True Allegiance and The Liberal Party’s Politics of Fear

The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, the last true Conservative and the last patriot of the true Canada, to serve as Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion, in a speech given early in the premiership of the first Trudeau, remarked how he could remember a time when one could disagree with the Prime Minister without being considered a bigot. The implication, of course, was that this was no longer the case. The speech is included in the collection published by Macmillan of Canada in 1972 under the title Those Things We Treasure. This book, along with John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, should be required reading for every Canadian. The latter is a philosophical defence of the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy against the rival republicanisms of the United States and the Soviet Union, and a warning to Canadians about how our system had been compromised and undermined in the Mackenzie King years. Diefenbaker’s book was a timely protest against how the actions of Pierre Trudeau were further undermining that system as well and also the traditional freedoms of Canadians and the culture of political civility associated with it.

At the time the Chief made the remark alluded to above the progressive tactic of smearing opponents on the right with the label “racist” was fairly new. It would soon become the standard progressive response to any criticism from the right and has been so beaten to death over the decades that in the last few years, progressives, finding that people have become desensitized to the word “racist”, have been turning to stronger terms like “white supremacist.” Milo Yiannopoulos in a recent interview with David Horowitz remarked:


When somebody calls you a racist, this is far worse than somebody who casually drops the N word, cause when you call somebody that name, the only person who looks bad is you. Whereas, when you call somebody a racist, you are creating a set of obligations for them to defend themselves, which will, whatever they do, indelibly associate their name with that crime. Way worse.


This is very true and it is worse yet to call somebody a “white supremacist” for this expression suggests an organized, ideological, form of racism and not merely prejudiced thoughts and attitudes.

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Party of Canada and its leader, swamped by the mire of the SNC-Lavalin Scandal and sinking in the polls with the next Dominion election only months away, has fallen back in desperation on this updated version of their old tactics. They have been issuing demands that Andrew Scheer denounce “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” They have continued to make these demands even after Scheer had complied with them. Scheer, in my opinion, ought not to have complied. The implication of such demands is that Scheer is under a presumption of guilt of sympathizing or collaborating with neo-Nazism until he proves otherwise by making a sufficient denunciation, and that those who make these demands have the right to decide when the denunciation is sufficient. Arrogant, bullying, demands of this sort ought neither to be acknowledged nor complied with. Especially when coming from someone against whom charges of ties to extremists of a different sort, Sikh separatists, are far more sustainable, having generated an international incident two years ago and just now resurfaced with the Liberal government’s redaction of last year’s terrorism report.

The other implication of these demands is that white supremacism is a significant problem in Canada and a realistic threat to our civilization. This is total bunk, a fact which nobody knows better than the Liberals themselves. It was a Liberal government in 1977, the government led by the father of the present Prime Minister, that passed the Canadian Human Rights Act after selling the Act to the public, with the assistance of the media, by generating a fear that Nazism was on the verge of being reborn here on Canadian soil. This had been facilitated by the formation of the Canadian Nazi Party which contained, maybe, one actual disciple of Adolf Hitler. It otherwise consisted of agents provocateurs supplied by the government and by private activist organizations that had an interest in seeing this legislation passed. There was not the slightest possibility of this group, or any white supremacist group, establishing a Fourth Reich in Canada but the manufactured, bogus, threat of such was used by the Liberals and their allies, to pass a bill which, despite its title, did nothing to protect the lives, property, and freedoms of people under the jurisdiction of Canadian law from the threat of abusive state power, but instead authorized state meddling in all sorts of private interactions and imported, from the Soviet system, thought police and tribunals which, since the media, except for a brief time about a decade ago when it felt its own liberty threatened, has largely refrained from criticizing or even reporting their doings, have been effectually allowed to function as secret police and tribunals. It was this system set up by the Canadian Human Rights Act, and not the phony “Nazi menace” invented to dupe the public into supporting it, which was and is the real threat to our freedom and order, civilization and way of life.

The Liberals also know as well as anyone else that the Conservative Party is not a front for white supremacists and that Andrew Scheer is not a crypto-neo-Nazi. If anything they are pathetically progressive and liberal on all issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, not only when compared to the Conservatives of a century ago, but to the Liberals and socialists of that era as well. The noise to the contrary, that the Grits are currently generating, is, of course, intended as a distraction from the scandal that has been engulfing them, but it is also an example of the very “politics of fear and division” which they accused the previous Conservative government of in the last Dominion election.

Let me speak now for a moment to anyone who might sincerely believe that we have a serious problem with white supremacism in this country. I have two things that I would say to such a person.

First, if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then it is all ideological racism and all racial nationalisms which are the problems and not just white supremacism. As Stephen Roney recently put it:

To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.


Indeed, and to further demonstrate the point that this paranoid obsession with one particular form of racial supremacy amounts to extreme racism in itself, I will draw your attention to the hysteria that was generated on campuses across North America late last year, including the campus of the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg, by the appearance of posters containing one simple phrase “It’s OK to be white.” The posters were widely condemned as conveying a “white supremacist” message, but if this slogan is “white supremacist”, then to not be a “white supremacist” one must hold that “It’s NOT OK to be white.” Taking that position amounts to racial hatred against white people.

Since the first Trudeau premiership the Liberal Party has conducted an aggressive campaign to drum racism out of Canada, a campaign that has been enthusiastically supported by the media, the academic establishment, the other progressive parties, and yes, even the Conservative Party in both its old and new incarnations, but this campaign, which has only ever seriously targeted white racism has in reality promoted anti-white racism. They have managed to get away with this for so long because anyone who has dared to point it out and speak out against it has been smeared with a lot of nasty labels, such as “white supremacist.” This is the very essence of the “politics of fear and division”, Liberal Party style, and it is about time that Canadians stop giving in to these bullying tactics and send the Grits and other progressives the clear message, that as long as they insist on a non-tolerance policy towards racial prejudice on the part of whites their own promotion of anti-white bigotry will receive the exact same treatment. Or, alternately, we could follow David Warren’s more amusing suggestion:


We need a National Bigotry Day, in which for twenty-four hours we can all find relief from the Political Correctors. And laugh at each other, scoff taunt and mock, because (have you noticed?) all of us deserve it.


The second thing I would say is that if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then the solutions, if there are any, are not be sought in modern and progressive thought. Nationalism – all nationalism, not merely the racial kind – and ideological racism are themselves the products of the Modern Age’s departure from royal monarchism in the political sphere and from orthodox, catholic, Christianity in the spiritual and religious sphere. When in the twentieth century progressives came to reject these offspring of the Modern Age, racism and nationalism, at least for white, Western people, and to regard them as problems, the solution they devised was one-world, globalism, the ideal of a world without borders, in which capitalism and socialism converge, and the flow of goods and people is completely unimpeded. This “solution” proved to be worse than the problem, and in rejection of it populist, nationalist, movements have been springing up all across the Western world to defy the globalist consensus between mainstream liberal and conservative parties. These, it must be added, are no more solutions to the problem of globalism, than globalism was a solution to the problems of racism and nationalism. Neither is the solution to the other because the real problem is the modern thinking that lies beneath both and to address this problem we need truly reactionary thinking that looks back to the older tradition, to royal monarchy and orthodox Christianity.

In a royal monarchy, sovereign authority is vested in a person, and is hereditary, passed down from ancestors to descendants. This is the very embodiment of the accumulated wisdom of the ancients that men in modern times have foolishly thrown away. Whereas Lockean liberalism declared voluntary individual contract to be the basis of society, the ancients knew that families were the building blocks of communities and societies, and that the sovereign authority in a state could not rest upon a contractual foundation, but was an extension of the natural authority of father and mother in the home, through the patriarchs and matriarchs of the extended kin group, to the kings and queens of the realm. The reigning monarch, by holding the sovereign authority in trust, is a symbol of stability and continuity, which are essential to order, which in turn is essential to true freedom, and is an example to the generation living in the present day, of the debt owed to generations past, to conserve what they have left, for generations yet to come. The hereditary nature of the office, derided as archaic and unfair by its democratic and republican foes, is what allows the monarch to be a unifying symbol in a way no elected politician ever could. Furthermore, the monarch as that symbol of unity, gives government a personal face. These last two aspects of the office make it the essential and necessary counter to two of the most obnoxious characteristics of the modern state, the endless factionalism promoted both by government by elected assembly and by meritocratic individualism, and the faceless inhumanity of bureaucracy.

As the symbol of unity and the personal face of the state, the royal monarch is the object of the natural allegiance of her subjects and the sworn allegiance of state ministers and immigrants. When a country is united by its loyal allegiance to the person of the royal monarch, that place as the object of loyalty, cannot be filled by abstract ideas. Filling that place with abstract ideas, is precisely what the liberals of the Modern Age, in rebellion against their kings, set out to do. The most popular such idea was that of “the people.” The liberals had either rejected or forgotten the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, who taught that democracy was the parent of tyranny which was the opposite of true kingship, and the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” begat tyranny on a scale the world had never before seen in the England of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the France of the Reign of Terror, and the Soviet Union and all subsequent People’s Republics. Nationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and spread throughout the Western world in the nineteenth, was originally a form of this left-wing, rebellion against royal monarchy which defined “the people” for whom the revolutionaries claimed to speak as “the nation”, i.e., a people united by blood, language, history, and culture. (1) The Third Reich, which would never have had the opportunity to rise had the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg thrones not been emptied, defined “the people” in more explicitly racial terms, but otherwise was not significantly different from these other regimes. It would make far more sense to look to what these regimes had in common as an explanation of their common industrial scale brutality than to single out what set the Third Reich apart as the sole reason for its specific atrocities.

Before the Modern Age, what we now call Western Civilization was called Christendom, and in Christian civilization it was acknowledged that there is an allegiance which men owe that is higher even than that which they owe to their king or queen, and that is the allegiance owed to God, the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of all that is. Orthodox Christianity has called itself “catholic” since the earliest centuries. The ancient baptismal Creed confesses faith in “the holy catholic church” and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in “one holy, catholic, and Apostolic church.” The third of the three ancient Creeds begins by saying “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the catholic faith.” The word “catholic” means “universal”, making it both ironic and inappropriate, that it is used today as a denominational label, but that is the subject matter for another essay. The early church chose this word to designate both itself and its faith both because it was an appropriate designation for the entire church worldwide as distinguished from the church in a particular location and because of the universal nature of the church and her mission.

Jesus, before His Ascension, commissioned His Apostles with the words “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28: ), and “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), and told them that “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). When the promise of the coming of the Holy Ghost was fulfilled, as recorded by St. Luke in the next chapter of Acts, the Apostles preached the Gospel to the multitude of Jews who had come from all over the known world to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost – the Old Covenant Feast commemorating the giving of the Law not the Christian Feast of the same name commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost – and each heard in his own tongue. (2) Eight chapters later, St. Peter was sent to proclaim the Gospel to the first Gentile convert, Cornelius and five chapters after that there were so many Gentile converts that the Apostolic Council met in Jerusalem to address the question of whether they would be required to be circumcised and to follow the diet and rituals of the Mosaic Law. It was ruled that these, which had been given in the Old Covenant to keep national Israel distinct and separate from her idolatrous neighbours, were not to hinder the unity of the new transnational spiritual commonwealth that was the church under the New Covenant. This was a point that St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, would emphasize throughout his epistles. St. John, in his apocalyptic vision, heard the twenty-four elders, representing the church in heaven, singing the new song “Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.” (Rev. 5:9-10) All people, orthodox Christianity teaches, are brothers because of our common descent from Adam, and out of this natural brotherhood, which since the Fall has carried the curse of Original Sin, all people are called by the Gospel, to believe and be baptized into the new spiritual brotherhood established by the Second Adam, Christ.

In royal monarchy, our sovereign is the personal object of our civil allegiance. In orthodox Christianity, Christ as the head of the “one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic church” which transcends all boundaries of tribe, race, and nation, is the personal object of our spiritual allegiance. When our civil and spiritual allegiance both belong to the right personal object, they cannot be claimed by the false substitute of the Modern Age, the people, in any of its various guises – race, nation, working class, the whole of humanity, etc. Only thus can we avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and racism, without falling into the opposite pits of one-world, globalism and the virulent anti-white racism that wears the mask of anti-racism.

Canada, although a century younger than the United States and thus founded well in to the Modern Age, because she was built upon the foundation of Loyalism rather than nationalism, was established as a parliamentary monarchy and as an explicitly Christian rather than a secular country. We retain our royal monarchy and our Christianity to this day, if only in the most outward, nominal, and ceremonial ways, despite the Liberal Party’s having done their worst to eliminate these things, and these outward trappings of Christian civilization are the signposts pointing the way back to our true civil and spiritual allegiance, should we ever find the courage and the character to take it.

(1) The American and French Revolutions were arguably the first nationalist movements. The word “nationalism” only goes back to the nineteenth century, but the phenomenon it designates goes back to the previous century. The American Revolutionaries called themselves “patriots,” using “patriotism” with all the connotations of nationalism, but patriotism is a much older concept which simply means “love of country.” Dr. Johnson argued, in both The Patriot (1774) and in conversation recorded by Boswell, that the patriotism espoused by the American rebels was false and hypocritical. Had the word been around to be used at the time he might have said that it was nationalism rather than patriotism.

(2) It has been observed that the miracle of the first Whitsunday was a reversal of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the event through which God divided the human race into different tribes and nations. This does not make the agenda of one-world, borderless, globalism somehow “Christian.” Christ told Pilate that His kingdom was “not of this world”, meaning, not that it was located on Mars or some other planet, but that it was an eternal and spiritual rather than a temporal and civil commonwealth and that is not in political competition with any of the latter. It is only in that spiritual kingdom, the Church, that the effect of Babel is reversed. Progressive, one-world, borderless, globalism is a manifestation of the same human arrogance that brought about the divine judgement at Babel in the first place.

Schadenfreude

On the fourth Sunday in Lent we were given a sermon on the “love thy enemy” passage in the Sermon on the Mount. While it is probably not entirely within the spirit of that passage to engage in schadenfreude over one's enemies' misfortunes, I find it impossible to resist doing so since this era of triumphant liberalism afford few opportunities for such to a man of the right.

The Liberal Party of Canada has, over the years, made itself odious to all sorts of Canadians but most consistently to two distinct groups who despise them for very different reasons. The old Tories of the kind frequently but erroneously called “Red,” (1) i.e., the ones who prize Canada’s British and Loyalist history, traditions, and heritage, her constitutional monarchy, Westminster parliamentary system of government, and Common Law, her ongoing ties to the British Commonwealth and who associate all of this with an older, more organic, more rooted, vision of society than modern, individualistic, commercialism see the Liberals, quite correctly, as a party of rootless, modernizers who can conceive of value in no terms other than those of a price tag and whose goal is to sell out the Dominion and everything for which she once stood to Yankee capitalism for a quick buck. On the other hand, the rugged, rural, inhabitants of the prairie provinces of the Canadian West whom the Liberals and their academic and media fellow travelers dismiss with “redneck” and other, worse, epithets, have long loathed the Grits as being a party of totalitarian socialists who a) tax them to death, b) ignore, or worse, aggravate, their economic difficulties, and c) display the same arrogant contempt towards them that the Obama/Clinton Democrats display towards middle and working class red state Americans. Both of these negative views of the Liberals are entirely valid. (2) Someone like myself, who has belonged to both groups simultaneously for all of his life - a Redneck Tory, would be one way of putting it, I suppose - has particularly good reason to look upon the Liberal Party with utter abhorrence.

The Liberal Party has always been bad but it has sunk to new depths of depravity under the current leadership of Captain Airhead who, more than any of his predecessors, has brought shame and disgrace upon the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion. Will Ferguson divided Canada’s Prime Ministers into two categories, “Boneheads” and “Bastards”, but Captain Airhead has the distinction of being both. Smug, arrogant, self-righteous and preening, all of his public statements and actions, before and after taking office, have been calculated to project, with the cooperation of a fawning media, a carefully crafted image of himself. Since that image was that of the opposite of, at first, his predecessor Stephen Harper, then later of American President Donald Trump, it has all along resembled a bad caricature of the worst sort of loony leftist. He began his term by trying to import the migrant crisis that has been threatening to inundate Europe and create a Camp of the Saints scenario for half of a decade, creating a miniature version of America’s southern border crisis on the 49th Parallel, and at the end of his term, signed an insane and evil United Nations accord on migration which in effect, amounted to an agreement to surrender the Dominion’s essential right to maintain and police her own borders. Any and all criticism of this, or, for that matter, any of his other policies, was met with accusations of "racism". He used the federal summer jobs funding program to coerce employers into agreeing with abortion on demand, having previously evicted pro-lifers from the Liberal Party, and otherwise attempted to shove his “woke” notions down all Canadians throats by legislation, or at any rate Parliamentary motions, condemning “Islamophobia” and protecting the new found “right” of individuals to choose or even make up their own gender identity. Jumping on board the bandwagon of an environmentalist movement that had long ago lost sight of its original, legitimate, goal – the conservation and preservation for future generations of natural resources and aesthetics – and gone to seed on apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, alarmism, he sabotaged and destroyed Canada’s energy industry and then, just this year, pulled the world’s most tasteless April Fool’s prank, by slapping down a carbon tax that will accomplish nothing but a needless rise in the cost of living, which hurts the poor and the working class the most. All the while his extravagance with the public purse has made his father, previously noted for his record deficits, look like a model of budgetary austerity in comparison. Speaking of money, he had the audacity to take the image of our first - and greatest - Prime Minister, the man who spearheaded the Confederation project and led the Dominion for most of its first two decades, fighting tooth and nail to get the railroad built and prevent the country from splitting up and falling into the avaricious hands of the republic to our south, off of our ten dollar bill and replace it with that of a woman who achieved fame, decades after the fact thanks to the Liberals' desperate sifting of Canadian history for an equivalent of the figures in America's Civil Rights Movement, for sitting down in a theatre.

It has been with much joy and pleasure, therefore, that I have been watching Captain Airhead’s image and popularity implode over the past couple of months. If there has been a cloud amidst all the silver lining of the SNC-Lavalin Affair it is that it took an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, corruption scandal to bring about the collapse of his reputation after all the evils mentioned in the preceding paragraph failed to do so. Perhaps the best way to look at that is to regard it as a case of the straw finally breaking the humpy back of the camel. To briefly summarize the scandal, a large corporation that has been a significant contributor to Liberal Party funds and which is based in the home province of the Prime Minister has been under prosecution for bribing a foreign government and last year our government snuck a bill in with the budget that allows for slap-on-the-wrist treatment of white collar crimes of this nature. When Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted out of her Cabinet position of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in January of this year, rumours began to circulate that this was because she had refused to give in to pressure from the Prime Minister's Office to apply the new rules retroactively to SNC Lavalin. As Jay Currie observed, the real scandal in all of this ought to have been the revelation that the government snuck legislation in to give their friends a break. Instead, what everyone jumped on was the compromise of an independent judiciary by inappropriate political interference in a prosecution. To put the same matter in Canadian rather than Yankee terms, as our press should have been doing all along although they have probably long ago forgotten what little they ever knew of Canadian civics, the rulings of the courts of the Queen-on-the-bench are not to be decided and dictated for political reasons by the ministers of the Queen-in-Council. Whether we speak Canadian or American it is a rotten and corrupt thing to do - and the Prime Minister's being guilty of it would not have come as news to anyone still capable of remembering that we were not always at war with Eastasia. What, after all, did his inappropriate tweets following the Gerald Stanley jury acquittal last year constitute if not an unashamed and public display of such interference? Indeed, this was a far worse instance of such interference and one in which Jody Wilson-Raybould was equally guilty for it had all the appearance of promising changes to the jury selection process that would compromise such ancient principles as the right of the accused to presumption of innocence and the right of the accused - not the victim - to a trial of his peers and put in the place of the justice based on such principles, a primitive form of blood-based-vengeance, as if the Oresteia were being played out in reverse. It was at this point that Captain Airhead and the then-Justice Minister should both have received a summons to Rideau Hall and been told that Her Majesty no longer requires their services. Of course this didn't happen and for that we ought to burn an effigy of William Lyon Mackenzie King annually for it was that, longest sitting Grit premier, who subverted the Westminster system and undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister's Office turning it into a virtual dictatorship whenever there is a majority government..

As the SNC-Lavalin scandal developed, Captain Airhead's team tried desperately to salvage their leader's reputation, but their every effort, beginning with the self-immolation of Seymour Butts - my apologies to Matt Groening and his creative staff for appropriating what was originally a joke of theirs but I refuse to sully my own Christian name by admitting that it is shared by this man - was like adding fuel to the fire. Now, the very people who for the past four years swooned at the very mention of Captain Airhead's name, are falling over themselves in their efforts to get as far away from him as possible. The scandal having broken on the eve of the next Dominion election things have gotten so bad for the Airhead Grits that they can think of nothing else to do than recycle the lame tactics that failed to win Hilary Clinton the last American presidential election by telling us that Andrew Scheer is courting the "far right" and, most hilariously since it has come a week after Robert Mueller announced that he could find no evidence that the Trump team had colluded with Russia, warning us about Russian interference in the upcoming election.

There is a lesson in this for Captain "Because it is 2015" Airhead if he is capable of learning it. Those who ride to the top on the crest of the wave of fashion, will crash and crash hard, when the tide goes out. Taylor Swift may very well have been right and she and whoever she was singing to at the time will "never go out of style", but Justin, baby, you just ain't her.


(1) This is due mainly to the socialist sympathies of George Grant and Eugene Forsey. While Grant attempted to argue that “socialism” was “conservative” his argument depended entirely upon a clever redefinition of socialism and he, like Forsey, acknowledged that this positive view of socialism was not that of the Tories as a group.

(2) This is true despite the fact that one view sees the Grits as being capitalist while the other sees them as being socialist. Capitalism and socialism are but two sides to the same coin which is the economy of the Modern Age. The true reactionary seeks wisdom, economic and otherwise, in the older traditions that predated the Modern Age. George Grant was a man who sought to do just that and this is reflected in his admirable criticism of capitalism but it was lamentable, pun intended, that he chose to stay within the limits of Modern thinking in using the term "socialism" for the opposite of where capitalism had gone wrong. Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, was a man who made no effort whatsoever to think outside of the Modern box, and while he produced an otherwise admirable critique of socialism, could see it in no other terms than a return to pre-Modern feudalism, which it was not.