It sometimes pays to be skeptical. Some of us seem to have been a mite too eager to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to be unleashed. And who knows? Perhaps more searches will find them.
On the other hand I wonder what Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor of National Public Radio, has been doing since September 11, 2001. In a "Salon" article written in August 1998 he asked "Is Osama Bin Laden a terorist master-mind or a fall guy?" He opted for the latter, saying:
Unless the Clinton administration can come up with some hard evidence that bin Laden is in fact calling the shots of a vast new anti-American terrorist network, all the present allegations and faceless intelligence-source leaks claiming facts too secret and explosive to be revealed should be taken with a grain of salt.
Bin Laden may be a dangerous anti-American zealot with a mouth as big as his bankroll. But the evidence so far does not support him being a cerebral Islamic Dr. No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world chessboard to checkmate the United States.
Since 1998 Loren has become infamous for a number of outrageous statements on the war against terrorism but I have yet to see an acknowledgement from him about being so wrong about Bin Laden.
An Australian researcher today will be awarded a Ph.D. for his revelation that Jesus was gay. Using insights granted him by Christ's astrological chart, Rollan McCleary has also discerned that 3 or 4 of the disciples were also gay. After getting his doctorate from the University of Queensland (Dexter is not touching that pun with a barge-pole) McCleary hopes to make "gay spirituality" a separate academic discipline. McCleary also opines that gays are more spiritual than others and are more "open to the transcendent". Needless to say Mr cCleary is an Anglican.
In other, absolutely unrelated, news the Anglican diocese of New Westminster, British Columbia has taken further steps to sanction the blessing of homosexual marriages in six of its parishes. This will undoubtedly vex the international leadership of the Anglican communion, including gay-friendly Archbishop Rowan Williams, which recently affirmed its opposition to such a move.
In still more news with no connection to the above, leaders of four of the five parties in the Canadian Parliament announced Tuesday their support for gay marriage. Only the hopelessly reactionary Canadian Alliance dissented.
W. F. Buckley's take on Christian evangelism in Iraq and elsewhere in the Moslem world is that it is good for all involved. He has some sensible points, but it isn't a straightforward issue. It is important to note that none of the groups involved in evangelizing the Arab/Moslem world practice (indeed, they oppose) coercive conversion, or the more subtle but equally dishonest tactic of linking aid to conversion. And while the conversion of a sizeable part of the Moslem world would solve many problems it wouldn't by itself solve them all; after all, one of the architects of the original airline hijackings was an Arab Christian. Christianity does little to innoculate Arabs against rabid Jew-hatred, and is only moderately successful in diverting them from Arabism or Marxism. Nonetheless this is a start.
CAIR and other lobby groups in the US are incensed by this, of course. They don't seem to realize that evangelism is no threat to the educated and committed believer; a Moslem who converts to Christianity at the first exposure to it was never likely a profoundly devout Moslem. On the other hand, perhaps they do realize it, and realize also that their power base derives largely from those untrained in theology of any sort, who accept the propaganda of their imams and send their dollars and their children wherever they are bidden. In this matter, as in others, it would seem that the opposition of CAIR and their ilk is confirmation that the West is on the right path.
The enigma that was Pierre Elliot Trudeau becomes even more opaque as the years go by; what we think we knew about Canada's 14th prime minister is ever undergoing change. First we learned to our astonishment that the aged adulterer and enemy of conventional religion was received back into the Catholic church as his death approached.
Then a conference at St. Jerome's University traced the roots of Trudeau's political spirituality and affirmed the influence of a certain brand of Catholicism upon the young Jacobin.
Now comes word that all of you who though that Trudeau was a Marxist, and who suffered social scorn as a result, may have been right in the first place. A testimony to that effect comes from the ghost of Pierre himself who is revealed to have told American diplomats in 1952 that he was a Communist and who went on to praise Russia and criticize the USA. An anxious Canadian government assured the Americans that the young Trudeau was just an infantile attention-seeker but I doubt the FBI was mollified. Certainly, anyone who thinks that Trudeau was not deeeply and reflexively left-wing will have a hard time explaining his warm regard of Mao's China and the presence of Fidel Castro at his funeral.
Trudeau was a very strange, lonely dude whose actions prompt this question: can a man whose political life and domestic life both testify to a thorough-going rejection of the Church's teachings, still warrant the title of "a devout Catholic" (as the Globe and Mail reverentially called him)? Perhaps it can if we are speaking only of the sort of private, almost entirely mental, religion that contemporary Canadian society prefers politicians have.
Here is the first of a two-part essay by Dennis Prager on why American Jews and blacks skew heavily Democrat in all levels of elections. Prager points out that although Democrat platforms seldom have anything in common with traditional Jewish values, the Jewish tendency to conflate the Republicans with Christian persecution and conservatism with Naziism (both without much factual basis -- US Christians have never, arguably until recently, sponsored religious Jew hatred as the European churches did) has resulted in traditionally high support for the Democratic Party. He makes some good points, and illustrates why Republican values are actually more synchronized with the morals and ideals of these two minorities than are those of the Democrats.
It is baffling, though, why conservatism of any degree is associated with the Nazis. In their faith in a centrally planned economy, (centrally planned everything, really) they were more attuned to the left. Where Marxists believed the bourgeoisie to be the key to the oppression of the people, Nazis put Jews in that role but changed very little of the context of exploitation and oppression of the Marxist narrative that motivated Communists against property owners, the self-employed and anyone else who prospered from his own efforts. In their faith in the state's ability to create a Utopia by using violence against its own citizens, the Nazis were much closer to the left wing governments of the 20th century like Russia, China and Cuba than they were to any right-wing government that has existed.
In its strange reverence for paganism and nature-worship, its utopian and violent goals, its vision of world conquest, its militarism and its hatred of religion and independent associations, the National Socialists of Germany are clearly the ideological relatives of the left, not the right. They believed neither in free people nor free markets. At the most basic level they were not "conservatives" in that they sought radical change, rather than a return to any previous social structure. It is more than time that this notion of Nazis being at the far end of the spectrum occupied by Republicans, Tories and religious conservatives is put to rest. It is damaging to meaningful political debate, intellectually lazy, and most importantly untrue.
Roger Scruton, who often writes for City Journal, has published elsewhere on the web an essay on food and culture. He discusses at length the role of cuisine and eating habits in England in particular, and makes many interesting points. Food has in the past had significant religious, cultural and emotional meaning in the Western world, but this has changed radically in the past decades.
Modern Judaism elevates the family table to the level of the Altar in the Temple. By charging women with the preparation and creation of sanctified food for the table, and men with the responsibility for leading the prayers before and after eating, every family meal gives everyone present the chance to emulate a ritual that has been impossible for millennia. The structure of the dietary law, as well, provides a means of both sanctifying and regulating the human appetite, a function sadly lacking from many tables today. Other religions use fast and feast days and other dietary restrictions to achieve the same purpose of elevating a basic need into something greater and more communal. Even those not disposed toward great observance often mark their evening meal with a meditation on their good fortune to be eating, however brief or formulaic. All these observances, though, depend on eating as being a communal and deliberate exercise, and this is no longer the case for many.
Many surveys done in North America have confirmed that in most families, everyone eats together at the table less than once a week. Many teenagers rely solely on what they can prepare themselves and consume while otherwise engaged. Many families have only a vestigial idea of how to shop for, prepare and serve a meal, and are restricted to take-out or pre-made and pre-assembled meals to mark family meals. A study done by Kraft some years ago found that the percentage of households in which meals are routinely prepared from scratch is remarkably low, which is of course to Kraft's advantage.
Pre-made meals are not only much more expensive than preparing the equivalent meal from raw ingredients would be; they are also generally less healthy, both due to heavily processed ingredients and chemical additions to regulate flavour, texture and shelf-life. The market is meeting the demand for healthier and fresher food, in pre-washed and arranged salads, for example, but even these are much more expensive and less flavourful than home-made salad would be. And the creation of meal kits, in which everything including the meat can be stored on the shelf at room temperature for several weeks, must strike every gourmet or cook with horror.
A fairly new and unwelcome feature of the Canadian diet is the way in which healthy habits are now more available to the wealthy than to the less well off. In earlier days, a sedentary lifestyle and access to fatty, heavily sweetened foods was reserved for those of means. Lack of a car, more physically demanding jobs and a reliance on grains and vegetables rather than meat and prepared foods meant that the lower middle class had in many ways healthier life-styles than the well-to-do. Today our culture has largely reversed this. When everyone eats pre-made meals, the fresher and healthier options are far more expensive. In a world where nobody walks anywhere and everyone works long hours, exercise tends to be most available to those with the money to join a gym or buy exercise equipment and the time to use it.
I am ordinarily an advocate of requiring schools to teach academics and to leave sex ed, driver's ed, and related life skills instruction to families. In this case, though, since it is most often those whom Dalrymple would call the underclass who have the fewest financial resources and the least inclination or ability to live healthily, schools could play an important role. Rather than teaching accounting, typing and condom usage, phys. ed. and home ec. could do much to improve quality of life in the post school years. Phys ed has generally been shown to improve not just the fitness of those who participate but also their discipline. And teaching teenagers how to prepare cheap and healthy meals could go a long way toward reversing the downward trend of group dining. Very few people who have made a meal from scratch will agree to it being consumed by one person in front of the TV, another at the table and yet another playing video games. If the government is determined to play its social engineering games, perhaps they could start with giving students the basic knowledge to care for and feed themselves adequately.
The assumption that demonstrated sexual skills ought to be required for marriage is a telling one. I am inclined to think that the best reason why a marriage license is a bad idea is that it would give the government yet more control over something intimate and personal that thrives without socialist interference and founders with it. Some of the arguments in favour, though, are persuasive, but the issuing authority should not be the government (governments, after all, did not create marriage.)
Drivers require licenses because if they blunder around without any idea what they are doing, they will cause damage to bystanders and society. It is impossible to argue in the early 21st century that this is not at least as true of marriage. More people are killed by bad drivers, true, but arguably more people are made unhappy by bad marry-ers. In fact most responsible clergymen and/or their institutions require some sort of assurance that the couple who propose to be married by him demonstrate a certain level of maturity, forethought and stability before they will grant their blessing and that of their church. This is the best kind of "marriage permit", since it has the backing both of the institution that originated marriage as we understand it and presumably the support of the community behind it.
But what kind of classes might the government require, were it to issue permits to marry in the manner that it issues permits to drive a car? The possibilities are endless. Required courses would have to include: how to raise children in a fully egalitarian and democratic family; how to rise beyond antiquated sex roles and ensure not just equal but identical responsibilities for each spouse; the importance of being open to different and equally legitimate sexualities. Any notion that marriage is a binding and lifelong commitment would of course be eradicated from this curriculum; rather, the importance of each partner being free to explore personal growth, even if it takes him out of the marriage, would be stressed. One must, after all, be true to oneself.
All socialist societies recognize that strong familial bonds threaten the bond between the individual and the leviathan state. In the Soviet Union, spouses and children were encouraged to inform on each other and rewarded for doing so, even as the hapless parent or spouse was led off to a life of torture in Siberia. In Israel's kibbutz experiment, children were raised communally so that parents might devote more of their time to the polity and children might feel more connected to the kibbutz than to their parents. The milder version of this that encroaches upon even Canada and the USA is the "it takes a village" model of child-rearing, in which children are seen as a communal responsibility more than the responsbility of their parents, and in which one's responsibility to provide for "the children" through insane taxes and government controlled schools hampers one's ability to provide for and educate one's own children as one sees fit.
Too many people stumble into marriage and parenthood (or more often, single parenthood, or parenthood and then shacking up) with no real plan nor idea of how to behave. The solution, though, is the opposite of more government regulation and intervention. Let us strengthen churches, neighbourhoods and families, who in times past and in a better future will provide their own role models, safety nets, and ground rules for raising the next generation and keeping marriages together. They also provided something entirely lacking from our society: stigma and disapproval for those whose refusal to honour their responsibilities endangers their own families and the community.
When I was studying philosophy with that great and good man T. Y. Henderson, he taught his young disciples the dangers of argument by analogy. He showed us a column by another great and good man, Billy Graham, who asserted that just as to drive a car one had to have a driver's license, so in order to enjoy carnal pleasures one ought to have a marriage license. Could anyone see a flaw in this argument, asked T.Y. Even the most doltish among us could: in order to win a driver's license one had to demonstrate a proficiency that was born of considerable practice. Was Graham advocating a learner's permit for sex? Hours of repetition of skills guided by a watchful parent? Surely not; ergo, be careful with those analogies, kids.
If one were to examine the argumentum per analogiam of Victor Davis Hanson one might immediately perceive that he had turned the current situation in the Middle East upside down. The South Atlantic episode of 1982 saw a small, barren territory populated by a small, backward people invaded by a foreign power wielding considerable military might, using as justification for their take-over irredentist claims from another century. It sounds like a perfect anology to me -- if we reverse Hanson's dramatis personae and equate Israel with the Argies and the Palestinians of the West Bank with the Falklanders. Who plays Margaret Thatcher is anyone's guess.
Hanson's logical clumsiness seems, to these aged eyes at least, an excellent example of argumentam ad crumenam.
There are many. First, Latinos don't use their petrochemical bounty to buy the world's silence in the face of barbaric behaviour. They don't stone rape victims to death, nor do they lop limbs off petty thieves. Even the humblest fruit picker aspires for something better for his child than to detonate himself in a crowded place. And not even the most militantly Catholic Latin American believes it his personal duty to convert or kill the rest of the world.
The English, for their part, can live safely and prosperously throughout the world, especially in the Anglosphere, a wealthy and powerful chunk of the world molded in their image. Hatred of the English does not fuel aspects of American or European politics. While Brussels would love to force its standards for produce on the Sceptered Isle, England nonetheless enjoys geographical distance from hostile neighbours. The Falklands, while of some naval importance in the days of non-nuclear fleets, have no special historical or theological significance to the British, nor do they represent the last bastion of safety to which Anglo-Saxons may cling after losing a third of their population. And one of the members of the Davis' proposed Quartet did not partake in anti-English Easter pogroms up until the 1950s.
If none of this were true, his analogy would fit a bit more closely.
If you want to read an irresponsible piece of geopolitcal blather, may I recommend Victor Davis Hanson's "Back to the Falklands"? In it Hanson, who is old enough to know better than to play with leaky analogies, tries to compare the Argentinian invasion of 1982 with the Israeli-Palestinian situation of 2003. Diplomacy would not have worked then, he says (quite rightly); it should not be tried now. He warns against trusting Mahmoud Abbas with Israel's security and, like Clio, brings up Abbas's dreadful doctoral thesis as proof that the man is no friend to Jews.
It was the ex-terrorist Menachem Begin who said that one doesn't negotiate with one's friends, one has to negotiate with the enemy. Presumably Israel can be trusted to concede nothing that will imperil its security but loitering on the way to the table has won the Jewish state nothing but a world of trouble. Sharon can best win more time for whatever rosy scenario he expects to drop into his lap by starting to talk and allowing the Palestinians to either knee-cap themselves again or demonstrate success in curbing their thugs. What can he gain by continuing to play the intransigent? Will there be fewer Palestinians under Israel's control in 5 years? Will more time in the refugee camps improve their disposition? Will they spend their idle hours searching for a leader more amenable to Israel's demands?
Mahmoud Abbas is no Thomas Jefferson. He cannot explain away that tawdry thesis by claiming that it was written when "Israel was the enemy." His reputation amongst his fellow Palestinians is not a shining one but he does represent a step or two in the right direction.
... click here. And let us all take inspiration from a conservative historian who is both tenured and often published. If only there were more.
There is a very interesting book review in The New Republic discussing trauma, memory and human resilience. One of the theses of the book being reviewed appears to be that the extent to which a victim of trauma is emotionally crippled by it has more to do with the individual's predisposition to instability and failure to cope than to the objective magnitude of the trauma. Certainly this confirms common sense and basic observation, as we live in a society in which some Holocaust survivors emerge from concentration camps to build families, lives, and businesses, and while never losing their memories of their suffering achieve contentment if not happiness; at the same time, we see some men and women with uniformly privileged and pleasant lives who live out their adulthoods bemoaning a personal tragedy, such as divorce, or a sibling whom a parent preferred, and are utterly unable to get beyond it. These latter types are often legitimately suffering, it is important to remember, but it makes much more sense to presume that they lack an inner resilience that others with far worse lives possess than it does to discuss whether a divorce or an older brother mom loved more are actually more horrible than a concentration camp.
The popular view of survivors of trauma as being able to recover only with intense therapy sustained another blow several years ago when a study of WWII veterans, all of whom had been injured and seen and participated in nightmares, revealed that the group that did not use therapy were by any measure doing much better than the group who did. The men who said they didn't think about it and got beyond it using their own resources claimed to be happier and less troubled than did the men who spent many years in therapy learning to cope with their trauma. But by other, more objective measures, the non-therapy groups were also doing substantially better: they had fewer sleeping problems, fewer somatic illnesses, fewer divorces, better employment histories, for instance. These are all measurable quantities that are commonly and with some justification held to reflect mental stability.
None of this, of course, means that traumatized people should be helped only if their trauma is sufficiently significant, or that therapy is never helpful. If the group who sought therapy were by nature less resilient and able to cope, therapy might indeed have helped them considerably, and the only way to demonstrate this would be to have a control group who sought therapy and were denied it, which is of course impossible. But focusing on the personal qualities, some of them likely biochemical, that help or hinder survivors of bad things to move on and prosper, rather than endlessly dwelling on and recounting the events themselves, will likely serve the sufferers, their families, and psychology as a field much better.
Many are reluctant to concede the moral high ground to the non-elected Arab we must nonetheless refer to as the Palestinian Prime Minister. Abu Abbas wrote his thesis on why the Holocaust was actually the fault of Zionist Jews working with Germany, thereby neatly combining denial with the leitmotif of late 20th century Jew-hatred, The Jew As Nazi. He is indeed taken more seriously and afforded more respect than Arafat, but this is a bit like the Taller than Danny DeVito contest: you can be very very short, and still win.
By delaying any permanent or hard-to-revoke concessions, Sharon is counting on the fact that nobody is able or even willing to restrain the Arab street from its homicidal weekly aerobic exercises. In fact the bombing of Mike's Place in Tel Aviv coincided neatly with the assumption of extremely limited power by Abu Abbas. The bombing in Riyadh by the ideological Siamese twin of Hamas further advances Sharon's argument, and it will be fascinating to see George W. Bush (or more likely the increasingly regretable Powell) try to explain why America will pursue the Riyadh bombers relentlessly and mercilessly, but Israel must not do the same. When it becomes clear that only the clothing of the Arab leadership has changed from a uniform and kafiyeh to a business suit, but none of the substance, pressure from Washington will doubtless subside.
None of this, of course, will matter at all to Robinson, Chomsky and the many more moderate and less articulate people who follow their general ideology. Israel's "human rights violations" are the life blood of these modern day Jew haters. (When aboriginal terrorists in Canada killed one police officer, Oka was barricaded at length. Checkpoints? Don't be silly, nobody was allowed in or out, at all. Let us ponder for a moment what benevolent Canada would do if these terrorists had routinely put bullets in the brains of babies at the park.) But had these critics lived in the 1950s, they would have justified their Jew-hatred by referencing at the same time the Zionist bankers' conspiracy and world wide Communism; had they lived in the 1920s, they would have insisted that they don't hate Jews, but are troubled by their rootlessness and disloyalty; had they lived in 18th century Poland, they would have been horrified and enraged by Jews drinking human blood; and in the 13th century would have justified their actions because everyone knows Jews caused the plague. Like these previous blood soaked myths, Israeli atrocities are the fiction by which intelligent people who should know better justify their words and actions that support and contribute to the slaughter of Jews.
Great news from Korea! Today is the 15th anniversary of Highly Beloved President Kim Jong Il's classic work "Let Us All Live and Struggle Like Heroes". It seems like only yesterday when I and and my comrades down at the Revolutionary Workers' Solidarity Bar and Grill were leafing through our copies of this immortal banner which encouraged all the servicemen of the Korean People's Army and people to a heroic struggle for accelerating the socialist construction and bringing earlier the reunification of the country. Heady days.
Meanwhile arch-reactionary George Bush and his lackey President Roh of the decadent southern Korean republic have devised yet another fiendish plot to destabilize the peace-loving North and its nuclear program which intends to harness the atom only to increase agricultural output and manufacture a harmless hair-removal paste which will be marketed in the Gulf region to former anti-imperialist fighters now fallen on hard times.
Surrounded by enemies, small in size and population, Israel has also been blessed with numerous advantages: Billions of dollars in aid annually from the government of the United States. Access to the latest in American military technology. Moral and financial support from the Jewish diaspora. The reputation of being the only democracy in a region of corrupt despots. But its two biggest assets have always been the claim to the moral high ground and the nature of its chief opponent.
In the Palestinians, Israelis have the best enemy a country could ever want. You couldn't invent a less telegenic foe than Yasser Arafat -- perpetually ill-shaven, clad in paramilitary garb, licking his blubbery lips, looking as if he fears that at any moment he will be called into the dentist's office for a root-canal, guiltily aware that he has sold the Novocaine on the black market to support his on-line pornography addiction. And his followers! The Palestinians, to quote Abba Eban, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Every time they build up international support they squander it with some vicious act of bravado. Their notion of clever public relations is to clothe a three-year old in a toy suicide belt or to flood the streets in jubilation at the news of September 11.
Such political maladroitness has given Israel an easy time in portraying itself as a victim of madmen and fanatics and allowed it to get away with its own acts of self-defeating machismo -- the invasion and occupation of Lebanon and Ariel Sharon's ill-advised photo-op at the Al-Aqsa mosque. As long as the only choices were supporting Israel or backing the PLO of Yasser Arafat, the Jewish state had little to fear from North Americans of real political influence. (I fear I must exclude Svend Robinson and Noam Chomsky from that category.)
Now along comes the newest "road-map." With the leverage provided by the victory in Iraq, President Bush hopes to push Sharon and PLO prime minister Mahmoud Abbas down a path of concessions that will lead, over three years, to an independent Palestine and peace in the Middle East. At the moment the PLO is occupying the moral high ground. Abbas has committed the Palestinians to negotiations without preconditions, has named moderates to key cabinet positions and condemned terrorism. Sharon, on the other hand, has refused to halt rogue settlements, continues to fight terrorism with terrorism and seems content to drag his feet. What can he be hoping for? Either for the Palestinians to self-destruct yet again, which will let Israel off the hook, or for the 2004 election to draw so close that Bush will do nothing to imperil the Republicans' new-found popularity among American Jewish voters.
In the long run, however, the West Bank settlements will be the ruin of Israel. It cannot survive as a Jewish state encompassing an indigestible, hostile, under-class of Palestinians who have one of the highest birth-rates in the world. Faced with this demographic time bomb it must either withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza or resort to ethnic cleansing, which even the most pro-Israel American government could not stomach. What does Sharon have to gain from delay?
This article from an up-state New York paper shows voter discontent with Hillary as a senator. Moreover Ms Rodham Clinton's national polls show very strong negatives among voters of both sexes, which means that few would be inclined to change their minds about her should she decide to run in 2008.
Another poll today should have Democrats reaching for the hemlock. 66% of those questioned couldn't name a single candidate for that party's 2004 presidential nomination. Astonishingly of Democrats polled, the number was 64% who could not recall such luminaries as Lieberman, Kerry and Sharpton.
If this article, describing a strategy for a Hillary run at the White House, doesn't send tendrils of ice down your spine I can't imagine what will. The only thing that could be worse would be a successful HRC/Sharpton slate, which could probably in four years turn the USA into a Third World dictatorship. And for company, Sasha Trudeau could be running Canada by then, with his lovely wife Catherine McTeer Clark at his side.
In the middle of an excellent article on the need in post-Iraq America to devise a new way of making geopolitical allies, Victor Davis Hanson makes the following observation:
Eventually, some astute diplomat is going to make the obvious observations that English-speaking nations like the United States, Australia, Britain, (Western) Canada, and India have defied popular wisdom and retained common cultural and historical affinities that only become more apparent in times of conflict — and could form the basis for a more permanent and formal alliance.
You caught the parentheses? Is Hanson saying that Americans have detected the schism in Canadian attitudes to the USA and that Bush supporters were likely to be found west of the lakehead? Was this because Radio Free Baghdad (aka the CBC) was seen to originate in Ontario? Or did he mean only to exclude Europhile and pro-appeasement Québec from the list of good guys? Probably the latter. If so, yet another good reason to cheer for a rejuvenated separatist movement and to dust off copies of Philip Resnick's Thinking English Canada.
In another article Steyn defends John Buchan from charges of anti-Semitism.
Mark Steyn explains how the Canadian cabal controlling Bush is really Jewish. Or how the Jewish cabal controlling Blair is really Canadian. Or something like that. And his final comment gives one pause, considering how many Episcopalians in Canada still really like John Buchan.
It is no secret that the Canadian experiment has been very, very good to the Atlantic provinces and Newfoundland in particular. Newfoundland discovered after centuries of being a British colony that quasi-independence was not a paying proposition and allowed itself in 1949 to be seduced into Confederation on payment of its debts and the promise of a steady stream of federal government cash transfers. And I'm glad it did. We would all be poorer as Canadians if the Rock had joined the USA or allowed itself to be annexed by Greenland. Can we imagine a Canada without Rex Murphy, figgy duff, squid-jigging and seal-clubbing? I can't.
And so it is with dismay that I observe erstwhile cod fisherman ripping up maple leaf flags and Newfie officials calling for scrapping Confederation and not enforcing Canadian laws. Throw in terrorist fishermen in New Brunswick, resorting to arson and intimidation to get a bigger quota for their crab catch and I have to ask the Atlantic provinces: what the heck do you think you're doing? Instead of whining and breaking the law like a bunch of French wine-growers, you should be on your knees thanking a gracious Providence for allowing you to live in a country that has subsidized your poverty-stricken region to the hilt and encouraged you to drink too deeply for too long of the overflowing cup of federal pogey. Burning some Micmac's boat isn't going to make the crab any more plentiful and calling for the head of Fisheries Minister Thibault won't bring back the cod. Relax, grab yourselves a Moosehead, and listen to the fiddles. Isn't that what I pay my taxes for?
What a difference 58 years makes. On May 8, 1945 the free world celebrated V-E Day, the final conquest of the quintessentially evil Nazi empire. Just to be clear to Mr Chretien, our Prime Minister, and Mr McCallum, our Minister of Defence, this was a time when Canadian soldiers carried weapons and used them to bring about a regime change. There are no records of Canadian troops in 1945 needing the protection of armed German chaperones.
Exactly two years earlier the Germans were busy exterminating the Jews of Poland. In Warsaw the Nazis were resisted by the inhabitants of the ghetto who fought German units for a month while their homes were burnt down around them. On this day in 1943 the leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization Mordechai Anielewicz was killed in his Warsaw bunker.
It just keeps getting worse. The Chretien government's ability to embarrass Canadians and their military has reached new lows with the revelation that our troops in Afghanistan have been sent unarmed. Because our officials have not signed off on the proper paperwork our soldiers will be the only unarmed adults on the streets of Kabul. But not to worry: we have chaperones. To keep us safe in Afghanistan our soldiers have been given German bodyguards. The only way this could have been more humiliating is if we were to be protected by the French.
Just when you feared that the mushy liberal homogeneity of Canadian news publishing was about to engulf "The National Post", along comes Patrick Watson. The long-time CBC apparatchik argues for a publicly-owned Canadian newspaper on the model of -- surprise! -- the CBC.
"This newspaper," declares the sesquipedalian Watson, would be "beholden to no commercial interest — produced, driven and governed by journalists, not investors or advertisers."
Just why the nation's taxpayers should fund a group of journalists, responsible to no one but themselves, to give us the same predictable drivel in print that we are forced to support over the air-waves is evident to Watson: EVIL CORPORATIONS own our newspapers. As Noam Chomsky has so brilliantly shown us in "Manufacturing Consent", this a Bad Thing and can only lead to repression.
The left wing in Canada has always supported the notion of state-run media and have long lamented the absence of the Canuck equivalent of "Pravda" or "The Daily Worker". I understand their frustration. It would be jolly if every slice of the political spectrum had its own media outlets but until that golden day comes we'll have to be content with the cacophony of the Web and blogs of every description.
He, too, sees nothing good in the change in management at the National Post. In his NRO blog he also makes the important point that while Asper & Co are preferrable to the Fedayeen Chretien who run most of Canada's newspapers, they are in no way comparable to Conrad Black, a conservative thinker as opposed to slightly-right-of-Liberal-dogma powergrubbers.
There is a disturbing sentence in the middle of a fascinating article on the future of American-European relations. Victor Davis Hanson takes Old Europe to task for enjoying a free ride on defense spending at American expense and repaying Yankee generosity with contempt and arrogance.
"Maybe", says Hanson, "it is our power and their weakness that incite jealousy and necessitate such pretence. It is an age-old phenomenon not unlike the case of the Aegean states of the Hellenic League, which preferred to pay Athens with tribute rather than ships for their own protection — and then awoke furious that the Athenian fleet was establishing its own defense policy and unchecked by multilateral constraints."
This is a troubling analogy. Fifth-century B.C. Athens, to whom Hanson likens the USA, had just cleared the Persian threat from the Greek mainland and proposed to go further, liberating even more Hellenic cities in Ionia. To do so they formed the Delian League with their island allies. These cities would pay into a common treasury and Athens would provide the ships and men to rout the Persians. Unfortunately Athens grew addicted to both this money (which was used largely to rebuild the Acropolis and subsidize the mob) and their military superiority. Hubris seized the city's leadership; the alliance was regarded as an Athenian empire. The bullying attitude of Athens led to the Peloponnesian war which brought defeat to the city and ended Greek pretensions to moral and political leadership forever.
I worry that an intelligent American commentator can overlook the lessons of 2,500 years ago and see in the Delian League only the weakness of the smaller states while ignoring the destructive pride and martial swagger of Athens that led to its own downfall.
There is no clearer illustration of the dangers that absolute power presents than Thucydides' "The Peloponnesian War", especially that part known as the Melian Dialogue. In this conversation between the Athenian delegation and the citizens of the island of Melos in 416 BC, the Melians attempt to put the case for their remaining neutral instead of being forced to become a tributary of Athens -- the equivalent of rebuffing the current American assertion that one is either for or against them. The Melians based their claim on justice, honour and religion but the Athenians dismissed such trifles, stating "in the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak accept what they must." Naked self-interest is what matters: "It is a general law of nature to rule wherever one can. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first who have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know that you and all mankind would do as we do , if you were as strong as we are."
The people of Melos, trusting to their gods and allies, chose to defy Athens. The Athenians slaughtered every Melian male of military age and sold the women and children into slavery. Lovers of history know, however, that this atrocity was avenged before very long. In 404 BC flute girls hired by the conquering Spartan played as the walls of Athens were pulled down and its war-galleys burnt.
While Americans revel in their current super-power status and survey a world where they have no military equal, they would do well to be more careful readers not only of Thucydides but also of the arch-apologist of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling who knew a thing or two about pride and destruction:
Recessional
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung batle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine -
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law -
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word -
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Ken Whyte is fired as editor of the National Post and is replaced by Matthew Fraser. Since this comes as part of a reorganization that sees one David Asper named as Chairman, is it not unreasonable to fear the imposition of an editorial line more in keeping with the Aspers' notoriously Liberal leanings?