Front Page » Archive »  No 100

How'd we get way over here?

by Kevin Potvin

It's our 100 th issue of The Republic! To mark the milestone, I take a look back at some of my 250 or so essays over the first 99 issues to find where I got things right, where I got them wrong, and how I ended up where I am now.

The lead-up to September 11

by Kevin Potvin

When the notorious attacks occurred, many agreed the world had been dramatically changed. Since then, most observers have backed off that assessment. But I haven't: that day does mark the end of one century, and the beginning of a new one, only in ways that weren't appreciated early on.

The darkening mood as war drums beat

by Kevin Potvin

After the attacks and before the war, The Republic began diverging widely from other papers, and took on a darker tone with each passing issue

I foresaw equal amounts of trouble on the home front, but I was guilty again of leaping ahead of the evidence with my brown-tinted glasses.

The childhood roots of fascism

by Michael Nenonen

In pre-war Germany, systemic child abuse set the culture up for construction of mass death camps. Social safety nets are the antidote to fascism, and we ought to be safeguarding ours more

War: What is it good for?

by Kevin Potvin

Absolutely nothing, as usual, and this one is no different. Preventing war is the only purpose the United Nations was created to serve. It missed a glorious opportunity to do so when it had the chance, as The Republic suggested, to expel the United States

The growing shroud of silence

by Kevin Potvin

As I delved deeper into an avowed anti-Americanism, trying to find where the line was over which Republic readers would no longer follow me, I discovered they were well over my line-only they were just keeping more quiet

Training for peripheral vision

by Kevin Potvin

Someone once said the trick of newspaper commentary is not to give voice to what people say, but to give voice to what they think, which could be a wildly different thing.

'Set against the backdrop of this economic prerequisite, the famous ideological battle [between communism and capitalism] that was understood for so long to frame the 50-year Cold War, looks now like the simplest of propagandizing hoodwinks.'

Long before Abu Ghraib . . .

Canadians wrote the book on cover-ups, official denials, and institutional complicity in crimes against humanity. A full accounting is still awaited by Kevin Annett of The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada

Co-ops defeat the bigs

by Kevin Potvin

It's possible for several small private enterprises to create a private co-op company that serves them all in areas they do not compete in. I saw in Italy the height of technology in the hands of the smallest of manufacturing firms

Transit is best

by Eric Doherty

The provincial government continues to push freeway expansion even as more people switch to transit

The size of the transformation we are in

Below is a reprint of a View from The Republic first printed a few weeks before September 11, 2001. This paper, as the several essays in this issue show, has grown increasingly dark and gloomy the last four years. Here, on the other hand, is a bright note, the kind of notion that keeps us here excited about doing this paper at least for another four years.

Turner's Movies

reviewed by Scott Turner

Motorcycle Diaries and I Heart Huckabees

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