In 1948 the United Nations formally codified genocide as a great crime against humanity. The concept was new, even the word was new, it was “first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin …
Category Archives: Genocide
Votes
If there is going to be an election in 2021, and many experts predict that there will be, then I hope that all my readers will go out and vote. It is our civic duty to do so. I fully understand that a few million Canadians can never bring themselves to vote for a Conservative …
It is time for a change
Many decades ago, when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, I was, for a while, a student at the Staff College where the Canadian Forces tried, with some success, to turn middle ranked officers into potential admiral and generals. We studied, amongst other things, the “national security environment.” (I think that’s how the academics, somewhat pretentiously, …
We must never forget
Despite the ongoing concerns about the novel coronavirus which we are all facing, we must never forget what happened more than 75 years ago. 75 years ago today, on 15 April 1945, soldiers of the British 11th Armoured Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp … … they found many thousands of bodies that lay unburied …
Everyone needs to hear or read this
This is a video of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s remarks made at Auschwitz. What she says matters: she speaks of “barbaric crimes,” and about people who were “humiliated, tortured and murdered,” and she says “this is the place where the most horrible crimes against humanity took place.” Let us be clear: the victims of these …
Nonsense (2)
A bit more than a month ago I deemed the Globe and Mail’s proposal for a nation-wide ban on handguns to be “arrant nonsense” because it would do little to address a serious problem beyond making those criminals who traffic illegal weapons even richer. Sadly, I must make the same comment about one aspect of …
