The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The Stopped Clock


The proverbial stopped clock is right twice a day. I am using the expression metaphorically to refer to the person who through the ignorance which decades of academic decline and progressive media brainwashing have induced in our electorate now occupies the office of Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in the Dominion of Canada. I don’t think his actual track record is quite as good as a stopped clock. Indeed, twice a year might be pushing the boundaries of what is credible. Nevertheless, he was right on Monday. Or as close to being right as I have seen from him in a long time. 

He was in Montreal for some purpose or another related to the bat flu and the upcoming rape – thank you Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for pointing out the analogy – of the populace with injections of some noxious and satanic witch’s brew, when somebody asked him about the violent, Canada-hating, thuggish mob that tore down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on Saturday. His response was to say:

Those kind of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country. 

Now, this was a poor way of saying “it was wrong.” Justice and equality should never be linked because equality is often the exact opposite of justice. Justice is doing right by everybody. Equality is treating everybody the same. The image of equality is that of treating a stranger as well as you would treat your own brother. This is how it sells itself. The reality of equality, however, is that of treating your own brother as if he were a stranger. This is the opposite of justice, which demands not that we treat everybody as if they were the same, but that we treat everybody right, which is much more difficult. Equality is the easy, lazy, substitute for justice.

Furthermore, even if he had not added equality to justice in this way and had simply said “greater justice”, this wording suggests that the vandals were striving towards a worthy and admirable cause, they just went about it the wrong way. In reality, however, those who tore down Sir John’s statue were, like past zealots who have sought to erase history – and for those who think otherwise, while the past cannot be erased, it is entirely possible to erase history, for history is not just the past but, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past” – are not admirable but misguided seekers after justice. They are the mob, the easily enflamed masses, stirred up by those who have incited hatred against our country, its history, its institutions, and its traditions.

I will return to that momentarily. Allow me to first conclude my reflection upon the Prime Minister’s words by saying that while it was a poor way of saying that the vandals were wrong, it was indeed a way of saying it, a condemnation of their actions. Erin O’Toole the new Conservative leader, Maxime Bernier the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, François Legault the Premier of Quebec, and Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta each and all said it much better, but he did say it. It is right to give credit where credit is due, even if I am thinking of Sawyer Brown’s linking that proverb with thanking “the devil for the trouble that I get into” as I write this, and so kudos to the Captain, Canada’s stopped clock, for finally getting something right, in a way. 

Now, having gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention back to the mob and the diabolical minds that have stirred up their passions and misdirected their energy. 

There are those who have tried to justify the actions of the mob by slinging mud at our first Prime Minister. Rather than re-invent the wheel, for those seeking answers to such people I refer you to Stephen K. Roney’s rebuttal of Bruce Katz, which can hardly be improved upon. To those looking for a fuller defence of Sir John I refer to my essay from two years ago entitled “Speaking Out For Old Tomorrow.” For those wanting a comprehensive rebuttal of the anti-Canada, Critical Race Theory, narrative as found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report and the more recent report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Committee, I refer you to the aforementioned Stephen Roney’s excellent book Playing the Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is Wrong.

The toppling of the statue, however, was an act of violence, directed not against Sir John A. Macdonald as an individual, but the country of which he is a symbol. Sir John A. Macdonald was the leading figure in Confederation, the discussion in which the provinces of British North America agreed to join into a federal union with our own Parliament under the Crown. He was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada and the man who saw her through the period in which she was most vulnerable to the various powerful commercial and political interests from the republic south of the border who wished the Confederation Project to fail that they might swallow up the pieces. He was the one who spearheaded the construction of the railroad which effectively thwarted the designs of Manifest Destiny and saw it through to its completion. It is no coincidence, that the Critical Race Theorists’ attempts to blacken his reputation take the form of a spurious and anachronistic deliberate misreading of everything he did in order to meet the obligations of the Dominion government under the treaties signed with the Indian tribes, and that those treaties just happened to have been negotiated as part of the process of building the railroad, settling the prairies and uniting the east with the west. The Critical Race Theorists know what they are doing and it is the Dominion of Canada the country, not Sir John A. Macdonald the man that is really under attack here. 

On a larger scale, of course, the attacks of this nature that we have seen occurring across Western Civilization are attacks upon that very civilization as well as the countries within it.

Neither the Dominion of Canada nor Western Civilization is beyond scrutiny and criticism, of course. Both are made up of fallible and deeply flawed human beings since other than the Son of God these are the only kind that can be found on this earth this side of Eden and prior to the Second Coming. The universal failings of human nature are a perpetual and unanswerable argument against those who would point to the inevitable shortcomings of human leaders, institutions, countries, and civilizations as grounds for razing them to the ground. Revolutionaries, no matter how lofty the ideals they preach, are fundamentally incapable of replacing an old order with a perfect and pristine new one, for they cannot escape participating in the same flawed nature as those who built the old one. In the end, all that revolutionaries can ever accomplish is to destroy all those things which meliorate the human condition and allow for the possibility of a good life for fallen human beings. We ought never to forget the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton that “good things are more easily destroyed than created.” 

The Dominion of Canada, established on a foundation of loyalty, honour, and continuity, has been blessed with an abundance of those good things. To list our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, and the civil rights, prescriptive liberties and judicial principles of the Common Law tradition, is to speak only of the most obvious civil or political examples of these. The way our political leaders and mass media commentators, from all sides of the political spectrum, feel constantly compelled to reduce all of these to “our democracy” has trivialized them, but that is a topic for another time. It is these good things that are under attack, when mobs stirred up by demon-inspired Critical Theory intellectuals, wage war on our country and civilization, by attacking its symbols and historic figures. 

If only the Prime Minister had included all of that in his answer.

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