Lighting Candles and Cursing Darkness

The expression “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” is often said to be an ancient Chinese proverb.   Many even attribute it to China’s greatest philosopher, the legendary sixth century BC sage and government advisor/official Kong Fuzi himself.   There is not much in the way of evidence to support these claims.   The earliest known use of the saying goes back only to the early twentieth century AD, during which century it spread like wildfire due to its popularity among liberal Democrat American presidents and their wives.   Although Roosevelt and Kennedy predated the period in which liberal Democrats became enamoured of all things Chinese provided they were no older than the Cultural Revolution it is probably stretching credibility to the breaking point to suggest that they had some special insight into the Confucian origins of an adage that continues to elude the best scholars in the field. 

 

In actuality, it is difficult to imagine such a saying originating in the wisdom literature of any ancient civilization when it so clearly bears the manufacturing stamp of twentieth century, Western, liberalism on it.   As a comparative value judgement it is a truism and an insipid, banal, and trite one at that.   It implies that we are under some sort of moral requirement to make an either/or choice between lighting a candle and cursing the darkness, thus demanding the question why one cannot do both, to which question, of course, there is no answer.  

 

Today is a good day to be contemplating these matters.

 

It is the second day of the second month.   On the liturgical calendar it is a Feast Day, the official designation of which in the Book of Common Prayer is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple Commonly Called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin”.   This is because it is forty days after Christmas.   The Mosaic Law required in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus that after a woman gave birth to a male child she would undergo a forty day purification period after which she would present the child in the tabernacle – later the Temple – to which she would bring a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, or, if this was beyond her means, two turtledoves or pigeons for both offerings.   The fulfilment of these requirements is recorded in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke – it is specified that the second option for the offering was taken – which is the occasion upon which Simeon and Anna prophesy over the Holy Infant.   The informal designation of this Feast is Candlemas.  (1)  This title alludes to the ancient custom of the blessing of the candles which traditionally occurs on this day.   The candles, representing Christ as the Light of the World, are presented in Church in ceremonial reenactment of the presenting of Christ in the Temple, and are blessed.

 

In how many parishes will this be occurring this year?

 

Not very many.

 

The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler is most remembered for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon.   In the novel, his protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is taken away by the secret police of the revolutionary regime he helped create in the middle of the night, and imprisoned.   He is given a number of hearings, not for the purpose of determining guilt or innocence but obtaining his confession.  Ultimately, he gives the confession and is executed.   Although the story and its characters are fictional they represent real events that had just taken place in the Soviet Union.  After Joseph Stalin had become dictator he had secured his control over the Communist Party and his absolute rule over the Soviet Union by ruthlessly eliminating his rivals within the party.   One of the more conspicuous elements of the Purge were the show trials, held in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, in which Trotskyists and other Old Bolsheviks who dissented to Stalin’s rule were made to publicly confess to various crimes before they were put to death.

 

It was Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, Daphne Hardy who later went on to become a sculptor, who gave the book its title.  She was also the one who translated it from his German manuscript and arranged for its publication in London, while Koestler was fleeing the Nazis in a highly adventurous manner.   The title was inspired by the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Job although it has little to do with what Eliphaz the Temanite was haranguing Job about.   It refers to the contrast between the reality (darkness) and the illusion (noon) of Communism as experienced by true believers – such as Rubashov within the novel, and Koestler its author (2) – who are brought to the realization that the ideal paradise they believed they were creating was actually an extremely oppressive tyranny.

 

It seems that no matter how many times the darkness of Communism is revealed for what it is – when a Malcolm Muggeridge tells the world about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, when an Arthur Koestler paints a literary picture of the Show Trials, when an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brings the GULAG to light – there will be those who blindly look to Communism as a source of light.

 

Today, our governments have taken away our most basic rights and liberties.   They have forbidden us from gathering together socially, assembling as religious communities to worship, and in some jurisdictions, even to leave our homes without their explicit permission and a justification they consider valid.   They have forbidden large portions of the population from running their own businesses or earning their own livings for extended periods of time, and basically told us all that we must look to government rather than to our businesses and jobs for our means of support.   They have conditioned us to expect security guards to be the first and last people we see everywhere we go, to be under constant surveillance, and to be stopped by enforcement agents at any time and made to give an account of why we are out and what we are doing.   They have encouraged us to snitch on our friends and neighbours every time we see or suspect them of violating any of an ever growing list of infractions.   Protests against these lockdowns are broken up by police and the protestors fined and/or arrested.   We are told by the media, speaking with a monolithic voice much like the press in the Soviet Union, that all of this is humanitarian and necessary for the greater good.   Everything about this, right down to the “science” invoked as justification for it all, resembles nothing so much as the dark tyranny the Bolsheviks imposed upon Russia a century ago.

 

These lockdowns are the reason that Churches will not be meeting to bless the candles today.   The politicians and health bureaucrats have declared that Church services are “non-essential” and, even though it is clearly Satan’s opinion that the politicians and health bureaucrats are speaking, the Church leaders have decided to obey man rather than God.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.   The nonsense that it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

 

Unless the Churches start cursing the darkness that is Communism – including the Communism that wears the mask of public health orders to slow the spread of bat flu – instead of kissing its butt they will never be able to light candles again.

 

(1)   An old tradition says that fair weather on Candlemas indicates that winter will be long.   In North America, this has led to the day acquiring the secular name of “Groundhog Day” after the creature assigned the task of checking the weather.   The legend accompanying this name is more specific than the tradition from the Old World and the specifics are rather amusing.   The groundhog or woodchuck – a really big squirrel who lives in a hole in the ground rather than in a tree – comes out of hibernation on Candlemas to check the weather.   If he sees his shadow – which will only happen in fair weather – it means there will be six more weeks of winter.   If he does not – it will be an early spring.   The joke of this is that the vernal equinox in this part of the world is always more than six weeks after Candlemas.    It falls between the nineteenth and twenty-first of March – this year on the twentieth.   Thus, a mere six more weeks of winter after the second of February would constitute an early spring.   The outcome, in other words, is the same whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.   Very amusing – almost as much as Harold Ramis’ 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

(2)   Nine years after Darkness at Noon came out, Richard Crossman’s anthology of ex-communists-turned-anti-communists The God That Failed was published.   Koestler was one of the contributors.

Government Hubris

Last December, at the annual pre-Christmas open house at the Manitoba legislature, I shook Premier Brian Pallister’s hand, congratulated him on his re-election, and told him to keep up the good work. Today, I wish I could take all of that back. Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Manitoba. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election, and have voted Progressive Conservative in every provincial election since I was old enough to vote. I do not think that I will be voting for them again for as long as Pallister leads the party. Indeed, I am contemplating actively and aggressively campaigning against their re-election. It is not that I think any other party would govern better. I do not. It is not that I wish to see Wab Kinew become premier of Manitoba. The very thought of that happening turns my stomach. I regard Kinew and the socialist party that he leads with greater disgust and contempt than anything that ever fell to the ground from the backside of a horse. It is rather that in my opinion the way Pallister has been talking and behaving over the last three weeks demands punishment. I am getting really, really, sick and tired of the arrogant, drunk-with-power, threatening tone of Brian Pallister and of his chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Pallister ought to have listened to Her Majesty’s marvelous speech on Sunday and learned from her how to speak to the public in a time of crisis. Indeed, all of our provincial premiers and the Dominion premier should have done so. That, of course, assumes that they have the capacity to learn. This is a very big assumption indeed. Our Sovereign is a lady of class and breeding, whereas our politicians, at the risk of unfairly insulting livestock, all give the impression of having been raised in a barn. I have many times written about the distinction between authority and power. Here we have that distinction perfectly illustrated. The Queen in her address to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth spoke with authority. Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin, who never open their mouths without bossing us around, slapping further restrictions down on us, and threatening us, only understand power.

Brian Pallister declared a provincial state-of-emergency at a much earlier stage of the COVID-19 outbreak than his counterparts in most other provinces. This occurred on Friday, March 20th, at which point in time Manitoba had seventeen confirmed cases of the virus, all of whom were people who had contracted the virus while travelling out of province. In declaring the state of emergency Pallister and Roussin limited gatherings to fifty people, required businesses to impose an one to two metre gap between patrons, limited the number of people theatres and dining facilities could seat, and closed all bingo and gaming, as well as gyms and other “wellness centres.” Roussin threatened everyone who did not obey these rules with fines up to fifty thousand dollars – five hundred thousand for corporations – and six months in prison. Pallister, in a truly odious press interview, in which he acknowledged but brushed off concerns that these measures were draconian, encouraged Manitobans to spy and snitch on each other.

Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the province has climbed slowly. It is only very recently at the beginning of April, that Roussin announced that the early stages of transmission within the community, as opposed to bringing it in from the outside, had been detected. At that time there were one hundred and twenty seven confirmed cases. It was before that, however, that he and Pallister had begun tightening the existing restrictions and imposing new ones. Indeed, that very day a two week order for all businesses and services that the provincial government deemed “non-essential” to close came into effect. The order had come down a couple of days earlier. Even prior to that, the government had decreased the number of people allowed to gather to ten. This took place about the time that the first death from COVID-19 in the province occurred – there have been two as of the time of this writing. The first death was of an elderly woman who had been in Intensive Care since the first phase of the provincial shut down. Her death would not have been prevented had Pallister and Roussin imposed the ten person limit on March 20th. Her death would not have been prevented had “non-essential” businesses been ordered to close on March 20th. Tightening the restrictions was not a rational act, but rather a sign that the exercise of absolute power had gone to the chief public health official’s head.

By the first day of this week the confirmed cases in Manitoba had risen to two hundred and three. On Monday, one additional case brought the number to two hundred and four. Eleven people have been hospitalized, seven of whom are in Intensive Care. The very same day, Roussin’s tone jumped to a whole new level of arrogant, totalitarian, bossiness. Issuing threats of police enforcement, this Grinch-like creature stole Easter and the Passover from Christians and Jews. Having already closed the Churches and synagogues, he now ordered the faithful not to have “family dinners and get togethers.” “Everyone needs to adhere to the public health orders” he said “and that includes faith-based organizations.” Which is simply another way of saying that he thinks that his commandments overrule those of God.

That doctors, in the sense of physicians, think they are God has long been a stereotype and, like most stereotypes, contains a great deal of truth. For this reason, it is dangerous to give them any sort of civil authority. It goes to their heads a lot quicker than it does other people.

To those, like this writer, who grew up reading novels by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess, and others warning us against totalitarianism, as well as the non-fictional accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest of the very real totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it is hugely offensive that today, Her Majesty’s free subjects in this province of Manitoba, in the Dominion of Canada, cannot go to the grocery store without being forced by authoritarian goons to wait, six feet apart, in a line outside the store until they are told to enter. Once inside the store, their every move is policed by the store Gestapo, until they enter a similar line at the checkout. These conditions belong in Communist countries like the former Soviet Union, not in a Commonwealth realm.

Dr. Roussin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is furthermore a huge violation of medical ethics. The fact that everyone else is doing it in no way excuses him. What principle of medical ethics could be more fundamental than primum non nocere, which principle is enshrined in the vow to abstain from harm in the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos? (1) Yet every conceivable form of harm – psychological, spiritual, ethical, social, civil, and physical, including death itself - is the inevitable result of a lengthy, enforced, universal shut down of society.

The tighter the restrictions become, the more rules are imposed upon us, the longer we are kept from our friends and family and Churches, and forced to violate our nature as Aristotle’s “social animal”, the greater the harm caused by the anti-COVID measures will be. There will be this significant difference, however, between the deaths from COVID-19 complications that these measures might be preventing and the deaths from domestic violence, suicide, and murder that these measures will cause if maintained for too long. Nobody, except perhaps the government of Red China, could be legitimately blamed for the former. The blood of the latter will be upon the hands and heart and soul of Dr. Brent Roussin and Premier Brian Pallister forever.

(1) The principle, in the familiar wording, comes, interestingly enough, from another work of Hippocrates entitled Of the Epidemics. In the Oath, of course, it is turned into a vow: ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν

The False Gospel(s) of the Left

St. Paul, in his farewell address to the Ephesians in Acts 20, said that he had not hesitated “to declare unto you all the counsel of God.” (v. 27) The “whole counsel of God”, as the ESV renders this phrase, can be summed up in two messages, the Law and the Gospel. The Gospel is the primary message, and its name means “the good news.” It cannot be understood apart from the message of the Law, which could also be called “the bad news,” not because it is bad in itself (Rom. 7:7) but because it reveals what is bad in us. For this reason it is called the “ministration of death” and of “condemnation” (2 Cor. 3: 7, 9) and all who are under it are said to be under a curse (Gal. 3:10). The Law reveals the aspect of the goodness of God that is called justice, and the perfect righteousness which God in His justice requires of us. To one degree or another, the Law has been communicated to all mankind, having been written in our consciences (Rom. 2:14-15), handed down as a moral code to national Israel in the Covenant of Mt. Sinai (Ex. 20:1-17), and taught in its highest and purest form by Jesus Christ Himself (Matt. 5-7). At whatever level we consider it however – conscience, Ten Commandments, or Sermon on the Mount – the Law is only ever bad news for us, because we are incapable of meeting its requirements of righteousness. The Law reveals us to be sinners, and therefore can only accuse and condemn us. It identifies our basic problem of sin, and reveals our basic need of righteousness but can do nothing towards solving that problem and filling that need.

It is the Gospel that meets our need. Whereas the Law is, albeit imperfectly, communicated to us naturally through our consciences, the Gospel is only to be found in the direct revelation of the inspired Holy Scriptures, where it is the main message. Theological liberals claim that the ethical teachings of Jesus – which are simply the highest and purest form of the Law - are the main message of the Christian Scriptures. In doing so they reveal that theological liberalism is not a version of Christianity but of the natural religion of mankind, of which all religions except true Christianity are forms, and which is clearly condemned in the Scriptures. Man’s natural religion is to seek acceptance with God through the Law by doing good works. True Christianity is the religion of the Gospel – the Good News that although, as the Law reveals, we as sinners are incapable of earning God’s acceptance by our works, He freely gives us His acceptance, pardoning all of our sins and declaring us to be fully righteous in His sight, out of His grace – favour that we have neither earned nor deserved – on the grounds of the completed Atonement for sin made by the Saviour Whom He has given. We receive that grace simply by believing in that Saviour as He is presented to us in the Gospel. The Saviour is God’s Only-Begotten Son, Who being true God, of one essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit from all eternity, took our human nature unto Himself when He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, and became true man. His name is Jesus and He is also called Christ or Messiah, meaning that He is the Anointed Redeemer-King that had been promised since the Fall of mankind. He lived a life of perfect, sinless, righteousness and then, when He was arrested, accused, and convicted of crimes that He had not committed, and condemned to die a cruel death on the cross, He took the guilt of all of the sins of the world upon Himself and voluntarily bore the punishment due those sins, fully satisfying the justice of God. In raising Jesus from the dead, God declared His satisfaction with the Atonement, His reconciliation to the sinful world, and His promise of pardon, justification, everlasting life to all who believe the Gospel of grace.

The two messages of Scripture, Law and Gospel, are both concisely summarized in one verse by the Apostle Paul: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6:23). Or, as Baptist evangelist John R. Rice was fond of paraphrasing it, “if you go to Hell, you pay your own way; but you go to Heaven on a free pass.”

While everyone needs the Good News of the Gospel a great many reject it. They reject the Gospel, because they refuse to accept the verdict of the Law upon themselves, that they are sinners who have earned the just condemnation of God, whose works are unacceptable, and who are therefore in need of the salvation announced and offered in the Gospel. When man refuses to accept God’s diagnosis of his basic problem as sin, he will not accept God’s solution to that problem in the Gospel of grace. He then tries to substitute alternative diagnoses and false gospels.

Everything the Left has ever proposed has been just such a false gospel. At the heart of liberalism, the political philosophy that is the source and foundation of all political leftism, is the rejection of the Law’s diagnosis of the human condition. All of the woes that have afflicted the human race throughout history, liberalism says, come not from sin inside ourselves, but from something external, some defect in our education, our form of government, our system of social organization, our method of producing and distributing wealth, etc. Having substituted these false diagnoses for the true one, liberalism has been devising political solutions to these problems for centuries, wrapping each of them up in the language of salvation. The attempt to put these false gospels into practice has been called the Left since the French Revolution – although it has been around since the Roundhead Puritans of the English Civil Wars. Each one has been a notorious failure.

Republican democratism is the oldest false gospel of the Left. Liberalism falsely diagnosed hereditary, royal, monarchy as the source of the evils of tyranny, despotism, and oppression, and proposed government by elected representatives (republicanism) and/or popular assembly (democratism) as the solution. The Puritan Roundheads, the American and French Revolutionaries, and all Communist revolutionaries have believed this false gospel and it has always failed to deliver in its promise of earthly salvation. The Cromwell Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and the Soviet Union and its imitators were all far more tyrannical, despotic and oppressive than the monarchies they replaced. Granted, the Americans did not turn their country into this kind of totalitarian hellhole – at least until the Presidency of Lincoln – nevertheless, the Americans have experienced a far more oppressive burden, both in terms of taxes and intrusive legislation and regulations, under their republican form of government than before their Revolution. Indeed, every Western country in which government authority has been taken out of the hands of royal monarch and placed into the hands of elected politicians has experienced this burden, whether it has officially become a republic or retained its monarch as a figurehead. History has thoroughly discredited this first false Gospel of the left. All false gospels are incompatible with the true Gospel. I am not saying that those who are not royalists are not Christians but it is a blasphemous insult to the King of Kings to attempt to demote Him to President of Presidents.

The next oldest of the Left’s false gospels are capitalism and socialism. Here a qualification is necessary. Capitalism, or economic liberalism as it is more properly called, has often been presented as a false gospel of economic salvation. This is how it appeared in the writings of Frédéric Bastiat and Richard Cobden in the nineteenth century who preached free trade as the path to world peace. It is how it appears in contemporary American neoliberals and neoconservatives who believe the American political and economic systems to be the hope of the world which should be exported to all other countries, by the force of American military might if necessary. The basic elements of economic liberalism, however – the private ownership of property and legal protection of the same, and legally protected freedom to enter into contracts and buy and sell – predate the theories of the economic liberals, indeed, are basic, common-sense facts of human existence, and are upheld by the Law of God (“thou shalt not steal”). They can be held without attaching any salvific significance to them.

Socialism, on the other hand, is ALWAYS a scheme of economic salvation. That is the sine qua non of socialism, its essential nature. Socialism starts by replacing the Law’s diagnosis of sin in the human heart as our basic problem with the idea that the unequal distribution of wealth – and therefore the private ownership of property – is the root of all our ills. It proposes salvation through either the elimination of private property or the government confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Socialism is a complete failure. Those countries unfortunate enough to fall under Communist tyranny, experienced the widespread poverty and misery that socialism, in its purest form, always produces. Western countries have discovered that the partial socialism they have implemented has left them with a choice between spending far beyond their means, crippling their economy, or doing both at once. Socialism is always a false gospel. There is no such thing as “Christian socialism” because the true Gospel cannot be combined with a false gospel. To the extent that a so-called “Christian socialist” is a Christian, he is not a socialist. To the extent that he is a socialist, he is not a Christian.

Feminism is another of the Left’s oldest false Gospels. While many people think of it as a fairly recent phenomenon it goes back to the early nineteenth century. Feminism’s one-word false diagnosis of the human condition is “patriarchy”, a term the roots of which suggest the meaning of “fatherly authority” but which feminism uses to mean a more general male dominance in politics, economics, society, culture and the family. The false gospel that it preaches is “the equality of the sexes”, although feminists often give the impression that “gynocracy” is what they are truly after. While feminism has become far more crazier over the years, to the point that today leading feminists maintain that heterosexuality is an oppressive artificial social construct, that complementing a woman on her looks constitutes “sexual harassment,” that sexual intercourse should be considered “rape” if the woman is dissatisfied and withdraws her consent ex post facto, and that women have the “right” to be believed in whatever accusations they choose to make against men regardless of whether or not there is evidence to substantiate their claims, among other lunatic notions, it has never been in touch with reality but has always been based on sheer fantasy. The implementation of feminism has required bloodshed on a Hitlerian scale (1) and the same adjective might be applied to feminism’s suppression of dissent in academia, government, and most workplaces. While the church has been plagued for decades with “Christian feminists” who oppose the Scriptural doctrine of the headship of the husband/father, who demand the ordination of female clergy against the clear Apostolic teaching, who have mutilated and bowdlerized hymn books, liturgy, and even translations of the Scriptures, with “gender neutral language”, and who in the most extreme cases wish to replace the triune God of Christianity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) with some pagan deity they address as Mother/Father God, what was true of “Christian socialism” is also true of “Christian feminism” – to the extent it is the one, it is not the other.

The false gospel of tolerance has been the leading false gospel of the Left since the Second World War. In most Western countries it has assumed the status of an unofficial state religion, and comes with its own redemption story, one which people are not allowed to openly question without severe legal repercussions. Originally, racism was its false diagnosis of the human condition, but it has since been expanded to include other forms of “intolerance” such as “sexism”, “homophobia” and more recently “transphobia.” Needless to say, “tolerance” is the proposed solution. Both “tolerance” and “intolerance” as they are used by the Left, do not correspond very well to their dictionary meanings. “Intolerance” seems to include any negative attitude towards people who differ from you in any discernable way – with the exception of negative attitudes towards white, Christian, heterosexual, males. “Tolerance” has no relationship to its Latin root, which means “to bear or endure” and thus necessarily implies a negative attitude towards its object. At its most benign it seems to mean little more than “be nice to each other, children.” More often, however, it means, “you’re not allowed to think or say that” and resembles the thought control found in Communist countries and the novels of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler.

There is one final false gospel that we will look at. Several decades ago the modern environmentalist movement was born as a synthesis of neo-pagan, pantheistic, nature-worship, feminism and Marxism disguised beneath a thin veneer of ecological science. At its best it promoted things that only a moron would find fault with – such as clean air and water and the preservation of plants, wildlife, and natural beauty. At its worst it called for depopulation through birth control, abortion, state-imposed limits on family size, euthanasia, and suicide. In the late 1970s it began to develop its own apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, doomsday scenario. In this scenario, civilization and life as we know it is on the brink of imminent destruction due to “global warming” or “climate change.” The diagnosis? Mankind’s industrial consumption of fossil fuels over the last two centuries has caused the problem by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The gospel of salvation? The nations of the world need to agree to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions.

This entire concept of anthropogenic climate change can be summed up in one word: bunk. It does not matter how many ex-American presidents, Hollywood movie stars, or Japanese-Canadian celebrity zoologists promote the idea. It does not require a Ph.D in climatology to understand that if the industrial emissions of greenhouse gasses is responsible for impending disastrous climate change then nothing short of a total return to some sort of pre-industrial society could possibly help. Therefore the climate change treaties, which propose reductions of carbon emissions – not their elimination – accomplish nothing more than allowing the politicians who waste tons of fuel flying around the world to have their picture taken signing these accords to feel good about themselves and to send the message to their voters that they are on top of the “problem.” Of course the entire theory is nonsense. The climate did not start changing in the twentieth century or with the dawn of industrialism but has been changing for all of human history. Other factors have had far greater, more demonstrable, and more immediate effects on global climate than human activity such as the volcanic winters brought about by the nineteenth century eruptions of Mt. Tambora and Krakatoa. Whether the current eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea will have a similar effect remains to be seen. The effects of Justin Trudeau’s self-righteous climate posturing – of which his arrogant carbon tax, his grants to anti-pipeline protesters are but two examples – are already being felt on our country, however, as the Canadians who can least afford it are being forced to pay the price of the former at the gas pumps, and unemployed Canadians are paying the price of the latter.

Political schemes of salvation are counterfeit gospels, of course, regardless of where they are found, Left or Right. Certain movements on the secular Right have demonstrated the same tendency to look upon their political agenda as a plan of salvation as the Left. It is the fundamental nature of the Left, however, to blame man’s problems on everything except the sin in his heart, and to look to politics as the means of salvation. The true Right, the Right of the old Tories, sees politics differently. The Tory Right accepts the doctrine of Original Sin, and that mankind is incapable of regaining Paradise through his own efforts. It sees civil government as being ordained for the ministry of the Law in its use as a curb to restrain evil. (2) The ministry of the Gospel, in Word and Sacrament, belongs to the Church. Government and the Church, with their respective ministries, are neither to be separate nor confused. In liberalism, with its schemes of secular, political, salvation they are both.

(1) William Brennan, The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution, (St. Louis: Landmark Press, 1983). The comparison has only become more valid over the last thirty-five years.
(2) In orthodox Protestant theology the Law has three uses – the curb, mirror, and guide. These are also called the first, second, and third uses of the Law but the order is different in Lutheran and Reformed theology. In Lutheran theology the order is as above, in Reformed theology it goes mirror, curb, guide.

Obnoxious Self-Righteous Jerks versus Basic Human Decency

The late Fred Phelps was a man who earned for himself the reputation of being a jerk. Not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, jerk, either, but a jerk on such a scale that the character which Denis Leary portrayed in the song “Asshole” from his 1993 album No Cure For Cancer had absolutely nothing on him. It is not just that the founder and “pastor” of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas disavowed the conventional Christian wisdom that God hates the sin but loves the sinner and that we ought to do the same in favour of an extreme five-point Calvinism that proclaimed God’s literal hatred for certain people. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, the way he choose to publicize his message. It requires an astonishing level of low-life creepiness to intrude upon the grief of people who are mourning the loss of a loved one by picketing a funeral. Indeed, perhaps the kindest thing that can be said in Mr. Phelp’s favour, is that he never – at least to the best of my knowledge – took it a step further and attempted to prevent the funerals he picketed from taking place.

As we shall see in a moment, that cannot be said of certain other people. First, however, let us consider just how contrary to the wisdom of the ages this sort of thing actually is.

Of the ancient Greek poets, none was more inspiring and influential than Homer, the epic poet of the eighth century BC. The most important of his works was the Iliad the story of which is set in the last year of the Trojan War. The many different conflicts and intrigues that take place among gods and men over the course of the poem’s twenty four books are tied together by the poem’s theme, identified in its very first line: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος “Sing goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” At the beginning of the poem, that wrath is directed against Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the leader of the Greek forces. Achilles, in his anger withdraws his Myrmidons from the war. His mother Thetis secures from Zeus the promise that the tide of the war will go against the Greeks until Agamemnon gives Achilles the honour he deserves and he returns to the war. When the Trojans are on the verge of burning the Greek ships, Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus obtains his permission to lead the Myrmidon army back into the battle. Wearing Achilles’ own armour, Patroclus is mistaken for Achilles and, ignoring the latter’s instructions to fight only in defence of the ships, he drives the Trojans back to their city where he is killed by the crown prince of Troy, Hector. At this point Achilles’ wrath turns from Agamemnon to Hector, and he re-enters the war himself, lays waste to the Trojan forces, and eventually kills Hector. Then, however, Achilles takes his wrath too far. Rather than turn the body of Hector over to the Trojans for proper burial, he ties it to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Ilium. This is in violation of the laws of the gods but he continues to do this until his mother arrives from Olympus with a message from Zeus telling him in no uncertain terms to knock it off. So rebuked, Achilles turns the body over to Hector’s father, King Priam, when he, smuggled by Hermes into the Greek camp, pleads for it, and assures Priam that he will make the Greeks abide by an armistice that will allow Priam sufficient time to bury Hector with all the proper honours.

The idea that it is against divine law to refuse a proper burial even to an enemy recurs in the Antigone, one of three surviving tragedies by fifth century BC playwright Sophocles that deal with the curse that Oedipus brings upon himself and his city, Thebes, by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. After Oedipus learned the truth, blinded himself, and went into exile one of his sons, Eteocles, drove the other, Polynices, into exile. The latter found refuge in Argos where he married the daughter of king Adrastus who then supported him in an expedition against Eteocles in Thebes. In the course of the battle, both brothers were killed. Creon, Oedipus’ uncle/brother-in-law was then made king of Thebes and he decreed that Eteocles was to be fully honoured, but Polynices was to be left to rot, imposing capital punishment upon anyone who defied this edict. This is where the Antigone begins for the title character, daughter of Oedipus, refuses to obey the edict and performs the burial rites for her brother. Although he is warned by the seer Tiresias, Creon persists in defying the law of the gods and orders Antigone to be buried alive. Divine judgement falls upon him in the loss of his own house, as his son Haemon who had been betrothed to Antigone kills himself in anger and grief, to be followed into suicide immediately thereafter by his mother Eurydice.

That one ought not to interfere with the proper burial even of those who were your enemies was evidently an idea that the Greeks felt rather strongly about. The Romans had a saying, de mortuus nil nisi bonum dicendum est – “about the dead, nothing except good, must be spoken” – which, while not entirely the same concept, nevertheless indicates a sort of consensus among the ancients, that the grievances we have against people in their lives ought to be buried with them in the grave and must not be allowed to interfere with the duty owed by the living to the dead.

There are some here in Canada today, I am sorry to say, who disagree with the wisdom of the ancients and have recently shown it in actions that make Fred Phelps look classy by comparison. It is not merely the ancient tradition dictating respect for the dead and mourning that they have disregarded, however, in their recent attempts to shut down a memorial service for an Ontario lawyer, but some of the most foundational principles of our system of justice. Their indecorous posthumous vendetta against this woman is based entirely upon who her clients were. One of the fundamental principles of our system of justice is that it is better for the guilty to escape punishment than for the innocent to be unjustly condemned. This too is a principle with ancient antecedents. Socrates argument against Polus in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer wrong than to commit it is one example, Abraham’s negotiations with God over the fate of the righteous in the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis is another. Upon this foundation rest such other basic principles as the right of the accused to confront his accuser and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Imagine what would happen to these principles if we were to allow the precedent to be established that defence advocates are to be treated as participants in the guilt of their clients.

If that were not bad enough in this case the lawyer’s clients were not people accused of crimes that are universally recognized as such – murder, robbery, rape and the like – but rather of thought crimes.

There is a backstory to all of this that goes back several decades. For a long time certain groups lobbied Parliament to have laws against “hate literature” passed. NB that hate literature does not mean literature that literally expresses hatred of the “I hate you, you lousy rotten sonuvabitch, I wish you were dead” type but rather literature that portrays racial and religious groups in a negative light. Unless, that is, the racial and religious groups are whites or Christians. In the 1960s, Lester Pearson appointed a committee to look into this and in 1971 Pierre Trudeau, who had been a member of that committee, added Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause, to the Criminal Code. Those who wanted these laws were still unsatisfied, because those charged under this law were entitled to the full protection of the rights of a defendant and so Trudeau passed the Canadian Human Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in 1977 and this included Section 13 that defined the communication via telephone of anything “likely to” expose a member of a protected group to “hatred or contempt” as a discriminatory act. Later Jean Chretien would add Section 13 b) that extended this to all electronic communication to cover the internet as well. Since the Canadian Human Rights Act is considered civil rather than criminal law it was much easier to charge and convict people under this law than under Section 318.

For anyone acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes or with the body of literature by authors such as Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that shone a light on the nature of such regimes the outcome of these laws will be chillingly familiar. A list of prohibited books was drawn up which were seized at customs and removed from libraries, public and academic. About a decade after these laws were passed widely publicized show trials of a handful of individuals accused of this new form of crimethink were held. The press tried these individuals in the court of a public opinion which they manufactured by making these individuals the subjects of a two-minute hate but remained largely mute about the much larger number of people who were being dragged before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals under Section 13.

That would change, of course, in the late 2000s when two magazines with national circulation were charged under the provincial equivalents of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hoist with its own petard, the media which had stood by and said nothing while Section 13 was used to ruin the lives of Canadians for daring to express forbidden thoughts, but now aware of the threat to its own freedom, began to report on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case to be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The light this shed on Section 13 and the shady behaviour of the Canadian Human Rights Commission generated enough of a backlash that Conservative MP Brian Storseth was able to garner sufficient support in Parliament for a bill that brought about the repeal of Section 13. Nevertheless, there is much more work that needs to be done to completely rollback this Soviet-style thought control and recover the atmosphere of freedom that Canadians used to know and which our Common Law birthright as subjects of the Crown.

In this fight for traditional Canadian freedoms against this kind of soft totalitarianism those who deserve the most honour are those who stood up against it from the beginning. It is one thing to speak out when someone tries to censor MacLean’s magazine. The true test of commitment to freedom of conscience, thought, and speech is when you dare to speak out when they go after an Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, or John Ross Taylor. This is a point that Pastor Martin Niemöller would certainly have understood. Foremost among those who demonstrated such commitment were BC lawyer Doug Christie and his long-time associate Barbara Kulaszka of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Although Christie, who passed away four years ago, was the better known of the two, Kulaszka had been a key figure in the fight for free speech from the beginning, when she worked alongside Christie in the Zündel case back in the 1980s. She passed away from cancer this year on the fifteenth of June.

The Canadian Association for Free Expression rented space in the Richview Public Library in Toronto for the purpose of holding a memorial service for Kulaszka last Wednesday. When word of this got out several individuals and organizations placed pressure on the Toronto Public Library system to cancel the event and a number of newspapers and other media outlets expressed manufactured outrage when the library, to its credit, refused to do this. Keep in mind that this was a memorial service – an occasion for those who had known Kulaszka, had worked with her, and whom she had defended in court, to remember her and pay her public tribute. It was not, despite the dishonest way in which it has been reported in many media sources, something akin to a Klan rally.

Overlooked and ignored by Kulaszka’s detractors is the fact that while many of her clients are said to have expressed admiration for Nazism and the Third Reich and questioned the accuracy of the crimes and atrocities attributed to it – I use the words “said to” because hate speech laws by their very nature are intended to prevent us from having access to what the thought criminal has actually said and to force us to rely upon the word of hate speech experts, themselves extremely hostile to the thought criminals, to tell us what they think and say - in fighting on their behalf against those who sought to penalize them for their ideas she was fighting, not for the ideology of National Socialism, but for the principles of freedom and justice that belong to the tradition of Great Britain and the Commonwealth – the countries that went to war to defeat Nazism. It is this desire to silence people with laws that penalize them for their thoughts and words that lies behind the hate laws that Kulaszka fought against which is akin to the spirit of the totalitarianism that was Nazism, not her brave and dedicated efforts to fight this tyranny.

So who are these people who are so utterly lacking in class as to begrudge Kulaszka her memorial?

Well, there are the politicians of course. John Tory, the present mayor of Hogtown, and Toronto City Councillors James Pasternak and John Campbell all gave quotes to the media expressing their dismay over the library’s decision to allow the memorial. Politicians being what they are it is reasonable to suspect that if the media had taken the opposite approach to the story they would have been quoted as supporting the library’s decision. So take their words for the nothing they are worth.

Then there are the usual suspects – the professional anti-bigots. Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, and Warren Kinsella were all on hand to vent their impotent rage at the library that actually dared to defy their edict as to who should or should not be allowed to rent public facilities for a memorial service. It is easy to see why these three are so upset. Warman, whom the media describe as a “human rights lawyer”, is a former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission who went on to become the complainant in the vast majority of Section 13 cases. Farber was the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress until it was swallowed up by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs about six years ago. The CJC was the chief organization that lobbied for hate literature laws before the Liberals acquiesced and while this was before Farber’s time as CEO he was himself an avid supporter of hate laws throughout his career. Kinsella, lawyer, Liberal Party strategist, and political commentator, has also been an outspoken advocate of hate laws over the years. It is people like this, who have devoted their lives to the cause of fighting views that they perceive to be bigotry, who, blinded by their zeal, seem incapable of distinguishing between lawyers and their clients or understanding that those who hold the views they object to do not thereby forfeit their rights.

Smug, soulless, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, they see no need for showing the basic human decency of allowing their opponents to mourn their dead in peace, and so they have been carrying on with the lack of class we have come to associate with Westboro Baptist Church. Is it that surprising, therefore, to learn that Fred Phelps in his first career, before starting Westboro Baptist Church, was a lawyer who specialized in racial discrimination cases?