely than the word 'Civilization.' What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization— and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all." Winston Churchill in 1938, quoted in Daniel Hannan Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

Yes, it’s Aethelred time again. But I’m not going to heap scorn on him this time, just anxiety. Because I have a different Aethelred in mind than my usual target, the weakly villainous Aethelred II "the Unready" who ruled England unsteadily and even intermittently for the disastrously long period from 978-1013 and again from 1014-16.

Today it’s Aethelred I "of Wessex" who ruled frantically from 865 to 871 and is chiefly remembered today for… nothing, because he isn’t remembered at all. But if he were, it would be for being the brother of Alfred the Great. This Aethelred was the fourth son of king Aethelwulf of Wessex and the third son of Aethelwulf to rule Wessex (following Aethelbald and Aethelbert and yes, these are pretty cool names once you get past the strangeness and the opening diphthong) in this desperate period during which the Danes seemed to be overwhelming English civilization.

Indeed, a great Viking army had hit England the same year Aethelred took the throne and it had destroyed the major kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia before turning their sights and swords on Mercia and then in 870 Wessex. And Aethelred himself was badly beaten by the Danes in the Battle of Reading on January 4, 871, regrouped to win at Ashdown but got walloped again at Basing and Meretun in the spring before dying shortly after Easter.

The logical sequel would be Alfred’s own defeat and the perishing of the Anglo-Saxon-Jute order in England, barbaric in its origins but thoroughly Christian and surprisingly civilized by the 9th century. It would be like the gradual disintegration of Arnor and the crumbling of the successor fragments of Rhudaur, Cardolan and Arthedain in the backstory to The Lord of the Rings (and for better or worse, I didn’t have to Google them before writing that sentence; I even spelled them correctly from memory) as the virtue and power of the Numenorians waned in Middle Earth. And not surprisingly, given Tolkien’s scholarly background in Anglo-Saxon history.

Instead a miracle happened hardly less improbable than the victory of the good guys in Tolkien’s epic. Which again is not surprising given Tolkien’s metaphysics. But as we celebrate the great heroes like Alfred and the great villains like the other Aethelred boo hiss, we should also remember those valiant figures like the first Aethelred or, fictionally, Theodred, who fight a valiant losing battle that helps, in however small a way, to buy time and space for the unlikely great victories to follow.

They are no less noble for having been less fortunate, and nobody can know when they dare draw sword against a mighty foe whether they will be Alfred the Great or Aethelred the Forgotten. Nor should they weigh the matter long when duty calls.

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor." Adrian Pierce Rogers in his 1996 Ten Secrets for a Successful Family (frequently misattributed online, incidentally)

In my latest National Post column I express shock at people's wish to be shocked, and at where they do and don't go to satisfy this weird desire.

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, January 3"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2017/January/Ask_Professor_72.mp3[/podcast]