Sacrificing Billions to Save Thousands?

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." – Rudyard Kipling

The way the World Health Organization, our power-hungry politicians, the technocratic boobs with tunnel vision who are our health apparatchiks, and the cheap harlots of the mainstream media talk about it, one would think that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a real life equivalent of the artificially engineered, antibody resistant, superflu which wipes out most of the world’s population in Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand and the various adaptations thereof. It is not. Although it is possible that like the weaponized flu strain in the novel, it escaped from a laboratory, that of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not remotely comparable in terms of lethality. It is basically a normal strain of bat influenza that has jumped species to humans, that has been spreading rapidly due to it being new to the species and thus our having no built up immunity to it yet, but most people are not at risk of anything worse than the ordinary flu from it. Those who are most susceptible to developing the severe and potentially lethal form of pneumonia that it can produce are the same people susceptible to catching pneumonia and dying from H1N1 and the other, ordinary, seasonal strains of the flu.

From the beginning of this pandemic it has been apparent that the WHO’s claims with regards to the lethality of this virus have been greatly exaggerated. Although the press in its daily reports has used “staggering” and similar scare words to describe the rising death tolls, the numbers themselves have not supported the use of such adjectives. Not when taken in context at any rate. COVID-19 has not become the leading cause of death, it is nowhere close to it. The overall number of deaths from all causes for the period of this pandemic has not risen astronomically in comparison with the number for the same period in other years. Indeed, in some areas that have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19 this number has been down from recent years.

In most countries, the epidemiologists’ original projections of expected deaths from this disease have been radically revised downward. At some point the mortality rate will have to undergo a similar radical adjustment. Contrary to the lies of the health authorities and the media, the official death count for COVID-19 is not too low but too high. Even though the vast majority of people who have caught this virus and died have had multiple other conditions that also contributed to their demise these have all been classified as deaths from COVID-19. If deaths from regular influenza were counted the same way the mortality rate for the flu would be much higher than it is. Similarly, the other number that goes into the mortality rate calculation is much too low. Since a large number – as many as fifty percent some estimates put it – of those who contract the virus are completely asymptomatic, the total number known to have been infected is obviously much, much, lower than the true number of infected. Indeed, when we consider that international travel in and out of Hubei province was allowed long after the initial outbreak began there – and long after Red China shut down travel from that province to the rest of their own country – during a period in which Western countries, sick with a liberalism far more lethal than this virus, resisted imposing travel restrictions on China, it is almost certain that the virus had made it into all of our countries long before we noticed that it had arrived.

Since the potential lethality of this virus has been hugely exaggerated, the extent to which the repugnant, totalitarian, Communistic measures being taken almost everywhere are “saving lives” is also exaggerated. In pointing this out I do not wish merely to throw water on those currently engaged in a nauseating orgy of self-congratulatory, backslapping, tripe over their efforts to save lives by sacrificing our freedoms, but to contrast the low number of lives saved with the potentially much higher number of lives endangered by the same measures.

While I am no fan of Karl Marx – Groucho is much more my style – and am of the firm opinion that he was wrong about almost everything, there are a few rare exceptions to this. One such exception was the sentence with which he opened his letter to Louis Kugelmann on July 11, 1868. He wrote “Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.” With this sentence he introduces an argument that is neither interesting nor relevant to the subject at hand, but the sentence itself states an obvious truth, one very similar to that which is found in the verses by Rudyard Kipling quoted at the beginning of this essay.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus continues to be remembered to this day for his theory about population size and the food supply. Human beings, Malthus argued, can increase our food supply through improved means of production, but if we do so the natural human response will be an increase in reproduction. The increase in reproduction will be faster and larger than the increase in food production so that the growth in population size will exceed the increase to the food supply and as a result there will be famine, poverty, starvation, disease and death. His essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798. He expanded and revised it in 1803, and published several further editions with minor revisions before his death in 1834. From that day to this, it has inspired several prophecies of doom, the most famous of recent times being the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb by Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die in the 1970s from starvation due to overpopulation. That, of course, did not happen.

There is obviously a flaw somewhere in Malthus’ theory. The question is where. According to the popular Demographic Transition Model, first developed by Warren Thomson in 1929, the problem is with his understanding of human nature. According to this theory, as societies progress towards industrialization they pass through stages and, after they have achieved a certain level of industrial development, fertility rates drop drastically and population size stabilizes. While the demographic history of Western countries and other developed countries such as Japan in the twentieth century would seem to bear this interpretation out, explaining its having passed into conventional wisdom, it has not gone without challenge. Dr. Virginia Deane Abernethy of Vanderbilt University, for example, in her book Population Politics (Transaction Books, 2000) gave several examples of empirical evidence that goes against the theory, making the case that popular late twentieth century progressive efforts to combat Third World overpopulation and poverty with policies based upon the assumption of the DTM, such as foreign relief and liberal immigration to the West as a population safety valve, have not worked as the model would have predicted but have, if anything, made the problem worse. The sharp decline in fertility that developed countries have experienced since the end of the post-World War II Baby Boom is better explained by other aspects of the transition to modernity, such as a severe weakening of the traditional idea that producing posterity is a duty we owe to our ancestors, than by industrial prosperity itself.


The other leading explanation of the flaw in Malthus’ theory is that he vastly underestimated our capacity to improve and increase the food supply. This explanation is also borne out by the history of the twentieth century and much more consistently than that of the DTM.

Now, if this explanation of what went wrong with the predictions based upon Malthus’ theory is the correct one, and I believe it is, then what could potentially happen when we have a global population of 7.8 billion people and we shut down the economy all over the world, jeopardizing out ability to produce food at this improved and increased capacity?

Why, lo and behold, we have just discovered where the potential for a death rate as a high as the one in Stephen King’s book is to be found.

Yes, shutting down the economies of practically every country in the world, is indeed a move that will put the food supply in jeopardy. When those who produce and sell food are almost the only ones allowed to be open they are essentially being asked or told to work for nothing, for nobody else is producing anything with which to pay them. Yes, governments are printing and handing out fiat money by the gazillions, but money has no intrinsic value. Its role in the marketplace is to be a convenient stand-in for real goods. The X number of dollars that you pay someone for Y amount of magic beans, represents the cow that you would have traded in a barter exchange. Perhaps that is a bad example, because both beans and cattle are sources of food, but I think it still gets the point across. If only category of producers are allowed to actually produce anything for sale in the market, the currency that is exchanged in that market will rapidly become worthless, and those producers will become overburdened and start to fail. It is estimated that nine million people in the world die from hunger every year. It is responsible for half of the deaths of children under the age of five. This is over three times the number of people known to have been infected with COVID-19. It is about fifty times more than the number who have died after contracting the virus. As of this writing, the number who have died from hunger in 2020 so far is almost three million. That’s about fifteen times the number who have died after contracting COVID-19, whether the virus was the primary killer or not. The measures being taken to combat COVID-19 will drive the number who die from hunger up and by considerably more than they can bring the number who die from COVID-19 down.

There are those who would say that this is the intentional and deliberate true purpose of the global lockdown. I would not go that far. The problem with the interpretation of events as being the intended outcome of a very powerful and malevolent cabal is that it requires assuming that politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, and the like possess an almost superhuman level of competence. In reality, these are people who think they are Sherlock Holmes, when they are actually Jacques Clouseau – the Jacques Clouseau portrayed by Peter Sellers in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films, not the version of the character more recently portrayed by Steve Martin. Unlike the latter, who is able to scrape together enough deductive reasoning to actually solve the case by the end of his movies, Sellers’ classic interpretation of this character was of a bumbling, clumsy, nincompoop whose incompetence is matched only by his vanity and arrogance, and who succeeds only through an extraordinary degree of sheer accidental luck.

That having been said, large scale global depopulation has been one of the chief goals of the environmentalist wing of the United Nations and its ultrawealthy backers like Bill Gates, George Soros, and the late Maurice Strong since at least the 1992 “Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro that produced the famous – or, depending upon your perspective, infamous – action plan “Agenda 21.” These people represent the most extreme version of one of the two distortions of Malthus that have been around since his own day. While his detractors, like Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, unjustly accused him of heartlessly wishing upon people the famine, poverty, and death his theory predicted, his supporters, especially those of more recent times, have advocated measures to combat overpopulation that he himself would have found morally repugnant, such as abortion, infanticide, and totalitarian state control of reproduction. Those who want the world’s population reduced by as much as eighty to ninety-five percent are the worst example of this sort. The overlap between the institutions such as the United Nations and individuals such as Bill Gates who advocate this radical agenda and those behind the global lockdown is certainly worth taking note of.

Whether intentional or merely the result of the kind of stupidity that is the unique property of technocratic experts – “I had no idea my solution to Problem X would create the much worse Problem Y because that is not my field of expertise” – the potential lethality of the measures being taken to combat COVID-19, far exceeds that of the disease itself.

The Greta Syndrome – A Diagnosis

It is sad to see what has become of the Kingdom of Sweden. At some point in the twentieth century, I think around the time of the Second World War, their political class developed a naïve and superstitious faith in the ability of social scientists to improve their customs and mores through radical experimentation. Perhaps the Nazis slipped some mind-altering substance into their water supply during the war that has been producing this lingering effect. Whatever the cause, the result has been that they have taken progressive social engineering to an extreme beyond what can be found in most other Western countries. This is most obvious when it comes to their policies and laws with regards to gender identity and the raising of children.

Sweden boasts of the fact that she was the first country to pass a total ban on corporal punishment. This happened back in the 1960s and about sixty countries have followed their example. Many other countries have passed partial bans, prohibiting it in schools but not in the home. From the über-progressive Swedish perspective this is something in which their country can take pride – they were ahead of the times, trend-setting, fashionable and forward-thinking. From the proper perspective, that is to say, my own, their being ahead of the times, trend-setting, fashionable, and forward-thinking is something of which they ought to be deeply ashamed. What it really means is that they have gone stark, börking, mad.

King Solomon, who was a far more trustworthy authority than some wacko sociologist or psychologist, wrote “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

Everywhere you look today you will find evidence that Solomon knew what he was talking about and that progressive social engineers are full of a nasty-smelling natural fertilizer. A few decades ago they took the strap out of the schools and now, at least in large urban centres, it has become necessary to go through airport-style security checks in order to enter them. At approximately the same time, quacks purporting to be experts on child-raising began peddling the message of permissiveness in cheap books and on bad television shows. They condemned methods that have been tested and proven over the course of centuries as barbaric and cruel. Spanking in particular, they likened to child abuse. As parents – and legislators – began listening to them and taking them seriously, authority in the home collapsed.

The anti-corporal punishment message caught on due to its superficial appeal to the feelings of parents. Parents love their children, people do not want those they love to suffer pain, corporal punishment inflicts pain, and therein lies the temptation to believe those who preach against spanking. Note carefully, however, the wording of King Solomon’s proverb quoted above. True love is not the empty, sentimental, feeling that is so often called by that name in the age in which we live. It also includes a commitment to meet one’s obligations towards those one loves. At the very minimum, parents have an obligation to their children to raise them – to instruct them in the right path and correct them when they go wrong. What the progressive and liberal theory of child raising really amounts to is the idea that parents should let children raise themselves. While this is certainly in keeping with the liberal ideal which makes complete individual self-determination out to be the highest good it is not consistent with genuine parental love.

It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that the country that took the first step down this path of utter madness is also the country that produced the most celebrated case of juvenile delinquency in the world today. There are many who would object to this description of Swedish enfant terrible Greta Thunberg but consider the actions that made her famous and then tell me that the träsko doesn’t fit.

After bullying her parents into depriving themselves of essential nutrients by going vegan she launched her career as a youthful rabble-rouser by encouraging children to play hooky from school in order to attend protest rallies demanding that governments ruin the lives of all the families that depend upon the petroleum industry – or raising livestock – for their livelihood. Her justification for all of this horrendously bad behaviour is her fear of climate change. Not real climate change but the bugbear of the eco-socialists.

Real climate change is a matter of long cyclical patterns of warming and cooling that have been going on since the beginning of time and will continue until the end of time. A multitude of factors, most if not all of which are beyond human control, contribute to it. It is not a bad thing, it is a part of the way things are. Periods of warming are nothing to be feared. People thrive in warmer periods. One thousand years ago, Thunberg’s Viking ancestors were able to farm Greenland thanks to one.

The eco-socialist version is a fictional horror story in which carbon emissions produced by human industry are the principle driving factor in climate change which threatens all life on the planet with extinction. It was thought up to serve the libido dominandi of men like George Soros and the late Maurice Strong who seem to have taken the supervillains in the movies based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels as their role models.

A lot of people have been duped into believing this nonsense, of course, but they do not all go around encouraging truancy and rebellion, throwing temper tantrums before assemblies of world leaders, and stirring up strife in other countries. Some would try to explain Thunberg’s aberrant behaviour by pointing to her having Asperger’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but I think that it is unfair to lump all who suffer from these conditions in with peace disturbing troublemakers like Greta.

No, I think the explanation is to be found in Sweden’s spanking laws. Had Sweden allowed Greta’s parents to discipline her properly, she may still have been taken in by the eco-socialist propaganda, but they would have been able to exert their authority to prevent her from acting on her fears in such an inappropriate, socially destructive manner.

We have not yet banned corporal punishment entirely in the Dominion of Canada, although it is probably on the Liberals’ agenda. Only parents are allowed to exercise this kind of discipline, however.

That is, perhaps, a pity. Had it been otherwise, when Greta recently travelled to Alberta to demand the total destruction of the province’s economy, their premier Jason Kenney could have turned her over his knee and publicly given her a lesson that would have done her a world of good.

The Westminster System is Better Than Republicanism

That the Westminster parliamentary system of government is a superior form of government to any republicanism has been a lifelong conviction of mine. This will come as a surprise to none of my long-time readers, I am sure.

There are many reasons for this conviction. On one level it is simple patriotism. True patriotism - as opposed to nationalism, which is the ideological devotion to an ideal vision of one's nation - is love, affection and loyalty for one's country because it is one's own. It is by nature the same thing as the love one ordinarily feels for one's family and home, just on a larger scale. The Westminster parliamentary system of government is the traditional form of government of my country, the Dominion of Canada, which inherited it from the United Kingdom where it originally developed. We share this form of government with the UK and several other countries in the British Commonwealth, or, as I often call it, the British family of nations.

There is a theoretical foundation for the conviction, however. Two and a half millennia ago, Plato, of whom A. N. Whitehead wrote that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes, wrote his most important dialogue, the Politeia. The title is usually translated "The Republic" from the Latin De Republica, which means "about the affairs of the public" but this is misleading because of the connotations the word "republic" now has. In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates debate the nature of justice , first with Thrasymachus, who maintains that injustice is superior to justice, and then with Glaucon (Plato's brother) who asks, in response to Socrates' answer to Thrasymachus, why justice itself is to be preferred over the mere appearance of justice. Socrates proposes that they found a hypothetical city-state and look at justice as it would be in that state on the theory that by seeing it viewed on a large scale there, they would be better able to understand the nature of justice in the individual.

The hypothetical ideal city-state is ruled by kings who are also philosophers, men who through higher thought have been able to catch a glimpse of goodness, truth, and beauty as they are in themselves, and not merely their worldly imitations. The constitution of this city-state is dubbed royal/aristocratic by Plato through Socrates, and is contrasted with actual constitutions of which four are identified. States, according to Plato, have the tendency to shift from one of these to the next as extremes beget their opposites and so states go from timocracy - the closest to the ideal, the rule of honour-seeking aristocrats, identified with the government of Sparta at the time, to oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, to democracy, which ultimately begets tyranny. This is a progression, in Plato's view, from best to worst.

Aristotle, Plato's student, modified his teacher's political theories by proposing that there were three simple constitutions - the rule of the one, the few, and the many which have good and bad forms depending upon whether the one, the few, or the many govern for themselves at the expense of the common good or for the sake of the common good. Like Plato, Aristotle saw states as going through these constitutions in cyclical fashion, but theorized that the cycle could be broken and a lasting, stable, constitution produced, by mixing monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, checking the worst tendencies of each and bringing out the best of all.

The Westminster parliamentary system is the living embodiment of this mixed constitution. The Americans also had Aristotle's ideal in mind when they drew up their republican constitution, but the Westminster system, forged over centuries of history, has the greater weight of prescriptive tradition behind it.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, in devising their republic, saw the importance of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. They were heavily influenced by the theories of Montesquieu who in turn looked to the Westminster system as the already-existing model of this separation. In the Westminster system these powers are both united and separated at the same time, with no contradiction, because the uniting factor is the Sovereign Crown. In Canada we speak of the distinction between "the Queen-in-council" (the executive branch, consisting of the Queen, usually represented by the Governor General, and privy council, the day-to-day business of which is carried out by the Prime Minister and Cabinet), "the Queen-in-Parliament" (the legislative branch, consisting of the House of Commons, Senate and again the Queen, usually through vice regal representation), and "the Queen-on-the-bench"(the judicial branch, the courts). The Westminster system makes this harmonious separation-in-unity of the powers possible, by distinguishing between the ownership of the powers of government, which belongs in each case to the Monarch, and the exercise of the powers which are carried out in her name by different groups of people. There is a slight overlap, in that the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers are also members of Parliament, but this is supposed to make the Cabinet, responsible for the everyday decisions of the executive branch of government, dually accountable, both to the Sovereign above in whose name they act and to the Parliament below.

There are many reasons for preferring this to the republican system. As I have discussed in many previous essays, history shows us that when government is thought of as the property of "the people" and leaders see themselves as the champions of "the people", traditional limitations on the use of government power break down. A government that acts in the name of the people can justify whatever it does to the people. Hitler saw himself as one of the common people, the first among equal brothers, empowered to act as the voice of the people in carrying out his tyrannical murderous evil deeds. The same was true of Stalin and every other totalitarian despot. By contrast, when the ownership of government power belongs to a Royal Sovereign, who stands in a paternal or maternal relationship to the people, the people who exercise the powers of government are in the position of being servants - which is what the word minister means - to their Royal master. This is a humbling position, and if the exercise of government power is to be carried out by politicians - people who by definition are power-seekers and therefore the most likely to be corrupted by actual power - it is all the more important that they be placed in a position of humility rather than one that promotes arrogance.

When a king or queen reigns over your country it adds a touch of class that is simply not present in a republic.

The events that we have seen in the republic south of our border this week testify to another strength of our system. No, I am not referring to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, which event I welcome for reasons explained elsewhere, but rather to the response to it. Protests have broken out all over America, ranging from the juvenile but fairly innocuous antics of Stefani Germanotta outside the Trump Tower in New York to the violent riots such as have been taking place in Portland, Oregon. Unsurprisingly, many of the protests appear to have been organized by the George Soros funded MoveOn, but the sentiment shared by all, organized or spontaneous, peaceful or violent, is expressed in the words "not my president."

Had the election gone the other way, the same sentiment would have been expressed by the other side. Whether it would have gotten this violent or not is difficult to say. The liberal media certainly feared it would, but that means very little as their powers of prediction have not been particularly great as of late. There was certainly potential for a violent uprising, however. The men and women who turned out in droves to vote for Trump included many white, middle and working class Americans who have been scapegoated by the American political, cultural, economic, and academic establishment for decades, seeing their jobs being exported and their replacements imported and their objections to all of this answered with vile accusations of bigotry, prejudice, ignorance and hatred. To these, the forgotten Americans whom the president-elect vowed in his victory speech would never be forgotten again, and whom Hillary Clinton had dismissed as "a basketful of deplorables", Trump had offered a glimmer of hope for the first time in years and, as Pat Buchanan pointed out in September, this election was really their last chance.

This was the most polarizing election the American republic has seen since 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln that year, incidentally, makes nonsense out of the claim that we heard from many pundits last month in feigned shock over Trump’s unwillingness to invite fraud by making a preliminary concession to Clinton, that the United States has experienced 227 years of uninterrupted peaceful transfer of power. That election split the country in two and brought about a four year internecine war that saw over 600, 000 casualties. Hardly what one could call a peaceful transition of power. At any rate, the election this year has revealed a division between Americans that rivals that of 1860 in its extent and intensity. It is a division that is unlikely to be healed any time soon, since the liberal left continues to reject the validity of the complaints of white, middle and working class Americans against their agenda and to accuse these Americans of being “hateful” and “bigoted” while scarcely bothering to conceal their own hatred of the same beneath the thin veneer of their positive-sounding but empty platitudes such as “love trumps hate.”

The weakness of the republican system revealed in all of this is that the president, who is head of state of the republic, is supposed to be the person who represents the country as a collective whole – as opposed to the members of the House of Representative, who represent their own districts, and the Senators who represent their own States. The president, however, is chosen by election, making it possible for those who voted against him to plausibly claim that he is “not my president.”

In the Westminster system, the head of state is the monarch, who is not elected. Since her position is hereditary, she is above the divisive and polarizing, political process, and is therefore a better symbol of the unity of the country than an elected president. Indeed, since she is the descendent of previous monarchs and ancestor of future monarchs, she is a symbol not just of the present unity of the country, but of the unity of the country across past, present, and future generations as well, and of our country's enduring link to other countries in the British family of nations. The party which wins a majority or a plurality in the House of Commons forms Her Majesty’s government and its leader becomes Prime Minister but the second largest party in the House has a role as well as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Opposition’s role is to challenge the policies and practices of the government, to hold it accountable to Parliament, and to be the Parliamentary voice of those who did not win the last election. The unifying factor, to which government and Opposition alike are supposed to be loyal, is the Royal Sovereign. No matter which party wins the election, even if the Prime Minister is a mindless, smug, smarmy, contemptable, little waste of space who never sold his soul to the devil only because he never possessed one to sell in the first place, like the present Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, all Canadians can look to our head of state and say “God Save the Queen!”

That is something for which, in light of the riots and uproar our republican neighbours are experiencing, we can be truly thankful.

God Save the Queen!

The Existential Crisis of the West

“To be, or not to be.” “That,” as Shakespeare’s Danish Prince famously soliloquized, “is the question.” Was he seriously weighing the pros of taking his own life – “to die, to sleep” – against the cons – “to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub”? Or, since he was feigning madness at the time, was this merely part of the act?

We don’t know and never will but what we do know, alas, is that Hamlet’s dilemma is precisely the one currently faced by Western Civilization.

It was novelist Jean Raspail who peered into the future and saw the form in which this dilemma would come upon the West in his Le Camp des Saints which was first published in French in 1973, followed by an English edition in 1975. The novel made the bestseller lists when it first appeared – and it returned to them about five years ago when the predicted scenario began to loom large on the horizon of the immediate future – but it met with much hostility from the fashionable elites of the liberal intelligentsia. Its author, a traditional Roman Catholic who longs for the restoration of the French monarchy, was treated by the bien-pensants as a racist rabble-rouser.

The novel tells the story of a fleet of a hundred rusting old cargo liners that set out from Calcutta en route to France laden with a million of the poorest of the poor. Long before the armada arrives in the Mediterranean where it will embark upon the French Riviera on Easter Sunday the world becomes aware of its destination and the French discuss among themselves how they will respond. Those in power are aware that what is at stake is the continued existence of France as they know it, that these refugees from abject poverty are attracted by the wealth of the West and not because they love French culture and civilization and wish to participate in it. They are invaders, but invaders armed not with guns and swords, but with their own wretchedness and the liberalism of the French. While a few of France’s leaders, including her president, privately do not wish France to succumb to this invasion, publicly they are afraid to express this sentiment and in the end lack the heart to act on it. Most of the intellectuals, clergy, journalists, and politicians welcome the coming of the invaders of which they speak in messianic, salvific, terms and embrace the death of their own way of life. The world waits to see what France will do and when she fails to conjure up the will to survive no other Western country dares to do so.

This doom, so vividly forecast by Raspail forty years ago, has gradually come to materialize until now it is dangling over Western countries like the sword that Syracusan ruler Dionysius the Younger hung by a hair over the head of his flatterer Damocles.

In the 1960s most Western governments radically liberalized their policies on immigration both in regards to who is allowed in and how many causing a massive upsurge in immigration from the Third World. This, predictably, generated a great deal of cultural and ethnic tension. The governments that had orchestrated this new wave of untraditional immigration – or at least passed the laws that made it possible – dealt with this tension in a number of ways. What these methods all had in common was that they involved the government siding with the newcomers against those who were already members of the societies they governed. Often these countries declared themselves to be multicultural, which was more than just a recognition that a plurality of cultures could be found within their borders, but a decision that their country would adapt to the immigrants rather than expect the immigrants to adapt to them. Several of them passed laws which forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and country of origin which, while worded neutrally, were clearly designed to be applied in one direction only. Sometimes, as was the case with the Canadian Human Rights Act passed in 1977, these laws included provisions aimed at the suppression of public disagreement with these new policies. Throughout the West dissent was further discouraged by means of accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia and other such words that suggested that liberal immigration was an obvious good, which nobody could rationally and legitimately disagree with, so that all disapproval was an irrational prejudice based in fear and hatred.

Then the illegal immigration problem began. Illegal immigration is when people move to a country without applying to immigrate through the proper channels. Some countries have more of a problem with this than others depending upon how easy they are to access from countries where large numbers of people need to flee. The United States has had a huge illegal immigration problem over its southern border with Mexico for decades, a problem that has been exacerbated by the refusal of their government to enforce its own immigration laws. Politicians of both the Republican and Democrat parties have preferred to amnesty illegal aliens, i.e., to pardon them for breaking into the country and grant them legal immigrant status. There are a number of reasons for this preference – it keeps the cost of labour low for unscrupulous companies and is considered to be the humanitarian response to people who are fleeing poverty looking for a better life – but without a secure border, it is a solution that only encourages more of the problem.

It is events that have transpired since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, however, that has made Raspail’s scenario loom so ominously on the horizon. Protests against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria that began in the “Arab Spring” of that year grew into armed rebellion, backed by the American government of Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the fighting escalated Islamic jihadists operating in both Syria and Iraq seized control of territory in these two countries and formed the Islamic State (ISIS) declaring it to be the revival of the ancient caliphate. With the United States backing the so-called moderate rebels, Russia and then later Iran backing the Assad government, and ISIS waging a terrorist war on all fronts with plenty of funding from oil-rich governments in the Middle East millions of people were driven from their homes and ended up refugees in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and other neighbouring countries.

Then in late 2014 a wave of migration started as masses of people began crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe. This wave developed into a tsunami in 2015 and by the fall of that year 8000 were crossing over on a daily basis. Although the migrants claimed to be seeking asylum from the Syrian Civil War, statistics gathered by the United Nations show that less than half of them are actually from Syria, with large numbers coming from Afghanistan, Iraq and even African countries such as Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia. UN statistics also showed that the majority of these migrants were men rather than women and children. Beneath the outward trappings of a refugee crisis this wave of migration looked suspiciously like an invasion.

The other players immediately began acting out the script Raspail had written for them decades ago. The pope, a heretic from Latin America who has difficulty distinguishing between the teachings of Karl Marx and those of Jesus Christ, told Europe that it was their Christian duty to take in all of these migrants and countless other clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, sang the same tune. The news media bombasted us with heart wrenching stories and images depicting about the plight of the refugees.

Meanwhile our politicians did not waste the opportunity this crisis afforded to show off their humanity at the expense of those they govern. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany had a “selfie” taken with a migrant and declared that Germany would place no limits on the number of asylum seekers they took in. Unsurprisingly, over a million took advantage of this generous offer. Realizing that this was too many, but not wanting to lose her reputation for being charitable and humanitarian, she asked other European countries to bail her out and take more of the refugees. When they proved reluctant to do so she attempted to bully them into doing so through EU-imposed quotas. All of a sudden right-wing, anti-EU, nationalist parties began to do well in the polls throughout Europe and in the UK the yes side won on the Brexxit referendum on leaving the EU.

In Canada, the new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who never met a photo op that he didn’t like, pledged to bring 25, 000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of last year. It actually took him until the end of February to do so but he then set a new target of resettling 50, 000 in Canada by the end of 2016. The thought of whether this would be good or bad for Canada and Canadians never crossed his mind. He got to show off how kind and compassionate and generous he was by bringing them over, getting his picture taken, and then dumping them on the country and forgetting about them.

All of the elements of Raspail’s haunting scenario are now present. We have the liberalism, hiding a death wish for our own culture and civilization behind a mask of concern for the other. We have the intellectual, political, religious and media elites obsessed with projecting an image of kindness and compassion at the expense of their own people. Finally, we have the teeming hordes flooding into the West with little interest in learning our ways, obeying our laws, and becoming part of our civilization. While they cannot be blamed for wishing to flee poverty, war, and other unpleasant conditions, they comprise, in effect if not in intention, an invasion force, armed with our own liberalism and aided and abetted by our own political and intellectual classes. Thus we find ourselves faced with the question of whether we allow this to continue and throw away the civilization our ancestors built, handed down to us, and entrusted us to pass on to their descendants or do we summon up the will to do what is necessary to preserve that patrimony as a sacred trust. Will Western civilization be or not be?

There is a major difference between what Raspail wrote and the reality unfolding around us today, however. It is not France that the eyes of the world are upon, but the United States of America. In this fall’s presidential race, one of the candidates, Hillary Clinton is pledged to raising the number of Middle Eastern migrants claiming to be refugees from the Syrian Civil War, taken in by the United States to 10 to 65 000, the high end of which would represent an increase of over 500%. In reality, the number if she is elected, is likely to be much higher. There will certainly be more people fleeing the region because as President she will pursue the same failed policies she pursued as Secretary of State. These policies are a large part of the reason there is a humanitarian crisis in Syria to flee from in the first place and as ought to be obvious from her belligerent sabre rattling against Syria, Iran, and Russia, she would only escalate the conflict as the American President. The other candidate, Donald J. Trump, is not only opposed to increasing the number of refugees brought in but insists upon better vetting for those who are brought in and has built his entire campaign on a platform of regaining control of America’s borders with regards to both trade and immigration. Furthermore, his foreign policy ideas of concentrating on fighting the real enemy, ISIS, and getting along with other countries like Syria, Iran, and Russia that are fighting the same enemy would be far less likely to exponentially increase the number of people needing to seek asylum.

What will be the decision on November 8th? Will the United States choose to preserve their own existence by electing Donald Trump or will they choose to dissolve America into the globalist new world order of George Soros and his puppet Hillary Clinton? If the Americans choose the latter, will any other Western country be able to find in herself the will to survive?