Posted in Foreign affairs, tagged Winston Churchill on July 3, 2008 | No Comments »
Winston Churchill loved India but hated Indians, a seemingly anomalous stance which is all too common among imperialists, who tend to disdain inhabitants of coveted lands. It’s worth asking how these divergent strands of Churchill’s thought – his desire to keep India under British rule and his extreme distaste for the real people who lived [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged Hitler, Pat Buchanan, Winston Churchill, World War II on July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I’m not a fan of Winston Churchill. The man had his virtues and did some good but he was also a militarist (of the type that romanticizes war as a grand adventure), an imperialist, a bungling administrator (Gallipoli being only the most famous of his many botched operations), a racist, and a militant supporter of [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged conservative intellectuals, Edward Luttwak on June 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Like his friend Michael Ledeen, Edward Luttwak lives in the weird nether-land where scholarship meets espionage and intellectual journalism meets military adventurism. When he’s not writing learned books on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire or crisp essays for the London Review of Books, Luttwak works as a consultant for the various military and [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, History, Philosophy, tagged anthony pagden, East & West, worlds at war on May 22, 2008 | 2 Comments »
For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, tagged Israel on May 6, 2008 | 7 Comments »
If you read tomorrows National Post, you’ll find an editorial condemning me. Oddly enough, the basis of the condemnation is an article that was commissioned by the Post itself (which will also run tomorrow).
Context is everything. The Post had asked me to write about Israel’s 60th anniversary, as part of series of articles by many different writers that [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs on May 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
David Frum and I talk about the future of Israel here in a National Post podcast. (There is no permanent link but it can be found under the May 1 2008 heading). Since these debates get a bit tedious and repititive, with both sides rehearsing their long settled talking points, I tried to interject a personal element by telling [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged China, gallup poll, greatest enemy, Iran, Iraq on April 11, 2008 | No Comments »
This Gallup poll on the identity of America’s “greatest enemy” got fairly good press coverage when it was released in late March, but there’s a lot of food for thought in it that is worth addressing even if we’re a couple of weeks on from the headlines themselves. First, it’s not shocking to see Iran, [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged Christopher Hitchens, Iraq on April 4, 2008 | 14 Comments »
Christopher Hitchens: master logician.
September 11 had a strong effect on Christopher Hitchens. “I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration,” he remarked to an interviewer in 2003. “Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I [...]
Posted in Canadian politics, Foreign affairs, Personalities, U.S. Politics on March 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
My friend and fellow blogger Jeet has suggested that Barack Obama should ”wave goodbye” to his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee - but not, mind you, because Goolsbee has done anything wrong. In the recent controversy involving Canada, NAFTA and the Obama campaign, Jeet even believes that ”Goolsbee was the innocent party.” Why, then, does Jeet think Goolsbee should go? In a word, “because of his policies.” What [...]
Posted in Asia, Foreign affairs, History, Japan, Personalities on February 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Hatoyama Kunio, Japan’s Justice Minister, gave an interview in the magazine Weekly Asahi last October that has been reprinted on Japan Focus, (a peer reviewed electronic journal and webzine on Japan), and reported recently in the Japan Times. The interview has some fascinating nuggets, but none so interesting as Hatoyama’s explanation for why Japan should continue to uphold the death penalty [...]
