Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

In honour of the 40th anniversary of CBC Radio’s Ideas program, which
features distinguished scholars from around the world, executive
producer Bernie Lucht has selected the transcripts of some of the most
impressive broadcasts and published them here. This is a superb
introduction to some brilliant thinkers.

Eugene Weber, for example, finds religion responsible for such horrors
as the 1993 Waco Siege (which led to 79 deaths), but also instrumental
in ending the African slave trade. Paul Goodman compares the nuclear
arms race to the Holocaust; German Jews were not sufficiently alarmed
but subsequently asked, “Why did we let it happen?” Ronald Wintrobe
says that if dictators feel secure, they will squander foreign aid, and
if they are worried, they will use it against their own people. John
McNight wonders why anyone would need a bereavement counsellor.

The advent of Mike Harris’s Conservatives in Ontario in 1996 prompts
two discussions: historian Michael Bliss laments neo-conservatism’s
challenge to Canadian assumptions that society has responsibility for
public education, transportation, health services, and the CBC; and, in
a debate between former Ontario Premier Bob Rae and U.S. journalist
William Kristol, Rae argues that adequate health and educational
services benefit everyone, while Kristol considers the welfare state
unaffordable and says it damages its recipients’ character. Dr. James
Orbinski looks at the work of the independent humanitarian medical aid
agency Médecins Sans Frontiиres. General Roméo Dallaire and Harvard
psychologist Gerald Caplain argue that an intrinsically racist world
ignored the Rwanda holocaust because it happened in Africa. Tariq Ali
discusses student life at a Roman Catholic school in Pakistan, where one
priest enthusiastically supported Franco during Spain’s Civil War and
some priests were sadists and sexual perverts. Helen Caldicott’s
description of nuclear war, and the ignorance of Ronald Reagan who
controlled the button, is frightening. Historians Tony Judt and Margaret
MacMillan forecast future trends.