The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, October 21, 2016

The Existential Crisis of the West

“To be, or not to be.” “That,” as Shakespeare’s Danish Prince famously soliloquized, “is the question.” Was he seriously weighing the pros of taking his own life – “to die, to sleep” – against the cons – “to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub”? Or, since he was feigning madness at the time, was this merely part of the act?

We don’t know and never will but what we do know, alas, is that Hamlet’s dilemma is precisely the one currently faced by Western Civilization.

It was novelist Jean Raspail who peered into the future and saw the form in which this dilemma would come upon the West in his Le Camp des Saints which was first published in French in 1973, followed by an English edition in 1975. The novel made the bestseller lists when it first appeared – and it returned to them about five years ago when the predicted scenario began to loom large on the horizon of the immediate future – but it met with much hostility from the fashionable elites of the liberal intelligentsia. Its author, a traditional Roman Catholic who longs for the restoration of the French monarchy, was treated by the bien-pensants as a racist rabble-rouser.

The novel tells the story of a fleet of a hundred rusting old cargo liners that set out from Calcutta en route to France laden with a million of the poorest of the poor. Long before the armada arrives in the Mediterranean where it will embark upon the French Riviera on Easter Sunday the world becomes aware of its destination and the French discuss among themselves how they will respond. Those in power are aware that what is at stake is the continued existence of France as they know it, that these refugees from abject poverty are attracted by the wealth of the West and not because they love French culture and civilization and wish to participate in it. They are invaders, but invaders armed not with guns and swords, but with their own wretchedness and the liberalism of the French. While a few of France’s leaders, including her president, privately do not wish France to succumb to this invasion, publicly they are afraid to express this sentiment and in the end lack the heart to act on it. Most of the intellectuals, clergy, journalists, and politicians welcome the coming of the invaders of which they speak in messianic, salvific, terms and embrace the death of their own way of life. The world waits to see what France will do and when she fails to conjure up the will to survive no other Western country dares to do so.

This doom, so vividly forecast by Raspail forty years ago, has gradually come to materialize until now it is dangling over Western countries like the sword that Syracusan ruler Dionysius the Younger hung by a hair over the head of his flatterer Damocles.

In the 1960s most Western governments radically liberalized their policies on immigration both in regards to who is allowed in and how many causing a massive upsurge in immigration from the Third World. This, predictably, generated a great deal of cultural and ethnic tension. The governments that had orchestrated this new wave of untraditional immigration – or at least passed the laws that made it possible – dealt with this tension in a number of ways. What these methods all had in common was that they involved the government siding with the newcomers against those who were already members of the societies they governed. Often these countries declared themselves to be multicultural, which was more than just a recognition that a plurality of cultures could be found within their borders, but a decision that their country would adapt to the immigrants rather than expect the immigrants to adapt to them. Several of them passed laws which forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and country of origin which, while worded neutrally, were clearly designed to be applied in one direction only. Sometimes, as was the case with the Canadian Human Rights Act passed in 1977, these laws included provisions aimed at the suppression of public disagreement with these new policies. Throughout the West dissent was further discouraged by means of accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia and other such words that suggested that liberal immigration was an obvious good, which nobody could rationally and legitimately disagree with, so that all disapproval was an irrational prejudice based in fear and hatred.

Then the illegal immigration problem began. Illegal immigration is when people move to a country without applying to immigrate through the proper channels. Some countries have more of a problem with this than others depending upon how easy they are to access from countries where large numbers of people need to flee. The United States has had a huge illegal immigration problem over its southern border with Mexico for decades, a problem that has been exacerbated by the refusal of their government to enforce its own immigration laws. Politicians of both the Republican and Democrat parties have preferred to amnesty illegal aliens, i.e., to pardon them for breaking into the country and grant them legal immigrant status. There are a number of reasons for this preference – it keeps the cost of labour low for unscrupulous companies and is considered to be the humanitarian response to people who are fleeing poverty looking for a better life – but without a secure border, it is a solution that only encourages more of the problem.

It is events that have transpired since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, however, that has made Raspail’s scenario loom so ominously on the horizon. Protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria that began in the “Arab Spring” of that year grew into armed rebellion, backed by the American government of Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the fighting escalated Islamic jihadists operating in both Syria and Iraq seized control of territory in these two countries and formed the Islamic State (ISIS) declaring it to be the revival of the ancient caliphate. With the United States backing the so-called moderate rebels, Russia and then later Iran backing the Assad government, and ISIS waging a terrorist war on all fronts with plenty of funding from oil-rich governments in the Middle East millions of people were driven from their homes and ended up refugees in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and other neighbouring countries.

Then in late 2014 a wave of migration started as masses of people began crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe. This wave developed into a tsunami in 2015 and by the fall of that year 8000 were crossing over on a daily basis. Although the migrants claimed to be seeking asylum from the Syrian Civil War, statistics gathered by the United Nations show that less than half of them are actually from Syria, with large numbers coming from Afghanistan, Iraq and even African countries such as Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia. UN statistics also showed that the majority of these migrants were men rather than women and children. Beneath the outward trappings of a refugee crisis this wave of migration looked suspiciously like an invasion.

The other players immediately began acting out the script Raspail had written for them decades ago. The pope, a heretic from Latin America who has difficulty distinguishing between the teachings of Karl Marx and those of Jesus Christ, told Europe that it was their Christian duty to take in all of these migrants and countless other clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, sang the same tune. The news media bombasted us with heart wrenching stories and images depicting about the plight of the refugees.

Meanwhile our politicians did not waste the opportunity this crisis afforded to show off their humanity at the expense of those they govern. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany had a “selfie” taken with a migrant and declared that Germany would place no limits on the number of asylum seekers they took in. Unsurprisingly, over a million took advantage of this generous offer. Realizing that this was too many, but not wanting to lose her reputation for being charitable and humanitarian, she asked other European countries to bail her out and take more of the refugees. When they proved reluctant to do so she attempted to bully them into doing so through EU-imposed quotas. All of a sudden right-wing, anti-EU, nationalist parties began to do well in the polls throughout Europe and in the UK the yes side won on the Brexxit referendum on leaving the EU.

In Canada, the new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who never met a photo op that he didn’t like, pledged to bring 25, 000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of last year. It actually took him until the end of February to do so but he then set a new target of resettling 50, 000 in Canada by the end of 2016. The thought of whether this would be good or bad for Canada and Canadians never crossed his mind. He got to show off how kind and compassionate and generous he was by bringing them over, getting his picture taken, and then dumping them on the country and forgetting about them.

All of the elements of Raspail’s haunting scenario are now present. We have the liberalism, hiding a death wish for our own culture and civilization behind a mask of concern for the other. We have the intellectual, political, religious and media elites obsessed with projecting an image of kindness and compassion at the expense of their own people. Finally, we have the teeming hordes flooding into the West with little interest in learning our ways, obeying our laws, and becoming part of our civilization. While they cannot be blamed for wishing to flee poverty, war, and other unpleasant conditions, they comprise, in effect if not in intention, an invasion force, armed with our own liberalism and aided and abetted by our own political and intellectual classes. Thus we find ourselves faced with the question of whether we allow this to continue and throw away the civilization our ancestors built, handed down to us, and entrusted us to pass on to their descendants or do we summon up the will to do what is necessary to preserve that patrimony as a sacred trust. Will Western civilization be or not be?

There is a major difference between what Raspail wrote and the reality unfolding around us today, however. It is not France that the eyes of the world are upon, but the United States of America. In this fall’s presidential race, one of the candidates, Hillary Clinton is pledged to raising the number of Middle Eastern migrants claiming to be refugees from the Syrian Civil War, taken in by the United States to 10 to 65 000, the high end of which would represent an increase of over 500%. In reality, the number if she is elected, is likely to be much higher. There will certainly be more people fleeing the region because as President she will pursue the same failed policies she pursued as Secretary of State. These policies are a large part of the reason there is a humanitarian crisis in Syria to flee from in the first place and as ought to be obvious from her belligerent sabre rattling against Syria, Iran, and Russia, she would only escalate the conflict as the American President. The other candidate, Donald J. Trump, is not only opposed to increasing the number of refugees brought in but insists upon better vetting for those who are brought in and has built his entire campaign on a platform of regaining control of America’s borders with regards to both trade and immigration. Furthermore, his foreign policy ideas of concentrating on fighting the real enemy, ISIS, and getting along with other countries like Syria, Iran, and Russia that are fighting the same enemy would be far less likely to exponentially increase the number of people needing to seek asylum.

What will be the decision on November 8th? Will the United States choose to preserve their own existence by electing Donald Trump or will they choose to dissolve America into the globalist new world order of George Soros and his puppet Hillary Clinton? If the Americans choose the latter, will any other Western country be able to find in herself the will to survive?

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

A Toxic Narrative

Lydia McGrew, a regular contributor to the website What’s Wrong With the World, in a recent post on her personal blog Extra Thoughts, took umbrage with those who have been sharing a particular meme in response to the controversy over the tape of Donald Trump’s lewd boasting of about a decade ago. She described the meme as toxic because it “represents the intrusion of vicious, misogynistic, manospherian attitudes into something more like mainstream culture.” The meme in question goes “If American women are so outraged at Trump's use of naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Grey.” Among the reasons Mrs. McGrew gives for condemning this meme, the first was that it downplays what Trump said, making it out to be about “naughty words” rather than “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it.”

The question of whether or not that meme is “toxic” is not of interest to me here. There is a narrative, however, one that is prevalent in institutions of higher learning today, that most definitely is toxic. Many of the responses that I have seen in social media over the last week to memes like the one Mrs. McGrew was discussing draw heavily upon this narrative and there is a hint of it in Mrs. McGrew’s own analysis even though it is not a narrative with which she is likely to have much sympathy given her stated views on a number of issues. The narrative I refer to is the feminist narrative of “rape culture.”

People who have shared memes similar to the one mentioned above have been accused of defending “rape culture” by those who accept Mrs. McGrew’s interpretation of Trump’s comments as “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it” rather than bragging that one of the benefits of his celebrity is that women are willing to let him do certain things which is the more natural interpretation of his words.

What is this “rape culture” to which they are referring?

Is rape culture the culture that we find when we drop the e off of rape and get rap? It would make sense to equate the two because rape and sexual aggression in general are frequently glorified in the lyrics of the noise which tries to pass itself off as music under that name. This is not, however, what is meant by rape culture and it is worthy of noting, in passing, that another recent meme has drawn attention to the fact that Michelle Obama, who claimed that the Trump tape “has shaken me to the core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted” and, like Mrs. McGrew, interpreted the comments on the tape as bragging about “sexually assaulting women” is herself a fan of rap music. The Obamas have hosted Common, Jay Z, and Rick Ross at the White House, noted misogynists, all of whose lyrics glorify violence in one form or another, including, in the case of Ross, drugging and date raping a girl.

Alright, if rap culture is not included in rape culture, how about a culture which encourages male family members to kill female family members who have been victims of rape in order to save the honour of the family? Last year, on New Year’s Eve, members of one such culture, Islamic culture, who had been foolishly admitted as refugees by female Chancellor Angela Merkel, ganged up on women in major cities all over Germany and sexually assaulted them. Is this the rape culture that everyone is talking about? Unlikely, given that it is Hillary Clinton who wishes to repeat Merkel’s mistake in the United States, and who has condemned as bigotry Mr. Trump’s call for members of this culture to be banned from entry into the United States until they could be strictly vetted.

No, what is meant by “rape culture” is nothing more or less than our culture, twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture, as seen through the lens of a narrative drawn up by the radical wing of the second wave of feminism. These radical feminists have been given an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of academia. The “women’s studies” and “gender studies” classrooms which have been established in major universities over the last fifty years serve little to no real academic purpose but exist solely to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with the message of feminism. The idea of rape culture is central to that message.

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller, a journalist who had been involved in several left-wing causes in the 1960s, including the more radical version of Second Wave feminism of which she would later write a history, had a book published entitled Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, which contained all of the main elements of the rape culture narrative: that rape is about power not sex, it is an instrument by which men as a class intimidate and oppress women as a class so as to keep power in the hands of men, and that Western culture normalizes and legitimizes rape in order to perpetuate the male power structure. The same ideas were put forward in other feminist writings at the same time but Brownmiller’s was by far the most influential.

The narrative, which relies heavily upon presuppositions drawn from Marxist theories that were long ago debunked, is itself utter nonsense. Western culture has condemned rape from time immemorial. One of the legends of Ancient Rome was that of the rape of Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman nobleman, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin Superbus the last king of Rome. Lucretia, after exposing the crime to her father which led to the revolution in which the Senate drove the Tarquins out and formed the Republic, plunged a dagger into her heart. Lucretia’s final act was honoured by the Romans as the ultimate evidence of her chastity but St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo presented a very different view of the matter in his De Civitate Dei. Having argued that the guilt of rape is imputable only to those who commit it, leaving the chastity of the souls and bodies of its victims intact, he argued that suicide is a completely inappropriate response to rape for it imposes the ultimate penalty upon the innocent party (Book I: Chapters 17-19, the last of which specifically addresses the case of Lucretia).

St. Augustine’s view, which could not be further removed from that of the cultures which think that a victim of rape should be killed to save the family’s honour, was informed by the Holy Scriptures, for the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes the death penalty for the man who commits rape, adding that “unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death.” Writing in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by the Goths, his ideas became foundational to Western Christendom.

Western civilization has changed a lot since the days in which it could be credibly called Christendom but the changes, while many of them are lamentable in my eyes, have mostly been ones of which feminists like Brownmiller would approve – women have been given the vote, access to higher education, recognized rights to own property in their own name, and access to careers outside of the home. Furthermore, all of this took place long before Brownmiller penned her tome. Yet it was the Western, and specifically North American, culture of the late twentieth century that the feminists indicted as rape culture.

Anybody who had two brain cells to rub together would not take this narrative seriously for a second, which is perhaps the reason it is so ubiquitous among academic intellectuals. It has only survived this long because feminists, by interweaving their ridiculous accusations against Western culture with the testimonies of actual rape victims have welded the two together in such a way as to make opposition to the narrative's interpretive grid seem like an attack on the personal experiences of rape victims ensuring that those indoctrinated with the narrative will undergo a negative emotional response to any criticism of it The narrative is passed on in an environment in which it is isolated from opposing viewpoints, ostensibly to create a “safe space” for victims, but more realistically to shield the narrative from criticism. It is completely toxic in its effects. It is used to transfer the guilt of a crime traditionally regarded as a capital offence off of its specific perpetrators and onto the entire male sex while condemning as encouraging rape the culture which is arguably the least condoning of it that the world has ever known. Feminists use this evil narrative to justify their insistence that those who make accusations of sexual assault have a “right to be believed” – to call their claims into question is supposedly a part of rape culture – an insistence that contradicts and undermines the fundamental Western right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those who have been evoking this toxic feminist narrative ought to be ashamed of themselves for doing so.




Monday, October 17, 2016

The Female of the Species is More Randy than the Male!

To point out the hard truth about women qua women as I am about to do in this essay goes against many of my deeply cherished convictions. As a Canadian Tory, which is something different from a right-liberal which is what most American conservatives are, I do not believe that everything worth defending in Western Civilization came about in the Modern Age as the result of the Enlightenment but insist rather, that there is much that is worth fighting and dying for to be found in the tradition that antedates modernity. That includes the concept of chivalry, which arose out of the code of honour of the knightly orders of the Middle Ages. One aspect of the attitude and behaviour towards women prescribed by chivalry, that of pretending that they are as pure as the driven snow, could be described as the maintenance of what Plato called a “noble lie.” It was based on the recognition of a greater truth, which was that men and women are different and not equal and that the natural inequality is such as warrants protective behaviour on the part of men towards women, even to the point of publicly holding such an illusion about them.

Unfortunately chivalry is dead having been murdered by the monstrous beast that is feminism. By insisting, contrary to reality that men and women are equals, and contrary to the superior morality of pre-liberal tradition that they must be regarded and treated as equals, feminism has so altered the relationship between the sexes as to remove any justification for the noble lie. That might not, in itself, be a good reason to say something unchivalrous, but female hypocrisy has never been more on display than it has for the last week and so the time has come to speak the ignoble truth.

In ancient Greek mythology there was a prophet by the name of Tiresias. He was an unusually long-lived man who lived in the city of Thebes. If you are familiar with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex you will recall that he is the man who reluctantly, and only after the provocation of an unjust accusation of conspiracy, revealed to Oedipus that he was the man who had killed King Laius and in doing so, unwittingly murdered his own father. Another well-known story about Tiresias is how he received the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery. One day he came across two snakes mating and whacked them with his staff, offending Hera, the notoriously psychopathic wife of Zeus, who turned him into a woman. Having undergone this apogynosis, she changed her name to Caitlyn, got her picture on the cover of all of Thebes’ popular entertainment magazines, was offered her own show at the amphitheatre, and became a star until, seven years later, she came across another pair of snakes going at it, and was changed back.

Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with all of this.

Tiresias was, as is quite unusual in a seer, blind. The stories vary as to how this came about, but one version says that he was called upon to judge, on the basis of his ahead-of-the-times transgendered experience, in a dispute between Zeus and Hera over which sex enjoyed copulation more. Zeus claimed that women got more out of it, Hera insisted that the pleasure mostly belonged to men. Tiresias, unwisely, answered truthfully and said that men get only one tenth of the pleasure that women do, thus pissing off the vengeful Hera yet again, and was struck blind as punishment.

Ancient stories of this sort are usually ways of telling truths and this is no exception. The truth contained in this story is that the female of the species is not only, as Rudyard Kipling famously noted, more deadly than the male, but she is also hornier and more randy as well.

As difficult as this is for most people to accept, having had it drilled into our heads most of our lives that the male is dominated by his libido, a violent and powerful force from which the female must be protected, it is also quite evidently true. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that a scientific comparison of the conversation men have among themselves, with that women have among themselves, would reveal that the former spend more of their time talking about women than the latter do about men? If so, such a person needs to get a grasp on reality.

Several years ago in a Bible study class at church the subject of pornography was addressed. It was put forward that this is a sinful addiction to which men are more prone than women. I made the objection that if we do not limit our concept of pornography to merely visual depictions of sex but include verbal descriptions as well, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, by that broader definition, a case can be made that the vast majority of fiction written for primarily female consumption constitutes smut, plain and simple.

Consider popular music for a further example. The most highly sexualized lyrics and performances on the pop music scene today are to be found among female recording artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. Let us grant that these are women with a very strong business sense who are providing a supply to meet a market demand. Is that demand coming from heterosexual males? You would find little evidence of that by looking at the fan bases of these stars. Their audiences are composed mainly of females.

Women do not like to acknowledge this truth and understandably so. It greatly weakens their bargaining power when it comes to negotiating their relationships with men. So they would prefer that society continue to maintain the fiction that the larger portion of lust has been allotted to men. The hypocrisy in this has been magnified to the nth degree by the feminist movement which purports to speak for women. Feminism demands that the expression of female sexuality be free from the constraints of traditional morality. It complains that traditional morality held a double standard which condemned promiscuity more severely in women than in men and interprets this as an attempt to maintain a male monopoly on power by controlling female sexuality. This ignores the far more realistic explanation that women get pregnant and men do not, a fact which means that the natural consequences of sexual activity are visible in women and place a heavy burden upon them, so that the rules of traditional morality actually serve women’s own self-interest far more than they do that of men.

While feminism has rejected the constraints of traditional morality on female sexuality the natural consequences that explain the existence of what feminism wrongly perceived as a double standard still exist. Feminism’s solution to these is a monstrous one, to assert for women a right to terminate the lives of their unborn children while developing in the womb. Meanwhile, it has replaced the old morality with a new one of its own mold and manufacture replete with a double standard of its own. It is masculine sexuality the new morality seeks to constrain, not with simple and straightforward rules like “thou shalt not commit adultery” as in the old morality, but with loosely defined jargon that is malleable and expansive enough to allow feminists to read virtually any expression of masculine sexuality that they don’t like as a form of sexual aggression. If that was not bad enough, the feminists insist that women who accuse men of sexually aggressive offenses have a “right to be believed” which, as I pointed out in my last essay, is completely incompatible with the right of the accused – male or female – to be considered innocent until proven guilty which is fundamental to our civilization’s concept of justice.

All of this feminist hypocrisy has been on prominent display for a week now as women of both sexes have been waging a blitzkrieg on Donald Trump in their determination to see a woman who makes Queen Jezebel look like the Blessed Virgin in comparison become the next President of the United States simply because she is a woman. In the face of such hypocrisy, the time has come for all of us, distasteful as it may be, to leave chivalry aside and call a spade a spade where women are concerned. The fact of the matter is that women, the raunchier of the two sexes, say things publicly all the time that are far worse than what they have been condemning Donald Trump for saying privately. Their hypocrisy is so great they could offer lessons in it to the scribes and Pharisees.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Feminism is the Enemy of Freedom and Justice

The most insightful commentary that I have run across on the recent media attempt to torpedo the campaign of Donald Trump with crude and lewd remarks he was recorded having made ten years ago is by Dr. Stephen Baskerville the Professor of Government and Director of the International Politics and Policy Program at Patrick Henry College. His article, entitled “The Sexual Revolution Triumphant”, which was posted at the Daily Caller on the Monday after the second presidential debate, makes the observation that both candidates are “not only products but pioneers of the Sexual Revolution, and together they personify its political dynamic.” Trump, Dr. Baskerville goes on to explain, represents the hedonism of the earlier stage of the Revolution. The later, political side of the Revolution eventually morphed into “the more aggressive and authoritarian feminism.”

The feminists were at first allies of the hedonists, Dr. Baskerville points out, but they “replaced the old sexual morality, defined by religion and enforced by social disapproval, with new political definitions of sin, defined by state functionaries and enforced by gendarmes” eventually creating a “political dynamic that both encouraged unrestrained sex and then punished men for engaging in it.” The success of the political side of the Sexual Revolution can be seen in the fact that in response to the Trump tape scandal, the outrage even of conservatives has not been expressed in terms of traditional morality but rather those of “the political ideology that has replaced it: ‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny,’ ‘sexual harassment,’ and other new political jargon that no one fully understands because it can be expanded to mean anything.”

What the liberal reporters who broke the story about the Trump tape hoped to accomplish, as I pointed out in my last essay, was to divide the Republican Party and, more specifically, to turn moral and religious conservatives against Trump. What Dr. Baskerville’s insightful observation about how conservatives have been using the jargon of feminist ideology rather than of traditional morality to condemn Trump’s remarks means is that to the extent that the liberal attack on Trump has succeeded in achieving its ends it has also succeeded in enlisting the champions of traditional morality and sexuality on the side of their mortal enemy feminism.

That feminism is the mortal enemy of more than just traditional morality can be seen in the follow up to the tape scandal. After the second presidential debate, in which Trump wiped the floor with Clinton, the media began publishing allegations of groping and other sexual misconduct against Trump. The allegations, by contrast with those made against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, are of exceedingly low credibility. The accused is an exceedingly wealthy, high profile businessman and celebrity, and thus a goldmine for anyone who could credibly bring a lawsuit against him over something like this, yet the accusations pertain to events that supposedly happened as far back as thirty years. One of the accusers seems to have lifted her accusation verbatim from a Velvet Underground song. The question of Trump’s guilt or innocence, however, is not what concerns me here, but rather how liberals and feminists responded to those who questioned the credibility of these accusations.

Let us use George Takei, the actor, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series and other versions of the franchise, as an example. Takei has a large social media following and is outspoken in his progressive opinions. On Friday, October 14th, at 7:22 am, Takei tweeted the following:

“If you ever wonder why sexual assault victims don’t come forward, just look what’s happening now to those who do.”

Let us now parse this interesting remark of Mr. Sulu’s and see what we can discover. Implicit in these snide and snarky words is the idea that we ought never to question the credibility of claims of sexual assault. If we question the credibility of those who make accusations of sexual assault, victims of sexual assault won’t come forward, therefore by questioning the credibility of accusers, we are preventing victims from obtaining justice. Shame on us.

Do you see where this kind of reasoning leads? To say that it is wrong to question the credibility of an accuser is to say that an accuser has the right to be presumed to be telling the truth. If that seems reasonable to you, then you need to recognize that giving accusers the right of presumption of truth is incompatible with another right long regarded as a bedrock principle of justice in Western Civilization and especially the English speaking world. That is the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

This principle, which goes back as far as the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire - ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (1) – has been fundamental to English Common Law for centuries. It is closely related to the principle that Sir William Blackstone, writing in the eighteenth century, formulated as “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” a principle that also has ancient roots. Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias, famously declared that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. In the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, Abraham pled with the Lord not to destroy the wicked cities if ten righteous men could be found therein and He agreed. In the event, not finding even that many, He sent His angels to rescue Lot and his family, before the fire and brimstone fell.

These ancient and traditional principles are fundamental to our entire way of doing justice which, whatever its flaws may be, for all earthly justice is flawed, is superior to any system that has ever operated on the opposite concept of a presumption of guilt. These principles are far too important to sacrifice to the idols of feminist ideology.

Yet that is exactly what feminism expects us to do. George Takei did not just beam his sentiments out of thin air. The idea that those who accuse others of sexual harassment, assault and rape have a right to be believed, because questioning their veracity discourages victims from coming forward, is part of what feminists have been brainwashing their victims into thinking in gender studies classrooms for years. The result, naturally, of teaching a particular kind of accuser that she has the right to be believed, has been an avalanche of false accusations which have ruined the education, careers, and lives of many. Just ask the Duke University lacrosse team or the poor sap that Mattress Girl got her five minutes in the spotlight for defaming. These are the sort of things that come from allowing an ideological movement, whose leading personalities in the 1970s and 1980s made the absurd claims that all heterosexual intercourse is rape and that rape is an instrument whereby men as a class oppress women as a class thereby making all men culpable to have this much influence over the minds of youth.

Dr. Baskerville, in the article that I referenced at the beginning of this essay, argues that the success of the Sexual Revolution in replacing the clear language of traditional morality with the malleable and expansive ideological jargon of feminism, so that even supposedly conservative politicians feel compelled to use the latter rather than the former when condemning Trump’s locker room talk, is ominous because it is the nature of the new terminology to create a rationalization for a power grab on the part of the kind of radicals who find their champion in Hillary Clinton. This, along with what I have pointed out above about how feminism’s insistence upon a right of presumption of truth for accusers in sexual harassment/assault and rape cases would mean the abandonment of the basic principle of the right of presumption of innocence for the accused, demonstrates how feminist ideology is a threat to the principles of freedom and justice that have been essential elements of the tradition of Western civilized societies for centuries.

(1) The burden is on he who asserts, not he who denies.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Scandals

In May of 1973, as the Watergate scandal that would eventually bring down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was in the early stages of unfolding in the press, our former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, addressing the House of Commons said “Honourable members know what has happened recently in the United States. Even making observations about it causes me very deep pain. The President has been a friend of mine for years. I wonder how many people in Canada who were going to abolish the monarchy are having second thoughts now about asking for a president?”

I, who very much share the Chief’s monarchist sentiments and preference for our own system of parliamentary government, cannot count the number of times since the current American presidential race began that I have been thankful that we are fortunate enough in Canada, to have a head of state who is above the political process and whose position is filled by good old-fashioned hereditary right of succession. No matter how loathsome our politicians are – and the present governing batch led by mindless media-whore Justin Trudeau are about as loathsome as they get – we can always look to our Sovereign and say God Save the Queen!

The Watergate scandal cost the United States the leadership of the statesman who was, in my opinion, the best president they had in the last century and a half. What Nixon was forced to resign over was less than what one of the present candidates has already done while serving in the administration of the outgoing president as Secretary of State. Nixon, having inherited a quagmire in the Vietnam War in which thousands of American lives had been wasted through the incompetence of the previous administration, brought America’s involvement in this conflict to an end in a way that minimized the damage to her national honour. By contrast, the former Secretary of State now running for president, through her ill-conceived support for Islamic rebel movements throughout the Middle East, helped created ISIS which is presently engaged in a jihadist war of terror against the rest of the world and, blaming the problems of the region on the Russian, Syrian, and Iranian governments actively fighting ISIS, proposes to solve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria that she helped generate, by pursuing the same failed policies in a way that could lead to the kind of direct US-Russia confrontation that statesmen spent the entire Cold War trying to avoid.

Late last week, as Wikileaks released documents showing that this candidate said one thing to audiences of Wall Street financiers and another to the general public – and advocated the practice of the same duplicity – the Washington Post, the liberal newspaper that had broken the Watergate story and which supports the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to generate a Watergate sized scandal for her opponent Donald J. Trump. They released a videotape from 2005, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush, prior to an appearance by Trump on NBC's Access Hollywood which Bush was co-anchoring at the time, could be heard on a bus having a rather crude and vulgar chat about women.

That Donald Trump had engaged in such a crass conversation probably came as a genuine shock to no one. There was much feigned shock over it, with nobody expressing more faux outrage than Hillary Clinton, who is no stranger to gutter talk herself. Trump apologized for the remarks which he described as “locker room” talk an expression which has long been around for the kind of unguarded and often lewd conversation which often takes place between men in informal settings in which women are not present. Clinton, deliberately parsing the expression in an overly literal way, cited coaches and athletes who tweeted that they never heard talk like that in their locker rooms. Her cheerleaders in the mainstream media, including the contemptible Anderson Cooper of CNN who co-moderated the second presidential debate at Washington University, St. Louis, two days after the tape was released, attempted to twist Trump’s words into something worse than boasting and obscenity. It is apparent to anybody who is both honest and in possession of a brain that Trump’s boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything”, while utterly distasteful, was not a declaration of entitlement to commit sexual assault but a statement of the fact that the fame and wealth that come with celebrity attract women.

Other than distracting people from the Wikileaks revelations about Clinton, the heirs of Woodward and Bernstein clearly had two objectives in publishing this story. Evident in the timing of the story was their hope to rattle Trump just prior to the second debate. This objective failed. When the matter came up at the beginning of the debate Trump apologized, repeated that it was just locker room talk, and pointed out that while they were condemning him for his words, Bill Clinton had been accused by a number of women of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape. He had arranged a pre-debate press conference with several of these women. Also present – and more relevant – was Kathy Shelton, a woman who had been raped as a twelve year old. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer who defended her rapist by attacking her character and sanity and who in a taped interview laughed and gloated over her victory in the case even though she was aware her client was guilty. Trump was able to prevent the scandal from dominating a debate in which he was able to get his message across – the need to concentrate on fighting ISIS rather than the other governments fighting her, the failure of Obamacare, the need for “extreme vetting” of refugees, etc. – while hammering away at Clinton over her emails, foreign policy failures, and mendacity.

The other objective, and probably the main goal of the scandalmongers, was to divide the Republican Party. In this they were more successful. Indeed, as Paul Ryan, John McCain, and other establishment Republican figures were quick to distance themselves from the Trump campaign and condemn their party’s candidate it became difficult to tell which group displayed the greater hypocrisy. Was it the Clinton Democrats, who for years have promoted sex instruction classes and contraceptive handouts in schools, who more lately have taken to insisting that boys and girls be allowed to use each other’s bathrooms and showers, who have basically done everything they can to undermine traditional Christian morality, and whose numbers include some of the most dirty-minded and foul-mouthed comedians, actors, singers and other celebrities imaginable, but who are now all of a sudden discovering their inner Mrs. Grundys? Or was it the mainstream Republicans who, having had the opportunity in 1992 and again in 1996 to nominate a man of high moral calibre with all the patriotic policies on trade and immigration that have been attracting supporters to Trump, rejected him and now, finding the policies that their grassroots voters have demanded being championed by a reality television and beauty pageant host are pretending to be surprised to find that his private conversation resembles that of a popular entertainer rather than that of a monk?

It was Republican politicians, of course, like Ryan and McCain who danced to the tune the media played. We await the outcome of November 8th to discover whether the religious conservatives in the Republican Party’s voting base find Trump’s off colour conversation of a decade ago so offensive that they would be willing to allow Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States. While one’s words do indicate one’s character, and character is an important consideration in evaluating a would-be leader, it is to be hoped that America’s conservatives – and her voters in general – have enough sense to weigh the shortcomings in character revealed by Trump’s raunchy talk against the shortcomings revealed by Clinton’s lying about her mishandling of classified information, her shedding crocodile tears over the humanitarian crisis she helped create in Syria while attempting to pin the blame on Russia, her making billions of dollars worth of arms deals with governments that happen to be big donors to the Clinton Foundation despite being aware that they are sponsors of terrorism, and countless other such corrupt abuses of office that could be pointed to and realise that not only do Clinton’s shortcomings outweigh Trump’s, they also are more directly relevant to the question of what kind of a president she would be. This is to be hoped because Western civilization is presently facing the existential crisis Jean Raspail predicted in The Camp of the Saints and to meet that crisis needs a Donald Trump at the helm of the United States and not a Hillary Clinton.

Whatever happens, it is undeniable that the level of American politics has been brought to a new low by this election. In reality, of course, politics has always been dominated by the pursuit of sex, wealth, and power and those who in the tradition of lofty philosophical discourse on politics that began with Plato two and a half millennia ago envision a political society organized towards the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must look elsewhere than to the popularity contests we know as democratic elections. For which reason I will close with the thought on which I began – thankfulness, that here in Canada we still have a Head of State who is above this degrading process, and of whom we can say, no matter how horrible our politicians are, God Save the Queen!