Neo-Manichaeism, Technological “Progress” and the Ethics of War

 

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”  -  Robert E. Lee

 

Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation.   Further suppose that immediately after doing so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.

 

In all likelihood what you would get, would not be insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic denunciation of the man who said it.    It would begin with the small handful in the room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty, administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about  just what a horrible person you had just quoted.   You would be told that you should not have quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.   

 

Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.

 

Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about something else entirely.    The similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.    

 

Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war.   The first clause can be taken as support for the assertion that war is an evil.   This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical one.   It would be the latter if the indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the same thing as “evil”.  Evil, sans article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun.   If used as the former it expresses an ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied.   If used as the latter, it expresses the idea of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is damaged.   When used with the indefinite article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who experience it and its consequences.   Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense.   In this sense, saying that war is an evil is stating the obvious.   

 

For the purposes of this essay the most important thing about the general’s saying is when he said it.   I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just the war.

 

Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern war or the first modern war?

 

If you ask historians that question you will find that they are divided on the answer.   If it is not obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of warfare not of the age in which a war took place.   1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the question with the chronological sense of the term in mind.   The case for the war being the first modern war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and means of communication and transportation than previous wars.   The case against it rests upon the even greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.

 

Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.    Now think about what that means with regards to the quotation.    If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a continent away?

 

Twentieth century technological development by making war so much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary than before.   Ethics is serious thought and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards to their rightness and wrongness.   Every aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare.   These are the questions expressed in Latin by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively.   Perversely, at the same time that the development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.

 

Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of good and evil.   Not the metaphysical and theological question of good and evil.   It is an ontological question – an ontological question, not the ontological question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity.  It is the question of who the good guys and who the bad guys are.   Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are the good guys.  Again, the way this question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics.   The good guys are not judged to be the good guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions.   The good guys are the good guys because that is who they are.   The bad guys are the bad guys because that is who they are.   Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with X.    Of course you are.   You are the good guy, X is the bad guy, therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong to go to war with you or anyone else.   Similarly, you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct war with X.   Since he is the bad guy, you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.

 

The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War.    Think about the terms in which Saddam Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003.   Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to 1999.   Or the Taliban in 2001.   Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but especially at the present moment.   It was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance.   In each case the foe was depicted as an avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile – of evil.   Only so could we justify to ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them.   The same sort of thinking was evident in the rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.   Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II, at least after the Americans joined.  

 

World War II seems to be where it all began.   Germany at the time was under the control of a man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in the fifth paragraph of this essay.   This made it easier for our leaders to paint him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as Hitler.    The fact that this depiction of our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat, itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War to the next.   Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon after the war ended.   By contrast, to this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life in general in North America.    The contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful.   Even more to the point, however, was the fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional surrender”.   From a strategic point of view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses.   From the ethical point of view that concerns us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah complex saw it.   How Sir Winston was able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. 

 

In one last detail of the Second World War we find the technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one.   By the end of the war the Americans had found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT.   Then they used two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945.   The death toll, almost entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand.   To date this is the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.   While some continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had they not been used, this is utter nonsense.   After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones they were eventually granted.   Had Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders (see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after Hoover’s death).

 

Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion, evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the “good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?

 

Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute.   Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research.   It might be worth noting, in this context, the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”.  Modern science had placed mankind on a course that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in war.   Therefore those intent on using them had to replace the latter with something else.  

 

Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied to all subsequent conflicts.  Adolf Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist.   In traditional Christian eschatology, however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan.   In traditional Christian eschatology there is only one Antichrist, capital A.   His defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ.   The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was, was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly.   Yet every foe we have fought since him has been depicted as the “new Hitler”.   Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?

 

Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”, these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated it.    Think about the predictable response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The woke look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the “good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race.   This was certainly not how the war was viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the Union side.   Nor is this how the conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that war.  That the woke who spend so much of their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.

 

How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of the ancients!   Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC, is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.   The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that resulted in the total destruction of the city.   Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero.  The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek.   Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan, Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted.   The individual that he most consistently depicts as admirable in his Iliad, however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started the conflict in the first place.   Hector is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to emulate.   By contrast Achilles, the protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke from the gods.   Homer shows him at his best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial.    Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history.   Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century, a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta than his own city.  So was Xenophon, the friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the history where Thucydides left off.   The Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does.   The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry, cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although ultimately failing to take Rome herself.   Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.  When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to Rome.   Yet even he is not depicted by Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.

 

Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to the above.   While it is true that the Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not the fundamental nature of their being.   This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment.   In their initial conquest of the Promised Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific sins of those nations.   Pretty much everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and similarly wipe them out.   It was not merely a matter of punishing sin.   God did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice, and the other abominations of Canaan.   They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer, repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry them away out of the land as well.   There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.  

 

When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to minimize the death and destruction it causes.   It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.

 

It is difficult to think of anything that more completely puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this.   What we call “advancement” and “progress” in the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it.   When wars were fought with swords you had to kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword.   The fighting therefore was much more fair in the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable.   Fighting in such a war was a way to test and prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of war.   If the terribleness of war from the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed evil.   When guns were introduced men could kill their enemies from a distance.   There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could shoot faster – and courage involved.   It was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially thousands of people he kills by the press of a button.   That is the generic “he” by the way.   I have seen those who regard this as “progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing buttons as men.    That puts a whole new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.    

 

By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to non-combatants.  These are sometimes still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a joke.   Paradoxically, the very thing that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more necessary that we do so.   This means that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards.   We cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that has prevailed since World War II.   The sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.

 

 

The Convoy and Captain Airhead

 

For those in the Dominion of Canada who still actually believe, as opposed to paying mere empty lip service to the idea, that freedom is a basic human good the legal protections of which must not be jettisoned in a state of emergency, the events of the preceding week have been most encouraging.   Indeed, as can be seen in the Monday column “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now”, by Dr. Ron Paul, the long-time Congressman from Texas who throughout my life time so far has been by far the most consistent advocate of personal freedom against the encroachments of government to have served as an elected representative in the federal government of our southern neighbour, they have inspired freedom lovers outside of our borders as well as within.

 

As you are undoubtedly aware, for the past two years most governments around the world have been trampling all over the basic freedoms of the people they govern.   The justification offered for all of this was the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in March of 2020.     A new flu-like virus, related to the SARS virus of twenty years earlier, had passed from bats to humans, either through a wet market or experimentation in a laboratory, and had caused an epidemic in Wuhan in China late in 2019.   Early in 2020 it had begun rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world.   Even then, the information necessary to respond rationally without panicking was available.  We knew that the people most at risk were the same people who are most at risk from any circulating disease – the really old and the really sick, although the danger to them was a bit more severe with this one.   We knew that while it could produce an intensively painful form of pneumonia, most people who contracted the virus would survive it, with many experiencing only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.   Our governments, however, told us that because the virus was spreading so rapidly, our hospitals, emergency rooms, and intensive care units were in danger of been swamped, and so they were going to order us all to stay home for two weeks, to go out only for “essential” purposes like buying groceries or medicine, to close our businesses if they were not “essential” as the governments defined “essential”, and to worship and carry out all social interaction online.   We were told that we would need to do all of this to slow the spread of the disease – to “flatten the curve” – in order to prevent the swamping of the health care system.   Very few seemed to notice the obvious problem with this – that if the health care system were swamped it would recover, that if hospitals, emergency rooms, and ICUs were burdened beyond their capacity this would not mean their ultimate irrecoverable failure and destruction, and that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to treat everything else as expendable and sacrifice it all to prevent a temporary flooding of the health care system.

 

Since our governments were allowed to get away with this unprecedented and tyrannical experiment at containing a respiratory disease – previous generations of mankind knew better than to arrogantly think they could do any such thing – they kept on doing it for the last two years, imposing restrictions and lockdowns every time there was a spike in the number of people testing positive for the virus.   When vaccines were invented for the bat flu virus in less than a year and given emergency authorization for use things got worse rather than better.   Our governments had been telling us that the strategy of restrictions and lockdowns would need to continue until vaccines were available.   Since the lockdown strategy was itself new and experimental, and was clearly causing more harm than the virus itself – as even our public health officers would admit in moments when they were relaxing restrictions rather than tightening them – and no one had been able to develop a vaccine for this kind of virus in the past this was highly dubious, to say the least.    When the vaccines were available, instead of saying “you should all return to your lives now, because we have vaccines to protect you from the virus if you want them” our governments began taking measures to coerce into being vaccinated those whom they could not persuade to be vaccinated voluntarily.

 

This took the tyranny to a whole new level.   While their telling us we could only “worship” online, could only meet with members of our own household, etc. made mockeries out of our freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, these attempts to coerce us rather than convince us to accept an inoculation, were an outright assault on our basic right to the security of our persons.   Our governments do not want to pass laws telling women they cannot have abortions on the grounds that such laws would violate a woman’s right to bodily autonomy even though abortion involves the deliberate taking of the life of another human being.   Euphemistically, those who support this status quo refer to this supposed right to have an abortion as a woman’s “reproductive rights” or her “right to make choices about her own reproductive health”.   Yet these same people seem to have no problem with telling everybody - men, women, whatever - that he must have a newly invented substance that has not yet completed its clinical trials injected into his body.   They claim to respect that whether a person does so or not is his choice.   Then they turn around and tell him that if he does not choose the way they want him to choose they will take away his right to participate in society until he makes what they say is the “right” choice.    This mobster-like bullying, of course, is itself a reason why refusing these demands is the morally right decision and complying with them is the morally wrong decision.

 

While we have not experienced this tyranny in its worst possible form here in the Dominion of Canada – our sister Commonwealth Realms of Australia and New Zealand have had it much worse – we have had to take it in combination with the insufferable arrogance of our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.     This is rather the opposite of Mary Poppins’ old line about how “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”   Captain Airhead has outdone himself in the realm of arrogance – a truly spectacular feat – when it comes to the vaccine coercion, for he has turned it into a form of scapegoating that makes it look like he was sitting around reading Mein Kampf and thinking something to the effect of “hey, you know, this guy gained tremendous public support by talking this way about the Jews, a disliked minority, maybe I should try the same with the unvaccinated.”   Except that the thought as it formed in his own mind would have been much less coherent.  Captain Airhead does not have the capacity for extended rational thought even of such a perverse type.   Captain Airhead began telling Canadians in the last couple of waves of the bat flu that these waves are all the fault of the unvaccinated.   Since the vast majority of Canadians were vaccinated – the vaccination campaign had been a record-breaking success - he was in effect telling Canadians “your vaccines won’t work unless everyone is vaccinated.”   Rather than admit that his pandemic and vaccination policies had been a failure from beginning to end, he opted to taking an utterly stupid position in order to blame his failure on people he thought he could get away with abusing, in the hopes of turning the hostility of Canadians fed up with all this pandemic nonsense onto them.    For weeks, he and his sycophants in the media, have been telling us that Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the unvaccinated, and trotting out polls ostensibly saying that most Canadians would support even more draconian measures being taken against the unvaccinated.

 

While behaving in the aforementioned disgusting manner, this increasingly petty tyrant turned on the very people he had held up to us as heroes – to the extent he was capable of holding anyone other than himself up as a hero – at the beginning of the pandemic.  On top of vaccine passports – those vile “show me your papers”, Mark of the Beast-style cards/QR codes that limited access to pretty much everything except grocery stores and pharmacies to the vaccinated – he began adding vaccine mandates where he could, and pressuring the provinces to add them where he had no jurisdiction.   One of the very first vaccine mandates to be widely brought in across Canada restricted work in the field of health care to the fully vaccinated.   Thus, those “front-line” nurses and other health-care providers, lauded as heroes two years ago, were told that unless they took a shot that they were not persuaded was in their own best interests to take, they would be out of work.   When many opted to lose their jobs rather than submit to this bullying and tyranny, the effect of the vaccine mandate was obviously to increase the pressure on the health care system rather than decrease it.    Now Captain Airhead has imposed a vaccine mandate on long-haul truckers crossing the border with the United States, either in collusion with the Biden administration or prompting the latter to do the same in retaliation.   His government has also dropped hints that it is looking at a similar mandate for inter-provincial transportation.      Two years ago Captain Airhead was telling Canadians to thank truckers who did not have the option of staying at home and were “working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked”.   Now he was telling them their services were not wanted unless they allowed him to dictate their medical choices.  This is what has prompted the long-overdue backlash we have been seeing over the last week.

 

Early last week, or the last day of the week prior to last if you wish to be precise, convoys of trucks set out from British Columbia heading towards Ottawa.   By the end of the week, similar convoys from every province of the Dominion were joining them.   As this armada of trucks descended upon the capital, everywhere they went supporters turned out in droves to cheer them on.   It was dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” and its purpose was quite straightforward.   It was a protest demanding the repeal, first, of the cross-border vaccine mandate for long haul truckers specifically, second, of vaccine mandates in general.   Many of the truckers, like all salt-of-the-earth type decent Canadians, also want Captain Airhead to step down.

 

About the middle of the week Captain Airhead dismissed the convoy with the sort of language we have come to expect from him.   He said “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they’re expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country”.    The best way to answer that is to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi (2017) as saying “Amazing.  Every word you just said was wrong.”    To briefly parse the latter part of Captain Airhead’s remarks, obeying government orders to stay apart for two years is the opposite of being there for each other, there is no such thing as “the science”, science, sans definite article, is a tool to be used and not a leader to be followed which real scientists would be the first to tell you, and agreeing to government measures that limit to the point of eliminating your and your neighbour’s freedoms of assembly, association, and religion and bodily autonomy helps destroy rather than ensure our rights, freedoms, and values.   It is the first part of the remarks, however, that are of most interest to us here.   It was apparent already on Wednesday when Captain Airhead said this and is unavoidable now that the convoy of truckers is a sizeable representation of a much larger segment of society and anything but “small” and “fringe”.   As for their “unacceptable views”, the only views that the truckers espouse as a group are that it is wrong and unacceptable for the government to be telling people they need to take a foreign substance into their bloodstream and punishing them if they don’t do it.    Prior to the pandemic, this was the consensus viewpoint in the free world.   As recently as last year Captain Airhead espoused those same views himself.   He opposed vaccine passports and mandates into the spring of 2021 calling them “divisive” and saying that this is not how we do things in Canada.   His complete flip-flop on the matter occurred at the time that Canada was emerging from the particularly harsh lockdown of winter-spring 2021, provinces were introducing vaccine passports, and they were polling well as they seemed to offer, to the vaccinated at least, a return to something resembling the normal.   It was around this time that Captain Airhead, faced with a Parliamentary order to hand over un-redacted documents regarding the dismissal of a couple of scientists from the virology lab in Winnipeg, documents he was so desperate to keep out of the hands of Parliament that he sued the Speaker showing his total contempt for Parliament and unfitness to serve as Prime Minister, was contemplating asking for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election.   When he ultimately went the latter route, arrogantly thinking he would be handed a majority government – the election, which nobody else but him wanted, restored the status quo ante – he tied his future political prospects to mandatory vaccination.    What arrogance, what hubris, what chutzpah to declare that his having abandoned his opposition to mandatory vaccination less than a year previously made that opposition into “unacceptable views”!

 

The Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday and Captain Airhead fled the city saying that he had come into contact with the bat flu and needed to self-isolate.   Then on Monday, after a weekend in which the truckers and their supporters had expressed their opposition to the vaccine mandates and other tyrannical pandemic measures without burning buildings down, looting stores, toppling monuments, or otherwise behaving like the kind of protestors Captain Airhead embraces and supports, Captain Airhead announced that he – triple vaccinated as of earlier that month – had tested positive for the bat flu, and that he would be speaking to the nation about the trucker protest.   When he gave his address, did he say “boy, I was wrong, I got all my shots and I still came down with the virus, maybe I should humble myself and talk to these truckers, who represent a lot more Canadians than I thought”?  

 

Hardly.   He doubled down on his insults, his arrogance, and his claims, obviously debunked by the fact that the most recent wave of the bat flu driven by a variant that infected more people in just over a month than previous variants had in a year producing a situation where, by contrast with previous variants, almost everyone has either had the bat flu or knows someone who had it, came after a record-breaking supermajority of the populace had been fully vaccinated, that vaccination is our only way out of the pandemic.   He said that “Canadians at home” were “watching in disgust and disbelief at this behaviour, wondering how this could have happened in our nation’s capital after everything we’ve been through together”.   He said this even as the results of the Angus Reid poll conducted over the weekend, results that showed that majority opinion in Canada had switched away from support for his policies to wanting all Covid restrictions lifted – the position of the truckers – were being released.  He spoke of those who “hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless”.  This was hardly typical of the behaviour of the demonstrators – were it otherwise the evidence would be all over the media – and is mighty rich coming from someone whose policies have ruined small businesses across the country while benefiting large multinationals, driven people into homelessness and destitution, and made life exponentially harder for the homeless (strict capacity limitations on homeless shelters and the closing of public spaces have, throughout the pandemic, corresponded with the winter months).   Wearing his “Mr. Tough Guy” mask, he declared that “we” – he should have used the singular, as that is what he meant, but he is not smart enough to recognize that holding the office of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister does not give him the right to use the royal “we” and that having lost his majority government in 2019, failing both then and in 2021 to win even a plurality in the popular vote, and now having lost majority support for his policies he should not presume to speak for Canadians in general – “would not be intimidated”.   His conveniently timed need to self-isolate in a non-disclosed secure location speaks rather loudly to the contrary.  “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans” he said.   Whereas protestors whose causes he has embraced over the past couple of years have toppled and beheaded statues, burned down churches, and committed real acts of vandalism, what he refers to here is the placing of a removable sign on the Terry Fox memorial.   As for the dishonouring of the memory of our veterans, I would say that the last two years of him trampling all over the freedoms those veterans fought for is far more dishonouring to their memory than a few protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

His focus, however, was on smearing the protestors with accusations of racism.  A few weeks ago, a clip of him giving an interview prior to last year’s Dominion election re-surfaced, in which he accused the unvaccinated of being “racists” and “misogynists” and asked whether Canadians should “tolerate these people”.   This dehumanizing language brought upon him vehement condemnation, at home and abroad, nor did the hypocrisy of the person of whom photographic – and video – evidence of his having worn blackface – and on one occasion full body brown skin makeup – on at least three separate occasions surfaced in the 2019 Dominion election calling other people “racists” go without notice.   Whereas accusing opponents of “racism” and “sexism” is a standard progressive tactic in Captain Airhead’s case there appears to be a personal element to it.   Knowing that he is guilty of not living up to his own progressive ideals – and, indeed, falling short of them in ways that are truly spectacular, as you can see by asking yourself how many people you know who have worn blackface even once – he projects his guilt onto others, in this case onto the unvaccinated he was trying to scapegoat and otherize in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, more often onto the country of Canada prior to his “enlightened” premiership.  

 

In his speech, he concentrated on such things as the single person at the rally carrying a flag bearing the symbol that his own father reportedly wore on his jacket while dodging the draft to fight in the war against the regime whose emblem that symbol was.   Since nobody has been able as of yet to locate the person who brought this flag to the protest nobody knows whether he did so as an expression of agreement with the ideology the flag represents or, perhaps more likely, to make the statement that the Prime Minister’s actions resemble those of the regime that flew that flag.   Either way, it is obvious to everyone – and I suspect this includes Captain Airhead and his sycophants, as much as they claim otherwise – that the person with this flag represented nobody at the rally but himself.   Another person at the rally carried the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the United States seven years before Confederation.   Progressives maintain that this flag is as objectionable as the first mentioned through a tortured reductionism that reduces all the differences that had been driving the two regions of the United States apart for a century prior to that to a single racially sensitive issue.   Within living memory – indeed, quite recent living memory - that flag was a universal symbol, not of racism, but of rebellion, employed as such even in countries with no discernable connection to the history, culture, and issues pertaining to the conflict that produced it.   This notwithstanding, the fact that the other protestors were filmed objecting to its presence clearly demonstrates that this person too, whatever his intent, did not speak for anyone but himself.  

 

What many people may not realize is that in any large size protest against progressive policies there will always be one or two people with symbols of this type.   Progressives themselves make sure of this.   While in some cases it is a matter of outright infiltration – a progressive activist, or a government agent provocateur will join the protest and do or say something to bring opprobrium upon the protest as a whole - it also has to do with the way progressives a) introduce policies that are unjust to certain whites – working class whites, middle class whites, prairie farmers and other rural whites – but not to others such as journalists, academics, and technocrats where their own white supporters can be found, b) proclaim any backlash against such injustice to be “racist”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist” etc., in the hopes of radicalizing the backlash so that c) they can point to the symbols of such radicalism, when they inevitably appear in larger protests against progressive policies that have nothing to do with racial issues whatsoever as a means of smearing the entire protest.

 

In this case, Captain Airhead’s efforts and those of his controlled media have failed on a truly grand scale.   The protest was too large and too obviously racially and ethnically diverse – predictably so, considering that what the media dubbed “vaccine hesitancy” is more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups – for Airhead’s remarks to be taken seriously by anyone with an iota of intelligence.

 

Captain Airhead, his fellow progressives, and their media spokesmen have spoken of the trucker protest as a threat to Canadian democracy.   Many supporters of the convoy have said, by contrast, that it is democracy in action.   In a way both are right and both are wrong.   What we have actually been seeing is two different understandings of democracy come to a clash.   There are many different ways of understanding democracy.   In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, there was a form of direct democracy, in which the democratic assembly, consisting of all corporate members – citizens - of the city, voted on every public matter.   In most societies with a form of democracy – and all complex societies with a form of democracy – that democracy has been representative democracy, where the citizens vote for representatives, who then form the government.   Republican governments such as that of our neighbour to the south are a representative form of democracy.   The House of Commons in our parliamentary form of democracy is also a representative form.   Populism, in which a grass-roots movement forms – often behind a charismatic leader – to make demands of the government is another form of democracy.

 

Captain Airhead’s understanding of democracy is an extremely corrupt perversion of representative democracy.   It is basically that every few years there is an election and whoever wins the election, at least if it is a Liberal, can then do whatever he wants until the next election, constitutional limits on his powers be hanged, because he is the choice and voice of the people. The truckers protest is populism in its best possible form.   The popular movement is not demanding that anything be taken away from anybody else, merely that what was stolen from them – and from every Canadian – their basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion and above all their right to reject with impunity the demand that they take a foreign substance into their body – be returned immediately.

 

Note the perspective of this writer.   I am not positively inclined towards democracy as an ideal.   I love and support my country’s traditional governing institutions, including our reigning monarchy and our democratic parliament, but with parliament I insist upon this distinction – I love and support it because it is a traditional governing institution and thus one that has proven itself over the ages and not because it is democratic.   Indeed, I belong to that “small fringe minority” of people with “unacceptable views” who agree with the consensus of the pre-modern tradition, classical and Christian, that democracy is the worst of all forms of government not the best, reject completely the modern liberal idea that legitimate government authority is that which is given to the government by the people (John Locke’s attempt to argue this against Sir Robert Filmer in his Two Treatises failed – even his fellow utilitarian liberal Jeremy Bentham could see that Filmer had the better of the arguments - and was thoroughly rebutted by the Rev. Charles Leslie, who demonstrated in his The Rehearsal that the legitimate authority of Parliament came through the Magna Carta from royal charter, not popular consent) along with the liberal idea that the individual person’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property come with the individual person into society from a pre-social state of nature (because there is no such thing as pre-social state of nature – society is part of man’s created nature – the rights of life, liberty, and property are real and bestowed by God, not the deistic God of Locke, but the True and Living God of Christianity), and hold in utter derision and scorn the modern equation of democracy with freedom (except when democracy is defined as self-government, and explained not in terms of the constitution of the state but the concept of subsidiarity – that the every decision should be left to those most locally competent to handle it rather than centralized in the state) because history clearly demonstrates that the size and intrusiveness of government grew exponentially after the modern heresy of popular sovereignty caught on and that governments that see themselves as the “voice of the people” have far less respect for those people’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property than kings who hold their authority by hereditary right and sacred oath.   (1) Recognizing these neglected truths does not incline one to much sympathy with populism.

 

These are exceptional times however.   Modern liberalism, in rejecting the ancient consensus that democracy was the mother of tyranny, believed that legal and constitutional recognition and protection of the rights of minorities was sufficient to guard against the problems the ancients had seen in democracy, which Alexis de Tocqueville summed up in his concept of the “tyranny of the majority”.   They failed to foresee the day when a professed liberal – the leader of the Liberal Party, as a matter of fact – would loudly espouse the rights and protections of “minorities”, but understand by that term “people of certain skin colours”, “women” (over 50% of the population), “people of certain ethnic and national backgrounds”, “people of certain religions”, “people of certain sexual orientations” and “people of certain gender identities”, while despising completely minorities in the sense the original liberals intended, the dictionary sense, of numeric minorities.   For all of his empty talk about protecting “vulnerable minorities”, Captain Airhead has felt completely free to dehumanize, otherize, scapegoat, and stir up hatred against those whom he has been unable to convince to voluntarily take a bat flu vaccine, because they are a numerically tiny fragment of the population.   The “unvaccinated” are the true “vulnerable minority”.   Mercifully, what we are seeing in this populist truckers protest, is not the kind of demagogue-driven mob action that has been the historical norm for populism, but Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, coming together to send Captain Airhead the message, loud and clear, that he does not speak for them, and to demand that government start respecting the basic freedoms of all Canadians once again.   This is a cause most worthy of our support.

 

God save the Queen!

God bless the truckers!

 

(1)   This week began with Royal Martyr Day, the anniversary of the death of a godly king who was murdered by religious fanatics who, having gained control of Parliament, believed that they had the right to do whatever they want.   King Charles warned that those who in their fanatical belief that they were the voice of a popular sovereignty went to war against his rights as sovereign king, would not hesitate to trample over the rights of anyone else.  Those who deposed him proved him right on this during the mercifully short-lived Cromwellian Interregnum, as did those who followed their example – the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, and the Communists, beginning with Russia in 1917 and spreading from there to about a third of the world in the last century before their collapse.

The New Kulaks

 

The "experts" that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus.   They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.   

 

This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.   

 

Think about what they are now claiming.   If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is - and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic - belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the "flatten the curve" strategy.   Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone's most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations.   It was the public health orders themselves - not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others' rights and freedoms - that gave us the variants.   It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available.   Natural immunity, as even the "experts" now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases.   When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio.  When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it.   When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.

 

For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern.   The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring.   With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021.   It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021.   Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer.    How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?

 

The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable.    The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights.    The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.

 

It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.

 

Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures.    There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”.    This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical.   Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections.     The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors.    That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.

 

With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination.   At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment.    This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.

 

Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing.   While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown.   The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature.   The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister.   In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the Jews to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.

 

What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon.      When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community.    This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms.  In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not.   In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis.   Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices.   Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.   

 

Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon.   While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject.   Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence.   He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation.   While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this:  the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice.   By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature.   When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment.   The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice.   As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people.   The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice.   It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system.  In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim.   That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.

 

What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices.     This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works.    One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind.   If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26), and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases.   This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance.    Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).   Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.

 

I alluded earlier to one such example, the scapegoating of the Jews by the Third Reich, of which it is unlikely that there is anyone living who is not familiar with the tremendous violent actions it produced.   Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today.   In Hitler’s case, the group designated as the scapegoat was a real religious/ethnic group the identity of which had been well-established millennia prior to the Nazi regime.    When, however, the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, led by V. I. Lenin and committed to his interpretation of Marxist ideology, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat. 

 

Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers.   Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted.   The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin sought to unify the other peasants in support of his regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land.    After Stalin succeeded Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy.   In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class.    The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).

 

“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people.   The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak.    Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust.   Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust.   In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily.   Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports.    While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed.   So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance.   So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine.   There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice.    It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights.   Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.

 

The Nazi scapegoating of the Jews, the Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation.   If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies.   In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens).   These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims.    The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.

 

The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer.   They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open.    Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel.   Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time.