Thanks for the Laugh Tucker, But No, His Majesty’s Free Canadian Subjects Do Not Need Your Type of “Liberation”

 As a madman who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, So is the man that deceiveth his neighbor, and saith, Am not I in sport? (Proverbs 26:18-19)

 

There was a dinner once, one of those formal affairs that people pay to attend and where they are forced to listen to a seemingly endless program of speeches.  At this one, the audience was about evenly divided between Canadians and Americans and they were intermixed among the various tables.   At the table where the speakers were sitting a debate broke out over concepts and styles of humour.   One speaker took the position that Canadians and Americans were indistinguishable in their senses of humour.   Another argued that Canadian humour was distinct from American humour. 

 

The debate continued through a couple of the formal speeches until the second debater, the one who contended for a distinction between Canadian and American humour, was on dock to speak next.   At this point he said that he would settle the matter.   “I’m up next”, he said.  “I bet you that I can separate the Canadians from the Americans in the room with a single joke.”

 

His interlocutor agreed to the bet and the speaker ahead of him concluded his speech.   “The ones who laugh are the Canadians” he said before going to the podium.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen” he said “I’m afraid I have some bad news.   The world will end at 7:30 tonight.   8:00 in Newfoundland”.

 

The preceding joke has, of course, been made largely obsolete by the demise of broadcast television and the explosion of new communications technology as well as by the waning number of Canadians who listen to or watch the CBC in any media format.   Today, the “8:00 in Newfoundland” joke would be more effective at distinguishing between older and younger generations of Canadians than distinguishing between Canadians and Americans.

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson maintains that we Canadians have no sense of humour and cannot take a joke.    Is he right?

 

The backstory to this begins with a remark he made towards the end of last month on “Tucker Carlson Today.”   This is the show he does on Fox Nation, the station’s streaming platform.  It has different content and a different format from “Tucker Carlson Tonight”,his weekday evening show on the station’s main cable/satellite platform.   He was joking with a guest about our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.    In this context, he brought up all the money the United States is wasting on the Ukraine and asked “Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau?   And I mean it”.

 

This came to the attention of Matthew Green, the Member representing Hamilton Centre in the House of Commons, who raised a motion on Tuesday, 26 January, calling upon the House to unanimously condemn Carlson’s remark.   Green and the party he represents, the socialist NDP, apparently took the Fox host’s remark as a serious proposal.   The motion did not receive the unanimous consent that was sought and was defeated.  

 

This prompted a response from Carlson on his show the following Wednesday.   “We don’t want to be too picayune or anything, but we did not suggest the armed forces liberate Canada” he said, either having forgotten his exact words or attempting to get the maximum mileage out of the distinction between a suggestion and a question.   Then, after a few remarks about everyone who cares about rights having fled Canada, Canada having become a dictatorship, the United States not liking dictatorships, and the like, he said that there is “so little going on in Canada, like civil liberties, that if you tell a joke about Canada, they go bonkers”.  

 

Green and his party, who have not let the matter drop but taken it from the floor of the House of Commons to their webpage where they are asking people to sign an online petition telling Tucker Carlson that his “hate” isn’t welcome in Canada, have responded very foolishly.   Even though he said “And I mean it” the overall laughing, flippant, tone of the conversation rather contradicted these words which he seems to have used much in the same manner in which teenagers, college students, progressive activists and other empty-headed twits use the word “literally”, i.e., as a sort of emphatic punctuation rather than with its actual meaning.   Carlson was joking.   It was an extremely tasteless joke.   Jokes about invading someone else’s country belong in the same category as jokes about murdering someone else’s children or raping his wife.   It is best not to bestow dignity upon such by acknowledging them, much less making an issue out of them in the halls of Parliament.  

 

Everything I just said applies to the joke that Tucker Carlson told intentionally.   There is another joke in his words, one which I rather suspect he told unwittingly.   It is a much better joke.

 

It is a joke to think of the United States “liberating” another country.    From the moment they staged their Revolution in the Eighteenth Century the Americans have been talking incessantly about “freedom” and “liberating” people.  All this is and all it has ever been is enough hot air to float a fleet of Chinese spy balloons.  The Americans fought their Revolution to “free” themselves from the most liberal government in the world at the time.   That’s liberal in the older and better sense of the word which referred to the belief that government power needed to be restrained and limited to protect the personal rights and freedoms of the governed.  The American revolutionaries falsely accused the British government of tyrannizing them despite that government’s having taken a largely laissez-faire approach to them, because it would not let them forcibly convert the French Roman Catholics of Quebec to English-speaking Protestantism and would not let them go into Indian territory and take it by force.   When, about thirty years after their Revolution the Americans did indeed try to “liberate” Canada they found that the Canadians correctly understood their “liberation” to mean “conquest” and preferred to remain in the British Empire.   The Canadians fought alongside the British army and successfully repelled the American invaders.    In this period, between the Americans having attained independence from the British Empire in the eighteenth century and British North America’s Confederation into the Dominion of Canada in the late nineteenth century, we who remained in the British Empire generally enjoyed greater freedom, less regulation, and more decentralized governance than the Americans did under their new federal republic.

 

Before proceeding to comment on the United States’ next big “liberation” project I would like to expand upon the last sentence of the last paragraph by saying with regards to the relative freedom of Canada and the United States that the nineteenth century was not the last time in which the case could be made for Canada being the freer of the two countries.   It made news last month when the Frazer Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the United States released the 2022 edition of the Human Freedom Index and Canada was in thirteenth place – a drop from her previous spot of sixth, and the first time since 2012 that Canada has fallen below the top ten.   In the 2022 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom  Canada ranks lower yet, at fifteenth place.   Undoubtedly the present Liberal government has contributed significantly to the decline in Canadian freedom – the compilers of the Human Freedom Index say that a large part of this was due to Canada’s harsh pandemic measures and while provincial governments, mostly Conservative, contributed to this, the main push for lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates came from the Dominion government.   Note, however, where the United States stands on both of these Indexes.   She is twenty-third on the Human Freedom Index and twenty-fifth on the Index of Economic Freedom.   In other words on both she is ten spots below Canada.   If we switch from discussing freedom in general terms to specific freedoms examples of freedoms that seem to have stronger constitutional protection in the United States than in Canada can be found.   Among fundamental freedoms, freedom of speech is the example that stands out and among auxiliary freedoms, the freedom to own and carry arms.   This, however, merely makes the rankings in these indexes that deal with freedom in more general terms all the more striking. These relative rankings are not an anomaly of the 2022 editions.  Nor can they be explained by pro-Trudeau bias.   The Cato Institute and Frazer Institute are libertarian think tanks and the Index of Economic Freedom is published by the Heritage Foundation – the foremost American conservative think tank. If there is any bias it would be in the opposite direction.   Undoubtedly such facts will cause some sort of mental breakdown among those incapable of distinguishing between talking the most and the loudest about freedom on the one hand and actually possessing and practicing it on the other.    

 

After failing to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, the next big “liberation” project undertaken by the United States followed upon the organization of the Republican Party in 1854 and the first election of a nominee of that party to the office of President of the United States in 1860.   Thirteen states found Abraham Lincoln to be such an insufferable ass that upon his election they decided to exercise the right of secession which the founders of their republic had written into their constitution after the original thirteen colonies had illegally seceded from the British Empire.   The breakaway states formed their own federal republic, the Confederate States of America, which the United States promptly invaded and conquered, employing brutal scorched earth tactics in what remains the bloodiest war in their history.    The states that wanted to secede were subjugated and those that had remained in the Union found themselves, alongside the conquered South, now saddled with a federal government that was exponentially more centralized, more powerful, and more intrusive than it had been before.   Naturally, the American government spun this as a war of “liberation” or, to use the synonym that was in vogue at the time, “emancipation”, i.e., of the slaves, and to be sure, after the war they passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing most types of slavery.   It is interesting, however, how that in his first Inaugural Address Lincoln had promised to do the exact opposite of that if the seceding states returned to the Union, whereas the Confederates had offered to abolish slavery if the United States would let them leave.   One might be tempted to think that the abolition of slavery, the accomplishment of which, oddly enough, required a deadly internecine war nowhere other than in the United States, was merely a pretext and that the true purpose of the war was to concentrate the political power that had previously been diffused through the American states in the American federal government in Washington D. C.

 

When the United States decided to enter World War I on the side of Great Britain, France and the other Allies their president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, sold it to Congress as a war to “make the world safe for democracy”.   Since such idealistic romantic drivel had nothing to do with the war as it had been fought  up to that point Wilson had to give the war a makeover and inserted into the conditions for peace at the end of the war that the German and Austrian emperors abdicate their thrones and these countries become republics.   This boneheaded blunder created the vacuum that two decades later was exploited by a man who consolidated both republics into one, made himself dictator, and set out to conquer Europe.   Once again Britain and the Commonwealth and France went to war with Germany and once again the United States joined us after her morally handicapped president figured out a way of maneuvering Japan into bombing his own country.   The Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day and for once the United States took part in an invasion that actually was a liberation as the Allies drove the Nazi occupiers out of Western Europe.   Eastern Europe did not fare so well.   There it was the Soviet Union that drove the Wehrmacht back to Germany but rather than liberate these countries it enslaved them to Communism.   This was an outcome that the other Allies did not want but was forced upon them by American president Franklin Roosevelt, the bitch to Joseph Stalin’s butch.  

 

At the end of the Second World War, therefore, the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe up to and including East Germany.    Soon thereafter the Chinese Civil War would start up again and the Chinese Communists, whom the Americans had insisted must be part of any Chinese government that wished to have good relations with the United States, drove their main rivals the Chinese Nationalists off the mainland which they then turned into the People’s Republic of China.       The Americans had brought the Second World War to an end with the unconscionable act of actually using the new weapon of mass destruction they had invented in the Manhattan Project to kill thousands of civilians in a country that had been trying to negotiate peace terms for a year.   By the end of the decade the Soviets had obtained this technology and the nuclear arms race was on.   In the Cold War, the United States, now the leading power in the West, maintained military bases in Western Europe and a nuclear arsenal to deter invasion from the Communist bloc.   The nuclear arms race, however, meant that if the USA and the USSR were to directly attack each other both would end up destroyed and the whole world along with them.   Therefore, while the Soviets and Americans both sponsored revolutionary groups that sought to take over the governments of third party countries – and each described the goal of the groups they sponsored as “liberation” – neither was willing to risk the direct confrontation that would bring about Mutually Assured Destruction.  Accordingly, military ventures in which the United States came to the assistance of someone fighting against actual Communist forces, such as the Vietnam War tended to end in failure or at best stalemate as in Korea.   At the same time they used the Cold War as a pretext to overthrow the governments of several countries – Guatemala in 1954 for example – for reasons of their own that had nothing to do with Communism.  The countries they so “liberated” were hardly better off for it  

 

This last item, that the United States used the Cold War as a pretext to “liberate”, i.e., overthrow the governments of several countries for reasons that had nothing to do with containing or rolling back the spread of Soviet Communism, is the germ of truth in the interpretation of the Cold War popular with leftists of the Noam Chomsky variety.   Otherwise, this interpretation which treats the Soviet threat itself as having been non-existent, a fiction devised to cloak American capitalist imperialism, is wrong and laughably so.     Just as laughable, however, was the idea of the United States as the great protector of the free world against Soviet tyranny.  In many ways this is comparable to a mob protection racket.   You know how these work.   The mob boss sends some of the boys over to a local business where they say “real nice place you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” and collect a payoff from the business owner for protection from themselves.  The Communist threat was real alright, but it came with a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.    I pointed out earlier how the United States’ having demanded the abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies created the vacuum that enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.  While the American government did not have the opportunity of overthrowing the Russian Tsar in the way she drove the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties from their thrones since Tsarist Russia was on the side of the Allies, her Wall Street bankers financed the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Orthodox Tsarist Russia and her Empire into the Communist, atheist, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the knowledge and approval of Woodrow Wilson.   As hard as it is for those raised in the Cold War with its dualistic mythos of the capitalist United States as the champion of light and freedom against the Communist Soviet Union the avatar of darkness and bondage to wrap their heads around the fact in the first half of the Twentieth Century right up to the start of the Cold War the attitude of the American government and indeed the American establishment in general towards the Bolsheviks and their regime was adulatory and supportive.   The Americans of that era saw the Bolsheviks as being brothers-in-arms in the common cause of Modern progress.   The difference between the Communist economic system and their own was less important to such Americans than their similarities.   Both the American and the Bolshevik regimes had been born out of revolution.   The Americans had rebelled against their king and established a federal republic, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Tsar and his family and established a federation of republics.   The Americans in their Bill of Rights had prohibited church establishment in their First Amendment, the Bolsheviks declared Soviet Russia to be officially atheist and sought to eradicate the church.   The Bolshevik approach was more murderous than the American, but both saw monarchy and the established church as that from which people needed to be liberated.   Both saw revolution as the means of liberation.   Both had a linear progressive or Whig view of history as moving from a dark past to a bright, shining, future and both had a materialistic faith in man’s ability to solve his problems through science and technology.   The United States was one of the first, if not the first, Western country to enact most of the planks of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.   For example, the second and fifth planks (“a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”) were implemented in the United States in 1913, the year before World War I broke out (1).   FDR’s fawning and obsequious behavour towards the worst of the Soviet dictators was not just some sick idiosyncrasy of his own, it was this earlier, positive, American attitude towards Bolshevism taken to its extreme.   While Americans quickly learned the true nature of the Soviet regime with the onset of the Cold War elements of the earlier attitude persisted until 1959 when the Americans helped put Fidel Castro into power in Cuba.   This too they thought of as an act of “liberation”.

 

When it comes to freedom or liberty, Americanism is largely zeal without knowledge.   The idea of revolution as the means of liberation is nonsense to anyone familiar with the history of revolutions the outcome of which is generally tyranny.  A stable and secure civil order is the prerequisite of freedom.  Revolutions are by their very nature inimical to stability and security which furthermore are the properties of long established institutions not of newly minted ones.  The new regime that emerges from a revolution has seized power, but has not attained authority and so must rely upon naked power to govern.   The very word tyranny itself originally spoke of usurpation, an ancient testimony to the fact that power that is seized is power that is abused.   The equation of freedom with democracy or the republican form of government is also nonsense.   Every dictator in the history of the world has come to power by claiming to speak for the people as their voice and champion and the most brutal dictators have been those with the masses behind them.   Every Communist state has been republican in form as was Nazi Germany.  With only a couple of exceptions the freest countries of the last century and indeed all of history have had parliamentary governments under reigning monarchs.   This is hardly surprising given what we just stated about a stable and secure civil order being the prerequisite of freedom and stability and security being traits that come with long establishment.   Monarchy is the most ancient and stable of government institutions.   Our American friends and neighbours are quite ass-backwards on all this.

 

Tucker Carlson appears to think that Canada has become a dictatorship under the premiership of Captain Airhead.   Is he right?

 

Captain Airhead certainly has a dictatorial mindset.   This was evident in the way he led his own party before he became Prime Minister and it has been evident in the way he has governed Canada since.   It was most on display in his response to the Freedom Convoy last year.   Rather than meet with and speak to those who were loudly but peacefully protesting his vaccine mandates he became the first Prime Minister in the Dominion’s history to invoke the Emergencies Act.   His father had been widely thought to have acted dictatorially in 1970 when he invoked the War Measures Act to deal with terrorists who were kidnapping and murdering people.    Captain Airhead invoked the successor legislation to the War Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest and moreover did so when the only aspect of the protest that was anything more than a nuisance to other Canadians, the partial blocking of traffic on important trade routes, had already been dealt with by local law enforcement without the use of emergency powers.   This was clearly the act of a Prime Minister who had lost whatever respect he may ever have had for the limits that tradition, constitutional law, or even common decency place on the powers of his office.   He froze the bank accounts of ordinary Canadians who were fed up with draconian pandemic measures and had donated a few dollars to the protest against such, he sent armed and mounted policemen in to thuggishly brutalize the protestors, and threw the protest’s organizers in prison.   Then, nine days after it was invoked he rescinded it.  However much he might think and act like a dictator, Canada’s constitution still works sufficiently to prevent him from actually being one.  After the Prime Minister declares a public order emergency both chambers of Parliament have to confirm the invoking of the Emergencies Act.   Captain Airhead was able to obtain such confirmation from the House of Commons when he and the leader of the socialist party shut down debate and whipped their caucuses into voting for it.   The Senate, however, was not about to rubber stamp the Emergencies Act.  They debated it vigorously and it would seem that it was because he did not have enough votes in the Senate to obtain confirmation that the Prime Minister revoked the Act and voluntarily gave up his emergency powers rather than face the humiliation of being stripped of them by the chamber of sober second thought.   Another aspect of our constitution that likely contributed to the revoking of the Act is the fact that Canada is a federation.   The Prime Minister had consulted with the provincial premiers before invoking the Emergencies Act, had received the general response that it was a bad idea, and a few days before he revoked it a couple of provincial governments announced that they would be filing legal challenges to it.

 

Could this sort of thing ever happen in the United States?

 

The year before the Freedom Convoy was the year in which the United States swore in a new president, Mr. Magoo.   To secure his inauguration, they sent in thousands of National Guardsmen and other armed forces and turned Washington DC into a military occupied zone.   Rather poor imagery for a country that boasts of its peaceful transfers of power but this was deemed necessary because of an incident that had taken place two weeks prior on the Feast of Epiphany.  That was the day that the American Congress was scheduled to meet to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   These were highly irregular results to say the least.  The incumbent, even though he increased his vote count from the previous election and carried almost all the bellwether states and countries, ordinarily near infallible predictors of an incumbent victory, apparently lost to Mr. Magoo, who’s having been nominated by his own party was somewhat difficult to explain given how poorly he had done in the primaries.   At any rate, the incumbent, Donald the Orange, believed he had good cause to suspect foul play.   As Congress convened on Epiphany, he held a massive rally of his supporters and aired his grievances.  The rally concluded with a protest march, and a portion of the protestors broke away from the main group and entered the Capitol.   This was declared to be an “insurrection”, “storming of the Capitol”, “coup”, “occupation” and “attack” and the powers that be in America continue to insist upon the use of this language although the facts don’t seem to warrant it.   It is a strange sort of insurrection whose participants feel no need to arm themselves to the teeth and mostly just walk around in weird costumes and take selfies.   In the fighting that broke out as the police went in to clear and secure the Capitol there were several injuries on both sides but the protestors clearly got the worst of it.   One of them was shot by the police.

 

Captain Airhead and his cabinet in framing their response to the Freedom Convoy were obviously seeking to evoke the image of what had occurred in Washington DC on the previous year’s Epiphany.   In both countries these events were followed up by public inquiries.   Note the difference, however.   In the Dominion of Canada, the focus of the public inquiry was the government’s response to the Freedom Convoy protest, her use of the Emergencies Act, and the question of whether or not it was justified under the terms of the Act itself.   The cabinet, including the Prime Minister himself, were essentially put on trial, held account for their actions, and subjected to grilling cross-examination.   In the American republic, the focus of the ongoing inquiry by the US House Select Committee has been on Mr. Magoo’s predecessor whom they are desperately trying to blame and prosecute for the “insurrection”.

 

So thank you for the laugh, Tucker, but no, we are far better off and far more free as subjects of His Majesty Charles III here in the Dominion of Canada, even with that dimwitted moron Captain Airhead as Prime Minister, than we would be “liberated” by your republic.   Let us worry about Captain Airhead.   You have enough problems of your own with Mr. Magoo.

 

 

(1)  Canada, by contrast, introduced the income tax at the end of the War as a measure to pay for it.   The income tax here never got as heavy and progressive as it got in the United States from the 1940s to the early 1960s.   From 1944 to 1963 the top American income tax rate never dropped below 90%.   It never made it that high here in Canada.   The Bank of Canada was chartered in 1934, twenty one years after the United States passed the Federal Reserve Act.

Neo-Manichaeism, Technological “Progress” and the Ethics of War

 

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”  -  Robert E. Lee

 

Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation.   Further suppose that immediately after doing so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.

 

In all likelihood what you would get, would not be insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic denunciation of the man who said it.    It would begin with the small handful in the room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty, administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about  just what a horrible person you had just quoted.   You would be told that you should not have quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.   

 

Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.

 

Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about something else entirely.    The similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.    

 

Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war.   The first clause can be taken as support for the assertion that war is an evil.   This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical one.   It would be the latter if the indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the same thing as “evil”.  Evil, sans article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun.   If used as the former it expresses an ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied.   If used as the latter, it expresses the idea of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is damaged.   When used with the indefinite article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who experience it and its consequences.   Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense.   In this sense, saying that war is an evil is stating the obvious.   

 

For the purposes of this essay the most important thing about the general’s saying is when he said it.   I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just the war.

 

Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern war or the first modern war?

 

If you ask historians that question you will find that they are divided on the answer.   If it is not obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of warfare not of the age in which a war took place.   1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the question with the chronological sense of the term in mind.   The case for the war being the first modern war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and means of communication and transportation than previous wars.   The case against it rests upon the even greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.

 

Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.    Now think about what that means with regards to the quotation.    If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a continent away?

 

Twentieth century technological development by making war so much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary than before.   Ethics is serious thought and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards to their rightness and wrongness.   Every aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare.   These are the questions expressed in Latin by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively.   Perversely, at the same time that the development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.

 

Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of good and evil.   Not the metaphysical and theological question of good and evil.   It is an ontological question – an ontological question, not the ontological question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity.  It is the question of who the good guys and who the bad guys are.   Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are the good guys.  Again, the way this question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics.   The good guys are not judged to be the good guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions.   The good guys are the good guys because that is who they are.   The bad guys are the bad guys because that is who they are.   Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with X.    Of course you are.   You are the good guy, X is the bad guy, therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong to go to war with you or anyone else.   Similarly, you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct war with X.   Since he is the bad guy, you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.

 

The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War.    Think about the terms in which Saddam Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003.   Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to 1999.   Or the Taliban in 2001.   Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but especially at the present moment.   It was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance.   In each case the foe was depicted as an avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile – of evil.   Only so could we justify to ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them.   The same sort of thinking was evident in the rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.   Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II, at least after the Americans joined.  

 

World War II seems to be where it all began.   Germany at the time was under the control of a man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in the fifth paragraph of this essay.   This made it easier for our leaders to paint him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as Hitler.    The fact that this depiction of our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat, itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War to the next.   Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon after the war ended.   By contrast, to this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life in general in North America.    The contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful.   Even more to the point, however, was the fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional surrender”.   From a strategic point of view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses.   From the ethical point of view that concerns us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah complex saw it.   How Sir Winston was able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. 

 

In one last detail of the Second World War we find the technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one.   By the end of the war the Americans had found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT.   Then they used two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945.   The death toll, almost entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand.   To date this is the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.   While some continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had they not been used, this is utter nonsense.   After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones they were eventually granted.   Had Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders (see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after Hoover’s death).

 

Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion, evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the “good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?

 

Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute.   Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research.   It might be worth noting, in this context, the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”.  Modern science had placed mankind on a course that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in war.   Therefore those intent on using them had to replace the latter with something else.  

 

Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied to all subsequent conflicts.  Adolf Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist.   In traditional Christian eschatology, however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan.   In traditional Christian eschatology there is only one Antichrist, capital A.   His defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ.   The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was, was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly.   Yet every foe we have fought since him has been depicted as the “new Hitler”.   Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?

 

Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”, these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated it.    Think about the predictable response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The woke look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the “good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race.   This was certainly not how the war was viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the Union side.   Nor is this how the conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that war.  That the woke who spend so much of their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.

 

How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of the ancients!   Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC, is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.   The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that resulted in the total destruction of the city.   Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero.  The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek.   Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan, Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted.   The individual that he most consistently depicts as admirable in his Iliad, however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started the conflict in the first place.   Hector is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to emulate.   By contrast Achilles, the protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke from the gods.   Homer shows him at his best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial.    Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history.   Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century, a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta than his own city.  So was Xenophon, the friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the history where Thucydides left off.   The Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does.   The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry, cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although ultimately failing to take Rome herself.   Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.  When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to Rome.   Yet even he is not depicted by Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.

 

Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to the above.   While it is true that the Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not the fundamental nature of their being.   This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment.   In their initial conquest of the Promised Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific sins of those nations.   Pretty much everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and similarly wipe them out.   It was not merely a matter of punishing sin.   God did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice, and the other abominations of Canaan.   They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer, repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry them away out of the land as well.   There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.  

 

When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to minimize the death and destruction it causes.   It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.

 

It is difficult to think of anything that more completely puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this.   What we call “advancement” and “progress” in the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it.   When wars were fought with swords you had to kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword.   The fighting therefore was much more fair in the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable.   Fighting in such a war was a way to test and prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of war.   If the terribleness of war from the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed evil.   When guns were introduced men could kill their enemies from a distance.   There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could shoot faster – and courage involved.   It was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially thousands of people he kills by the press of a button.   That is the generic “he” by the way.   I have seen those who regard this as “progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing buttons as men.    That puts a whole new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.    

 

By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to non-combatants.  These are sometimes still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a joke.   Paradoxically, the very thing that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more necessary that we do so.   This means that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards.   We cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that has prevailed since World War II.   The sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.

 

 

Lysenko's Spirit

Modern man frequently slanders his ancestors by accusing those who lived in the countless generations prior to Modernity of ignorance and superstition.    If called upon to give account for this defamation he will argue that the men of previous generations did not share his knowledge of and appreciation for science.    While it is certainly true that the men of the past did not place science in as high a rank on their hierarchy of epistemic value as Modern man does this does not necessarily justify the latter’s impiety towards his forbears.   It could alternately and just as easily be interpreted as meaning that Modern man has placed too much value on science, so much so that he has in fact fetishized it and rendered it the object of a new superstition.  

 

It is indeed this writer’s judgement that Modern man has fetishized science and created a new superstition around it.    While this can be said about Modern man in general it is not the general phenomenon that is of interest for the purposes of this essay but the more specific manifestation that occurs when the Modern attitude of wedding the exaltation of science as the path forward into a better future to the dismissal or even condemnation of traditional religion as holding man captive to the past, is taken to its extreme.    When this happens, those who put science in the place of highest honour and loudly proclaim their faith in and allegiance to science, inevitably speak of science in such a way as to attribute to it the qualities that are the opposite of those which make it valuable to more reasonable people.   Moreover, their “science” at best fails to achieve as impressive results as that of others and at worst produces results that are highly negative and undesirable.

 

The classic example of this can be found in the career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.     For the account that follows I have relied upon Valery N. Soyfer’s Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, originally published in samizdat format in Russian, translated into English by Leo and Rebecca Gruliow and published by Rutgers University Press in 1994.  

 

Lysenko, the eldest son in a family of Ukrainian peasant farmers, was born in Karlovka in the province of Poltava in 1898.  In his youth he developed the ambition to make a name for himself as a scientist in the fields of horticulture and agronomy, an admirable goal as genuine achievement in these fields would have greatly benefited his family and the people of his village and province.   In 1917 his second application to the Uman School of Horticulture was accepted and he graduated from this school in 1921.   The following year he entered the Kiev Agricultural Institute as a correspondence student and graduated with a degree in agronomy in 1925.   He was then offered the position of junior specialist at an agricultural experimental station in Ganja, Azerbaijan.   

 

It was while working in this position that three things happened that would start him on his path to the top of the Soviet agricultural sciences.   The first of these was that Pravda, the Soviet propaganda rag, ran a puff piece on him.   He was barely out of school yet at the time and had not accomplished much but as a scientific researcher from a poor background he fit the image the Communist paper was looking for to a tee.  

 

The second was that right around the time the Pravda piece appeared he began the research that his legitimate scientific reputation, to the extent that he actually had one, was built upon.   There are some plant types that require winter to trigger the stage of maturation where they flower and produce fruit.   In the case of winter cereals such as winter wheat these have the potential to produce greater yields than their spring counterparts but also carry a greater risk of crop failure due to adverse weather conditions. In the nineteenth century horticulturalists began to discuss the possibility of using artificial cold temperatures to induce these plants to mature early.   With winter wheat, the hope was that if unplanted seed were treated in this way they could be planted in spring and yield a crop in a much shorter time than if they were planted in the fall as usual.   Lysenko’s experiments confirmed that this was possible although he grossly exaggerated his accomplishment, falsified evidence to support the exaggeration, and spun a vast web of pseudoscientific theory out of it.   He gave the procedure both the Russian name of яровизация (yarovizatsiya) and the English name vernalization.   The naming of the procedure was, perhaps, his truest accomplishment.

 

The third thing that happened was that Lysenko came to the attention of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, then Russia’s leading agronomist and the director of ВАСХНИЛ (VASKhNIL), the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which oversaw the experimental station for which Lysenko was working.   Vavilov was impressed by Lysenko and his work with vernalization and undertook to promote him and his career by arranging for him to be invited to and to address important scientific conferences.    This would be Vavilov’s own undoing as we shall see.

 

To understand what comes next in this story some historical context is necessary.    The same year that Lysenko had been accepted into the Uman School of Horticulture, a number of mutinous military units dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the First World War joined with seditious liberals within the Duma (the Russian Parliament) in forcing Tsar Nicholas II of the House of Romanov, the legitimate monarch of Russia, to abdicate.      They attempted to fill the vacuum they thus created with a weak, liberal, republic which was unable to prevent the return of the revolutionary terrorist V. I. Lenin from his exile in Switzerland.    Lenin resumed command of the Bolsheviks, the faction of the larger Marxist movement that had been spawned by his teachings fourteen years previously.   While the Bolsheviks expressed their goals in ideological terms drawn from Lenin's interpretation of Karl Marx's economic and social doctrines of Karl Marx, their actions were primarily motivated by their religious and in many cases racial hatred of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian people, and the Tsar who was protector of the former and father of the latter.   They seized control of Russia in a coup in October of 1917 and then fought a six and a half year Civil War against a coalition of various forces that opposed Russia's succumbing to Bolshevik tyranny.    Unfortunately for Russia, the Red Army eventually defeated the White Army, and the triumphant Bolsheviks reorganized the Russian Empire into the totalitarian terror-state the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  They set out to remake Russia, socially and economically, into the "workers' paradise" of Communist ideological fantasy.   Apart from the Potemkin villages shown to gullible and foolish Western liberal journalists and emissaries, however, the "workers' paradise" more closely resembled a "workers' inferno".   The rapid industrialization of an agricultural economy was carried out through brutal, police state, tactics, which left the Russian labour force in a condition that deserved the label slavery which Communists hurled against the condition of factory workers in capitalist countries far more than that latter condition did. The forced collectivization of the farms generated huge food shortages and millions died of starvation.   While the first steps towards this economic and social transformation of Russia were taken by Lenin, it was his successor Joseph Stalin who presided over it for the most part.   Stalin was a despicable despot who made Adolf Hitler look like a third-rate petty amateur by comparison, as even the Russian Communists admitted shortly after his death condemning his long dictatorship as the "cult of personality".   Faced with the fact that the collectivization of Russian agriculture had produced misery, famine, and starvation rather than the plenty for all it had promised, Stalin was confronted with a choice.   He could admit that Communism doesn't work and disavow the ideological foundation of his own dictatorship.   Or he could find a scapegoat.   The problem for him was that he had already used up Lenin's scapegoat, the kulak class of peasants, during his first Five Year Plan when he confiscated all their property and sent the ones he didn't murder into the GULAG forced labour camps or Siberia.   The Five Year Plan ended, Soviet agriculture was still a mess, and now he needed a new scapegoat.

 

Then Stalin and Lysenko found each other.

 

In February of 1935, an agricultural conference was held in the Kremlin with Stalin himself in attendance.   Lysenko, addressing the assembled scientists and government officials, discussed his work with vernalization, both what had been accomplished and what had yet to be done.   Part way through his speech, however, he began denouncing other scientists:

 

You see, comrades, saboteur-kulaks are found not only in your kolkhoz [collective farm] life…They are no less dangerous, no less accursed, in science.   A great deal of mortification has had to be endured in defending vernalization in all kids of battles with so-called scientists…Comrades, was there—and is there—really no class struggle on the vernalization front?... 

Indeed there was…Instead of helping the collective farmers, they sabotaged things.  Both within the scientific world and outside it, a class enemy is always an enemy, even if a scientist.

So, comrades, that is how we carried out this work.   The kolkhoz system pulled it through.   The kolkhozes have pulled through and are pulling it through on the basis of the sole scientific methodology, the one and only scientific guiding principles, which Comrade Stalin teaches us daily.

 

These words earned him a standing ovation from Stalin who leaped to his feet, clapped, and yelled “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!” which, of course, meant that everyone else present had to begin applauding this disgusting display of stabbing one’s colleagues in the back.   It is no wonder Stalin was pleased.   Not only did Lysenko give him the scapegoat he was looking for in these supposed saboteur scientists, but he showed himself to be a man after Stalin’s own heart and cut from his own cloth.   His path to power had been strewn with the corpses of betrayed comrades and the year after this speech the Moscow Show Trials, in which Stalin would consolidate his power by levelling capital charges against his rivals and opponents within the Communist Party under the Soviet Union’s notorious Article 58 began.   He was also undoubtedly pleased to hear the nonsense about his teachings being the only true principles guiding scientific methodology.  

 

This speech ensured Lysenko’s rise to the top of his profession because Stalin became his patron and protector.   It also placed those among his colleagues who had started to notice that Lysenko’s claims for his work in vernalization were exaggerated and that his promises of exponential yield growth far exceeded his delivery and who were starting to question his methodology and the legitimacy of some of his results on notice to watch their step.   Geneticists in particular had cause to be afraid.   After his initial work on vernalization had earned him acclaim, Lysenko had made increasingly fanciful claims for the process.   Around the time that he gave the speech that brought him to Stalin’s notice he had begun claiming that wheat seeds from the plants grown from vernalized seed would retain the vernalization.   His geneticist critics noted that this was a reversion to the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, widely associated with the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which had gone out of favour among serious biologists in the early twentieth century with the rediscovery of the findings of Gregor Mendel, first published in 1866.    Lysenko went on the offensive against the geneticists.   He condemned them as “Mendelists” and “Weismannists” after August Weismann, the author of germ plasm theory a precursor to genetics.   His favourite epithet for them was “Morganists” after Thomas Hunt Morgan, the American Nobel-prize winner who was the most prominent geneticist in the world at the time and a particular object of Lysenko’s scorn and envy.   His use of these labels was entirely pejorative and had little to do with the actual ideas and accomplishments of these men.   He used the terms the way contemporary leftists use the words “reactionary”, “fascist”, “imperialist” and “racist” and, indeed, he used this latter set of epithets interchangeably with the former.   He portrayed the geneticists as the “class enemies” and “saboteurs” of which he had spoken in his address before Stalin.   See Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959) by Conway Zirkle, who had ten years previously published a monograph specifically on the Lysenkoist persecution of the Russian geneticists, for the case that Lysenko’s neo-Lamarckian biology can be traced back to roots in the writings of the founders of Communism.

 

The ultimate test of any practical science is its results.   While Lysenko constantly promised that his work would bring about greater, more abundant, harvests so that the USSR would be able to easily feed her people and, more importantly to his political masters, would pull ahead of the United States in food production, he not only constantly failed to deliver, but his techniques, which after 1935 would increasingly be imposed upon all of Soviet agriculture, produced crop failure after crop failure.   By contrast, in the non-Communist world, those engaged in the very research Lysenko demonized in Russia, were successfully providing their countries with results similar to what Lysenko was promising by applying the findings of genetics to hybridization.  Nevertheless, Lysenko had hit upon a formula that was successful in terms of appealing to the Communist minds that ruled Soviet Russia.   By declaring his pseudoscientific quackery to be “progressive” and “revolutionary” and the like and his opponents’ theories to be “fascist” and “reactionary” he was able to declare his theories and methods to be the one true science and the path to a golden future without any concrete and verifiable results and to blame all of his failures on his opponents.

 

Newly empowered by Stalin’s patronage, Lysenko committed the sin which in Dante’s Inferno damns one to the lowest circle of hell with Lucifer, Brutus, Judas, and Cassius, the sin of betraying one’s benefactor.   He turned on Nikolai Vavilov, and while the latter’s established reputation was not such as could be overturned in one night, eventually Lysenko’s accusations destroyed the man.   He was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to death in 1941.   While his friends were able to obtain a commutation of the sentence of twenty years in prison, he died in 1943 from conditions brought upon by his imprisonment.

 

After the Second World War ended but food shortages continued, several Soviet scientists, including Stalin’s son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov, felt emboldened to criticize Lysenko who had become the director of VASKhNIL and thus the top agricultural scientist in the Soviet Union in 1938.   Appealing directly to Stalin, Lysenko obtained the authority to crush his opponents completely.    In 1948, in the notorious “August Session”, a weeklong conference of VASKhNIL which Lysenko opened with an address the draft manuscript of which bears comments and corrections in Stalin’s own handwriting, the entire field of genetics was condemned as “bourgeois pseudoscience” and “Michurinism” (1) as Lysenko and his followers dubbed their own theories was declared to be the “only correct” view.   Yuri Zhdanov, seeing the handwriting on the wall, wrote a letter of recantation to his father-in-law which was published in Pravda on the last day of the session.   That day other defenders of genetics gave speeches renouncing their criticism of Lysenko.   The session concluded with genetics being formally banned in the Soviet Union by the Central Party Committee a mere five years before James Watson and Francis Crick published their double-helix model of the DNA structure of the chromosome in Nature.   Geneticists were forced to renounce their field.   Those who didn’t, and even some who did but were deemed to be insufficiently punished thereby, were expelled from the institutions of Soviet biology and in many cases handed over to GULAG or put to death.

 

Lysenko’s domination of Soviet biology survived the death of Stalin, but it collapsed after Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office in 1964.   Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lysenko before the General Assembly of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that year, and after the coup against Khrushchev the Academy began a formal investigation into Lysenko’s work.   The results, when published, demolished Lysenko’s reputation and he was stripped of all authority outside of the Lenin Hills experimental farm that he had taken over upon becoming director of VASKhNIL in 1938 and which remained under his supervision until his death in 1976.

 

Trofim Lysenko as an ideological Communist held to the most extreme form possible of Modern man’s inflated view of science.   Science was everything to him, the way forward to a golden future from out of a past in which he could see nothing but darkness.   What he thought of as science however, was largely the opposite of the science that has produced the results for which Modern man holds it in such high estimation.    The science that “works” is a methodology in which hypotheses are put forward and tested through experimentation but if the tests support the hypothesis another hypothesis can always come along to replace it and the openness to this possibility is of the very essence of science.   Lysenko’s science consisted of rigid dogmas which amounted to an extreme version of the nurture side of the ongoing nature versus nurture debate that sought to end the debate by ending the discussing and eliminating the other side.   While he promised beneficial results, the harvest he reaped was famine and scarcity rather than plenty.

 

Only a few short years after Lysenko’s reputation and career collapsed in his own country, his spirit was found to be alive and well on academic campuses in the West.    New Left groups such as Science for the People started protesting lectures by scientists whose views they did not want heard, disrupting meetings of scientific associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and demanding that a narrow party line be taken with all dissenting views condemned on a variety of politically charged subjects.   Not only was the attitude very similar to Lysenko’s, when the issues pertained to the biological sciences the New Left groups took a hard nurture stance against those whose research and theories supported the nature side.   See Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate (Oxford, 2000) and the chapter in Edward O. Wilson’s autobiography Naturalist (Shearwater, 1994) where he discusses his persecution by his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin.   Even the epithets hurled by the New Left – “racist”, “fascist”, etc. are the same as in Lysenko’s day.   Today, the successors to these New Left groups, the “woke”, rule the academic world with an iron fist.

 

In British Columbia, a family physician who has served the rural community of Lytton for almost thirty years, Dr. Charles Hoffe earlier in the year reported the adverse effects that many of his patients had experienced after receiving the Moderna vaccine and circulated a letter questioning the ethics of continuing to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine after 12 countries in Europe suspended its use over blot clotting.   The BC College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Interior Health Authority ordered him to shut up about all of this because it would promote “vaccine hesitancy”.   Dr. Hoffe continued to see his patients suffer serious ill effects from the vaccines but received brush off responses from the public health authorities to the effect that the vaccines were “safe” and this was all a coincidence.   Taking such basic medical ethics principles as the “no harm” principle of the Hippocratic Oath and the right to informed consent seriously, he refused to obey the order to shut up.   He is now under investigation by the College and the IHA.   Furthermore the IHA has suspended his emergency room privileges on the grounds that he is spreading “misinformation” by which they mean entirely factual information, by any objective standard, about the low fatality rate of the bat flu, the dissemination of which conflicts with their agenda of achieving universal vaccination.   Countless other examples of physicians who have been disciplined for dissenting from the party line on the bat flu and the vaccines in various ways, from administering inexpensive, long-established-to-be-safe, treatments to opposing the unjust and draconian lockdowns, could be cited.   The public health authorities clamping down on these dissident physicians and demanding that everybody obey their every order without question claim that they are following “the science”.   Their totalitarianism tells us that the “science” they are following is closer in spirit to Lysenko’s than to anything deserving of the name.

 

(1)   Michurinist was derived from the name of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, who died in 1935 and thus was spared seeing his name so misappropriated.   Like Vavilov his contributions were in the direction of the development of hybrids based on genetics, and thus the sort of thing that Lysenko condemned as Weissmanist-Mendelist-Morganism.