The Devil’s Deadly Trick

 

Last week David Warren wrote “I have long supposed the Devil’s ‘fan base’ is to be found overwhelmingly on the political Left. The cause is obvious: they are the godless parties.”  I agree with this.  I usually find myself in agreement with what the former editor of The Idler and Ottawa Citizen columnist writes.  Usually, not always.  I don’t agree with him that St. Peter was given a universal jurisdiction over the other Apostles and the entire Church which has descended to the Patriarch of Rome to this day although I rather admire the way he has handled that office being currently held by someone who is clearly not what the Presbyterian Anne Blythe nee Shirley would have called a “kindred spirit.”  Of course this is a relatively new belief of his.  He entered the Roman Communion in 2003.  Back when I was reading him in print in the 1990s he was still a member of the Anglican Communion to which I currently belong, although at the time alluded to I was attending Non-Conformist meetings of a very Low Church sort.  Looking back, it must have been somewhere around the time that he crossed the Tiber that my theology started to develop along the High Church lines that put me on the Canterbury trail by the end of the decade.  I also no longer share his current admiration for Donald the Orange, although in the interest of being fair I do admire the dismantling of America’s “deep state” that Warren was praising in the piece quoted above.  While Trump initially lost my admiration the moment he first threatened Anschluss against Canada I have since come to see that he is someone who no Christian of any Communion who is familiar with Scripture and Tradition should be supporting because he has formed a cult of followers around himself that make blasphemous claims about him that he has never repudiated, at one point retweeted, and has both made himself and encouraged among his followers.  In the most recent example, Paula White, the heretical televangelist whom Trump has appointed the head of his newly created “White House Faith Office” formed ostensibly for the purposes of combatting anti-Christian discrimination, blasphemously said “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”  In the early centuries of Christianity, when persecution came from officials of the Roman Empire, it was because Christians refused to accept the claims of divinity that the state cult made for the emperor.

 

That having been said, I reiterate that I do agree with Warren’s statement about the Devil’s fan base being “overwhelming on the political Left.”   In this essay, however, I intend to demonstrate that the Devil’s can sometimes more effectively work through those who are not his fans, those who are not openly on his side.   The first step in the demonstration is to ask a question.  

 

If the Devil’s fans are on the Left what are we to make of a “Right” that has largely aligned itself with a cult that worships a false christ?

 

This is an important question to ask because historically the home of political messianism has been on the Left.  The idea that political action is the path of salvation is arguably the defining characteristic of the historical Left.   The Right’s historical attitude has been to reject this idea and to regard the various schemes that have been hatched out of it with the appropriate response ranging from skepticism to horror.  If it be countered that the “far Right” twentieth century movements Fascism and Nazism both preached a form of political national salvation, the response is that these movements were not related to the historical and traditional Right, did not consider themselves to be on the Right – Nazism stands for “National Socialism” and regarded itself as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary party – rejected all the principles of the historical and traditional Right, formed regimes that resembled those of Communism, and are only considered on the “Right” because the Left has so categorized them.

 

This “Right” that so blasphemously looks upon Donald the Orange as a “Saviour” is obviously primarily an American phenomenon based in the United States of America.   This itself is sufficient to explain its turn to political messianism.  The American Right has no more of a relationship with the historical and traditional Right than Fascism or National Socialism did because the United States was founded on the repudiation of the principles of the historical and traditional Right.

 

The historical and traditional Right was essentially the resistance of Christendom – Christian civilization – to its being replaced with Western Civilization – Modern, liberal, secular civilization.  As such, it held the worldview of Christendom, a worldview incompatible with theories of political salvation such as were to become all too numerous in the politics of Modern, liberal, secular, Western Civilization.  The struggles and woes of man in this world are a condition from which he cannot extract himself because they are the consequences of Original Sin – he is in exile from Paradise Lost.  The State has been given to man, therefore, not to save him from his condition, but to administer earthly justice and enforce the laws made necessary by Original Sin.  Although salvation was accomplished by God in this present world in history through the events of the Gospel, and can be partially enjoyed in this present world in Christ’s spiritual kingdom the Church in her “militant” mode, the full enjoyment of salvation, Paradise Regained is to be looked for outside of history, after the event that will bring history to a close, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to “judge both the quick and the dead.”

 

The historical and traditional principles of the Right are basically three – one political, one religious, and one that combines the political and the religious.  The political principle is royal monarchy.  Not just monarchy, the governance of the one. Dictatorship or tyranny, the absolute rule of someone propelled into power by the mob, is a perverse example of that.  Royal monarchy or kingship, the reign of someone selected not by popular election but by an established line of secession that places his office above democratic politics, who accedes immediately on the death of the previous Sovereign, but is confirmed in the office by swearing oaths before and to God in the Church.  The religious principle is orthodox Christian Churchmanship which is the confession and practice of the orthodox Christian faith of the ancient Creeds, in a Church in organic descent from the Church in Jerusalem, with valid Sacraments administered by the ministerial priesthood governed by bishops in Apostolic succession.  The third principle is the union of Church and State, not in the sense of a theocracy in which the Church rules the State or Erastianism in which the State rules the Church, but in the sense of the co-operative relationship between the Christian kings of the first principle, and the orthodox Church of the second principle, in which each exercises their authority in their own sphere to uphold the other in its sphere.

 

The most legitimate Right is the Right that continues to hold to these principles.   The second most legitimate Right is that which defends the other good things that the Left turned to attacking after its war on kings, the Church, and Christendom’s union of Church and State. Any list of such good things would have to be representative as the Left is constantly adding to it.  The American Right at its best – and it is far from its best at the moment – can only ever be a version of the second most legitimate Right, because the United States was founded on an explicit repudiation of the first and third principles, by Puritans, freemasons, and deists who had personally repudiated the second.

 

Does this mean that the United States was founded as a country of the Left?

 

Yes and no.  The United States was built on the foundation of liberalism.  While “liberalism” and “the Left” have often been used interchangeably they are not identical.  Think of a river, flowing from a spring, from which, near the source, a tributary breaks off.  Now, if you think of the spring as the turning away of Modern philosophy from Christianity and the traditions of Christendom, liberalism as the river flowing from it, and the Left as the tributary, you will have the basic idea of the relationship between these things.  It should be added that throughout their history the streams of liberalism and the Left have sometimes moved closer to each other and sometimes further apart. 

 

Now, while liberalism’s repudiation of the principles of Christendom and the Right was bad and places it on the Devil’s side along with the Left, the ideas of liberalism were not all bad, and those that were bad were not all bad to the same degree.  It was necessary that this be the case for the Devil’s trick to work.  For that trick is simply this, to present people with two options, one on the Left that is more or less explicitly evil, the other, a more palatable liberal option that can be marketed as “conservative” and to tell people they have to choose one or the other.  I am not thinking primarily of party politics although the American two-party system does provide an illustration of how the trick works.  The most recent Democratic presidential candidates have been people who think women have the right to murder their babies, that white people should be made into racial scapegoats for the problems of everyone else, that men who claim to be women are what they claim to be and have a right to be treated as such and that violent criminals should be turned out onto the streets as soon as possible.  That is only a sampling of their crazy and evil ideas.  They are the Devil’s fan base indeed.  So the Republican candidate gets elected. 

 

The Devil has played this trick very effectively in economics.  The Left has offered us an option called socialism.  Socialism is a scheme of political salvation.  It tells us that our woes are all due to economic inequality, that the cause of economic inequality is private ownership, and that salvation is to be attained by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with some form of common or public ownership.  Don’t be deceived by its surface appearance for if you look beneath the surface it is clear that this is not some benevolent if sappy “lets care and share” sort of thing but something far more sinister.  Where its true face can be seen is in its egalitarianism.  A movement that was genuinely about alleviating economic suffering and misery would do so rather than obsessing about the unfairness, real or imagined, of their being “haves” when there are also “have nots.”  Eliminating private ownership is a way to harm the “haves” not to help the “have nots.”  “Private property”, Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “is a vital need of the soul.”  Socialism therefore reduces to Envy, the hatred of others for their possession of something you desire that is the second worst after Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins.  That so many have been fooled into looking no further than the surface and seeing something that looks to them like Christian Love for the poor and disadvantaged should not surprise us.  This is another of the Devil’s tricks, the one identified by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15.  Today, after about a century of socialism having been given chance after chance to alleviate misery, only to produce more than it alleviated, that trick is less effective.

 

This brings us to the other economic option that in the Devil’s trick is presented as the alternative to the Left’s bad option of socialism.  This is capitalism, the economic system for which liberalism has always advocated although the capitalism of reality and the capitalism of liberal economic theory have never been the same thing.  For our purposes here the differences are irrelevant.  The key elements common to reality “capitalism” and liberal theory “capitalism” are the private ownership of capital (wealth that can be used to create more wealth), contractual labour, and voluntary economic transactions.  Since these are each preferable to their alternatives, capitalism as a whole has been easy to sell to those who see socialism for what it is and capitalism has often been thought of as the economics of the Right despite its association with liberalism.  When it comes, however, to all those good things that the Left has declared war on, capitalism, the economy of Big Business, has been very destructive, arguably far more so than socialism.  Richard M. Weaver, writing in 1948 identified a few of these goods: “The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties.  These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property.” (Ideas Have Consequences, 121)  He then added “Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.”  

 

Much was made, and rightly so, in the Batflu scare of 2020 to 2022, of the harm the lockdowns and other repressive measures were doing to small businesses that did not have the resources to weather that storm of stupidity the way large conglomerates did.  While lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the like, are hardly “capitalist” measures, I wonder which was responsible for eliminating more small businesses, Batflu tyranny or the online global business empire of Donald the Orange’s newfound billionaire bestie Jeff Bezos?

 

Numerous other examples of this trick of the Devil’s can be produced.  One that is particularly germane at the moment is the nationalist opposition to the Left’s dream of world federalism with global citizenship and a battery of international bureaucracies to impose sex reassignment surgery on those few children they have allowed to escape subsidized, near-mandatory, abortion the second they experience a moment of gender confusion anywhere in the world whatever the local laws happen to say about it.  The alignment of the Left with the Devil’s values is particularly obvious in this case.  As tempting, however, as that makes the nationalist option, it ought to be resisted by the Right.

 

For one thing, nationalism’s home, like that of political messianism is properly on the Left.  Nationalism, historically, was a product of the French Revolution.  The Jacobins equated nation with state, and demanded, at the risk of your head if you didn’t comply, that loyalty to king and Church be replaced with loyalty to the nation-state.  For another, nationalism like socialism is a vice masquerading as a virtue.  The virtue it pretends to be, obviously enough, is patriotism, the love of one’s country.  Nationalism, however, is a poor imitation of patriotism.  It’s exaggerated and loud boasting about its country, its belligerence towards and bullying of other countries, none of which is characteristic of quiet, irenic, patriotism, betrays a lack of love for one’s country.  In a recent and excellent column Charles Coloumbe said much that is true, but when he wrote of Donald the Orange “That the newly restored president deeply loves the United States is, no doubt, true” he was very mistaken.  If Donald the Orange deeply loved the United States, he would accept her for what she is warts and all, quietly try to remove the warts without drawing attention to them, and leave the rest of the world alone, rather than loudly proclaim his intention to make her “Great Again” a proclamation that shows that he does not consider her to be great now and that greatness, a measure of strength and size, is the quality he wishes for her, rather than goodness, which is what someone who truly loved her would look for and manage see in her, even underneath her flaws.

 

In the last example there is a clear third alternative that the Right should chose over both nationalism and the Left’s world federalism/global citizenship/international bureaucracy and that is simple patriotism.  Such an alternative is more difficult to identify for the false choice of socialism and capitalism, in part because there are a multitude of acceptable alternatives. The distributism proposed by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, its close American cousin the agrarian economy that the Vanderbilt Twelve associated with the antebellum South which Wendell Berry both promoted and lived, Austrian economist Wilhelm Roepke’s synthesis of these with the liberal free market are just three such.  I shall defer further discussion of this point to an essay of its own at a later date.  I raise it here to make the point that these choices are false choices.  There are other options than socialism and capitalism.  There is a better alternative to one-worldism than nationalism.  There is a better alternative to democracy than republicanism.  We do not have to fall for the Devil’s trick and choose capitalism because socialism is so repugnant or choose nationalism because of all the evil that has been done by one-worldism.  Capitalism and nationalism have historically been very destructive of the good things in this world that we on the Right wish to conserve or restore.   

 

Finally, just because the Devil’s “fan base” on the Left, reviles and hates Donald the Orange for the things he gets right such as his refusal to allow his country to overrun by invaders, his banning the mutilation of children, his recognition of only two sexes, and the like, this does not mean that we on the Right should join what has so obviously become a deluded and dangerous cult, that worships the American president, and blasphemously looks upon him as some kind of saviour figure.   Out of all these false choices, this is by far the worst.

 

In the Olivet Discourse Jesus warned that “many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” (Matt. 24:5)   Later He told His disciples how to respond to these “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.” (v. 23).   It is incumbent upon us to obey our Lord’s words now.  False christs, as Gamaliel pointed out to the Sanhredrin in Acts 5, don’t end well, and they bring their followers down with them.  Jesus of Nazareth, was shown to be the true Christ, the Son of God, by the fact that the Crucifixion was not His end, He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven and is present in His Church to this day.   The Trump movement, by contrast, will end like that of any other false christ.  The fact that he is president of the United States will only make his fall that much harder.

 

Don’t fall for the Devil’s trick.

Dead Souls

The second of February is the fortieth day after Christmas and therefore the day on which the Church commemorates the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This commemoration is popularly known as Candlemas from the tradition of blessing candles in Church on this day.  There is an ancient folk tradition that says that if it is a clear day on Candlemas it will be a long winter.  A tradition derived from this one says that a hibernating animal – which depends on where you live – will temporarily awaken on Candlemas to predict the remaining length of winter by whether or not he sees his shadow.  In North America, the hibernating animal is the groundhog or woodchuck.

 

This year Candlemas fell on a Sunday.  On most Sunday evenings a friend comes over to watch movies and the obvious choice was “Groundhog Day” the 1993 film by Harold Ramis in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who goes to Punxsutawney, the small community in Pennsylvania where Groundhog Day is a much bigger deal than elsewhere, and becomes trapped in a personal time loop that forces him to relive the day over and over again.  The way in which Phil, Murray’s character who shares a name with the famous groundhog, responds to this dilemma evolves over the course of the movie.  At one point, fairly early in the plot, his response is gross self-indulgence since there are no consequences due to the slate constantly being wiped clean.  In this phase, the character of Rita portrayed by Andie MacDowell, watching him engage in reckless gluttony in the local diner, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him:

 

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he’s sprung

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

In the movie, Phil’s response is to laugh and make a joke about having misheard Walter Scott as Willard Scott.  Watching the movie with my friend, my response was to point out that Rita had misapplied the lines she quoted.  The lines are from Canto VI of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and refer not to a hedonist but to the person lacking patriotism.  The first part of the Canto goes:

 

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

 

After this comes the lines quoted in the movie.

Clearly Sir Walter Scott shared the opinion of Scottish-American, neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue as well he ought for that opinion is correct.  Note, however, that the correctness of the opinion depends on the definition of patriotism.  Nationalism, which is frequently confused with patriotism, is not a virtue.  It is not the opposite of a virtue, a vice, either, but this is only because it does not belong to the same general category, the habits of behaviour that make up character, of which virtue and vice are the good and bad subcategories.  Nationalism is an ideology.  An ideology is a formulaic substitute for a living tradition of thought (see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics And Other Essays).  Shortcuts of this type are always bad. 

 

In a recent column Brian Lilley spoke of “national pride” and criticized those who have only recently started to display national pride as Canadians in response to Donald the Orange.   While Lilley’s argument is related to my main topic in this essay, I bring it up here to make the point that “national pride” is not a good way of describing the patriotism that is a virtue.  To be fair, Lilley did not equate patriotism with “national pride” but this is because the word patriotism does not appear in his column.  Pride appears four times and the adjective proud appears nine times.  While it is easy to see why Lilley would use these terms, since much of the column is appropriately critical of the attacks on Canada and her history, identity, and traditions that have been coming from the current Liberal government for the duration of the near-decade they have been in power, pride is not the right word.  It is the name of a vice, indeed, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than a virtue.

 

Fortunately, we do not have to look far and wide to find the right term.  Patriotism, correctly defined, is neither the ideology of nationalism that values one’s country for its perceived superiority to all others requiring that all others be insulted and subjugated nor the deadly sin of pride as directed towards one’s country, but simply love of one’s country. 

 

Love of one’s country is indeed a virtue.  Whereas pride is the worst of all sins, love is the highest of all virtues. Of course, the love that is the highest of all virtues is a specific kind of love.  The Seven Heavenly Virtues include the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude and the Three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.  The Cardinal Virtues are habits that anyone can cultivate and so make up the best moral character that man can attain in his natural or unregenerate state.  While faith, hope, and love in a more general sense can be similarly cultivated, the Faith, Hope, and Love that make up the essence of Christian character must be imparted by the grace of God although the Christian is also expected to cultivate them.  Love is the greatest of the three as St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and therefore as Henry Drummond called it, “the greatest thing in the world”.  It incorporates the other two since they are built upon each other.  Natural loves are lesser than Christian Love or Charity, but they are still virtuous insomuch as they resemble, albeit imperfectly, the Theological Virtue.  Patriotism, the love of country, is such a love.  Edmund Burke famously described how it develops “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”  The “little platoons” include one’s family and local community and is Burke had wanted to belabour the point he could have said that the first principle is love of one’s family, which develops into love of one’s local community, and then outward.

 

It has been heartwarming to see Canadians display their love of country over the last month or so in response to the repeated threats of Anschluss coming from America’s Fuhrer.  While not all of these displays have been in good taste they do all demonstrate that Captain Airhead’s efforts to kill Canadian patriotism by endlessly apologizing for past events that need no apologies, cancelling Canada’s founders and historical leaders such as Sir John A. Macdonald, and other such nonsense have failed.  This resurgence in Canadian public patriotism ought, therefore, to be welcomed by the “conservatives” who rightly despise Captain Airhead.  Oddly, however, it has not been so welcomed by many of them. 

 

In part this is due to the fact that Captain Airhead, the Liberals, the NDP, and their media supporters who were all on the “cancel Canada” bandwagon until yesterday are now wrapping themselves in the flag and these do deserve to be called out for this.  The right way to do so, however, is to say something to the effect of “you are rather late to the party, but thanks for showing up.”  To Brian Lilley’s credit, that is the gist of what he says in the column alluded to earlier.  Many other “conservatives”, however, have responded quite differently.  In his 2006 book, In Defence of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue, Jeremy Lott pointed out the difference between Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy and Modern condemnation of hypocrisy.  In condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Jesus did not condemn them for the high moral standards they taught, but for falling short of those standards by sinning.  Moderns, however, when they condemn hypocrisy, condemn the moral standards rather than the sin.  The response of many “conservatives” to the newly discovered Canadian patriotism of progressives resembles this in that they seem to be criticizing the progressives more for their expression of patriotism today than for their lack of it yesterday.  One even quoted Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  I refer him to the comments of James Boswell, whose record of the remark is the reason we are familiar with it today, as to what it means.  Dr. Johnson was not impugning love of country, but a kind of pseudo-patriotism which interestingly enough was associated with the founding of America.

 

It can hardly be a coincidence that these same “conservatives” have been rather less than patriotic in their response to the threats from south of the border.  The founder of one “conservative” independent online media company first responded to these threats by saying they should be treated as a joke and a funny one at that. Then, when Donald the Orange said last weekend that it was no joke,  she flip-flopped and criticized Captain Airhead for having initially done exactly that and said the Anschluss threat was a joke.  In between she conducted and published an interview with an immigrant from America who twelve years ago proved herself to be exactly the kind of immigrant we don’t need when she published a book proposing the merger of our country with her country of birth. 

 

The general response to these threats in this organization’s commentary has been to treat the American dictator as a reasonable man, with legitimate grievances, who can be negotiated with and to propose an economic merger between the two countries that falls short of a political merger.  Ironically, their website is promoting a children’s book they just published on the life of Sir John A. Macdonald intended to counter the negative propaganda about the Father of Confederation that progressives have been spewing based on their skewed narrative about the Indian Residential Schools.  The book was a good and patriotic response to this blood libel of our country.  Sir John must be spinning in his grave, however, at the thought that the defence of his memory could be merged with the idea of an economic union with the United States.  Sir John spent his entire career as Prime Minister promoting internal east-west trade within the Dominion and fighting the siren call of north-south trade because he knew that this was the greatest threat to the success of the Confederation Project.

 

Free trade is a good idea from an economic perspective, but each of the “free trade” agreements we have signed with the United States has been a terrible idea from a political perspective.  The kind of economic union these “conservatives” are promoting would be worse than all of the other “free trade” agreements, since the United State is currently led by a lawless megalomaniac, who respects neither the limits placed on his powers by his country’s constitution nor the agreements he has signed and cannot be trusted to keep his own word – the “free trade” agreement he is currently, and deceitfully, claiming is so “unfair” to his country is the one he himself negotiated – and who looks at tariffs and economic measures in general as weapons to accomplish what his predecessors accomplished by bullets and bombs.  By his predecessors I do not mean previous American presidents, but Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  I recognized that this was what we were dealing with the moment he made his first “51^st state” remark and was confirmed in this when he doubled down on this talk after Captain Airhead announced his intention to resign.  No Canadian patriot could fail to recognize it today after he has continued to escalate his lies and rhetoric and threats for the last month.   Yes, the Left’s endless likeness of everyone they don’t like to Hitler has desensitized us to these comparisons, but let us not be like the villagers in Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.  This time the wolf is real. The sort of things the Left objects to in Donald the Orange, his immigration policies, his termination of the racist, anti-white, policy of DEI, do not warrant a comparison with Hitler, but his threatening us with Anschluss, his demand for Lebensraum from Denmark, his intent to take back his “Danzig Corridor” from Panama, his finding his Sudetenland in Gaza, most certainly do, as does the insane personality cult his followers have developed into.

 

Canadian conservatives ought to be leading the renaissance of Canadian patriotism, and yes, Brian Lilley, you are right that it should not have taken something like Trump’s threats to bring that renaissance about.  Liberals have always been the party of Americanization in Canada.  Sadly, today’s conservatives are mostly neoconservatives.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neoconservative is a conservative who has lost his memory.  On the authority of Sir Walter Scott I deduce from the disgusting anti-patriotism I have seen recently that many have lost their souls as well.

On Owning the Left’s Abusive Labels

About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.”  They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action.  While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter.  A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact.  They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.”  If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.

 

A couple of months ago David Warren said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.”  He was absolutely right about that, as he usually is about most matters.  See his piece from last month entitled “Annals of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the sadly long defunct Idler on this silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not. 

 

By labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they said about the Campaign Life Coalition.  The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby.  By social conservative, I mean approaching issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known as Christendom.  While they address a range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their efforts, and that is abortion.  They would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group.  While I share their position I prefer the negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life.  Abortion is murder, as any person capable of sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter.  It is therefore a bad thing and the right thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it.  The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side in the capital punishment debate.  The right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty.  Admittedly, there are good practical reasons for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never be trusted with that power.  My point, however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered “far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty extreme standpoint.

 

The CAHN, like most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current leadership and the New Democrats.  When it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets.  They have opposed the introduction of any restrictions on abortion.  Three years ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example.  But no, the Left voted as a block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right” to be limited even to prevent discrimination.  Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who claim to oppose all discrimination. 

 

Let us return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the position of the Left in terms of life and death.  Almost thirty years ago Pope John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then, liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since.  Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of murder.  The return of the Liberals to power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician assisted suicide violated Charter rights.  The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously regarded as appropriate for it.  Even more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the medical treatment they were seeking.  The program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying.  If government programs had theme songs it would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning with M, M*A*S*H.  The theme song, the lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.”  From the standpoint of those who support and are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane, rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed appear to be “extreme.”

 

Again, Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by people like that.

 

The expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense.  It is derived from the concept of political thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the further left you are.  This is a concept that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole was identified  classical liberalism (individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state, socialism).  By this standard, the more of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is.  Indeed, in some presentations of this spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no state is the furthest position to the right.  Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism (Nazism).  National Socialism, however, was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the points contrasted was aligned with the left pole.  National Socialism was a European rather than a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left” had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum arose.  This is because they were taken, not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French Revolution.  Supporters of the Revolution were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right.  The “Right” therefore, in French political usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather than the Bourbons for example).  It was basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England.  National Socialism, which opposed the traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right” of classical liberal republicanism.  This is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American meanings of Right are to each other.  The expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity to it.

The Left’s determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point where they are incapable of extracting themselves today.  It makes no difference to the Left if those they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in nature.  Once again the labelling says more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation of that extreme position on race.

 

To understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of the racialism of the actual National Socialists.  He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.”  Idolatry is what happens when man turns away from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships and serves instead false gods of his own construction.  Through worshipping and serving these false gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32).  Christianity called mankind out of the darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9)  It is hardly a coincidence that National Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically (theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation.  This does not mean that race and nation, which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through them to devils.

 

The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was.  What it wishes to conceal is that the idols it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served.  Like the National Socialists they worship at the altar of race and nation.  There is a difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most part their own.  Moreover, they are actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations.  This is the true nature of what the Left calls anti-racism.  It is a worse form of this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists.  Implicit within the Commandment to honour our fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors.  The Second Greatest Commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves.  Neighbours means those in proximity to us, and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise.  From this it follows that the idolatry of the race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s own race and nation.  It can be safely predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes of Communism. 

 

To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.”  The call to do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary one, a call to turn back the clock.  The irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical European sense of Right.  The irony is due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language.  In neither American nor European usage does it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual and the less on the collective, including the collective of race.  In the classical European sense of the Right, political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation are invited and called to join.  The further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.

 

The classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for whom the principles of neither Right are sacred.  The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional continental form.  If holding this position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label.  My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.

 

If invocation of the saints were my regular practice, I could think of no better way of closing this essay than with "Colonel Sibthorp, pray for us."

The Ups and Downs of Deviancy

I  have commented in the past on the sick, twisted, irony that the same period that saw tobacco use demonized, driven out of public spaces – even outdoors ones – and increasingly private spaces as well, saw the legalization, normalization, and glorification of the use of marijuana.   Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sat as a Democrat in the American Senate representing New York in the days when Democrats, even Democrats from New York, were not all open cheerleaders for civilizational collapse, wrote an article for The American Scholar in 1993 entitled “Defining Deviancy Down”.   The gist of the article was that many were responding to the explosion of social and moral problems, such as family breakups, single-parenthood, and crime by simply lowering standards and expectations, and that this was not a good thing.   Later that year neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Moynihan’s article with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Defining Deviancy Up” in which he argued that the Senator was right, but that he addressed only half the story, the other half being the imposition of new standards on ordinary people so that “once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant”.   A few years later Robert H. Bork, the American jurist and law professor whose appointment to the American Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan had been defeated in the Senate, expanded upon both of these themes at book length in his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1993).   The war on tobacco which is carcinogenic, especially when chemicals have been added to it as is the case with cigarettes, but which can both calm and stimulate minds without impairing them in the slightest, fought simultaneously with a campaign to promote marijuana which is known to mess up people’s minds, is this set of complementary phenomena, defining deviancy both down and up at the same time, manifesting itself in the realm of substance use and abuse.   One could, of course, take the position that the old ideal of mens sana in corpore sano calls for opposition to both tobacco and marijuana, but the position taken by our contemporary culture shows just how much it has come to elevate the body over the mind.   Plato would be appalled.

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we are now seeing the combination of defining deviancy up/down manifesting itself in yet another way in this same area.   Earlier this week, an organization called the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction made international headlines.   Before commenting on how it did that a few words about the organization itself are appropriate.   The CCSA was established by an act of Parliament during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.   At the time it was called the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, which name is still reflected in the acronym, the new name having been adopted for reasons of political correctness.   The organization’s board is appointed by the Governor-in-Council and it operates under the oversight of Health Canada.   Therefore, while the organization was set up as a non-profit charity that accepts private funding and claims to occupy the space between government agency and non-government organization, it is questionable as to how large or how real the distance between it and the government it answers to actually is.   It made headlines by releasing a report, commissioned and funded by Health Canada, on alcohol use which basically said, in about 90 pages, that there is no safe level of consumption, that there are no health benefits to drinking, that bottles of booze should come with warning labels, and that Canadians should limit themselves to a maximum of two “standard” drinks per week.   This attracted so much attention because of how radically out of sync these recommendations are with those of health agencies in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, the United States, France, and basically all of Europe except the Netherlands.

 

The admirably reactionary David Warren, retired Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of the sadly defunct Idler, sees this as a step towards a revival of prohibition.    While some might say that this is reading too much into the report I am inclined to think that Warren is right, as he usually is about most matters that don’t pertain to the patriarch of Rome’s claim to supremacy over the entire Church.   The same media that spent the last two to three years demanding total suppression of Canadians’ basic freedoms of movement, assembly, and religion because “experts” said that “social distancing” and “lockdowns” and basically enforced isolation were “necessary” to stop the spread of a virus that they were depicting as far more lethal than it actually was (even at the beginning) and insisting that anyone who disagreed with them was promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation” and must be silenced, even as they gaslighted everyone with obvious nonsense such as their denial of natural immunity, has been promoting the CCSA’s report and recommendations in much the same manner.   Take the CBC for example.  CBC writers Ioanna Roumeliotis and Brenda Witmer wrote up the story with the same attitude of “the experts” have spoken, we must all bow down and obey that has become so nauseatingly familiar since 2020.   With regards to the CCSA report saying that “no amount of alcohol is safe” they use the words “points out that” rather than the more objective and accurate “claims”.   The appeals to the authority of the World Health Organization are there too and the gaslighting.   The gaslighting is most obvious in the denial of there being health benefits alongside the risks.   Even the claim the most Canadians are unware of the risks is highly dubious.  While the claim applies specifically to the risk focused on in the report, i.e., the risk with regards to cancer, it is absurd to say that most Canadians are unaware of the many other risks attendant upon drinking alcohol, and I very much doubt that anyone undeterred by the risk of DTs, liver cirrhosis, getting into a brawl, driving into a tree or making a total ass of oneself in public and alienating one’s friends and family, is going to care much about a risk of cancer.   Sunlight is carcinogenic.   Is that good reason to either adopt a vampire’s schedule or erect a sunblocker ala The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns?   Bill Gates, in the unlikely event you happen to be reading this, the answer to that last question is “no”.

 

Whether or not our government is about to repeat the famously failed social experiment of a century past when, due to the estrogen poisoning brought on by having given women the vote, we temporarily imposed a total ban on alcoholic beverages, (1) by sponsoring this ridiculous report they are certainly engaging in Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up”.   One does not have to look far to find the corresponding acts of “defining deviancy down”.   The province of British Columbia is currently decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs, something that its largest city Vancouver did two years ago.    As of the last day of this month, it will be legal for adults in British Columbia to possess small amounts of cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamine.   Both city and province required the cooperation of Health Canada for this, as the federal agency needed to grant a waiver under the Controlled Drug and Substances Act.   It was not difficult to obtain such an exemption as the current Dominion premier is on board with British Columbia’s approach to the drug crisis.   Neither the Prime Minister nor the government of British Columbia nor the city council of Vancouver are libertarian purists who support decriminalization because they don’t think the government should be dictating personal choices.  These are the same people, remember, who a year ago were telling people that they had to have a new, man-made, substance injected into their bloodstream if they wanted anything resembling a normal life in society.   Their argument for decriminalization in the midst of a drug crisis is that they think it will decrease the number of drug deaths.   The reasoning behind this is that as long as hard drugs are illegal, those who use them must rely upon illicit sources, which may be tainted with such substances as fentanyl and down which can cause overdoses in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs.   This is also the reasoning used by those who argue that the government should provide, at the taxpayers’ expense, “safe” drugs, needles, and places to use them.    Indeed, those who argue for decriminalization for other than libertarian reasons and those who support government provided “safe injection sites” are generally the same people.    At the very least, this way of thinking can be criticized as myopic, focusing on the danger that fentanyl and other contaminants pose to drug users as if this were the whole of the drug problem, and ignoring the countless other dangers posed by hard drugs, often to other members of society who don’t use them themselves.   A man who is walking down the sidewalk, minding his own business, and gets his head punched in by someone whom he doesn’t know from Adam, because that someone is in a meth-induced paranoia and thinks that he, the man he punches that is, is an alien hitman sent after him by the demonic overlord of a planet in some distant galaxy, will require just as much stiches, hospital time, or morgue space depending on the severity of the attack, if the meth was obtained from a government-funded “safe” site as if it were obtained on the street.   At least if it were obtained from the street, the man would not have been forced to contribute to his own assault with his taxes.   Note that those who advocate this approach of dealing with the drug crisis are the ones who speak about the need to “destigmatize” drug use.   To destigmatize something, however, is to remove societal disapproval, and, as we have already seen with regards to marijuana this, if not nipped in the bud, will become a demand for societal approval of hard drug use and a cultural campaign to promote it.   We are already witnessing this taking shape around us.

 

To summarize, we are being told by the CCSA, Health Canada, and the CBC that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol that can be consumed at the same time that we are being told that hard drugs should be decriminalized and, worse, “destigmatized” and  safe” injection sites provided for their use by the government at our expense.   It is tobacco v. marijuana and the defining of deviancy both up and down at the same time all over again.

 

This time around, however, there is a spiritual aspect to this that was not there when tobacco was being driven out to make room for marijuana.   Neither tobacco, which was unknown to the Old World until imported from the Americas, nor hemp, the plant from which marijuana is obtained and which was certainly present in the Ancient Near East, are mentioned anywhere in the Holy Scriptures by name.   Alcoholic beverages, however, are certainly mentioned in the Bible and the New Testament makes use of the Greek family of words from which our “pharmacy” is derived.   With regards to the nouns φαρμακός and φαρμακεία, these are usually rendered “sorcerer” and “witchcraft” or “sorcery” respectively in English translations of the New Testament.   Their primary reference is with regards to drugs.   The first is often rendered “poisoner” in uses outside of the New Testament, and the second can mean both the administration of drugs and poisoning.    They are translated the way they are in English Bibles because the idea in the New Testament is of the use of substances in magic and communication with the spirit world.   They are never used in a positive sense. 

 

The Bible speaks of alcoholic beverages, primarily wine, far more frequently and by contrast the overwhelming majority of references are positive.   Drunkenness is condemned, but wine is spoken of as a gift of God given to cheer the heart of men.   In what St. John the Evangelist identifies as the very first miracle that Our Lord performed, He instructed the servants at a wedding He attended at Cana at some point between His Baptism and the beginning of His public ministry in Galilee to fill six stone waterpots, each capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons, with water after the wedding wine supply had run out.   He then told them to take the pots to the chief steward.   The roughly 120 gallons of water was transformed into roughly 120 gallons of wine which the chief steward proclaimed to be better than that which had already been consumed.    Four chapters later, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only miracle other than the Resurrection which St. John records in common with the Synoptic Evangelists, Jesus in His Bread of Life discourse with the multitude proclaimed the necessity to eat His body and drink His blood.   Later, at the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that He shared with His Apostles before the Crucifixion, Jesus would reveal how this was to be done by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion in which His followers would partake of bread as His body, broken for us, and wine as His blood of the New Testament, shed for us and for many for the remission of sins.   Partaking of wine as Christ’s blood in this way, has been essential to the main ceremony of regular Christian worship in all the most ancient Churches ever since.   Only in the last couple of centuries in North America have certain sects – separatist groups – substituted the Islamic view of wine for the traditional Christian one, and in support of this substitution invented spurious arguments that Jesus turned the water into unfermented, concentrated grape juice and that this is what should be used in Communion. (2)   Therefore, those who define deviancy up to include the drinking of any amount of alcohol in so doing attack the central rite of the Christian faith and religion, while in defining deviancy down so as to “de-stigmatize” the use of hard drugs, they have embraced behaviour that in the Scriptures is inseparable from trafficking with evil spirits.

 

In this, the true nature of this aspect of the “culture war” is evident.   Ultimately, it is on the spiritual field, that this battle will be won or lost.

 

(1)   About the only thing positive I have to say about prohibition was that it inspired Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian humourist, economist, and political scientist to write an excellent essay against it.  Entitled “The Tyranny of Prohibition” it first appeared in the August 2, 1919 issue of The Living Age, and can be found in several anthologies of Leacock’s essays.   Prohibition is also discussed in his “The Woman Question” which was first published in 1915 and can also be found in Leacock anthologies, including Essays and Literary Studies, the first edition of which was published in 1916.   The two essays taken together can be read as a before and after look at the two big social experiments that occurred together at the end of the First World War.

 

(2)   The sects and revivalists who thought up this idea also started up, in conjunction with the early feminists, a prohibition movement that they inappropriately called “temperance”, which word used properly means the virtue of “self-control” and “moderation”.   This idea remains in circulation largely due to the influence of the book Bible Wines: The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients by Rev. William Patton, first published in 1871.   This book employs the same kind of arguments that Alexander Hislop used in The Two Babylons to back up his claim that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition other than the Bible itself was the pagan religion of ancient Babylon dressed up to look Christian.  There are plenty of quotes and plenty of footnotes which look very convincing unless you take the time to look up the quotes in the original sources, most of which are very obscure to discourage you from doing this.   If you do, however, you realize quickly that the entire book is pure codswallop.     I diagnose those who promote the messages of these books as suffering from a severe case of κεφαληανααυτουπρωκτόςις.  

The Year of Platinum Jubilee

 

The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.  She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms.   This marks yet another milestone as she has become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee.     Congratulations to Her Majesty!   Long may her reign over us continue to last!

 

As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of The Idler, who was years ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.   He wrote:

 

Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an incomparable ring of years and changes.

 

Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.

 

Amen!   As there is little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion.   There has been some discussion about how to mark and celebrate the anniversary   Stephen K. Roney addressed this early last month:

 

And what has Canada planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude. 

 

That almost sounds like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.

 

We can do better. Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic, we could all use a big party.

 

The federal government may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically, distinguishes us from the USA.

 

Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last line deserves emphasis.   The monarchy is what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA.  Lefties in recent years would have us believe that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care system.   The former, however, was established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society”).   The latter, a system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA.    The monarchy is also what has historically united Canadians.   It is the single element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical Canadas.   English Canada was born out of the United Empire Loyalists.   French Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion, and culture on the eve of the American Revolution.   The Crown is the other signatory in each of the Indian treaties.    It is very appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens.  By doing so, they are joined to the historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place of which cannot be taken by anything else.

Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.

 

My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published early in her reign and which has been out of print for years.   The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown.   Its author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne).   Farthing was an academic man, who studied first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen Leacock.    Later, after a ten-year hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.  

 

Farthing began writing the work for which he would be remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”.   This conflict is known as the Cold War because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option.   This was the world situation when the young Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke.   The two sides of the conflict represented rival political and economic ideals.   The United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union represented socialist totalitarian democracy.   Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to these.   It was also, he argued, a superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that had forged and tested it.    This heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.

 

Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and better at securing the common good than the Soviet system.   He also discussed in detail how this heritage had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng Affair of almost a century ago.   It was not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.   King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a year old government because of a corruption scandal.    By refusing, the Governor General exercised in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament.    The Governor General reminded King that he had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives, had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an alternative government.   King resigned, Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial government in London.   In fact, as King’s letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be granted a dissolution under such circumstances.   The Canadian public accepted King’s story, however, and returned him a majority government.   By his success in deceiving the public, Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.   Farthing’s understanding of this historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical paperwork, as noted above.   It had previously been championed by Eugene Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.   Farthing’s interpretation of the larger significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended to treat their office as that of an elected dictator. 

 

When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her Majesty, his manuscript required editing.   His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood House.

 

Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our freedom.   Freedom stands and falls with traditional institutions, especially monarchy.   The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies.   Totalitarian police states have been republics.   Farthing’s book was a great contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit?   Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.  

 

Happy anniversary Your Majesty!

God Save the Queen!