Strange Bedfellows

In an essay discussing the rise of “woke capitalism” after the news about the capitulation of Chic-fil-A in the Culture War I made the point that the alliance between “conservatism” or “the Right” and “capitalism” which dates back to the rise of socialism, the mutual foe of both, in the nineteenth century was an unnatural alliance, and that those who wish to preserve or recover elements of the heritage, history and tradition of Western Civilization that predate modern liberalism need to reconsider this alliance with a force that has been a far more effective engine for the uprooting of communities, destruction of traditions, and alienation of individuals than socialism ever has. In this essay, I wish to follow up on that by looking at another unnatural alliance, that which exists between “environmentalism” or “The Green Movement” and socialism.

An alliance between environmentalism and conservatism would be much more natural. I am speaking, of course, of the unadulterated, original versions of both environmentalism and conservatism, neither of which is very recognizable in the present day movements by those names.

Environmentalism began with the concern that something valuable, which had come down to us from past generations, was disappearing and in danger of being lost to future generations. That something included both natural resources valued for their utility, their usefulness to man and his enterprises, and the beauty of our physical surroundings, especially the countryside. Environmentalism grew out of the instinct to protect these things and preserve them for generations yet to come. Hence the earliest form of environmentalism was the conservation movement.

Conservatism, which obviously shares a common root with conservation, grew out of a similar concern that something valuable, which had come down to us from past generations, was disappearing and in danger of being lost to future generations. For Edmund Burke and the original conservatives, that something included both the institutions that the Tories of previous generations had fought for – the monarchy and the Apostolic Church – and the constitutional rights and liberties for which the Whigs had professed to have been fighting. (1) Conservatism was originally the instinct to protect and preserve these things for future generations, against those who wished to bulldoze them down in the name of building a fanciful earthly paradise, on the foundation of their rationalistic, abstract ideals.

Given the very similar instincts and starting points of these two movements it is rather astonishing that they did not develop a strong and enduring alliance. There have always been outspoken advocates of ecological conservation on the Right. The reactionary, Roman Catholic philologist, poet, and novelist J. R. R. Tolkien made it rather plain what he thought about industrial de-forestation in his famous fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Michael Wharton, who for decades as the writer of the “Peter Simple” column for the Daily Telegraph was the most right-wing columnist in the United Kingdom, said in The Missing Will, the first volume of his autobiography, “I had developed, partly because of my general loathing for ‘progress’ and technology – I can claim to have been what is now called, somewhat nauseatingly, a ‘friend of the earth’ thirty years before the Environment was invented – an extreme hatred of Communism which has never left me.” Nevertheless, the environmentalist movement has long tilted left, and conservatism in response has viewed it with suspicion. This is due, in part, to conservatism’s mistake in seeing capitalism as a friend rather than a foe, a mistake which has grown over time to the point that present day conservatism, or “neo-conservatism” has little interest in preserving anything other than capitalism. The other contributing factor is environmentalism’s mistake in seeing socialism as a friend rather than a foe. Both mistakes arose through the faulty reasoning “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Both mistakes were magnified by the erroneous assumption, which became almost universal in the twentieth century, that if one was not a capitalist one was therefore a socialist and vice versa.

To understand why socialism is not a friend of true environmentalism, it is important that we understand the nature of socialism. Socialism is not being compassionate and charitable to the poor. Socialism is not “standing up for the working man.” Socialism is not the application of the classical idea of restraint to human greed. (2) The many different socialisms that arose in the nineteenth century all sprang out of the same common idea: that the private ownership of property is responsible for most or all human suffering and must therefore be eradicated.

One of the oldest observations that pertain to conserving resources and the beauty of our surroundings is to be found in the third chapter of Book Two of Aristotle’s Politika. This is the section of that work in which Aristotle made the case for private ownership against complete communal ownership. As translated by Benjamin Jowett, he wrote:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.

Universal experience confirms what Aristotle has written here. Take houses, as just one example. Houses that are owned by the people who live in them, whether they take care of them themselves or are rich enough to hire a staff to do it for them, are generally the ones that are kept in best repair and which are a pleasure to look at. Houses that are owned by the public, rented out at low cost, and maintained by employees of the state with no other personal interest in them, are the most likely to be run down, eyesores. Other arrangements that fall between these polar opposites also typically fall between them in terms of their level of upkeep.

Despite the fact that any one of us can confirm with his own eyes the truth of what Aristotle pointed out twenty-three and a half centuries ago, environmentalists continue to talk as if the exact opposite were the case and human societies took better care of their environment before there was private property and will do so again once socialism eliminates private property.

There is a widespread myth, that pre-civilized tribal societies, without a well-developed and defined sense of private property ownership, had more of a connection to land, nature, etc. and so took much greater care not to pollute the environment or to waste their resources. This myth, which like capitalism and socialism has its roots in the pets de cerveau of the so-called Enlightenment of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and was popularized by Romantic poetry and Disney cartoons, is completely counterfactual. The societies in question hunted animals to extinction, set forests on fire to drive the wildlife out into the open where they could be more easily hunted, and were far more wasteful than property owning societies. Nevertheless, nowhere is this myth more prevalent than among environmentalists.

If it is a myth that pre-property societies were ultra-Green and eco-friendly it is laughable folly to suggest that post-property societies are so or will be so. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we learned that not only was the great experiment in Communism a failure economically – instead of elevating the living conditions of the workers it lowered them, leaving them in worse poverty and virtual slavery – but it was a disaster ecologically as well. Nowhere in the world were there dirtier cities, more depleted forests and other natural resources, more soil erosion, acid rain and polluted air and waters than in those countries unfortunate enough to have fallen behind the Iron Curtain. Nor, until relatively recently, have things been any better behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Has any of this caused environmentalists to renounce socialism?

No, in spite of it, environmentalism seems to be more in bed with socialism now than it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Think, for example, of environmentalism’s present obsession with warding off a climactic apocalypse. The entire anthropogenic climate change horror story is nonsense that is easily demonstrated to be such. Carbon dioxide is the natural product of human and animal respiration and the food of vegetable photosynthesis. It is hardly a pollutant. The global climate has never been static, but has gone through cycles of warmer and cooler periods throughout known history. A myriad of factors contribute to this, the majority of which, and the most important of which, are beyond human control. Furthermore, it is a rather obvious historical fact that human life and civilization, as well as all other life, animal and plant, have thrived much more in warmer periods than in cold periods. Climate change alarmism requires one to believe the opposite of all of this. While environmentalists claim that “the science” backs them up, by “the science” they mean the kind of phony consensus that can be produced by threatening the research grants, potential tenure, and the like of those who dissent. Science, in other words, in the same sense in which Lysenkoism was once considered “science” in the Soviet Union.

Environmentalists insist that the climate crisis demands immediate action on the part of the world’s governments. Their proposals, however, from the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 to the Paris Agreement of 2015 to the Green New Deal currently being touted, are all designed to create global socialism – central economic planning, wealth redistribution, etc. on a planetary scale. Since socialism was ecologically catastrophic for the Soviet Union and its satellites on a national scale, the most likely outcome of these accords is to create a genuine global ecological crisis in the name of averting a chimerical one.

If there is any genuine concern left in the Green movement for preserving natural resources and the beauty of the countryside they will abandon their unnatural alliance with a socialism that can ultimately work only against these ends. (3)




(1) In my, unreconstructed Tory, opinion the actions of the Whigs, and their predecessors the Roundheads, did more to damage these than to defend them.

(2) George Grant, a conservative who recognized that capitalism was not the friend of conservatism, absurdly tried to define socialism this way in Lament for a Nation, showing that even the best of thinkers can be guilty of huge errors. Grant’s mistake arose out of the erroneous assumption that one must be either a capitalism or a socialist.

(3) I am not saying that everything that is objectionable in environmentalism can be traced back to its strange alliance with socialism. Volumes could be written, and have been written for that matter, about the influence of neo-pagan, earth and nature worship, on the Green movement. Further, for about seventy years now environmentalist thinking about the limits of natural resources has been informed by neo-Malthusianism. Back in the nineteenth century, the Reverend T. Robert Malthus had warned that the human population was growing at a much higher rate than was food production and that if not corrected this would lead to poverty, war, etc. He advocated correction that was consistent with Christian ethics, such as chastity before marriage and postponing marriage until one could afford to raise a family on his means. The neo-Malthusianism, favoured since the 1950s by United Nations environmental agencies, the Club of Rome, secular ecological groups, and alarmists like Dr. Paul Ehrlich, reworked Malthus’ theory into a prophecy of imminent, global, ecological collapse, not unlike the climate change alarmists’ doomsday scenario, and proposed solutions that the Rev. Malthus would have found ethically repugnant – forced sterilization, mandatory artificial birth control, abortion, quotas on family size, etc. Thus, the whole objectionable “culture of death” aspect of environmentalism which can be attributed to this neo-Malthusianism, was present even in the writings of such dissident ecologists as the late Dr. Garrett James Hardin, who had been Professor of Human Ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who was otherwise a refreshing voice of sanity in an increasingly mad environmentalist movement. He defied the environmentalist mainstream in such articles as “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, 1968, and his unfortunately subtitled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Psychology Today, 1974. In the former he made the Aristotelean case that private ownership is the right choice for the conservation of resources and that collective ownership combined with universal, egalitarian access is the recipe for ecological disaster. In the latter he opposed the mainstream, environmentalist, tendency to think on a global scale and urged countries to focus on their own, national ecosystems, arguing for the metaphor of hundreds of lifeboats adrift on the sea rather than the “Spaceship earth” metaphor preferred by most environmentalists, and applied this by arguing against mass immigration and foreign aid. This year, a fifteenth anniversary edition of Ronald Wright’s 2004 Massey Lectures series, A Short History of Progress, was published. The original edition came out a year after Dr. Hardin left us, and in these lectures Wright made all of the mistakes which Hardin had avoided, as well as all of the ones he had not, thus tainting what might otherwise have been a valuable look at the problems human civilization can cause for itself, through the shortsighted pursuit of technological progress. Perhaps a new edition of Dr. Hardin’s Living Within Limits, Stalking the Wild Taboo, or The Ostrich Factor would be more in order.

Election Time Grumbling

During the last Dominion election, four years ago, I made the remark that the three major parties were offering us a choice between the Dragon, the Beast and the False Prophet. After the election I added that the False Prophet had won. I think the last four years have justified that assessment rather well.

To make the above joke about the last election, of course, required speaking as if a misconception, that has lamentably become almost universal in Canada, were in fact true. Dominion elections are not about who the next Prime Minister will be. They are about who the next Parliament will be. You and I do not vote for the Prime Minister. We vote for who will be the Member of Parliament for our constituency. The job of our Member of Parliament is to represent our constituency, the portion of the country that includes the neighborhood in which we live. If our MPs remembered that their job, first and foremost, is to speak in Parliament on behalf of the constituencies that elected them – the places and the people living in those places whether they voted for or against the winner, they would do that job much better. Note that if we were to adopt the electoral reform that the Liberals promised four years ago, mercifully reneging on that promise, this would not help our MPs to do that job better, but rather hinder them from doing it. Proportional representation would make for a more partisan, more ideological Parliament. Only fools would want this, which is why proportional representation is so popular. The eponymous principle of Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, the first in his Sword of Truth fantasy series and the last before these books achieved the unachievable and became an exposition of Ayn Rand’s ideas even more tedious and tiresome than her own, is “people are stupid” and this is absolutely correct. But I digress. In an election, we choose the representatives for our constituencies, these make up the next Parliament, and the person who becomes Prime Minister, who leads the government in the sense of the Cabinet, the Crown Ministers who carry out the actual day-to-day administration of the Queen-in-Council, is the person who has the most support in Parliament. That we have come to treat every Dominion election as a nation-wide plebiscite on who would make the best Prime Minister is an unwelcome intrusion of Americanism into our system.

I also declared during the last Dominion election that I likely would not be voting in it at all. The Conservatives, I vowed, would never have my vote again as long as Stephen Harper was their leader. Harper, while admittedly the best Prime Minister Canada has had since 1963 – this is not saying much as the entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers were horrid and rotten and abominable – had ticked me off one too many times. He had capitulated to the liberal-left on abortion and immigration and was absolutely horrible on freedom of speech. While Section 13 was abolished on his watch, he deserves no credit whatsoever for that fact, for the bill that repealed it was a private member’s bill that a Conservative MP had introduced and which had received enough support from both Conservative and Liberal Members to pass, despite the active opposition of the Prime Minister. It was that crazy bill, authorizing the government to invade the privacy of ordinary Canadians in the name of “fighting terrorism” that finally made me wash my hands of Harper altogether. Since the usual alternatives to the Conservatives in my riding were the NDP and Liberals, neither of which I would ever consider voting for, the Greens, and fringe parties even further to the left, I thought I would have no-one to vote for, and was fine with that, citing the precedent of Evelyn Waugh, who, after years of voting Conservative and having them fail to turn the clock back by even a second declared that he would abstain in the future on the grounds that it was presumptuous for a subject to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers. In the event, the Christian Heritage Party ran a candidate in my riding, for probably the first time ever, and as the candidate was a friend, I had someone to vote for after all.

This Dominion election is not shaping up to be any better than the last. The Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, aka Captain Airhead still has an astonishing amount of support considering that he has accomplished nothing in the last four years except something which should not have been done, i.e., the legalization of marijuana, that he has spent Canada hopelessly into debt, has aggressively sabotaged the economy of one of our provinces and seriously undermined national unity, has gone out of his way to sour our relations with India, the Philippines, China, the United States, and perhaps other countries that I don’t remember off the top of my head, has been found guilty of major ethical violations, been hit with three major scandals within the space of a year any one of which by itself would have ended the career of virtually any other Prime Minister, and been proven to be a total hypocrite on three matters that he is constantly preaching to other Canadians about.

When the Conservatives were contemplating whom they would choose to replace Stephen Harper as leader I offered my opinion that they should pick Don Cherry. Granted, he was not actually seeking the position, but I said they ought to draft him. Had they followed my semi-serious suggestion they would be way ahead in the polls right now. They did not, of course, nor did I expect them to and they put in Andrew Scheer instead. Commenting on that at the time, I said that it was a mix of the good and the bad, the good being that Scheer, in a survey of the potential leaders, had taken the strongest royalist stand, and that he was a staunch opponent of the carbon tax by which Trudeau pretends to be saving the world from “climate change” while in reality doing nothing but unnecessarily increasing the cost-of-living for those least able to afford such an increase. The bad was that Scheer was a Harper-style neo-conservative, which meant that he would probably wimp out on social issues and on free speech. Look at his performance in this election campaign so far and tell me that these predictions have not been borne out.

Consider Scheer’s response to attacks from the left on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

With regards to abortion, Scheer has told the press that while he, a Roman Catholic, is personally opposed to abortion, a government that he leads will neither move to limit abortion nor support any efforts by backbenchers to do so through means of private bills. This is the very definition of wimping out. Saying that you are personally opposed to abortion means absolutely nothing if you not only will not initiate any legislation on the matter but will deny your support to members of your party who wish to do so. Indeed, there is no difference between this and the position that Justin Trudeau has held until very recently when, realizing that it was self-contradictory, he rejected the personal opposition to abortion and came out as being entirely pro-choice. Trudeau’s position, although it amounts to openly declaring his allegiance to the forces of evil, is the more honest of the two.

What Scheer should have told the press – and the Liberal, NDP, and Green leaders when they all ganged up on him and tried to pressure him into affirming the Satanic dogma that a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion – is the following:

You claim to be worried that I am going to re-open the debate on abortion but the truth is that there is nothing to re-open because the debate on abortion never occurred in the first place. Abortion was completely illegal in Canada until 1969, and I affirm what previous generations of Canadians believed, that taking the life of an unborn, innocent, baby is nothing less than cold-blooded murder and nobody, man or woman, has the right to commit murder. The present status quo, in which there are no legal restrictions on abortion whatsoever up to the very moment of birth and the taxpayer is required to pay for it, would have been regarded as abhorrent by previous generations of Canadians, and would be rejected by most living Canadians if they actually understood what the status quo is. We did not arrive at this status quo by means of a debate in which the pro-murder side, as the so-called pro-choice side ought properly to be called, won. We arrived at where we are today, because the father of the current Prime Minister changed the law in 1969 to allow for abortions in exceptional circumstances, and then turned our Supreme Court into an American-style kritarchy in 1982, which then used the changes he had made to our abortion laws as a pretext for ruling those laws to be unconstitutional. That Parliament, which the Supreme Court in the same ruling said ought to pass new abortion legislation, has failed to do so for thirty-one years, is not due to there being any sort of general consensus in favour of the status quo but to the bullying tactics of the leaders of the progressive parties and their echo chambers in the media. These tactics are designed to prevent the debate that you falsely claim is over from ever happening. It is your tactics and not my views that are unacceptable in a civilized country like ours and I am and here and now calling you out on them and demanding that you cease and desist immediately. We are going to have that debate whether you like it or not and the fact that you are so desperate to prevent it from happening shows that you are not at all as confident of the claims of your own side as you pretend to be.

That is how Scheer ought to be talking. The same speech, mutatis mutandis, is also the appropriate response to the progressive attacks on him for his views on same-sex marriage.

Michael Wharton, who wrote the “Peter Simple” column for the Daily Telegraph for decades, frequently referred to what he called the “Great Semantic Shift” by which opinions on several matters “which were once held by the majority and described as ‘moderate’, ‘of the centre’ or merely ‘patriotic’ have gradually come to be described first as ‘right-wing’, then as ‘extreme right-wing’, then as ‘lunatic fringe’ and finally as ‘fascist’” (1) Others would describe the same phenomenon as a leftward shift in the Overton Window. The kind of bullying described above is the means by which this shift has been accomplished and right-of-centre parties have a duty to confront it head on and call it out for the thuggery it is. Otherwise, they will themselves be constantly drawn further to the left. As John O’Sullivan famously put it “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” (2)

The leadership of the Conservative Party evidently believe that doing the opposite of what I have been suggesting is the strategy that is going to put them back into government. That is absurd. Either you present the electorate with a real alternative to progressivism or you end up competing with the Liberals, NDP, and the Greens for the progressive vote which would far more naturally go to one of these other parties. With Trudeau’s dismal record as Prime Minister, the humiliating collapse of his reputation from one of international celebrity to that of the laughing stock of the whole world, and scandal after scandal after scandal, the Conservatives ought to be so far ahead in the polls as to make their victory in the upcoming election a foregone conclusion.

Of course, it does not help matters that Scheer has gotten himself embroiled in a scandal of his own with regards to his citizenship. When the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein asked him recently “On dual citizenship, why wouldn’t you have dealt with that before the election?” he answered:

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal … I know many, many people have dual citizenship for many different countries … The very first time I was ever asked that question I answered it truthfully and honestly.

I believe Scheer when he says he didn’t think it was a big deal. Sadly, that is the problem. For most of my lifetime (3) Canada has permitted dual citizenship with the United States. This change was made by a Liberal government – the government of the present Prime Minister’s father – and is an example of the decay of the very national principles for which the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to stand.

Here is how I worded the problem in a comment on a post at the Patriactionary blog the other day:

The law should not allow for someone to have this kind of dual citizenship. It is a contradiction. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy built on the sound, pre-modern, Christian principle of allegiance to our reigning Sovereign. The United States is a republic built upon the evil, Satanic, and thoroughly modern anti-principle of rejection of that allegiance and arrogant assertion of the “sovereignty” of an autocratic “people”. (4) No one can be a true citizen of both. Dual citizenship between Canada and any other Commonwealth monarchy is no contradiction. Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction, shocking as that will be to most Americans to hear. Dual citizenship between these two sets of polities is an absolute contradiction and the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to look on this particular kind of phony dual citizenship with repugnance. (5)

I don’t have much else to add on that subject and so will leave it at that and move on to my final observation about this election.

Two weeks prior to the last Dominion election I posted an essay entitled “The Election Issue That Wasn’t”. The issue in question was immigration. In it I said the following:

It is not an election issue for the same reason it has not been an election issue in previous elections – no party dares raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist…The only way this matter will ever be brought to a vote is if one of the parties breaks with the consensus of the others and makes it an election issue. Despite there being plenty of reasons for the Conservative, New Democrat, and Green parties to do so, none seem to possess courage enough to weather the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did, and so immigration remains the election issue that wasn’t.

This time around someone has decided to make it an election issue. That someone is Maxime Bernier who was narrowly defeated by Andrew Scheer in the Conservative Party’s leadership race. Subsequent conflict between Scheer and Bernier over the latter taking far more right-wing positions than the former was comfortable with led to Bernier leaving the Conservatives and founding a new party with an unfortunate, Communist/American-sounding name, the People’s Party of Canada.

On Sunday, someone slipped a card outlining the party’s platform under my windshield while at church. Which is good, because the media have been conspiring to keep the public uninformed as to that platform. The entire platform on the card is exactly what I would have liked to see from the Conservatives. Here is the section on immigration:

“On Immigration the PPC will:
*keep Canada safe and say “no” to illegal immigration;
* focus on what unites Canadians instead of on diversity;
*respect Canada’s constitution, history, and heritage;
*focus on Canada’s economic needs when setting immigration policy;
*reduce immigration to 250, 000 per year; and
*increase resources to vet immigrants.

To all of which I give a hearty amen.

My church is in the next riding over from the one in which I live and vote and in which I have seen no sign of a PPC candidate. It is nice to know that someone is finally taking a stand for all the right things however, whether I have an opportunity to vote for them or not.


(1) I have taken the words quoted from a column entitled “Extremism” reprinted on page 36 of Peter Simple’s Century, The Claridge Press, 1999, but he made this observation far more than once.
(2) John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law”, National Review, October 27, 1989. Also extremely relevant is (Robert) Conquest’s Second Law, which O’Sullivan cites in the article “The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies”
(3) I am five years younger than Justin Trudeau and three years older than Andrew Scheer. The law recognizing dual citizenship went into effect a couple of months prior to my first birthday.
(4) This is very strong language but I stand by it. Fr. Seraphim Rose, the American Russian Orthodox hieromonk wrote the following “We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical, social structure. We shall see in the next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and undertand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’ society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government.” Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994, 2018, p.28. This entire book was originally the seventh chapter of Rose’s never-completed magnus opus The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God. The “preceding chapter” and “next chapter” referred to in the quote are the preceding and following chapters in the larger work. This was written before his ordination and so the book is credited to him as “Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose”.
(5) Upon further consideration, I would have to revise the statement that “Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction”, for while the principles of the American republic and Communist “peoples’ republics” are far closer to each other than either is to the sound, royalist, Loyalist principles on which our country was originally founded, it occurs to me that with republics of any sort, it is probably a contradiction to be a citizen of more than one.

Bring Back Bron!

There has been an awful lot of finger pointing going on in the aftermath of the unfortunate incident in Texas a couple of weekends ago. The question “who is to blame” has been on everyone’s minds. Nobody is much interested in the obvious answer, i.e., that the shooter himself is to blame, as that answer, however truthful, is lame and boring. So the blame has been shifted onto virtually everybody else. I use the qualifier “virtually” because I have yet to hear anyone blame country and western singer/songwriter and NASCAR speed demon Marty Robbins for the shooting. Yet the case against him is as sound and logical as the case which progressives, liberals, and other left-wing kooks and weirdos have been pressing against Donald the Orange.

The song that established Robbins’ country and western career and won him his first Grammy award was “El Paso”, written and recorded for his 1959 album “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.” The song is a first person narrative in which the character of the narrator sings about falling in love with a Mexican girl named Feleena, a singer at Rosa’s Cantina in the “west Texas town of El Paso.” When another cowboy comes to town and he sees the two of them together in the saloon he jealously challenges the newcomer to a duel and shoots him dead. He steals a horse and flees to New Mexico, but is unable to resist the urge to see Feleena again. On his return he encounters several mounted cowboys who are out looking for him and runs the gauntlet to get into town, being severely wounded in the process. He makes it to the backdoor of Rosa’s, only to be shot down, and dies in Feleena’s arms moments later.

Here we find the inspiration for the unhappy turn of events that has been all over the news as of late. Clearly, Whatever-the-heck-his-name-is, was listening to this song one day and the idea popped into his head “Hey, this song is saying that in El Paso, the thing to do when you are mad is to go around shooting people” and the massacre ensued.

What’s that you say? “Preposterous!” “Absurd!” “Nonsense!”

Of course it is. No more so, however, than the ridiculous claim that Donald the Orange’s supposedly “racist” rhetoric is to blame.

The accusations against the American president utilize the same sort of illogic that progressives here in Canada, as well as in the UK and Europe, have used for decades to justify laws against so-called “hate speech.” According to their way of thinking, hate speech, which does not mean expressions of literal hatred such as “I hate you” so much as statements which reflect negatively on an identifiable group of people leads to violent actions and so should be treated as a violent act itself and prohibited and punished by law. This sort of thinking is very similar to the basic concept that underlies the practice of magic, the non-sleight-of-hand-type of magic that is, - the idea that you can produce effects in the physical world simply by uttering the right word or combination of words. A lot of progressive thinking is like this. Note how they seem to believe that governments have the ability to alter reality by passing laws and that an individual is whatever sex or made-up gender he, she, it or whatever declares himself, herself, itself, or whatever to be. Given the way the left-wing mind seems to operate, perhaps, if you ever find yourself in the situation of being afflicted with unrequited love for a person of the progressive persuasion you should follow the advice of David Seville’s shaman and try uttering the words or syllables or whatever they are: “oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” – it might actually work.

It is at times like this that we really feel the loss of the late, great Auberon Waugh, who knew no equal – with the exception of Michael Wharton aka Peter Simple – in his ability to poke fun at this sort of thing. Mercifully, an article he wrote many years ago can be applied to the situation at hand. It appeared first in the July 10th, 1976 issue of The Spectator and was later included in the anthology Brideshead Benighted, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1986, where it can be found on pages 153 to 156. The title is “Che Guevara in the West Midlands.”

In the article, Waugh begins by talking about an interview, which had just been published, with John Tyndall, the leader of the National Front, and goes on to discuss Robert Relf, whose difficulties with the Race Relations Board were highly-publicized at the time and who is the “Che Guevara” alluded to in the title. “I don’t know why it is that race relations should attract so much foolishness and pomposity on both sides of the fence”, Waugh began one paragraph and in the next added “For myself, I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board. Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously.” In his concluding paragraph he wrote that “I feel certain that the only thing which gives the National Front glamour or popular appeal at the present time is the attempt by foolish, well-meaning people to suppress its views and treat its language as unfit for publication” and of the Race Relations Board “The kindest and wisest thing to do is to laugh at them.”

This, for those who have forgotten, which is probably most people since there is so much of the opposite floating around these days, is what sanity looks like. The part of the article that is most relevant and which is what brought it to mind is the following excerpt:

They [the National Front] may well be a nasty, boring and humourless collection of fanatics, but I have never seen that there was anything more wicked about race hatred than there is about class hatred or religious hatred or the peculiarly intense and inexplicable hatred which my dear wife feels for Jimmy Connors, the tennis player. They are all part of the rich panorama of life. If I forbade my wife to express her true feelings for Jimmy Connors, I have no doubt they would fester inside her, creating little black eddies of resentment and paranoia which would eventually burst out in some hideous drama on the Centre Court at Wimbledon when Connors would expire, coughing blood, in front of the television cameras, with a lady’s parasol sticking between his ribs; public subscriptions would create a Jimmy Connors Memorial Trust and we would be stuck with a hideous modern statue of the young man somewhere on those green and pleasant lawns. So, wisely, I let her have her say.

The insight this shows is truly profound. The verbal expression of hatred is not the cause of violence but a safety vent that helps prevent it. I am persuaded that Waugh was on to something here and that if civilization ends up being consumed in a race war it will be progressive anti-racists who demand that the law be used to force those they disagree with to shut up who will be to blame for it.

In addition to saying that the current American president’s rhetoric inspired the El Paso shooter, progressives also maintain that he has been promoting “white nationalism.” “White nationalism” is an expression which has been used to mean anything from white people engaging in the kind of racial identity politics that the progressive Left promotes for every other race to the violent ideology of National Socialism but it is the latter end of that spectrum that progressives have in mind when they make this accusation against Trump. They are as wrong in the one accusation as they are in the other and for the same reason. Their own promotion of identity politics for all other groups together with their vilification of whites as a race makes white identity politics legitimate as a defensive, response. Their denial of that legitimacy, is what creates the risk of white racial identity politics turning radical, revolutionary, and violent. Someone like Trump, who provides a voice within the system whereby whites can air their legitimate racial grievances, is the best safeguard against that outcome. Only a total moron could fail to realize that.

Of course progressives are wrong about this just as they are wrong about everything else that has to do with race. Eleven years ago Barack Obama ran on a platform that basically amounted to “vote for me because I am black, you have to vote for me because I am black, oh, and by the way, did I mention that I am black.” This proved to be a winning strategy and American voters responded by electing their first president chosen on the basis of the colour of his skin. When this happened, progressives hilariously declared that his election signified that the United States had entered into a post-racial era. In reality, it was Obama, not Trump, who ushered in a new era of highly racialized politics. Progressives are pointing to El Paso and Christchurch as proof that a wave of white supremacist terrorism is upon us when in reality these incidents completely disprove their argument. Since every time a white person anywhere in the world commits a violent act which can possibly be attributed to racial motives the media makes it the top story for weeks if not months on end we can be certain that we have heard of every such incident that has ever occurred and they are a miniscule fraction of a fraction of the violent incidents that occur on a daily basis. Neither the Christchurch nor the El Paso killer was part of any organized movement. Both incidents were carried out by deranged loners and in both cases in order to create the narrative spin they desired the liberal media had to cherrypick the killer’s manifesto. By contrast, the anti-racist terrorism that the liberal media and progressive political leaders refuse to condemn even while they demand that all right-of-centre political leaders disavow and condemn white advocacy whether violent or not is systematic, organized and widespread.

Yes, this sort of insanity is crying out for the return of Auberon Waugh to once again satirize the unsatirizable. While raising him from the dead is beyond my abilities, Naim Attallah of Quartet Books has done the next best thing by publishing a new anthology of his writings entitled A Scribbler in Soho. For any sane person looking to lighten his spirits in these dark and gloomy days I highly recommend it.

Be careful, however, about the messages you soak in while listening to 1950’s era country and western music. I would hate to hear that any of you had shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.