Race Riots: One More American Import We Don’t Need

I have, for as long as I can remember, been an opponent of the Americanization of Canada. This will probably not come as a surprise to long-time readers, although it might shock those who think of the Canadian way as being progressive, liberal, and left-wing and the American way as being reactionary, conservative and right-wing. When one takes the historical point of view, however, and remembers that all three of the latter set of terms originally referred to people who supported the institution of royal monarchy and the establishment of a Church governed by bishops in direct succession from the Apostles, it is quite apparent that they are misapplied in reference to the secular, republic of the United States of America. It is less difficult to argue against the claim that the Canada of the present day is progressive, liberal, and left-wing, but to the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Americanization of Canada. The Liberal Party was historically the party of Americanization. This was most obvious in 1891, 1911, and throughout the entire period when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister. (1)


I oppose the Americanization of Canada politically, on the grounds that the Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy is superior to any form of republicanism and that innovations introduced from the American republican system have never improved things here but only made them worse. I oppose the Americanization of Canada religiously - while I would prefer that the mainstream Christian Churches in Canada were far more orthodox and far less liberal than they are, I do not think the solution is more of the mixture of Puritanism, direct-personal-revelation-from-God-through-experience enthusiasm (2), and fanatical Millennialism that tends to characterize American folk Christianity. We have quite enough of our own domestic version of that sort of thing. I oppose the Americanization of Canada culturally. Probably nothing originating below the 49th Parallel has been more erosive and corrosive of Canada's traditions, institutions, culture, morality, and religion than what has been imported from the motion picture studios of Hollywood, California, and the recording studios of greater Los Angeles. To be fair, this is also what has been eroding and corroding the United States' own traditions, institutions, etc.



It is greatly to my disgust, therefore, to see signs that the American custom of the race riot is starting to move northward. We have enough trouble with our own, closest domestic equivalent, to worry about. Periodically Indians illegally blockade roads and railroads until the cowardly and craven politicians in Ottawa throw enough of the taxpayers' money at them and make enough absurd and meaningless gestures in response to whatever demands, reasonable or unreasonable, they are making. Nowadays, as the railroad blockade earlier this year demonstrates, professional agitators on the payroll of American petroleum interests can get away with this by claiming to be Indians, even if this claim has about the same level of validity as Elizabeth Warren's. We certainly do not need what is going on south of the border happening up here.


Once again the inner-cities of major American metropoles are burning. The race riot is an American tradition that is usually traced back to the Harlem riot of 1935. I am going to pass over this and the Harlem riot of 1943 due to their being isolated incidents, however celebrated, and date the tradition to the Harlem riot of 1964, since it was demonstrably the first in a chain. The riot, which started in response to a police officer’s having shot down a black teenager named James Powell, ran for almost a week. It began on July 16th. This was two weeks to the day after the Civil Rights Act came into effect.


The significance of that timing cannot be stressed enough. Ten years previously, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that de jure segregation was unconstitutional in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The American President at the time, liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower, declared that this decision would be backed up by force if necessary and three years later, when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas he demonstrated that he meant it. Progressive liberals, to distract public attention from the fact that the institutional white racism, which even then they were blaming for all the evils of the world, had been dealt a death blow in a top down move by an all-white Supreme Court (3) backed by a white President, had the new mass media of communications technology shine its spotlight on a bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama led by a local Baptist minister about a year and a half after Brown v. Board, to create the illusion of a grass-roots, protest movement, headed by a saintly preacher of non-violent resistance, that would slay the dragon of segregation. In reality the movement was fighting a mortally wounded segregation in its death throes. Its crowning achievement was the aforementioned Civil Rights Act which laid the foundation for the crazy busing schemes of de jure integration, Affirmative Action and its quotas, anti-discrimination litigation and the shakedown industry in general. Two weeks after it had come into effect, the first race riot began. Let that forever shut the mouths of those who try to justify riots of this sort on the grounds that “it’s the only way they can make themselves heard.” That is and always has been utter tripe.


Ten days after the Harlem riot broke out in July of 1964, another one started in Rochester in the same state. Then in August race riots broke out in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These were relatively small scale compared to the one that broke out in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles the following summer, after a black man was pulled over by a highway cop for reckless driving and found to be drunk as a skunk. Like the Harlem riot this one lasted almost a week. It saw 34 deaths, over a thousand injured, and some $40 million worth of property damage as almost a thousand businesses and government buildings were looted and burned. In July of 1966 there were race riots in the West Side of Chicago and the Hough section of Cleveland. The year after that saw the infamous “long, hot summer” in which over 150 race riots broke out between the months of June and August all over the United States, the worst of which was the one in Detroit, Michigan. Finally, in 1968, another string of riots broke out in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and over thirty other cities, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


These marked the end of the first wave of the race riots. There would be others periodically in the next two decades but it would not be until 1992 that anything comparable to those of the sixties took place. The previous year, Rodney King, who had been driving drunk in violation of his parole for robbery, sought to elude arrest. The result was a high speed chase which ended badly for him. A video of his capture which showed the police beating him was released – although the longer, unedited version paints rather a different picture of the events than the small clip that was repeatedly played on the media. When the police who arrested him and were charged with excessive force were acquitted in early 1992, race riots again erupted in Los Angeles. The deaths and injuries were about double those of Watts in 1966, and the property damage was at least twenty-five times greater.


What has grown into the current wave of race riots began almost a decade ago when the Black Lives Matter movement sprung up in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an incident which the media had grotesquely misrepresented in a deliberate and successful effort to stir up strife. Called activists by their sympathizers and terrorists by their detractors, Black Lives Matter appears to subscribe to a belief system in which all police brutality is directed towards blacks and black men are more likely to die at the hands of the police than in any other way, are always unarmed, never resist arrest, and are always salt of the earth pillars of their community. This belief system forms the interpretive lens through which they view any incident involving the police and a black man.


When you look at the actual data available on the subject you discover that pretty much everything progressive liberals, Hollywood celebrities, the news media, etc. take as given when it comes to race and the police in the United States is the opposite of the truth. Blacks are not killed by policemen in numbers disproportionate to their own involvement in violent crime unless by disproportionate we mean lower than we would expect, more whites are killed by American police each year than blacks and Hispanics, cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than unarmed blacks are likely to be killed by police, white cops are far more likely to kill other whites than they are to kill blacks, it is black cops who are the most likely to kill other blacks, and black people in general are far more likely to be killed by black criminals than by either whites or police of any colour and ethnicity. That these facts sound so strange to so many people is entirely due to the duplicity of the media. The newspapers and television news highlight cases of white cops killing black suspects, editorializing on them for weeks on end, while under-reporting cases that don’t fit the pattern.


It is that same media that refers to every Black Lives Matter event as a “protest” regardless of how violent it gets, similar to how the illegal blockade of the railroads earlier this year was called a “protest” even though it manifestly went beyond a peaceful demonstration.


Early last week, a black man named George Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis. A video that someone took from their phone showed him on the ground by a police car, with an officer named Derek Chauvin keeping him in this position by pressing his knee on the man’s neck for almost ten minutes. Floyd could be heard saying that he could not breathe and within an hour was dead. It is difficult to imagine any evidence coming to light that would show this not to be an excessive use of force and Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder. Yet, despite the fact that the officer responsible was quickly charged, a protest that was held in Minneapolis the day after Floyd was killed quickly degenerated into a riot, and riots rapidly spread to other cities of the United States. The number of cities where these riots have occurred or are occurring already exceeds that of the “long, hot, summer” of 1967. While David Warren is quite right when he says “there is no such thing as a spontaneous riot” these show evidence of a much higher level of organization than previous riots of the type. It is quite obvious who is doing the organizing. Despite the looting, arson, and other lawlessness typical of these sort of riots, many in the media persist in calling them “protests.”


How all of this will end is difficult to say at this point. The police are hardly in a strong position to contain these riots and the use of military force to keep the peace is being decried by the same sort of “human rights” watchdog groups who had no problem whatsoever with governments placing their entire populations under house arrest for two and a half months to stop the spread of bat flu.


There are those in this country who hold the opposite sentiments to those expressed in the first two paragraphs of this essay. There are those who think we need a “Canadianized” version of everything that happens south of the border, seemingly putting no thought into the question of whether it is good or bad in itself. There are others who would like to see Canada swallowed up by the United States entirely. One would like to think that nobody would be so foolish as to want the civilization-threatening violence south of the border to come up here, but apparently one would be mistaken in so thinking.


I was rather less than impressed, Saturday, to watch a televised report of a protest in Toronto. The protest pertained to the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet last Wednesday. Korchinski-Paquet was a 29 year old black woman, whose mother had called the police late in the afternoon. Some sort of conflict was going on and her mother asked the police to take Korchinski-Paquet to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She was subject to epileptic seizures and apparently had other mental health problems as well. She ended up falling to her death from the balcony of their apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. Her mother, in an interview that evening, accused the police of pushing her daughter off the balcony.


This was, I think, the least credible accusation of murder that I have ever heard levelled against the police. It is one thing to accuse a policeman of using too much force and beating someone to death or of being too quick to pull the trigger. These things, regrettably, happen. It is far less believable that they would push a mentally ill person they are trying to help off of a balcony.


Unfortunately, this incident took place two days after the death of George Floyd, just as the riots were heating up south of the border. Which brings us back to the protest in Toronto on Saturday, with approximately 4000 in attendance. Some wore coronavirus masks, others wore Antifa masks. There were signs demanding “justice for Regis”, signs that made reference to George Floyd, and signs with all sorts of left-wing slogans of varying degrees of inanity. There were plenty of Marxist flags and anarchist and revolutionary chants. It was just the sort of thing that could easily and quickly have degenerated into the sort of thing happening south of the border.


The next day that was exactly what did happen in Montreal. What began as a demonstration outside of police headquarters late in the afternoon turned into a violent riot in which windows were broken, shops were looted, and a barricade was set on fire.


This is precisely the sort of import from American culture that we would be better off without.


(1) The point could be argued that in the period when the Liberal Party veered to the hard left - the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - it abandoned its platform of Americanization for one of anti-Americanism. It could be counter-argued however, that this was merely a matter of appearance. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the two superpowers seemed to be each the polar opposite of the other. This was not how things looked in the period from 1933 to 1945 in which the American president was the biggest cheerleader of the Soviet Union and the latter was ruled by the most brutal despot of its entire history. It was in this period that Lester Pearson betrayed his king and country, and became a spy for the Soviet Union through the network headed and later exposed by Elizabeth Bentley. Pearson would later win a Nobel Prize for supporting the Soviet and American interest - once again united - against the French, Israeli, and, most important, British in the Suez Canal Crisis, betraying Canada's tradition of Commonwealth Loyalty and costing the government in which he was minister the next election. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1963, it was by bringing down the Diefenbaker government in a conflict over whether Washington DC should be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. Diefenbaker took the con position, Pearson the pro - see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). In Trudeau père's premiership, his most Communistic innovations were all brought in by following American precedent. His "just society" expansion of the welfare-nanny state followed the example of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", and his Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, establishing the Canadian equivalent of Soviet thought police and tribunals, was modeled on the United States' Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(2) I am using this term in its technical theological meaning, not its colloquial use.

(3) Thurgood Marshall Jr. was not appointed to the American Supreme Court until 1967, a good thirteen years later.