Canada's Cultural Marxism was "Made in the USA"

In reporting on the Trudeau Liberals’ draconian new “transgender rights” bill the editors at Taki Theodoracopolus’ e-magazine made the remark that “[a]t any given moment, Canada is also about 15 years ahead of the USA down the murderous path of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion that must not be transgressed under penalty of death.” This is not, alas, an entirely erroneous statement, at least if we have the last few decades in view, but the most interesting thing about it is that it is essentially saying that Canadian progressives are attempting to be more American than the Americans. In Canada, Cultural Marxism is and always has been, a product imported from the United States.

Cultural Marxism is the use of culture to subvert and undermine the traditions of a society and civilization. It is usually thought of in terms of the attacks on people of white European ancestry, the Christian religion, the patriarchal family and the male sex in general, and heterosexual normality, that now permeate popular and academic culture. Political correctness is the popular appellation for Cultural Marxism in its coercive aspect.

American conservatives think of all of this as having been imported from Europe and they are correct in one sense in that Cultural Marxism as an actual strategy of infiltrating and subverting the institutions that generate and transmit culture such as schools, media, and churches was developed by European neo-Marxists such as Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period of the last century and brought to America by thinkers such as those of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse – who temporarily relocated to Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s and had a surprisingly large amount of influence in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s for men whose theories were primarily a synthesis of the ideas of the two most boring and uninspired thinkers in all of history, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. If Europe was the birthplace of Cultural Marxism at the level of theory, however, Los Angeles, California has been the central base of operations from which it has conducted its highly successful campaign against the peoples, religion, and traditions of Western Civilization. Can there be any doubt that the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the Cultural Marxists has been the “pop culture” produced in music and motion picture recording studios of the City of Angels?

All of Cultural Marxism’s victories in its endless war against all things good, decent, and normal can be traced to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was itself to a large degree a Hollywood fabrication. The conventional narrative of this history tells us that black Americans, having undergone a century of continued cruel oppression under segregation after they had been freed from slavery in the American Civil War, rose up against their oppressors under the leadership of a modern-day Spartacus, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and finally obtained their rights in the Civil Rights Act passed by the United States Congress in 1964. In reality, the US Supreme Court had dealt the deathblow to segregation in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a year before the media elevated King to celebrity status in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Civil Rights Act did not terminate the “separate but equal” state laws that had already been struck down by the Supreme Court ten years earlier but rather made it a civilly liable offence for private citizens to discriminate on the grounds of race or sex, in certain situations. By telling people what they were or were not allowed to be thinking while selling or renting a house, hiring, promoting and firing an employee, or serving or withholding service from customers, thus extending the rule of law into the realm of private conscience, and by placing an impossible burden of proof upon the accused, this bill was in itself a major assault on principles of justice that had been long established in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, so effective was the falsified, media-generated, version of these events that the Civil Rights Movement has served as the template ever since for the “Social Justice Warriors” who, howling with outrage on behalf of one supposedly mistreated group or another, have demanded radical changes to society and the strict curtailing of how we are allowed to think or speak.

The American Civil Rights Act was obviously the model upon which the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 was based. Like its American equivalent, the CHRA forbade private acts of discrimination, but it went the American bill one further by including the notorious Section 13, which defined as an act of discrimination, the communication via electronic media of words and ideas that were “likely” to expose people to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of their race, sex, national origin, or any other prohibited grounds of discrimination. It was the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that brought in the CHRA with Section 13 in 1977, and we can see a parallel with what the present Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is seeking to do by introducing Bill C-16, which proposes to make “hate speech” against transsexuals a criminal offence, punishable with up to two years of prison time. Both generations of Trudeaus looked to the United States for their inspiration, in Justin’s case to the President Barack Obama’s attempt to shove all this transgender rights nonsense down all the states’ throats by executive order. In both cases the Trudeaus have taken a rotten American idea and made it even worse.

In this we see how it is true for the editors of Takimag to say that Canada, with the Trudeau Liberals in power, is ahead of the United States in the game of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion, but that this is by imitating the United States and trying to outdo the Americans in their own game. The reorientation of Canada away from her British roots and connections and towards greater continental integration with the United States has been the goal of the Liberal Party since the nineteenth century. This remained the case when the Liberals came under the leadership of the Trudeaus, themselves a cheap, Canadian, knockoff of the trashy, American Kennedy family. To this day the Liberals look to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as their greatest achievement during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. The Charter is clearly a second-rate imitation of the American Bill of Rights. It is built on the same false premise as the American document – that rights and freedoms are better secured by being written down on paper than being enshrined in long-established custom and tradition – while making no mention of the basic right to one’s own property, and making the most important rights and freedoms mentioned, less secure than the multicultural, egalitarian, and feminist agenda that Pierre Trudeau had borrowed from Hollywood. The biggest effect of its having been added to our constitution was to make the Canadian Supreme Court more like the American, that is to say, a panel of activists carrying out a social, moral, and cultural “revolution from above” against the Christian religion and the customs, traditions, and way of life that had been identifiable as Canadian since Confederation. Six years after the Charter was introduced, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down all of Canada’s laws against abortion, a decision the American Supreme Court had anticipated by fifteen years. Last year it struck down all of our laws against doctor assisted suicide. In between were a string of liberalizing and secularizing decisions striking down long-established laws and traditions of the type the Americans have had to endure from their Supreme Court since at least the 1950s. Progressive activist judges in the United States had had the Fourteenth Amendment at their disposal since 1868. Their Canadian equivalents had to wait until 1982 to get the Charter.

It is deeply ironic, therefore, that virtually everything which progressives, including supporters of the NDP and Green Parties, both of which basically want all the same things as the Liberals only faster, think of as being “the Canadian way” as opposed to “the American way” is merely one American innovation or another taken to an absurd extreme. The original Canadian Tories, from Sir John A. MacDonald through to John G. Diefenbaker, knew that what set the Canadian way apart from the American was our loyalism, monarchism, and our remaining true to our British traditions and institutions within the larger British family of nations and it is pathetic, that the party that bears the Conservative name, has abandoned its opposition to same-sex marriage and endorsed the transgender rights bill thus essentially conceding the culture war to the Cultural Marxism that has infiltrated our country with “MADE IN THE USA” stamped all over it.