Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters: Special Charlottesville Edition

- While I am, on principle, opposed to all republics and presidents - states should be headed by royal monarchs - I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and the Donald deserves much credit over his press conference the other day. How refreshing to hear someone tell the truth - that it was not only neo-Nazis and white supremacists participating in the protest of the tearing down of Robert E. Lee's statue, that the antifa counter protesters who unlike the "Unite the Right” crowd did not get a permit were violent thugs, that there was blame on both sides, and that the tearing down of the one statue could lead to the tearing down of others, such as Washington and Jefferson. The press were furious because finally someone who could not be silenced, no-platformed, or ignored was saying these things and exposing them for the unmitigated liars that they are.

- Progressives – in which category I would include John McCain and Mitt Romney - don’t like it that the Donald treated white nationalists and the antifa as moral equivalents. They are, in a sense, correct – the two are not moral equivalents – but not for the reason they think. The antifa are much, much, worse. Spare me the snivelling, hypocritical, handwringing about the one group being racist and the other being opposed to racism. “Antiracist” activists only ever seem to oppose racism when the racists are whites. This is itself a form of racism, racism against white people. The real moral difference between the two groups, is that the one went there to hold a peaceful demonstration after having obtained legal permission to do so, the other went there to shut down the other group with violence. It was one of their own that ended up dying from the violence that day but that does not alter the fact that they were the ones who turned it into a violent event and went there with the intention of doing so.

- In Canada today, those who honour our country’s British history, heritage, traditions, and institutions are frequently accused of being Nazis by the followers of the Trudeau Liberals’ cult of diversity. It was British Canada, of course, that went to war with the Third Reich in 1939, and it was because we were British that we did so. The architect of Canadian multiculturalism was a draft dodger who reputedly expressed his contempt for Canada’s war efforts by wearing a German army helmet and a swastika.

- There are only really two kinds of people in North America today that would – other than ironically or when portraying a role on film – goose step, wave a swastika flag, or wear a Nazi uniform or Klan robe. The first group is the mentally ill. Liberals ordinarily demand that we look upon members of this group with compassion and, if they happen to have committed a heinous crime like beheading a fellow passenger on a bus, excuse them, but they make an unprincipled exception in this case. The second group is government agent provocateurs. In Canada, for example, the composition of the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1970s and the Heritage Front of a couple of decades later, both resembled that of the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, i.e., almost entirely government agents.

- If, for some reason, you actually wanted to radicalize white people to swell the ranks of a resurgent Nazi movement, the way to go about it would be to do exactly what the liberal left has been doing since 1945. You would reduce their percentage of the population in Western countries through ongoing large-scale immigration and blame them for all the woes of the world while denying them any legitimate means of protecting their collective interests by vehemently condemning any individual or group that attempts to speak for these as racist.

- If you take the way soi-disant “anti-racists” talk about white people and substitute “Jews” for “whites” you will end up with something that sounds like a Nuremburg Rally speech or reads like a chapter of Mein Kampf. Now you know who the real Nazis are today.

- The left have always, first and foremost, been scapegoaters. Unwilling to accept that sin, sorrow, suffering, and woe has always been and always will be a part of human existence east of Eden and this side of the Second Coming, they are always looking for someone to blame for the inevitable failure of their schemes to retake lost Paradise by force. In the eighteenth century it was the king, the aristocrats, and the church. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the bourgeoisie and middle class. For the National Socialists it was the Jews and today it is whites, Christians, males, heterosexuals, and especially, white, Christian, heterosexual males.

- Nazism was a movement of the left not the right. The left began its life in the eighteenth century as the revolutionary movement that deposed the Bourbon monarchy in France. A militant movement, with the flashy slogan “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and holding the “Rights of Man and of the Citizen” as its ideal, it formed the first totalitarian regime in what is known as the “Reign of Terror” in which, having murdered the king and queen, and whatever aristocrats had failed to flee its clutches, it then turned on its own, as the Jacobin club divided into warring factions, and the Montganards led by Robespierre ousted the Girondists who had led the Revolution in its early stage, sending the latter and a host of their other enemies to the guillotine before eventually being hoist on their own petard. In the nineteenth century Marxism became the leading ideology in the continental left, producing the Communist movement which in Russia, split like the Jacobins into warring factions the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, with the former coming to power to form the Soviet Union. In Italy, when Benito Mussolini left the Communist Party to found the Fascist Party which, when in power, put the Communists in prison, this was yet another example of the left dividing into warring factions, for the repressive terror state of the Italian Fascists resembled nothing else so much as what the Bolsheviks had put in place in Russia. Even closer in its resemblance to the Soviet Union was the Third Reich in Germany, established by Adolf Hitler whose rise to power began with his taking over a German labour party and transforming it into the National Socialist German Workers Party. Hitler, who fully acknowledged his debt to Marxism, gave his party the name of two nineteenth century left-wing movements – socialism, of course, but also nationalism which was recognized as liberal, progressive, and left-wing in the nineteenth century because its basic concept, the sovereignty of the nation, came from the philosophy of Rousseau and had been used by the French Revolutionaries to challenge the sovereignty of the king. The Nazis were revolutionaries rather than reactionaries. That they themselves recognized this is reflected in the words of the Horst Wessel Lied. They were fundamentally opposed to everything that the right stood for, whether it be the king, aristocracy, and church of classical Tory conservatism or the classical liberal individualism and middle class capitalism of the American right.

- Nazism was the bastard child of Communism and imitated its parent’s evils – secret police, show trials, mass murders, forced labour and other worse types of camps, etc. - but it was a short-lived threat that died with its Fuhrer in a bunker in Germany in 1945. The same cannot be said of Communism which retained the power that it had seized in Russia in 1917 until 1990, conquered a much larger portion of the world than Nazism had, retained control of it longer – the Communist Party is still in power in China today – and committed atrocities on an even larger scale, having murdered over 100 million people in the last century. It is only Communism that has a vested interest in promoting the idea that its estranged child, Nazism, is a universal threat that can pop up anywhere at any time and if you look closely at the various anti-racist or antifa activist groups today I suspect that you will find that apart from Christophobic hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League and hypocritical money-making scams like the Southern Poverty Law Centre they are virtually all fronts for Stalinist, Maoist, and other Marxist-Leninist organizations.

The Triumph of the Donald

Eight years ago, Dr. Thomas Fleming, then editor of Chronicles Magazine, wrote that no matter who won that year’s presidential election the outcome was known – the victor would be the worst president in American history. This was an understandable prediction. The candidates that year were John McCain for the Republicans and Barack Obama for the Democrats. The former was a warmongering hawk who was likely to have started a World War. The latter was a man who had an agenda of racial division and strife that he tried to hide behind a façade of substance-free, positive sounding tripe about hope and change.

This year the Democratic Party put forward as their candidate someone who was a combination of the worst elements of both John McCain and Barack Obama – Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mercifully, it is Donald John Trump and not her, who has just been elected the next president of the United States.

The media, which has treated Trump’s campaign as a joke from day one, and has predicted his failure every step of the way up until this last evening when it became evident that he would win the required number of electoral college votes is now trying to figure out how they could have been so wrong and how to explain Trump’s victory.

They need look no further than the writings of a late colleague of the aforementioned Dr. Fleming, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, one-time award winning editorial columnist with the Washington Times and political editor of Chronicles. A traditional Southern conservative and a sworn foe of political correctness, Sam Francis was also a brilliant student of Realpolitik and the Machiavellian elite theory of power politics as articulated by ex-Trotskyist-turned-Cold Warrior James Burnham. Accepting Burnham’s thesis in The Managerial Revolution, that the paths of socialism and capitalism had converged and a new type of society that was neither and both had emerged led by a new elite of technocratic managers and bureaucrats, Francis attributed the problems he saw in late twentieth century America to this new elite. He brilliantly diagnosed the combination of the breakdown of law and order and border security with the tyranny of political correctness, bureaucratic overregulation, and the surveillance state as anarcho-tyranny – a synthesis of anarchism and tyranny. In the theories of liberal sociologists Donald Warren about MARs – Middle American Radicals – Francis believed he had found the solution to the problem. The exportation of their jobs through free trade, the importation of their replacements through mass immigration, and their being heavily taxed to pay for a welfare state while being targeted by anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and political correctness in general, had potentially radicalized middle class white Americans. A populist nationalist could tap into this potential to fight against the new order. Francis’ friend Patrick J. Buchanan, columnist and former speech writer for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, attempted to do this three times in 1993, 1996 and as a third party candidate in 2000.

Buchanan, unfortunately, came nowhere near the White House and so Sam Francis, who passed away eleven years ago, did not live to see his arguments bear fruit.

The reason why the same populist, nativist, platform that failed to produce a Buchanan presidency has carried the Trump train all the way to the White House is evident in this year’s presidential race. To win, Trump had to first fight off all the other contenders – each preferred by the Republican Party’s own establishment over himself – for the Republican nomination. Then in the general election he had to fight the Democratic Party, a united mass media, the powerful financial interests behind Clinton, and more often than not the establishment of his own party. To do this required a particular combination of credentials which only Donald Trump possessed.

First, as a very successful businessman he was extremely wealthy – enough so that he did not have to rely upon the financiers to whom he would otherwise be indentured and no different from any other politician. The same could be said of Ross Perot – but Perot chose to run as an independent and third party candidate, paths that lead to nowhere.

Second, as the host of the popular reality/game show The Apprentice, Trump was a world famous celebrity and therefore not someone who could simply be silenced or ignored.

Finally, Trump had the combination of sincere patriotism, sheer egotism, and unrelenting determination sufficient to weather everything that his powerful enemies threw at him.

It was only someone with this particular combination who could capitalize on Francis’s MARs strategy and carry it through to victory.

I cannot recall a time when the outcome of an election pleased me more than this one. That may seem odd, coming from someone who is neither an American nor a republican, but is rather a Canadian Tory who can only tolerate popular democracy when it is mixed, as it is in our parliamentary system, with hereditary monarchy. For that matter I have long been of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s opinion that the ideology which is nationalism is a dangerous substitute for the virtuous sentiment that is true patriotism. Donald Trump does not strike me as being an ideologue, however – it was amusing to hear a representative of the Democratic Party interviewed on CBC after the third presidential debate talk about Trump’s ideology, as if he had one – and on practical matters such as immigration and free trade the difference between patriotism and nationalism is somewhat moot. There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this, I confess – I have long loathed Hillary Clinton, everything she stands for, and the type of people who have been backing her. It is very satisfying, however, to see someone who has his country’s good at heart, on matters like trade and immigration, win out over the forces of globalism and political correctness that have seemed undefeatable for decades.

On November 8th, 2016 the American voting public sent a very clear message – to both Hillary Clinton and the politically correct, corporate globalist elites. That message, put simply, was “you’re fired!”

Now that Donald Trump has been elected president the question will be whether he will do all the things he has promised to do. There are many that say that he won’t – but they also said through this entire race that he would never be able to win this primary or that one, that he would never be able to secure the Republican nomination, that he would never be able to defeat Hillary Clinton – and he proved them wrong at every turn. Hillary Clinton, with her combination of all the bad traits of both John McCain and Barack Obama, had she won, would have been the worst American president in all of history. Donald Trump, if he accomplishes even a fraction of what he has set out to do, may very well go down in history as their greatest and best president ever.

Scandals

In May of 1973, as the Watergate scandal that would eventually bring down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was in the early stages of unfolding in the press, our former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, addressing the House of Commons said “Honourable members know what has happened recently in the United States. Even making observations about it causes me very deep pain. The President has been a friend of mine for years. I wonder how many people in Canada who were going to abolish the monarchy are having second thoughts now about asking for a president?”

I, who very much share the Chief’s monarchist sentiments and preference for our own system of parliamentary government, cannot count the number of times since the current American presidential race began that I have been thankful that we are fortunate enough in Canada, to have a head of state who is above the political process and whose position is filled by good old-fashioned hereditary right of succession. No matter how loathsome our politicians are – and the present governing batch led by mindless media-whore Justin Trudeau are about as loathsome as they get – we can always look to our Sovereign and say God Save the Queen!

The Watergate scandal cost the United States the leadership of the statesman who was, in my opinion, the best president they had in the last century and a half. What Nixon was forced to resign over was less than what one of the present candidates has already done while serving in the administration of the outgoing president as Secretary of State. Nixon, having inherited a quagmire in the Vietnam War in which thousands of American lives had been wasted through the incompetence of the previous administration, brought America’s involvement in this conflict to an end in a way that minimized the damage to her national honour. By contrast, the former Secretary of State now running for president, through her ill-conceived support for Islamic rebel movements throughout the Middle East, helped created ISIS which is presently engaged in a jihadist war of terror against the rest of the world and, blaming the problems of the region on the Russian, Syrian, and Iranian governments actively fighting ISIS, proposes to solve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria that she helped generate, by pursuing the same failed policies in a way that could lead to the kind of direct US-Russia confrontation that statesmen spent the entire Cold War trying to avoid.

Late last week, as Wikileaks released documents showing that this candidate said one thing to audiences of Wall Street financiers and another to the general public – and advocated the practice of the same duplicity – the Washington Post, the liberal newspaper that had broken the Watergate story and which supports the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to generate a Watergate sized scandal for her opponent Donald J. Trump. They released a videotape from 2005, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush, prior to an appearance by Trump on NBC's Access Hollywood which Bush was co-anchoring at the time, could be heard on a bus having a rather crude and vulgar chat about women.

That Donald Trump had engaged in such a crass conversation probably came as a genuine shock to no one. There was much feigned shock over it, with nobody expressing more faux outrage than Hillary Clinton, who is no stranger to gutter talk herself. Trump apologized for the remarks which he described as “locker room” talk an expression which has long been around for the kind of unguarded and often lewd conversation which often takes place between men in informal settings in which women are not present. Clinton, deliberately parsing the expression in an overly literal way, cited coaches and athletes who tweeted that they never heard talk like that in their locker rooms. Her cheerleaders in the mainstream media, including the contemptible Anderson Cooper of CNN who co-moderated the second presidential debate at Washington University, St. Louis, two days after the tape was released, attempted to twist Trump’s words into something worse than boasting and obscenity. It is apparent to anybody who is both honest and in possession of a brain that Trump’s boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything”, while utterly distasteful, was not a declaration of entitlement to commit sexual assault but a statement of the fact that the fame and wealth that come with celebrity attract women.

Other than distracting people from the Wikileaks revelations about Clinton, the heirs of Woodward and Bernstein clearly had two objectives in publishing this story. Evident in the timing of the story was their hope to rattle Trump just prior to the second debate. This objective failed. When the matter came up at the beginning of the debate Trump apologized, repeated that it was just locker room talk, and pointed out that while they were condemning him for his words, Bill Clinton had been accused by a number of women of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape. He had arranged a pre-debate press conference with several of these women. Also present – and more relevant – was Kathy Shelton, a woman who had been raped as a twelve year old. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer who defended her rapist by attacking her character and sanity and who in a taped interview laughed and gloated over her victory in the case even though she was aware her client was guilty. Trump was able to prevent the scandal from dominating a debate in which he was able to get his message across – the need to concentrate on fighting ISIS rather than the other governments fighting her, the failure of Obamacare, the need for “extreme vetting” of refugees, etc. – while hammering away at Clinton over her emails, foreign policy failures, and mendacity.

The other objective, and probably the main goal of the scandalmongers, was to divide the Republican Party. In this they were more successful. Indeed, as Paul Ryan, John McCain, and other establishment Republican figures were quick to distance themselves from the Trump campaign and condemn their party’s candidate it became difficult to tell which group displayed the greater hypocrisy. Was it the Clinton Democrats, who for years have promoted sex instruction classes and contraceptive handouts in schools, who more lately have taken to insisting that boys and girls be allowed to use each other’s bathrooms and showers, who have basically done everything they can to undermine traditional Christian morality, and whose numbers include some of the most dirty-minded and foul-mouthed comedians, actors, singers and other celebrities imaginable, but who are now all of a sudden discovering their inner Mrs. Grundys? Or was it the mainstream Republicans who, having had the opportunity in 1992 and again in 1996 to nominate a man of high moral calibre with all the patriotic policies on trade and immigration that have been attracting supporters to Trump, rejected him and now, finding the policies that their grassroots voters have demanded being championed by a reality television and beauty pageant host are pretending to be surprised to find that his private conversation resembles that of a popular entertainer rather than that of a monk?

It was Republican politicians, of course, like Ryan and McCain who danced to the tune the media played. We await the outcome of November 8th to discover whether the religious conservatives in the Republican Party’s voting base find Trump’s off colour conversation of a decade ago so offensive that they would be willing to allow Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States. While one’s words do indicate one’s character, and character is an important consideration in evaluating a would-be leader, it is to be hoped that America’s conservatives – and her voters in general – have enough sense to weigh the shortcomings in character revealed by Trump’s raunchy talk against the shortcomings revealed by Clinton’s lying about her mishandling of classified information, her shedding crocodile tears over the humanitarian crisis she helped create in Syria while attempting to pin the blame on Russia, her making billions of dollars worth of arms deals with governments that happen to be big donors to the Clinton Foundation despite being aware that they are sponsors of terrorism, and countless other such corrupt abuses of office that could be pointed to and realise that not only do Clinton’s shortcomings outweigh Trump’s, they also are more directly relevant to the question of what kind of a president she would be. This is to be hoped because Western civilization is presently facing the existential crisis Jean Raspail predicted in The Camp of the Saints and to meet that crisis needs a Donald Trump at the helm of the United States and not a Hillary Clinton.

Whatever happens, it is undeniable that the level of American politics has been brought to a new low by this election. In reality, of course, politics has always been dominated by the pursuit of sex, wealth, and power and those who in the tradition of lofty philosophical discourse on politics that began with Plato two and a half millennia ago envision a political society organized towards the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must look elsewhere than to the popularity contests we know as democratic elections. For which reason I will close with the thought on which I began – thankfulness, that here in Canada we still have a Head of State who is above this degrading process, and of whom we can say, no matter how horrible our politicians are, God Save the Queen!