Bishop Strachan and the Soul of Canada

On July 1st, 1867, the British North America Act went into effect and the Dominion of Canada was born, consisting, at the time, of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but which would eventually grow to include all the provinces and territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown in continental North America. Four months later, on the Feast of All Saints, a man who had called for the confederation of British North America decades before the political realities of the 1860s spurred our statesmen into action on the matter, went to his eternal reward. That man was the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto. For much of the half century prior to Confederation Strachan had been the spiritual and intellectual leader of Upper Canada. He was also the very embodiment of Toryism in its pure, undiluted form. A much watered-down version of this same Toryism inspired and drove the Fathers of Confederation, a fact that the Liberal Party has always resented, which resentment has been behind their relentless efforts to undo Confederation and re-make the country into their own, warped, image. In these efforts, they have been all too lamentably successful.

John Strachan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1778, while the American Revolution was underway. (1) When he was fourteen, his father died in an accident at the local granite quarry of which he was the overseer, and the support of his mother and sisters fell upon him. He was able, through tutoring and teaching, to both provide that support and to fund his own studies in divinity at the University of Aberdeen. After a number of disappointments in his efforts to improve his situation in Scotland, he was told that an academy had been founded in Kingston, Upper Canada with the intention that it would grow into a college, and that the principalship of the school was offered to him. He accepted the offer and crossed the Atlantic only to discover that the school was just theoretical. Nevertheless, he found a patron in the Hon. Richard Cartwright, the United Empire Loyalist from Albany, New York who had rebuilt his family’s fortune as a businessman in Kingston, and served as a judge and legislator in the province. Cartwright made Strachan the tutor of his eldest sons, and soon other leading Loyalist families put their sons under his tutelage as well.

One of the Loyalists who sent his sons to study under Strachan was Dr. John Stuart, the founding rector of the Anglican parish in Kingston that would eventually evolve into St. George’s Cathedral (the basis of the fictional St. Nicholas’ Cathedral that features in Robertson Davies’ Salterton trilogy). It was Dr. Stuart who persuaded Strachan to seek ordination in the Church of England. Strachan had come from a family that was mixed religiously, and while the theology he had been taught in Aberdeen was that of his mother’s Presbyterianism, he was more drawn to the non-juring, Scottish Episcopal Church of his father, and would become a staunch advocate of the beliefs, practices, and rights of that Church’s English counterpart. In 1803 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, by Dr. Jacob Mountain, the first bishop of the diocese of Quebec, which at the time included all of the Anglican Churches in what is now Quebec and Ontario. The following year he was ordained a priest. His first assignment was to the mission church in Cornwall.

His entering into Holy Orders ought not to be considered a change in careers. He certainly did not see it that way himself and, if anything, his educational efforts increased after his ordination. This is entirely in keeping with his philosophy of education, in which the Church was the institution best suited to provide a sound education on a solid religious foundation. Accordingly, one of the first things he did upon taking up the ministry in Cornwall was to establish a grammar school which quickly achieved distinction. His student roster resembles a Who’s Who of the next generation of judicial, executive, legislative, and ecclesiastical leadership of Upper Canada. The school was basically a traditional, British, parochial grammar school – a classics based curriculum, daily prayer services, and an emphasis on character formation, especially the instillation of a sense of civic and religious duty – but with a larger role for what we would today call STEM classes. The non-existent academy that had lured him to Canada he thus ended up creating himself.

It was during his ministry in Cornwall that he met and married Ann, the daughter of the local physician, and the young widow of Montreal businessman Andrew McGill. He also became a close friend of his wife’s brother-in-law from her first marriage, James McGill, and convinced him to bequeath his large estate for the purpose of founding of a college. This, of course, is how McGill University came to be. Strachan was named a trustee of the college in McGill’s will and was intended by McGill to be the school’s first principal, although his commitments in Upper Canada ultimately prevented him from taking this position in Lower Canada.

In 1812 Strachan accepted the post of rector of the Anglican parish in York. At the time the future city of Toronto was just a small town, but an important one, being the capital of Upper Canada. Sir Isaac Brock, the Lieutenant Governor of the province, appointed him the chaplain to the military garrison stationed at York at the same time that he assumed the rectorship. This was immediately prior to the outbreak of war. The grasping and covetous Yankees, believing that all of North America was destined to belong to their republic, declared war on the British Empire on the assumption that her preoccupation with the Napoleonic war in Europe, would render British North America vulnerable to their plans of conquest. At the cost of much bloodshed, they were proven to be mistaken as the Canadians took up arms and fought alongside the Imperial army and such Indian allies as the Ojibwas and the Iroquois Confederacy to repel the invaders who arrogantly saw themselves as liberators. In all of this, Strachan played a major role, not only through his role as military chaplain and by using his pulpit to promote patriotic Loyalism, but as the main organizer of the “Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada”, to raise support for the relief of the wounded, widows, and orphans. He also had the unfortunate task of having to negotiate terms in 1813 when American forces overwhelmed the defenders of York and forced the Imperial troops to retreat to Kingston. He was able to secure the release of the starving, sick, and wounded militia men who had been taken prisoner, but was unable, due to the inability of the American general to control his men, to completely prevent the burning and looting of York. (2) Had he not already been a man of strong Loyalist, royalist, and Tory principles, firmly and fundamentally opposed to liberalism, republicanism, and everything else the United States stood for, this experience would have made him one, and it steeled him in these convictions.

After the war Strachan found himself fighting the forces of liberal, secular, American republicanism in the domestic form of the subversive Reform movement – the movement from which the Liberal Party of Canada, eventually sprung. The Reform movement, created by pamphleteers and yellow journalists, had as its initial goal the transformation of Canada into a Yankee style republic, but when they found that this would not sell – the republican revolution attempted by William Lyon Mackenzie in 1837 received little support and was easily defeated (3) – they moderated this into a demand for “responsible government.” This consisted of a two-fold transfer of power – first, from the Imperial to the provincial government, second from the executive branch of the provincial government to the legislative assembly. Even in this modified version, the Reformers, like the American Revolutionaries before them, followed in the footsteps of the seventeenth century Puritan Whigs, who had usurped the authority, rights, and privileges of the Crown because they saw the concentration of power in the elected assembly which they were able to control as the easiest path to shoving their radical agenda down everyone else’s throats. “Responsible government” is a nonsensical phrase – unfettered democracy is, and always has been, the least responsible form of government, and the well-spring of all tyranny. (4)

Strachan had been appointed to the Executive and Legislative Councils of Upper Canada in 1815 and 1820 respectively. He was not the first or only clergyman to serve in this capacity, but his presence there was regarded as intolerable by the Reformers. Nor did the fact that many of his former pupils also served on these Councils reconcile the Reformers to his presence.

When Upper Canada had been separated from Lower Canada in the late eighteenth century, the Crown had set aside land for the support of “Protestant clergy” with the obvious intent of establishing the English parochial system in the former. Strachan was a strong believer and defender of the original intent of the Clergy Reserves, whereas the Reform Movement took the position that the legislature should confiscate the land, sell it off, and use the proceeds to support – secular – education. Others did not go as far as this, but wanted the Reserves divided between the Church of England and the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. Still others wished to divide the Reserves further, including the non-conformist and enthusiastic sects as well.

Strachan, as we have seen, was a pioneer in the development of Upper Canadian education. This was related to his support for the re-creation of the parochial system because he believed firmly that schools administered by the Church, with a sound, orthodox, religious foundation for learning, were the best way to elevate and refine a culture, and civilize a society. He held this to be true of higher education as well and in 1827 around the time that he was made Archdeacon of York he obtained a Royal Charter along with an endowment of land for King’s College, an Anglican university of which he would serve as the president. The Reformers demanded that the university be confiscated and secularized.

The Reformers won in each these battles and it is worth noting that similar struggles were taking place in the United Kingdom at the same time. The Warden, the first of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, tells the story of a saintly clergyman, whose income as warden of an almhouse supported by a land bequest dating back centuries, comes under attack by a newspaper editor bent on reform, who makes up for what he lacks in the way of brains and information with an overabundance of self-important ideals. While the story is fictional, Trollope drew from real situations and people in writing his novels, and there are obvious parallels between this and the Clergy Reserves fight in Upper Canada. Not long after the battle for King’s College in Canada, liberal reformers in Britain successfully used their strength in Parliament to force secularizing reforms on Oxford University, diverting much of its endowments from their intended purposes in theological education, and weakening the school’s ties to the Church by making religious services and subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles optional. (5) This helps to illustrate the sad point that George Grant made in Lament for a Nation that our vulnerability to Americanization despite our Tory Fathers best efforts to shield us against it is largely due to liberal rot having already set in throughout the British Empire, including the mother country herself.

At the heart of each of these three conflicts can be seen the same basic clash of ideals. The Reformers were motivated by a liberal ideal that had first been enunciated by the Anabaptists and one extreme branch of the Puritans and which later was enshrined in the Constitution of the American republic, the doctrine of separation of Church and State. This is a false ideal from the perspective of both sound theology and sound politics. The reasons why it is bad theology are too long to get into here. (6) Politically it is unsound because it reduces religion to a matter of personal choice and hinders if not outright prevents its being the force for social and civil good that it is supposed to be. Strachan understood this and fought for Church establishment on sound, orthodox, principles. He lost each of these battles – he resigned his positions on the Executive and Legislative Councils, was forced by the legislative assembly to sell the Clergy Reserves, and saw King’s College confiscated by the legislative assembly and secularized into the University of Toronto. In both cases the legislative assembly grossly exceeded their authority thus illustrating what I said earlier about democracy being the well-spring of tyranny for the confiscation of endowed property and the perversion of educational institutions into the opposite of what their founder intended constitutes a form of tyranny. They got away with it because the Imperial government, not wanting to risk another American revolution so soon after the first one, was unwilling to check the provincial legislature when it stepped out of bounds. Nevertheless, while the Reformers defeated Strachan’s vision of Church establishment, they fell short of achieving their own goal of separation of Church and State which goes beyond mere non-establishment. (7)

Strachan’s response to these losses is most admirable and shows tremendous character. After the legislative robbery of King’s College, he raised the funds to create a new Anglican university, Trinity College, for which he obtained a second Royal Charter! In 1839 the Church of England in the Canadas had grown sufficiently that is was deemed appropriate to divide the Diocese of Quebec and form the Diocese of Toronto of which he was consecrated the first Bishop. He continued to promote the growth of the ministry of the English Church, and despite the loss of the Clergy Reserves was successful enough to warrant the formation of two more Dioceses out of his own, the Diocese of Huron in 1857 and the Diocese of Ontario in 1862. Even before his efforts to create an established, parochial, system failed, he had the foresight to plan for a day when the Church would have to govern and support itself apart from Royal patronage, and in 1851 formed the first Diocesan Synod, setting the precedent that would be followed by the Anglican Church throughout the Dominion of Canada.

If Bishop Strachan, the orthodox Churchman who stood for “Apostolic Order and Evangelical Truth” can see the huge leap away from both that the Anglican Church of Canada is planning on taking in its next General Synod, he is undoubtedly spinning in his tomb, beneath the High Altar of St. James, the parish he pastored in Toronto the building of which, having to be rebuilt due to fire, re-opened as his Cathedral upon his return from his consecration at Lambeth Palace in 1839. This is all the more true if he can also see how Papa Doc and Baby Doc Trudeau have done their worst to turn the Dominion of Canada that had just come into being prior to his departure from this life into a crummy, Communist, Third World, dunghole and how the educational system of Canada, that he put so much thought and effort into, and which at its height produced such minds as Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, Harold Innis, Robertson Davies, Northrop Frye, Donald Creighton and Eugene Forsey has so decayed that it is now churning out unreflective morons who buy wholly in to the militant “wokeness” that has come to infest our country and fail to recognize it for what it is, a cruel totalitarianism that is far closer in spirit than anything else in Canada today to the regime against which we and the rest of the British family of nations bravely went to war in 1939. Whereas Bishop Strachan fought for Canada’s soul, today’s progressives have sold it.

Happy Dominion Day
God Save the Queen!

(1) For the biographical details included in this essay I consulted Alexander Neil Bethune, Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D. D., L.L.D., First Bishop of Toronto, Toronto, Henry Rowsell, 1870. The author had attended Strachan’s Grammar School in Cornwall, later became a divinity student under him, was appointed chaplain by Strachan upon his elevation to the episcopacy, then later archdeacon, and was chosen and consecrated by Strachan as coadjutor bishop in his final days, and thus ultimately succeeded him as bishop of Toronto.

(2) The following year, the Yanks experienced payback when the Imperial forces burned the city they had built on the marshy territory between the Potomac River and Tiber Creek. However, since most Americans rightly consider the swamp gas that is still emitted from the goings on in that city to be the source of a major part of their woes, perhaps we should think of this not so much in terms of payback but as doing them a favour.

(3) Mackenzie went into exile but later returned and was elected to the legislative assembly. His attempt at violent revolution ought to have barred him from even running for public office. Ideally, the ban would have extended to his descendants as well. His grandson and namesake, became Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister and was also Canada’s third or fourth worst Prime Minister after the two Trudeaus, and possibly Pearson, depending upon which you consider to be worst, the treasonous betrayal of your country to both the Americans and the Soviets simultaneously (Pearson) or sabotaging our system of king/queen-in-Parliament and granting near dictatorial power to the Prime Minister’s Office (Mackenzie King). Any one of the notorious Black Donnellys of Kingston, even if they had been guilty of ten times the crimes of which their neighbours accused them before lynching them in 1880, would have made a better Prime Minister than any of these contemptible, lowlife, creeps.

(4) The most responsible form of government, is the traditional mixed king/queen-in-Parliament system, which still survives in Britain and Canada although badly damaged by the efforts towards democratic absolutism of liberals in both countries in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries respectively. The Whig Interpretation of History maintains that this system emerged from the triumph of the Puritans over the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, but this is nonsense. It is the Stuarts who were the champions of the balanced, responsible, Westminster system against the Puritans and the Whigs who sought to subvert it. Also nonsense is the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian history which re-writes our story from one of noble Loyalism into a version of the American struggle for independence. That the majority of Canadian historians teach the Liberal version lends it no credibility. It is merely more evidence that the Liberal Party of Canada operates like the Communist Party of North Korea, where only the Kim-approved official version of Korean history is allowed to be taught. Which is one reason why aspersions cast by the Canadian Historical Association on the “academic merit” of the work of others ought to be treated as nothing more than a laughable joke. For real Canadian history the best writers were Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton.

(5) See the second volume of Edward Meyrick Goulburn’s extensive biography of John William Burgon, for an account of how Burgon, later the Dean of Chichester Cathedral but at the time the vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin – the position held by John Henry Newman before his defection across the Tiber – fought, heroically but unsuccessfully, against these reforms. The biography was published by John Murray of London in 1892.

(6) I shall, Deus Vult, address this issue in full in a later essay. The orthodox view of the matter is that the Church and State are distinct kingdoms, under God, with their own sphere of authority. As members of the Church, baptized kings like other Christians, are subject to the authority of the Apostolic ministry, as members of the State, Bishops, like other subject-citizens, are subject to the authority of the king. Bishops govern the Church through the ministry of the keys, kings govern the State through the ministry of the sword. Church and State are complementary and distinct, but not separate. See George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, 1716, especially the 42 propositions in the section found on pages 62 to 129, as well as the section on Church and State, Part V, found in the second volume of William Palmer’s A Treatise on the Church of Christ Designed Chiefly for the Use of Students of Theology, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838.

(7) Liberal writers such as Michael Harris and Warren Kinsella have sometimes claimed that separation of Church and State is a Canadian value. If this is not just a simple matter of confusing our history and tradition with that of the United States, then they presumably have the outcome of the battles over the Church Reserves and King’s College in mind. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that non-establishment is the full equivalent of separation of Church and State, which it is not. This still would not make the separation of Church and State a Canadian value. By Canada, the Liberal writers mean the Dominion of Canada, the country founded by the Confederation of British North America. The above battles affected only Upper Canada – Ontario. They did not affect the other provinces of British North America, not even Lower Canada – Quebec – in which the Roman Catholic Church was firmly established and remained so until the Quiet Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Quebec’s controversial Bill 21, just passed, does indeed seem to have created a separation of Church and State, but only in the province of Quebec. Warren Kinsella in a recent column condemned it as fascist. Whether he is right or wrong is a subject for another time, although I will say that in my opinion Quebec would have been better off going the route of undoing the Quiet Revolution and re-establishing the Roman Church than taking the path of complete secularization. I merely wish to point out the extremely amusing irony of the self-contradictory position Kinsella has taken.

Progressive Do-Gooders and Racial Realities

In The Warden, the first volume of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, we are given an illustration of the mischief which zealous, progressive social reformers can do when they have the support of the news media. The title character is the Reverend Septimus Harding, an elderly clergyman who is the warden of an almshouse operated by the Church of England in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. A zealous young social reformer and the suitor of the warden’s daughter, Dr. John Bold believes that the warden receives too high of an income from the property which had been donated to establish the almshouse, and takes legal action to correct this perceived injustice. While Bold is able to keep his knowledge of the fact that the warden is a good and honest man in a separate compartment of his mind from that in which he has formed his opinion about the warden’s income, his friend Tom Towers, publisher of the powerful newspaper The Jupiter, joins his crusade by writing and publishing a couple of articles in which he paints the warden in as negative of a light as possible as a greedy hypocrite and robber of the poor. When Bold goes to Towers, tells him that he is wrong about the warden and asks him not to publish any such stories again, he is told that to do so would defraud the public.

Trollope’s novel was first published in the middle of the 19th century and the causes which inflame self-righteous social reformers have changed between then and now. One of the causes which the John Bolds and Tom Towerses of the present day are obsessed with is that of correcting racial injustices. Or rather, that of combating “racism”, which is not quite the same thing. This obsession dates back to World War II, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the international indignation over the policy of apartheid practiced by South Africa back before it became a failed state.

Many are the Septimus Hardings who have fallen victim to the self-righteousness of the pompous do-gooders and their anti-racist crusade. In 1995, award winning editorial writer Samuel Francis was fired from the Washington Times. A few years earlier, Joseph Sobran, a brilliant protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. had been fired from National Review by his old mentor. In both cases the writers were fired by supposedly conservative publications after progressives had accused them of racism – or in Sobran’s case anti-Semitism – over something they had written and said.

The latest victims are Patrick J. Buchanan and John Derbyshire.

Buchanan is a syndicated columnist, a best-selling author, a former adviser and speechwriter to three US Presidents, and a three time candidate for the US Presidency himself. He was fired from the television news network MSNBC earlier this year. Progressives had been demanding that he be fired ever since the publication, last year, of his latest book Suicide of a Superpower, which included a chapter on “The End of White America”. The network’s president announced in January that he thought what Buchanan had written was not appropriate for “the national dialogue” (1) and in February, Buchanan was fired.

John Derbyshire is the author of several books, including We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. He is also a freelance writer who until recently was published by National Review. Late last week he committed the terrible sin of writing an article for the webzine Taki’s Mag entitled “The Talk: Non-black Version”. Several articles had been published recently which discussed conversations certain black parents had with their children warning them about the racism and prejudice they can expect at the hands of white America. Derbyshire’s article was a response to these in which he presented an alternative “talk”, which he says is derived from conversations he has had with his own mixed-race children about black people. The leftist gutter press, including such trash rags as the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post, threw a conniption over this article and the once conservative magazine’s editor Richard Lowry (2) fired him this past weekend.

What had Francis, Sobran, Buchanan, and now Derbyshire said to warrant this outrage? Did they demand the re-establishment of de jure segregation? Did they suggest that black slavery should be reinstated? Did they say that blacks or members of any other race should be denied the civil rights and legal protections of other citizens? Did they call for the persecution or extermination of people on the basis of their skin colour?

Judging from the hysterical denunciations of these men penned by progressives and pseudoconservatives onewould think that they did all of the above, but in fact they did none of the above, nor anything remotely similar.

These men were accused of racism because they rejected the progressive narrative in which whites, and only whites, are the perpetrators of racism, and non-whites, and only non-whites, are the victims of racism. They were accused of racism because they did not accept the idea that it is “racist” for white people to think of themselves collectively as a group and to look out for their own interests and those of their children but that it is not racist for people of other races to be conscious of a racial identity and work to advance their interests. They were accused of racism because they objected to the way in which governments of Western countries were using liberal immigration policies to adversely affect the future well-being of white people. (3) They were accused of racism because they refused to abide by the liberal-imposed taboos against the discussion of facts which conflict with the idea that the best way to deal with the reality of race is to pretend it does not exist.

Samuel Francis had given a speech in which he connected the achievements of Western civilization to the character of the people who built that civilization and suggested that the survival of that culture and civilization required the survival of that people. (4)

Joseph Sobran, who wanted the United States to withdraw from global military endeavours when the Cold War ended, warned that America’s close relationship with Israel could potentially lead her into perpetual war with the Arab nations. (5)

Patrick Buchanan wrote a jeremiad about the decline of America that pointed out that the USA will be irrevocably changed once whites become a minority in America, as is scheduled to happen before this century is half over, and dared to question whether that change will be for the better.

John Derbyshire told his half-European, half-Asian children that as individuals black people are entitled to the same courtesy and respect as any other citizen, that as a group “there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black)”, that there are major differences between blacks and whites in terms of group averages, and that in certain specific circumstances there is reason to be afraid of blacks. (6)

These men lost their jobs because progressive liberals had determined that the expression of certain facts and truths was detrimental to their cause, that everyone who expressed those facts and truths must be branded a racist and silenced, and because the executives of the largest “conservative” publications lacked the courage to stand up to the bullying demands of the left.

One man who has been much in the news over the last month, stands to lose much more than a job, however, because of the alliance between anti-racist social reformers and the media. That man is George Zimmerman. If progressives and their media allies have their way, Mr. Zimmerman will arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

George Zimmerman, for those of you have been vacationing on the moon since Christmas, is a member of the neighborhood watch in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which is a gated community in Sanford, Florida. On the evening of February 26th, he noticed a 17-year old black youth named Trayvon Martin. Martin, it turns out, had walked from the home of his father’s fiancé to a local 7-11 to buy skittles and ice tea. He was unarmed. Zimmerman thought he looked suspicious, and called police dispatch to report “looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.” The police told him they did not need him to follow Martin and that they would send a car to investigate. When the police arrived they found Martin dead and Zimmerman standing nearby. Zimmerman told them that he had shot Martin in self-defence. The police took Zimmerman in for questioning, but they did not charge him, and eventually released him.

Progressives maintain that this was an act of racism, that Zimmerman was afraid of Martin because of his skin colour, and murdered him in cold blood.

Let me say right now that I do not know that this was not a murder. Perhaps the progressives are right for once – a stopped clock is right twice a day after all – and Zimmerman deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life. I do not know, because I do not know what happened in the interval between Zimmerman’s phone call to the police and their arrival, other than that Zimmerman shot Martin. Neither, however, do the progressives know what happened. They were not there anymore than I was.

I do know that the media falsified evidence to support the progressive interpretation of these events.

The National Broadcasting Corporation, for example, played an excerpt from Zimmerman’s call to the police that went “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman’s actual words were “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The words “he looks black” were in response to a direct question from the police “OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?”

When this was made public, NBC promised to investigate, and wrote the entire thing off as an “error”. (7)

It is difficult to imagine an “error” that would edit a conversation and make it into a racist statement. It is not difficult, unfortunately, to think of a plausible reason why a media company would intentionally do so.

Think about it. There are countless numbers of tragic deaths that occur in the United States every year. Why has this particular case attracted international media attention?

It has done so because the case has been depicted in the media as a classic example of racism. It has been turned into a morality tale to instruct us as to the evils that come from racial profiling. It is being offered as proof that the United States, over 140 years after abolishing slavery, over 40 years after the abolition of Jim Crow and the replacement of de jure discrimination against blacks with de jure discrimination in their favour, and 4 years since they elected their first black President, is a white racist society. The story of racist Zimmerman shooting down an innocent youth in cold blood because he was black is a story tailor-made to suit the purposes of those progressive anti-racists who seem to think that Adolf Hitler is going to break out of hell and start up anew in North America any day now.

The facts of the story, however, do not seem to fit the mold into which the progressive media has been trying to force it.

For one thing, Zimmerman, despite his German/Jewish last name, is not white. He is of mixed race, his father being white, his mother being Peruvian Hispanic. He identifies himself as Hispanic when voting. The media has taken to referring to him as a “white Hispanic”, although he is of dark complexion and it is not customary to refer to people of mixed ancestry in this way. It does not seem to have occurred to the media, that their insistence upon calling Zimmerman “white” in order to associate the shooting of Martin with “whiteness” is itself racist against whites.

For another thing there is evidence to support Zimmerman’s account. The police reported that he was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head and that he showed signs of having been on the ground himself. The surveillance video of Zimmerman entering the police station, despite claims by ABC News to the contrary, shows those injuries. A witness testified to seeing Zimmerman lying on the ground with Martin on top of him punching him.

It should go without saying that this event was a tragedy one way or another. A 17 year old, unarmed kid, was shot dead on his way home from the store. However he dressed, whatever he called himself on Twitter, he did not deserve that. Having said that, however, it does not follow that Zimmerman is the cold-blooded killer that he has been portrayed as in the media. The way the media has handled this affairs means that it will be virtually impossible for Zimmerman to receive a fair trial if he is arrested and charged. Sir William Blackstone once said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” Progressives appear to be willing to sacrifice this noble principle, a key element of the English concept of justice, to the cause of anti-racism.

What the progressives want us to believe is that the Martin shooting proves that white racism is a significant social problem in Obama’s “post-racial” America which justifies legislation and social programs aimed at correcting that problem. The facts are otherwise. If there is a major problem with racism in the USA today it is not the racism of whites against blacks, but of blacks against whites.

Data compiled by the American government demonstrates that the vast majority of crimes committed in the United States are intraracial, i.e., committed against someone of the same race as the person committing the crime. When whites commit crimes, it is most often against other whites, when blacks commit crimes it is most often against other blacks.

The date also shows that interracial crimes, i.e., crimes committed against someone of a different race than the perpetrator, are far more often committed by blacks against whites, than the other way around. (8)

Progressives insist that crimes should receive a greater punishment if they can be shown to be motivated by racial prejudice. They have succeeded in getting laws passed against “hate crimes” in many places. Yet black on white crimes, despite being more frequent than white on black crimes, are seldom if ever treated as hate crimes. Nor do they receive the media attention that the much rarer white on black crimes receive. Particular black on white crimes only seem to receive the kind of media attention the shooting of Trayvon Martin has received when they involve a celebrity like O. J. Simpson.

The progressive/media campaign against racism is a very selective campaign indeed. Certain statements are mercilessly condemned as “racist” when made by whites, even if they are unquestionably true, whereas violent crimes committed against whites are excused as being the expectable response to white racism, rather than racism against whites.

In Trollope’s novel the efforts of John Bold and Tom Towers do not, in the end, help the people in whose name they had appointed themselves to speak but actually make their condition worse. Towers’ accusations drive the warden from the almshouse, the bishop decides not to replace him because of the controversy surrounding the warden’s income, the institution falls into decline, and the residents are deprived of a good friend and of the allowance he had paid them out of his own pocket.

How about the progressive campaign against racism? Has it benefited those in whose name it is fought?

No, it has not. The major injustices committed against blacks in the United States, slavery and de jure segregation, have been abolished for decades. The anti-racist movement continues to blame the problems blacks face today on these injustices however. This does nothing to improve relations between the races, generating distrust on both sides. If blacks and whites both would be benefited from better race relations, then the anti-racist movement is harming both races.

Black people have far more important problems than racism to deal with. Many live in urban centres that have been turned into slums by misguided urban planning on the part of the American federal government (9). A black middle class took shape and began to grow in the decades before the Civil Rights movement began (10), but upward mobility among American blacks has actually slowed down since the Civil Rights movement many urban blacks today find themselves trapped in multi-generational poverty and dependence in part due to anti-family incentives in social programs designed ironically to combat poverty (11). A negative culture which glorifies crime and violence and preys upon black youth has developed and this culture contributes significantly to the high crime rates, both as perpetrators and victims, among American blacks (12).

Progressive and media anti-racism encourages black leaders to turn white people into scapegoats for all these problems rather than to seek real solutions to them. It also contributes to the problems, especially the violent youth culture.

Everybody, white and black alike, suffers from the actions of our contemporary anti-racist John Bolds. If anyone benefits, it is the self-righteous progressive do-gooders themselves, who are usually the first to put into practice in their personal lives the advice John Derbyshire gave his children in his brilliant article.

1. Patrick Buchanan tells the story of his firing in this column here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/2012/02/16/blacklisted-but-not-beaten/ You can read my review of his book here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/11/fate-of-america.html

2. Lowry became editor of National Review in 1997. The editor who preceded him was John O’Sullivan, who had taken over the editorship when Buckley stepped down and semi-retired in 1988. Officially O’Sullivan announced that he was resigning the editorship. There is evidence, however, that William F. Buckley Jr. forced him to step down. O’Sullivan had approved a cover story for the magazine entitled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” in 1992, written by finance columnist Peter Brimelow, who would later write the 1995 bestseller Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster calling for immigration restriction and found the immigration restrictionist webzine VDare. Brimelow was fired from National Review at about the same time O’Sullivan “stepped down.” The new editor, Lowry, brought the magazine more in line with “neo-conservatism”, an ideology originally associated with former ‘60’s and ‘70’s radicals and liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, which basically consists of support for American military crusades to spread democracy and capitalism around the globe, a strong American alliance with Israel, free trade and immigration. .

3. Sobran was a late convert to the immigration reform/restrictionist movement, following the publication of Buchanan’s State of Emergency.

4. The speech was given at the first American Renaissance conference in May 1994. It was later adapted into the article “Why Race Matters: The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms”, which appeared as the cover story of the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. It can be read online here: http://www.amren.com/ar/1994/09/#cover American Renaissance is a monthly publication that deals entirely with racial issues. It was founded by Jared Taylor, a Yale University graduate, whose book Paved With Good Intentions, first published by Carroll & Graf in 1993, argues that efforts to create racial harmony in the United States following the American Civil Rights Movement through affirmative action and the dismantling of white racial identity have in fact produced the opposite of racial harmony. Politically, Taylor holds to a modified libertarianism in which the state restricts immigration, but is domestically colour blind. Taylor has pointed to studies that show that people of all races prefer to associate mostly with members of their own race, and argues that people of all races should be free to self-segregate or to mix, as they wish. His views can be taken to be the editorial position of American Renaissance, which publishes well-written articles by academics or scientists (some writing under pseudonyms for obvious reasons) which challenge the various racial taboos of progressive America.

5. Sobran expressed these opinions, not in the pages of National Review, but in his syndicated column. This was around the time of Patrick Buchanan’s first presidential campaign and Buchanan expressed similar views, as did Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. It is noteworthy that these conservative columnists were all strong Israel supporters during the Cold War. Each of them believed that the USA should withdraw from military interventionism and adopt a position of armed neutrality after the collapse of the Soviet threat. The accusations of anti-Semitism came primarily from neo-conservatives who wanted the exact opposite of this, a Pax Americana in which liberalism, capitalism, and democracy would be spread throughout the world with the backing of the US military. Often the progressives who repeat the neo-conservatives accusations of anti-Semitism against men like the Buchanan, Reese, and the late Sobran, are the same progressives who lionize Palestianian terrorists as “freedom fighters” and demonize Israel as an “apartheid state”.

6. http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire While I don’t agree with his advice in 10h, the facts as he presents them are correct, and his advice based upon them is largely common sense.

7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/nbc-issues-apology-on-zimmerman-tape-screw-up/2012/04/03/gIQA8m5jtS_blog.html h/t Lawrence Auster http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022083.html

8. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams081899.asp This column was written in 1999. In it Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, tells how he independently verified the findings of The Color of Crime, a report published by the New Century Foundation earlier that year. The New Century Foundation is the company that publishes American Renaissance, referred to in footnote 4. In 2005 a second, updated, and enlarged edition of The Colour of Crime was published. It is available to download in .pdf format here: http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf The report finds that blacks commit 85% of interracial crime in the United States, and whites commit 15%. Blacks are 12% of the American population, whites are over 60%. Note carefully what these figures say and what they do not say. They do not say that the majority of black Americans commit interracial crimes. They do say that the vast majority of interracial crimes in America are committed by black Americans.


9. Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates how slums are created on pages 117-122 of Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). The example he uses is the South Bronx. He traces its decline, beginning with federal government intervention in the housing market after World War II to housing projects in the 60’s and 70’s. He does so to illustrate the concept of prytaneogenesis – “damage actually generated by the state”.

10. The history of this can be read in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

11. A strong family structure helps deter multi-generational poverty. This structure is weakened when social programs provide – unintentionally – incentives to men to desert their wives and children, for a father and mother not to marry, and for women have children outside of wedlock with multiple fathers and raise those children alone. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994), particularly pages 124-133.

12. If you look at the total number of crimes committed in the United States, and break it down by race, blacks do not commit the majority of crimes in the United States. They do, however, commit a very disproportionate percentage of the crimes. What that means is that for the vast majority of American crimes, the percentage committed by blacks is much higher than the roughly 12% that is their percentage of the American population. Progressives typically explain these figures away by accusing police and judges of being racist. Racial arrest and conviction figures however, correlate strongly with the racial analysis of the testimony of crime victims. The Color of Crime, referred to and linked to in footnote 8 does this correlation. The most recent edition is 7 years old but updated source data is available for at the websites of the FBI and the US Bureau of Justice. The US Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245 The following link includes a number of reports from the survey that deal specifically with race: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922 The FBI’s United Crime Reports can be found here: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr Reports for the years 1995 to 2010 are available as is a preliminary report for 2011. To find the racial figures, first click on one of the years, then on “rates” under “Offences Known to Law Enforcement”. This will open a page with a series of options in a horizontal bar at the top. Click “Persons Arrested” then choose the options available for “race” under Expanded Arrest Data at the bottom of the page. Note carefully, that because most crime is intraracial, these figures mean not only that blacks commit a disproportionate number of American crimes, but that they are victims at a disproportionately high rate as well. Therefore, the constant attempts of progressives and their media allies, to slander and libel anyone who points these facts out as a “racist”, is harmful rather than helpful to black Americans, because it covers up a problem that afflicts them worse than anyone else in the USA.