KEN McGOOGAN

“History never repeats itself,” Mark Twain once said, “but it does often rhyme.” Today, few people want to see a future that repeats anything like Europe in the 1930s, when a lunatic personality cult gained control of the most powerful nation on the continent and then ran amok. While tracking that history in my forthcoming…

Wonderful to see The Walrus run an excerpt from Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Tyranny. Huge thanks to those who made the call. To see the original — or indeed to hear an audio version — you can go to thewalrus dot ca slash why-canada-should-worry-about-trumps-second-coming slash. Alternatively, you can wait for…

A recent article in POLITICO carried the headline: “Canada’s Big Worry: A US Civil War.” Alexander Burns, head of news, wrote that as political events unfold south of the border, we Canadians should stand quietly aside and “just watch.” At the risk of sounding impolite, I have to say thanks but that’s a non-starter. To…

Cover reveal! Coming from Douglas & McIntyre.  Release date: August 24. Now available for pre-order. The overview reads something like this: Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale conveyed visions of dystopia that evolved out of past tyrannies. They warned that if history doesn’t repeat itself, certainly it extrapolates and often it…

A leading Canadian historian decries the restoration of the recently reopened Bellevue House in Kingston, Ontario. Patrice Dutil, Canada’s foremost authority on Sir John A. Macdonald, writes in The Hub that the renovated historic site “provides yet another embarrassing display of national flagellation.” Dutil, a professor and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, will publish…

This is the most detailed and devastating critique of Trump I have seen in a while. It turned up on Quora, but since we can’t link to it, I’m quoting it here. By Mike Burch / Works at Alpha Omega Consulting Group (company) Will Trump last until the election? He seems to be deteriorating much faster than…

Saint or cultural assailant? Mark Bourrie takes a new look at a Jesuit martyr in Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brebeuf and the Destruction of Huronia (Biblioasis, 448 pages, $26.95).  Review by Ken McGoogan /  Special to the Star In 2019, Mark Bourrie published Bush Runner, a biography of the adventurer Pierre-Esprit Radisson. In a…

Alice Munro turned up in my 2013 book 50 Canadians Who Changed the World. Under the heading, “Booker Prize winner creates her own country,” I began  by quoting Jonathan Franzen and Cynthia Ozick and the judges who awarded Munro the Man Book International Prize. From there I waxed eloquent for 1,700 words. But the painting above,…

OK, this is rough. But it does make me wonder if, as a one-minute marketing tool, Video-AI might come in handy. See for yourself by clicking here.

What happened last century when authoritarians gained control of leading democracies? History doesn’t repeat but, as the saying goes, sometimes it rhymes. Bestselling historian and author Ken McGoogan delves into dictatorships of the twentieth century to sound the alarm about the possibility of democratic collapse in the US and what that might mean for Canada.…