From a review of the Mickster’s recent memoir at the Wall St. Journal:
…
By the book’s midpoint, however, Mr. Ignatieff begins succumbing to the temptation to do what every defeated politician wants to do, to the detriment of many a memoir: set the record straight. I doubt many readers will care to hear about all the ways in which the Liberals were right and the Conservatives wrong; about how the Liberals pressured the Conservatives into passing an economic stimulus that “saved the Canadian economy from depression”; about how the Conservatives underfunded government services. This is the kind of stuff that turns engaging political memoirs into yawners.
All this score-settling reaches an unintentionally hilarious climax over the matter of a series of negative TV ads that the Conservatives ran against the author. Mr. Ignatieff lived outside Canada for the vast bulk of his professional life, and although he may have done remarkable things since he left the country in 1972, the fact remains that he was gone for a very long time. So in the run-up to the 2009 elections, the Conservatives produced ads that called attention to Iggy’s extended expatriation. Each ad concluded with the devastating words: ” Michael Ignatieff : Just visiting.” Most would see a 34-year absence as a political liability for someone seeking national premiership. Not Mr. Ignatieff…
And then just to confound all those Liberals we find this at The Atlantic:
Machiavelli Was Right
The shocking lesson of The Prince isn’t that politics demands dirty hands, but that politicians shouldn’t care.
Michael Ignatieff
…
So if we return to the Situation Room and to the decisions presidents make there, Machiavelli’s The Prince tells us the question is not whether one human being should have the right to make such terrifying determinations. The essence of power, even in a democracy, is to use violence to protect the republic. It matters to the very soul of a republic, however, that the violence used in its defense never be gratuitous. His is not an ethic that values action for its own sake. Machiavelli praises restraint when it serves the republic. It may even be advisable, for example, for the president to stay the order to dispatch cruise missiles to Syria if he cannot discern a clear target or a defensible strategic objective.
What he refuses to praise is people who value their conscience and their soul more than the interests of the state. What he will not pardon is public displays of indecision. We should not choose leaders who agonize, worrying about the moral hazards of the power they exercise in the people’s name. We should choose leaders who sleep soundly after taking ultimate risks with their own virtue. They are doing what must be done. The Prince’s question about the current president would be: Is he Machiavellian enough?
So we can see what country about which he really agonizes and why he was a lousy Canadian politician; we really don’t interest the visiting Prince. Truly just visiting, eh?
The problem that Count Michael made for himself was that he listened to the Liberal
Party handlers. He knew nothing of them and they knew nothing of him; and neither
gave a damn. They prepared a generic campaign for him, and he followed their advice.
Hence, although he does know more than most about government in the abstract, he
sounded just like the Liberal hack he had been transformed into.
“I’d gone out into the wider world and tried to make something of myself and I’d come home because I wanted to serve.”
Michael, you are a damned liar. You came home to RULE over us peasants,and we were well aware of that.
THAT is why you were soundly defeated. Ignatieff,the great intellectual,is in thrall to his vision of his own magnificence. He imagines we “little people” should be honored by his very presence in our midst.
Every excerpt I’ve read from Iggy’s book,(I sure as hell won’t buy it at Chapters for $37)is on the same theme,” I came here for YOU,you ungrateful peons,and you didn’t recognize my greatness”.
Go to Harvard,Michael.
He was the Canadian version of Liberal ‘hopey/changey’ except he didn’t love us enough to hang out.
The Shiny Pony has been here but his brain is mostly hair. Polar meet opposite for the Libs. For them, it’s all about ‘rock star’ politics and most certainly not about us.
I am truly enjoying the long slow suicide of the Canadian Liberal Party.
Stephan, Iggy and now the shallow end of the gene pool.
Hey Libtards, could you cough up that 40 million before you finally jump?
The first sentence, or maybe it’s a subtitle, states: “The shocking lesson of The Prince isn’t that politics demands dirty hands, but that politicians shouldn’t care.”
This actually serves to defend P.M. Stephen Harper against every accusation of Machiavellian behaviour that his opponents – including the Liberals – throw at him.
Ignatieff: “Machiavelli’s enduring provocation is to baldly maintain that in politics, evil deeds cease to be evil if urgent public interest makes them necessary.”
This omits by far the most important point of context. Coercion is evil when it is initiated by one person on another. Coercion in self-defense is not evil. A person’s urgent personal interest may on occasion require him to use coercion against an aggressor, which is justified, but would not be if he were not defending himself. This is from the fundamental principle of civilized society. Similarly, a state’s “urgent public interest” may require it to defend itself from foreign invaders who threaten to use coercion on all its citizens in order to deprive them of their freedom.
Note that the fundamental principle of civilization had not been formulated in Machiavelli’s time.
From a book by Alan Ryan, cited by Ignatieff: “The staying power of The Prince comes from … its insistence on the need for a clear-sighted appreciation of how men really are as distinct from the moralizing claptrap about how they ought to be.”
This also glosses over the coercion context. Ethics is a guide to man’s actions. A person ought to do things that maintain his life and standard of living. But “how men really are” includes the fact that humans are not omniscient, and may make errors in judgment of various natures that turn out to be self-defeating. Government officials are not omniscient either – contrary to the collectivists’ usual attitudes toward government with themselves at the helm – but need to be held to a high standard of ethical behaviour, since government has a monopoly on the use of coercion. The surest way not to achieve this is to rely on anti-moralizing claptrap about how men really are rather than how they ought to be.
Ignatieff: “In politics, the polestar must be the health of the republic alone.”
And: “The essence of power, even in a democracy, is to use violence to protect the republic.”
The purpose of government is to protect individual rights. In part, this does involve the use of violence, where necessary, to protect the republic from foreign invaders. But “the republic”, meaning the state, is not the fiefdom of certain political operatives who have a right to harass their internal enemies, or worse. It’s just a geographical location with defined borders populated by permanent residents, who hold individual rights. The polestar is the freedom of the individual residents, not “the health of the republic”.
Ignatieff makes all his arguments in the context of the decision to eliminate Osama bin Laden in 2011. Given the enormity of 9/11, few would argue that the U. S.’s actions were not justifiable.
Overall, one gets the impression that he is conflating a government’s behaviour against genuine foreign enemies with its sometime behaviour against internal opposition politicians (which possibly Machiavelli did too; I haven’t read The Prince or any of his other works). These are two entirely different issues, and should be analyzed separately.
Ignatieff: “The Prince’s question about the current president would be: Is he Machiavellian enough?”
So is Stephen Harper Machiavellian enough by your standards, or what?
Obama’s America is the right place for that guy up until it collapses under the weight of itself. Let’s hope they keep him so we never have to hear about him again.
Do the libs still owe 40 mill
Where can one find out about that repayment program
If it were brought up in parliament the press would call it an attack on the pony
The review in the WSJ is simply excellent. It’s not excellent because I agree with its author’s politics. It’s remarkably even-handed, rational, and incisive. It’s everything that opinion writing should be. If you haven’t followed Mark’s link to read it, I strongly recommend that you do so.
Excellent points, nv53
Ignatieff was parachuted in this Toronto riding by the Libtard brass. Local glibs in that riding who had served the party for years. were not permitted to run. They hated him so much, that they had to nail plywood sheets over the constituency office windows, because the locals were throwing
rocks through them! Bwahahaha!