The Kangaroo Court is Now in Session

The sixth of June is the anniversary of D-Day, the day, in 1944, when the Allied forces landed on the beach of Normandy and launched the offensive that would liberate Occupied Europe from the forces of Nazi Germany.  This year, on that date, something happened in the Upper Canadian city of London, which the government of the Dominion has declared to be an attack of an entirely different sort.  That evening a family was waiting to cross at an intersection, when a pickup truck ran into them.   One was killed on the spot, three later succumbed to the injuries they had sustained, a fifth was wounded but not fatally.

 

This would be a horrible occurrence, of course, under any circumstances.  It appears, however, that this was not just some terrible mishap where the driver lost control of his truck.  It seems to have been deliberate.    If this is indeed the case that makes it much worse because a crime is much worse than an accident.  I am speaking, obviously, about how the incident as a whole is to be evaluated.  The dead and wounded would have been no less dead and wounded in an equally fatal accident.

 

The London police very quickly announced that they were investigating this as a hate crime.   Indeed, the speed in which they made this announcement seems extremely irresponsible when we consider that virtually nothing in the way of evidence corroborating this interpretation of the incident has since been released.   This could be explained, perhaps, if the perpetrator, who soon after asked a taxi driver to call the police and thus essentially turned himself in, had confessed to being motivated by hate.   If this is the case, however, the police have not yet disclosed it.   From the facts that have been disclosed, the only apparent grounds for classifying it as a hate crime are the ethnicity and religion of the victims, who were Muslims and immigrants from Pakistan.

 

There are many who would say that just as a crime is worse than an accident, so a hate crime is worse than a regular crime.   I am not one of those.   There are basically two angles from which we can look at the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes.   The first is the angle of motive.   Viewed from this angle, the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes is that the former are motivated by prejudice – racial, religious, sexual, etc.- and the latter are not.   The second angle is the angle of the victim.   Viewed from this perspective, the distinction between hate crimes and regular crimes is that the victims of the former are members of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities, women, or something other than heterosexual and cisgender and the victims of the latter are not.  Viewed either way, however, the idea that a hate crime is much worse than a regular crime is extremely problematic.

 

Is it worse to take somebody’s life because you don’t like the colour of his skin than to take his life because you want his wallet?  

 

If we answer this question with yes then we must be prepared to support that answer with a reason.   It is difficult to come up with one that can stand up well under cross-examination.   One could try arguing, perhaps, that the murder motivated by prejudice is worse than the murder committed in the act of robbing someone on the grounds that whereas prejudice is irrational, wanting someone else’s money if you have desperate need of it yourself, is not.   This runs contrary to long-established judicial precedent, however.   If a man is so irrational that he is considered to be insane this is grounds for a plea of not guilty in a court of law.   Conversely, the man who did not go out intending to kill someone but does so in the act of stealing his wallet can be charged with first-degree murder.   This is because his intention to commit the crime of robbery makes it a premeditated act.  

 

Suppose, however, we take the view from the other angle and distinguish between hate crimes and regular crimes based upon the identity of the victims.   From this standpoint, the assertion that hate crimes are worse than regular crimes translates into the idea that it is worse commit a crime against members of such-and-such groups than it is to commit crimes against anyone else.  Worded that way, is there anyone who would be willing to sign on to such a statement?

 

The idea that hate crimes ought to be considered worse than regular crimes of the same nature but with other more mundane motivations arises out of the idea that “hate” itself ought to be treated as a crime.   The problem with this is that hate, whether in the ordinary sense of the word, or in the rather specialized sense of the word that is employed when discussing “hate speech”, “hate crimes”, “hate groups”, etc. is an attitude of the heart and mind.   To say that “hate” ought to be a crime, therefore, is to say that the government ought to legislate against certain types of thought.   This, however, has long been considered one of the distinguishing characteristics of bad government, government that is tyrannical and totalitarian.   Those familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 will remember that in the totalitarian state of Oceania there was a special police force tasked with tracking down anyone questioned, disagreed with, or otherwise dissented from the proclamations and ideology of the ruling Ingsoc Party and its leader Big Brother.   Such dissenters, including the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith, were regarded as being guilty of crimethink.    I’m quite certain that if Eric Blair were alive today he would be reminding us that this was supposed to be an example to avoid rather than one to emulate.

 

To return from the idea of hate crimes in general and in the abstract, to the specific, concrete, incident of the sixth of the June, the way our politicians and other civil leaders, aided and abetted by media pundits and religious leaders have been behaving is absolutely atrocious.   All evidence that has been released to the public to date points in the direction of this Nathaniel Veltman having been a “lone truckman”.   Our politicians, however, led by Captain Airhead and his goofy sidekick Jimmy Dhaliwal, but including Upper Canadian Premier Doug Ford and London Mayor Ed Holder, very quickly and very shamelessly politicized the incident and capitalized upon the suffering of the Afzaal family in order to shift the blame off of the actual perpetrator and onto the Canadian public in general with their incessant talk about “Islamophobia”.  

 

Once again Captain Airhead has been demonstrating his total inability to learn from his past mistakes.   One might think that the man who after building his political career upon a carefully constructed image as the poster boy for “woke” anti-racism was revealed to be a serial blackface artist would have learned a little humility and would have given up lecturing the Canadian public about how we all need to be more enlightened and less prejudiced.   Or that the man whose efforts to use inappropriate political influence to obtain a prosecutorial deal for a company that was a huge donor to his party landed him in the biggest political scandal of his career might have learned that it is not his place to issue proclamations about criminal guilt before the investigation is complete, charges have been laid, and a conviction obtained.   One would certainly hope that the man who has long made it a point of never calling acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam “terrorism” would not use this word to describe any act of violence committed against Muslims at the first opportunity that presented itself as if he lived in some fantasy world where Muslims could only be victims and never perpetrators of terrorism. Anyone thinking or hoping such things does not know Captain Airhead very well.

 

The cynical among us would observe first and foremost just how this incident seems tailor-made to fit Captain Airhead’s agenda.   Captain Airhead has made no secret of the fact that he wants Canadians to be less free to disagree with him on matters of race, religion, sex, etc.   Granted, he doesn’t word it that way, he says that free speech is important but it doesn’t include hate speech.     Here is the key to understanding him.   Every time someone says “I believe in free speech” or some equivalent statement expressing support for free speech and a “but” immediately follows that statement, everything that follows the “but” negates and nullifies everything that precedes it.   Captain Airhead has been trying since the beginning of his premiership to re-introduce laws forbidding Canadians from expressing views that he doesn’t like on the internet.    Bill C-10, introduced last fall for the ostensible purpose of bringing companies like Netflix under the same regulatory oversight of the CRTC as traditional broadcasters, has been widely regarded as a means of smuggling this sort of thing in through the back door, and the Liberals numerous attempts to circumvent open debate in the House so as to ram the bill through prior to the summer adjournment have hardly done anything to assuage such suspicions.   Captain Airhead was undoubtedly looking for an incident that he could blow out of proportion enabling him to grandstand and basically say, “See, I’m not a creepy little dictator-wannabee, I’m just trying to fight hate like the kind that we saw here”.     No, I’m not suggesting that Captain Airhead faked the incident.   I would not be surprised to learn, however, that some memorandum had been sent to law enforcement agencies telling them to be on the lookout for anything that could be plausibly spun as a hate crime, and to flag it as such regardless of the evidence or lack thereof.  

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal, the less said about his ridiculous assertions that Muslims are living in constant fear of their Islamophobic neighbours in Canada the better.   Such nonsense does not deserve the dignity of a response.

 

By politicizing this incident in this way, Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal are, of course, trying to put the Canadian public in general on trial.   “It is because you are prejudiced against Muslims” they are saying in effect “that this happened, and so you are to blame for this young man’s actions, and therefore you must be punished by having more of your freedoms of thought, conscience, and speech taken from you”.   For years the Left has put the Canada of the past, and her founders and historical figures and heroes on trial over the Indian Residential Schools.  It has been the kind of trial where only the prosecution is allowed to present evidence and the defense is not allowed to cross-examine much less present a case of its own.   Over the past few weeks this mockery of a trial has been renewed due to the non-news item of the discovery of an unmarked cemetery at the Residential School in Kamloops.   The incident in London is now being exploited by the Left to put living Canadians of the present day on the same sort of unjust trial before the same sort of kangaroo court of public opinion.

 

In 1940 the film “My Little Chickadee” was released which starred the legendary sexpot Mae West and the equally legendary lush W. C. Fields.   It was the first – and last – time they would appear together.   West and Fields had also written the screenplay, or rather West wrote it with some input from Fields in the rare moments he wasn’t totally sloshed, and there is a scene in it in which some of the dialogue is purportedly taken from West’s own experience of thirteen years earlier, when she had been briefly jailed in New York on the rather Socratic charge of “corrupting the morals of youth” over the Broadway play “Sex” that she had written, produced, directed, and, of course, starred in herself.   In the scene in the film, West’s character, Miss Flower Belle Lee finds herself, through the tongue of the character played by Margaret Hamilton, the actress who had portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West the previous year and who seems to have remained in character sans green makeup for this film, appearing before a judge.   After one of her trademark flippant remarks, the judge asks her “young lady, are you trying to show your contempt for this court?”   Her famous reply was “No, your honour, I’m doing my best to conceal it”.

 

I trust that you, my readers, will recognize that no such concealment is being attempted here.

Brian Bowman's Brainless Balderdash

 

Brian Bowman, the current mayor of the city in which I reside, Winnipeg, the capital city of the Province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is not a man noted for his intelligence.   Indeed, as far as I can tell, he is noted for only two things.  The first is his close resemblance in physical appearance to Jon Cryer, the actor who before he took on the role of Alan, the anal-retentive loser brother of Charlie, the drunken letch portrayed by Charlie Sheen on Three and a Half Men was best known for playing “Duckie” in the John Hughes film Pretty in Pink.   I have long suspected that this is the real reason he was elected.   If only a Charlie Sheen look-a-like- had run against him.   Or, better yet, Charlie Sheen himself.   Yes, Sheen has been struggling with a lot of personal demons in recent years, but the late Rob Ford struggled with many of those same demons in the city formerly known as York and he was the best mayor in the whole Dominion at the time.   His brother Doug rose to the premiership of Upper Canada on his posthumous coattails although Doug has subsequently proven himself unworthy of the Rob Ford mantle.   The second thing for which Bowman is noted is his act of hysterical wailing and hand-wringing over the evils of racism.   Unlike the problems that Rob Ford and Charlie Sheen struggled with, this precludes one from being an excellent, or even a good mayor.   Bowman’s example of the performance art of racially “woke” virtue-signaling is second to none in Canada, not even that of Captain Airhead himself, although Captain Airhead, who is also the country’s foremost blackface artist, retains the championship title for hypocrisy.

 

Bowman has declared this week to be Winnipeg’s first “Anti-Racism Week”.   The official theme of the week’s events is “What would Winnipeg look like without racism?”   If the organizers of this pompous display of left-wing pseudo-piety, including our feckless, inept and dimwitted mayor, were ever to learn the answer to this question, they would be horrified.

 

A Winnipeg without racism would be a Winnipeg in which people were no longer treated differently from others because of their skin colour or the place of origin of their ancestors.    This means, among other things, that in a Winnipeg without racism, people with white skin colour, whose ancestors came from Europe and the British Isles, would no longer be treated as if they all shared a collective guilt for racism while people of all other skin colours and ancestry are treated as if they shared a collective innocent victimhood of racism.  This is pretty much the opposite of what Bowman et al. envision a “Winnipeg without racism” as looking like.   

 

While all these people who wear their “Anti-Racism” in prominent display on their sleeves like to adopt the stance of Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru towards racism that is directed against white people, such racism is not difficult to find.   Earlier this week, all sorts of left-wing personalities found themselves with egg on their faces as they rushed to delete all the tweets and other social media posts in which they had spouted off about the evil, racist, white man who had shot up a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, killing ten people, before it was revealed that the shooter was a Syrian refugee who liked to rant on the internet about the evils of racism, Islamophobia, and Donald Trump.   They had, of course, assumed the shooter was a white man in the vernacular sense of the term rather than the technical sense in which physical anthropology classifies East Indians and Arabs as part of the Caucasian race.   This assumption was based upon a stereotype, the type of assumption they would have been the first to condemn had somebody mistakenly assumed the perpetrator of an inner-city mugging to be black or mistakenly assumed the culprit in some major financial swindle to be Jewish.  

 

If you think the above example to be of a relatively minor form of racism consider this next example from last week.   This too pertained to comments made about a mass murder, in this case the shooting spree that a sex addict had gone on in the massage parlours of Atlanta, Georgia on the sixteenth of this month.  Since most of the people killed in this earlier massacre had been prostitutes of various East Asian ethnicities many had speculated that the crime had a racial motivation although the evidence seems to be against this interpretation of the event.   One person who ran with this interpretation was Damon Young, co-founder of the blog Very Smart Brothas which operates under the umbrella of the older black e-zine The Root, and author of the 2019 book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.    In a post on the seventeenth entitled “Whiteness is a Pandemic”, Young declared “whiteness” to be a “public health crisis” and “white supremacy” to be a virus which “will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect.  Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it and kill it.”   This is eliminationist language, the language of genocide, and the argument that seeks to explain this away as talking about “white supremacy”, a system, idea, or ideology rather than people is completely invalidated by the fact that Young uses “whiteness” and “white supremacy” interchangeably throughout his rant.   Would-be defenders of Young might attempt to point to this usage as indicating that by “whiteness” Young means the system or ideology of white supremacy rather than “the condition of being white” as the term would be more naturally understood.  Nobody, however, would accept that kind of reasoning as being valid in excusing the use of this sort of language in connection with “blackness” or any other “ness” other than whiteness. 

This use of “whiteness”, a term that naturally suggests the condition of being fair skinned and of British or European descent, as if it was the designation of a system set up to limit power to white people and oppress all others, is not original with Young.  This has been standard usage on the campuses of academe for decades now where it has always been accompanied by either calls for genocide that are cleverly excused as demands for the abolition of an unjust system or demands for the redress of racial grievances, real and otherwise, that are irresponsibly worded in eliminationist rhetoric, depending upon how much grace one wishes to extend to those, such as the late Noel Ignatiev, who use this kind of language in one’s interpretation of their motives.   The University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, both located in this city, are no exceptions to this, and, indeed, some might argue that they are among the worst universities in Canada for this sort of thing.   That they are not among the first campuses that come to mind when this subject comes up is due to a dearth of high-profile incidents connected with these schools, which itself can be attributed to the national media not particularly caring about anything that goes on in Winnipeg.  

 

The closest to a high-profile incident took place two and a half years ago when somebody put up signs saying “It’s okay to be white” on walls around the University of Manitoba.   The CBC reported on this under the headline “Hate messages show up on the University of Manitoba campus”.   Immediately beneath the headline is the sentence “Many students say they feel unsafe due to threatening nature of messages, union says”.   Both the headline and this sentence were plainly nonsensical.  The words “It’s okay to be white” make a simple, positive, assertion about white people.  They do not express hatred of people who are not white or threaten people who are not white.   They don’t say anything about people who are not white at all.   To reject the statement “it’s okay to be white” is to affirm its negative counterpart “it’s not okay to be white”, and to affirm the latter is itself a racist act, because to say that it is not okay to be white is just as racist as to say that it is not okay to be black or to be any other race.   Indeed, it is not just racist but racist of the genocidal or eliminationist type.   While the left has recently decided that sex is no longer an immutable aspect of human reality, that people must choose or discover for themselves whether they are male, female or some other option, and that it is a horrible offense to reject a person’s own gender self-identification and stick to the older reality of sex, they have not yet applied the same lack of reasoning to race and so being white or black or whatever is still, for them as much as for rational people, something one does not choose, is born with, and cannot change, unless, perhaps, one is Michael Jackson, and so, the statement that it is not okay to be white is followed logically by the statement that white people must be eliminated.    All of this is very obvious and all of the people cited in the CBC article – a student, an associate professor in the department of Native Studies, the head of the same department, the Students’ Union president, and the university president avoid all discussion of the actual content of the text of the posters they were denouncing.   Their arguments – if you can call them that – were basically of either the “these posters are bad because they made me feel bad” or the “these posters are bad because bad people put them up” varieties.   The lengthy quotation from University of Manitoba president David Barnard’s diatribe denouncing the posters left a very poor impression of the man’s intelligence and integrity.   In reporting this sort of drivel, the CBC actually managed to compromise what little had remained up to that point of its journalistic standards.

 

Neither the explicitly eliminationist anti-whiteness rhetoric on campus nor the equation of even the simplest positive assertion about white people with hatred and threats towards non-white people appears to be of much concern to Brian Bowman and it is unlikely that his vision of a Winnipeg without racism would exclude these forms of racism.   The only racism that he seems to recognize is racism directed towards BIPOC groups and even then only if it is perpetrated by whites and not by other BIPOC groups.    This makes his anti-racism into something of a farce.

 

In Winnipeg, the emphasis of anti-racists like Bowman is on racism directed towards Native Indians.  Indeed, Bowman who is white as a lily, identifies as Métis, in much the same way that Elizabeth Warren identifies as an Indian (a distant ancestor on his mother’s side was Cree).   When he gave an interview about this at the beginning of his mayoral career his remarks seemed oddly racially condescending.  He mentioned his mother making bannock and his getting into a fight at school over it when he was a kid almost as if these were his credentials for his racial self-identification.  Many would consider this to be akin to pointing to one’s love of fried chicken and watermelon as proof of one’s blackness.  In January of this year, he jumped on board the bandwagon of the “Not My Siloam” movement that sought, ultimately successfully, to remove Jim Bell as CEO of Siloam Mission, on the grounds that under his leadership the Christian homeless shelter had not done enough to promote Native Spirituality, a new religion invented in the late twentieth century that bears approximately the same relationship to the religions of the pre-evangelized Native Indians as Wicca, the twentieth century religion founded by Gerald Gardner, bears to the pre-Christian paganism of Britain and Europe.   It would be interesting to know just how deeply Bowman looked into the facts of this “scandal” before getting involved.  Did he ever learn, for example, that the font of most of the accusations against Bell was a disgruntled, ex-employee of Siloam, who had earned for herself a reputation within not just Siloam but the broader community of outreach to the homeless and indigent of extreme bigotry towards those who were not Native Indians, especially fair-skinned Christians of European ancestry, people of whom she seemed unable to speak without the use of pejoratives?    I suspect the answer is no.   Bowman’s most publicized initiative with regards to Native Indians has been his Indigenous heritage initiative.   It consists of little more than looking into changing certain place names and altering the wording on certain historical markers.   David Chartrand, the leader of the Manitoba Métis Federation was quoted by the Winnipeg Sun last month as being totally unimpressed, both by Bowman’s initiative and by the Year Zero, Cultural Maoist, monument toppling that was the context in which it was announced.

 

In recent months the broader North American anti-racist movement has been emphasizing racism directed towards “Asians”, a designation that lumps together certain nationalities from Asia on purely racial grounds despite the fact that these nationalities have historically hated each other and would have found the thought of being to be lumped together in a common identity with the others as utterly repulsive.  

 

Needless to say, racism against Native Indians and racism against Asians are the types of racism that have been talked about most this week.   The most interesting detail about these types of racism, however, has been conspicuously absent from the discussion.   That detail is that explicit and outspoken racial animosity towards those of the ethnicities designated as Asian is far easier to find among Native Indians than among whites, and explicit statements of contempt for Native Indians are far easier to find among people of Asian ancestry than among whites    The reason for this omission is easy to see – it doesn’t fit well into the narrative of Anti-Racism Week about how whites and only whites are the bad guys who are guilty of racism and all others are victims who must unite in solidarity against their common oppressors.   

 

That narrative is total bunk, and therefore so is Anti-Racism Week.

 

Is it too late to draft Charlie Sheen to replace Brian Bowman as mayor of Winnipeg?

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ford

Nineteenth century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is remembered mostly for his novels Treasure Island, featuring the pirate Long John Silver, and Kidnapped.   Almost as well-known as these, and probably far more influential in terms of the number of imitations it has inspired and adaptations that have been made, is a shorter work, published in 1886, the same year as Kidnapped, entitled Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1).  

                                                                                                        

The story is about a physician, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who like everybody else, struggles with the inner conflict between his base instincts and urges on the one hand and his ethical standards on the other.   Unlike everybody else, he, being a scientist, tries to find a scientific solution to the problem, which he sees more in terms of the need to protect his reputation than to suppress his vicious desires.   He invents a serum that transforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde so that he can indulge the latter without damaging his reputation.   The potion, however, also produces a division in his moral character, basically separating all the wickedness into the persona of Mr. Hyde and all of the goodness into the persona of Dr. Jekyll.   The consequence of all of this, is that Mr. Hyde is left with no inner constraints on his wickedness, and becomes a thoroughly depraved, sadistic, sociopathic, murderer.   Dr. Jekyll, who by contrast becomes more upright, humane and saintly, eventually loses control over the transformation process and starts to transform into Mr. Hyde involuntarily, at first in his sleep, later when he is awake.   Then, running out of the serum that reverses the transformation, and being unable to produce another batch that will work, he realizes that he is about to become his evil alter-ego permanently, and commits suicide.

 

After the story was published and became widely known, the names of the character became more or less synonymous with the kind of dual personality in which a person can be sweet, gentile, and charming one minute and the exact opposite of that the next.

 

I have been reminded of this story every time that Doug Ford, the current premier of Upper Canada, or Ontario as those who like to keep up with the times prefer to call it, has appeared in the news in the last eight months and especially the last two.

 

Two summers ago, when the Progressive Conservatives led by Doug Ford, won a majority of 76 out of the 124 seats in the provincial legislature, I breathed a sigh of relief for our neighbours to the east.   They had suffered under Grit misrule for fifteen years, first under Dalton McGuinty and then under Kathleen Wynne, who were in my opinion the two worst provincial-level Liberal leaders in the entire history of the Dominion.   The election that put Doug Ford in the premier’s chair, also reduced the Grits to seven seats, the worst defeat they have ever suffered in that province, which was itself even greater cause to rejoice than the Conservative victory.

 

When Doug Ford became leader of Upper Canada’s Progressive Conservatives in the lead-up to the provincial election of 2018, I knew little about him other than that he was the brother of the late Rob Ford, who from 2010 to 2014 had been mayor of the city which had been known as York before political correctness prompted its being rechristened with the Indian name of Toronto in 1834.  During the years in which Rob Ford was mayor, he was constantly under attack by the CBC and the rest of the mainstream progressive media, which only strengthened me in my conviction that, as I said at the time, Rob Ford, drunk and on crack, ran his city better than any other sober mayor in Canada, including and especially our own here in Winnipeg.   That would have been Sam Katz back then, and Mayor Duckie (2) who has since replaced him is even worse.    

 

The same corrupt left-wing media that had relentlessly pursued the destruction of his brother, went after Doug Ford during the 2018 election.   They shamelessly dug poor old Rob up from his grave – he had passed away from cancer two years previously – and began whipping and crucifying his corpse.   Since Ford was using populist rhetoric in his campaign, they naturally compared him to Donald the Orange who through populism and nationalism had become president of the American republic in 2016.    Now, just to be clear, since my politics happens to be the royal-monarch-as-defender-of-the-Church kind of Toryism from which the Conservative Party has been lamentably drifting for decades – or rather centuries – populism and nationalism are actually lower in my own estimation than they are in that of the progressive media.   Forced to choose between the former and the latter, however, I would gladly chose the populists any day.   So it was that this progressive assault on “Ontario’s Trump” raised his stock considerably in my books.

 

Despite the media’s amusing attempt to use his populist rhetoric to hang the “far right” label on him – neither populism nor what the media considers to be “far right” is right wing at all, let alone extremely right wing -  Doug Ford was basically a mainstream, centre-right, Progressive Conservative.   His platform consisted mostly of tax reductions, infrastructure improvement, de-regulation, and cleaning up the mess that McGuinty and Wynne had made of the province’s school system.   While there was much that was lacking in this platform, it was a major improvement over what the former governing party had been offering.   After Ford won the election, the first year and a half of his premiership were fairly impressive.   He stuck it to the provincial bureaucrats with a salary-and-hiring freeze, and went to war with the environazis who were determined to make life more miserable and unaffordable for everybody because of their superstitious belief in a climate apocalypse extrapolated through a computer simulation from the pseudoscientific theory of anthropogenic global warming.   This included standing up to Captain Airhead, whom we are unfortunate enough to have as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa, and who was threatening to impose a federal carbon tax on all provinces that did not voluntarily adopt one of their own.   Shortly after the election, the new Minister of Education announced that the province would repeal everything the outgoing government had done to turn the schools into indoctrination camps for brainwashing young children with sexual perversion and gender identity politics although there have been reports that the follow-through on this was less than spectacular and that all they really did was make a few minor adjustments.   (3)

 

The qualifying remarks in my last sentence aside, Ford had gotten off to a fairly good start for a contemporary, mainstream, Progressive Conservative premier.

 

Then the Chinese bat flu arrived in Upper Canada.    When that happened, Doug Ford underwent an almost-overnight metamorphosis into a despotic, bullying, COVID-monster, and became the darling of the media that had been demonizing him for the last two years.

 

Of course, something similar could be said about every premier in the Dominion.   Our own Progressive Conservative Premier here in the south-east corner of Prince Rupert’s Land, Brian Pallister, declared a state of emergency and put our province into a most draconian lockdown before there was any significant outbreak, gave that – in my opinion - power mad goon Dr. Brent Roussin a blank cheque for imposing restrictions, no matter how stupid, self-contradictory, and outright harmful they were, and only the other day doubled the fines for people who violate these arbitrary regulations.   Pallister, however, has long been known to be a jerk.   The only reason I welcomed his re-election the other year is that the other option was the truly odious Wab Kinew.   Doug Ford, on the other hand, had given us every reason to expect much better of him, before he turned around and started acting like a squirt bottle used for cleaning the orifices of the nether regions of the body.

 

Now, some might come to Doug Ford’s defence by saying that his province was hit particularly hard by the bat flu.   Granted, out of all the provinces its number of deaths was exceeded only by those of Lower Canada.   This hardly constitutes justification of his actions, however.   It is only to be expected that in a country-wide outbreak, the two provinces of Central Canada would have the most deaths.   They have the most people, after all.   There is more to it, however, than just that.   The bulk of the deaths in those provinces took place in long-term care facilities, which, again, is predictable from the fact that the only people who are at any sort of  statistically significant risk from the  Chinese bat flu are those who are really old, with two or more complicating health conditions.   In Upper and Lower Canada, the situation in the nursing homes got so bad that the Armed Forces had to be sent in to take the place of the staff who had either contracted the virus themselves or deserted in fear of doing so.    They sent back to their superiors reports of the horrendous conditions they found there – conditions such as cockroaches, rotting food, bedding left soiled for days on end, and worse – caused not by the bat flu but by neglect and abuse on the part of the administration and staff.   While Ford is hardly to blame for such conditions, for in many of these places this sort of thing had been going on for years prior to his premiership, the fact of the matter is that had he done the common sense thing at the beginning of the “pandemic” and taken measures to provide extra protection for the people most at risk, rather than listening uncritically to the imbecilic advice of medical experts who, themselves regurgitating nonsense cooked up by the World Health Organization to serve the nefarious ends of the Chinese Communists and the pharmaceutical conglomerates, recommended a universal quarantine on the young and healthy instead, this sort of thing could have been dealt with much earlier, and steps could have been taken which might have prevented the outbreaks in the nursing homes from getting so bad.  Jumping on board the lockdown bandwagon, prevented him from pursuing other, sounder, options, and made the situation even worse.

 

When the World Health Organization screamed “pandemic”, Ford traded in his tired old populism and common sense for a shiny new superstitious belief in the infallibility of international health organizations and other medical experts, and imposed their recommendations with a particularly heavy hand.   When people with legitimate concerns about the erosion of their rights, freedoms, livelihoods and businesses under public health orders and who likely largely overlapped the people who had voted Ford into the premier’s office two years ago, began to protest against social distancing, lockdowns, and the like, he dismissed them all as yahoos.   In July, he rammed Bill 195 through the legislature, a bill which gave him two years’ worth of emergency powers which he could exercise without consulting the legislature.    This was a province-level equivalent of what Captain Airhead and his Liberals had tried to sneak into an emergency spending bill in Parliament in March, but which Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had mercifully thwarted.   Ford punished the members of his own party who voted against this bill, such as Belinda Karahalios, the MPP representing Cambridge, by expelling them from the caucus.

 

On Monday, September 28^th, Ford held a press conference in which he announced that his province was officially in the “second wave” of the bat flu, and that it “will be worse than the first wave we faced earlier this year.”    As with all the other claptrap about this so-called “second wave” this was a cunning form of sleight-of-hand.   That day, Upper Canada had seen the highest number of new cases recorded in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic.  It had not seen a commensurate spike in the number of people gravely sick, being hospitalized, put in intensive care, and dying.   Indeed, the new cases were mostly among age groups which were not at any significant risk from the disease.   This has been more or less the case everywhere throughout this so-called “second wave”.   My province, which seen the number of deaths multiply since the beginning of September – we were at fourteen at the beginning of September and are now at forty-seven, is not an exception.   These deaths are, like those which more populated provinces experienced in the spring, almost entirely among those who are both extremely old and extremely sick, because this is Manitoba’s first wave, the entire misguided and totalitarian “flatten the curve” strategy having merely delayed it, while causing a whole lot of unnecessary other harm in the process.  

 

Even before Ford made this announcement, he had lowered the number of people allowed to meet socially in Toronto, Peel Region, and Ottawa to ten, slapped a $10 000 fine on anyone who organized an event that broke this rule, and a $750 fine on anyone who attended.   It is difficult to decide which is more ridiculous, the limit of social gatherings to ten in a country where assembly and association are two of the officially recognized fundamental freedoms, or the insanely high amounts of those fines.  (4)  Certainly, the late Rob Ford, who was well known for his love of large social gatherings, must be spinning in his grave over all this party-pooping, and the whole general way in which his brother has turned into a piece of rotting Communist excrement.

 

My unsolicited advice to Ford is to find the serum that will turn him back to his original self and to do so quickly.   Nobody, except the media progressives, who want everybody to spend the rest of their lives, hiding under their beds in their basements, curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, afraid to go out lest the SARS-Cov-2 Bogeyman get them, likes this new version.

(1)   Stevenson deliberately left out both the definite article and the periods after the abbreviations for doctor and mister from his title.   His original publisher followed his whims.   Most subsequent publishers have not.  

(2) Brian Bowman looks like Jon Cryer, who, prior to his role as Alan on Three and a Half Men, was best known as “Duckie” in John Hughes’ 1986 “Brat Pack” teen rom-com, Pretty in Pink.   An interesting bit of trivia, although as completely irrelevant as this entire footnote, is that Charlie Sheen, Cryer’s co-star in Three and a Half Men (and earlier in Hotshots), was the original choice for the role of Blane, “Duckie”’s ultimately successful rival for the affections of Andie (Molly Ringwald) in this film, a role that ended up going to Andrew McCarthy.

(3)   See this article from The Interim.  It is worth noting that a serious effort to clean up the schools would have to involve more than just repealing Kathleen Wynne’s curriculum.   I was in Toronto for a wedding almost ten years ago, while Dalton McGuinty was still premier.   On the ride back to Pearson International, my driver, a recent immigrant from somewhere in the Middle East, struck up a conversation.   When he found out I was from Manitoba, he told me how lucky I was to be living in a rural, conservative, province, where I did not have to put up with the likes of Dalton McGuinty, who was making the schools teach sexual perversions to young children.   I didn’t have the heart to break the news to him, that the NDP which was governing Manitoba at the time was just about as bad, although they had not taken the schools quite that far.   My point, however, is that this conversation could not have taken place when it did, had McGuinty not already started the schools along the path down which Wynne would take them much further.

(4)  Of course there are those who have gone even further than Ford in this absurdity.    Dr. Brent Roussin has limited social gatherings to five in Winnipeg and the surrounding region.  Back in Ford’s own province, Patrick Brown, his predecessor as PC leader and currently the mayor of Brampton, imposed fines of up to $100 000 on those not practicing “physical distancing” as far back as April.   An orchard owner in neighbouring Caledon was threatened with a fine that large by the Ontario Provincial Police in late September for letting people pick their own apples on his farm.

Plagued By Dictators

For almost two months now our public health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have been acting like dictators. They have suspended our basic rights and freedoms, denied us access to public facilities such as libraries, gyms and parks, forced businesses that they consider to be “non-essential” even though they are hardly such to the livelihood of the owners and employees to close, locked up the Churches, synagogues and other places of worship, and otherwise acted as if they were the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Our provincial premiers have been no better. Even those I previously had a degree of respect for, such as Upper Canada’s Doug Ford, whose late brother Rob must be spinning in his grave right about now, have shown their true tyrannical colours. The worst of all has been Captain Airhead, the Prime Minister in the Dominion government. While Liberal Prime Ministers since Mackenzie King have behaved like autocratic control freaks rather than the humble servants of Queen-in-Parliament that they are supposed to be, the Trudeaus, who never met a Communist dictatorship they did not admire and fawn over and strive to imitate, have been by far the worst.

Many of those who, like this writer, were fed up with all of this the first hour into the lockdown, might be surprised to learn that creating a dictatorship in response to a plague is not a new phenomenon. Universal quarantines are new – previously, we quarantined only the sick or those we had good reason to suspect might have contracted the contagion. Plague time dictators, however, go back to the very first dictators, those of ancient Rome.

The eternal city was originally a monarchy. Its legendary founder, Romulus, was its first king. Romulus’s fourth successor and Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinus Priscus, was an Etruscan. Beginning with his reign, the Etruscans gained more and more influence over Rome and this created a growing division between the monarchy and the Senate, the Council of the patriarchs of the noble Roman families which Romulus had established to help him govern the city. In the reign of the seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who seized the throne through the assassination of his predecessor, his arrogance – which is actually what his cognomen signifies – and his crimes, along with those of his son, Sextus, pushed that division to the breaking point. When Sextus, through threats and blackmail forced himself upon Lucretia, the wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, leading to her taking her own life in shame, her husband and father, along with Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, drove the Tarquins out of Rome after which the Senate declared the city to be a republic.

This was the first occasion in which the word republic was used to signify a government without a king. Res publica, which literally means “the public thing”, was one of two Latin expressions commonly used to translate the Greek politeia, which simply refers to the institutions which are constitutionally set up to look after the business of the public regardless of whether they be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture, and is best rendered in English by “state”, “commonwealth” or even “constitution.” When the Roman Senate borrowed this Latin expression to refer to their new type of constitution, small-r republicanism was born.

As much as Tarquin the Proud deserved being deposed, the problem stemmed from who he was as a person and not from his office of authority. The Roman nobles of the sixth century BC were not thinking of this, however, when they drove him out, and so they created an inferior constitution, a republic. There are many roles and duties in the constitution of a state that can only properly be filled and performed by a king or queen. I do not intend to argue this point at length here, having made it many times in the past, and mention it only by way of introducing the observation that the Romans themselves quickly figured out that they had created a constitutional vacuum that would need, on certain occasions, to be filled. Thus they created the office of dictator.


Today the terms dictator and tyrant are more or less interchangeable but his was not the case back then. The term tyrant was used to refer to a ruler who was the opposite of a king. Whereas a true king came to his office lawfully, a tyrant was generally a usurper. The term tyrant comes from a word that originally referred to usurpation and it came to be associated with the heavy-handed abuse of power because someone who unlawfully seizes power does so because he thirsts for power and is therefore inclined to abuse it in a way that is not generally true of a lawful king. Note that Tarquin the Proud, who became "king" by assassinating Servius Tullius, was properly a tyrant rather than a king. When the Romans created the office of dictator, the term did not carry any of the opprobrium that would later be attached to it and was already at that time attached to the term tyrant.


The Roman office of dictator was a temporary position. The term was six months, half of that of the consuls, the two co-presidents of the Roman Republic, the first of whom were the aforementioned Brutus and Collatinus. When an emergency arose in which the Romans perceived the need for a single individual to wield the undivided supreme Imperium, the Senate would ask one or the other of the consuls, or both in the event that neither was off on a military venture somewhere, to name a dictator. Sworn into office, his first duty would be to name a magister equitum - master of horse. This was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, his "vice-dictator." The title obviously derives from the expectation that he would lead the cavalry that would accompany the unified army led by the dictator. This points to the fact that the emergencies that prompted the appointment of a dictator tended to be military in nature, when some powerful enemy threatened the city.


The first time this happened, at least according to Livy, was in the ninth year of the Roman Republic. War with the Sabines seemed imminent and the Senate asked consul Postumus Cominius Auruncus to name a dictator. He named his co-consul Titus Lartius Flavus, who appointed Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, one of the consuls of the previous year, to be his master of horse. Although war was declared, no fighting ensued, and Lartius laid down his powers before his six months expired.


The final Roman dictator was Gaius Julius Caesar, who was made dictator for life. That life was cut short on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a gang of conspirators, one of the leaders of which was his former friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had been the first consul of Rome. His death brought the office of dictator to an end because that office existed to fill the vacuum in the Roman constitution that had been created by the absence of a king. A new Roman monarchy would soon be established when Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavius was declared by the Senate to be the sole ruler of Rome and given the titles of Augustus (1) which means “exalted one”, Princeps, which means “first, chief, prince”, and Imperator, which had been a military term meaning “general” but from that point on would also mean “emperor”, a connotation the family name “Caesar” would also soon take on.


In between Lartius and Ceasar, the most well-known dictator, and the one who is the most admired, was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who held the position twice. In 458 BC, war with the Aequi left one of the consular armies besieged and the other powerless to help. Cincinnatus, an elderly farmer, was at his field, the legend says, when a delegation from the Senate arrived to tell him that he had been named dictator. With Lucius Tarquitius as his master of horse, he conscripted a large army, marched to the relief of the besieged consul, quickly forced the Aequi into submission at the Battle of Mount Algidus, and returned to his plow in a fortnight plus one day. His second dictatorship was almost as short, and involved putting down an internal conspiracy against the city.


Usually the emergencies were military in nature, but this was not always the case.


It can be amusing, when reading the ancient Roman historian Livy's multi-volume history of Rome from its beginning down to his own era, the Augustinian, to note the many occasions on which the Romans appointed a dictator in order to pound a nail into a wall. This, of course, sounds to the modern reader like a ridiculous thing to do and it is made all the more absurd by the way in which every time this happened the dictator would name a master of horse even though the task for which he was appointed sounds very much like a one-man job and was not military in nature.


Perhaps you are wondering what sort of bizarre carpentry emergency was constantly arising that required a dictator to take up the hammer. This is the funniest part of it all because it had nothing to do with carpentry at all but was done whenever the city was threatened by a plague.


Now if your next question pertains to what they were smoking in ancient Rome and/or where you might acquire some of it, allow me to assure you that while promising to legalize the abuse of mind-altering substances helped Captain Airhead to seize power, it had nothing to do with the Roman custom of nominating a dictator to drive a nail into the wall to stop a plague.


What I have been talking about was a religious ceremony. The nail, a symbol of the goddesses of fate, destiny, and necessity, would be ceremonially driven into a wall once a year, upon an important anniversary, in a number of Roman temples. The most important of these ceremonies was the one that took place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder had begun construction of this Temple in his reign, but it was not completed until the period in which Tarquin the Proud was driven out and the Republic established. It was consecrated on September 13th in either 509 BC or 507 BC. The reason for the uncertainty is that while the ancient authorities are in agreement that Marcus Horatius Pulvius, the uncle of the famous Horatius Cocles who figures in to story about “Horatius at the Bridge”, was the consul who consecrated the Temple, they do not agree as to whether it was while he was suffect consul in 509 or during his second consulship in 507. At any rate, each year on that date the Epulum Jovis banquet would be held in honour of the temple’s patron deity. On the same day the clavis annalis would take place, in which one of the consuls would ritually attach a nail to the wall of the Temple, on the right side near the shrine to Minerva. Horatius was probably the first to perform this ritual.


The law governing this ritual was itself written out and attached to the wall where the ritual was performed. It specified that only the praeter maximus, or chief magistrate, could perform it. For the annual ritual, this meant one of the consuls. Whenever the Senate decided that there was an emergency calling for a special extra performance of the ritual, only a dictator would suffice. The first time this happened, according to Livy, was in 363 BC. A plague had been ravaging the city for a couple of years. Lucius Manlius Capitolinus Imperiosus was named dictator (Lucius Pinarius Natta was his master of horse if you wish to know) for the purpose of performing this ritual. After he had hammered the nail into the wall the plague stopped. On several subsequent occasions when Rome was threatened by a plague this was repeated.


Exactly why the Romans thought this would work is unclear because the original significance of the ritual has been lost to the sands of time. The seeming success of the first performance might explain its having been repeated but not why it was done in the first place. One explanation is that the nail was thought to be symbolically driven through the spirit behind the plague, fixing him in place and preventing him from doing harm, but nobody really knows for sure.


Today’s epidemiologists would scoff at such an unscientific and superstitious manner of dealing with a plague but I see little evidence that would commend their own approach as being superior. Science and superstition are a lot more closely related than they would like us to believe. The methodology of each involves about an equal amount of guesswork, blind leaps in the dark, hit and miss, trial and error, and sheer dumb luck. Science is more respectable only because it has shinier, fancier, equipment and more impressive technical terminology. Where Roman superstition is truly vulnerable to critique is on the religious grounds. A far better religious response to a plague is to do as the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah, and call upon the nation to turn to the true and living God in humility, confessing our sins, and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Our superstitious medical dictators obviously want none of that, however, as evidenced by their locking up all the Churches during Lent, the annual season of pre-Paschal repentance.


Indeed, the ancient Roman technique has this to commend it in comparison with today’s medical dictatorship. It at least complies with what has been recognized as the first rule of medical ethics since Hippocrates of Kos, who died seven years before the first time a Roman dictator was called upon to stop a plague with a nail. Whether it did any good or not, it could not conceivably do any harm. Shutting down society and the economy and putting everybody under universal house arrests does immeasurable harm – economic, moral, legal, political, social, spiritual, psychological, physical, and even mortal.


The lesson in all of this for Captain Airhead is that if he truly feels this pandemic requires a dictatorial response, he would be better off looking to the example of the ancient Roman dictators rather than modern Communist ones. If he really wants to be useful, he could, if he can figure out the difference between the flat and the pointy end, try hammering a nail into a wall.



(1) Although this was a title that was passed on to all of his heirs, it is also used as the personal name by which historians identify him after his elevation to the rank of emperor.

Assorted Reflections

- Liberals think that parliament is an acceptable form of government because it is democratic. They have, as usual, got things backwards. Tories know that democracy is a dangerous abstraction that is only tolerable when it is incorporated as an element in an established and time-proven institution like parliament.

- I have been reflecting lately on a number of the valuable insights of John Lukacs. Lukacs, who was raised in Hungary and partially educated in England, lived through the occupation of his home country by the Nazis and when it was about to fall under the oppression of the other form of twentieth-century totalitarianism, Communism, fled to the United States where he had a successful career as a historian, primarily of the Second World War. A Roman Catholic in religion, Lukacs describes his political views as reactionary. He uses this term in much the same way that I use the term Tory, as a designation of what remains of the older, European, Catholic/Anglican royalism, that used to be called conservative before this latter term was co-opted by classical liberals and populist nationalists. A strong Anglophile, Lukacs has much praise for classical, bourgeois, liberalism and much scorn for populism and nationalism. With regards to nationalism, he has frequently reminded us of the distinction between patriotism and nationalism – the former being “defensive”, the latter “aggressive”, the former having as the object of its love “a particular land, with its particular traditions”, the latter loving “the myth of a ‘people.’” Nationalism, he insightfully says, is a “political and ideological substitute for religion.” Patriotism, by contrast, is a natural affection, the love of one’s home writ large. In populism, he sees democracy, liberated from the restraints which classical liberalism placed on it so as to become a threat to civilization. While these points sound like they were written with Donald Trump in mind, Lukacs has been making them for decades – his book, Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred, hardly the first time he tackled these subjects, was published in 2005. Furthermore, unlike the vast majority of Trump’s detractors, Lukacs is not an admirer of the liberal immigration that was the target of Trump’s populist rhetoric. As far back as 1986 he wrote a booklet, Immigration and Migration – A Historical Perspective, that concluded by saying “the greatest potential threat to the United States is not that posed by the Soviet Union, but by the so-called Third World.” Perhaps his most important insight, one that ties the previously mentioned ones together, is that which is found on pages 267 to 268 of his The Hitler of History. There, Lukacs traces the history of the exaltation of culture over civilization, from its roots in nineteenth century German philosophy, to the doctrines of Adolf Hitler, to its having become accepted orthodoxy among the intellectuals of the present day. Culture in this sense refers to artistic achievement, civilization to government, law, order, and basically the political or civil structures that allow everyday life to function more or less smoothly. While it is easy to see why those of a romantic bent of mind – Spengler, Nietzsche, Hitler, and most modern intellectuals among them – would value “spiritual and creative” culture over “material and bourgeois” civilization, Lukacs, a witness of the horrors that occur when civilization breaks down, takes the opposite stance that “When civilization is strong and widespread enough, culture will appear and take care of itself.” (Last Rites, p. 58) Nationalist-populism on the one hand and mass Third World immigration on the other both threaten civilization, and it is this more than culture for which we ought to be concerned.

- It is essential for civilization that power – the use of strength to compel obedience – be employed only in the service of authority – leadership by established right – and that authority take precedence over power. Royal monarchy possesses authority, democracy can only ever possess power – the power of numbers. Parliamentary government combines both principles – republicanism, which excludes the royal monarchical principle, is fundamentally uncivilized. Among parliamentarians, it is the Tory, who sees the royal monarchy as the guardian of civilization against the barbarism of unchecked democracy, rather than the Whig, who has the proper perspective.

- The Oresteia of Aeschylus is a trilogy of plays in which the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus is avenged by Orestes at the prompting of Apollo. Pursued by the Furies, Orestes finds refuge in Athens where Pallas herself presides over the first jury trial, in which Orestes is acquitted of the murder of his mother and the cycle of vengeance ends. The main theme of the trilogy, obviously, is how court administered justice under the rule of law is the foundation for the emergence of civilization from the barbarism of kin-administered blood vengeance. There are many important layers to the edifice of civilization that rests upon that foundation, foremost among them being the principle that it is preferable for the system to err in failing to administer justice to the guilty than by wrongfully punishing the innocent, a principle famously expressed by Socrates as quoted by Plato in the Gorgias. In practical terms, this principle translates into the onus of proof for the accuser and the presumption of innocence for the accused. It shows how little value the Liberal Party of Canada places upon civilization that the present government claims to be taking seriously the demands of aboriginal activists who, angry at the acquittal of a farmer who had shot and killed a native youth in defence of his family and property, have called for radical revisions to the “racist” justice system, insisting that representatives of their group be placed on juries even when this would amount to a jury prejudiced against the defendant. Since one of the proofs native activists most frequently offer of the “racism” of the justice system is the disproportionate number of aboriginals arrested, convicted, and incarcerated, logically they ought to be arguing for the strengthening, rather than the weakening, of the rights of defence. To give in to their foolish demands would be to step away from civilization and justice in the direction of tribal, blood-and-kin-based, vengeance.

- Theological error is at the root of all other errors of the Modern Age. The idea that man’s most fundamental nature is that of a homo economicus, a rational agent whose chief end is material possession, is the common basis of both economic liberalism or capitalism and socialism. At its heart it is a denial of the classical and Christian idea that man has a spiritual as well as a physical nature and that the spiritual ought to rule the animal nature. The idea that most or all of human suffering can be eliminated by reorganizing society economically, socially, and politically is rooted in the ancient heresy of Pelagianism for it is a denial of the fact that since the Fall, human nature itself has been afflicted with the flaw of Original Sin, which is the true source of all human suffering, an affliction for which there is no economic, social, or political cure.

- The spirit of the Modern Age is often characterized as the spirit of progress. By progress, the harnessing of the knowledge made available through reason and science for ongoing social, economic, and political improvement is meant. The true spirit of the Modern Age revealed itself in England in 1642-1649, in the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1775 to 1783, in France in 1789 to 1794, in various European countries in 1848, in Russia in 1917, and in many other countries throughout the world since. It is the spirit of anarchy and revolution, a spirit to which orthodox Christianity assigns a personal name, and which Dr. Johnson correctly identified as the first Whig.

- The faith of the Modern Age in democracy has sometimes been expressed in terms of the majority always being right. This tenet of modern faith comes with a practical application: when a decision needs to be made on behalf of a community, the sound and proper way of making a just and fair choice is to poll the people and go with what the majority wants. There are many flaws with this way of thinking and classical liberalism, despite its avowed belief in democracy, sufficiently recognized the dangers of majority rule to insist that it must operate within the parameters set by guaranteed civil rights and liberties for individuals and minorities. Tories or classical conservatives, who, as previously mentioned, believe in tested and established institutions like parliaments rather than abstractions like democracy, emphasize the need to limit the excesses of democracy by balancing it with the older governing institutions of royal monarchy and aristocracy. Popular opinion is easily manipulated both by those who control the instruments of information distribution, i.e., the media and by strong-willed, charismatic, populists. When both of these are actively at work manipulating public opinion at the same time and in open warfare against each other you get what the United States is currently going through. In reality, the majority can rarely be expected to know what is best, but an important exception to this, it needs to be emphasized, is the issue of immigration. The reason this is an exception is obvious. The kind of liberal elites who prefer unrestricted, large scale, open immigration, live in gated communities where they have sealed themselves and their children off from the consequences of the policies they espouse whereas the majority of ordinary people have to live with those consequences on a daily basis. The majority of ordinary persons, on this subject at least, are better informed than the elites, and their opposition to liberal immigration cannot be simply dismissed as uninformed prejudice or the result of demagogic, populist, fear-mongering.

- For decades, the concepts of “left” and “right” that have prevailed in mainstream North American thought have been primarily economical with the left being associated with socialism and the right with capitalism. Students of history, who know of the origins of the political connotations of “right” and “left” in the French Revolution, will recognize the irony in this. The original “right” were the defenders of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic establishment, and the nobility – essentially the equivalents of the English Royalist-Cavalier-Tories. The “left” were the members of the Jacobin Club who, for various, often conflicting reasons, promoted the Revolution. It was certainly not theoretical economics over which the original “left” and “right” fought. The Jacobins accused the Bourbons of hoarding the food supply after a bumper harvest, causing unnecessary want and hunger, accusations to which there was no substance as the Jacobins knew full well for it was their own ringleader, the king’s cousin Philippe d’Orleans, who later renamed himself Égalité, who had secretly bought up the grain supply in order to stir up dissatisfaction and strife. That was about the extent to which economics – practical, rather than theoretical – figured into the Revolution and it was a mere pretext. Of course, those who make the North American “left” and “right” all about economics are kind of sloppy with their definitions of “capitalism” and “socialism” as well. These are envisioned as the two poles of a spectrum having to do with the extent of government involvement in the economy. Total government ownership and control of the economy, pure socialism, is the left pole and zero government involvement in the economy, pure anarcho-capitalism, is the right pole. By this simplistic reasoning any move away from zero government involvement is a move towards the left and towards socialism. The folly of that is demonstrable by a single example – Sunday shopping restrictions. Until very recently, within living memory, laws that predated the economic theories of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, strictly limited commercial activity on Sundays. The removal of most of these restrictions is a consequence of the secularization of society. The logic of the left/socialist-right/capitalist spectrum requires the conclusion that this was a move to the right. Yet this conclusion is clearly absurd – secularization is favoured by the left, and opposition to it exists almost entirely on the right. As for capitalism and socialism, while it is not wrong to say that the liberalization of Sunday laws served the purposes of capitalism it does not follow, and indeed sounds utterly ridiculous, to say that the retention of those laws would have been socialistic. Socialism, correctly defined, is the idea that the collective ownership or control of farms, factories, and other means of production is necessary for a fair distribution of resources. This foolish notion has no relationship whatsoever with the idea that one day in seven should be set aside, as much as possible, from commercial activity and kept holy. Since collective ownership or control translates, in practice, into government ownership or control, socialism does involve much more economic involvement on the part of the government than capitalism, but it does not follow that all forms of government involvement are a step towards socialism. The nature of the government involvement has to be taken into consideration as well.

- Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein have recently argued that left-wing anti-Zionism is simply a mask for anti-Semitism. The reason the anti-Zionist left singles Israel out for condemnation for acts that other governments, including ones the left coddles, engage in, so this reasoning goes, is because Israel is Jewish. It would have been far more refreshing had Harper and Goldstein been bold enough to speak the real truth – the left’s rabid anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Israel being Jewish, and everything to do with Israel being Western, European and white. While today the condemnation that the left heaps on Israel for her determination to preserve her own existence, even in the face of global, liberal, disapproval, against the enemies on all sides who desire her destruction, seems unique, it is no different from the way the left had behaved towards South Africa in the 1980s and Southern Rhodesia in the 1970s. Neither South Africa nor Southern Rhodesia was a Jewish country. What these countries had in common with Israel was that they were countries established by European settlers – the Jews who made Aliyah to Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from Europe – with Western parliamentary institutions, and thriving Western economies and civilization. In each case, the country was surrounded by hostile countries dedicated to its destruction and had – or, in Israel’s case, has – a large mass of enemies within its own borders. To preserve their own existence, these countries simply could not behave in the way that liberals living in countries that until recently – the “Camp of the Saints” scenario that liberal immigration and the so-called “refugee” crisis has been producing is rapidly changing this – were not faced with similar existential threats, demanded. So the liberals condemned each of them as “racist.” In the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa they wore down the country’s will to survive and the consequences of liberalism getting its way has been the breakdown of law and order in both countries, the devastation of their economies, the collapse of their civilization, and the mass murder of their white farmers. The real hatred behind the left’s anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews qua Jews, but the hatred of white, European, Western civilization. Harper and Goldstein know this as well as I do. It would be nice if they would grow a pair, come out and say it, and denounce this type of race hatred as being just as bad as anti-Semitism if not worse. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

- There are two groups of people who one constantly hears harping about “racism. White liberals, who hate people of their own skin colour, and consider themselves to be morally superior beings for doing so, are the first group. The most ethno-centric representatives of other races, who can barely utter a sentence without expressing their own race-based hatred, are the other.

- Throughout North America, and indeed, the Western world as a whole, but especially here in the Dominion of Canada, left-wing ideology has long held the institutions of higher learning in its totalitarian grasp. The atmosphere on campus, to say the least, has not been conducive to the formation and expressions of thoughts outside of the progressive box. In his run for the Conservative Party's leadership, Andrew Scheer vowed to cut off government funding for schools that did not allow freedom of speech for non-progressive views. More recently, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has given all the colleges and universities of Upper Canada until the next New Year's Day to adopt such free speech policies. What Ford gives with one hand, however, he takes away with the other for he has also insisted that these schools adopt anti-hate speech policies. Classifying the expression of non-progressive opinion as "hate speech" has long been the left's main weapon for suppressing freedom of thought and speech. As long as "hate speech" is forbidden and the left gets to decide what is "hate speech" - and note that in their definition "I hate you, you dirty, rotten, SOB" is NOT "hate speech" but "studies show that group X has on average a higher percentage of undesirable trait Y than does the general populace" is "hate speech" regardless of whether or not it is true - no affirmation of freedom of speech can possibly be effective. Of course, even an effective free speech policy would only be the first step towards clearing the atmosphere in the halls of higher education. Cutting off all public funding for gender studies, ethnic studies, and other such courses, insisting that institutions that offer these pay for them solely out of private funds, and that they be entirely elective, would be the necessary next step. The neoconservative solution of a STEM-centred curriculum would not work because it is based on a false premise - that the hard sciences and mathematics are impervious to being taken over by those wishing to promote a progressive agenda. Those who believe this premise would do well to research the history of the left-wing activist group Science For the People and the careers of such prominent members as Richard C. Lewonkin (geneticist and biologist) and the late Stephen Jay Gould (paleontologist and biologist) who both taught at Harvard University from the early 1970s to around the turn of the millennium. Another problem with the STEM-based approach is the underlying assumption that the purpose of education is to give people the tools they need to earn a living and advance in a career. That confuses training with education. What is sorely needed in Canada is a full reformation of the humanities, so that liberal education once again means education that provides Canadians with all that they need to fully participate in society as Her Majesty’s free citizen-subjects and no longer means indoctrination in the latest tenets of left-wing ideology.

- Karl Marx’s “ideas” have been so thoroughly debunked by the events of the last century that it is only academics and intellectuals who are stupid and idiotic enough to still take them seriously. I do not refer merely to the fact that the movement he inspired enslaved one sixth of the world, murdered one hundred million people, and made Hitler’s totalitarian tyranny look amateur in comparison. I also refer to the fact that his predictions spectacularly failed to come true – life for industrial workers did not become unbearably hard under capitalism, quite the opposite, and when the general war came – twice – the workers fought for their country rather than their class. Even in the Soviet Union, Stalin had to appeal to good old fashioned Russian patriotism to marshal the troops against Hitler. The foundational premise of the labour theory of value that Marx borrowed from Adam Smith has also been debunked. It is quite evident that the expanded productivity that has led to such a rise in the standard of living has been due to the improvement of capital and not to an increase in labour. As nauseating and disgusting as most other aspects of her world view are, it is the premise behind the main plot device of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the Galt strike, that has been confirmed and verified, and not Marx’s inane drivel. The debunking of Marxist theory has in no way prevented it from wreaking havoc, death, and destruction around the globe. This is because Marxism as a revolutionary movement did not arise out of Marxism as a political and economic theory but rather Marxism as a political and economic theory was devised as a rationalization and justification for Marxism as a revolutionary movement. This is why the response of Marxists to the falsification of Marx’s predictions, as far back as the interwar period, was not to abandon the revolutionary cause in disillusionment but to devise new theories to perpetuate it. When these new theories were in turn debunked – the first ones borrowed ideas from Freudianism which is now universally regarded as quackery – this too, was no big deal to the revolutionaries, they simply came up with yet newer ones. Unlike real philosophers, Marxists see their ideas as tools for promoting revolutionary violence rather than steps in a journey towards the truth. Since the Second World War neo-Marxists have used their new theories to expand their list of enemies to be destroyed. No longer does their sedition target only their old class enemy, the bourgeoisie, but now also the racial, sexual, and gender enemies of white Caucasians, males, heterosexuals, and most recently the cisgendered. Indeed, through the idea of “intersectionality” they now attack all of these targets simultaneously. Eventually, of course, these ideas will be as dead and debunked as classical Marxism, but since their utility for the Marxists’ revolutionary purposes is completely independent of their truth claims, this will not defeat Marxism. Only by abandoning liberalism, with its foolish insistence on interacting with Marxism in its various guises as if it were a legitimate philosophical contribution, will we be able to recognize it for what it is, a seditious movement of pure violent hatred, and respond to it accordingly.

- The vision of the Fathers of Confederation was simple – the provinces of British North America, would come together to form a nation, which would retain its monarchical, parliamentarian, and Common Law institutions and preserve its existence against the threat of the economic, cultural, social, and political domination of the American republic by maintaining its connection to Britain and the rest of the Empire. The federal system would accommodate the cultural differences between English speaking Protestants and French speaking Catholics, while a strong, central, government would preserve the unity of the country and prevent the kind of fracturing that had led to the conflict of 1861-1865 in the United States. The broader Empire would evolve into a strong alliance of self-governing associated kingdoms under the common Crown (Stephen Leacock’s “Greater Canada – An Appeal” articulates this vision of the Commonwealth and Canada’s role in it). When we compare this vision with what has become of our country in the century and a half since we cannot help but weep. At the time the United States, confident in its Manifest Destiny to rule North America, resentful of the continued presence on the continent of the Empire it had rebelled against, and scornful of monarchical government, was the biggest threat to the Dominion. The United States ridiculed Confederation, tried to prevent Canada from obtaining Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory, cheered on the Red River and North-West Rebellions, tried to derail the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad necessary for building the Canadian national economy, and poured money into the election coffers of the Liberals when they campaigned for unconditional trade reciprocity, regarded on both sides of the Forty-Ninth Parallel in those days as a step that would lead inevitably to annexation. Ultimately, however, it was the enemy within, the Liberal Party of Canada, which proved to be more dangerous than any external threat. Mackenzie King’s actions in 1926 so undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to the king-in-parliament that it turned the Prime Minister’s office into a virtual dictatorship. Trudeau’s Charter undermined the Common Law and established a judicial tyranny similar to that in the United States. In between were a number of cosmetic changes in which meaningful symbols of the Canada of Confederation, such as the flag under which we fought two world wars and our original national holiday which honoured the day we became a “Dominion”, the designation the Fathers of Confederation had chosen to give the kind of self-governing, associate, kingdom they had created, were replaced with lame substitutes. While our national emblems are a lesser concern than our queen-in-parliament system of government and the prescriptive rights, personal freedom, and accumulated-precedent-based-justice of our Common Law, the Liberal Party’s changes to the former reflect their assault upon the latter basic institutions of Canadian civilization.