The Existential Crisis of the West

“To be, or not to be.” “That,” as Shakespeare’s Danish Prince famously soliloquized, “is the question.” Was he seriously weighing the pros of taking his own life – “to die, to sleep” – against the cons – “to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub”? Or, since he was feigning madness at the time, was this merely part of the act?

We don’t know and never will but what we do know, alas, is that Hamlet’s dilemma is precisely the one currently faced by Western Civilization.

It was novelist Jean Raspail who peered into the future and saw the form in which this dilemma would come upon the West in his Le Camp des Saints which was first published in French in 1973, followed by an English edition in 1975. The novel made the bestseller lists when it first appeared – and it returned to them about five years ago when the predicted scenario began to loom large on the horizon of the immediate future – but it met with much hostility from the fashionable elites of the liberal intelligentsia. Its author, a traditional Roman Catholic who longs for the restoration of the French monarchy, was treated by the bien-pensants as a racist rabble-rouser.

The novel tells the story of a fleet of a hundred rusting old cargo liners that set out from Calcutta en route to France laden with a million of the poorest of the poor. Long before the armada arrives in the Mediterranean where it will embark upon the French Riviera on Easter Sunday the world becomes aware of its destination and the French discuss among themselves how they will respond. Those in power are aware that what is at stake is the continued existence of France as they know it, that these refugees from abject poverty are attracted by the wealth of the West and not because they love French culture and civilization and wish to participate in it. They are invaders, but invaders armed not with guns and swords, but with their own wretchedness and the liberalism of the French. While a few of France’s leaders, including her president, privately do not wish France to succumb to this invasion, publicly they are afraid to express this sentiment and in the end lack the heart to act on it. Most of the intellectuals, clergy, journalists, and politicians welcome the coming of the invaders of which they speak in messianic, salvific, terms and embrace the death of their own way of life. The world waits to see what France will do and when she fails to conjure up the will to survive no other Western country dares to do so.

This doom, so vividly forecast by Raspail forty years ago, has gradually come to materialize until now it is dangling over Western countries like the sword that Syracusan ruler Dionysius the Younger hung by a hair over the head of his flatterer Damocles.

In the 1960s most Western governments radically liberalized their policies on immigration both in regards to who is allowed in and how many causing a massive upsurge in immigration from the Third World. This, predictably, generated a great deal of cultural and ethnic tension. The governments that had orchestrated this new wave of untraditional immigration – or at least passed the laws that made it possible – dealt with this tension in a number of ways. What these methods all had in common was that they involved the government siding with the newcomers against those who were already members of the societies they governed. Often these countries declared themselves to be multicultural, which was more than just a recognition that a plurality of cultures could be found within their borders, but a decision that their country would adapt to the immigrants rather than expect the immigrants to adapt to them. Several of them passed laws which forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and country of origin which, while worded neutrally, were clearly designed to be applied in one direction only. Sometimes, as was the case with the Canadian Human Rights Act passed in 1977, these laws included provisions aimed at the suppression of public disagreement with these new policies. Throughout the West dissent was further discouraged by means of accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia and other such words that suggested that liberal immigration was an obvious good, which nobody could rationally and legitimately disagree with, so that all disapproval was an irrational prejudice based in fear and hatred.

Then the illegal immigration problem began. Illegal immigration is when people move to a country without applying to immigrate through the proper channels. Some countries have more of a problem with this than others depending upon how easy they are to access from countries where large numbers of people need to flee. The United States has had a huge illegal immigration problem over its southern border with Mexico for decades, a problem that has been exacerbated by the refusal of their government to enforce its own immigration laws. Politicians of both the Republican and Democrat parties have preferred to amnesty illegal aliens, i.e., to pardon them for breaking into the country and grant them legal immigrant status. There are a number of reasons for this preference – it keeps the cost of labour low for unscrupulous companies and is considered to be the humanitarian response to people who are fleeing poverty looking for a better life – but without a secure border, it is a solution that only encourages more of the problem.

It is events that have transpired since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, however, that has made Raspail’s scenario loom so ominously on the horizon. Protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria that began in the “Arab Spring” of that year grew into armed rebellion, backed by the American government of Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the fighting escalated Islamic jihadists operating in both Syria and Iraq seized control of territory in these two countries and formed the Islamic State (ISIS) declaring it to be the revival of the ancient caliphate. With the United States backing the so-called moderate rebels, Russia and then later Iran backing the Assad government, and ISIS waging a terrorist war on all fronts with plenty of funding from oil-rich governments in the Middle East millions of people were driven from their homes and ended up refugees in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and other neighbouring countries.

Then in late 2014 a wave of migration started as masses of people began crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe. This wave developed into a tsunami in 2015 and by the fall of that year 8000 were crossing over on a daily basis. Although the migrants claimed to be seeking asylum from the Syrian Civil War, statistics gathered by the United Nations show that less than half of them are actually from Syria, with large numbers coming from Afghanistan, Iraq and even African countries such as Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia. UN statistics also showed that the majority of these migrants were men rather than women and children. Beneath the outward trappings of a refugee crisis this wave of migration looked suspiciously like an invasion.

The other players immediately began acting out the script Raspail had written for them decades ago. The pope, a heretic from Latin America who has difficulty distinguishing between the teachings of Karl Marx and those of Jesus Christ, told Europe that it was their Christian duty to take in all of these migrants and countless other clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, sang the same tune. The news media bombasted us with heart wrenching stories and images depicting about the plight of the refugees.

Meanwhile our politicians did not waste the opportunity this crisis afforded to show off their humanity at the expense of those they govern. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany had a “selfie” taken with a migrant and declared that Germany would place no limits on the number of asylum seekers they took in. Unsurprisingly, over a million took advantage of this generous offer. Realizing that this was too many, but not wanting to lose her reputation for being charitable and humanitarian, she asked other European countries to bail her out and take more of the refugees. When they proved reluctant to do so she attempted to bully them into doing so through EU-imposed quotas. All of a sudden right-wing, anti-EU, nationalist parties began to do well in the polls throughout Europe and in the UK the yes side won on the Brexxit referendum on leaving the EU.

In Canada, the new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who never met a photo op that he didn’t like, pledged to bring 25, 000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of last year. It actually took him until the end of February to do so but he then set a new target of resettling 50, 000 in Canada by the end of 2016. The thought of whether this would be good or bad for Canada and Canadians never crossed his mind. He got to show off how kind and compassionate and generous he was by bringing them over, getting his picture taken, and then dumping them on the country and forgetting about them.

All of the elements of Raspail’s haunting scenario are now present. We have the liberalism, hiding a death wish for our own culture and civilization behind a mask of concern for the other. We have the intellectual, political, religious and media elites obsessed with projecting an image of kindness and compassion at the expense of their own people. Finally, we have the teeming hordes flooding into the West with little interest in learning our ways, obeying our laws, and becoming part of our civilization. While they cannot be blamed for wishing to flee poverty, war, and other unpleasant conditions, they comprise, in effect if not in intention, an invasion force, armed with our own liberalism and aided and abetted by our own political and intellectual classes. Thus we find ourselves faced with the question of whether we allow this to continue and throw away the civilization our ancestors built, handed down to us, and entrusted us to pass on to their descendants or do we summon up the will to do what is necessary to preserve that patrimony as a sacred trust. Will Western civilization be or not be?

There is a major difference between what Raspail wrote and the reality unfolding around us today, however. It is not France that the eyes of the world are upon, but the United States of America. In this fall’s presidential race, one of the candidates, Hillary Clinton is pledged to raising the number of Middle Eastern migrants claiming to be refugees from the Syrian Civil War, taken in by the United States to 10 to 65 000, the high end of which would represent an increase of over 500%. In reality, the number if she is elected, is likely to be much higher. There will certainly be more people fleeing the region because as President she will pursue the same failed policies she pursued as Secretary of State. These policies are a large part of the reason there is a humanitarian crisis in Syria to flee from in the first place and as ought to be obvious from her belligerent sabre rattling against Syria, Iran, and Russia, she would only escalate the conflict as the American President. The other candidate, Donald J. Trump, is not only opposed to increasing the number of refugees brought in but insists upon better vetting for those who are brought in and has built his entire campaign on a platform of regaining control of America’s borders with regards to both trade and immigration. Furthermore, his foreign policy ideas of concentrating on fighting the real enemy, ISIS, and getting along with other countries like Syria, Iran, and Russia that are fighting the same enemy would be far less likely to exponentially increase the number of people needing to seek asylum.

What will be the decision on November 8th? Will the United States choose to preserve their own existence by electing Donald Trump or will they choose to dissolve America into the globalist new world order of George Soros and his puppet Hillary Clinton? If the Americans choose the latter, will any other Western country be able to find in herself the will to survive?

A Toxic Narrative

Lydia McGrew, a regular contributor to the website What’s Wrong With the World, in a recent post on her personal blog Extra Thoughts, took umbrage with those who have been sharing a particular meme in response to the controversy over the tape of Donald Trump’s lewd boasting of about a decade ago. She described the meme as toxic because it “represents the intrusion of vicious, misogynistic, manospherian attitudes into something more like mainstream culture.” The meme in question goes “If American women are so outraged at Trump's use of naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Grey.” Among the reasons Mrs. McGrew gives for condemning this meme, the first was that it downplays what Trump said, making it out to be about “naughty words” rather than “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it.”

The question of whether or not that meme is “toxic” is not of interest to me here. There is a narrative, however, one that is prevalent in institutions of higher learning today, that most definitely is toxic. Many of the responses that I have seen in social media over the last week to memes like the one Mrs. McGrew was discussing draw heavily upon this narrative and there is a hint of it in Mrs. McGrew’s own analysis even though it is not a narrative with which she is likely to have much sympathy given her stated views on a number of issues. The narrative I refer to is the feminist narrative of “rape culture.”

People who have shared memes similar to the one mentioned above have been accused of defending “rape culture” by those who accept Mrs. McGrew’s interpretation of Trump’s comments as “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it” rather than bragging that one of the benefits of his celebrity is that women are willing to let him do certain things which is the more natural interpretation of his words.

What is this “rape culture” to which they are referring?

Is rape culture the culture that we find when we drop the e off of rape and get rap? It would make sense to equate the two because rape and sexual aggression in general are frequently glorified in the lyrics of the noise which tries to pass itself off as music under that name. This is not, however, what is meant by rape culture and it is worthy of noting, in passing, that another recent meme has drawn attention to the fact that Michelle Obama, who claimed that the Trump tape “has shaken me to the core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted” and, like Mrs. McGrew, interpreted the comments on the tape as bragging about “sexually assaulting women” is herself a fan of rap music. The Obamas have hosted Common, Jay Z, and Rick Ross at the White House, noted misogynists, all of whose lyrics glorify violence in one form or another, including, in the case of Ross, drugging and date raping a girl.

Alright, if rap culture is not included in rape culture, how about a culture which encourages male family members to kill female family members who have been victims of rape in order to save the honour of the family? Last year, on New Year’s Eve, members of one such culture, Islamic culture, who had been foolishly admitted as refugees by female Chancellor Angela Merkel, ganged up on women in major cities all over Germany and sexually assaulted them. Is this the rape culture that everyone is talking about? Unlikely, given that it is Hillary Clinton who wishes to repeat Merkel’s mistake in the United States, and who has condemned as bigotry Mr. Trump’s call for members of this culture to be banned from entry into the United States until they could be strictly vetted.

No, what is meant by “rape culture” is nothing more or less than our culture, twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture, as seen through the lens of a narrative drawn up by the radical wing of the second wave of feminism. These radical feminists have been given an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of academia. The “women’s studies” and “gender studies” classrooms which have been established in major universities over the last fifty years serve little to no real academic purpose but exist solely to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with the message of feminism. The idea of rape culture is central to that message.

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller, a journalist who had been involved in several left-wing causes in the 1960s, including the more radical version of Second Wave feminism of which she would later write a history, had a book published entitled Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, which contained all of the main elements of the rape culture narrative: that rape is about power not sex, it is an instrument by which men as a class intimidate and oppress women as a class so as to keep power in the hands of men, and that Western culture normalizes and legitimizes rape in order to perpetuate the male power structure. The same ideas were put forward in other feminist writings at the same time but Brownmiller’s was by far the most influential.

The narrative, which relies heavily upon presuppositions drawn from Marxist theories that were long ago debunked, is itself utter nonsense. Western culture has condemned rape from time immemorial. One of the legends of Ancient Rome was that of the rape of Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman nobleman, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin Superbus the last king of Rome. Lucretia, after exposing the crime to her father which led to the revolution in which the Senate drove the Tarquins out and formed the Republic, plunged a dagger into her heart. Lucretia’s final act was honoured by the Romans as the ultimate evidence of her chastity but St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo presented a very different view of the matter in his De Civitate Dei. Having argued that the guilt of rape is imputable only to those who commit it, leaving the chastity of the souls and bodies of its victims intact, he argued that suicide is a completely inappropriate response to rape for it imposes the ultimate penalty upon the innocent party (Book I: Chapters 17-19, the last of which specifically addresses the case of Lucretia).

St. Augustine’s view, which could not be further removed from that of the cultures which think that a victim of rape should be killed to save the family’s honour, was informed by the Holy Scriptures, for the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes the death penalty for the man who commits rape, adding that “unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death.” Writing in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by the Goths, his ideas became foundational to Western Christendom.

Western civilization has changed a lot since the days in which it could be credibly called Christendom but the changes, while many of them are lamentable in my eyes, have mostly been ones of which feminists like Brownmiller would approve – women have been given the vote, access to higher education, recognized rights to own property in their own name, and access to careers outside of the home. Furthermore, all of this took place long before Brownmiller penned her tome. Yet it was the Western, and specifically North American, culture of the late twentieth century that the feminists indicted as rape culture.

Anybody who had two brain cells to rub together would not take this narrative seriously for a second, which is perhaps the reason it is so ubiquitous among academic intellectuals. It has only survived this long because feminists, by interweaving their ridiculous accusations against Western culture with the testimonies of actual rape victims have welded the two together in such a way as to make opposition to the narrative's interpretive grid seem like an attack on the personal experiences of rape victims ensuring that those indoctrinated with the narrative will undergo a negative emotional response to any criticism of it The narrative is passed on in an environment in which it is isolated from opposing viewpoints, ostensibly to create a “safe space” for victims, but more realistically to shield the narrative from criticism. It is completely toxic in its effects. It is used to transfer the guilt of a crime traditionally regarded as a capital offence off of its specific perpetrators and onto the entire male sex while condemning as encouraging rape the culture which is arguably the least condoning of it that the world has ever known. Feminists use this evil narrative to justify their insistence that those who make accusations of sexual assault have a “right to be believed” – to call their claims into question is supposedly a part of rape culture – an insistence that contradicts and undermines the fundamental Western right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those who have been evoking this toxic feminist narrative ought to be ashamed of themselves for doing so.

Hic et Ille IV

Sad News

I learned this morning that Phyllis Schlafly passed away yesterday at the age of 92. Schlafly was a noted American conservative leader. She will probably be most remembered for leading the anti-feminist campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment – one of the few social conservative campaigns in the last half century to actually succeed in attaining its objective. In 1964, her book A Choice Not An Echo, called upon conservatives within the Republican Party to choose Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater as their candidate. Just as the title of Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences has endured as a slogan in the American conservative movement – regrettably, the book’s substantial content has not fared as well – so ought the title of Schlafly’s book to endure as a perennial reminder to purportedly conservative politicians, ever faced with the temptation to adopt progressive policies in order to “get with the times” and “appeal to the masses,” that they are supposed to present the electorate with an alternative to liberalism, not just alternative leadership to liberalism. Rona Ambrose and other leaders of Canada’s Conservative Party, I am looking in your direction as I write this. Most recently, Schlafly, who operated mostly through an organization she founded back in the 1970s called the Eagle Forum, has taken a strong stand on immigration and accordingly endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for the US Presidency. Her enemies, as far back as Betty Friedan in the fight over the ERA, accused her of being a hate-filled woman, an accusation that I have seen repeated in one or two headlines announcing her death – demonstrating once again, just how unclassy people who believe in a classless society can be – but like most if not all accusations of “hate” from the left, this was obviously a projection of their own feelings upon the object of their own hatred. She was a devout Roman Catholic Christian, whose writings I have enjoyed over the years. May she rest in peace.

Happy News

Angela Merkel’s sinister (that’s Latin for left) attempt to make the death of Western civilization through its own liberalism foretold in Jean Raspail’s dystopic novel The Camp of the Saints into a living reality has now backfired against her. Her party did poorly in the state elections in Germany this past weekend, coming in third in her own state, behind the AfD party which opposes the policy of national and cultural suicide through the embrace of the migration tsunami that Merkel has spearheaded over the last year and a half. Acknowledging that her decisions with regards to the “refugees” contributed to her losses at the polls, she has nevertheless doubled down and insisted that these decisions were right. Perhaps she ought not to be blamed for being a slow learner, however. It seems to be a common affliction in her country, which last year sentenced an 87 year old grandmother to ten years in prison for saying that Auschwitz was “not historically proven” to be a death camp, thus demonstrating that they learned absolutely nothing of value whatsoever from their twelve years under the tyranny of the Third Reich where people were imprisoned, or worse, for saying things the regime did not like. Hopefully, however, the trouncing Merkel got over the weekend shows that the Germans have learned a lesson or two from her misrule. Let us pray that the trend indicated by this election, and by the BREXIT vote in the UK a few months back, will continue, that the monstrosity that is the EU will be brought down, and the “Camp of the Saints” style death of Europe for which it had longed, averted.

Quis erit Caesar?

George Santayana famously stated that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The eighteenth century founders of the American Republic might have profited from this insight, had it been made prior to their own time. In their rebellion against the British Crown and Parliament, they envisioned the republic they built for themselves as a New Rome in the New World. The old Rome, having driven out the Tarquins with much greater grounds of complaint than the Americans ever had against King George III, created a vacuum in their constitution which periodically had to be filled by dictators, and which eventually was permanently filled by the Caesars. The lesson to be learned is that if you will not have your lawful king to rule over you, eventually you will have to bow your knee to Caesar. It is evident that the American Republic, having become an empire in the twentieth century, is now entering a phase of Caesarism and the question the Americans will be answering in their election this November is who gets to be Caesar? Will it be the decrepit old harpy, who thinks she is owed the position by virtue of her sex, who dishonestly wrangled the nomination of her party away from the more popular Bernie Saunders despite running while under criminal investigation, who thinks that by claiming that not knowing “C” stood for “classified” on the top-secret information she was so loose with as Secretary of State excuses her behaviour rather than demonstrating her to be incompetent to hold high office, who is the most corrupt candidate her party – the party of Tammany Hall and Joseph P. Kennedy, mind you – has ever known, and who with the blood of Serbs, Iraquis, Libyans, Egyptians and Syrians already on her hands from her warmongering as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, seems determined to go head to head against Russia? Or will it be the first candidate in decades not to dance to the tune of the one-world globalists and free traders, who is instead, to borrow the words of the late Phyllis Schlafly, presenting Americans with “a choice, not an echo”?

St. Mother Theresa and the Beast

Mother Theresa of Calcutta has just been canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Without calling into question her worthiness of the honour, I would merely observe that it is somewhat tainted by the fact that presiding over the canonization was a Pope truly worthy of the appellation the Reformers gave to his predecessors in the sixteenth century – Antichrist.

Justin Trudeau’s So-Called “Social Justice”

Whenever I hear the expression “social justice” I am reminded of what T. S Eliot had to say about this phrase in a footnote to the introduction of his excellent Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot wrote:

I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term ‘social justice’. From meaning ‘justice in relations between groups or classes’ it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to what these relationships should be; and a course of action might be supported because it represented the aim of ‘social justice’, which from the point of view of ‘justice’ was not just. The term ‘social justice’ is in danger of losing its rational content—which would be replaced by a powerful emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should never be employed unless the user is prepared to define clearly what social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just. (1)

Today, almost seventy years after the first edition of this book was published, that the rational content of “social justice” might be replaced by a powerful emotional charge is no longer a danger but rather something that has long since come to pass. It does indeed, now, mean a particular assumption as to what the relationships between groups or classes should be, namely that all groups and classes ought to relate to each other as equals, with, of course, the understanding implicit in all egalitarian dogmas that some, as Orwell wrote, “are more equal than others”. Moreover, almost every course of action that is justified today by the cause of social justice, stands condemned as unjust before the tribunal at which “justice”, as Plato and Aristotle understood this term, an understanding which corresponds quite well with the use of the same term in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, sits as judge.

True justice, in the classical understanding of the term, is both the external requirement that we pay what we owe to God, the law, and to other people and the internal virtue of habitually so doing. This excludes any form of egalitarianism for our obligations towards God and Caesar are different from each other, and our obligations to our fellow men vary greatly in accordance with our relationship to each. What a man’s owes to his wife and children he does not owe to his neighbour’s wife and children, and all men are under greater obligation to their friends and neighbours than they are to strangers, and to their countrymen than to foreigners.

In the Christian faith we are taught that we have obligations to the poor, the sick, the stranger, and in general, those who are in need. Sadly, there is a tendency among many who profess faith to read these obligations into all secular talk of social justice.

Recently, Christian Week, a monthly periodical with at least two titular inaccuracies, ran an article by columnist Josh Valley entitled “Evangelicals Should Applaud Justin Trudeau’s Sense of Social Justice”. In this column Valley asks if we ought not to “forgive” or “overlook” the liberalism of leaders like Trudeau when “it’s clear they’re compassionately sold to welcoming the least of these and bringing forth justice for the vulnerable and mistreated”.

The question was worded so as to elicit the response of “yes” from his readership. Who in their right mind, after all, would oppose and not support “bringing forth justice for the vulnerable and mistreated”? Valley then goes on, however, to give examples of what he considers to be the Prime Minister Trudeau’s compassionate commitment to justice. The very first example he gives is this:

Although overly ambitious and imperfect, the Trudeau government’s efforts to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada should cause Evangelicals to applaud Trudeau’s sense of social justice.

Oh really?

The unemployment rate in Canada has been over 7 percent since August of last year, jumping to 7.2% this past month. With our economy in the state it presently is, as reflected in the low value of the Canadian dollar, things are likely to get worse, probably much worse, before they get better. Yet, at the Prime Minister’s behest, the governments of Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, and it would be fair to assume every other province in the Dominion, have been offering taxpayer-funded incentives for employers to hire the incoming Syrians.

When 7.2% of Canadians are unemployed, and the provincial governments are giving incentives to employers to hire Syrians, the Prime Minister’s efforts to bring large numbers of these Syrians here will only make things worse for Canadians who are out of work.

Why exactly are evangelicals expected to applaud this?

Valley goes on to say: “What we do for the least of these should not only define who we are as Canadians, but who we are as Christians as well.”

If, however, we think of “the least of these” in terms of the poor and unemployed members of our own society, then these are the ones who will be most adversely affected by Trudeau’s Syrian policy. Perhaps Mr. Valley thinks that “the least of these” on a global scale trumps “the least of these” within the context of one’s own national community, but this is not what Christianity has historically and traditionally taught.

Nor is it merely a question of jobs. Last year Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors of her country to “Syrian refugees” on a much larger scale than Trudeau has attempted, with the consequences that on New Year’s Eve all major German cities saw their young women subjected to robbery, sexual harassment, and even rape by gangs of these migrants. What kind of justice demands that a country expose its young women to this sort of thing in order to show compassion to foreigners? Will Mr. Valley still be suggesting that we applaud Trudeau's "social justice" when Canadian women are subjected to the same treatment?


According to Mr. Valley, we should be proud that our Prime Minister “cares about the vulnerable and the abused in our midst”. Yet a few paragraphs later he acknowledges that Mr. Trudeau takes “position on issues like abortion, marijuana and euthanasia” that would be problematic for evangelicals. That is a bit of an understatement. Mr. Trudeau has taken the most extreme pro-abortion position possible – that there should be no restrictions on a woman’s “right” to kill her unborn child up until birth, and that there should be no further discussion of the issue. What does it say about Mr. Trudeau’s “care” for the “vulnerable and the abused” that he not only refuses to protect the vulnerable and abused unborn, but won’t allow others the freedom of conscience to do so either?

“God does not call us”, Mr. Valley writes “to be moral crusaders, but peace-makers and love-proclaimers.” As true as this is, it needs to be pointed out that “social justice” is a banner under which a different sort of moral crusader marches. Furthermore, while the person crusading against abortion, homosexuality and euthanasia, seeks to impose limitations on people’s behavior and actions – or rather, to restore the social limitations on these that were in place several decades ago - the social justice crusader seeks to impose limitations on people’s thoughts and feelings, and is by far the more oppressive of the two.

Finally, just because someone likes to portray his agenda as being one of “love” “compassion” “peace” and the like does not mean that we ought to shut down our brains and blindly follow him. These kind of soft words sound pleasant to men’s ears, much more so than the hard words in which truth must often be spoken, and are for this reason the kind of words that deceivers love to use. Mr. Trudeau’s words may be full of caring and compassion, but his actions sing another tune, at least as far as the unborn, the unemployed Canadians who will be competing for fewer available jobs thanks to his Syrian program, the women who he is potentially exposing to the kind of harassment we have just seen in Germany, and the future generations who may end up defrauded of the Canada their ancestors once enjoyed and which should have been theirs, are concerned. There is nothing in this for the thinking Christian to applaud.


(1) T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1948, 1962, 1967), pp.16-17, footnote 2.

The Stench of Cologne

In the fall of 1798, a young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, accompanied by his friend and poetic collaborator William Wordsworth, paid a visit to Germany, where he came under the influence of German philosophers and poets such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, which influence he brought back to England with him where he, along with Wordsworth and Robert Southey, launched the Romantic movement in nineteenth century English poetry. On a later visit to Germany, what he brought back with him, was a negative impression of the city of Cologne. In July of 1828 he wrote the following lines which were published a few years later:

In Köhln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

One of the things that stands out about this poem today is the irony of this malodorous accusation being leveled against the city whose name has become synonymous with that of perfumes bottled for and marketed to men. The irony may be intentional – the original Eau de Cologne had been around for almost a century by the time the future Lake Poet visited Germany - although it was the city’s extremely poor sewage drainage system that the poet was directly talking about. This may go a long way towards explaining why Johann Maria Farina felt the need to create the famous scent in the first place.

Farina, as you may have surmised from his name, was not German born. An immigrant from Italy, he created the perfume which bolstered the reputation of his adopted city in the very year in which he made Cologne his home. That was 1709. Much has changed, unfortunately, between 1709 and 2015, and as the latter year drew to a close, on the eve of the New Year, a very different class of immigrants introduced a new stench to the city, a stench so strong that it turned the area around the city’s famous Cathedral, housing the Shrine of the Three Kings, into a no-go zone right before Epiphany, the Feast commemorating the Visit of the Magi whose relics are supposedly contained in that shrine.

It is in the city’s central square, located between the railway station and the aforementioned Cathedral, that the inhabitants of Cologne customarily gather together to ring in the New Year. Among those assembled this time around, were large numbers of young, drunken, hooligans, described by their victims as being recent immigrants who were “Arab or North African” in appearance and origin. These threw firecrackers into the crowd to create confusion and then, in the midst of that confusion, isolated young women, surrounded them in large numbers, and groped, robbed, and, in some cases, raped them. The number of victims who have come forward with complaints is now in the hundreds.

Similar happenings, it should be noted, took place in other German cities such as Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Hamburg and in other northern European countries such as Austria and Finland.

If the stench of these crimes was not bad enough in itself, to it must be added that of the response on the part of the German civil authorities and the establishment media. I do not mean merely the failure of the Cologne police on the night in question to contain the incidents, capture the perpetrators, protect the public and restore order. These attacks were well organized and the police were overwhelmed. I refer rather to the way in which the authorities, from the Cologne police administration up to the German Chancellor’s office, and the media, made it their highest priority to protect the very foolishness that left German cities vulnerable to this kind of attack in the first place.

A civil war has been underway in Syria since the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, in which rebel forces, with heavy foreign support, have sought to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In the course of the war the eastern part of the country came under the control of the same hard-core Islamic groups that had seized power in western Iraq, creating what is now known as ISIS or ISIL, the Islamic State that has declared itself to be the restored and revived caliphate. Since the war began a large number of Syrians have fled, whether from ISIS, Assad, or just the destruction of the war itself, to such neighboring countries as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey.

A little over a year ago another phenomenon began to attract attention as thousands of people had begun pouring into Europe through Turkey claiming to be refugees from the Syrian conflict. This flood shows no signs of abating and has grown to the millions, the overwhelming majority of whom are young Muslim men of military age, and of whom only a minority are actually from Syria. It was obvious to those who had eyes to see that this horde of young men, who showed a great deal of disregard for the law, customs, and authorities of the countries they were entering, were not a genuine wave of refugees seeking asylum from threats to life and limb at home, but an invasion.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, chose instead to accept the deceitful media narrative about a crisis of humanity and some moral obligation we supposedly have to open our hearts and borders to those who at the time were striving to endear themselves to the countries they wished to enter by swarming over fences, chanting obscenities, and hurling rocks and bottles at the police. She declared that Germany would take in any Syrian refugee who wanted to come – by the end of the year, a million had taken her up on that offer – and began pressuring other European governments to do the same.

Merkel is now calling for Germany to implement new laws which would make it easier to deport asylum-seekers who commit crimes but has not acknowledged that her effort to win a reputation for compassion at the expense of her country and people was, to put it mildly, mistaken. Indeed, the Cologne police and the German federal government initially denied, what they have now been forced to admit, that those who committed this wave of sexual assaults and robberies were mostly newcomers to Germany, from the Middle East, who entered as asylum-claimants and they continue to be more concerned that those on the right who oppose open borders and mass immigration will gain support because of incidents like these than they are for the well-being of their countrymen, or in this case, countrywomen. The German media, which did not seriously report on these events until the eve of Epiphany, five days later, seems to share this attitude, the stink of which is greater than any of the two and seventy, noted by Coleridge in the nineteenth century, and which would require a sea of Eau de Cologne to drown it out.

Fighting the Invasion in Fiction: A Comparison Between C. S. Lewis and Jean Raspail

C. S. Lewis, the Oxford and Cambridge professor who wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, is mostly remembered as an author for his novels. These, like his works of non-fiction, articulated and defended Christian truth. The most popular of these are the seven novel fantasy series for young readers in which children from England have adventures in a magical world called Narnia. The BBC adapted the first four of these for television in the 1980s and Walden Media produced the first three of them as big screen films starting with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005. Another company is currently working on the fourth.

Both sets of adaptations followed the order in which the books were originally published. Had the BBC continued the series The Horse and His Boy would have been next. It is highly unlikely that any movie company would be willing to make a movie version of this and if, by chance, one were to do so, the original story would almost certainly be unrecognizable in the film.

In this underrated novel, first published in 1954, the Tisroc, ruler of Calormen, a desert country populated by turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding people of dark complexion plots the conquest of Narnia and Archenland with his heir Prince Rabadash who desires to make Narnia’s Queen Susan his bride by force. Narnia and Archenland, situated to the northwest of Calormen, are free countries, populated by talking animals, magical and mythological creatures of various sorts, and governed by people of light skin and fair complexion. Narnia and Archenland are loyal to Aslan the Lion, while Calormen is an idol worshipping land, the chief idol of which is the demon Tash. The title characters are Bree, a Narnian talking horse, and Shasta, a highborn Archenlander boy. Both were captured and taken to Calormen when very young and are now attempting to flee to the lands of their birth. They join forces with Aravis, a Calormene princess who for reasons of her own is trying to escape her own country, and her talking mare Hwin. When they discover the Tisroc’s plot, their escape attempt becomes a race to keep ahead of Rabadash’s army so as to warn Narnia and Archenland in time.

For obvious reasons The Horse and His Boy is not going to win any awards for political correctness. It is interesting to compare and contrast this book with The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The original French edition of this latter volume came out nineteen years after The Horse and His Boy was first published. The largest similarity between the two is that in both, civilized, free lands with light-skinned people are threatened with invasion from lands to their southeast populated by dark-skinned people. There is a major difference in how the story turns out, however. At the risk of giving away the endings to both books, in The Horse and His Boy Shasta succeeds in his mission, the forces of Narnia and Archenland defeat the invaders, and Rabadash receives his comeuppance, but in The Camp of the Saints, Western civilization succumbs to the invasion and disappears.

Some might explain the significance of this difference as being that between an optimistic and a pessimistic outlook, others that it is the difference between an idealistic and a realistic outlook. I suggest that the real significance is that it is a difference in how the real world in which we live is meant to be reflected in the fictional worlds of the two novels. Narnia is a world of the imagination, the France of The Camp of the Saints is a fictional version of the France in our world. This, of course, means that Narnia is a step further removed from our real world, but it is nevertheless the case that Lewis intended for us to see truths about our world through the imaginary world he has portrayed for us. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, we are obviously intended to see the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in that of the Lion Aslan.

To the extent that the Narnia and Archenland of Lewis’ imaginary world reflect the Western Civilization – or better yet, Christendom – of our world, they are pictures of our past, inspired by history. When the early Islamic Caliphate sought to conquer Europe, and the forces of Abd-er-Rahman were decisively defeated by Charles Martel’s Franks in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD and when the Ottoman Turks marched against the Holy Roman Empire to be defeated before the gates of Vienna in 1683 AD – these historical events from our world have an echo in the defeat of Rabadash in the world of Narnia.

It is a different episode of history that is fictionally re-enacted in Raspail’s novel. When, at the end of the story, Western Civilization has been reduced to twenty faithful defenders besieged in a small village overlooking the Riviera, among them are a Constantine Dragasès and a Luke Notaras – the names of the last Byzantine Emperor and his military commander when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 AD. The vision of our world that we are presented with in The Camp of the Saints, is not of our past but of what, at the time, was a possible future, one in which all of Western Christendom falls as Constantinople did.

Today, the novel reads not so much as a picture of a possible future but of an all too real present. Much of it is coming true before our very eyes. Minister Jean Orelle’s press conference in chapter seventeen, in which he announces that France is ready and willing to “assume the humanitarian obligations incumbent upon all men of good will in these truly unprecedented times” by taking in the migrants from India, and “asks only one thing…that she not stand alone” has taken on flesh in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s throwing open Germany’s borders to the migrants claiming to be Syrian refugees, while expecting other European countries to help cover the cost of her compassion. The media’s one-sidedness, dishonest coverage, and emotional manipulation have been so close to what Raspail described that one can almost hear Albert Durfort telling us “we are all from Kurdistan now”.

Sadly, the church too has been behaving as if Raspail’s novel were a script to follow. Pope Francis’ lecture to the American Congress last week sounded like it was lifted from the papal Good Friday address in the thirty-third chapter of the book. The Protestant churches are behaving no better. Virtually every official ecclesiastical statement on the “refugee crisis” conveys an attitude of “we are rich and they are poor therefore we need to bend over and take it” that is enough to make one vomit. It comes straight out of the pages of The Camp of the Saints.

In The Camp of the Saints, Raspail depicts a church that is walking around after it is already dead. Corrupted by liberalism and leftism, her clergy have abandoned her old ways, traditions, and faith and her people have abandoned their churches. When the Ganges fleet approaches the Suez canal the Muslim world take to their mosques and call upon Allah. Raspail’s narrator muses about what would have happened if the people of Europe had returned to their churches and begun to call upon God in earnest once more. Only twelve Benedictine monks are faithful to the old ways and march to the sea carrying the Blessed Sacrament in the hope that it will repel the invaders. These are all that remain of the religion that moved men like Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski to take up arms and fight off the invaders of Christendom in the past.

The spirit of that religion, or at least of its fictional otherworldly counterpart, is alive and well in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia which is why, when Shasta arrives in the nick of time, King Lune of Archenland does not then sit down with Lord Darrin to discuss the ways in which they can make Rabadash and the Calormenes welcome, but instead sets about defending his castle and fighting off the invading army.

In Lewis’ novel, the invaders come on horseback armed with swords. In Raspail’s novel, and in real life today, they come armed with their own poverty and seemingly desperate conditions, which are much harder weapons to fight against as they are effectively designed to penetrate our defences and hit us where we are weak. We will never be able to fight such a weapon unless we recover the old-fashioned Christianity of C. S. Lewis, with its fighting spirit and will to live and abandon the sappy, liberalism that has taken its place, that apologizes for the Crusades, and embraces the cultural and ethnic death of the peoples of the West and their civilization.