What Does Pro Wrestling Say About Human Nature, Really?

What does professional wrestling say about human nature?

It's an oft-asked question -- explored by sociologists, social activists and (on rare occasion) in the media -- but rarely explored with any great depth.

Perhaps for good reason. After all, professional wrestling is not only ridiculous, but unabashedly ridiculous. It seems to thrive on its own ridiculousness.

As a superhero, I've often encountered the dark side of humanity, and the dark side of human nature. And it may be fair to say that the enjoyment of something like this clearly falls on the dark side of human nature:



This is a match from a "King of the Deathmatch" tournament held in Japan numerous years ago. One of the wrestlers in this match is actually quite famous. Cactus Jack, real name Mick Foley, wrestled for the WWF at one point in his career. The other performer, Wing Kanemura, is far less famous. He's likely rarely been heard of in North America, but may be rather famous in Japan -- who knows?

At certain levels, it may be tempting to impart a certain amount of nobility in the struggle being waged between these two men. Both want to be known as the toughest, most resilient, and most vicious deathmatch wrestlers in the world. One of them -- Cactus Jack -- even went on to win that particular honour.

What is on display here, to the naked eye, is simply a competition between two incredibly determined individuals.

These two men, however, are competing in front of a sold-out audience in what appears to be a large outdoor stadium. In other words, someone is making a lot of money off of this event.

Someone is making a lot of money off the suffering willingly accepted by these two individuals for what, at the end of the day, will likely be a very small pay-out.

As the eventual winner of the tournament, Cactus Jack was treated to nothing more than a can of soda as a "bonus", and a "King of the Deathmatch" trophy he wasn't allowed to keep.

Some people may think that because pro wrestling is fake that such things could never happen in real life.

Sadly, they'd be wrong. If they doubt it, they need look no further than Bum Fights.

Produced by the contemptible Ty Beeson, Bum Fights profits off homeless people by degrading them for very meagre pay-outs. Homeless men mutilate themselves for a sandwich, humiliate themselves for a handful of quarters, or fight each other over a bottle of liquor.

Kicking Beeson off his show is perhaps the one thing that Dr Phil has ever done right:



In the end, human rights are only as valuable as individuals themselves treat them. Someone willing to participate in enterprises such as Bum Fights -- and perhaps even professional wrestling -- clearly do not honour their own human dignity, or their own human rights.

Certainly, some professional wrestlers do become very wealthy through wrestling. Cactus Jack himself is one of them. Wing Kanemura, it seems, is likely far less fortunate.

What professional wrestling says about the people who watch it may be more pertinent than what it says about the wrestlers themselves. Few wrestling fans could pretend to be ignorant of how many of their favourite performers end up: broken down, injured, and dead at very young ages.

Yet they continue to watch unabated by the unfolding tragedy. I'm not sure if I accept the argument that wrestling fans are simply the enablers for attention-seeking musclemen, but that argument clearly exists.

(Then again, what is a superhero -- like myself -- than an attention-seeking muscleman with an overriding sense of self-righteousness? And have you seen the outfits we wear? Seriously. Perhaps it takes one to know one.)

The audience cannot be expulpated of responsibility for the sad outcomes these men eventually suffer -- just as anyone who has ever purchased a Bum Fights DVD is responsible for that particular travesty.

At least professional wrestlers don't accept explicit demeanment in the course of their careers. Unless a wrestler is no good at all, they tend to enjoy at least some moment of glory along the way.

Perhaps that makes a difference.

The Value of the Thing in the Pit

In "The Thing in the Pit", Spartacus contends with one of the dark underbellies produced by societies in which human life possesses no inherent value. The only running value on life shakes out to be something like this:

The lives of the people killed by other denizens of the pit are worth the least. Those who are capable of and willing to kill are moderately more valuable. The lives of those who can afford to pay gladiators to kill on their bhealf hold the most value -- but only so far as their coin extends.

The proliferation of such places is a side-effect of a politics that forgets the true value of citizenry. The true value of citizenry is not the value of the money they possess, or the value of their obedience to the state.

Rather, the true value of the citizen is what they can contribute to the community, given the opportunity, and the value of their life. This notion is deeply engrained within the codes of rights that are a feature of the most advanced of modern societies.

In Ancient Rome, no modern notion of citizenship truly existed. The notion of citizenship that existed in Ancient Rome was both antiquated and tyrannical.

There are places in modern society where such notions prevail today. Wherever a dog fight is staged, wherever a young woman is enslaved for the purposes of prostitution, wherever a sleazebag pays two homeless people to fight for their entertainment, we see the moral hazard of a monetized notion of the worth of life creep into the modern psyche.

It's something that all people must work together to prevent, or the dark pits that populate modern society could become all the more brazen.

Back From San Diego

I'd like to apologize to anyone who may be reading this for my absence over the last few days. It wasn't planned. But when Walter asked me -- at the last minute, that impulsive bastard -- to come to San Diego to take in the Comic-Con there, I simply had to go.

Peace and justice and all that.

After battling Omega Flight, sometimes it's nice to be reminded that some of the world's real-life villains are much more mundane.

Take, for example, these truly evil people:

I was more than a little shocked to encounter this brand of scum and villainy. It very nearly ruined my vacation.

Fortunately, I can say that fellow attendees of the Comic-Con knew precisely how to handle it:





The comforting thing about villainy is that, while it can be even more dangerous in its mundane forms, mundane villainy doesn't need superpowers -- or even electro-magnetic battlesuits -- to fight it.

When I suited up to battle Wendigo, I always approached it from a "don't try this at home" mentality. But when it comes to standing up to lunatics like the Westboro Baptist Church, I highly recommend trying it at home -- or anywhere they may happen to be.

The Ends and Means of Imperialism

One of the most pervasive evils of imperialism is that it treats people not as ends, but as means.

Immanuel Kant lectured that it is wrong to treat people as a means to an end, rather than as an end to themselves. This is referred to as Kant's categorical imperative, and it's treated as one of the greatest criticisms of utilitarianism.

In Ancient Rome gladiators were teated not as an ends in themselves -- not as fully-fledged autonomous human beings -- but rather as means. Spartacus "Legends", the characters of Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) and Ilithyia (Viva Bianca) demonstrate just such a disregard for the value of the Gladiators.

They treat Crixius (Manu Bennett) and Varro (Jai Courteny) as sex slaves. Crixius is exploited for Lucretia's pleasure. Varro is forced to copulate with a slave girl for the entertainment of a gathered crowd. Moreover, Lucretia commands Varro to couple with the woman again in order to tantalize Ilithyia.

Ilithyia and Lucretia live stridently decadent and opulent lives. They believe that they are entitled to this luxury -- so much so that Lucretia is willing to debauch Ilithyia so she and her husband may gain advantage over Gais Claudius Glaber, which will in turn aid them in maintaining their own threatened lifestyle.

Under modern consumerism, one finds a similar sense of entitlement in the exploitation of labour in the developing world.

Few consumers could honestly claim to be ignorant of the "high cost of low prices" paid by both the employees of a local Wal Mart, and by those who produce the products sold in these massive box stores.

Consumers shopping at these stores must simply feel entitled to the luxury of being able to purchase a package of tube socks for a mere $10, while the workers who would otherwise produce such products closer to home often go unemployed or underemployed.

Such consumers treat the producers of these products as a means to maintaining their own lifestyles rather than as ends to themselves. Otherwise, the thought of spending a few dollars more on their tube socks wouldn't be so unthinkable.

Human Life Worth Less Than Foolish Pride?

In episode two of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Sparatcus is admitted to the ludus of Batiatus, where he receives training to become a gladiator.

In particular, one converstion between Batiatus and Lucretia is very telling: Lucretia complains that Batiatus paid too much for Spartacus when he purchased him from Batiatas.

Batiatas recounts the circumstances by which he came to purchase Spartacus: he had defeated what was essentially a death squad of Gladiators dispatched to kill Spartacus. The crowd demanded freedom for Spartacus. In the name of placating the pride of Claudius Glaber.

There is, of course, another ulterior motive for Batiatus' purchase. It allows him to further embarrass Solonius (Craig Walsh Wrightson).

It's a tremendous comment on the sad state of human rights in Ancient Rome: not only is the life of Spartacus deemed to be valuable only as a means of placating the pride of the legatus, but it's ultimately deemed to be less valuable than the pride of Batiatus and Solonius.

A Declaration of Culture War?

For years, the Canadian culture industry has treated American cultural products as something of a bear in the woods (to strike a Reagan-esque metaphor).

Would it surprise a lot of Canadians to find that the bear is just as afraid of us as we are of the bear?

An American conservative group, calling itself Declaration Productions (naming itself, it seems, after the Declaration of Independence) has set up shop. Working around a cooperative model, the group promises to make pro-America movies (as if there were any shortage of them).

In a YouTube video explaining the purpose of the group, they accuse foreign influence -- in the form of foreign money -- of corrupting Hollywood so instead it allegedly made anti-American films (in other words, anything that criticizes the United States).



At the 4:16 mark of the video, those influences are basically identified. Clearly identifiable in the top right-hand corner is none other than the CN Tower. Toronto. Canada.

With Canadians having been so concerned about the cultural impact of American cultural products on Canadian culture, it's amusing to see that American conservatives have identified Canadian capital as one of the sources of what they see as the rot of American culture.

The question that remains is this: should Canadians be amused that such a group could identify Canadian influence on their culture as overwhelming negative? Should Canadians be angry about it? Or should we take it seriously at all?

The Perils of Mocking Fascism

In 1935, Leni Riefenstahl presented to the world a heavily-orchestrated portrayal of the Nuremberg rallies known as Triumph des Willens -- Triumph of the Will in English.

In the decades since, the film has rightly become reviled as a propaganda piece for one of the most vile dictators the world has ever produced. (If judged by genocial fury, Hitler is by far history's worst villain. If measured by body count, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong may well have been worse. If measured by death toll as a proportion of a country's population, Pol Pot may have been worse yet.)

But what others revile often invites mockery. While the various Downfall videos recently removed by YouTube under copyright claims by the film's producers may have been a more popular internet meme, "The Notorious HIT" is a less popular mockery of Hitler.

The YouTube video presents Adolph Hilter addressing the Nuremberg rally with the Notorious BIG's "Come On" spliced over top of it. Hitler is shown ranting over the music, while his fawning crowd is shown reacting to Biggie Smalls' punchlines.

The video holds up Hitler's mania as something merely to be mocked.

Yet there is a danger in declaring an ideological mania as virulent as Nazism to be a mere object of ridicule. It implicitly underestimates the danger posed by these kinds of manias.

After all, something that is only to be mocked is something that is not to be feared. Something that is not to be feared is not something recognized as dangerous.

The truth about Nazism, however, is that it very much was something to fear, even when some of the western world's leaders may not have had the sense to reocgnoze it. Should Nazism, or a similar ideological construct, ever return in a form that could wield political power, it would very much be something to fear again.

Adolph Hitler's ideas should be treated with an appropriate level of seriousness. Only when these ideas are treated with that level of seriousness will the dangers be recognized in time to turn them back.

300 and the Perils of Lionizing Oppression

Following the 2007 release of 300, the Greek city state of Sparta has increasingly captured the imaginations of people around the world.

In the Battle of Thermopylae, a small number of 300 Spartan soldiers -- with periodic assists from Athenian soldiers -- stalled an invading Persian Army. According to 300, the Spartans waged their desperate fight in the name of freedom and justice.

The biggest mistake one could make after watching 300 would be to believe that Sparta was a free city.

At one point, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) proclaims that "a new age has begun, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it."

Yet when one considers how Sparta was governed, it becomes immediately apparent that Sparta was not a free land. In fact, Sparta may well have been history's first command state, and in fact had more in common with oppressive regimes like the Soviet Union than they did with any free society in history.

The Spartan martial society was born after an uprising by the Messenians, whom the Spartans had conquered so that their fertile land could be used to feed their growing population.

The biggest problem for the Spartans was that the Messenians outnumbered them ten to one. So the Spartans re-conceptualized their political system into a military state, and rendered the Messenians into Helots, essentially slave farmers who would pay an annual tribute to the Spartan owner of their land, keeping a small portion of it to sustain themselves.

But, in time, Spartans wouldn't merely enslave the Helots. They would eventually enslave themselves.

For Spartan men, joining the military was not a matter of choice. Enrollment at military school was mandatory, as was military service. They would be forced to live apart from their families for nearly their entire lives. Only at 30 would Spartan men be allowed to live with their families, but were compelled to continue their military service until the age of 60.

A particularly vexing element of Spartan society was their approach to childrearing.

Not only was the future of Spartan children decided well in advance by the state, but whether or not a child would live to see a future at all was also decided by the state.

The Spartans may well have been history's first practitioners of institutionalized eugenics. As 300 depicts, Spartan children were inspected thoroughly and, if deemed weak, were abandoned to die in the elements.

More than two thousand years later, Adolph Hitler would embrace eugenics with a similar homicidal zeal. While many other juriisdictions that practiced eugenics were content to merely sterilize those deemed unfit, Hitler mused in his writings about euthanizing children deemed unfit. In fact, Hitler feverishly estimated that up to 100,000 German children per year may be culled as part of his eugenics program.

Fortunately, history denied Hitler the opportunity to put this particular program into operation. It was one of the few horrors produced by Hitler's imagination that humaity was spared.

While Sparta treated its women far more liberally than any other Greek state, this is nearly entirely immaterial. Women comparatively free within an unfree society are still themselves not free. They were denied freedom just as anyone else within Sparta was.

Like the modern-day Chinese legislature, Sparta's government consisted of cleverly-hidden hierarchies. Power ultimately rests at the top of a pyramid-styled structure, in which increasingly large groups of legislators wield less and less power. In the end, the lion's share of political power in Sparta was wielded by the five men who made up the Ephorate.

Despite the portrayal of Sparta in 300, Sparta was neither democratic nor free. In fact, Sparta may well have been history's very first fascist society.

While 300 makes for fantastic entertainment, lionizing Sparta based on it is politically a deeply dangerous notion.

Is Progressivism a Cancer?

The short answer is "no, of course not".

In Glenn Beck's Common Sense -- a book in which Beck attempts to aspire to the lofty heights of Thomas Paine, by crafting a tome of the same title, and publishing it along with Paine's version -- Beck argues that progressivism is, indeed, a cancer.

Surely, a great many Americans -- and Canadians -- would be tempted to agree with him.

But the question needs to be asked: is it civically safe to denounce a philosophy ascribed to by any significant number of citizens to be inherently dangerous?

Progressivism can only be as dangerous as progressives allow it to become. Earlier this year, Daily Show host Jon Stewart gave Countdown host Keith Olbermann a dressing-down on his program -- long a favourite of American progressives.

Olbermann, a former sportscaster and noted progressive, had grown positively feverish in his denunciations of Scott Brown, a Republican poised to win the late Ted Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate.

Olbermann noted that himself, Stewart, and fellow MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow were considered the "big three" progressive truth-tellers (one presumes he forgot about Stephen Colbert) on TV and seemed to imply that conventional wisdom suggested that Stewart should overlook Olbermann's excesses.

Stewart did not. He took Olbermann to task for his ad hominem attacks on Scott Brown, as well as on many others. In turn, Olbermann accepted Stewart's judgement, and admitted that he had been "over the top" recently.

Neither Olbermann nor Stewart allowed their progressivism to run away with them that amount of self-control is an indispensible virtue. Sadly, not all prominent public commentators share that virtue.

To cite a conservative example, Rush Limbaugh clearly lacks that virtue. He often plays directly into the hands of his critics with ambiguous comments into which his detractors can insort all manners of repulsive stances.

In his lack of self-control, Limbaugh is his own worst enemy.

Progressivism has its own out-of-control demagogues. Janeane Garofalo rightly sparked outrage when she denounced Tea Party protesters for all being motivated by racism, and attributing to them conditions akin to mental illness. (Olbermann, present for that rant, did nothing but nod in approval.)

There were almost certainly some racists amongst the Tea Party participants. And certainly there were few black participants among the movement. But few black participants does not an inherently racist movement make -- no matter what demagogues like Garofalo would insist.

For individuals like Garofalo, progressivism has very much become a cancer. Their dedication to it has decimated their capacity to control themselves, and instead descend into the folly that accompanies that.

Their meltdowns are the symptoms of greater meltdowns, those that occur when ideological movements lose interest in truth-seeking and more interested in attaining a position of dominance.

This is particularly pronounced when such ideological movements reject the notion of collaborative truth-seeking -- the process of searching for truth via discourse, by exchanging and debating ideas with movements that would otherwise be their rival.

A progressivism that embraces this impetus can be nothing but a cancer. A progressivism that rejects it is anything but.

It's in the hands of progressives, not the hands of Glenn Beck, to decide whether or not progressivism is -- or will become -- a cancer.

Change the Perspective on Health Care

Today the Toronto Star is carrying an op/ed column by Michael Rachlis that should hold some shocking revelations for many Canadians.

The subject of the story is a study by The Commonwealth Fund comparing the health care systems of Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

In the study, the United States had the worst health care system overall. This is no surprise.

What may surprise a great many Canadians is that the study ranked Canada's health care system -- a source of national pride -- second last. Canada's health care system ranked dead last in timeliness of access, effectiveness and overall quality.

Canada's health care system scored an alarming second-last on efficiency.

Worse yet, the five countries that scored better than Canada did so while spending a smaller portion of their Gross Domestic Product on health care. The results of this study should be sobering for all Canadians.

According to the study, Canada suffers most in terms of primary care. We've struggled to retain family doctors, while the closure of community clinics continues to effectively hamstring our health care system. It seems that Jack Layton is right when he points out that the lack of family doctors in Canada is problematic. But does he have the right solution?

The question seems to revolve around whether or not Canada will maintain its current system, or rebuild it from the ground up.

An examination of what is happening within Canada's system as it stands may shed some light on the matter.

A 2009 study by Alain Vanesse, Sarah Scott, Josiane Courteau and Maria Gabriela Orzanco determined, among other things, that doctors tended to migrate from Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Martimes to Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia.

As it so happens, these three provinces are bastions for a feared prospect in Canadian health care: privatization. More private health clinics exist in these three provinces than anywhere else in Canada.

This should be an alarming prospect for Canadians who favour a strictly public system, as it determines that the favoured model of practice for Canadian doctors is a privatized model.

The question Canadians must have for Jack Layton is this: were he to become Prime Minister tomorrow, how would he solve this particular problem? By seeking to satisfy the profit motives of individual doctors within a fully public system, by restricting the freedom of doctors to establish private practices, or by creating a hybrid system such as the one that exists in many of the other countries subject to this study?

That, by the way, includes the Netherlands. According to The Commonwealth Fund, they rank #1.

Two things should be fully evident to Canadians: that there is significant room for improvement in Canadian health care, and that simply throwing more money at the system is, in itself, not the solution.

(Britain, ranked #2 in the study, spent the second-least money per capita on health care in 2007.)

For a country that prides itself on public health care, a sixth place finish in a study such as this is no more an acceptable result as is seventh place in Olympic hockey.

Yet while Canadians would brand one of these results an outrage -- and did precisely this in 2007 when Canada's men's hockey team finished behind Switzerland -- one of these results has been cause for complacency.

No more. It's time to change the Canadian persepctive on health care, make it about more than simply a comparison to the United States, and start to improve our health care -- both in terms of quality and cost -- before it's too late.

The Broken Promises of Empire

Spartacus: Blood and Sand re-tells the classic story of Spartacus.

The story is one of the Roman Empire at one of its apexes of its glory and decadence, yet brought to the edge of economic ruin by a drought.

At its height, the Roman Empire was perhaps the most total empire in the history of its world. It commanded the fealty of leagues of territory, and scores of people. In Roman Catholicism, it was able to impose its cultural values as far as its territory expanded.

Today, a form of imperialism exists which rivals the Roman Empire in its scope and influence. Described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, it's a form of cultural imperialism, that has used the tools of globalization -- network communication -- to impose a core of western cultural values on the rest of the world.

"The Red Serpent" demonstrates the most destructive notion of Imperialism: empire nonchalantly breaks its promises.

Spartacus and his Thracians were promised that their obligation would end with victory against the Visigoths, and that Rome would protect their village. But the Romans kept neither promise.

Not only does Gaius Claudius Glaber attempt to press gang the Thracians into another campaign to be waged solely for his own personal glorification, but when Spartacus returns to his village he finds his wife under attack, and the village itself in flames. He rescues his wife from her assailants only to wake the following morning to be taken prisoner by Glaber. Spartacus will face death for humiliating Glaber. His wife will be enslaved.

Similarly, readers of Negri and Hardt will recognize that the modern version of cultural imperialism also casually breaks its promises. Cultural imperialism promises that concepts such as human rights will bring human security to the world.

Yet when atrocities begin to take place in countries like Rwanda and in the Sudan, powerful countries often simply decline to intervene. Human rights violations unfold in gristly horror, and foreign leaders choose to look away.

Even a kinder, gentler form of imperialism, one that insists it's more respectful of individual rights than outdated forms of imperialism, falls to the same kind of folly.

Human rights have their place, and have their value. But imposing it uopon societies in the world that do not share beliefs in this concept requires a will that the modern incarnation of empire lacks the will to do, though it may well have the power.

The Roman Empire at least had the will to attempt to impose itself thoroughly -- even if, in time, it proved to lack the power.

Moderacy in the Defence of Liberty is No Vice

When American Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination for President in 1964, he uttered words that have been repeated often by conservative thinkers wanting to follow in his footsteps.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Goldwater would go on to lose the 1964 Presidential election to Lyndon B Johnson, partially as a result of the infamous "Daisy" TV spot which even Johnson admitted may have been excessive, but made the point he felt needed to be made about Goldwater.

That point is rather simple: that extremism does not guarantee the survival of liberty. Rather, extremism can only ensure its destruction.

Goldwater had famously remarked that he believed a nuclear weapon was a weapon unlike any other. There were few ways to interpret Goldwater's remarks other than to agree that he must have thought the use of nuclear weapons to be perfectly permissible -- and who other than someone with incredibly extreme views would believe this?

Yet the geo-political climate of the Cold War also speaks for itself, as does the nuclear balance of power of the time. If Goldwater as President had used nuclear weapons the Soviet Union would almost certainly retaliate against not only the United States, but against all of its allies as well, including (but certainly not limited to) Britain, France and Canada.

What would have emerged in the wake of Goldwater's use of nuclear arms -- presumptively launched in the defense of liberty -- would instead have been its destruction in every sense of the word.

The speech in which Goldwater spoke these famous words contained several other sentences which could be treated as a defense of extremism. Most of it leads to dangerous conclusions, although not all of it.

"Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue."

Tolerance for tyranny, of course, also spells the end of liberty.

One should be reminded of a poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, a German evangelical pastor who, although initially a supporter of Adolph Hitler, turned away from the National Socialist Party in the face of its extremism.

He wrote:

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out."

Niemoller's poem reminds us of a famous remark by Edmund Burke: "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

Although Niemoller opposed the Weimar Republic and supported right-wing opponents of the regime, he couldn't have imagined what was coming when he supported Hitler's ascension to the office of Chancellor. He believed Hitler's ascension woud bring a German revival.

Instead, in the Nazi's racially-charged fascism, he recognized the looming destruction of Germany. And for a time, this was true. The war that Hitler launched decimated German industry, ravaged its population, and split the country in half for the better part of 50 years.

Niemoller opposed the Aryan Paragraph which restricted citizenship in Germany to members of the Aryan race. In response to it, he formed the Confessing Church, a demonination which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches, and joined a group of German clergy who opposed the Paragraph as in violation of the Christian virtue of charity.

For his troubles, Niemoller was treated as many critics of the German state were: he was arrested on July 1, 1937.

If Niemoller had opposed the Nazi regime sooner, it's hard to say what success he could have had on his own. But it's undeniable that Niemoller was one of literally thousands of Germans who could have stopped Adolph Hitler if they had recognized the danger of extremism soon enough.

For a time, Niemoller tolerated tyranny. In time, he paid with his own freedom. It was merely by his own integrity that he salvaged his conscience.

"Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

The crux of this statement is that one must actually be pursuing justice. Indeed, this can often be difficult to determine.

When the Girondins and Jacobins struggled over control of the French state during the reign of terror, each side believed it was fighting "enemies of the revolution".

An unknown number of French -- estimated ranging from 16,000 to 40,000 -- were subjected to the tender mercies of the "national razor", also known as the Guillotine. Through the Committee for Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal, revolutionaries denounced their political opponents and sent them to the guillotine for beheading.

The most famous practitioner of terror during this period was Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre, who dominated that committee.

Many innocent men met their deaths at the guillotine under the tribunal's decree. Certainly, many members of the committee must have known full well that they were using the revolutionary state organs to murder for their own benefit. Others must have believed they were executing dangerous reactionaries and dispensing justice.

In the end, the Terror finally turned on itself. Following the Thermidorian Reaction, Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were executed at the hands of their own machinations.

Just as Martin Niemoller's tolerance in the face of tyranny threatened to destroy him, Robespierre's and Saint-Just's extremism consumed them.

The lesson is as simple as it is evident: just as timidity is a danger to the timid, extremism is a danger to the extremist.

"Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue."

When sir Winston Churchill reassumed his role as First Lord of the Admiralty upon the British Declaration of war on Nazi Germany, he already knew that reckless decisions could have disastrous consequences.

During the First World War, Churchill planned British landings on Gallipoli. What unfolded there was an unmitigated military disaster.

Nonetheless, Churchill made other decisions with a great deal more deliberation -- including making the decision to convert the British Navy from coal-fuelled steamers into diesel-fuelled vessels.

When Germany began to rearm, Churchill damned the consequences as criticized Neville Chamberlain as fiercely as he thought necessary for his appeasement of Nazi Germany. He was effectively exiled from the ranks of the Tories. He was overlooked when Chamberlain appointed a new Minister for Coordination of Defense in 1936.

Even after war was declared, Chamberlain continued to be all too timid in the face of Hitler's aggression. Churchill recommended that Britain move to pre-emptively occupy Norwegian iron-ore resources at Navik, and iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden. Chamberlain rejected the idea, and Nazi Germany instead invaded and occupied Norway and Sweden.

In time, Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister. Being one of the only Tories who could command near-unanimous support of all the parties in the House of Commons, Churchill was asked to take over. He agreed.

He carefully navigated Britain's course through the war, even allying with the Soviet Union in order to free Europe from the Nazi's grip of tyranny. There is, however, a caveat to be found.

While Europe was eventually freed from Nazi domination, Eastern Europe fell under the domination of Soviet tyranny, left to the tender mercies of Joseph Stalin, the man who had engineered the notorious Holodomor which wiped out millions of Ukranians.

To continue fighting the war against the Soviets was clearly an option for nobody involved. But to allow the Soviet Union to decide the course of Eastern Europe for nearly fifty years after the war's end had its own disastrous consequences -- both in terms of the Cold War and its various satellite conflicts, and the direct consequences for the people of countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

But the moderate course Churchill plotted as Prime Minister of Britain ensured a stable and free country for the people of Britain ever since the end of the war -- even if Britons rejected Churchill's leadership in the next election.

These historical lessons carry an important moral: extremism is the enemy of liberty.

Extremism doesn't preserve liberty, nor can it enhance it, or even tolerate it. Extremism destroys liberty, and must be opposed in all corners, and at all costs.

That is the lesson that Canadians must remind themselves of this Canada Day and every Canada Day -- Canada has enjoyed a history largely free of extremism. It's enabled Canadians to remain free.

Anyone who would threaten that delicate balance of moderacy must be opposed, no matter what.

Liberty must be continually vindicated through the defeat of extremism.