Newsletter April 2008 #72

Table of Contents:

Editor's Remarks

It has long been the practice of the Mackenzie Institute to avoid publically identifying our sponsors and supporters; we temporarily set this tradition aside for one notable exception.

On March 12th, 2008, Mrs. Miriam Weston Burnett passed away after a short illness. The eldest of the nine children of W.Garfield Weston, Miriam was one of the magnets that hold that clan together and an exemplar of the civic spirit of her father and grandfather. Miriam has one son, and was pre-deceased by her husband, Charles Ryland Burnett; once an American naval officer.

She was a gracious lady in every sense of the word, and yet possessed a large measure of the virtue of stubborn courage in adversity, without detracting from her warmth, liveliness and modesty. We’ll also miss her at the Mackenzie Institute as a stalwart friend to our purposes and one of our truest benefactors for many years. In the 1990s, the support she arranged often comprised the greater part of our annual revenues; and these contributions remained important even in our more prosperous years following 2001.

At her memorial service in Toronto, much was said about her humor, humility, faith and many of her interests; but there were some in attendance (besides this writer) who also recalled her commitment to the elements of national security – as a means of defending freedom and the safety of those societies where it is cherished.

Miriam Weston Burnett quietly espoused many values that too many ‘modern’ people find quaint or old fashioned. She also personified them. The world is a lesser place with her passing.

-- JT

Explaining Terrorism, Again

Rudyard Kipling, who was sometimes one of the more astute observers of the human condition, wrote one of his bleaker poems in 1919: “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. It is always worth reading for the poem concerns the grim realities that forever plague humanity whenever we forget some fundamental verities about the human condition. But we keep hoping for prosperity without working by robbing ‘selected Peter to pay for collective Paul’; keep imagining that we can have peace without keeping our weapons at hand, or that the day of universal free love has finally dawned… and each time reality painfully reminds us that everything has a price.

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Existential War

All languages evolve, and as time passes, words take up new meanings – or in some cases return to old ones. Usually, only old fuddy-duds (another term slipping out of usage, probably without lament) notice or chart the changes; although the archeologists of the English language do squirrel everything away in the vaults of the Oxford Dictionary.

Occasionally, the change happens in the realms of contemporary intellectual discourse. Take, for instance, what is currently happing to the word “Existential”.

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Op-Ed Column: From Berlin to Beijing

Should Canada go to a Beijing Olympiad?

Adolf Hitler turned the 1936 Olympics into a showpiece for Nazi propaganda. Moscow held the games in 1980, only to find out that much of the World refused to show up on account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – an invasion which helped add another million corpses to the USSR’s leading score in the 20th Century’s Totalitarian games.

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Alexander Mackenzie's Bookshelf

How Jihadis Figh

The ancient contest between the professional soldier and the amateur warrior is running stronger than ever, with the usual flavor being that of Western troops against Jihadist insurgents and terrorists in and around the Middle East. The results have been mixed, often because Western militaries remain fixated on conventional warfare (a traditional area of excellence) and so often neglect the hard-won lessons of historic encounters with Muslim combatants.

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“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it.”

And this is just in from the ‘You-can-say-that-again’ Desk:

“Political correctness is a doctrine which holds the proposition that it is possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

The Mackenzie Institute

The Institute was formed in 1986 to provide research and comment on such diverse subjects as terrorism, organized crime, political extremism, propaganda, conflict and other such matters. It does not shy away from controversy.

The Institute holds to the proposition that our democratic institutions need to be defended and enhanced, and works to do what it can to protect the stability of Canadian society.

Those who support its purposes are invited to become Friends of the Institute, and those who contribute $60 (or more) to it, receive its publications for the next twelve months.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca