Abstract Flags

 

One of the bad habits of the age in which we live is the habit of turning abstract terms into flags, running them up the pole, and demanding that everybody salute them or be denounced as a traitor. 

 

This habit can be found on both sides of the political spectrum.   This is, for example, what neoconservatives do with the term “liberty” and its synonym “freedom”.   Up until about a century ago it was self-identified liberals who did this these terms but that is the nature of neoconservatism.   Irving Kristol defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”.  Neoconservatism is yesterday’s liberalism.   Think back two decades to the events of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that ensued.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his supporters all maintained that 9/11 had been an attack on American “liberty” by people who hated Americans for their “freedom” and that their “War on Terror” would be fought on behalf of said freedom.   They ran freedom up the flagpole, demanded that everyone salute, and denounced everyone that was not 100% behind everything they were doing as a traitor to liberty.

 

By turning “freedom” and “liberty” into flags, and proclaiming their allegiance to them, however, they avoided accountability for how their actions were affecting the actual freedoms and liberties of American citizens.   In order to fight the “War on Terror” on behalf of the abstract flag of “freedom”, they permanently and exponentially expanded the powers of their government and created a national surveillance state.   It is a strange sort of “freedom” and one that does not much resemble the traditional understanding of the word that can be defended in this way.  

 

This, of course, is the problem with this habit of making flags out of abstract terms.   Allegiance to the term as a flag is required of people, but it is all that is required, not any sort of consistent, intelligent, understanding of the term.

 

Progressives are just as prone to this bad habit as conservatives.   Indeed, they are much worse.    In the previous example it was noted that the abstraction the neoconservatives were saluting as a flag had originally been run up the pole by liberals, who are progressives and this is true of most of the abstractions that today’s conservatives salute.   Progressives are the ones who make the abstract terms into flags, then, when they have decided that the flag they were saluting yesterday is no longer “modern” (1), they abandon it to the conservatives and make a new one.   “Democracy” is an abstract flag that progressives created and neoconservatives adopted even though the progressives have not abandoned it.   Both sides frequently accuse the other of betraying “democracy”.   This is one reason, among many, why I try to avoid saluting this particular flag, and insist that I believe in the concrete institution of parliament under the reign of a royal monarch, that has proven itself through the test of time, rather than abstract ideal of democracy.

 

At the present moment the primary abstract flag that progressives are saluting and demanding that the rest of us show our allegiance to is that of “diversity”.   This, of course, raises the question of what kind of diversity is in question.   The term is used in a myriad of diverse contexts, from speaking of someone whose outfits are radically different from day to day as having a diverse wardrobe to a farmer who plants diverse crops as opposed to only wheat or only barley to my own use of the word at the beginning of this sentence.   The diversity that progressives demand our allegiance to today is a very specific kind of diversity.   It means diversity of the population in terms of categories of group identity.   Race and cultural ethnicity are the most obvious such categories.   Sex ought to be the least controversial such category, in that no human population could last longer than a generation that is entirely of one sex, and all societies except for mythical ones like the Amazons, have been sexually diverse in the traditional sense.   Progressives have turned it into the most controversial category, however, by demanding that everyone show their allegiance to diversity of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.

 

In practice, the progressive insistence that we all salute the flag of diversity translates into a requirement that we accept the propositions a) that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing to a society and b) the more diversity of this kind a society has the better off it will be.   Here again, we find the habit of making flags out of abstract ideas shutting down intelligent thought concerning those ideas.   Both propositions are obviously false.   Consider the first proposition.  The much more nuanced statement that there are positives and negatives to both cultural and racial heterogeneity (diversity) and homogeneity, that each conveys distinct advantages and disadvantages upon a society, and that the advantages and disadvantages of each must be weighed against those of the other can be defended intelligently.   So can the assertion that after such weighing, the advantages of diversity outweigh its disadvantages and the advantages of homogeneity, although the opposite assertion can also be intelligently defended.    The proposition that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing cannot be intelligently defended.  Even if it could, however, and further, we were to concede it to be the case, the second proposition, that the more diversity the better, would by no means follow from the first.   Plenty of things that are good in themselves turn bad when taken to excess.   Indeed, in classical Aristotelean ethics, vices (bad habits) are formed by indulging natural appetites that are good in themselves to excess, and in classical Christian theology heresies (serious doctrinal errors concerning tenets of the Gospel kerygma as summarized in the ancient Creeds) are formed by taking one tenet of the faith, true in itself, to excess.

 

More important, for the purposes of this discussion, than what is included in the “diversity” to which progressives demand our allegiance, is what is excluded.   It is quite clear, from the way progressives respond to those who dare to raise points such as those raised in the previous paragraph, that diversity of thought or opinion is not included in the diversity they praise and value so highly.   Indeed, this entire bad habit of turning an abstract idea into a flag is very inconsistent with the idea of diversity of thought or opinion.   Yet, for anyone who values freedom in the political sense as it was traditionally understood, this is surely the most important kind of diversity of all.   For that matter, for parliamentary government or democracy, in any sense of the word that is consistent with a free society, to function, diversity of thought must be the most important kind of diversity.

 

While this does provide a further illustration of how progressives, in raising new abstract flags, abandon those they saluted in days gone by, it has long been observed that even when liberals, the progressives of yesterday, expressed a belief in diversity of thought, their practice often contradicted it.   Remember that famous line of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover there are other views”?  He made this statement, in one form or another, numerous times, and I don’t know when he first said it, but the oldest version of which I am aware comes from his Up From Liberalism, first published in 1959.   “Duke” Morrison, the legendary actor who under the stage name John Wayne starred in countless films from The Big Trail in 1930 until The Shootist in 1976, in an interview with Tony Macklin in 1975 said:

 

I have found a certain type calls himself a liberal.   Now I always thought I was a liberal.   I came up terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist, when I listened to everybody’s point of view that I ever met, and then decided how I should feel.  But this so-called new liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your point of view and they make a decision as to what you think and they are articulate enough and in control of enough of the press to force that image out for the average person.

 

If this could be said of liberals back in 1959 and 1975 it is all the more true of today’s progressives.   

 

One way in which this is evident is in their exclusionary rhetoric.   Progressives, especially those who hold some sort of office of civic authority, have become increasingly prone to issuing proclamations about how such-and-such a thing they disapprove of has “no place” in our community and society.  It would be one thing if what they were so excluding were things like murder, robbery, and rape which would meet with broad disapproval in pretty much any society in any time and place.   In most cases, however, they are speaking of some “ism” or “phobia”, usually one that has been that has been newly coined.   What these neologisms have in common is that each of them is defined in a special way.   On the surface, these “isms” and “phobias” appear to refer to varieties of crude bigotry but they are applied by progressives in actual usage so as to include all forms of dissent from the sacred progressive dogma that identity-group diversity is always good and that more identity-group diversity is always better, no matter how respectfully and intelligently that dissent is worded.   A couple of months ago the Orthosphere blogger who writes under the nom de plume Bonald after the reactionary philosopher who wrote against the French Revolution and its aftermath provided us with some disturbing insights into the implications of the growth of this sort of rhetoric.

 

Another way in which the progressive Left’s increasing rejection of the most important form of diversity for those who want to live in a free society with a functioning parliamentary government is in its use of the terms “denial” and “denier” as derogatory epithets for those who disagree with its dogmas.

 

This has become fairly standard practice whenever progressives run into disagreement on a wide assortment of matters.   The implications of this use of these terms are that either a) what progressives are asserting is so self-evidently obvious that one would have to be stubbornly, stupidly and willfully ignorant to disagree, b) we are under a moral obligation to believe what the progressives say and therefore are committing a moral offense in disagreeing, or c) a combination of a) and b).    Since progressives are not the authorities of a religious communion to which we all belong and have no legitimate authority to set dogma, the second of these implications is absurd.  Since progressives use the “denial” and “denier” epithets to avoid answering well-reasoned and evidence backed arguments against their positions the first of these implications is also ridiculous.

 

This becomes quite comical when the progressive assertions pertain to matters that have a large scientific component.  For decades now, anyone who has questioned the progressive narrative that states that due mostly to the emissions of greenhouse gasses by livestock and human industry the average temperature of the earth has risen and cataclysmic climate change is impending unless the population of the world is radically reduced, we all become vegans, and we stop using fossil fuels for energy has been labelled a “denier”.   A rather convenient way of avoiding answering difficult questions such as “why should climate change be assumed to be for the worse rather than the better, especially since historically human beings have thrived better in warm periods than cold ones?” and “why, since the earth’s climate has hardly been constant throughout history to the point that advocates of your theory have stooped to doctoring graphs of the historical data to hide this fact, should we expect it to remain constant now and be alarmed about the observed rise of about a degree in the earth’s average temperature over a century?”   In the last year and a half we have seen progressives accuse anyone who questions whether it is either good or necessary to sabotage the economies of every country in the world, drive small businesses into bankruptcy while enriching the billionaires who control the big online businesses, cancel our constitutional rights and freedoms, brainwash everyone into looking upon other human beings primarily as sources of contagion, exponentially accelerate the problem of people substituting their smartphones and computers for real, in-person social contact, establish anarcho-tyrannical police states in which acts that are bona in se and absolutely essential to healthy social and communal life are turned into mala prohibita crimes and hunted down with greater severity than real crimes that are actually mala in se, and bribing and blackmailing people into accepting an experimental new gene therapy in violation of the Nuremberg Protocol, all in order to combat a pandemic involving a virus that has proven to be less lethal than the vast majority of previous pandemics for which no such extreme measures were ever considered, let alone taken, of being a “COVID denier”.    To be fair, plenty of “conservative” political leaders, including the premiers of my own province (Manitoba), Alberta, and Upper Canada have all done the same, but the progressives have been much more monolithic about it.   The reason this is so comical is because real “science”, as anybody who understands the word knows, does not make dogmatic statements and therefore admits of no “denial”.   The comedy is greatly enhanced when those denouncing “COVID deniers” or “climate change deniers” advise us to “follow the science” or “listen to the science” as if “science” made dogmatic proclamations, or when they say “the science is settled” when, by the prevalent litmus test of the philosophy underlying science, for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, and therefore, science can never be settled.   Less funny and more sad, is when someone like Anthony Fauci or Theresa Tam admits the real nature of science, that it is always evolving, but uses this to back up a claim to absolute obedience of the nature of “you should unquestioningly obey my orders at any given moment, even if it contradicts what I told you to do the moment before” as if he, or allegedly she in the case of Tam, were Petruchio and the rest of us were Katherina the shrew.

 

It is far less comical when progressives impose a narrative interpretation on their country’s history in order to undermine the legitimacy of their country and its institutions and attack its historical figures, and then accuse those who point out the holes in their narrative of “denial”.   In this case, the progressives are walking in the footsteps of the French Jacobins, the Chinese Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge all of whom wrought tremendous devastation, destruction, and disaster upon their countries by insisting that their history was irredeemably corrupt and needed to be razed to the ground, along with all of the countries’ institutions.   This is what the progressives that infest Canada’s university faculties and newsmedia, both print and electronic, have been attempting to do in Canada for a couple of decades with their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools.   In the real past, the past as it actually happened, these were boarding schools, initially founded by Christian Churches as a missionary outreach to Native Indians to provide their children with the kind of education they would need if they were to thrive in the modern economy.   The Indian chiefs of the nineteenth century wanted just this kind of education for their children and so, at their insistence, the stipulation that it would be provided by the Dominion government was included in all of the treaties.   Accordingly, the government funded and expanded these schools, as well as making provisions for day schools on the reserves.   If Indian parents neglected to send their kids to the day schools, the government would make the kids go to the residential schools, but initially it was mostly the kids of the chiefs and the elders of the bands who were sent to the schools at their own parents’ insistence.   By a century later, however, the government was making these schools serve the double function of schools and foster group homes for Indian children whom child welfare social workers had removed from their homes to protect them from such things as physical abuse.   Through utterly contemptible methodology, including a “victim centred” approach to testimony that could just as easily have been used to produce an equally damning picture of the schools to which wealthy, elite, white kids were sent, or for that matter schools of any sort because for any school you can always find alumni for whom the experience was something horrible to be “survived”, and which is completely in violation of the standards by which truth and guilt are assessed in the courtroom and the historical process, progressives spun a cock and bull narrative in which all the bad experiences in the schools were made out to have been the intent of the schools’ founders, administrators, and the Canadian government, and the  purpose of the schools was interpreted as the elimination of Native Indian cultural identities.   The progressives then used this narrative interpretation to claim that all of this was the moral equivalent of what the Third Reich did in its prison camps in World War II or what was done to the Tutsis in the last days of the Rwandan Civil war, which would have been a reprehensible claim even if the facts admitted of no other interpretation than that of their narrative, which is not even close to being the case.   The progressives insist that everything else in the history of Canada, especially anything traditionally seen as a great and positive achievement of either English or French Canadians, must take a backset to their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools and that Canadians of all ethnicities, but especially English and French Canadians, must perpetually live in shame and submit to having their country “cancelled”.   In the last month or so the progressives have kicked this up a notch by claiming falsely that the discovery of the location of abandoned cemeteries on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School – and more recently the Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan – was a “shocking” new discovery (that such cemeteries were to be found has been known all along – an entire volume of the TRC Final Report is dedicated to this) and, irresponsibly to the point of criminal defamation of past Canadian governments, the Churches and the school administrators, faculty, and staff, that the graves constitute evidence of mass murder, the least plausible explanation, by far, of the deaths of the children.

 

For several weeks now Chris Champion, author, historian, and editor of the history journal the Dorchester Review, one of the few publications in Canada still worth reading, has been attacked by progressives over tweets made on the journal’s Twitter account challenging this narrative.   Sean Carleton, who is associated with the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Manitoba, accused the Dorchester Review of being a “straight up garbage, genocide denialism, outfit” for agreeing with the Final Report of the TRC that “the cause of death was usually tuberculosis or some other disease”.   Janis Irwin, the Deputy Whip for Alberta’s NDP, also denounced Champion as “reprehensible and disgusting” for expressing this agreement with the TRC’s Final Report, and demanded that Jason Kenney scrap the K-9 social studies curriculum on the preparation of which, Champion had advised the Albertan government.   While this sort of thing is to be expected from those of Carleton’s and Irwin’s ilk, about a week ago the CBC, the Crown broadcaster paid for out of the taxes of all Canadians, ran a story by Janet French of CBC Edmonton,  full of quotes from people such as the Alberta NDP Education Critic, Sarah Hoffman, Nicole Sparrow who is press secretary to Kenney’s Education Minister, Kisha Supernant who is an archeology professor at the University of Manitoba, and Daniel Panneton of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, all expressing how appalled they were at Champion’s disagreement with the progressive, Canada-bashing, narrative, this time in an article that appeared on Dorchester Review’s website under his byline on June 17^th and which pointed out just how inappropriate the comparisons the narrative makes between the residential schools and what happened in Europe in the 1940s are.    

 

In his article, which is well-worth reading in its entirety, Champion wrote:

 

It is ridiculous to compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD.   And it is equally false and unjust to act as if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was a child-abuser or sexual predator. 

 

All of this is absolutely true and, it is worth noting, the second sentence is quite consistent with the TRC Report in which the testimony of those who experienced sexual abuse is overwhelmingly of the type in which older students were the abusers, sadly the common experience of boarding school students of all types.  Which is why all of Champion’s detractors quoted in the CBC article do not answer his arguments but merely accuse him of bigoted attitudes and “denial”.   “One photo of smiling children does not negate thousands of survivors’ stories”, which Kisha Supernant is quoted as having said, is the closest thing to an attempt at an answer that appears, although anyone who reads Champion’s article from beginning to end – since the CBC article appeared the same day it is questionable as to whether those quoted had done so – will know that nothing in the article negates the testimony of those whose experience at the residential schools was bad, only the spin by placed on that testimony by the progressive narrative, a narrative, incidentally, which itself negates the testimony of no small number of alumni of these schools whose experience was positive.

 

The progressives who have been attacking Champion and the Dorchester Review talk as if they think that someone who tells a story of having suffered victimization, especially of the sort that can be attributed to some prohibited “ism” or “phobia”, has a right to have “their truth” in current progressive lingo accepted without question or cross-examination.  A certain type of feminist makes this claim explicitly with regards to females who claim to have been sexually harassed or assaulted.   This sort of thinking runs contrary to the principles of courtroom justices, such as the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, principles which exist for very good reasons, to prevent courts of law from being used as instruments of abuse by false accusers.   This kind of talk, however, is a rhetorical device that dishonestly equates criticism of the progressives’ ideas, interpretations, and narratives with criticism of personal testimony incorporate into these narratives.  

 

In all of these examples of progressive dismissal of their critics as “deniers” we can see how progressives have moved increasingly further away from the diversity of thought and opinion that is the most important diversity as far as the freedom of society and the functioning of parliamentary government goes.    In the last example, the diversity of thought they condemn as “denial” is disagreement with their narrative interpretation of the history of the residential schools, a narrative interpretation that they are presently using to attack the foundations and institutions of Canada, an attack which if it succeeds and follows its historical precedents will not bode well for freedom and parliamentary government in this country.   This makes the way progressives have run “diversity” up the flagpole and are constantly demanding that we salute it into a kind of sick joke.

 

Perhaps it is time we all got over this bad habit of turning abstract ideas into flags.

 

 

 

 (1)   In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, (1932) Basil Seal, having fled England to avoid the duties his mother was insisting he take up, is invited to help modernize the country of Azania by its Emperor Seth, an old Oxford friend of his.   He tells Seth “we’ve got a much easier job than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…” to which the Emperor asks “what is all that” and is told “just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern”.

From Dubya to Dhaliwal

 I am a Tory rather than a true libertarian.   Actual libertarians would say that government is either a necessary evil or an unnecessary one, depending upon whether the libertarian is one who believes in the “nightwatchman state” model or one who believes that the state is a criminal plot against the rights of the individual.   I hold to the classical view that laws are necessary and that government is a good thing in the sense that it is an institution that was established and exists to serve the good of the public.   The degree to which any specific government in any specific time and place can be said to be either good or bad depends upon the degree to which it actually accomplishes this purpose.   Having said all of that, I am the kind of Tory who, like the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon, has a great deal of sympathy for the minimal government type of libertarian.   As the elder Waugh once put it “I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”     It is from this perspective that I make the following observations. 

 

Whenever government declares “war” against something other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, poverty, whatever, it is for the purpose of expanding its own powers.    This expansion of government is never necessary and it always involves the diminishing of the civil rights and freedoms of the governed.   It is very difficult to contract the powers of government after they have been expanded and to restore rights and freedoms after they have been diminished.   Any time, therefore, that the government starts talking about wars against abstract enemies we should take this as an alarm bell telling us to stand up for our rights and liberties before we lose them.

 

You are perhaps thinking at this point that I am about to apply this to the militaristic language our governments have been using while announcing totalitarian restrictions as their response to the spread of the bat flu.   While that is certainly a valid application, I will let you make it for yourselves.   Instead, I wish to consider another example from twenty years ago, the ramifications of which are now becoming most evident.

 

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida, an Islamic terrorist organization that had evolved out of the CIA-trained mujahideen that the United States had employed against the Soviet Union following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan decades earlier, attacked its former sponsor by hijacking planes and flying them into the towers that symbolized American and international commerce in Lower Manhattan.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, shortly thereafter declared a “Global War on Terror” and gave the rest of the world an ultimatum to either stand with the United States in this battle or be counted on the side of the enemy.

 

By declaring war on the abstraction of terrorism in general rather than merely the specific, concrete, terrorist organization al-Qaida that had attacked America, Bush signaled that he had a far more ambitious project than merely settling the score and punishing the perpetrators of 9/11.   While terrorism is notoriously difficult to define due to a lack of consensus with regards to certain of the particulars there is a general understanding that it occupies the space where the kind of violence that law enforcement deals with and the kind that requires a military response overlap each other.   This makes it a particularly bad choice for an enemy in an abstract war.   In addition to the problem common to all wars against abstract enemies, that they can never be won and brought to a decisive end because abstract enemies cannot surrender or be toppled or killed, a war against terrorism is an invitation to merge the law enforcement and military functions of government in a way that threatens the privacy, rights, and freedoms of the governed.

 

This is precisely what happened with the Bush administration’s War on Terror.    In the first month of the War on Terror the Office of Homeland Security was established which about a year later would be expanded into the Department of Homeland Security, a creepy body, like something out of a totalitarian dystopia, in which the line between law enforcement and the military is all but eliminated.   In less than two months after 9/11 the Bush administration had drafted and pushed through Congress the draconian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, which stripped Americans of anything but nominal constitutional protection of their privacy rights and turned the American republic into an Orwellian surveillance state. 

 

I knew full well at the time that this was a power grab aimed at expanding the powers of the American government at the expense of the privacy, rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.   I knew this because this is precisely what the men who were rushing to do this in September of 2001 had been saying about similar efforts on the part of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

 

In the spring of 1995 I was finishing my freshman year as a theology student.   At the very end of the semester a terrorist attack in the United States was all over the news.   A truck loaded with a homemade bomb had been detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.   Bill Clinton immediately began pointing to this event as demonstrating the need for the Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill that his Attorney General Janet Reno's Department had drafted and that had been introduced in the US Senate a couple of months earlier by none other than the present occupant of the White House who at the time was Senator for Delaware (Chuck Schumer was the sponsor of the Bill in the House of Representatives).   The bill met with strenuous opposition from civil libertarians of the left and right and consequently it was only a very emaciated version that was signed into law by Bill Clinton on Hitler's birthday the following year.  When, barely a week after 9/11, Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft had the draft of the PATRIOT Act available - a bill so long that few who voted on it had been able to read the entire thing - this was because he had basically recycled Clinton's Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill, adding a few bells and whistles here and there.   Ashcroft is said to have called up Joe Biden to tell him that it was essentially the same bill that he, that is Biden, had introduced seven years earlier.   Now, although Clinton had failed to get the surveillance state he sought in 1995-1996, he did not let up in his efforts to enhance government powers in the name of fighting terrorism.   Indeed, he brought the matter up with increasing frequency as his many indiscretions began to surface and his administration became enmired in scandal.     Around 1997, for example, he wanted the FBI to be given the power to intercept and read all internet communications.   An excellent article was penned in opposition to this by the said John Ashcroft, who at the time was Senator for Missouri.   The article was entitled "Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet" and included such wise observations as the following:

 

"The Clinton administration would like the Federal government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer communications...The proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans' privacy...There is a concern that the internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity.  However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps.   Why then, should we grant government the Orwellian capacity to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?...The administrations interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.   Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions.   Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications".

 

Indeed.   It appears that some time between 1997 and 2001 one of the pod people from Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers had replaced Ashcroft with a look alike who instead of the above sound reasoning espoused rhetoric about how those raising concerns about the PATRIOT Act's impact on civil liberties were aiding and abetting the terrorists.   He was hardly the only one.  The same could be said of a great many of the most prominent figures in American conservatism who had talked like Ashcroft about the Clinton administration's threat to American liberties in the 1990s, only to turn around and support the PATRIOT Act in 2001.   It was at this point that I lost all respect for American conservatives - other than those like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Charley Reese who were manifestly the same people, espousing the same principles, regardless of whether a Clinton or a Bush was in power.

 

 

It was a couple of years later, when Bush and Ashcroft were again talking about expanding their powers to fight terrorism – they had drafted the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, nicknamed “PATRIOT II”, but it was never presented to Congress – that the late Sam Francis wrote an article explaining the case against all legislation of the type, in what was the single best response to the annoying “it’s okay when our side does it" attitude among the Bush “conservatives” that I ever read.   He wrote:

 

But the larger point is not what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.

The point is that the powers are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn't use could still be used by future ones.

 

That, of course, is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all.

 

Instilling in citizens the notion that the power to seize library records is something the state needs is an excellent way to assist that erosion.

 

Most libertarians, of the left or the right, will tell you how we have been eroding those habits and that mentality for several decades now.  – Samuel Francis, “Bush Writing Last Chapters in Story of American Liberty”, September 25, 2003, Creators Syndicate.

 

The truth of Sam Francis' words is now glaringly obvious.   

 

The White House is now occupied by the decrepit swamp troll who had introduced the first draft of what would eventually become the PATRIOT Act back in 1995 and he is calling for even more anti-terrorism legislation.   He has also openly turned the War on Terror against those whom the Clinton administration had in mind when they attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch their own War on Terror that year - American citizens who stand up for their rights and freedoms, especially Christians who are serious about their faith, white people who object to being vilified for the colour of their skin and turned into scapegoats, and gun owners.   

 

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin that implies that those who are unsatisfied that the outcome of last year's election was legitimate, are opposed to the lockdown measures that trample all over their rights and freedoms ("frustrated with the exercise of government authority" is how the memo words this), or both, are potential violent threats to the United States.    A government that regards around half of the people it governs as threats is no longer a constitutional government that respects limits on its own power for the protection of its citizens and their rights and freedoms.  It is more like a government that fears and has declared war on its own people.   The progressive media that during the last administration defended its monolithically hyper-adversarial stance with slogans like "democracy dies in darkness" has been calling for Republican senators such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and in some cases the entire Republican Party to be designated "domestic terrorists".  The United States is a two-party country.   If you criminalize one of the two parties you are left, of course, with a one-party state.   Otherwise known as a totalitarian dictatorship.   The kind of state that the United States, the capital city of which is now under military occupation by its own army, is giving every impression of becoming.

 

From up north in the Dominion of Canada it is appalling to watch our southern neighbour turn itself into the world's largest banana republic, both because of what it means for our American friends and because bad ideas and trends down there have a nasty habit of migrating up here.

 

Think back to 2001 once again.   Our Prime Minister at the time was Jean Chretien, who was in my opinion a creepy, sleazy, low-life scumbag, to list only his better qualities. While Bush, Ashcroft, et al, were making a big noise about the PATRIOT Act and all the other things they were going to do in fighting their War on Terror, Chretien, relatively quietly had Anne McLellan introduce Bill C-36, an anti-terrorism bill of his own into Parliament.  It quickly passed the House and Senate and received Royal Assent in December of that year.   It consisted of amendments to several different pieces of existing legislation, such as the Criminal Code and the Official Secrets Act.   Some of its provisions, at the suggestion of Bill Blaikie who at the time was the Member representing Winnipeg-Transcona in the House of Commons, were given sunset clauses which caused them to automatically expire in five years. Other provisions remain to this day.      

 

I will provide an illustration of how this led to the shameful abuse of government power twenty years ago before returning to the present.

 

One the pieces of legislation amended was the Canadian Security Intelligence Services Act, which created CSIS in 1984.   The amendment replaced "threats to the security of Canada" with the much broader wording "activities within or related to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state".   CSIS, when it took over the RCMP's intelligence functions, also took over the issuing of security certificates, a provision of the 1978 Immigration Act which allowed for those who were not Canadian citizens to be declared a threat to national security and deported in a streamlined manner.

 

In December of 2001, just as Bill C-36 was going into effect, American immigration officials arrested Ernst Zündel, who had left Canada in 2000 vowing never to return, rather understandably as he had on three separate occasions been persecuted by our government for his unpopular political-historical views.  He had married an American citizen, the Russian-German Mennonite novelist Ingrid Rimland and, had he been anybody else, would have been on track for American citizenship himself.    Interestingly enough, in February of that year the men’s magazine Esquire had published an essay by journalist and war correspondent John Sack in which Zündel featured   The essay was entitled “Inside the Bunker” and recounted the writer’s experiences at the previous year’s conference of the Institute for Historical Review where he met holocaust revisionists such as Zündel.   The essay, which was later selected for inclusion in the anthology, The Best American Essays 2002, edited by Stephen Jay Gould, was more-or-less the opposite of every other article which had ever appeared about holocaust revisionists in the mainstream press.  Sack treated them respectfully, pointed out a few places where they were demonstrably right, and gave reasons for rejecting their conclusions that were based on evidence rather than abuse, for he presented them all in general, and Zündel in particular, in a sympathetic light as basically ordinary people, who were more hated than guilty of hatred and whose views arose defensively, in response to post-World War II German bashing, rather than out of anti-Semitic bigotry.  Evidently, the essay had no impact on the American and Canadian authorities.   The Americans charged him with overstaying his visa and sent him back to us.   CSIS issued a security certificate against Zündel, which it would not have been able to do prior to Chretien’s anti-terrorism bill becoming law because he was by no means a threat to the security of Canada having been a peaceful and non-violent man for all of the decades he had lived here.   Under the Anti-terrorism Act, however, they were able to stretch the very flexible new wording of their mandate to include him on the basis of people he had associated with.

 

He was detained and held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for over a year while he was tried in his absence before a prejudiced judge on the grounds of evidence to which neither he nor his lawyer, Doug Christie, were given full access, and ultimately was deported to Germany where he was arrested over things he said or written in North America, charged, and sentenced to five years in prison.

 

To summarize, the greater flexibility that had been given to our “intelligence” agency on the grounds that it was needed to protect our country from the threat of terrorist violence was used pretty much immediately after it had passed into law, to once again persecute a man whom our government had been persecuting for his political-historical opinions since 1984, this time denying him the protection of due process that had been available to him previously and which had ultimately prevailed in those cases when the Supreme Court struck the laws under which he had been convicted down.

 

This was a most disgraceful episode and one that clearly demonstrates that governments that seek to expand their own powers and flexibility in order to combat foes like “terrorism” cannot be trusted to confine the use of those powers to that purpose.

 

Parliament did take greater precautions than the US Congress in passing the Anti-terrorism Act.   I have already mentioned that certain provisions came with sunset clauses that would cause them to expire in five years unless the House and the Senate agreed to an extension.   The Act also required that the House and Senate appoint committees to conduct a comprehensive review of the Act within its first three years, which would be a necessary preliminary step towards any extension.   While a short extension was agreed upon after the first review, ultimately these provisions were allowed to expire in 2007.   By this time Stephen Harper had become Prime Minister, but the expiration of the provisions should not be attributed to any great concern for the privacy, rights, freedoms, and due process of Canadians on his part.   In his final year as Prime Minister he introduced a new Anti-terrorism Act, Bill C-51, which was more like the USA PATRIOT Act than Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act had been, and which greatly expanded the powers and mandate of CSIS.   Readers might recall that this loathsome piece of legislation was the reason I vowed never to vote for the Conservatives again as long as Stephen Harper led the party.   The Conservatives were defeated in the election that fall, which I would like to think was in retaliation to Bill C-51, except that they were replaced in government by the only party in Parliament that had supported them in passing it.

 

Now let us return to the present.   One of the provisions of Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act that remains in effect was the creation of a list of groups officially designated as terrorists.   It is odd, actually, that this was allowed to stand, because it is one of the worst provisions in the Act.   It essentially functions like a decree of outlaw, depersoning everyone in the groups placed on the list, stripping them of all constitutional protections.

 

One might think that the New Democrat Party, Canada’s officially socialist party (as opposed to all the unofficial ones), with its long history of human rights rhetoric, would have a problem with this.   Back in 2015, when they were led by Thomas Mulcair, they were on the right side, the opposing side, of the Bill C-51 debate.   In 2021, however, they are led by Jagmeet Singh.   One might think that Singh, considering his open support for the cause of separating Punjab from India and Pakistan and turning it into the Sikh state of Khalistan, a cause that has frequently been supported by acts of terrorism, including one of the most notorious – if not the most notorious – to take place on, well, not on Canadian soil, but in Canadian airspace, the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, would have even more cause than other NDPers to oppose the official terror list.   At the very least one would expect him not to be throwing stones from within this particular glass house.   One would be very, very, wrong in all of this.

 

Not long after a number of unarmed and oddly dressed supporters of Donald the Orange temporarily delayed the Congressional certification of the Electoral College vote by entering the Capitol in Washington DC causing everyone to break out into histrionics screaming “coup” “insurgency” and the like, Singh tweeted that the event was an “act of domestic terrorism” and stated that “the Proud Boys helped execute it”, “Their founder is Canadian”, “They operate in Canada, right now” and that he was “calling for them to be designated as a terrorist organization, immediately”.

 

What is this “Proud Boys” that Singh thinks deserve the terrorist designation more than the mass murderers of Hindus?

 

It is not, as its title would seem to suggest, an organization devoted to advancing the alphabet soup cause.   It is a group that has attained notoriety over the last five years mostly for its confrontations and clashes with antifa.   Antifa are those groups of masked thugs that go to events organized by right-of-centre groups and lectures featuring speakers with views that leftists believe ought not to be heard and try to disrupt and shut down these events and lectures through intimidation and bullying.  I don’t know if this was the original intent when the Proud Boys was founded but it quickly gained a reputation as a group that was eager and willing to fight back.

 

The media, which has tacitly and sometimes explicitly, supported antifa for years, has attached all sorts of labels to the Proud Boys that seem to completely disregard the group’s account of itself.   It is frequently called “white nationalist”, for example, despite the fact that it has always been multiracial, that its founder, the Canadian born “godfather of hipsterdom” and co-founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, is a civil nationalist who explicitly rejected racial nationalism, and its current leader, the one who has been charged with regards to the incident on Capitol Hill, is an Afro-Cuban.   McInnes described the group as “Western Chauvinist” but he explained this quite clearly in terms of the values of Western Civilization, which anyone from any race can adhere to and which, in an irony totally lost on his progressive critics, are entirely liberal – in the sense of classical liberal – values.  

 

Since the facts obviously conflict with the claim that the Proud Boys are white nationalists, why do the media and the self-appointed anti-hate watchdog groups continue to so designate them?

 

Obviously it is because they are not using the term to convey any meaningful information about who and what the group is but as a weapon to demonize, discredit, and destroy it.

 

The exact same thing can be said about Jagmeet Singh Dhaliwal’s call to designate the group a “terrorist organization”.   There is little if anything in the facts that would support this designation in any meaning-conveying sense.   The violence perpetrated by antifa which exists solely for the purpose of using violence or the threat of violence to suppress opinions with which the left disagrees and silence those who hold such opinions far more closely fits the meaning of the word terrorism than pushing or punching back against said violence, whatever else one might think about this sort of responding in kind.   The designation is not intended to be meaningful, it is intended to destroy a group that Singh opposes for political reasons.

 

This is a terrible misuse of a law that seems like it was written to be terribly misused.

 

Singh followed up on his tweet by raising the matter in Parliament and bringing it to a vote.   The House unanimously voted for a motion recommending that the government add the Proud Boys to the terrorist list.   There was not a single dissenting vote.   Anybody in the Conservative Party who might have thought that antifa and BLM deserved to be on that list much more than the Proud Boys kept that thought to himself.   Anybody in the NDP or Green parties who might have objected to the terrorist list even existing on the grounds that it is a threat to human rights, kept that thought to himself.   This unanimous vote to declare the group a terrorist organization for entirely political reasons, depersoning its members and stripping them of their constitutional protections, speaks extremely poorly about the politicians we have sent to Parliament, and bodes very ill for our country’s future.

 

The motion in Parliament had no binding force on the government.   Bill Blair, the ex-cop who is Public Safety Minister – a title from the French Reign of Terror which ought not to exist in a free Commonwealth realm, back to Solicitor General, please – told the CBC that the decision would be based on “intelligence and evidence collected by our national security agencies” and that “Terrorist designations are not political exercises”.     On February 3^rd he declared that the Proud Boys, along with a bunch of obscure groups that few have ever heard of before, had been added to the list.    

 

Jagmeet Singh was elated, although it was reiterated on the occasion that his motion was not a motivating factor in the decision (yeah right), and he called upon the government to go even further in eliminating groups that disagree with him.  He was quoted by the CBC as saying:

 

We need to build a country where everyone feels like they belong. Those hateful groups have no place in our country.

 

Clearly all anti-terrorism legislation needs to be repealed immediately.   Anything that gives such a man, who is so completely stupid that he cannot see the glaring contradiction between these two sentences, this kind of power to destroy those he doesn’t like is a far greater threat to our country than terrorism itself.

Weighing Evils

Since the birth of the internet there have been certain memes which recur online once every four years when the Americans have their presidential election. Of these, one of my favourites is the “Cthulhu for President” meme. Cthulhu is an entity from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth century writer of gothic horror and science fiction. An ancient space demon, described as a giant humanoid with a head like an octopus, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu lies sleeping in the city of R’lyeh somewhere at the bottom of the ocean awaiting the cosmic re-alignment in which he will awaken and plunge the world into madness, chaos and destruction. The slogan for his perennial mock presidential candidacy is “why settle for the lesser evil?”

This slogan and, indeed, the entire Cthulhu for president meme, pokes fun at the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils which is sure to be put forward by the supporters of at least one of the two actual candidates. The idea is that you ought to vote for candidate X, not because of the merits of candidate X, but because candidate Y is so much worse. It is indicative of just how bad the quality of politicians has become when you find this argument being invoked in every election by both parties.

This has been the case for at least two decades, if not longer, now. To be fair, it is the Republicans who have usually fallen back on the lesser of two evils theme for such less-than-spectacular candidates as Dole, Romney, and McCain. The Democrats tend to prefer their own variation of the theme which is to compare the Republican candidate to Hitler.

This year’s election has probably set a record for most uses and abuses of both of these themes. What is somewhat odd this time around is that the same person is the target of both. It has been no surprise to see the Democrats, and the left in general, try to portray the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. What has been more unusual is that the same establishment Republicans who trotted out the lesser of two evils argument for George W. Bush twice, have been using it this year against their party’s own candidate on the behalf of the candidate of the other party. A recent example of this can be found in the article “The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton” which recently appeared on the website of The Atlantic. The author is David Frum, son of legendary CBC interviewer Barbra Frum, brother of Canadian Senator Linda Frum, son-in-law of the late, great, Peter Worthington, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, and speechwriter/biographer of former US President George W. Bush. The title can only be regarded as something of a sick joke. Frum, whose emigration to the United States I have often said is our country’s gain and America’s loss, has been a thorn in the side of conservatives on both sides of the 49th parallel for almost three decades now. In Canada, he was not a traditional Tory, i.e., a defender of our British institutions and heritage against American political, economic and cultural imperialism. Nor was he a genuine right-wing populist of the mold of the original Reform Party and was constantly calling upon that party to abandon the social and moral conservatism that were its most genuinely conservative positions and adopt a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. In the United States he is neither a Burkean traditionalist of the Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet variety, nor a true libertarian. His idea of a “conservative” would appear to be a corporate, internationalist, free-trader who believes in a global Pax Americana. Thirteen years ago, he had the gall to write a despicable article for National Review – which had the poor taste to actually publish it – accusing American conservatives like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Charley Reese, and Bob Novak of being “unpatriotic” for having the prescience to see that the Bush administration’s plans for invading Iraq were foolhardy and would prove disastrous. Now, in an article that maintains that to “vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe” Frum says of Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who told an audience of Brazilian bankers that her dream “is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders” - that she “is a patriot” and that she “will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States.” Someone ought to buy this man a dictionary because it is apparent that he does not know the meanings of the words he uses.

How anybody could look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and say that the former is the lesser of two evils is beyond me.

Compare the personality flaws of the two. Donald Trump is boisterous, vulgar, hotheaded, crude, and emotional. Hillary Clinton is cold, calculating, manipulative, and ruthless. Trump’s failings are those of a human being – Clinton’s are those of a robot programmed to act out Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Now consider the past misdeeds of the two. Everyone is familiar with the accusations against Trump because – despite Frum’s feeble attempt to deny the overwhelming pro-Clinton bias of the media – they have been in the headlines and aired around the clock on all the major news networks for a month. One of these – claiming business losses against one’s income taxes – is hardly a misdeed, but something every rational person does, the alternative being to unnecessarily fork over to the government large amounts of your income. When the Clinton campaign and its disinformation arm, also known as the mainstream media, focus on matters like this it is not people’s moral outrage to which they are making an appeal but their envy. As for the far more serious accusation of being a sexual predator, while his behaviour can certainly be described as sleazy the attempts to spin it as worse than that bear all the marks of media fabrication.

Contrast that with Clinton’s long record of large scale wickedness. Hillary Clinton is the godmother of a family that makes the Gambinos, Lucianos and Massinos look like third-rate amateurs in comparison. All of this controversy over her private server e-mails is not just a matter of careless negligence with state secrets. The post-subpoena deletion of thousands of her e-mails, much like the disappearance of all those Rose Law Firm files pertaining to the Whitewater deal after the “suicide” of Vincent Foster twenty three years ago, was felonious tampering with evidence when the Clinton family was under investigation. Skipping over the details of Whitewater, which dates back to when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, as Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is accused of selling public office for personal profit. Under her secretariat the State Department made massive arms deals with governments that were known to be sponsors of the very jihadi terrorists the United States was ostensibly at war with – governments which happened to have made large donations to the Clinton Foundation – and awarded government contracts, in, for example, the rebuilding of post-earthquake Haiti, to friends of the Clintons who were also large private donors to the Clinton Foundation. For decades every time a Clinton has held public office – be it Senator or Secretary of State in the case of Hillary or President or diplomat in the case of Bill – their actions have served the interests of Wall Street financiers and corporate globalists, who have paid them back with six digit fees for speeches the transcripts of which have been kept from the public until – against the Clintons’ wishes – they were brought to light by whistleblowers recently.

Which leads us to the policies and platform of the two candidates. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy involved the destabilization of regimes deemed insufficiently democratic, like those in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, and the support of rebel groups even if they happened to be Islamic jihadists such as the ones who established the Islamic State. The most hawkish member of the Obama administration, her belligerent confrontational attitude towards Russia – and her insane proposal of a no-fly zone over Syria – is likely to bring about the very head-to-head Russian-American confrontation that every American president from Truman through Reagan sought to avoid during the years of the arms race and MAD. Trump, by contrast, says that it would be a good thing if America got along with the Russian and Syrian governments, and concentrated on fighting their mutual foe in ISIS. Trump’s foreign policy is sensible – Clinton’s is sheer madness. Then consider that Clinton wants to bring into the United States record numbers of “refugees” from the parts of the world she bombed as Secretary of State and will continue to bomb as President. Any sane person can see that “invade the world, invite the world” is a recipe for disaster and, from her past record we know that she will attempt to deal with the terrorist violence that this imbecilic combination is sure to bring upon her country by increasing domestic surveillance, thus threatening the civil liberties of all Americans.

Add to this the facts that she believes that the ongoing slaughter of the unborn is a sacred right that must be protected, is certain to continue Obama’s policy of inciting anti-white, anti-cop racial violence of the sort that took place in Charlotte, North Carolina this summer, and will step up the Obama administration’s heavy-handed attempts to force traditional religious believers to conform to the dictates of progressive ideology, and there is only one conclusion to which any person capable of rationally weighing the evidence can come to. Those voting for Hillary Clinton will be choosing the greater evil. They might as well write in Cthulhu on their ballots.

The ISIS Crisis

In the op/ed columns of newspapers and on blogs on the internet and in commentary on television and radio, a debate is raging over the necessity of “boots on the ground”. The question is one of how to deal with ISIS – not the ancient Egyptian goddess but the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – the Sunni jihadist organization that has seized control of a large chunk of territory on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border and which earlier this year proclaimed itself to be a caliphate. We have been hearing news stories about the atrocities this group has perpetrated, from the ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi to the mass kidnapping of Christian girls to the beheading of Western journalists, for months and for those carrying out the aforementioned debate, it is a matter of whether air strikes would be a sufficient response or whether a ground invasion is necessary. It is taken as a given by both sides that military intervention of some sort or another is necessary..

That military action against ISIS is necessary is certainly the position of our Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Last month he declared the Islamic State to be “a direct threat to the security of this country” and promised that Canada would not “stand on the sidelines and watch” in the fight against ISIS but that we would “do our part”. What doing our part entails, apparently, is the sending of Canadian CF-18 Hornet fighter jets, along with support vehicles and military personnel, to take part in an international coalition fighting against ISIS in Iraq. The House of Commons approved this action by a vote of 157-134 on October 7th and polls indicate that it has broad support among Canadians.

That support is not universal, of course, and while Prime Minister Harper’s rhetoric does raise the interesting question of what he would have proposed to do about this “direct threat” to Canada’s security if an international coalition had not already existed and neither the USA, UK, not UN showed any interest in fighting ISIS, perhaps the best argument in favour of the government’s position is to contrast it with the alternative position of the vapid and vainglorious leader of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau. Trudeau insists that Canada’s role in this conflict should be one of providing “humanitarian assistance” rather than combat, i.e., providing food, shelter, and other necessities to the victims of ISIS rather than helping to take out the terrorist organization that is victimizing them. This is rather akin to the man in the old anecdote about the insane asylum who proves that he is worthy of abiding in that institution by continuing to mop up a floor flooded by an overflowing sink rather than turn off the tap.

Recently, former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien weighed in on the matter, supporting Trudeau’s position, pointing to all the thankful remarks he still receives from Canadians for keeping us out of the 2003 Iraq War and saying that providing humanitarian assistance has been Canada’s way for fifty years. That is somewhat of an oversimplification, which ignores the fact that Canadians had a combat role in the War on Afghanistan authorized by Mr. Chretien himself or that we had a combat role in the original war against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Yes, Jean Chretien was right to keep us out of the 2003 Iraq War. It was probably the only time in his life he was ever right about anything but you know what they say about a stopped clock. The invasion of Iraq began in the March of 2003, one year and a half after the attack by Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda upon the United States on September 11, 2001. It was this latter event that took the administration of then American President George W. Bush down a militaristic path. Now the United States, at least to any sane person, had in the 9/11 attack a clear justification for retaliation. It seemed odd, therefore, that so soon after 9/11, while its broadly supported efforts to take out the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks and the Taliban regime that sheltered them were still underway and incomplete, the Bush administration would concentrate so much effort on taking out the Saddam Hussein regime which had no plausible connection to the attacks.

The Bush administration’s official reason for toppling the Hussein regime was their claim that Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction which it was cleverly hiding from UN inspection teams. That seemed then as it seems now to be an excuse, a pretence that hid the Bush administration’s real motives. At the time those of us, left and right, who thought the Iraq War was a mistake, did so because a costly war of regime change in Iraq did not make sense when the War in Afghanistan was still underway and because we suspected that the actual motives of the Bush administration were less than noble. Whether those suspicions were warranted or not, now, looking on it from the perspective of eleven years of hindsight, another reason for considering the Iraq War to have been utter folly is apparent. Namely, that it is the removal of Saddam Hussein that made the rise of ISIS possible.

The Ba’ath government of Saddam Hussein was reprehensible in many ways, of course, but what it had going for it was that it was capable of keeping jihadist groups like the one that eventually became ISIS down. If what Iraq needed was a stable government, with something vaguely resembling law and order if you looked at it from far enough away, where Muslims other than those of the predominant sect, Christians, and other groups would enjoy a degree of protection and not be completely trampled on, then Saddam Hussein was the best of all possible bad options.

Whatever the non-ideological motivations of the Bush administration might have been, two overarching ideological principles can be seen to have guided its military actions. The first is the idea of “taking the fight to the enemy”, i.e., going overseas to take out the terrorists before they can attack us in Western countries. The second is the idea is that terrorism is the product of and supported by non-democratic governments which should therefore be replaced by democratic ones wherever possible. If the “War on Terror” was an expression of the first idea, the Iraq War embodied the second.

The current President of the United States has been criticized by many for his handling of international affairs. Frequently this takes the form of comparing him negatively to George W. Bush – whereas the latter was decisive, firm, and strong, Obama is indecisive, wishy-washy, and weak. However much truth there may be in this, I would suggest that with regards to international affairs, Obama deserves the most criticism for the area in which he and Bush are most alike, namely their naïve belief in democracy as a universal force for good.

By removing the dictator who kept such forces at bay in Iraq, in the name of democracy, Bush created the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS there, just as his insistence upon democratic elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip only empowered and gave a sort of pseudo-legitimacy to the terrorist organization Hamas. Obama received much criticism for not following through on the “line in the sand” rhetoric he directed against the government of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War, but, while this did cause the United States to lose a great deal of “face”, perhaps the bigger problem was that he had thrown his support behind the rebels, when the weakening of the Assad regime is precisely what led to the rise of ISIS on the Syrian side of the border. Consistently, Obama like Bush before him, has supported rebel groups against strongman governments in Egypt, Libya and all across the Middle East and, as with Bush before him, the largest benefactor has been Islamic jihadists.

Indeed, if you are looking for a sound case against Canada’s involvement in the coalition against ISIS, ignore the twaddle coming out of the mouth of the son of our worst ever Prime Minister, the fact that Barack Obama is the leader of the coalition is a good place to start. To that, we could add that the coalition includes the biggest jihad-sponsoring countries in the Middle East but none of the governments that have effectively kept down and contained jihadist terrorism in the past. The same was true of the coalition George W. Bush put together for his War on Terror which is why that War was for the most part a sad and sick joke. Finally, we could make the case ironclad by pointing out that while our opponents, by establishing a caliphate, have sought to stoke the fire of zeal among their followers by conjuring up imagery from the earliest history of Islam when it was united, strong, and a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, we are once again marching into battle against them not under the aegis of the faith that defeated their fathers at Tours and the Gates of Vienna, but in the name of liberalism, the disease that is killing us from the inside.

Perhaps one day Western leaders will awaken to the fact that the best strategy for dealing with groups like ISIS is the reverse of the Bush doctrine. Instead of taking the fight to the terrorists overseas in the hopes of averting terrorist attacks on Western soil it would make much more sense to close the borders of the West to the Islamic world so that we do not have to involve ourselves in their conflicts over there. Despite the disturbing number of “Western” youth being recruited by organizations like ISIS, however, this strategy is less acceptable to progressive liberals and leftists like Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair than outright war. In the meantime, we should be thankful that Prime Minister Harper, however grandiose his rhetoric, placed very careful and specific limits on the military action for which he sought and obtained Parliamentary approval. The United States is not so fortunate. Their president is clearly in over his head and in the long run could potentially have them bogged down in a quagmire that would make George W. Bush’s look like a little mud puddle in comparison.