Humility and Hubris

Canada is a Commonwealth Realm, a country within the British Commonwealth of Nations which governs herself through her own Parliament but which shares a reigning monarch with the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms.  Progressives, especially of the woke, “anti-colonial”, “anti-imperial” type, don’t like this and periodically call for us to “severe our ties to the monarchy."  This expression demonstrates just how little they understand our country.  We don’t have “ties” to the monarchy as if it were something external that can be lopped off.  It is integral to our constitution and for that matter to our history.

 

When our current king was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 6 May, 2023 he was greeted by a young lad of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal who welcomed him “in the name of the King of kings.”  To this, His Majesty replied "In His name and after His example I come not to be served but to serve."  This was an addition to the coronation service requested by His Majesty himself although it expresses the attitude of humility appropriate to the tradition of the king coming to Church to be crowned by priestly representatives of the King of kings.

 

What a contrast between this attitude of humility on the part of the man and appropriate to the office he fills with the insufferable arrogance that has been characteristic of his Canadian prime minister for the last decade.  Thankfully, that prime minister will soon be history.  On Epiphany he announced his upcoming resignation, to take effect after the Liberal Party has chosen its new leader which is set to take place on 9 March.  Unfortunately, the joy of hearing that he is finally stepping down, nine years after he should have resigned, has been dampened by the noise coming from south of the border.  For as big as the contrast between His Majesty’s appropriate Christian humility and the vainglory of his rotten Canadian prime minister may be there is an even bigger contrast between that humility and the hubris of the festering anal sore who is set to be sworn in again as American president on 20 January.

 

Yes, that last sentence expresses a rather different character evaluation of Donald the Orange than the one I have been expressing for the last eight years.  As recently as last 5 of November, Guy Fawkes Day and the day of the American presidential election, after declining to endorse either candidate on the grounds that it was an election in another country and for an office, president of a republic, of which I don’t approve, I did say that “If someone were to ask me which of the two candidates I like better as an individual person and which of the two has, in my opinion, the better ideas and policies, my answer to both questions would be Donald the Orange.”  I can no longer say this, although my opinion of Kamala Harris has in no way improved.  One’s insight into another person’s character gets a lot clearer when he is holding a gun to one’s country’s head and screaming “Anschluss!”  Whether he is joking or serious, literal or non-literal, is entirely immaterial. Since he is holding a gun to another country’s head and screaming “Lebensraum” and demanding from yet a third the return of his “Danzig Corridor” he has clearly gone stark raving mad.

 

Enough, however, about the wounded head, now healed of the revived Roman Empire to our south who has been given a “mouth speaking great things and blasphemies” whose followers all wear a sign of allegiance on their foreheads. I do not wish to write an essay all about him because he thinks everything everywhere should always be about him and I have no desire to indulge him on that.  Rather this essay is about Canada’s small-c conservatives and how the behaviour of some of them over the past week has made me abundantly glad that in my 1 January essay this year I distinguished my own Toryism, not only from big-C Conservative partisanship but from small-c conservatism as well. 

 

John Casey, writing in the 17 March, 2007 issue of The Spectator, in an article entitled “The Revival of Tory Philosophy” recounted a conversation that had taken place between Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative Philosophy Group, which Hugh Fraser, Casey, the late Sir Roger Scruton and others had founded back in the 1970s.  The meeting was just before the Falklands War and in it Edward Norman had given a presentation on the “Christian argument for nuclear weapons.”  In the discussion that followed according to Casey “Mrs. Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values.”  Then this exchange took place:

 

Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, Prime  minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.’ Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism. 

 

I very much doubt that many of the small-c conservatives in Canada today would have understood Enoch Powell’s point any more than Margaret Thatcher did although Toryism is the traditional Right of Canada as well as the UK.  One’s country is a concrete good for which a patriot fights regardless of what he may think of the people in government at the moment and what their ideology may happen to be.  Of course many, probably most, on the Right today, would call themselves nationalists rather than patriots and would probably not understand this difference either.  Here it is as explained by American paleoconservative/paleolibertarian Joe Sobran in a column from 16 October, 2001:

 

This is a season of patriotism, but also of something that is easily mistaken for patriotism; namely, nationalism. The difference is vital.

G.K. Chesterton once observed that Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of British imperialism, suffered from a “lack of patriotism.” He explained: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.”

In the same way, many Americans admire America for being strong, not for being American. For them America has to be “the greatest country on earth” in order to be worthy of their devotion. If it were only the 2nd-greatest, or the 19th-greatest, or, heaven forbid, “a 3rd-rate power,” it would be virtually worthless.

This is nationalism, not patriotism. Patriotism is like family love. You love your family just for being your family, not for being “the greatest family on earth” (whatever that might mean) or for being “better” than other families. You don’t feel threatened when other people love their families the same way. On the contrary, you respect their love, and you take comfort in knowing they respect yours. You don’t feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other families.

While patriotism is a form of affection, nationalism, it has often been said, is grounded in resentment and rivalry; it’s often defined by its enemies and traitors, real or supposed. It is militant by nature, and its typical style is belligerent. Patriotism, by contrast, is peaceful until forced to fight.

 

Joe Sobran, sadly, passed away far too early in 2010 and so did not live to see the “Make America Great Again” movement.  The paragraphs quoted above, however, are a good indication of what he would have thought of it, especially in its current revised version.  In 2016, the movement used nationalist rhetoric but when it spoke of putting “America First” it sounded like it was echoing what those words meant to Sobran’s friends, Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan.  Neither man took it to mean that the United States should be telling the rest of the world “we’re the best, we’re the strongest, so all the rest of you have to do what we say,” quite the contrary.  Buchanan campaigned for American president three times on a platform of doing the opposite of that.  In 1999 he published a book entitled A Republic not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny.  In 2016, American neoconservatives, the most vehement supporters of American imperialism, shunned the MAGA movement because it sounded to them like Buchananism.  It was thought by many that MAGA had taken its playbook from Sam Francis, who predeceased Sobran in 2005 and his “Middle American Radicals” strategy.  The MAGA of 2024-5, however, is clearly the nationalism Sobran wrote against, taken to the nth degree, in both rhetoric and reality.  Note that the neoconservatives who shunned it in 2016 are flocking to it today.  Compare the Ben Shapiro of 2016 to the Ben Shapiro of today, for example.

 

John Lukacs, the Hungarian born historian who fled the Nazi and then Communist occupations of his home country and immigrated to the United States was another who understood the difference between nationalism and patriotism.  He was a man of the Right, but was very skeptical about the American conservative movement which popped up after World War II in a country that had always considered itself to be founded on liberalism.  Lukacs, like his friend Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, another refugee from Europe whom he succeeded as history professor at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia when Kuehnelt-Leddihn returned to Austria after the war, he was a Roman Catholic royalist, the continental equivalent of a Tory, and always referred to himself as a reactionary.  I learned to self-apply this favourite epithet of the Left from his example.  In his Democracy & Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005) which I reviewed here, he predicted that a new type of Right was on the ascendency, but warned that it might be an unpalatable sort of Right that blended populism, the demagogic exploitation of dissatisfaction with elites with nationalism rather than traditionalism with patriotism.

 

The MAGA movement in the United States is, of course, a blend of populism and nationalism.  It is at its best when playing the role of the “agin man”, that is, someone identified by what he is “agin” (against).  It opposes globalism, uncontrolled and illegal immigration, the soft-on-crime policies that are wreaking havoc in places like New York and California, and to the whole combination of racial, sexual, gender and other identity politics that is woke ideology.  MAGA did not invent the opposition to these things, however, and one does not have to be either a populist or a nationalist to oppose them.  The term “woke” in its political sense had not yet become a household word when Joe Sobran died, but he opposed everything the term denotes and we have already seen his opinion of nationalism.  John Lukacs’s mini-book “Immigration and Migration: A Historical Perspective” which can be read in .pdf on the American Immigration Control Foundation’s website here was originally published in 1986, decades before MAGA, the embodiment of the populist nationalism or nationalist populism he foresaw in 2005 and saw unappealing, arrived on the scene.

 

All of these things that MAGA opposes, the Liberal Party under its present leadership has embraced, taken to their most absurd extremes, and made into its own platform.  This was not in response to MAGA, since Captain Airhead was promoting these things from the moment he became Grit leader, which was a couple of years before he became prime minister the year before that in which Donald the Orange defeated Hilary Clinton.  He did, however, take his cues from the man who was president of the United States at the time, Barack Obama.  Liberal prime ministers in Canada have always taken their cues from the United States.  The Liberal Party has always been the party of Americanization.

 

In 1891, when Sir John A. Macdonald won his last Dominion election, he was campaigning against Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals who were running on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity” or what today would be called “free trade” with the United States.  Macdonald has overseen the construction of the railroad in his premiership both to promote trade within Canada, uniting our economy, and to resist pressure to become dependent on trade with the United States, because he correctly foresaw trade dependence on the United States as a step towards falling into the cultural and political gravitational pull of the American republic and so undermining the Confederation Project.  Macdonald won his last majority government in that election, shortly before he passed away, by campaigning against any such outcome.  His campaign posters bore the slogan “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader.”  William Lyon Mackenzie King, who led the Liberal Party for much of the early twentieth century was even more of a free trader and Americanizer than Laurier. 

 

Now someone might point out that Mackenzie King represented a different wing of the Liberal Party big tent than that which today is identified with the Trudeau family.  That is true but it is also true that the Trudeau Liberals as much as the Mackenzie King Liberals took their cues from the United States.  Indeed, the very celebrity of the Trudeau family in Canada is an imitation of that of the Kennedy family in the United States.  Americans should be grateful that they have not had a second Kennedy presidency.

 

When Pierre Eliot Trudeau became prime minister he began to expand federal social programs in an unveiled imitation of Lyndon Johnson’s similar expansion in the United States.  More importantly, in 1977 Pierre Trudeau introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act and in 1982, he introduced the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in imitation of the US Bill of Rights.  The Charter gave the Canadian Supreme Court the type of powers the American Supreme Court has and after 1982 Canada began for the first time to experience the kind of cultural revolution through liberal judicial activism that had plagued the United States for decades prior.  The American Supreme Court, for example, threw the Bible and prayer out of American public schools two decades before Pierre Trudeau introduced the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  They were still in Canadian public schools when I attended and I would have been in Grade 1 when the Charter passed.  The Morgentaler ruling of the Canadian Supreme Court came in 1988, 15 years after Roe v. Wade in the United States. Such a ruling would not have been possible prior to 1982.

 

As for the Canadian Human Rights Act, this was an imitation of the United States’ unnecessary 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting private discrimination that capped Martin Luther King Jr. phoney career as a civil rights crusader which started a year after segregation had been ruled unconstitutional by the American Supreme Court and was hence already legally dead.  Most of the free speech battles in Canada during my lifetime have been because of problems that go back to this Act.  Those who maintain that we would not have had these problems if we had the American First Amendment are grossly mistaken.  From 1949 to 1987 the American communications regulator the FCC had a policy called the Fairness Doctrine that amounted to what Jordan Peterson calls “compelled speech”, which transgresses freedom of speech worse than “prohibited speech.”  The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters, if they expressed editorial opinions, to give equal time to the opposite view, thus forcing them to subsidize views they disagreed with.  It was not evenly enforced but was enforced against right-wing broadcasters while left-wing broadcasters were generally left alone.  The Rev. Carl McIntire ran afoul of it, for example, on a number of occasions.  It was not struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds of the First Amendment, although challenges on that basis were made.  After pressure from Congress and the Reagan administration, the FCC repealed it itself in 1987.  So no, the American First Amendment is not the sacred guarantee of freedom of speech that some think it to be.  Furthermore, and this is actually the main point, the enforced racial, sexual, and gender identity politics of today’s wokeness, at least insofar as it touches on public policy, in Canada can be traced directly to Pierre Trudeau’s introduction of an Act in 1977 based on an American Act of 1964.  This, coupled with the fact that the biggest agent for promoting wokeness in popular culture, not only in North America but throughout the civilization formerly known as Christendom, has been the mass culture production industry centred in Los Angeles, California demonstrates that wokeness comes stamped with “Made in the USA.”

 

In 1980 at the beginning of the Reagan administration in the United States and a year into Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the United Kingdom, Sir Roger Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism to demonstrate that while Reagan and Thatcher had their good points, conservatism was not what they thought it was, free market ideology, but rather the instinct to preserve and pass on the good things that others have built before you because these things are much easier to destroy than to build.  Towards the end of the 1980s, a movement arose in Canada that completely ignored Scruton’s message.  It called itself small-c conservative to distinguish itself from the party, and it took the position that Reaganism/Thatcherism is the standard to which conservatism should hold itself.  While the movement loathed the Liberal Party, its foundational misconception meant that it would never be more than an imitation of the centre-right wing of the Liberal Party.  When it founded an alternative party to the old Conservatives, it gave it the name that the movement which became the Liberal Party had gone under in the years leading up to Confederation, the Reform Party.  It promoted more economic integration between Canada and the United States, the Liberal Party’s position, rather than the economic nationalism traditional to both Canadian Toryism and American Republicanism.  Lacking historical depth and a proper understanding of Confederation it wanted to make Canadian provinces more like American states and the Canadian Senate more like the American Senate.  The social and cultural conservatism of the movement and the Reform Party initially attracted me to them until I realized that these were entirely expendable to the movement and that it would always put business interests ahead of traditions, institutions, and basically all those good things Scruton said that a conservative instinctually defends. 

 

It is understandable, perhaps, that small-c conservatives, after almost a decade of misrule by the Liberal Party at its worst as far as extreme Leftism goes, would look to the success of the MAGA movement in the United States, but it is a huge mistake to follow the example of the Liberal Party in taking cues from the United States.  Since Epiphany, small-c conservatives have demanded that the prorogation of Parliament end and that we go into the next Dominion Election right away.  I, as well, would like to see that happen.  Challenging the prorogation in court is not the way to go about it.  Should the challenge go through this would weaken the Crown’s reserve powers and that outcome would be worse for us than having to wait until March for the no confidence vote that will inevitably bring down the Liberals.  We should be strengthening, not weakening, the Crown, so as to check any future prime minister from becoming as autocratic as the current one.  What this means is that the role of recommending whom the King appoints as Governor General must go to someone other than the prime minister.  The Governor General should have refused to prorogue Parliament to give the Liberal Party time to choose a new leader, just as Lord Byng refused to dissolve it to save Mackenzie King’s skin 99 years ago.  The solution is not to have the use of the Crown’s powers subjected to judicial review but to take control over the appointment of the Governor General away from the prime minister.  Lord Byng was not appointed at the prime minister’s recommendation.

 

Furthermore, it is one thing to accuse the prime minister of abusing the process and putting party ahead of country by asking for Parliament to be prorogued until the eve of Lady Day to give the Liberals enough time to choose a new leader.  It is quite another to complain that the Liberal Party choosing a new leader before the dissolution of Parliament that will lead to the Dominion election in which the Liberals are defeated is letting Party insiders choose the next prime  minister rather than the people.  Small-c conservatives, like Ezra Levant and Candace Malcolm, have perhaps not thought through the implications of this talk.  There will be another Dominion Election by October.  There will be one a lot sooner than that, because whoever the Liberals put in as their next leader will be brought down almost immediately when the House sits again.  The next Liberal leader may technically be the next prime minister but it will be a very, very, short premiership.  What Levant, Malcolm, et al., are demonstrating, however, is a lack of understanding of the Westminster Parliamentary model, which allows for the premiership to change hands between elections.  In Dominion elections, we do not vote for the prime minister in the same way Americans vote for their president.  We vote individually for the representative of our constituency, and collectively for a Parliament.  The results determine who will be the next Prime minister – the person who has the confidence of the House – but not directly.  It has been a huge mistake over the last thirty years or so to increasingly treat each Dominion election as if it were a direct vote for the prime minister.  The last thing we need in this country is to import more of the American cult of the leader.  Green Party leader Elizabeth May showed more understanding of our Parliamentary system and more basic constitutional conservatism than anyone at True North or Rebel when she schooled the American president-elect on why Wayne Gretsky can’t run directly for prime minister.

 

Then there are those who think Kevin O’Leary’s proposal of an EU style, common market, common currency has merit.  This appears to include Brian Lilley.  Has it perhaps eluded their notice that the result of this experiment in Europe was that each country involved began to face a migration crisis and related problems similar but on a larger scale to those that conservatives in Canada and the United States say they want to solve rather than exacerbate?

 

The small-c conservatives who have annoyed me the most have been those who have suggested one anti-patriotic response to Trump’s obnoxious behaviour or another.  Laughing alongside Trump as if his “51^st state” remarks were jokes only at Trudeau’s expense rather than that of the country as a whole is one example, excusing his remarks on the grounds that this is how he does business, “it’s all in the Art of the Deal” is another.  If that is how he does business that compounds the charge against him it does not excuse it.  Going around saying “I’m bigger than you and stronger then you therefore you have to do as I say or I’m going to take your toys” is bad behaviour in the schoolyard and it is no more acceptable anywhere else.  It is just as reprehensible in business as it is in geopolitics.  Then there is the response of emphasizing what good friends Canada and the United States have been.  That is not the way to talk at this time.  As Joe Warmington in the Toronto Sun put it “Trump can no longer claim to be a friend to Canada. No friend talks like this.”  The problem with these anti-patriotic small-c “conservatives” is that while they lack true patriotism, that love of Canada like unto their love for their own immediately family, they do have a Nietzschean worship of power and strength which they direct towards the United States that in certain respects resembles what Joe Sobran called nationalism except that it is worse because it is focused on a country other than their own.  Mercifully, these types are, I think, a small, if loud, minority.

 

The prize for the most reprehensible attitude goes to Stephen K. Roney who has been positively salivating at the idea of becoming the 51^st state.  He seems to be under the impression that those of us who love our country bear the burden of justifying her continuing independence of the United States.  My answer to him is that if he wants to be an American so badly he is free to move there if the Americans will let him.  I wouldn’t let him if I were the Americans.  Someone who has that kind of attitude towards his own country cannot be trusted to be loyal to any other.

 

Yes, if these types are what it means to be “conservative” today, I am glad that I am a Tory rather than a conservative, just as I am very glad to be a Canadian, a citizen of a Commonwealth Realm and the subject of a king who went to his coronation to follow the example of the King of kings, not to be served but to serve, rather than the citizen of an imperial republic, whose incoming president is so full of himself, that I half expect him to raise a statue of himself in the National Cathedral in Washington DC and demand that not just Americans but everyone in the world worship before it.

 

God Save the King.

Hier Stehe Ich!

 Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year's Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write.  It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.   I have often used Dr. Luther's famous "Here I Stand" as the title in one language or another.   This year it is the German original.  Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same.   Each year I have to resist  the temptation to  just point to T. S Eliot's "Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature" and say ditto.   I usually do make reference to Eliot's famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself.  I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country's traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister's Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for.  I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College - at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary - in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an "Anglo-Catholic in religion"?  If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I's martyred Archbishop William  Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes.     If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant.   I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al.  got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state.   I have far less sympathy for the tendency that  manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a "this will have to do for now" type attitude.   The Vincentian Canon, "that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all", and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church's leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West.   I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult.  As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church - the Apostles' and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol - as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus  their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower  orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ's One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine.  Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a  Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God's written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to "criticism" based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book.   Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these "sources" in a pre-"redaction" state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text).  Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God's book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot.  So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith,  that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a "royalist in politics" should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website.   I will add here that I am also a monarchist.   For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable.   It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both.   I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument.   I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life.   While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from  memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible.   Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics.  Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable.   The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy's essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey.  I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago.   I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy.   Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity.   God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists.  In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form - think Plato here - of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be.   This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity - traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism - saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as  Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title "King of Kings" by saying "no king but King Jesus".   

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory.   The words "conservative" and "right-wing" as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose.   Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age.   It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time.   The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism's false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely.   The Left also worships liberalism's false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal.   A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man's problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership.   From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.   Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression  arising out of American racial grievance politics, "wokeness".   "Wokeness" is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx's "haves" and "have nots") but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc.   Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today's Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left.   Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed.   The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God.   Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs' sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a "classicist in literature" I think that if we take this to  mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold's "the best that has been thought and said" this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well.   It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture.   I have striven to follow this goal on and off again - it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today - with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions.   Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards.   I read Mark Twain's remark that a "classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" years ago and thought to myself "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months.   Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a "Sez you, Tom Fleming" response.   Today, as the Left in its "woke" form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with "the best that has been thought and said".   This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be.   So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and  encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

Still Standing - a Reactionary Tory in 2022

After the second of two anni horribiles in a row, the Kalends of January is upon us once again.   In the civil calendar this is New Year's Day and in the sacred Kalendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.    When I began to write I borrowed a custom from one of my favourite writers, the late Charley Reese, a curmudgeonly, common-sense conservative, op-ed writer from the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly syndicated column.   At the beginning or end of each year he would write a column in which he talked about himself, his  positions, the causes he supported, and the organizations to which he belonged.   He encouraged other writers to do the same because he felt they owed it to their readers to regularly disclose these things so their readers would know where the opinions they were reading were coming from.   Reese's column would come out in late December or early January on a day his column was scheduled to appear.   Since I self-publish my essays on a blog and can keep my own schedule I have always timed mine to come out on New Year's Day.

I am 45 years old.  I have lived in the city of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, in the Dominion of Canada all my life.   I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, and studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, about a half-hour south of Winnipeg.

There are two words that I regularly use to describe my general point of view in all of its aspects - political, theological, philosophical, cultural, etc.   These are reactionary and Tory.  The former has long been a term of abuse by progressives or leftists and I learned the habit of self-applying it from the late historian John Lukacs.   When I do so, I use it more in the sense in which he used it, and in which Michael Warren Davis uses it in his just published The Reactionary Mind: Why "Conservative" Isn't Enough, than in the sense that in which Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, et al, use it, although by making this distinction I do not mean to disparage the latter who have written much that is worthy in criticism of the Modern and what has followed it.     In this sense it means someone who looks back to the social, civil, and religious order of Christendom, the civilization that preceded Modern Western Civilization, and rather than finding there darkness from which he thanks Modernity for rescuing us, finds goodness and light and a solid place to cast his anchor so as to keep from being tossed adrift on the stormy seas of Modernity and Postmodernity.   A reactionary then is very different from a conservative.   The latter is usually someone who values Western Civilization only for the achievements of Modernity, distinguishing himself from progressives merely by the fact that the strain of Modernity he prefers, is the older, somewhat saner, form of liberalism, rather than that of the increasingly looney left.

From what I have just said about being a reactionary, it should already be clear that when I describe myself as a Tory I don't mean a small-c conservative, although I usually agree with small-c conservatives in their disputes with progressives, much less a big-C Conservative.     I mean it in the sense of Dr. Johnson's famous definition as "one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig" and of T. S. Eliot's description of himself, which reads like an update of Dr. Johnson's definition, and goes " an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

When it comes to the political aspect of being a Tory, the "royalist in politics", I have been one all my life.   Although a subtle distinction can be made between a royalist and a monarchist - the former denotes loyalty to royal blood, the latter denotes loyalty to and belief in the institution and office of the monarch - I will use the word royalist to encompass both meanings.   I have always been glad that my country is a parliamentary monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state and the head of the family of nations, the Commonwealth, to which we belong, rather than a republic.   Like Anthony Burgess, one of my favourite novelists who had similar views, "I hate all republics", although I might make the long defunct Confederate States of America the exception that proves the rule, if only because the kind of people who would be most offended by my doing so are also the sort of people who irritate me the most.  As I learned the history of my country, I was very pleased - I don't like to use the word proud because Pride is the worst of all sins and vices - to know that Canada's history diverged from that of our republican neighbour because we chose the way of the older virtues of Loyalty to the Crown and Honour, over that of rebellion and sedition in the name of new-fangled abstract ideals.   I very much despise the way Modern man prefers abstract ideals over time -proven concrete institutions.    I am very much the opposite of that in my thinking, which is why I will defend parliament, the time-honoured institution that legislates under the reign of the Crown, but not democracy, the abstract ideal, and insist that this distinction is crucial.   It always infuriates me when certain small-c conservatives speak gushingly about democracy and disparagingly about the Crown.   The Honourable Eugene Forsey was raised Conservative, but became a socialist, was one of the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (predecessor to today's New Democratic Party), worked as research-director for the Canadian Labour Congress, and was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal by Pierre Eliot Trudeau.   There were a great many issues on which his position was the polar opposite of mine.   Nevertheless, he was a great defender of Canada's constitution, about which he knew more than any other Canadian in history except the Fathers of Confederation, and of the monarchy and always called himself a "Sir John A. Macdonald Conservative".   I gladly acknowledge him to have been a brother Tory.  I would not extend the same courtesy to such small-c conservatives as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, J. J. McCullough and Spencer Fernando who have expressed their preference for the republican form of government, even though on a wide battery of other issues I would agree with them.   I would recommend that they all read John Farthing's Freedom Wears a Crown.  The most totalitarian governments in history have been republics, the freest have been headed by monarchs.  The more I have read and reflected on political science over the years, the more confirmed I have become in a royalism that was at first instinctual.   A country needs a hereditary, unelected, head of state who is above partisan politics, and so can truly fulfil the role of the office of head of state, which is to represent the country as a whole, including not just all the various factions of those living in the present, but those who have gone before and who are yet to come as well.  Only a king or queen can do this.

I had what for Canadians of my generation was a fairly typical mainstream Protestant upbringing.   My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my grandmother on my father's side subscribed to the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Brandon diocese, we were read Bible stories and said the Lord's Prayer in school, and celebrated the two main Christian holidays.   From the New Testament the Gideons gave me when I was twelve and Christian books I borrowed from the library, I gained a fuller understanding of Who Jesus Christ was, and why He died on the Cross and rose again.   When I was 15 I placed my faith in Him as my Saviour.   I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half later and a couple of decades after that was confirmed as an adult in the Anglican Church.  Several years ago, Michael Coren, a writer who had been a prominent social and religious conservative, left the Church of Rome and joined the Anglican Church in which he was later ordained.   Nowadays, whenever he appears in print, he can be depended upon to consistently take the wrong position on whatever hot button topic he has been invited to address.   For Coren the move from Romanism to Anglicanism was a move from conservatism to liberalism, a move that I had suspected that he would one day take ever since I had seen him take the republican side in a in-print debate about the monarchy in the National Post years earlier.   My decision to join the Anglican Church was very different from this.   For me, it was the outcome of a deepening of my theological conservatism from a mere Protestant fundamentalism to a High Anglican orthodoxy.

There was an instinctual element to my theological conservatism as there was to my political royalism.   Even before my conversion theological liberalism had repulsed me.  By theological liberalism I don't mean the making of theological arguments for politically liberal positions.  I mean the approach to Christianity of those churchgoers who either pick and choose from the Creed what they want to believe and discard what they don't (keeping heaven and getting rid of hell is an obvious example of this) or profess a "belief" in the articles of the Creed that looks more like unbelief in disguise (think of the sort of person who says he believes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but means by it something that did not require Jesus' body to return to life and leave the tomb).    This sort of thing disgusted me before I was  a believer, and the disgust intensified when I became a believer.   Over the years I have come to recognize in what I call hyper-Protestantism something that is akin to theological liberalism in attitude and spirit and arguably its immediate ancestor.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond Protestantism's rejection of what can be clearly demonstrated from Scripture to be the errors of the Church of Rome and rejects everything it associates with the Church of Rome which is not absolutely required by Scripture even if it is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, held by all the ancient Churches that go back to the unbroken Communion of Churches of the early centuries, from those early centuries to this day.   I have come to be as repulsed by this attitude as by liberalism and as a consequence my theological conservatism has deepened and matured.

I hold to the fundamental truths of the Reformation as much now as ever.   The first of these is that the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, is the inspired written Word of God, and as such its authority is infallible.   The Church, whether it be the actual Catholic Church - all Churches that were once part of the unbroken Communion - or a particular Church, such as the Roman, that falsely claims to be the entire Catholic Church, is not infallible.   The Bible, therefore, is the infallible standard of truth, to which the Church is held accountable.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, takes this way too far.   Rather than merely saying the Church is not infallible, it assumes the Church - not just the Roman Church but the actual Catholic Church - to be wrong about everything, unless it is clearly, in the most literal way possible, proven by Scripture, and takes the position that it is better for the individual believer to ignore the Church and rely directly upon the Holy Spirit for understanding the truth of the Bible.   This, however, in effect, treats the private interpretation of the individual believer as infallible, which is a far worse error than that of Rome.   The promise of Christ that the Holy Spirit would guide to all truth, was not made to the individual believer but to the collective society of believers the Church, in the persons of the Apostles whom He had set as governors over the Church.   This did not make the Church infallible, but it means that personal interpretation must be subject to the teaching of the actual Catholic Church, just as the latter must be subject to the corrective authority of the infallible Word of God.

The second fundamental truth of the Reformation is that salvation in its spiritual sense of the restoration of the sinner to God's favour, including such things as eternal life and bliss, pardon for sins, and righteousness in God's eyes, is something that is utterly beyond the reach of our own efforts - we cannot achieve it for ourselves, earn it, or exchange anything for it - and so it has been freely given to us in the gift of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who in His Incarnation, life, suffering, and death did everything necessary to accomplish that salvation and in His Resurrection and Ascension demonstrated it to be complete.   We merely receive our salvation as the gift it is in the only way a gift of this nature can be received - by faith, which is believing and trusting, believing the Gospel message that proclaims to us that God has given us a Saviour Who has taken away our sins, trusting Him to have accomplished for us what the Gospel says He has accomplished, which are, of course, the same thing stated two different ways.   Our own works - our efforts to please God by what we think, say, and do - as important, essential and necessary, as they are, contribute nothing to our salvation, but rather flow out of our salvation as the effect of its liberating and transforming aspects and our way of thanking God for it.    Our works cannot please God in any way, even the sense in which He graciously accepts the imperfect works of believers, if they are done with the intent of contributing to our salvation.   The Reformers stressed this truth which is so central to the Johannine and Pauline writings of the New Testament against the the teachings of the Church of Rome which, by the sixteenth century, had fallen so far from the grace of God, that not only did its teachings make salvation resemble a carrot dangled in front of a horse from a stick, but its Patriarch even stooped to the sacrilege and blasphemy of trying to sell salvation as a fund-raiser.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, in the name of this fundamental truth, rejects what the Scriptures and Catholic - not just Roman - doctrine clearly teach about the ordinary means God has appointed through which He works to bring the freely give grace (favour) Christ obtained for us on the Cross to us and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   In the New Testament, Jesus Christ establishes a religious society called the Church, which people became members of through the initiatory ritual of baptism, appointing His Apostles as governors over the Church and committing to them the ministry of the Gospel, which included both teaching and preaching and the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper, the Gospel Sacraments.    The Church, her Apostolic government, and her Gospel ministries of Word and Sacrament are the appointed ordinary means through which God works to bring the grace of Christ to us, and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   Hyper-Protestants reject this in the name of the Reformation truth of the freeness of God's saving grace, but place themselves in a quandary with regards to the New Testament verses that taken literally, as hyper-Protestants usually claim they prefer Scripture to be taken, tell us that baptism unites us with Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4, Col. 2:12) and that the food that sustains our spiritual life is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (John 6:53-58) which, of course, is offered us as food only in the Eucharist.   Since they see baptism and the Lord's Supper as works, things we do in obedience to God in order to please Him, rather than Sacraments, things through which God works to bless us, they see works salvation in the literal meaning of these passages, and must twist them to fit their theology.   Ironically, hyper-Protestants are themselves susceptible to the charge of works salvation.  If they are Arminians, they make faith itself into a work by making it into an act of our will by which we meet God's condition for salvation.   If they are Calvinists, they teach that God gave Christ to save only a limited few elect, and that we can only know we are of this elect by seeing the evidence of it in our holy lives, thus essentially telling us to place our faith in our works instead of Christ.   By contrast, the Catholic doctrine based on the literal meaning of the above passages is entirely consistent with the freeness of God's saving grace if Sacraments are understand, as they have been since the Church Fathers - see St. Augustine especially - as a visible, tangible, way of preaching the Gospel, and if it is understood that God works through extraordinary as well as ordinary means.

In both of the above examples of hyper-Protestantism twisting fundamental Reformation truths to attack genuinely Catholic doctrine as well as Roman error it is obvious that hyper-Protestantism is fundamentally rebellion against the legitimate authority God has placed in His Church and not just the exaggerated claims of Rome.    In rejecting the Patriarch of Rome's claim to supreme authority over the entire Catholic Church, the Reformers were actually taking the Catholic position for early attempts by said Patriarch to assert such supremacy were clearly rebuffed in the Ecumenical Councils.   Hyper-Protestants, however, reject the entire Episcopal College's claim to authority over the Catholic Church.   That claim, however, is founded in the Bible.   Jesus Christ gave the government of His Church to the Apostles, which governing authority could only be passed on to others from those who had it before, which is precisely what we see the Apostles doing in the New Testament when they admitted others such as Timothy and Titus to their government over the lower Orders they, on their Christ-given authority had created, the Presbyters and Deacons.   Dr. Luther taught the New Testament truth of the universal priesthood of all believers.   Hyper-Protestants conclude from it that if all Christians are priests, then Christ could not have established a more specific priesthood and set it over His Church.   This logic, however, would condemn the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament, because national Israel was also described as a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6).   The accounts of the Last Supper, especially those of St. John and St. Luke taken together, make it quite clear that Christ established His Apostles as the new priesthood of His Church.   Compare the ritual footwashing described by St John at the beginning of his account (13:3-18) with the ritual washing when the Aaronic priesthood was established (Ex 40:12, 30-31).   Then note the institution of the Eucharist, the bread and wine of which clearly allude to the grain and drink offerings of the Levitical system, and which are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the One effective sacrifice to which the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed.   If it were not already obvious that when the Lord told the Apostles to perform this rite  He was telling them to do something only priests could do, note that the word St. Luke uses for "this do" in instituting the Sacrament while generally meaning "make this" or "do this" has a ceremonial meaning of "offer this".  The hyper-Protestant position smacks of the rebellious attitude of Dathan, Korah and Abiram.

The more I studied this the more I came to see how hyper-Protestantism led to theological liberalism, because the rejection of the legitimate albeit not-infallible authority Christ had placed in those He set over His Church and not just the false supremacy claimed by the Roman Patriarch was a step towards rejecting the infallible authority God had placed in His written Word.   Latitudinarianism paved the way for deism and rationalism, and Puritanism became the ancestor of both political liberalism (the Whigs began as the successors to the Puritan party in Parliament) and leftism (the French Revolution, the template of all subsequent Communist totalitarian revolutions, was itself inspired by the Puritan rebellion against the godly King Charles I).   This led me to place a much higher value on the ancient Creeds, the teachings of the Fathers, and the Councils of the early Church than I had before, and my theological conservatism matured into High Anglican orthodoxy.

The last two years have put a strain on these theological convictions, as the leaders, not only of the Anglican Communion, but the other Communions with an Apostolic ministry, have with few exceptions, submitted to the tyranny of the new false religion of Antichrist that has made an idol out of physical health to which it has demanded that spiritual health and wellbeing as well as psychological health and the health of society, economy, and community all be sacrificed.   Abusing the Keys Christ gave to the Apostles - not just St. Peter - they have locked people away from the Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament, not because of unrepentant open sin, but because a respiratory disease that resembles the flu far more than it does cholera, the Black Death, or any of the other far worse historical plagues that nobody ever behaved this stupidly over has been going around.   When they opened the Churches again, they imposed all sorts of "safety protocols" such as capacity limitations, social distancing, wearing masks, and in some cases, mercifully much fewer, vaccine passports , all of which are completely contrary to the example set by Him Who healed the sick that were brought to Him, including the infectious lepers, rebuked His disciples for sending the little children away, and promised that whoever comes to Him He would in no wise cast out.  Some of these, especially the masks and vaccine passports, are chillingly reminiscent of St. John's prophecy of the Mark of the Beast.   Christ promised, however, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, and I pray that He will rescue her from this apostasy soon.

It is difficult to be a classicist in culture today in a practical rather than a merely theoretical sense because of the aforementioned false religion of Antichrist.   The medical Beast has locked me out of museums, the Centennial Concert Hall where I used to attend the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Opera, or anywhere else where edifying culture might be found, except libraries, because I refuse to be bullied into taking his vaccine.   Even if I were fully persuaded that the vaccine was 100% safe and effective I would not take it because the bullying manner in which it is being imposed on people is behaviour that ought not to be either rewarded or even tolerated by the civilized.   When I look at what the Winnipeg Art Gallery currently has on exhibition according to its website, and the current season of the Manitoba Opera, the loss becomes somewhat more bearable.   Having to miss Beethoven's Fifth a little over a month ago and Haydn's final symphony later this month is rather stinging however.   On the popular culture front I am also shut out of the movie theatres.   That is perhaps something to be thankful for.  Movies and television shows have been noticeably declining in quality for decades and this has recently accelerated.   Look at everything that is now being released through the online streaming platforms.  Or better yet don't.   It is all trying to preach the message of "wokeness", i.e., the racial superiority of people of colour, the sexual superiority of women, the normality of homosexuality and transgender identity and abnormality of heterosexuality and cisgender identity, the impending doom from climate change unless we all stop burning fossil fuels and start eating vegan, and other nonsense of the sort.   On the plus side, plenty of  classic older films, Shakespeare plays , and the like are readily available to stream as well, although the habit of spending all of one's time watching a screen is not one that ought to be cultivated.

Happy New Year

God Save the Queen!

Stand Up to the Mob!

 

When a mob vandalizes or tears down statues that have been in place for generations of nation-builders, whether statesmen like Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation and first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, or educators like Egerton Ryerson, one of the chief architects of the Upper Canadian – Ontarian for the hopelessly up-to-date – public school system, back the in days when schools were a credit to their builders rather than a disgrace, this tells us much more about the mob than about the historical figures whose memory they are attacking.   It is far easier to tear something down than it is to build something, especially something of lasting benefit.   It is also much quicker.   What these acts tell us is that the members of these mobs, whether taken individually or collectively, who are howling for the “cancelling” of the memories of men like Macdonald and Ryerson, do not have it in them to achieve a thousandth of what such men accomplished.  Driving them down this quick and easy, but ultimately treacherous and deadly, path of desecration and destruction, is the spirit of Envy, which is not mere jealousy, the wish to have what others have, but the hatred of others for being, having, or doing what you do not and cannot be, have, or do yourself.   It was traditionally considered among the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, second only to Pride.    This makes it almost fitting, in a perverse sort of way, that last weekend’s mob assault on the statue of Ryerson at the University that bears his name, took place at the beginning of the month which, to please the alphabet soup people of all the colours of the rainbow, now bears the name of that Sin in addition to the Roman name for the queen of Olympus.

 

The toppling of the Ryerson statue came at the end of a week in which the Canadian media, evidently tired of the bat flu after a year and a half, found a new dead horse to flog.   Late in May, a couple of days after the anniversary of the incident which, after it was distorted and blown out of proportion by the media, sparked last year’s wave of race riots and “Year Zero” Cultural Maoism, and just in time to launch Indigenous History Month, yet another new handle for the month formerly known as June, the Kamloops Indian Band made an announcement.   They had hired someone to use some fancy newfangled sonar gizmo to search the grounds of the old Indian Residential School at Kamloops and, lo and behold, they had discovered 215 unmarked graves.  

 

The Canadian mainstream media was quick to label this discovery “shocking”.   This speaks extremely poorly about the present state of journalistic integrity in this country.   When used as an adjective, the word shocking expresses a negative judgement about that which is so described but it also generally conveys a sense of surprise on the part of the person doing the judging.   There was nothing in the Kamloops announcement, however, that ought to have been surprising.   It revealed nothing new about the Indian Residential Schools.   That there are unmarked graves on the grounds of these schools has been known all along. The fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report is entitled Missing Children and Unmarked Burials.  It is 273 pages long and was published in December of 2015.    According to this volume the death rate due to such factors as disease – tuberculosis was the big one – and suicide was much higher among aboriginal children at the Residential Schools than among school children in the general population.   The TRC attributed this to the inadequacy of government standards and regulations for these schools which fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than the provincial education ministries like other schools, as well as inadequate enforcement of such standards and regulations, and inadequate funding.   Had the TRC been the impartial body of inquiry it made itself out to be it would also have compared the death rate among Residential School children to that among aboriginal children who remained at home on the reserves.     At any rate, according to the TRC Report, unless the families lived nearby or could afford to have the bodies sent to them, they were generally buried in cemeteries at the schools which were abandoned and fell into disuse and decay after the schools were closed.    All that this “new discovery” has added to what is already contained in that volume is the location of 215 of these graves.   One could be forgiven for thinking that all the progressives in the mainstream Canadian media who have been spinning the Residential School narrative into a wrecking ball to use against Canada and the men who built her are not actually that familiar with the contents of the TRC Report.

 

The Canada-bashing progressives have been reading all sorts of ridiculous conclusions into the discovery of these graves that the actual evidence in no way bears out.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hardly an impartial and unbiased body of inquiry.   Its end did not seem to be the first noun in its title so much as painting as unflattering a portrait of the Indian Residential Schools, the Canadian churches, and the Canadian government as was possible.  Even still, it did not go so far as to accuse the schools of the mass murder of children.   The most brazen of the progressive commentators have now been pointing to the discovery of the graves and making that accusation, and their slightly less brazen colleagues have been reporting the story in such a way as to lead their audiences to that conclusion without their outright saying it.   This is irresponsible gutter journalism at its worst.   The Kamloops band and its sonar technicians have not discovered anything that the TRC Report had not already told us was there, and bodies have not been exhumed, let alone examined for cause of death.   Indeed, they did not even discover a “mass grave” as innumerable media commentators have falsely stated, with some continuing to falsely say this despite the band chief having issued an update in which she explicitly stated “This is not a mass grave”.   The significance of this is that it shows that the media has been painting the picture of a far more calloused disposal of bodies than the evidence supports or the band claims.

 

The media, of course, are not acting in bona fide.  This time last year, they were using the death of George Floyd to promote a movement that was inciting race riots all across the United States and even throughout the larger Western world.   Coinciding with this was a wave of mob attacks on the monuments of a wide assortment of Western nation-builders, institutional founders, statesmen, and other honoured historical figures.   The New York Times, the American trash rag of record,  had been laying the foundation for this for months by running Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, a revisionist distortion of American history that interprets everything by viewing it through the lens of slavery, in its Sunday Magazine supplement.    What we are seeing up here this year is simply the Canadian left-wing gutter press trying to reproduce its American cousin’s success of last year.

 

Those who use their influence to support statue-toppling mobs have no business commenting on history whatsoever.   By their very actions they demonstrate that they have not learned a fairly basic historical lesson.   Movements that seek to tear down a country’s history – her past cannot be torn down, but her history, her “remembered past” to use John Lukacs’ definition, can - never end well but rather in disaster, destruction, and misery for all.   The Jacobins attempted this in France in the 1790s when they started history over with their Republic at “Year One”, and endued up with the Reign of Terror.   It has been a pretty standard feature of all Communist revolutions since.    Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, when they took over Cambodia in 1975, declared it to be “Year Zero”.   Watch the film “The Killing Fields” or read my friend Reaksa Himm’s memoir The Tears of My Soul to find out what that was like.  Anybody who fails to grasp the simple historical fact that these are terrible examples and not ones to be emulated has no business passing judgement on the errors of the historical figures who built countries and institutions, led them through difficult periods, and otherwise did the long and difficult work of construction, enriching future generations, rather than the short and easy work of destruction that can only impoverish them.

 

There are undoubtedly those who would feel that this comparison of today’s statue-topplers who are now likening our country’s founders to Hitler with the Jacobins, Maoists, Pol Pot and other statue-toppling, country-and-civilization destroyers of the past is unfair.    It is entirely appropriate, however.   It is one thing to acknowledge that bad things took place at the Indian Residential Schools and to give those who suffered those things a platform and the opportunity to share their story.   It is another thing altogether to use those bad things to paint a cartoonish caricature so as to condemn the schools, the churches that administered them, and the country herself, wholesale, and to silence those whose testimony as to their experiences runs contrary to this one-sided, un-nuanced, narrative.   It is one thing to acknowledge that admired leaders of the past were human beings and thus full of flaws, or even to point out examples of how they fell short of the standards of their own day or of timeless standards.   It is something quite different to use their flaws to discredit and dismiss their tremendous accomplishments and, even worse, to condemn them for failing to hold attitudes that are now all but ubiquitous but which nobody anywhere in the world held until the present generation.  

 

When the so-called Truth and Reconciliation process began – I don’t mean the appointment of the Commission but the proceedings that led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement which brought about the creation of the Commission, so we are talking about two and a half decades ago – the discussion was primarily about physical and sexual abuse that some of the alumni of the schools had suffered there, over which they had initiated the lawsuits that led to the Settlement.   With the creation of the TRC, however, the discussion came to be dominated by people with another very different agenda.   Their agenda was to condemn the entire Residential Schools system as a project of “cultural genocide”.

 

The concept of “cultural genocide” is nonsensical.   Genocide, a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, means the murder of a “people”, in the sense of a group with a common ancestry and identity.  The Holocaust of World War II is the best known example. The mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda towards the end of that country’s civil war in 1994 is a more recent example.   The concept of “cultural genocide” was thought up by the same man who coined the term.   It refers to efforts to destroy a people’s cultural identity without killing the actual people.   Since the equation of something that does not involve killing actual people with mass murder ought to be morally repugnant to any thinking person, the concept should have been condemned and rejected from the moment Lemkin first conceived it.    Soon after it was conceived, however, the leaders of certain Jewish groups began using it as a club against Christianity.   Christianity teaches that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the Redeemer prophesied in the Old Testament Who established the promised New Covenant through His death and Resurrection and Who is the only way to God for Jews and Gentiles alike.   Christianity’s primary mission from Jesus Christ is evangelism – telling the world the Gospel, the Good News about Who Jesus is and what He has done.   While not everybody believes the Gospel when they hear it and it is not our mission to compel anybody to believe, obviously the desired end of evangelism is for everybody to believe.   Since rabbinic Judaism has long taught that a Jew who converts to Christianity ceases to be a Jew, the Jewish leaders in question argued that evangelism amounts to cultural genocide – if all the Jews believed the Gospel, there would be no Jews any more.   On the basis of this kind of reasoning they began pressuring Christian Churches to change their doctrines and liturgical practices as they pertain to the evangelism of Jews.  Sadly, far too many Church leaders proved to be weak in the face of this kind of pressure.

 

Canada’s Laurentian political class showed a similar lack of backbone when it came to defending our country against the smear that the Residential Schools were designed to wipe out Native Indian cultural identities.   Indeed, their attitude throughout the entire “Truth and Reconciliation” process was to accept the blame for whatever accusations were thrown against Canada and to refuse to hold the accusers accountable to even the most basic standards of courtroom justice.   Imagine a trial where the judge allows only the prosecutor to call witnesses, denies the defense the right to cross examine, and refuses to allow the defense to make a case.   That will give you a picture of what the trial of Canada by the TRC over the Residential Schools was like.

 

The reality is that had Canada wanted to erase Native Indian cultural identity she would have abolished the reserves, torn up the treaties and declared the Indians to be ordinary citizens like everyone else, insisted that they all live among other Canadians, and that their children go to the same public schools as everybody else.   In other words, she would have done the exact opposite of what she actually did.   The Canadian government’s policy was clearly to preserve Indian cultural identity, not to eradicate it.   Had they wanted to do the latter, residential schools would have been particularly ill-suited to the task.   The TRC maintains that the idea was to break Indian cultural identity by taking children away from the cultural influence of their parents. If this was the case one would think the government would have had all Indian children sent to these schools.  In actuality, however, in the approximately a century and a half that these schools operated, only a minority of Indian children were sent there.   This was a very small minority in the early days of the Dominion when Sir John A. Macdonald, whom the TRC et al seem more interested in vilifying than anyone else, was Prime Minister.   The government also ran day schools on the reserves and in those days the government only forced children to go to the residential schools when their parents persistently neglected to send them to the day schools.    The Dominion had made it mandatory for all Indian children within a certain age range to attend school – just as the provinces had made it mandatory for all other children within the same age range to attend school.  It was much later in Canadian history, after the government decided to make the schools serve the second function of being foster group homes for children removed from unsafe homes by social workers that a majority of Indian children were sent to the residential schools.     Even then, the eradication of Indian cultural identity is hardly a reasonable interpretation of the government’s intent.

 

The TRC, in the absence of serious challenge from either Canada’s political class or the fourth estate, created a narrative indicting our country and its founders for “cultural genocide”, featuring a one-sided caricature of the Indian Residential Schools.   Now, after a discovery that adds nothing that was not already contained in the TRC Report, left-wing radicals egged on by the mendacious and meretricious media, have gone far beyond the TRC in their defamatory accusations of murder against the schools and their Pol Potish demands that we “cancel” our country, her history, and her historical figures.   It is about time that we stood up to these thugs who in their envy and hatred of those who did what they themselves could never do by building our country wish to tear it all down.   It is slightly encouraging that the Conservatives were able to stop the motion by Jimmy Dhaliwal’s Canada-hating socialist party to have Parliament declare the Residential Schools to have been a genocide.   I didn’t think they had the kives – the Finnish word for “stones” the bearing of which as a last name by a local reporter brings to mind how the biggest man in Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men was called “Little John” – to do so.

 

For anyone looking for more information about the side of the Indian Residential Schools story that the Left wants suppressed I recommend Stephen K. Roney’s Playing The Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is WRONG!, Bonsecours Editions, 2018 and From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, edited by Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf and just published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy here in Winnipeg earlier this year.

 

Since the progressive wackos are calling for Canada Day to be cancelled, I encourage you this July 1^st to fly the old Red Ensign, sing “God Save the Queen” and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, raise your glass to Sir John and celebrate Dominion Day with gusto.   The only thing we need to be ashamed of in Canada is the way we have let these ninnies who are constantly apologizing for everything Canada has been and done in the past walk all over us.   While I seldom recommend emulating Americans in this case I say that it is time we forget about our customary politeness and take up the attitude of old Merle, who sang “When they’re runnin’ down my country, man, They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me”.