Gwynne Dyer Quotes

The historian Gwynne Dyer has said that Sennacherib destroyed Babylon as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb would have. In fact, the only difference between the ancient world and the modern is that it took a lot more human muscle power to accomplish the same thing.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.

The most basic change necessary to our collective survival is underway: the last redefinition of humanity - gradually extending from family to tribe to nation to the human race.

What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

Civilization and culture in North America are more menaced, more strongly threatened, by internal disorders than by external pressure.

The appropriate course of action is to ensure the survival of the Syrian regime. Yes, Assad and his Ba’ath Party have done terrible things (as Stalin did), but they are still preferable to the alternative (as was the survival of the Soviet Union in 1941). The Assad regime’s cruelty and tyranny are comparable to Saddam Hussein’s record in Iraq but, at least in retrospect, it is clear that it would have been preferable to leave Saddam Hussein in power. Any reasonable observer would agree that Iraq would be a far better place, and that hundreds of thousands of people who died would still be alive, if the United States and its sidekicks had not invaded the country in 2003. The best of the bad options now is to leave Assad in power in Syria, although—horror of horrors!—that would mean the United States was helping a dictator.

Bombing people in the Middle East is something Western governments can do without incurring significant casualties on their own side, so it is politically safe and answers the public demand for action.

The Canadian public’s uncritical admiration of the United States, which had been Diefenbaker’s undoing, had pretty much dissipated by the end of the 1960s. The growing nightmare of the Vietnam War was sabotaging America’s reputation as an effective operator abroad just as the wave of urban violence was destroying its image as a bastion of justice and democracy at home, and the United States was coming to be seen in Canada as just another muscle-bound great power stumbling around without a clue.

There have been a few attempts to turn Prime Minister Diefenbaker into the tragic hero of Canada’s lost independence, but that is ludicrous. For one thing, the country’s independence was certainly compromised, but it was not really lost. For another, Diefenbaker is nobody’s hero: he was a bombastic prairie politico who combined a crude but saleable version of English Canadian nationalism with an unwavering commitment to a Cold War view of the world.

There have been a few attempts to turn Prime Minister Diefenbaker into the tragic hero of Canada’s lost independence, but that is ludicrous. For one thing, the country’s independence was certainly compromised, but it was not really lost. For another, Diefenbaker is nobody’s hero: he was a bombastic prairie politico who combined a crude but saleable version of English Canadian nationalism with an unwavering commitment to a Cold War view of the world. “Dief” never admitted a mistake, had no particular attachment to the truth and suffered from chronic indecisiveness and low-grade paranoia. The image that lingers from his latter days is that of an old-fashioned and rigidly self-righteous man shaking his wattles in muddled indignation.

If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no Islamic State now.

climate-change scenarios are already playing a large and increasing role in the military planning process.

There’s not much risk that it will conquer Iraq’s Shia-majority region or Kurdistan, now that the first shock of its expansion up to their borders has passed, for both could count on strong Iranian military support if required. Syria is a more worrisome case, for a jihadi victory in Syria would bring Islamic State (and, in the north, perhaps also the Nusra emirate) right up to the borders of Lebanon and northern Israel. Millions more refugees would pour across the borders into Lebanon and Jordan (which have already taken in several million Syrian refugees), possibly with Islamist fighters in hot pursuit. This would create a high probability of a direct military confrontation with Israel, even if the Islamists would really prefer to concentrate on killing Shias first.

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.