I‘LL FOREVER BE SURPRISED by current day apologists of Richard Nixon, who are able (much like admirers of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton) to side-step quite a bit of nastiness to put forward the triumphs — in this case concerning China and the Soviet Union and the often cited “détente.” And indeed this was the chief tactic of Nixon himself, who discounted the Watergate disclosures and who preferred to talk instead about his efforts “to build peace in the world.”
Note: this interview took place in October 2012 and was originally recorded for a proposed (but unrealized) Nation Talk Radio program.
Visit Chelsea Vowel’s website âpihtawikosisân here. Read “Burden of Proof: What a native blogger found out about her country, and herself, in the wake of the Attawapiskat scandal,” by Christine Fischer Guy (Eighteen Bridges Magazine).
• Week of 04.08.2013
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SOME YEARS AGO I had the good fortune and pleasure to befriend the wonderful Larry Loyie and Constance Brissenden. Larry is a Cree author and playwright from Slave Lake in Alberta. Constance is a freelance writer, author and editor who I first encountered when she was writing for Macleans in its glory days, under the capable editorship of Peter C. Newman, in the 1980s. Larry and Constance met in a writing class in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and within a few years had formed the Living Traditions Writers Group.
MEDIA REPORTING of the Assembly of First Nations’ Annual General Assembly, in Whitehorse, focused on the theme of intertribal warfare. The question topmost on every reporter’s jotting pad, it seemed, was this: Could the Manitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak recruit enough First Nations chiefs to establish a parallel organization — the “National Treaty Alliance”? Never you mind that Nepinak himself downplayed the talk of schism: the Indian wars, of every kind, draw attention.
• Week of 21.07.2013 
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Further to my National Post Conrad Black piece of this week I bring to your attention today’s article, by the Father, Raymond J. de Souza, “Communism vs. Catholics“:
In China today, as in Poland during the Cold War, Christians are being persecuted for their faith. Visiting the capital of Poland for the first time in 16 years, my thoughts turn to heroes of the country’s past — and to heroes of the present in other parts of the world. Imprisoned clergy are no longer a reality in Warsaw. But they are in Shanghai.
A great hero of mine is buried here, in Warsaw’s St. John’s Cathedral. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski was archbishop of the city, and primate of Poland, for 33 years, from 1948 to 1981. An indomitable foe of atheistic communism, he was also a master strategist who mobilized Polish piety to strengthen the culture and memory of the Polish nation during the dark night of communist oppression. Wyszynski was the great architect of religious resistance in Poland, confounding the communists here and in Moscow, and, it must be said, confusing officials in the Vatican who did not understand how to deal with tyrants. [emphasis added]
PERHAPS THE MOST remarkable thing about Adnan Rasheed’s defence of the Malala Yousafzai shooting (putting aside the fact it’s a defence) is how predictable and clichéd a performance it is, beginning with its disingenuous preamble “I’m sorry this happened, but ….”
ON MONDAY, National Post’s Full Comment contributor Conrad Black (“An unhappy civilization, but not one in ‘decline’”) produced Oswald Spengler in support of an effort to reject the notion of a Western decline. In doing so, he reasserted elements of Spengler’s conservative nationalism, proposing that Canada shed its “outworn reluctant attitudes about leading in the world” to assume its rightful place at the forefront of nations, and advancing along the way a piece of Chauvinism it is my present intention to scrutinize.
IN A MAY 2013 Ahram Online interview, the US ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, fielded a question about her government’s delicate relationship with the Morsi regime:
The fact is [the Freedom and Justice party] ran in a legitimate election and won. … Of course it is challenging to be dealing with any new government. However, at the state institutional level, we are for instance still liaising with the same military and civil service personnel, and thus have retained the same long-established relations.
One month later, footage of Tahrir Square brought to the world an outpouring of hostility, aimed at Ms. Patterson and President Obama. Why, ask the Egyptian critics of Morsi, did Obama keep up the flow of money and other material supports, as the Freedom and Justice Party undertook to replicate the authoritarianism of earlier regimes? Or to put it another way — the way Patterson did — why did the American government “retain the same long-established relations”?
THE NEWS from Afghanistan has been nothing but bad, and every indication is of worse to come. By the end of 2014, the Afghan people will be on their own, as they were in 2001 before the arrival — at local invitation — of British and American forces. Recall that twelve years ago the Islamist dirtbags who constituted the Taliban held Kabul, where they supervised a fanatical program of demodernization and terror punctuated by regularly scheduled mass executions. Imagine trying to re-engineer a nation of the twenty-first century along bronze age specifications, and you’ve got the idea — or, rather, don’t imagine it: the experiment was there before the eyes of anyone who cared to look. Now that the war-weary West has thrown its arms around the convenient fiction that the Taliban are ready for a negotiated re-entry (or is it entry?) to the twenty-first century, let’s review a sample of the bad tidings.
EVEN AFTER the tide of events had vindicated Nelson Mandela, beginning with his 1990 release from a twenty-seven-year imprisonment and culminating in his attainment of the South African presidency, some of his Cold War detractors maintained the charge against him of Communism. In fact, the influence of the Comintern, either upon himself or on the black struggle in general, was the only charge that Mandela repudiated outright in the April 1964 Rivonia trial speech which to this day provides our most detailed first-person account of his political convictions. To the charges against him, concerning acts of sabotage and of violence, Nelson Mandela provided a thoroughgoing and qualified admission: Yes, he conceded, his actions appeared revolutionary from the perspective of the majority white population — but since the white man both feared and repressed democracy in South Africa, how could the assertion of a black person’s democratic rights be conceived by him otherwise?
• Week of 23.06.2013
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IT WAS separation from his wife which in 1974 brought the Welsh political columnist Alan Watkins to the first-floor Islington flat of his son, and thereby to the acquaintance of the Telegraph columnist Frank Johnson, who occupied the floor below. Out of the friendship between this witty pair came the popularization of the phrase “the chattering classes,” to designate that portion of the bourgeoisie which earns its daily bread by talking. This week one is likely to summon the well-remunerated speaker and federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in that connection, and in doing so an opportunity arises to look into this important matter of verbal performance — not only as it pertains to the aspiring Trudeau but to his category of persons in general.
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