Let me again extend an invitation to NRO readers to visit the archive of my previously published journalism at www.davidfrum.com. Back Sunday night with Democratic convention curtainraisers.

“Picton: A Proudly Loyalist Town”

That’s what it says on the billboard welcoming visitors to Picton, Ontario, a town of 10,000 that was once the local capital of Prince Edward County, Ontario. I’ve spent much of the past dozen summers in a village about 10 miles from Picton. Prince Edward County is no longer really a county: Ontario’s counties were rationalized out of existence three decades ago.

Prince Edward County does not much hold with the modernizing spirit. The old county court house and shire offices are preserved as historical sites, as is the county’s oldest hotel, built in the 1840s. Many private homes – and until recently even some public buildings – fly the old Loyalist flag: a Union Jack as it was in 1776, which is to say, the Jack minus one stripe, the cross of St. Patrick, which was only added to the Jack in 1801.

This part of Ontario was settled by political refugees from the American Revolution, some 10,000 of them. Americans often talk about the United States as a “creedal” nation – meaning one that was founded by and defined by a political creed. Ironically enough, however, English-speaking Canada originated as even more a creedal nation than the United States. “Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet”: “Loyal she began; loyal she remains.” That is the official motto of the province of Ontario, and it appeared on license plates well into my boyhood. Canada came into being as the country of those British Americans who believed that the King of England should rule the English-speaking populations of North America. That was their creed, and it was for a long time as devoutly held as any of the beliefs of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

The problem was that the King of England gradually ceased to lose the ability and the inclination to rule over here. The creed became obsolete, as creeds tend to do. Much of what has gone wrong in recent Canadian politics can be understood as an attempt to find a substitute for the vanished creed of Loyalism. So far the results have been disappointing, to put it mildly.

One of Samuel Huntington’s most haunting challenges in his Who We Are is his challenge to the assumption that nations based on creeds will somehow prove more stable and enduring than nations based on culture and ethnicity. The American creed laid down in documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution has deeper philosophical and cultural roots than the old Loyalist creed. But it too is a human work, and like all human works perishable. It is a question worth a thought or two in the middle of the night: What holds nations together should the time comes when their old beliefs fade away?

Today, July 21, is Belgian Independence Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’m reading a little Belgian history – history that has surprising relevance for today.

The history is Larry Zuckerman’s Rape of Belgium, a lucid and powerful account of the German occupation of Belgium in World War I. The phrase “rape of Belgium” is one of those vestiges of history that now brims with archaism, like "white slave trade" or "demon rum." During the 1914 war, Allied propaganda so exaggerated German atrocities that it became fashionable afterward to deny that the Germans had done anything wrong at all. Zuckerman has retrieved the history of those horrible years to document what truly happened. The Germans may not have bayoneted babies, as the British alleged – but what they did do was more than horrible enough. The errors of the Allied defenders should not justify oblivion of the crimes of the German invaders.

During the 1914 invasion, they systematically used terror to break Belgian resistance. They massacred civilian populations to punish guerilla resistance to their armies: When a bullet felled a German colonel in the town of Aerschot on August 19, 1914, the Germany army shot 156 civilians, burned 400 buildings, and deported 1,000 of the town’s 8,000 residents. (The colonel was probably killed by friendly fire.)

Over the next four years, the German army stole everything of value in Belgium, from chickens to whole factories, and conscripted 100,000 Belgians to work for derisory wages in German factories. Had it not been for American food aid, hundreds of thousands of Belgians would have starved to death. Belgium was, Zuckerman argues, a laboratory in which the Germans devloped the occupation techniques that they would extend to the whole of Europe in World War II.

Belgium today is a peaceful country, the capital of the European Union. Why recall all this terrible history now? Zuckerman the writer is motivated by a powerful moral indignation. He lives by Milan Kundera’s motto that the struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

And if we, whose memories Zuckerman seeks to prod, need a second reason, here’s one immediately relevant to our own time. During this war on terror, we’ve all furiously debated international law. The history of the last century should teach us that law only restrains the cruel when it is backed by effective power. Belgium was rescued and the Belgian people saved only because Germany lost the war – which is to say, because American troops arrived in time to win the war for the Allies. Had the United States stayed neutral, all the law in the world would have availed the Belgians little.

In this election year, candidates are debating America’s role in the world. And sometimes I think that the two great parties are not really so distant from each other as the campaign rhetoric makes them sound. But one of the places where they do differ is this: Can the world be made safe by treaties and agreements alone – or do those words need to be backed by something more, something that the United States and only the United States has given the world: justice backed by power.

You can’t judge a magazine by its cover. I was so put off by Newsweek’s nauseously obsequious July 19 “Sunshine Boys” front page that I refused to open the magazine. Big mistake! Put off guard by the magazine’s floor-kissingly abject treatment, Democratic nominee-presumptive John Kerry opened up and revealed much more than usual of the man underneath the Foghorn Leghorn senator act.

My two favorite quotes from the Fineman-Wolffe interview with Kerry and Edwards. (No link, but you can find the source on p. 24.)

“NEWSWEEK: Is John Edwards the best-prepared person that you could have picked as your running mate to deal with defense and foreign-policy questions?

“KERRY: If I were just looking for someone who is solely versed in one topic, I could go find someone who would know a little more than him or even me on some one topic.”

That “even me” is very delicious I think.

And then,

“NEWSWEEK [to Edwards]: Iran is a big problem; everyone is trying to grapple with it. How do you go about enforcing nuclear agreements when it seems the countries have a different agenda? And how do you stop Iran's nuclear program?”

Kerry interrupts: “Do you mind... since John just joined this ticket two days ago and he and I have not had the time to sit down, so he and I haven't fully brought up to speed on the speeches... I gave a speech in Fulton, Mo., in which I laid out what I sense are the priorities with Iran and proliferation. …”

Some observations that emerge from half a dozen pages of flattering prose:

1. Kerry’s indecisiveness and his instinct to pander may not in the end be his greatest political weaknesses. (Some cynics might even consider them to be political strengths.) His greatest weakness may well be his seemingly fathomless personal vanity. He’s already made it clear that he considers himself George Bush’s moral, intellectual, and class superior. Interviewed by Newsweek, he could not resist doing the same to his vice president. This trait will not charm the electorate. If Kerry should ever make it to the White House, it will certainly not charm Congress.

2. If Kerry-Edwards wins in November, the era of the powerful vice president – an era that began with Walter Mondale’s effective vice presidency and culminated in Richard Cheney’s powerful advisory role – may abruptly end. As those two quotes imply, Kerry manifestly feels very little respect for his running-mate. Nor does there seem to be much love lost on the other side. Edwards speaks in relentlessly groveling terms about Kerry, but I doubt that he enjoys it – or means it. The Kerry-Edwards ticket is often compared to Dole-Kemp in 1996, but to me it looks much more like the Democrats’ 1960 ticket if Lyndon Johnson had won the nomination and John F. Kennedy had been given the vice presidency: The man on top disdaining his number two as a witless fop with a good barber; the number two privately ridiculing the number one as a heavy-handed and graceless embarrassment.

3. The Democrats are not well served by the media bias in their favor. Irritating as conservatives may find these quadrennial orgies of positive publicity for the Democratic nominees, any Democratic nominees, conservatives at least know not to believe it. Liberals though find themselves being whirled about by their own spin until they are dizzy. Newsweek’s Democratic-leaning readership may be delighted to see the dour and long-winded Kerry compared to a summer’s day – but the nearly 300 million Americans who do not read Newsweek are much more likely to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears. I sometimes think that Democrats suffer from the same problem as ultimately felled Saddam Hussein: They cannot trust their servants to report the truth. And the truth is that they have nominated themselves the weakest presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis.

4. On the other hand, keen-eyed readers can gather little glimmerings of the truth if they invest the time to crack the newsmagazine’s code. Sometimes the code works by euphemism. When the newsmagazines describe Kerry as “nuanced,” they mean indecisive. Sometimes it works by Pravda-style inversion. When they describe the acutely class-conscious Mrs. Edwards as “down to earth,” they mean she is a ferocious snob. (Newsweek quotes a friend on Mrs. Edwards's populist style: “She connects to real people.” And who is this expert on “real people”? Sharon Rockefeller!) And sometimes they give up altogether and just go with the horrible truth: As when the same correspondent who praised Elizabeth Edwards acknowledged in the May 3 edition of Newsweek that the Democrats “would lock [Teresa Heinz] in a closet if they could.”

I am traveling this weekend - back Tuesday morning. In the meantime, a large archive of articles - "vintage" as they say in the retail business - has been posted at my website, www.davidfrum.com. I'm working now on a selection of "Favorites" that will be posted under the tab of that name. In the meantime, just hit one of the buttons labeled from 1997 to 2003 to see a selection of work published in that year. 1996 and 2004 will be updated shortly, as will the "Appearances" page.