Commentary In “Civilization: The West and the Rest” historian Niall Ferguson asks why, from about 1500 AD, the West was able to rise from being a backwater of illiterate, unhygienic bumpkins to become the greatest civilization the world had ever seen. He suggests an answer: the West created what he calls “the six killer apps”…

Commentary In “Four Quartets,” one of the most celebrated poems of the last century, T.S. Eliot writes: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past. … A people without history/ Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments.” Eliot’s…

The year 2020 started with the coronavirus pandemic and ended with the U.S presidential election. What a roller-coaster! Shortly before Christmas, a new variant of the coronavirus forced London to lock down again. Reports say it is spreading 70 times faster than COVID-19 and is more deadly. Throughout history, when our ancestors were facing a…

Commentary Whenever one hears the dreaded pleasantries “diversity,” “tolerance,” or “inclusion,” one knows that another of one’s fundamental democratic liberties is about to be rescinded by the revolutionary guard of progressive orthodoxy. Having witnessed the progressive—in both senses of the word—erosion of the freedoms of speech, religion, and association in Canada, which have fallen faster…

Commentary Karl Marx was convinced that his envisaged revolution to save the world from its march to perdition would be realized by the united workers of the world. They would throw off the shackles of capitalism, voluntarily re-inventing their various regions as socialist utopias joined in global sodality. That never happened voluntarily, of course. It…