On Owning the Left’s Abusive Labels

About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.”  They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action.  While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter.  A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact.  They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.”  If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.

 

A couple of months ago David Warren said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.”  He was absolutely right about that, as he usually is about most matters.  See his piece from last month entitled “Annals of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the sadly long defunct Idler on this silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not. 

 

By labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they said about the Campaign Life Coalition.  The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby.  By social conservative, I mean approaching issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known as Christendom.  While they address a range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their efforts, and that is abortion.  They would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group.  While I share their position I prefer the negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life.  Abortion is murder, as any person capable of sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter.  It is therefore a bad thing and the right thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it.  The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side in the capital punishment debate.  The right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty.  Admittedly, there are good practical reasons for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never be trusted with that power.  My point, however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered “far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty extreme standpoint.

 

The CAHN, like most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current leadership and the New Democrats.  When it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets.  They have opposed the introduction of any restrictions on abortion.  Three years ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example.  But no, the Left voted as a block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right” to be limited even to prevent discrimination.  Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who claim to oppose all discrimination. 

 

Let us return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the position of the Left in terms of life and death.  Almost thirty years ago Pope John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then, liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since.  Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of murder.  The return of the Liberals to power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician assisted suicide violated Charter rights.  The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously regarded as appropriate for it.  Even more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the medical treatment they were seeking.  The program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying.  If government programs had theme songs it would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning with M, M*A*S*H.  The theme song, the lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.”  From the standpoint of those who support and are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane, rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed appear to be “extreme.”

 

Again, Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by people like that.

 

The expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense.  It is derived from the concept of political thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the further left you are.  This is a concept that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole was identified  classical liberalism (individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state, socialism).  By this standard, the more of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is.  Indeed, in some presentations of this spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no state is the furthest position to the right.  Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism (Nazism).  National Socialism, however, was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the points contrasted was aligned with the left pole.  National Socialism was a European rather than a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left” had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum arose.  This is because they were taken, not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French Revolution.  Supporters of the Revolution were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right.  The “Right” therefore, in French political usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather than the Bourbons for example).  It was basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England.  National Socialism, which opposed the traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right” of classical liberal republicanism.  This is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American meanings of Right are to each other.  The expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity to it.

The Left’s determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point where they are incapable of extracting themselves today.  It makes no difference to the Left if those they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in nature.  Once again the labelling says more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation of that extreme position on race.

 

To understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of the racialism of the actual National Socialists.  He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.”  Idolatry is what happens when man turns away from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships and serves instead false gods of his own construction.  Through worshipping and serving these false gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32).  Christianity called mankind out of the darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9)  It is hardly a coincidence that National Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically (theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation.  This does not mean that race and nation, which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through them to devils.

 

The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was.  What it wishes to conceal is that the idols it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served.  Like the National Socialists they worship at the altar of race and nation.  There is a difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most part their own.  Moreover, they are actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations.  This is the true nature of what the Left calls anti-racism.  It is a worse form of this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists.  Implicit within the Commandment to honour our fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors.  The Second Greatest Commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves.  Neighbours means those in proximity to us, and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise.  From this it follows that the idolatry of the race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s own race and nation.  It can be safely predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes of Communism. 

 

To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.”  The call to do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary one, a call to turn back the clock.  The irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical European sense of Right.  The irony is due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language.  In neither American nor European usage does it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual and the less on the collective, including the collective of race.  In the classical European sense of the Right, political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation are invited and called to join.  The further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.

 

The classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for whom the principles of neither Right are sacred.  The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional continental form.  If holding this position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label.  My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.

 

If invocation of the saints were my regular practice, I could think of no better way of closing this essay than with "Colonel Sibthorp, pray for us."

The Conservative Party’s Capitulation in the Culture War

It is almost thirty years since the label “culture war” was first attached to the relentless onslaught of liberalism, the ideology that misleadingly took its name from an adjective used by the Romans to denote generosity and all that is worthy of free people, against the traditions, religion, and ancestral ethnic groups of the Christian civilization that succeeded the Graeco-Roman civilization of antiquity. In Canada, the Liberal Party had turned the Supreme Court into a weapon of offence in this war by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to our Constitution in 1982 and in 1988 that weapon was used to strike down all the laws against abortion in Canada, scoring a major victory for what Pope John Paul II would a few years thereafter call “the culture of death.” At the time, the Progressive Conservative Party was inclined to fight back against liberalism and in 1989 introduced Bill C-43, which would re-criminalize abortion while allowing it in instances where a mother’s life was in danger. The bill passed in the House of Commons, but died on its third reading in the Senate in 1991, when it received a tie-vote. The Tories, lamentably, did not press the issue further and today it would appear that the Conservative Party has raised the white flag in the culture war.

Last month, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals introduced Bill C-16, Rona Ambrose, the interim leader of the Conservative Party, declared that she would not oppose the bill. Several other Conservative MPs followed suit. Bill C-16 is the bill which will make it illegal to discriminate against transgender people, i.e., people who think that they are a sex other than the one they actually are. In practice, what this means is that public facilities designated for the use of one sex, including washrooms, change rooms, and showers, will be required by law to be open to people of the other sex who maintain that they think or feel that they are of the sex for which the facilities have been reserved. It also means that anyone who turns down someone who is in disagreement with their X and/or Y chromosomes as to what sex he/she/it is for a job, passes over for promotion, or fires that person, may face a charge of discrimination in which he will have to bear the impossible onus of somehow proving that he is not guilty of the crimethink of which he accused. If all that were not bad enough the bill will also make “hate speech” against transgender people into an offence punishable with up to two years in prison. Note that the words “hate speech” do not, as sane people might be tempted to think, merely refer to explicit incitement to violence but include the expression of thoughts that contradict what progressives have decided all enlightened people must believe. If ever there was a time for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to oppose something, this is it.

Yet, not only is the Conservative leader supporting this insane new bill but the party, in its national convention held later in the same month, voted by a very large margin to abandon its position that marriage is something that exists “between one man and one woman.” It also voted to change its policy on marijuana and to take the position that the possession of small amounts ought to be decriminalized. The latter is a much lesser matter than the former but we can see the same train of thought at work in both decisions. The Conservatives were trounced majorly by the Liberals in last fall’s election and are now reasoning that this was because the Liberal positions on same-sex “marriage” and marijuana were more popular than theirs and that this means they must change their positions in order to survive as a party. To reason this way seems to be a perennial temptation for Conservatives whenever they lose elections. As long as Conservatives keep succumbing to this temptation, liberalism will keep winning, and will keep moving further and further to the left, dragging the rest of us along with it. The Liberal Party already has a pair of doppelgangers in the NDP and Green Parties and it does not need another one in the Conservatives.

The idea that it was the Conservative Party’s right-wing positions on matters like marriage and election that cost them the last election is absurd when one considers that they had done next to nothing about these issues while they were in office for the last nine years, even in the four years in which they had a majority government. The Civil Marriage Act that created the legal fiction of same-sex “marriage” nation-wide – the courts had already done this at the provincial level through most of the country – was passed during the Liberal premiership of Paul Martin in 2005, the year before the Conservative took power. It was only in that first year that they attempted to re-open the issue, at a time when they had a minority government making it inevitable that the attempt would fail. Nor did they attempt to reintroduce restrictions on abortion – indeed, then Conservative leader Stephen Harper had declared that the abortion debate would not be reopened during his premiership. On the matter of doctor-assisted suicide, Steven Fletcher, at the time a Conservative MP, actually introduced legislation similar to the bill the Liberals are currently ramming through Parliament a year previously.

In other words, the Conservative Party had already basically surrendered in the culture war by the beginning of the Harper premiership. This surrender was even more complete when it comes to immigration and the issues surrounding it than with regards to abortion, same-sex “marriage”, euthanasia and the other issues that are conventionally categorized as “social.” In the late 1960s, during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals launched an aggressive assault against white Anglophone Canadians. Their weapons were mass immigration, the Canadian Human Rights Act, the public schools and the national news media. Under the pretence of making Canada’s immigration laws fair and race-neutral, which the Conservatives had already done during the premiership of John Diefenbaker in 1962 having a negligible effect on the composition of immigration, the Liberals changed that composition from being almost ninety per cent traditional European at the beginning of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership to being seventy per cent Third World by its end. In the Canadian Human Rights Act they made it a civilly liable offence to discriminate on the basis of race. On paper, this looks like it applies to everyone – whites cannot discriminate against blacks, blacks cannot discriminate against whites – but in practice it was only enforced against whites, and only intended to be enforced against whites. This anti-white bias is what the Liberals really mean whenever they say “protecting vulnerable minorities”. They turned the public schools into indoctrination camps to program people into thinking that racism, bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, and xenophobia – on the part of white people, that is - were all greater sins than Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust. The news media branded anyone who dared to publicly disagree with the Liberals on any of this as a Hitlerite even if, like the late Doug Collins, he was a man who actually fought against Hitler during the war. No subsequent government has dared to do anything about any of this, certainly not the thoroughly cucked Conservatives under Stephen Harper’s leadership.

While liberals claim open-mindedness and tolerance as their virtues, on all of these matters they have insisted every time they have scored a victory in the culture war that all discussion of the issue ought to be closed, and that people who disagree with them publically ought to be punished. Since Canadian liberalism has made it absolutely clear that it will accept no victory short of a Carthaginian peace in this culture war, the Conservatives, in the face of such an attitude, ought never to have ever contemplated surrender.

Having said that, I could have told you thirteen years ago that something like this would happen.

That was the year that the present Conservative Party was formed when the merger between the old Conservative Party and the right-populist Reform Party was completed. Theoretically this could have produced a superior party that would combine the best of both. From the original Conservative Party, formed in the year of Confederation and which under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald, Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, governed the country for nineteen of its first twenty-four years, it could have taken its royalism, patriotism, Anglophilia, and economic nationalism. To this it could have added the small town, rural common sense of the Reform Party, founded as a Western protest party in 1988, as well as its opposition to such things as bureaucratic overregulation, progressive social engineering, and socialist wealth redistribution. The social and cultural conservative defence of the Christian religion, its ethical teachings and its traditional and historical role in Canada, an element the two parties had in common, could have served as the glue to make such a union work.

I could not see this happening, however. The old Conservative Party was hardly recognizable as the party of Sir John A. MacDonald any more. Having foolishly added the adjective Progressive to its name in 1942, thus creating a self-contradicting title and a confused identity to go along with it, the party ousted in 1966, John Diefenbaker, a leader who was patriotically fighting for Canada’s traditional symbols such as the old flag against Liberals determined to replace them, and, back in power in the 1980s, abandoned its traditional anti-contintentalist economic nationalism and negotiated a free trade deal with the United States. After its one failed attempt to recriminalize abortion it gave up and it made the immigration problem, started by the Liberals, even worse by jacking the yearly target of immigrants to be accepted up through the roof. As for the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it was then called after an initial, incomplete, attempt at merging with the Conservatives, its capitalism was always more important to it than its social conservatism. By 2003 – indeed, long before then – capitalism had evolved from a relatively benign, small town, competitive market into a globalist economy controlled by multinational megacorporations who, as an examination of the list of those who have intervened legally against state governments south of the border that have sought to protect traditional marriage or even the freedom of conscience of traditional religious believers, will reveal, have joined forces with liberalism in the culture war. I predicted that the new party would join the worst elements of the two parties rather than the best, and that social conservatism would be the first thing on the chopping block. I decided it would not be worthwhile joining.

Unfortunately, since all the other parties in the House of Commons are completely and extremely liberal, the betrayal of the Conservatives leaves those of us who love this country and would like to pull it out of the abyss of cultural and moral insanity into which it has sunk without a voice in the federal legislative assembly.