LIES!! (Toronto newspaper joke. Sorry.)

Rick McGinnis emails to remind us that “the National Post is a conservative newspaper”:

The headline for their obit of George Macdonald Fraser:

“Flashman author held reactionary views”

And why precisely did the man deserve such a Maoist assessment of his life?

   “A short, heavily-built man, Fraser held unashamedly reactionary
   views on law and order. He was particularly firm in his conviction
   that the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified,
   believing that among the lives that it had saved had been his own.”

   “Nor did he have much time for fashionable attitudes about the
   emotional delicacy of soldiers and their need for counselling.”

   “His experience, in what he acknowledged was another age, was that
   war was a job that needed to be done, one accomplished by his
   generation without relish but with common sense and resolve since
   vanished from the public spirit.”

In other words, he held views that were considered normal before the 1960s, and were still considered normal for those who experienced their history directly, without academic or political filtering.

And that makes him a reactionary.

The obit was from the Daily Telegraph, but the headline was written by a Post editor, who I can only imagine reading the raw copy and pursing their lips when they got to the section I quoted, then hammering out the headline with a sense of satisfaction: “Take that, old man!”

But the National Post is a conservative newspaper.