State of the Dominion – 2025

Seven years ago I entitled my annual essay for our country’s birthday “State of the Dominion – 2018.”  This was during the premiership of Captain Airhead, towards the end of his first term, and I noted that we were in the midst of a third “revolution within the form.”  The first had taken place in the early twentieth century in the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and the second from the mid-1960s to 1982 in the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.  Captain Airhead is finally out of office, although the Liberal Party – the party that each of these men had led – remains in power, under the new leadership of Blofeld.  So it is time to revisit the matter of the state of the Dominion.

 

The first thing to be observed is that as we emerge from the Airhead premiership Canada is in a far less worse condition than we could have anticipated going into that premiership after the 2015 Dominion Election.  This does not mean that we are emerging unscathed, far from it. 

 

On the social/moral front alone, the progressive agenda has been horribly advanced.  In 2023 a bill banning “conversion therapy” passed Parliament with unanimous support.  While the expression “conversion therapy” tends to conjure up the image of something similar to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, the bill banning it was worded so broadly that it essentially forbids the offering of counseling to anyone seeking help in conforming their “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to the reality of their biological sex.  Meanwhile, the progressive forces that demanded this ban have insisted that the opposite sort of conversion therapy be provided at the taxpayers’ expense to minors without their parents’ consent.  The opposite sort of conversion therapy is hormone therapy and surgery intended to conform biological sex, at least in appearance, to “gender identity.”

 

Nor is this the worst example of the advancement of the progressive social/moral agenda in the Airhead years.  That dishonour goes to the aggressive promotion of the culture of death by Captain Airhead.  There was little he could do in the way of making abortion more available in Canada since the status quo going into his premiership was the absence of any legal restrictions due to the failure of Parliament to pass any after the Morgentaler ruling in 1988 struck down the previous laws on the matter.  He could and did waste tax dollars on promoting abortion outside of Canada.  It was the euthanasia side of the culture of death, however, that will be remembered as the darkest part of his legacy.  Captain Airhead became prime minister later in the year that the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibition against euthanasia and in the first year of his premiership a bill that outright legalized it passed Parliament.  In the near-decade since, further legislation, policy decisions and court rulings have expanded the assisted suicide program dubbed MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) and like abortion, marketed by those in favour of it as a “health care” choice, extending it far beyond the terminally ill.  In 2021 they got Parliament to pass a bill making it much easier to obtain approval for MAID and extending it to those whom sane people would say are most in need of being protected from it, that is, the mentally ill, although this provision was delayed from coming into effect until the year after next.  In the meantime government agencies that process requests for financial aid from, most notably, military veterans, have recommended MAID as an alternative.

 

So no, Canada did not emerge from the Airhead era unscathed, and wounds on other fronts than the social/moral could be provided to further illustrate this.  My point, however, is that Captain Airhead did not do all the damage it looked like he was about to do at the beginning of his premiership.  This was not for lack of intent or trying on his part.  It is partly due to the fact that he and his entire circle of associates were grossly incompetent, an affliction not shared by previous revolutionaries such as his own father or William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It is partly due to the fact that the Canada which the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us with her ancient Imperial/Commonwealth heritage of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, while weakened by these Liberal “revolutions within the form” was still resilient enough to prevent Captain Airhead from doing his worst.  It is partly due to the fact that most Canadians have simply not succumbed to the brain rot that in its most recent form has been dubbed “wokeness” to the extent that Captain Airhead and the progressive commentariat all assumed they had.

 

The first of these three factors needs nothing in the way of further commentary.   

 

The second factor may be disputed by neoconservatives (people who call themselves conservatives even though they wish to replace our constitution, traditions, and heritage with those of the United States or something more closely resembling them) who over the last several years have chosen to express their frustration with the Airhead Liberals by taking it out on the country with the claim that “Canada is broken” but these are wrong.  The Fathers of Confederation built a far more resilient country than could be ultimately broken by the likes of Captain Airhead.  I attribute the neoconservative error in about equal parts to their misguided preference for the American system and to the sort of infantile thinking that sees every court ruling, election, or other such public occurrence that does not go one’s way as showing the entire system to be damaged beyond repair, which sort of thinking is by no means limited to neoconservatives.

 

Of all Captain Airhead’s bad acts, the worst was when he invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Freedom Convoy Protest.  Unlike the types of protests he routinely supported, the Freedom Convey did not involve the destruction or defacement of property, public or private, violence, or riotous behaviour in general but was a true peaceful demonstration.  The trucker-protestors converged on Ottawa, parked in the neighbourhood around the government buildings, and basically threw a long, loud, party in the streets.  The protest was entirely justified.  It was in response to the Liberal government’s having introduced new restrictions by removing the exemption to vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers at the time when restrictions were generally being rolled back, showing the government’s determination to milk the absurd bat flu paranoia for as long as they could at the expense of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods of Canadians.  There was no call for bringing out the biggest weapon the government had at its disposal against the protestors, the brutality with which the government broke up the protest was the sort of thing one would expect from the Chinese or North Korean regimes, and the ongoing legal persecution of the protest organizers is disgusting, to say the least.  Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse, and all the evidence indicates that Airhead and his cronies intended to go much further.  They were forced to rescind the Emergencies Act, however, because the Senate was about to vote against confirming their having invoked it, which would have made their position much more difficult going into the mandatory inquiry that followed.  As for the inquiry itself, while Justice Rouleau’s finding that the government had met the threshold required for invoking the Act was absurd, Captain Airhead failed in his efforts to turn the inquiry into a trial of the protesters’ actions rather than his own, and when the Federal Court ruled on the same question a year later, they found against the government.

 

That is what the system working looks like.  It could have and should have worked better.  Ultimately, however, it worked.

 

That Canadians do not share Captain Airhead’s “woke” views to the extent he always assumed is a large part of the reason why he is no longer prime minister and why the Liberal Party under Blofeld has taken several steps back from aggressive promotion of the “woke” agenda..  Whether this will be permanent or is only temporary while the forces of progressive insanity regroup remains to be seen, but for now at least, the Liberal government is focusing on matters that appeal to a wider base among Canadians than the far left fringe.  That something like this would happen sooner or later was inevitable because an ideological agenda based on maximizing every type of diversity except diversity of thought is unsustainable.  Towards the end of the Airhead premiership, the left’s efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of sex and gender were undermined by its simultaneous efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of culture and race.  That this would happen was entirely predictable because the only way to maximize diversity of culture and race in a Western society is by increasing the number of people whose culture has not been so transformed by Modern liberalism as to make it supportive of maximizing sex/gender diversity.  Eventually the foreseeable clash occurred and a sizeable portion of Canadians realized that Captain Airhead was pushing diversity too far in both of these areas.

 

For the immediately foreseeable future, it is likely that immigration levels will remain higher than they ought to be but will cease to resemble overt efforts to make Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints into a reality.  Promotion of the alphabet soup agenda will probably continue but it will be much lower key than under Captain Airhead.  That this is the case is evident in the fact that the abuse of the sign of God’s covenant with Noah was a lot less conspicuous last month than in the “month formerly known as June” in previous years.  The same will be more or less true in other areas where Captain Airhead pushed his agenda far beyond what the general public was willing to support him in.

 

In conclusion, while Canada should be in a much better condition than she actually is, she is far better off after a decade of Captain Airhead than could possibly have been anticipated. 

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

Apocalypses 2020

Years from now, provided there is anyone left to write the history, the year 2020 AD might very well be dubbed “The Year of the Apocalypses.” That is not a typo, the plural is deliberate.

A mere three months ago, in a period that already seems to have been wiped from living memory by the death of George Floyd, we were told by the mainstream mass media that we were living out the reality of Stephen King’s The Stand. A superflu was spreading around the globe like wildfire, threatening all life in its path. We would either die a horrible death from an asphyxiating pneumonia that causes excruciating pain, or, more likely, would experience ordinary flu symptoms, or, just as likely, no symptoms whatsoever. In the name of saving us all from this fate, our governments suspended our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion, told most people other than those involved in the production and distribution of food and medicine that their jobs and businesses were “non-essential”, and ordered everybody to stay home and to stay at least six feet away from each other at all times. It looked very much like our governments had decided that to avoid living out The Stand we needed to live out George Orwell’s 1984 instead, and learn to love Big Brother.

We have now moved from The Stand into The Camp of the Saints. In this novel by Jean Raspail which first appeared in French in 1973, white, Christian, Western Civilization is brought to an end by its own liberalism. First, the liberalism which permeates France from the top to the bottom, prevents her from doing what is necessary to preserve her own existence when threatened by the invasion of an armada of decrepit ships laden with the teeming, impoverished, masses of the Third Word. France’s president knows what must be done to save France, but is unwilling to say it publicly. The overwhelming message, expressed in mindless and banal slogans, from the political and cultural leadership of the country is that the migrants must be welcomed and embraced. This part of the story occupies the largest part of the novel. After France’s refusal to turn away the migrants lays bare the weakness of the West for all to see, anti-racist uprisings occur in every major Western city with the West’s own, progressive and liberal corporate, governmental, ecclesiastical, and media elites defecting to the side of the revolutionaries.

Five years ago I wrote about how the migrant – or “Syrian refugee” as the media falsely labelled it – crisis in Europe, was like watching the first part of Raspail’s story come true. Today, what we are seeing looks more like the second part of the story. The Black Lives Matter movement has capitalized on George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis police to organize events in every major city in not just the United States, but in Canada and throughout the Western world. Called “peaceful protests” by an adoring and sympathetic mainstream media, they are more accurately described as riots, being all too frequently, and hardly coincidentally, accompanied by mass looting, vandalism, arson, and violence. In all of this they are no different from previous race riots, such as those of the “long hot summer” of 1967. This time, however, they have the endorsement, not just of empty-headed celebrities, but of major corporations and religious and political leaders as well. Indeed, with all the monument and statue toppling that has being going on, “insurrection” would be a better word than even “riot.” It is very much starting to resemble the global racial insurrection in The Camp of the Saints.

Earlier this year, when the previous Apocalypse was underway, many of us noted that the way the politicians, the media, and the World Health Organization were talking about keeping the lockdown in place until a vaccine was developed and then making that vaccine mandatory, was sounding suspiciously like the passage in the thirteenth chapter of the actual Apocalypse of St. John in the New Testament that speaks of the Mark of the Beast. This was even before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the United States House of Representatives devised a bill authorizing the American Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend $100 billion in programs for “Testing, Reaching, and Contacting Everyone” with regards to the coronavirus and gave it the number HR6666. I made a few jokes about Bill Gates, a major funder of vaccine development and who was talking last year about implanted vaccination records, acting like he were auditioning for the role of Antichrist, but I promptly regretted it when a friend tried to turn it into a tiresome and tedious discussion of the fine and minute points of eschatology and what has to happen before what in the unfolding of the last of the last days.

Now it seems that another contender for the infamous Mark has appeared on the scene. In these anti-white racist rallies, the representatives of civil authority such as politicians and policemen, have been expected to participate in a ceremony that is usually called “taking the knee.” It began in the world of athletics four years ago when Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49s, knelt during the pre-game playing of the American national anthem as a protest against what he erroneously believed to be the state of affairs in his country with regards to police racism. It is obvious from the way it is being used in the rallies today that is has developed into something far beyond what it was in its original context. It is demanded as a sign of submission and contrition – albeit with no absolution proffered.

It is noteworthy that this ritual abasement involves a gesture that is virtually identical to what is called genuflection in Christianity – the bending of one knee and touching the ground with the other. The significance of genuflection in Christianity is as a sign of respect and reverence in acknowledgement of the presence of God. It was originally derived from the recognition of God as the King of Kings. One would bend one knee when called into the presence of his earthly liege lord and Sovereign. The Church, in recognition of God as the Highest of Kings, reserved the other knee for the acknowledgement of His presence. In the Roman Communion, and the higher of the Churches of the Anglican Communion, it is customary to genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in both the Nicene Creed and in the reading of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, in acknowledgement of the fact that God had come down from His throne in Heaven to dwell among men as one of us. Other genuflections, such as those made by the celebrant during the consecration of the elements of the Eucharist, and by the congregants upon entering and exiting the building or their pew, are in acknowledgement of Christ’s Sacramental Presence.

The practice is not universal among Christians among whom there are many theological disagreements with regards to Christ’s Sacramental Presence. When a violent and totalitarian movement, however, starts demanding that people demonstrate their submission by making to it a sign of respect that has traditionally been reserved for the presence of Christ, all the faithful should recognize that it is the Enemy of their souls who so demands their submission and allegiance.

Whether or not this is “the” final, Mark of the Beast, of prophecy, I have no idea. The way things have been going we are likely to get two or three more Apocalypses in before the end of the year. Either way, our duty is plain and that is not to submit.

Those who take the knee, do so at the peril of their own souls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures and Words

It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and, like most familiar adages, there is much truth in this statement. A single picture is capable of conveying, instantly and powerfully, what it might take a long time and many words to get across verbally. Furthermore, pictures have the ability to speak to the emotions with a voice which drowns out that of the rational argument which speaks only to the intellect.

Pictures, therefore, are dangerous weapons in the wrong hands, for, like words, they can convey falsehoods as well as truths. Moreover, a lie spoken through a picture can have a lasting impact even after it has been exposed and that impact can be stronger than the words through which the truth is revealed.

The media recently treated us to an example of this as they splashed across our television and computer screens and the front pages of our newspapers the image of the body of a drowned, three year old boy, lying dead on a Turkish beach. Virtually every detail of the story that accompanied this image, even down to the name of the boy as initially reported, has subsequently been demonstrated to be at least partially false, yet its emotional impact continues to linger on, exerting a baleful influence on the Western world’s response to the flood of migration from the Middle East and Africa. Due to the sheer numbers involved, the situation calls for realism, cool heads, and long-term thinking, but instead, thanks to this picture, we are getting grandstanding gestures, reeking of sentimentality.

The death of a three year old is a terrible thing, of course, but it is not ordinarily world news, much less world changing news. The purpose of the highlighting of this story by the world media was to present a message, not about the boy himself, but about the wave of migration that is being called a refugee crisis. That message is that thousands of people, displaced by the war in Syria, will die like this young toddler, unless taken in by the countries of the West, as the victims both of the war and of Western heartlessness.

That is the message carried by the first stories that accompanied the image and which, due to the law of first impressions, is the message that endures, regardless of the countless subsequent retractions of the details of the initial reporting. This is a media technique that Professor Bruce Charlton calls “first-strike framing” in his recent book Addicted to Distraction.

There has been plenty the media have had to retract, or at the very least, redact, about this story. Whatever else Alan Kurdi might be a victim of, he is not a victim of either the war in Syria or Western heartlessness. His family had fled ISIS in Syria, yes, but they were already living in safety in Turkey. Nor, as it turns out, had they been turned away by the Canadian Ministry of Immigration, for, contrary to the initial claims of the father and aunt of the boy, the only application that had been filed had been for the boy’s uncle, Mohammed. Yet even if such an application had been filed and rejected, it could scarcely have contributed to the death of the boy, whose destination on this ill-fated boat trip was not Canada, but the Greek island of Kos. Indeed, from the testimony of the other survivors, it is apparent that the responsibility for the boy’s death falls squarely on his father, Abdullah, who has been using the soapbox the world media gave him to point fingers at everyone but himself. According to these other survivors he is a people smuggler and was driving the boat himself when it capsized.

Just as the story about the Kurdi family does not bear up under scrutiny, neither does the larger narrative about the so-called refugee crisis. While undoubtedly many genuine refugees have been created as people have been dispossessed and displaced by the war between the rebels and the Assad government in Syria, especially after the creation of ISIS and the wave of religious persecution that ensued, there is a world of difference between those who have fled to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to escape immediate danger and persecution, and the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, flooding into Europe across the Mediterranean. To accept these indiscriminately, as the media, humanitarian organizations, leftist politicians, and bleeding heart clergymen demand, without making the vital distinctions between a true refugee and a migrant, and between a migrant and an invader, could only destroy our own countries while doing no good for real refugees as we would be letting in the kind of people they are fleeing from along with them and potentially recreating the conditions from which they are trying to escape in our own countries.

According to statistics gathered by the European Union, only about a fifth of those pouring into Europe are actually from Syria. Even more significantly, almost three quarters of these are men. Whatever their country of origin, it is from safe locations to which they have already arrived that they are flooding into Europe. All the evidence points to the conclusion that, contrary to the media narrative, what we are seeing is not the kind of emergency situation that demands a humanitarian response of immediate and unconditional acceptance of any and all claiming asylum but an invasion that must be repelled if Western civilization is to survive.

If progressives in the West are loathe to accept this conclusion, others elsewhere clearly see this invasion for what it is. How else can we explain Saudi Arabia’s offer to pay for the construction of 200 mosques for the migrants in Germany? Refugees are people forced out of their homes, looking for temporary asylum until it is safe to return. This project tells us that in the eyes of the Saudi Arabians, who have not offered to take in their fellow Muslims themselves, this is something much more permanent.

Those who are unwilling to accept this conclusion, inevitable as it is to those with the proverbial eyes to see, hurl against those who bravely speak the forbidden truth, such words as “racist” and “xenophobic” or “inhumane” and “heartless”. These are among the few words in our language that have a power comparable to that of pictures because they too speak to the emotions in a way that the words of a rational argument cannot. It is a power that is abused every time these words are spoken, for they cannot be used in good faith being accusatory words that pronounce their verdict upon the heart, known only to God, while denying the accused what in our legal and judicial tradition is a basic right, that of the presumption of innocence.

These words are weapons in the arsenal of the invaders for this is not a force armed with horses and bowmen, swords and spears, tanks, aircraft, guns and bombs. No, it has much more effective weapons than all of those. It is an invasion force like that described in Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints, armed with our own liberalism and humanitarianism. Its chief offensive weapons, the swords against which we must quickly develop shields or perish, are our self-accusations of racism, and the picture of a drowned three year old boy.

Sinking Our Lifeboats

Imagine that you are on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. Your pilot is a historical re-enactment fanatic who, in a moment of drunken insanity, decides that the time is ripe for re-creating the sinking of the Titanic and rams the ship into an iceberg. Like everyone else on board you head to the lifeboats. You wait in line, they put you on board a lifeboat, and when it is full lower it onto the sea.

From the safety of your lifeboat you watch the ship go down and realize, to your horror, that something has gone wrong with the evacuation process. A panic has broken out and in the irrational frenzy of that panic several of the remaining lifeboats have been damaged and rendered useless. There are no longer sufficient lifeboats to carry everyone on the ship and people are jumping into the ocean and desperately swimming towards the ones already afloat, including yours.

You are now faced with a dilemma. You know that your lifeboat has a limited carrying capacity. If you let more people onto the lifeboat you risk running out of the lifeboat's resources before being rescued or, worse, capsizing the lifeboat. If that happens, you will have not only have failed to save the people you pulled from the ocean, but will have needlessly killed yourselves in the process.

American biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin first posed this dilemma in an article for the September 1974 edition of Psychology Today entitled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” the awful subtitle of which, added by the editor without the author's approval, misses the point completely. Wealthy countries, Hardin argued, like lifeboats have limited carrying capacities and therefore taking in masses of immigrants from poorer countries will not solve the problems of poor countries but will only sink our lifeboats, metaphorically speaking.

Hardin’s article is timelier today than when it was first published forty-one years ago. For weeks now the most important international news item has been the horde of migrants evacuating Syria and flooding into Europe claiming to be refugees from the war that has ravaged that country and from the terrorism and tyranny of ISIS. The better informed among us know that this is only part of a much larger wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe that has been accelerating over the last year or so. The television and newspaper media have manipulated this story in such a way as to make us feel that Western countries are morally obliged to take in these refugees and they have been aided and abetted in this by irresponsible clergymen like the present Pope and by most of our politicians who seem to be competing with each other as to who will sink their country’s lifeboat the fastest. It is as if they were all acting out roles in a script written for them by Jean Raspail forty-two years ago.

In Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, The Camp of the Saints, an armada of one hundred ships carrying a cargo of a million of India’s poorest and most wretched, sets sail from Calcutta en route to the French Riviera. While many in France, including her president, can see the handwriting on the wall and know that if their country and civilization are to survive they must turn these invaders, armed only with their own plight, away, they lack the moral courage to do it, being paralysed by guilt induced by decades of liberalism. With the exception of a small handful of heroes in which the spirit of the old West lingers on, France succumbs to an invasion that is cheered on by her own media, politicians, and church.

When Hardin first used the lifeboat metaphor his concern was a country’s limited supply of material resources. What Raspail’s novel illustrates is that there are more important things at stake in keeping our lifeboats afloat. Our customs, way of life, beliefs, laws, traditions, history, and our very identity are all more important than physical resources. Indeed, it is these things which make possible the conditions that are attracting all of these migrants from other parts of the world.

Laws which protect and secure our persons and property, a respect for personal liberty that allows us to thrive and prosper balanced with a sense of fairness and justice that demands that we collectively look after the weaker and less successful among us, with recognized, established, and, for the most part respected, civil rights do not just come about on their own. Whether these things draw immigrants for their own sake or for the sake of the abundance of material goods that these make widely available in our countries, we tend to think of them as being based upon universal, abstract, principles available through reason to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This liberal assumption, however, does not bear the scrutiny of history in which these things developed slowly within the context of national cultures that claimed the heritage of classical Greco-Roman antiquity and of Christendom as their own. Should those cultures go down with our lifeboats, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that these things would survive, and there is plenty of evidence that they will not do so in the failed states that were once thriving colonies of European empires.

Make no mistake – the sinking of our national lifeboats, and our entire civilization along with them, is the doom that we choose for ourselves if we continue to base our response to the refugee crisis on sentiment and emotion rather than facts and reason. It is not as if the refugees were pouring into a healthy Europe of countries confident in their traditions and identities. They are pouring into a Europe which has experienced decades of low fertility in which governments have relied upon large scale immigration to keep their population levels up, a pattern encouraged by the European Union that has developed over the same period of time. While a healthy country can take in and absorb a certain number of immigrants without harm to itself for a country to rely upon large numbers of immigrants to make up for low fertility as a long-term policy is to adopt a policy of population replacement over reproduction which is to embrace its own death as a nation.

After several decades of this, what Western countries need is a break from immigration, but what our politicians are offering us instead is to inundate us yet further with thousands of migrants who claim to be refugees but are clearly behaving more like a mob of invaders. The British government has offered to resettle 20, 000 Syrian refugees by 2020, with the opposition party and its supporters complaining that this is not enough. The governments of Germany and Austria have opened their borders wide to any and all claiming asylum. Even here in Canada, an ocean and half a world removed from the Middle East, each of the two largest opposition parties are vying to outdo the other in accusing the present government of culpability in the death of the three year old boy whom the media have been dishonestly presenting as a victim of Western heartlessness and in the tens of thousands of refugees they are promising to resettle should they win the upcoming election.

There are those, of course, who will insist that to think about preserving our national identities, cultures, and ways of life while other people are fleeing persecution and war is to show a lack of perspective and wrong priorities. They might further insist that the idea that we should not think only of ourselves but of others as well is the highest ethical principle of the faith at the heart of our traditional cultures and that to abandon that principle is also, in a sense, to lose who we are. While these objections should not be lightly dismissed, we must distinguish between moral principles themselves and the sentimental way in which some would apply them.

The Golden Rule tells us to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but as none of us in our right mind would want another country to take us in if it did so in such numbers that it lost everything that made us want to move there in the first place, this clearly does not contradict the logic of lifeboat ethics, whatever the current pretender to St. Peter's throne has to say about it. Christianity calls upon us to follow the example of Christ, and that example is one of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, but a cross is something that can only be taken up individually, not collectively. It is one thing to throw yourself in front of a bullet to save another person. It is quite another thing to put your child in the way of the bullet and then later try to claim the laurels of a hero. To insist that out of humanitarianism and compassion we resettle this growing flood of migrants in Western countries is to be like the latter person, not the former.

Worse, as is the whole point of the lifeboat metaphor, it is to be like the man who credits himself for heroism for sacrificing his child but failing to stop the bullet.

The Real Threat to Israel – and to the Rest of Us

Since the latest round in the Israel/Palestine conflict we have seen a phenomenon arise that is cause for great concern. “Protest rallies” have been held against Israel that would be better described as riots than peaceful demonstrations. Recently in Calgary, for example, an anti-Israeli mob gathered on the steps of the Alberta city’s City Hall to protest Israel’s airstrikes. What, exactly, they thought the city of Alberta could do about it, is unclear. At any rate, the “demonstration” broke out into violence as the mob turned on a small handful of Israel supporters who, perhaps unwisely, were also present. Several of them were injured and hospitalized as a result. Mercifully, nobody was killed.

The Calgary riot is far from being the only example. The same thing has happened in other major Canadian cities such as Toronto and across the rest of the Western world. Indeed, while this sort of things is new to us for the most part here in Canada, in some countries, such as France, it is both old hat and far more extreme. The riots in France have been aptly compared to the Kristallnacht, the pogrom in Nazi Germany in 1938 in which Jewish homes, synagogues, and stores were vandalized and ransacked. The biggest difference between the two events was that in 2014 Paris, the rioters who were smashing windows and attacking Jews were not Aryan supremacists but Arabs who mixed praises to Allah, with their gutter level, Nazi-era, anti-Semitism.

This sort of thing does a huge disservice to the Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank in whose name these protests are ostensibly being held. So, of course, does the actions of Hamas, the despicable terrorist group that hurls rockets at civilian neighbourhoods in Israel from launchers that it hides in schools, nurseries, and hospitals in an utterly evil attempt to maximize the deaths of non-combatants on both sides (for the most part ineffective when it comes to Israeli citizens). This is not what I wish to focus on here, however.

The fact that we are experiencing this sort of nonsense throughout the West is indicative of a much deeper problem, one which very few commentators seem willing to address. Some go out of their way to avoid addressing it. Arthur Weinreb, for example, recently writing in the neo-conservative Canadian Free Press, said that the police and not pro-Palestinian protestors were the problem. Now much of what he said is valid. In a country like Canada, peaceful protests and demonstrations are and should be legal, and it is the job of the police to ensure that when they occur they occur in a lawful and orderly fashion and do not breakdown into violent riots of this sort. The police seem to have abdicated that responsibility to a certain degree in the case of Calgary.

Weinreb attributes this abdication to political correctness on the part of the police, an unwillingness to investigate Muslims. That may very well be the case but placing all the blame on the police and virtually exonerating the protestors is itself a form of political correctness. For the elephant in the room here, the issue which commentators are unwilling to touch, is the fact that these riots would not be a problem were it not for liberal, multicultural, policies that encourage mass immigration from the Third World while discouraging assimilation to the established cultures, institutions, and ways of Western countries.

Forty one years ago, a distinguished writer in the country that has seen the worst of these riots, addressed this issue in a prophetic novel. In The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail, a traditionalist French Catholic and royalist, depicts Western civilization on the verge of collapse, threatened by an invasion of Third World immigrants armed with nothing but their own wretchedness, against which the West, weakened by generations of liberal guilt, finds itself powerless to resist. When European countries close their consulates, ending a program whereby impoverished parents in India could improve the lots of their children by putting them up for adoption in Europe, a horde of millions of the poorest of the poor, climb aboard an armada of decrepit ships in heed to the words of an unlikely prophet, who declares that the day has come for “Buddha and Allah” and all the Hindu gods to cross the seas and take for themselves the kingdom of the “nice little god of the Christians”, and set sail for the coast of France where they are due to arrive on Easter morning. The French media, in a frenzy of self-loathing, propagate the welcoming of the armada, which they dub the “last chance for mankind”, uttering banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now”. When France fails to summon up sufficient will to live in order to resist this invasion, the rest of the West falls too. Towards the end of the novel, the Grand Rabbi is depicted as joining in the surge of antiracist sentiment that dooms France and the West, “in spite of the fact that Israel herself was doomed not to survive it.”

Raspail, although the armada he depicts is laden with Hindus from India, showed a great deal of insight into the true nature of the threat that Western countries, including Israel, face. Needless to say, in a West dominated by liberalism, his insights have gone ignored. This is true of mainstream conservatives as much as anybody else for they have opted to concentrate on military threats that are for the most part non-existent. As the Cold War drew to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was progressing towards an “end of history” in the form of universal, liberal, capitalist democracy. More realistically, Samuel P. Huntington argued that history would continue to be shaped by the “clash of civilizations”, with the next clash being between the America-led West and the Islamic world.

Since the jihadist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, this clash has been mostly conceived of in military terms. The knee-jerk tendency is to think of the threat in terms of terrorist bombs and the solution in terms of high-tech military hardware, wreaking death and destruction upon Arab and Muslim countries or alternatively, imposing liberalism, feminism, and democracy upon them (one result of which was the electoral victories of Hamas). It would make more sense to think of the threat in demographic terms, as Patrick J. Buchanan did in The Death of the West. In this 2002 book, Buchanan argued that Israel could be seen as a metaphor or microcosm of the West as a whole. Noting the high fertility rates of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, as well as in the surrounding Arab countries, he pointed out that over the next twenty-five years her population, including both Jews and Arabs, could be predicted to grow by 2.1 million while her neighbours would grow by 62.2 million, while the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel herself would grow to 25 million, vastly outnumbering the number of Jewish Israelis. In the long run, this and not Hamas’ rockets, is what threatens Israel’s existence. Similarly, it is the low fertility rates of Western countries, combined with the mass immigration of people with much higher fertility rates, that threatens Western civilization – or what is left of it – and which is importing into the West, a problem with jihadist violence that we otherwise would not have to put up with.

Of course liberals will have nothing to do with any proposals that take that diagnosis of the problem into account and neither will mainstream conservatives. A couple of years ago, the man who is now being spoken of as likely to succeed Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party and possibly Prime Minister of Canada, Jason Kenney, banned Serbian-American scholar Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from entering Canada. Dr. Trifkovic’s strategy for victory in the war against jihadism is a combination of keeping the jihadists out of Western countries while letting them be in their own countries, a refreshing opposite strategy to that of George W. Bush and one which rests squarely on the diagnosis of the problem that we have just considered. Mr. Kenney, however, appears to prefer the failed strategy of appeasing them here, while bombing them to death over there. So problems of this sort are likely to continue for the foreseeable future.