May They Rest in Peace

The last couple of years have seen the passing of several individuals whose thought has been influential on my own. In May of last year, the Hungarian born historian, John Lukacs passed away from congestive heart failure. I have had cause over the last month to recall Lukacs’ definition of history as “the remembered past” more than once. The past itself, of course, is beyond the reach of the mad iconoclasts, but history, through which we learn from the past, is under siege. It was from Lukacs, especially his first volume of memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), rather than from Mencius Moldbug, that I learned to embrace the label “reactionary.” He was an Anglophile and a Roman Catholic, who had fled to the United States after his native country was taken over first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, preferring America’s liberal republicanism over either of the rival twentieth century totalitarianisms, but whose sympathies in many ways lay with the pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of civilization. He warned against the dangers of populism and nationalism, but was also the author of a pamphlet that argued strongly against the kind of immigration that populists and nationalists generally oppose. He was also wise enough to see that the Modern Age was over, without turning that into a weird pretext for separating language from reality.

The following month came the news that Justin Raimondo had passed away from lung cancer. Raimondo was a very interesting character. He was raised in the state of New York and lived most of his adult life in California, two rather left-leaning states. He was the founder and editor of Antiwar.com, a website opposed to American military interventionism and adventurism. Raised Roman Catholic, he lost his faith, and was openly homosexual. While that may sound like the resume of an ultra-progressive, he supported arch-conservative Pat Buchanan all three times Buchanan ran for the presidency of the United States, to the point of actually working for the campaign. The last time Buchanan ran it was as the Reform candidate in 2000. Raimondo had addressed that party’s national convention urging them to nominate Buchanan, obviously successfully. More recently, and right up until his death, Raimondo had been a strong supporter of Donald J. Trump. His politics were, in fact, right-libertarian, and more specifically the kind of right-libertarian that is called “paleo-libertarian.” Think Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Hans-Herman Hoppe. Indeed, Raimondo was the author of the biography, An Enemy of the State (2000) of the father of paleo-libertarianism, Murry N. Rothbard. He was also the author of a history of the American “Old Right”, i.e., the American Right of the 1930s and 1940s that preceded William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the American Conservative movement. This Right began as opposition to the expansion of the American government in the Depression under FDR, and also on non-interventionist grounds opposed American entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbour. Raimondo’s history was entitled Reclaiming the American Right: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993). Buchanan wrote the foreword. I have read both of these books, as well as his The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003), although it was the monthly column he wrote for Chronicles in the last few years of his life that I appreciated the most out of all his writings.

Earlier this year, in a single week we lost both Sir Roger Scruton and Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien, who was the youngest member of the 1930s-40s Oxford literary club, the Inklings, will be remembered not as a primary author, but as the editor who took the supplementary writings to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, had left behind, edited them for publication.

Sir Roger Scruton, on the other hand, has left behind a vast corpus of writing on pretty much every subject imaginable. While primarily a philosopher who specialized in aesthetics – the branch of philosophy that deals with art and beauty – he was a true polymath. I have written reviews of two of his books – The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Think Seriously About The Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012). The first was written at the beginning of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and the presidency of Ronald Reagan to show that true conservatism was not an ideological argument for freedom and capitalism, per se, but a reflexive defence of the good things which make up a civilized order, which are “easily destroyed, but not easily created.” The second examined the conservative roots of environmentalism to make the case for the responsible preservation of the beauty of our surroundings and our natural resources while avoiding the pitfalls of extremism that the environmentalism movement is noted for falling into. Many other of his books, including but not limited to his memoir Gentle Regrets, his short introduction to Beauty, his books on the aesthetics of music, his history of the Anglican Church, his takedown of the thought of the leading intellectuals of the Postmodern and Critical Theory influenced New Left, and his defence of Western Civilization against those who would attack it from without and within, The West and the Rest, have been of tremendous benefit to me. Countless of his insights, such as into the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence”, as well as his countering the left-wing charge of “xenophobia” with that of “oikophobia”, a term borrowed from the Lake Poet Robert Southey, are particularly relevant to this moment in time. So, for that matter is his personal experience. As related in Gentle Regrets and elsewhere in his writings, it was when he witnessed student radicals in the late 1960s behaving basically the way BLM and Antifa are acting today, with nothing but Marxist gibberish to back up their actions, that he realized his fundamental opposition to this sort of thing and became a conservative. Let us hope that many today will experience something similar, in reaction against the revolting, in both senses of the word, “woke.”

Alan Clark used to refer to Enoch Powell, the Tory statesman who delivered a famous speech warning against immigration and the consequences of the Race Relations Bill to Birmingham in 1968, as “the prophet.” The same appellation could be applied to French author and explorer Jean Raspail, who died earlier this month at the age of 94. He travelled the world in his early life, exploring, and doing what could have been preparatory field work for a career as an anthropologist. His earliest writings were travel memoirs, later he turned to writing novels, incorporating his experiences of the world while globetrotting into his fiction. It was these which won him critical acclaim. His religious and political views – he was a traditionalist Roman Catholic, a royalist who longed for the restoration of a legitimate, Catholic, French monarchy, and someone who deplored most if not all modern ideas, trends, and movements – also found their way into his books. The most well-known of his novels, however, which appeared in French in 1973 and in English translation by Norman Shapiro in 1975, was The Camp of the Saints.

The title alone, borrowed from the twentieth chapter of St. John’s Apocalypse, suggests the prophetic nature of the novel. The story opens on Easter morning on the French Riviera, where a retired academic from his home near the ocean, watches as masses of liberal lunatics gather on the beach to welcome the arrival of a vast mass of the poorest of Calcutta’s poor, arriving on ninety-nine ships. The novel then goes back a few months in time to explain how they got to that point. The Belgian government had closed down a charitable adoption program when it was swamped with too many applications, after which, a prophet of sorts, “the turd eater”, having been turned away from the Belgian consulate, addresses the multitude with a parable that curiously borrows the lines from Revelation from which the title of the novel is derived, although twisting their meaning to the effect that the thousand years allotted to the God of the Christians was at an end, and now He must surrender His kingdom to Allah, Buddah, and an assortment of Hindu deities. At his encouragement they board the hundred ships – one is lost along the way – and set sail for France. This provokes much discussion in France over what is to be done – but due to the extreme liberal cultural climate, everyone - the politicians, news media and celebrities, clerics, very interestingly headed by a Latin American pope – all give the answer that the migrants must be accepted and welcomed. The armada is dubbed the “Last Chance Armada” as in the “last chance for mankind” and this, along with “We are all from the Ganges now” and other such tripe are the only acceptable way of speaking about the situation. A handful of individuals are brave enough to dissent – we are slowly introduced to them throughout the novel – and these all gather at the aforementioned academic’s house to make one last stand for Western Civilization. When the French president, who knows full well what must be done and had been counting on the only remaining right-wing publisher in France to make the point for him, sends the military to the beach, he cannot find the courage to order them to fire, and leaves it up to their consciences, at which point they defect. France is swamped and shortly thereafter coloured immigrant communities rise up in major cities throughout what was once Western civilization, while Western borders fall as the Chinese swarm into Russia, the Palestinians overwhelm Israel, etc. The narrator, indicates that the bastion from which he is writing, Switzerland is about to fall, bringing white, Christian, Western Civilization to an end forever.

It is almost twenty years since I read this novel for the first time. I have read it many times since and, to compound the thought crime indictment against me, have given copies of it out to others. Over the course of the last decade, it has come more and more to resemble a prophetic description of our own times. Its author lived to see this happen. Let us hope and pray that the story does not end the way he wrote it.

God Save the Queen

Over the course of several months last year, the media manufactured a scandal with regards to the Duke of York’s reluctance to drop his friendship with a notorious financier after the latter’s less respectable, depending upon how you view the world of finance, side-business as a pimp was exposed and he went to prison where he died in an apparent case of Arkancide. Between this and the media spotlight on all the doings and difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex culminating in what has been amusingly dubbed “Megxit” it is not surprising that the republicans have come crawling out of the woodworks like the creepy little beady-eyed, pointy-eared, worm-tailed, buck-toothed, vermin that they are. Could there be anything lower or sleazier, more base, more despicable, or more vile, rotten and cheap than to make use of her relatives to attack Her Majesty and the sacred, time-honoured, office she holds after a lifetime of faithful, dutiful, public service?

It is more surprising to see men of sound principles like Peter Hitchens say things like “I do not much like the British royal family”, which is the sentence with which he opened a recent e-article for First Things in which he gave an excellent and admirable defense of the institution of the monarchy but expressed his doubt that anyone of generations younger than that of the current occupant of the throne has had the upbringing necessary to bear the responsibilities of the office. Mr. Hitchens posed this to his readers as a personal conundrum – how could he reconcile his monarchism with his lack of enthusiasm for the next generations of the reigning House?

Mr. Hitchens’ dilemma reminds me in some ways of the attitude of the Right Honourable Alan Clark, who served as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and later for Kensington and Chelsea and held the office of Junior Minister in three different Ministries under Margaret Thatcher. Clark, a British nationalist, believed in all of his country’s old institutions, including the monarchy, but spoke rather disdainfully of most living members of the Royal Family. He respected the Queen, more so her mother – who was still living in his day - and adored Princess Diana but that was about it. Clark, however, never gave any indication of any sort of internal struggle over the matter and, indeed, was similarly rude in the way he spoke of virtually everyone else, his own family included.

I don’t have this problem myself. I am both a monarchist and a royalist in the sense of believing in the institution of the monarchy and the principle of hereditary reign, but I also very much admire and respect Elizabeth II as a person and do, for the most part, like the royal family. The members of the family that I would, perhaps, like less than the others, are not in the immediate line of succession. I may disagree with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the subject of climate change but that hardly constitutes grounds for disliking him and I happen to think that he will make an excellent king. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also impress me as a couple that will do an admirable job of reigning when their time comes. With regards to the latter couple Mr. Charles Coulombe, an American Monarchist – yes, there are Americans of sane and sound principles out there – said the following in his recent article about “Megxit” for the Roman Catholic magazine Crisis:

Princess Grace threw herself into the greatest role of her career. Devoting herself entirely to her new country and to her husband’s work, she became the symbol of Monaco’s new image, for all that her children from time to time seemed to be trying to revert to dynastic type.

So, too, has Prince William’s consort and future queen done, despite her middle-class background.

Since I like and respect the present occupant of the throne, the heir apparent and the next in the line of succession I don’t foresee myself having to face the kind of internal struggle Peter Hitchens is dealing with. I did, however, read a passage a couple of decades ago that struck me as providing the answer for anyone of sound principles struggling with this sort of dilemma. It is found in Twenty Years After, the second of the three (1) novels written by Alexandre Dumas père which are loosely based on a previous novel that itself is loosely based on the life of Charles D’Artagnan, Captain of Louis XIV’s Musketeers. In the passage, the Count de la Fère – better known to fans of the series as Athos - visits the grave of Louis XIII where he gives the following advice to his son Raoul, the Viscount of Bragellone:

This is the sepulcher… of a man who was weak and without grandeur, but whose reign was, notwithstanding, full of important events. Above this king watches another man's spirit, as this lamp watches over this tomb, and lights it up. The latter was a real king, Raoul; the other only a phantom into which he put a soul. And yet so powerful is the monarchy among us, that he has not even the honor of a tomb at the feet of him for the glory of whom he wore out his life, — for that man, if he made this king an insignificant one, has made the kingdom great. And there are two things enclosed in the Louvre Palace, — the king who dies, and the royalty which does not. That reign has ended, Raoul; that minister so renowned, feared and hated by his master, has gone to the tomb, drawing after him the king whom he did not wish to leave alone for fear he should destroy his work, — for a king only builds up when he has God, or the spirit of God, near him. Yet then every one thought the cardinal's death a deliverance, and I, blind like my contemporaries, sometimes opposed the designs of the great man who held France's destiny in his hands, (2) and who, just as he opened or closed them, held her in check or gave her the impress of his choice. If he did not crush me and my friends in his terrible anger, it was without doubt that I should be able to say to you to-day: Raoul, learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything. Only God has wished to render this principle palpable by incarnating it in a man. Raoul, it seems to me that I see your future as through a cloud. It will be better than ours. We have had a minister without a king; you, on the contrary, will have a king without a minister. You will be able then to serve, love, and honor the king. If he prove a tyrant, — for power in its giddiness often becomes tyranny, (3) — serve, love, and honor the royalty; that is the infallible principle. That is to say, the spirit of God on the earth ; that is, that celestial spark which makes this dust so great and so holy that we, gentlemen of high condition indeed, are as unimportant before this body extended on the last step of this staircase as this body itself is before the throne of the Supreme Being. (I have added the bold for emphasis on the most relevant sentences)

Now back to the republicans.

I don’t know which group of republicans in Canada disgusts me the most.

There are the neo-Marxist professors who fill the heads of impressionable youth with nonsense about how “imperialism” and “colonialism” were the equivalent of fascism and Nazism. Our young people have become particularly vulnerable to this inane tripe since they have not been taught history properly. Otherwise they would know that it was precisely because Canada was member of the Imperial Commonwealth that we went to war with fascism and Nazism in 1939. It had absolutely nothing to do with some Americanized crusade for “democracy.” Young Canadians of that generation gladly signed up to go overseas because they felt it was their duty to their God, their King, and their country.

On a somewhat related note allow me to interject here a comment on the following remark from Mr. Hitchens’ First Things article:

The monarch, stripped of all ancient direct power, is now remarkably like the king on a chessboard—almost incapable of offensive action, but preventing others from occupying a crucial square and those around it.

My comment is simply this – that it is less than a century since we were given all the evidence we need of just how important this role actually is. It was because they had retained their king that the Italians were able to remove Mussolini from power, although they proved themselves to be extreme ingrates when they voted for a republic the year after the war ended. In Germany, where Hitler had taken advantage of the vacancy created by the empty thrones of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern families to seize absolute power, those who sought to depose him had no such advantage. Thus, Claus von Stauffenberg and his associates – mostly Roman Catholic aristocrats with royalist and monarchical leanings – had to resort to an assassination plan which famously failed.

Then there are the “Canadian nationalists” who think that we should have a domestic head of state rather than a “foreign monarch.” These twits can’t seem to grasp the fact that it is a total contradiction in terms to profess a “nationalism” or a “patriotism” towards a country while denying its historical and traditional essence. Again, part of the problem is a lack of knowledge of history. If only the late, great, Donald Creighton were still around to enlighten them – although his legacy lives on in his books – The Road to Confederation, The Dominion of the North, Sir John A. Macdonald Volumes I and II, etc. if they could only be bothered to read them. Perhaps it is too much to expect people these days to be capable of reading anything longer than a poorly spelled text message. Contrary to the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian History – our domestic equivalent of the Butterfield-rebutted nineteenth century Whig Interpretation – Canada’s is not the history of a country that followed the same path as the United States, only through the route of negotiation rather than revolution. Canada’s is the history of a country that defined itself as following a path from which the Americans diverged two and a half centuries ago - Loyalist instead of Revolutionary, royalist instead of republican. To deny this is to deny the historical and traditional essence of Canada, to deny the very country of which these people profess to be “patriots” and “nationalists.”

Somewhere between these two groups are the divisive agitators. By this, I mean those who attack the monarchy on the grounds that it is “offensive” to some group or another – originally French Canadians, more recently native aboriginals and immigrants. Again the lack of any sort of logical reasoning is apparent.

Whatever French Canadians might have historically thought of the defeat of General Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) in the Seven Years’ War the fact of the matter is that when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against the Crown in 1776 the French Canadians chose to side with the British and the Loyalists because they knew that they stood a much better chance of preserving their language, religion, and culture under the Crown that had guaranteed these things two years earlier than by siding with those whose rebellion had been in part an angry response to that very guarantee.

Something similar can be said with regards to the native aboriginals. When the time came to choose sides between the Crown and the Americans, first in the American Revolution then again in the War of 1812, the tribes overwhelmingly, although not unanimously, chose the side of the Crown. Indeed, many of them can be counted among the Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution. The first Anglican Church in Upper Canada, or Ontario as it is called in the vulgar tongue, was founded for Mohawk Indians who had fled to Canada as Loyalists. It is called Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks and still stands in Brantford, Ontario.

As for more recent immigrants the reasoning of the divisive agitators assumes them to be either incredibly stupid – moving to a country with a constitution and sovereign monarch they disapprove of without having inquired into these basic facts about her – or subversives who have moved here to overthrow said constitution and sovereign. If either of these things were true this would be a case for a much stricter immigration policy and not a case against the monarchy.

W. L. Morton provided the answer to all of this sort of illogic in his The Canadian Identity:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (4)

Probably the republicans who annoy and disgust me the most are those who are also libertarians, social conservatives, people who have enough courage to be open opponents of the overt anti-white bigotry and racism that hides beneath the guise of the cult of diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, and/or Western regional populists who feel the prairie provinces have been treated very poorly by the government in Ottawa. They do not annoy and disgust me because they hold these other views. Quite the contrary, as I agree with each of these groups far more often than I do those who espouse the opposite of these views. While these groups don’t always agree between themselves – the first two hold views that are usually considered to be difficult to reconcile with each other – in Canada, they all have a common enemy in the Liberal Party.

It is the Liberals, more than any other party, that have expanded the size of government and created the present-day cultural climate that is hostile to freedom of association, thought, and expression. It is the Liberals who have done the most to promote abortion, easy divorce, and the various causes associated with the alphabet soup gang in Parliament and it is the Charter they introduced into the constitution in 1982 that turned the Supreme Court of Canada into an American-style body of social liberal activists. The Grits are also the most obvious enemies of the other two groups. While the Liberal Party has never been officially republican, republicanism has walked hand in hand with it throughout its history. It has had all of two ideas throughout the duration of that history. The first, which dominated the party until 1963, was “let us make Canada more like the United States”, and the second, which dominated the party from 1963 to 1984 was “let us make Canada more like the Soviet Union”, after which the party has survived by not thinking at all. Both of these ideas naturally incline towards republicanism since the United States and Soviet Unions were both republics. It was in the second period that the Liberal Party did everything it could to earn the undying enmity of the libertarians, social conservatives, et al. The Americans, after all, only seceded from the reign of their king, the Bolsheviks murdered theirs. It was in this same period that the Liberal Party’s inclinations towards republicanism became most pronounced and obvious as they removed the designation “Royal” from several government branches and downplayed the country’s title “Dominion”, chosen by Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation to denote our being a kingdom without being as likely to provoke an invasion from the republic to our south. Ironically, any libertarian, social conservative, white rights defender or Western populist who advocates republicanism is in a sense promoting the completion of what Pierre Trudeau started. I regard all such as traitors to their own principles.

The previous paragraph should not be construed as saying that the monarchy is or ought to be a partisan issue, but merely that the groups mentioned are untrue to their own principles if they support republicanism. While the most outspoken advocates of republicanism in Canadian history have come from within the socialist movement the same movement has also been represented by some of the finest supporters of the monarchy – constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, Tommy Douglas, and even the much more recent Jack Layton come to mind. The monarchy ought to have the support of all parties because it provides us with a head of state – the person whose office involves the duty of representing the country as a unified whole – who is above the process of partisan politics. How anyone could possibly fail to see this as a huge benefit considering what is happening below the 49th parallel at this very moment is beyond me.

Think about it for a moment: The partisans of one party control the House of Representatives, the partisans of the other party control the Senate. The elected head of state belongs to party that controls the Senate. The party that controls the House has voted to impeach the President. The real grounds behind their doing so, not the thin veil of spurious rationale offered to the House, is because they cannot stand the man and his party. The Senate, which must conduct the trial before the impeachment is final, is most likely to rule in the President’s favour, not because the charges against him are the farce that they are but because he is of their party.

Why would anyone want to imitate the constitutional arrangement that allows for this scenario?

So let the republicans crawl back into the sewers they came from, I say.

God Save the Queen!


(1) The Son of Porthos was written by Paul Mahalin, although it was published under the name of Dumas père and Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask were originally published as part of The Viscount of Bragellone.
(2) This is a reference to the plot of the first novel in the series, The Three Musketeers.
(3) This foreshadows the plot of The Viscount of Bragellone, in which Athos, who had failed to save Charles I of Britain in Twenty Years After assists, with D’Artagnan’s help, in the restoration of Charles II, serving the principle of royalty even though he has a falling out with his own king, Louis XIV, over the latter’s tyrannical acts.
(4) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972, p. 95.

My Druthers

While I am, for the most part, opposed to the vulgar, Americanization, of the English language, the phrase I have chosen for the title of this essay, a late nineteenth century drawled American contraction of the words “would rather”, expresses the subject of this essay perfectly.

In the unlikely event that I have my druthers and the upcoming Dominion election turns out exactly the way I want it to the following is what will happen on October 21st.

First, Captain Airhead will be turfed out on his rear end in the most decisive negative vote in the history of Canada. I am talking zero seats being given to the Grits in the next Parliament.

Second, the New Democrats will also be reduced to non-party status and be finished once and for all.

Third, the Greens will form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and will from here on out take the place on the left made vacant by the decimation of the Liberals and NDP.

Fourth, the Conservatives will receive a minority government. Nota bene, I said minority, not majority. The Conservatives wasted the last majority government they received under Stephen Harper and I have not the least doubt that they would do the same under Andrew Scheer.

Fifthly, holding the balance of power and propping up the minority Conservative government, will be Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. My reasons for wanting this to happen rather than for Bernier to form the next government are twofold. First, I suspect that he and his party would drift left-ward if they actually formed the government. This would inevitably be the case if they received a minority government – any other party, including the Conservatives, holding the balance of power would exert a left-ward pull. Second, I think that by exerting the leverage they would hold in this position they could accomplish more of the excellent goals in their party platform than if they formed the government.

Remember, all of this is what I would like to see happen, not what I am predicting will happen. I doubt that anyone will be able to accurately forecast the outcome of this election and I think the likelihood of it turning out exactly the way I want is extremely slim. It would require, for one thing, that the Canadian right develop overnight a capacity for strategic voting that it has given no previous indication of possessing, unlike the Canadian left which used that very method to straddle us with Captain Airhead in the last Dominion election.

It provides me with no small amount of amusement that so many of those who would share the first and second of the above set of druthers get so irate at the suggestion that anything less than an outright majority government by the Conservatives – or People’s Party depending upon which sort of partisan they happen to be – would be acceptable, much less desirable. Obviously the leaders, candidates, and campaign teams of the parties cannot make anything less than a majority government their goal, but there is no good reason why right-of-centre thinkers outside of the aforementioned groups should not prefer a different outcome. It is the job of right-wing politicians to win elections by selling a right-wing platform to the electorate. It is not the job of the right-wing portion of the electorate to put those politicians into office in an unthinking manner, without asking hard questions and making hard demands of them. The attitude that the electorate owes them their votes has always been one of the most obnoxious aspects of smug, Grit, arrogance. It ought not to be imitated on the right. It is the duty of right-wing commentators of the fourth and, like this writer, fifth estates, to constantly remind right-wing politicians of right-wing principles and hold them accountable. It irritates me that those who think otherwise regard any criticism of the leaders of their preferred parties as being akin to campaigning for the left. I have even seen such nincompoops describe Ezra Levant, the same Ezra Levant whom the mainstream media equally absurdly labels a “right-wing extremist”, as a Liberal agent because of his criticism of Scheer. These fools think of elections in terms of salvation and cannot bear to hear anything negative about their would-be Messiahs. This is the way progressives view politics and there ought to be no room for it on the right.

Of course the sort of people I have been talking about are “conservatives” of a highly Americanized type. Over the last two to three decades I have watched them jettison virtually every principle that has historically and traditionally been considered right-wing to the point that only capitalism seems to be indispensable to them. Which is ironic because capitalism is not right-wing. The true right is anti-socialist not capitalist. It is anti-socialist because it is hierarchical and socialism is egalitarian and it is anti-socialist because it is strongly pro-property – even more so than classical liberalism – and being anti-property is the very essence of socialism. The true right, while anti-socialist, has always been willing to condemn the vulgarity and Philistinism of capitalism and its erosion of social and cultural mores.

The same people, I would point out, are often the ones who insist that if the Liberals win again the Western provinces, or at least Alberta, ought to separate from Canada. While they are right to believe that Ottawa has treated the Western provinces unjustly, especially whenever the Liberals headed by a Trudeau have been in government, I have no sympathy with this kind of separatism whatsoever. The separatists all talk about forming a republic, proving themselves to be liberals. Alan Clark, the military historian turned Tory statesman, best remembered for his Diaries, who served as a junior minister in the ministries of Trade and Defence under Margaret Thatcher, was a Powellite and Eurosceptic who after the vote on the Common Market told the Labour MP Dennis Skinner “I'd rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of f***ing foreigners.” To paraphrase the sentiment, and apply it to the matter at hand, I’d rather live in a socialist Canada with her traditional constitution than in any sort of ******* republic. (1)

This, by the way, is why I would like to see the Greens replace both the NDP and the Grits on the other side of Canada’s political spectrum. Elizabeth May, however crazy I think her climate-change alarmism is, and however annoying I find her other progressive twaddle like that nonsense about “white privilege” she was spouting at Monday’s debate, is sound on the constitution. (2) Jagmeet Singh, like most NDPers, (3) is not.

Allow me to conclude by returning to the subject of my druthers and pursuing it a bit further than the outcome of the imminent election.

First, Canada would undergo a major revival of sound Christian religion.

Second, to summarize paragraphs nine through twelve above, the Canadian right would abandon American neo-conservatism and return to genuine British/Canadian Toryism. This would mean that both the preservation of our constitution – the preservation of our constitution, mind you, and not the adoption of one more like that of the Americans - and opposition to moral, social, and cultural decay would take precedence over any economic and fiscal concerns.

Third, the Canadian right would make it a top priority to break the control of the progressive cartel over the majority of the fourth estate.

Fourth, they would make it another top priority to repeal the Canadian Human Rights Act and abolish the Canadian Human Rights Commission/Tribunals. Despite the name of the Act/Commission/Tribunal these do nothing to protect people from the arbitrary abuse of government power but rather enable that abuse by allowing the state to police the thoughts, intentions, and motives of Canadians. To demonstrate this to the public, all that needs to be done is to encourage them to actually read the Act. Then explain the difference between a non-discrimination policy – Her Majesty’s government will administer the law and justice fairly and justly without discriminating on the basis of X, Y, Z – and an anti-discrimination law in which the government unnecessarily interjects itself into private transactions and tells us that we cannot have certain thoughts or allow them to influence us in our interactions with others.

Fifth, they would work through the provincial legislatures – which have jurisdiction over the matter – to ensure that a Canadian civics in which our constitution, history, and heritage are respected becomes part of our educational system so much so that parties that want to destroy our constitution, turn the country into a republic, or break up Confederation, become completely unelectable.

Sixth, they will put Sir John A. Macdonald back on our money where he belongs, and restore any other monument to the leading Father of Confederation that has been removed for politically correct purposes.

I could probably add others but that is enough wishful thinking for now.

(1) In response to a recent post by Will S. at his Patriactionary blog about how the West should have recognized the Republic of China (Taiwan) as legitimate rather than the People’s Republic of China (Red China) I said: “Neither Republic is legitimate, as no republic is a legitimate form of government (I would allow for the possibility of two exceptions to this in all of human history – Switzerland and the defunct Confederate States of America). The West should have told all of China that until they restored the Quin dynasty and put the rightful heir of the House of Aisin Gioro back on the throne we would not recognize any Chinese government as being legitimate, with the People’s Republic being even less legitimate than the other one. Sadly, the West let the bloody Yanks do all the talking for the rest of us.”

(2) http://maplemonarchists.weebly.com/blog/monarchist-profile-elizabeth-may

(3) Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton, both deceased, are the only exceptions that really come to mind off the top of my head. Eugene Forsey, who in his heart was really a Conservative all his life regardless of which party he was nominally associated with at the time was a strong constitutionalist but he was never an NDPer. He left the CCF when it became the NDP.