About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.” They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action. While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter. A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact. They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.” If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.
A couple of
months ago David Warren
said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of
the Far Left.” He was absolutely right about that, as he
usually is about most matters. See his
piece from last month entitled “Annals
of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the
sadly long defunct Idler on this
silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the
latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed
and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not.
By
labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their
organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they
said about the Campaign Life Coalition.
The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby. By social conservative, I mean approaching
issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is
traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known
as Christendom. While they address a
range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their
efforts, and that is abortion. They
would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group. While I share their position I prefer the
negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life. Abortion is murder, as any person capable of
sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter. It is therefore a bad thing and the right
thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it.
The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side
in the capital punishment debate. The
right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic
principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder
of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty. Admittedly, there are good practical reasons
for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort
of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were
reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the
masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees
in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate
management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and
omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants
who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never
be trusted with that power. My point,
however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered
“far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty
extreme standpoint.
The CAHN, like
most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the
culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current
leadership and the New Democrats. When
it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets. They have opposed the introduction of any
restrictions on abortion. Three years
ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay
Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective
abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it
on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of
which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example. But no, the Left voted as a
block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept
of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over
their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right”
to be limited even to prevent discrimination.
Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that
it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one
sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual
discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who
claim to oppose all discrimination.
Let us
return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being
pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the
position of the Left in terms of life and death. Almost thirty years ago Pope
John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a
struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then,
liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and
nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa
which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive
euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since. Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of
murder. The return of the Liberals to
power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter
v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician
assisted suicide violated Charter rights.
The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician
assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously
regarded as appropriate for it. Even
more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting
it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the
medical treatment they were seeking. The
program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying. If government programs had theme songs it
would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical
fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning
with M, M*A*S*H. The theme song, the
lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late
Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.” From the standpoint of those who support and
are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane,
rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those
whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed
appear to be “extreme.”
Again,
Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by
people like that.
The
expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense. It is derived from the concept of political
thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one
pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the
further left you are. This is a concept
that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole
was identified classical liberalism
(individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was
identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state,
socialism). By this standard, the more
of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is. Indeed, in some presentations of this
spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no
state is the furthest position to the right.
Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to
associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism
(Nazism). National Socialism, however,
was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the
points contrasted was aligned with the left pole. National Socialism was a European rather than
a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left”
had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum
arose. This is because they were taken,
not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people
stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French
Revolution. Supporters of the Revolution
were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right. The “Right” therefore, in French political
usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the
Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of
counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning
became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather
than the Bourbons for example). It was
basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle
of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of
the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England. National Socialism, which opposed the
traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more
resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right”
of classical liberal republicanism. This
is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American
meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American
meanings of Right are to each other. The
expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and
American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity
to it.
The Left’s
determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion
of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap
that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which
conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National
Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud
is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual
shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they
have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point
where they are incapable of extracting themselves today. It makes no difference to the Left if those
they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate
solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in
nature. Once again the labelling says
more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation
of that extreme position on race.
To
understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the
present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to
how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of
the racialism of the actual National Socialists. He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.” Idolatry is what happens when man turns away
from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships
and serves instead false gods of his own construction. Through worshipping and serving these false
gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening
his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32). Christianity called mankind out of the
darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and
true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead,
even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9) It is hardly a coincidence that National
Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox
Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically
(theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to
accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment”
philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries
through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von
Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His
Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the
National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation. This does not mean that race and nation,
which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National
Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing
so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through
them to devils.
The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living
God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was. What it wishes to conceal is that the idols
it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served. Like the National Socialists they worship at
the altar of race and nation. There is a
difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of
their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except
one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most
part their own. Moreover, they are
actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human
sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations. This is the true nature of what the Left
calls anti-racism. It is a worse form of
this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists. Implicit within the Commandment to honour our
fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors. The Second Greatest Commandment, according to
the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves. Neighbours means those in proximity to us,
and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that
of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense
of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of
fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the
Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise. From this it follows that the idolatry of the
race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and
nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s
own race and nation. It can be safely
predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power
and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing
those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes
of Communism.
To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and
nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must
turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for
his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered
us from the wrath to come.” The call to
do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary
one, a call to turn back the clock. The
irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this
step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical
European sense of Right. The irony is
due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language. In neither American nor European usage does
it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward
motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the
historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual
and the less on the collective, including the collective of race. In the classical European sense of the Right,
political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose
office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as
the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say
universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred
and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation
are invited and called to join. The
further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of
race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which
is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.
The
classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position
compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in
its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional
Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who
prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for
whom the principles of neither Right are sacred. The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical
European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a
higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional
continental form. If holding this
position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t
give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office
or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label.
My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.
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