Ignatieff michael biography air

Michael Ignatieff was born in Toronto on 12 May 1947.
I was one of those who ventured out to witness History, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in Darfur.
Writer Michael Ignatieff.

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After my grandfather retired in the 1980s, he and my grandmother devoted themselves to working on the family tree. In the days before the internet with its quick online database searches, this meant filing cabinets full of meticulous notes, phone bills for long distance calls to records offices all over the world, and, most excitingly, trips around the globe to ferret out existing relatives. They loved it. When one family tree was done, they’d move on to another branch of the family and so they continued for years, happily gathering and recording stories before they were forgotten. For them, this was important work. It was important to them that they know who came before and that they pass that knowledge down to their children and grandchildren so that we too would know. I took that to heart as a child. I already loved history but it became more important to me when I considered events that I knew had impacted my family. It made it more personal and, because of that, far more exciting.

The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff feeds directly into my fascination with famil

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Originally published in Liberties Journal, 2024

Michael Ignatieff’s latest book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.

Is it possible to be a historian of your own life? To see yourself as a figure in the crowd, as a member of a generation who shared the same slice of time? We cannot help thinking of our own lives as uniquely our own, but if we look more closely, we begin to see how much we shared with strangers of our own age and situation. If we could forget for a moment what was singular about our lives and concentrate instead on what we experienced with everyone else, would it be possible to see ourselves in a new light, less self-dramatizing but possibly more truthful? What happens when I stop using “I” and start using “we’?

What “we” are we talking about here? Which “we” is my “we”? An old joke comes to mind. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by Indian warriors. The situation looks bad. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto. “What do we do now?” Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we’, white man?” The “we” to which I refer and belong were the white middle

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Michael Ignatieff is a writer, former Canadian politician, and former president of the Central European University. He acted and later served as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Opposition from 2008 until 2011; he resigned after a “historic defeat” in the 2011 Canadian federal election that had seen the Liberal Party relegated to third-largest and cost it the status of Official Opposition.

Ignatieff has worked in academic positions at institutions including Harvard University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto.

His political opponents criticized Ignatieff for referring to Ukrainians in a 1993 book as “little Russians” and writing that Ukrainian independence creates the image of “phoney [sic] Cossacks in cloaks and boots, nasty anti-Semites,” though Ignatieff said the statements were taken out of context. Ignatieff has also been criticized for his comments on the bombing of Qana in Lebanon in 2006, in which civilians were accidentally killed when Israeli forces targeted Hezbollah terrorists. He had said that he