Newsletter July, 06

Table of Contents:

Alexander Mackenzie’s Bookshelf

We love the Great and Dear Leaders

North Korea is fanatically hermitical, and the ruling Dynasty seems extremely guarded about their true past. Yet a dedicated and skilled reporter can learn much. Bradley K. Martin is just such a reporter, having spent 25 years on the Asian beat and visiting North Korea several times. Oddly, he was just invited back even after the first edition of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St. Martin’s Press, New York 2^nd edition 2006) hit the shelves.

Perhaps the North Koreans have learned to ignore irony. Martin is looking behind the veils of North Korea and the Kim family and reporting exactly what he sees, and such candor is not loved by most totalitarians, but he does not denounce and he reports what he was told with a straight face (and a gentle ironic wit). He has wrought a superb exploration of North Korea and its idiosyncratic leaders. The book is timely, because one gets the sense that the Kim Jung Il family will not rule eternally, and North Korea is creaking at its overstressed seams.

A Rage Against the Dying of the Light?

One of the most courageous journalists to ever grace Italy, Oriana Fallaci, wrote an extremely provocative book about Islamofascism in 2002. The Rage and the Pride was a call to arms for the Western world to see to its protection. The next two years brought her nothing but grief from the so-called peace movement, the Inquisitors of Political Correctness, and sundry other intellectual quislings (her term but worth reviving); it also emboldened Jihadis and their supporters to attack her.

Fallaci’s answer to these howls of abuse and attempted persecutions is The Force of Reason (Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2006). Fallaci’s frustration in her role in Cassandra is real, but the threat to civilization and the future of humanity is real too. For after all, what do the Islamofascists and the quislings ("the Ward Churchills, the Noam Chomskys, the Louis Farrakhans, the Michael Moores, their accomplices, and the domestic traitors who sell us to the enemy") represent but a sustained attack on all the institutions and the heritage of the West itself?

This is not a passionate cry of ‘I’m a victim, defend me!’ but one of ‘Look to your safety, defend yourselves!’ It remains to be seen how many will rally to it.

History Worth Collecting

What true bibliophile or history lover has not coveted the complete set of Will and Ariel Durant’s History of Civilization? After some years of collecting individual volumes, it was a delight to find the complete matched set in a Halifax used bookstore for a reasonable price.

The series is a titanic piece of scholarship, detailed and complete in every respect — starting with Our Oriental Heritage in 1935 and ending with the 11^th volume The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975 when Will turned 90. This is indeed the work of a lifetime and we shall probably never see a historian of this caliber again.

In the forty years it took to complete this project, the perspectives of the historians changed somewhat (Will, for example, appears to have substantially re-evaluated his own views on the worth of religion). Besides their dry observations about human nature, the series delights by their thoroughness. Every aspect of human activity is listed, and one gets an idea of the context of the times they study in a way that few teachers can convey. They are not easy to read because of their length and complexity, but whatever time is invested is amply rewarded. Good hunting!

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