Truth Versus Canada’s National Media

This year on July 1st, the 150th anniversary of the British North America Act’s coming into effect and establishing the Dominion of Canada as a new country, a disgraceful event occurred. It is not, however, the event which the national media has been harping on.

Some idiots decided that an appropriate way to celebrate the sesquicentennial was to stage a protest at the statue of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax. Edward Cornwallis, a Lt. General in the British Army, had founded, back in 1749, the settlement that would develop into the provincial capital of Nova Scotia. The protestors, carrying an upside-down Canadian flag, defaced the statue with crude anti-Canadian slogans, and a woman who identifies herself as Chief Grizzly Mamma cut off her hair and put it on the statue accusing Cornwallis of genocide and saying “You took their scalps, you can have mine too.”

She was referring to the bounty that Cornwallis had placed on the scalps of Micmac Indians, (1) on October 2, 1749. Cornwallis had done so after the Micmacs had carried out the Raid on Dartmouth three days earlier in which they scalped and beheaded a number of the British settlers. Cornwallis’ proclamation was, therefore, both defensive and retaliatory, although it was not effective, even when the bounty was raised a couple of years later. Chief Grizzly Mamma and her co-protestors had cherry-picked Cornwallis’ proclamation out of its historical context in order to insult our country on its birthday.

This protest is the disgraceful event to which I refer. It is not, however, what the national media focused on. During the protest, five young men, carrying the Canadian Red Ensign, came up to observe the events. These men, who were members of the Canadian Armed Forces – four navy, one army - politely and respectfully expressed their disagreement with the way the protestors were distorting history and then peacefully left despite the protestors’ belligerent attempts to pick a fight. The national media has ganged up on these men and, if you will excuse the metaphor, called for their scalps. Sadly, the Chief of Defence Staff and the Defence Minister have been all-too-willing to comply with this demand.

In addition to being servicemen these men were also members of an organization called Proud Boys. This is an organization founded last year by Gavin McInnes, who decades ago as co-founder of Vice Magazine, earned himself the sobriquet “the godfather of hipsterdom”. In more recent years he has developed a reputation as a kind of right-wing libertarian “shock jock.” He writes a regular column for Taki Theodoracopulus’ eponymous paleolibertarian e-zine and is also a commentator on Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media, a sort of online samizdat that was established to fill the hole that had been left when the Sun News network shut down. The media have been portraying this organization he founded as some sort of Nazi-sympathetic white supremacist organization but anyone familiar with Canada’s national media will recognize this as their worn out, nasty trick, of smearing anyone who dissents from what the liberal-left decides we must all think about race and race-related issues as a Nazi. McInnes, who despises political correctness almost as much as I do, goes out of his way to say things that offend the oversensitive and provoke the politically correct thought police but nobody who listens to what he has to say with an honest heart and an open mind could make the mistake of thinking that he is a true believer in racism of the ideological sort or that he would found an organization committed to such.

Listening with a honest heart and an open mind excludes most members of Canada’s national media, I am afraid, and so it doesn’t surprise me that apart from Rebel Media, the only person I have seen with the balls to report honestly on this story was the National Post’s Christie Blatchford. Sadly, her colleagues at the National Post do not all share her journalistic integrity. This is where I find myself, much to my amusement, dragged into this story.

In honour of Canada’s 150th I wrote two essays this year. One of these, a tribute to the great patriot Eugene Forsey, was posted on my own site, Throne, Altar, Liberty, on July 1st. The other, an essay entitled “Canada: More Than Just a Land” I contributed to the 2017 symposium at Northern Dawn, a traditionalist/neo-reactionary website where, as it so happened, it was also posted on the holiday. The title of the essay alludes to the fact that the English lyrics of "O Canada", declared to be our official national anthem in 1980, speak of Canada only as a northern land, omitting any reference to its history, traditions, and institutions, unlike "The Maple Leaf Forever", which had served as an informal national anthem alongside "God Save the Queen" since Confederation. The essay is about how "O Canada", the anthem of choice of the Liberal Party, reflects what our country is in danger of being reduced to by the Liberal Party’s long-standing campaign against the original vision of the Fathers of Confederation. Whereas the Founding Fathers of the United States had built their republic on the foundation of rebellion against and separation from the British crown and empire, the Fathers of Confederation chose to build our country on the opposite foundation of loyalty, honour, and maintaining our ties to the British crown and the empire that would soon become the Commonwealth. The Liberal Party, ever since, has tried to re-write Canada’s story into another version of the American story and has sought to divest us of our British heritage, including our traditional symbols, and in the process has threatened and weakened our parliamentary form of government and the Common Law, and the rights and freedoms of which these are the source.

This essay was quoted, earlier this week, by Graeme Hamilton, the Quebec correspondent of the National Post. Under some circumstances this could be considered an honour but Mr. Hamilton’s article is entitled “Former Canadian flag, the Red Ensign, gets new, darker life as far-right symbol.” Now if “far-right” means further to the right than the neoconservatives, or better yet what “the right” originally meant in the eighteenth century – a supporter of royalty, the institution of monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, and the established church – then I have no problem with the term being applied to myself. When the media speak of the “far-right”, however, they ordinarily mean and intend their audience to understand them as meaning admirers and followers of Adolf Hitler. This is what Mr. Hamilton, who makes reference to both the Aryan Guard and John Beattie who founded the Canadian Nazi Party decades ago, has in mind. As I have said many times, I have nothing but contempt for Adolf Hitler, his tyrannical system of government, or the left-wing movement he headed – for National Socialism, like Communism, was a direct ideological descendent of the original eighteenth century left, i.e., the anti-king, anti-church, anti-aristocracy French Revolutionaries.

Mr. Hamilton begins his article by talking about the Red Ensign’s having been used by the Proud Boys in the incident in Halifax, and using this as a launching point for a discussion of the way in which the Red Ensign has been “adopted as Canada’s equivalent of the Confederate flag by some extremists.” In the context of this discussion he includes the following paragraph:

Northern Dawn, a Canadian alt-right website launched last year to defend Western heritage against “chaos,” has used the Red Ensign as its Facebook cover photo. In a July 1 essay on the site, Gerry Neal decried the 1965 replacement of the Red Ensign with the current flag as evidence of a Liberal revision of national symbolism “to eliminate reference to our British heritage.”

Now, taken by itself, this paragraph does not misrepresent what I had to say about the replacement of the Red Ensign, but placed within the context of Mr. Hamilton’s article as a whole, which at no point acknowledges, let alone discusses, any of the differences between the groups and individuals it describes as “far right”, it presents a rather distorted picture of my essay in which race is not even mentioned, let alone discussed.

There is much that I could have said about race in that essay had I not been writing within the confines of a word limit. I could, for example, have pointed out that the Liberal Party of Canada, under Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, reintroduced racial bias into our immigration policy after it had been removed by John Diefenbaker. It was John Diefenbaker, by the way, who led the opposition to the changing of the flag, who insisted that the Red Ensign rather than the current flag should drape his coffin at his state funeral. Diefenbaker was an outspoken champion of the Old Canada, our ongoing family connection to Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, our constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, and Common Law heritage as the basis of our traditional rights and freedoms – all the things I argued for in my essay. He was also the Prime Minister who at a meeting of the Commonwealth leaders stood up and insisted that the Commonwealth must be colour blind in its policies. Diefenbaker removed race as a selection criteria from our immigration laws in 1962. Pearson and Trudeau put it back in there and, furthermore, the racial bias they introduced, was worse than the racial bias Diefenbaker had removed.

Prior to 1962, by an all-party consensus, our government considered race in the selection of immigrants for the purpose of maintaining the ethnic status quo. This is condemned as racist by liberals today, but it can be defended on grounds that have nothing to do with racist ideology. Indeed, the desire not to import a lot of new racial conflicts into a country where the peaceful co-existence of English-speaking Protestants, French-speaking Roman Catholics, and the various aboriginal tribes was already filled with tension, is arguably the exact opposite of racism. The racial bias introduced by Pearson and Trudeau, however, was the opposite of the original racial bias – rather than seeking to preserve the ethnic status quo, they wished to smash it to pieces by making Canada as ethnically diverse as possible, as fast as they could, with utter disregard for any potential negative consequences such as the atomization of communities and the balkanization of the nation as a whole.

Moreover, whereas Canada’s original race-based immigration policy had been carried out openly and honestly, as had Diefenbaker’s introduction of racial neutrality, Pearson and Trudeau introduced their new, reverse racial bias, in the sneaky, underhanded, dishonest manner that is the Liberal Party’s modus operandi. Instead of putting it down on paper in a bill, debating it in Parliament, and seeking public approval at election time, they simply instructed our visa officers to give priority to applications from the Third World and snuck millions of people past the race-neutral points system through a loophole. Then, if anyone dared to notice what was happening, let alone say anything critical about it, they loudly and aggressively cried “racist.” Worse, to deal with the increase in racial tension and conflict that would be the inevitable result of their reverse-racist immigration policy, they, following a precedent set by the Americans in the 1960s, passed laws dictating what employers, landlords, and a host of other people can or cannot be thinking in conducting their everyday business in complete violation of our traditional freedoms of thought and association, and established what is essentially a “friendly Canadian” version of Soviet/Nazi style thought police to enforce these evil and unjust laws in a manner that itself displays racial bias of the reverse type.

There are two lessons that we can learn from this history, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see. The first is that race, like sex, is a fact of human existence that we cannot escape from, and no good can come from pretending that it is otherwise. The second, is that when men forget God, the idols they erect in His place will eventually devour them. The Germans in the early twentieth century made just such idols out of their race and the man who appointed himself to be the voice of that race. The post-World War II liberal West, understandably recoiling from the horrors perpetrated in the name of that idol, but unwilling to return to the true and living God, have embraced the idol of diversity. We will eventually learn the hard way that this idol is no less monstrous than the other one.


I very much question whether Mr. Hamilton possesses either the intelligence to understand the difference between what I have said in the last four paragraphs and a Nazi screed or the honesty and integrity to acknowledge that difference. It does not bother me, however, to be smeared by association with the likes of the Aryan Guard in his article, because I am in good company with the much-maligned servicemen – two of whom are Metis – who stood up against the defamation of our country on its birthday. If you too think that these men did the right, honourable, and patriotic thing in not standing by and letting our country be insulted on its anniversary, then please sign Gavin McInnes’ “Save the Five” petition which can be found here:

https://www.therebel.media/save-the-five



(1) My use of “Indian” and the traditional English spelling “Micmac” is not out of any disrespect for the people so designated but out of a refusal, under any circumstances, to obey the dictates of political correctness. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s 1984, will recognize in political correctness’ demands that we use this word instead of that, or this spelling instead of that, what Orwell called “Newspeak” in his novel.

Appendix: My Correspondence with Mr. Graeme Hamilton

Graeme Hamilton to Gerry T. Neal
Friday, July 7, 2017, 11:21 AM
Subject: National Post inquiry

Hello Mr. Neal
I’m a reporter for the National Post, based in Montreal. I came across your blog through a link on the Northern Dawn site. I’m working on a story about the adoption of the Red Ensign as a symbol by what some call the alt right. I’d be interested in your thoughts on the flag’s appeal and was wondering if you would have time to talk today.

Regards,

Graeme Hamilton
National Post Quebec correspondent

Gerry T. Neal to Graeme Hamilton
Saturday, July 8, 2017, 12:00 AM
Subject: Re: National Post inquiry

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

I have just now received your e-mail. It is after eleven in the evening in Manitoba, which means that it is after midnight in your time zone. I am assuming, therefore that it is too late to call.

With regards to the Red Ensign - the Canadian Red Ensign, that is, rather than the provincial flags of Ontario and Manitoba - there are various people who still prefer it to the flag adapted in 1965. For Canadian veterans of the Second World War, for example, it is the flag they fought under and that many of their comrades in arms died under. For others, the present flag is a symbol of the massive top-down changes the Liberal Party wrought in this country during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and they therefore embrace the Red Ensign as a symbol of their rejection of these changes.

I am far too young to have fought in the Second World War and so it is for the latter reason that I display the Red Ensign on my blog. For me it is not just a negative symbol, however, of rejecting the changes introduced by Pearson and Trudeau - although it is that - but also, and primarily, a positive symbol - representing the Canada that the Fathers of Confederation envisioned in 1867. Our constitutional monarchy, our Westminster-based parliamentary system of government, our Common Law heritage, and the Victorian era Christian worldview shared, with nuances of course, by English-speaking Protestants and French-speaking Catholics alike - these are the things that I, as a High Tory, argue for on my blog and which the Liberal Party, for over a century, has worked to undermine. The Liberal Party's "revolution within the form" was far more extensive than national symbolism, of course - they have systematically undermined the powers of the Crown, Senate, and Opposition to stand in the way of Prime Ministerial dictatorship in their efforts to turn Canada into a people's republic over which they will perpetually rule - but symbols are important, and in this essay, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the flag change, I explain the sinister significance of that change: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2015/02/day-of-infamy.html

That explains why I use the Red Ensign myself. I don't presume to speak for anyone else. "Alt-right" is short for "alternative right", and in the broadest sense that would apply to anyone on the right who does not conform to the neo-conservatism that has become the mainstream right in the last thirty-forty years or so. I doubt that anyone could accurately speak for such an array of vastly differing individuals and groups.

Best,
Gerry T. Neal