"One of Cromwell's Parliaments proposed burning all state records so that, having effaced all official memory of the past, life could begin afresh. Disavowel of antecedents is the quintessential revolutionary act, as Napoleon, too, understood.

When shown a genealogy of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon brushed it aside, remarking: "Je suis mon propre ancetre" (I am my own ancestor. Considering the scale of Napoleon's vanity, and the nature of that genealogy, his rejection of it was understandable. But his rejection also reflected the modern disdain for history as "the dead hand of the past."

Napoleon is the archetypal modern man of action, a bloody nuisance ricocheting around civilization, making history and orphans. He made so much history because he knew so little. He traveled fast because he traveled little, unencumbered by an educated person's sense of limitations, the sense that is the bittersweet fruit of historical understanding. Such people are tolerable, if you like history as made by Corsican bridgards and other modern world-shakers.

...

Many historians, like many other intellectuals, long to be "relevant" to the specific problems of today. Thy flinch from acknowledging that the most useful lesson of history is highly general. It is: things have not always been as they are, and will not always be as they are. This is an especially important insight for Americans, who take for granted freedom and abundance, both of which are, considered in the sweep of history, rare and shortlived phenomena.

History contains more sadness than gladness, more dreams frustrated than fulfilled. But this means that the study of history is, for many historians, unacceptably unfun and unheroic. Like many other intellectuals, many historians want to believe that they are pregnant with the future. They want to dissolve the distinction between thought and action. They are, they think, deliverers: history will yield highly practical "lessons" that will propel manking to the uplands of happiness.

Many modern intellectuals, like optimists through the ages, recoil from this truth: the best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering dissapointments.

Optimists as different as Marxists and Americans believe in History- Americans call it Progress- as a linear process leading inexorably to higher stages of life. But if historians and other intellectuals were free from Promethean pretensions, young people at school would learn the unfun, unheroic truth that history is circular, like a maelstrom."

-George Will, "Inoculation by History"

"FDR's New Deal broke with nineteenth-century liberalism (which is what passes for conservatism today) by abandoning the premise that society, as distinguished sharply from government, produces the elements of happiness in life, and that government's role is merely to maintain a framework of order in which people pursue happiness. What was new about the New Deal was the notion that government had a duty to provide people with some, and more and more, of the tangible elements of happiness.

Long and forever gone are the days when it was thought that well-bring, economic and otherwise, should be solely the result of the individual's ability to cope with society, with social forces that government could not or should not regulate. The New Deal changed, irreversibly, Americans' expectations, and the legal and psychic relationship of Americans to their government.

This year some GOP conservatives seem to be trying, again, to turn an election into a referendum on the propriety of those expectations and that relationship. It is unclear how the GOP can benefit from so straight-on a challenge to the settled habits of mind of the American majority, which accepts the Rooseveltian premise that government should supply crucial elements of happiness.

The GOP challenge is a risky tactic against Carter, who calls to mind Disraeli's recommendation: Tory men and Whig measures. Carter is an unmistakably conservative person. The values he obviously cherishes and repeatedly invokes- piety, family, community, continuity, industriousness, discipline- are the soul of conservatism, The appeal of Carter to conservatives is in his aspiration to use government vigorously in the service of conservative values."

-George Will, "Odd Man In"

"Most UN members are police regimes. Many of these regimes rule over ersatz nations. Many use their energies to pound together human elements that lack cultural affinities. To such regimes Israel, a real nation, is either unintelligible or a reproach. Regimes resting on force are bound to find fault with the rich legitimizing sources of Israel's nationhood.

Israel became a nation after the United Nations was born. But in a sense Israel is one of the oldest nations (with Egypt and China) represented there. One hundred years hence, if historians bother to remember the UN at all, they may remember it as a mob of regimes representing force without legitimacy, all power and no authority, venting their rage against one of the few nations truly represented there."

-George Will, "Zionism and Legitimacy," 1975

"As Czechoslovakia, a democratic country, was accused of mistreating the German minority in the Sudeten region, so Israel, also a democratic country, is accused of mistreating the Arab minority within Israel itself and also, of course, in the occupied territories. As the creation of the Czechoslovak state after WW1 was called a mistake by Hitler and Chamberlain, so the creation of the Jewish state after WW2 is called a crime by contemporary totalitarians and their appeasers. The insistence by the Czechs that surrendering the Sudeten regions to Hitler would leave Czechoslovakia hopelessly vulnerable to military assualt was derided, especially on the Left, as a shortsighted reliance on the false security of territory and arms; so a similar insistence by the Israelis with regard to the occupied territories is treated today with lofty disdain by contemporary descendants of those believers in the irrelevance to a nation's security of territorial buffers and arms."

-Norman Podhoretz

"In Cambodia the Communists, running true to form, are concentrating their fury on the ultimate enemy of any Communist regime, the people. The Communists have emptied the cities, driving upwards of four million people- young and old, childing mothers and newborn babies, the healthy, halt and lame- on a forced march to nowhere, deep into the countryside where food is scarce and shelter is scarcer still. Even hospitals have been emptied, operations interrupted at gunpoint, doctors and patients sent packing. The Communists call this the "purification" of Cambodia.

This forced march will leave a trail of corpses, and many more at its destination, wherever that is. But that is, according to the Communists, not an atrocity, it is a stern "necessity."

The Detroit Free Press containted a droll (I hope it was meant to be droll) sub-headline on events in Cambodia: "Reds Decree Rural Society." If one kind of society offends you, decree another. Communism, like its totalitarian sibling, fascism, is the culmination of a modern heresy: people are plastic, infinitely malleable under determined pounding. And society is a tinker toy, its shape being whatever the ruling class decrees.

To create a New (Soviet, Chinese, German, Cambodian) Man- and what totalitarian would aim lower?- you must shatter the old man, ripping him from the community that nourishes him. Send him on a forced march into a forbidding future. He may die. If he survives he will be deracinated, demoralized, pliant.

There is no atrocity so gross that American voices will not pipe up in defense of it. Today they say: it is "cultural arrogance" for Americans to call this forced march an atrocity, when it is just different people pursuing their "vision."

This is the mock cosmopolitianism of the morally obtuse. Such people say: only "ideologically blinkered" Americans mistake stern idealism for an atrocity just because it involves the slaughter of innocents. Such people will never face the fact that most atrocities, and all the large ones, from the Thirty Years War through Biafra, have been acts of idealism.

Of course, one must not discount sheer blood lust, and the joy of bullying. Totalitarian governments rest on dumb philosophy and are sustained by secret police. But they are a bully's delight. Totalitarians have never been without apologists here, people who derice vicarious pleasure from watching- from a safe distance, of course; from the meadow, with ice cream bars, if possible- other people ground up by stern "necessities." Apologists say that totalitarians only want totalitarianism for the sake of the revolution. The apologists, being backward, have got things backward.

-George Will, "Famous Victory"

It's always good to be smacked back to reality by the consummate Tory.

"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposted on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."

-Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV"

"In retrospect there is a quality of inevitability about the course he did puruse. But historians insist that the inevitable is inevitable only after man have made it happen."

-Teddy White, "The Making of the President, 1964"

"I just want to remind you, ladies and gentleman, of one proven fact in history, because we conservatives are always blamed for wanting to go backwards. That is not true. We just want to take a look at what has happened before we try it again. Because everything that this administration is trying today has been tried not by just our own government, but in other governments of the history of the world, and I remind you, they have never succeeded. A government that is big enough to give everything that you need and want is also big enough to take it all away."

-Barry Goldwater, 1964 campaign

"[Grits are] men...who tremble with anticipation because they have seen the rouged face of power."

-Pierre Trudeau

"But the Liberal Party is the greatest whorehouse in the western world and you know what happens when you try playing piano in the parlor of a place like that. Pretty soon, you're in the thick of the fray upstairs."

-Rene Levesque

"Quebec politicians have never been either Liberal or Conservative. They have always been simply and wholeheartedly French."

-Frank Underhill

"The philosophy of the Liberal Party is very simple- say anything, think anything, or better still, do not think at all, but put us in power because it is we who can govern you best."

-Pierre Trudeau

"The Liberal Party has no dogma. Its creed is unity- national unity and party unity."

-Michael Pitfield

"The Liberal Party is like a high-powered fraternity. It rushes the most promising young men in every generation. And then it demands their absolute loyalty."

-Wilson Parasiuk

""It's the League for Social Reconstruction all over again," they would say. "Those people will get sick of it, always sitting there on the Opposition benches yelling across the floor. There's a limit to altruism. If you can't win, you can't get any policies effected, no matter how high-minded or well-meaning they are.""

-Christina McCall