Technocracy Triumphant

Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable.   There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible.   That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs.   If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge.   To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty.

 

 

Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1)   One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer.   The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1.    The evidence in these challenges was heard in May.   After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases.   For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”.

 

 

The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases.    In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling.   In paragraph 292 we find the following:

 

 

I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions.

 

 

This is very good and right.   The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.”   Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”.   Here is what followed:  

 

 

But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence.

 

 

This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged.   If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified.   If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”.    Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law.  (2)

 

 

In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice.   In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test.    The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause.     To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”.   Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s).  (3)  For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test.    Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office.   If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either.

 

 

The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic.  What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy.

 

 

Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis:

 

 

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.  (God in the Dock, 1948)

 

 

This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.  

 

 

That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge.   This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation.   These are sections 13 and 67.   Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures.   Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.  

 

 

Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional.   In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age.   He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”.   The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic.   In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that:

 

 

the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health  (first ruling, 12).

 

 

Does it ensure such an appropriate balance?   As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17).   Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it.

 

 

The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken.   The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health.   The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.  In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint.   The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder.   The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy.  This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.

 

The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”.   This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.

 

The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.”    Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”.

 

 

Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health.   Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter. 

 

 

It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism.   The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance.   The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good.   Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms.   Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around.

 

 

The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this.   This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions.   This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field.   The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them.   Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual's expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.

 

Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians.   A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse.   Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power.   For this reason it is imperative than  in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances.   This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4)

 

 

This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms.    Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation.  (5)  When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes?

 

 

Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.   Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief.  Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”.   That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize.   The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.”   Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury.  That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum.   “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal.

 

 

Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better.   The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”.   The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”.   It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession. 

 

 

Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?  

 

 

Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?  

 

 

Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.  

 

 

The next sentence is even worse.    “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.”    So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament?   Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government's not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.      

 

 

Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded.

 

 

Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good.   Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields.  Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision.   It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in Abraham Maslow’s proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.   A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health.   He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession.   In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated.  To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.   

 

 

Consider the words that George Grant in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society identified as encapsulating spirit of technological thought, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”  The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable.    Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and Oppenheimer’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be "when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A".   A might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired.  (6)

 

 

It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity.

 

 

 

For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7)

 

 

 (1)   The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual:  Ross MacKay.

(2)   Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag - or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.

(3)   There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.

(4)   The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity.   The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people.   The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time.   Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time.   It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.

(5)  Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading.   Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated.   This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights.   With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1.  As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.  

(6)   Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths.   The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths.   However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths.   The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not.   Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing?   It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other.   The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage.   The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so.   Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive.  I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.

(7)   That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999).   In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986).   It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny.   Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s master of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people.   He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.

 

 

 

The New Kulaks

 

The "experts" that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus.   They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.   

 

This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.   

 

Think about what they are now claiming.   If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is - and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic - belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the "flatten the curve" strategy.   Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone's most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations.   It was the public health orders themselves - not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others' rights and freedoms - that gave us the variants.   It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available.   Natural immunity, as even the "experts" now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases.   When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio.  When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it.   When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.

 

For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern.   The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring.   With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021.   It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021.   Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer.    How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?

 

The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable.    The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights.    The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.

 

It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.

 

Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures.    There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”.    This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical.   Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections.     The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors.    That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.

 

With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination.   At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment.    This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.

 

Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing.   While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown.   The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature.   The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister.   In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the Jews to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.

 

What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon.      When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community.    This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms.  In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not.   In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis.   Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices.   Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.   

 

Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon.   While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject.   Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence.   He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation.   While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this:  the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice.   By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature.   When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment.   The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice.   As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people.   The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice.   It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system.  In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim.   That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.

 

What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices.     This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works.    One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind.   If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26), and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases.   This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance.    Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).   Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.

 

I alluded earlier to one such example, the scapegoating of the Jews by the Third Reich, of which it is unlikely that there is anyone living who is not familiar with the tremendous violent actions it produced.   Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today.   In Hitler’s case, the group designated as the scapegoat was a real religious/ethnic group the identity of which had been well-established millennia prior to the Nazi regime.    When, however, the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, led by V. I. Lenin and committed to his interpretation of Marxist ideology, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat. 

 

Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers.   Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted.   The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin sought to unify the other peasants in support of his regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land.    After Stalin succeeded Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy.   In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class.    The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).

 

“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people.   The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak.    Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust.   Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust.   In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily.   Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports.    While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed.   So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance.   So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine.   There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice.    It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights.   Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.

 

The Nazi scapegoating of the Jews, the Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation.   If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies.   In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens).   These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims.    The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.

 

The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer.   They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open.    Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel.   Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time.

The Ism That Isn't

The suffix -ism comes to us from the ancient Greek language.   In ancient Greek, if you wanted to form an action noun out of a verb, you would add the suffix –mos to the stem of the aorist tense.   Whenever this was done with verbs that ended in -izo in the lexical form (the form you would use to say that you, the speaker, are doing whatever the verb means as you are speaking), you would get the contracted ending -ismos.   This happened quite frequently, and eventually –ismos became a suffix in its own right, one used to form abstract nouns, that is to say nouns that allow you to talk about ideas as if they were tangible objects.   Drop the gender/number/case marker and you get the English -ism.    An English word that illustrates the original Greek usage well is "criticism".   Criticism, formed from a verb that means to evaluate or judge, can refer either to the act of evaluating or judging, corresponding to the original usage of –mos, or it can refer to the idea of judgement or evaluation, corresponding to the derived usage of –ismos.   In English, however, this suffix has taken on a more specific primary meaning.    It is now used mostly to denote a system of organized thought, a set of doctrines that are believed, or a movement embodying either of these things.

 

This standard English usage is several centuries old.   Much more recently a number of new words with the suffix -ism entered the language.   These do not conform either to the original Greek usage as illustrated by criticism, or the standard English usage of which vegetarianism, Zionism and stoicism might be offered as examples.   These are formed by adding the suffix to a noun denoting a general category rather than a verb and they do not denote a system of specific beliefs or doctrines.   They are closer in usage to words like alcoholism, which was coined in the nineteenth century to depict the state of chronic drunkenness as a pathology, a medical condition.   There is a very significant difference, however.   Alcoholism was coined to remove much of the stigma that went with previous words for the same state by treating it as something from which one suffers, a disease, rather than a moral failing.   The words to which I refer, by contrast, while they too portray certain attitudes and behaviours as pathological, it is for the purpose of adding rather than removing stigma.   The first of these, of which all the others are imitations, is racism.    Since it is this word I wish to concentrate on and I am fairly certain you can figure out what the others are, I shall not provide a comprehensive list.   I will merely note that "anti-Semitism", although it is often used in the same way as these words, actually fits the standard English usage of the suffix since at the time it was coined in the nineteenth century it designated a movement with a definite ideology.

 

Although the term racism first appeared in the interwar period of the last century it was not until after the end of World War II that it really took off.   This was, of course, in part a consequence of the war itself.   The regime we fought and defeated in that war, the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany known as the Third Reich, was dominated by an ideology that incorporated elements of nationalism and socialism, as its official name indicates, but also had racialism as a strong component.   Note that the word racialism, although now used interchangeably with racism by most people, is an older term that in that period did indeed conform to standard English usage with regards to isms.   It referred to a system of doctrine - or rather, a number of similar systems of doctrine - that pertained to what its adherents believed to be the political implications of race, in the anthropological sense of the term.   Race, which comes to English from cognates in Romance languages that refer to lineage and descent, originally was a fairly loose word, which could refer to the concept of lineage in a particular family ("the race of Jones"), to common human descent from Adam and Eve ("the human race"), or even to a line of those in a particular trade or occupation  ("the race of plumbers"), the last of which made much more sense in a day when it was the rule rather than the exception for a son to follow the same line of work as his father.   The science of anthropology, which began as an attempt to apply the methodology of zoology (the branch of biology pertaining to animal life) to human beings, before it was taken over by radical leftists such as Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss and their followers who stripped it of all real science and turned it into a vehicle for indoctrinating impressionable young people with their poisonous ideas, gave the term a technical meaning of large populations of human beings whose common ancestry was indicated by the sharing of several distinctive morphological characteristics.   Although hardly the first to notice the existence of such groups within humanity (see Race: The Reality of Human Differences, 2004, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele), they were the first to attach much significance to it, as human group loyalty had always been focused on family, tribe, and nation rather than race in the past.   The original racialists took this a step further by drawing political implications from the anthropologists' findings.  National Socialism, incorporated a particularly unpleasant form of racialism that viewed the races as locked in a Darwinian struggle, in which their own race and nation must dominate if it is to survive at all.    The crimes of the Third Reich  were used in the post-War world to discredit first National Socialism, second racialism in general, and finally even the anthropological study of race which has for the most part had to rebrand itself as the study of "genetic populations" in order to survive.   It was those who insisted that the Third Reich's crimes discredited not just National Socialism, but all racialism and even the anthropological concept of race, the movement of radical egalitarianism known as the Left, which had coined the term racism before the war and effectively put it to the use described in the previous paragraph after the war.   

 

It is very unlikely that the Left would have succeeded in generating an almost universal moral revulsion towards that which their newly coined word denoted if they had attempted to do so under their own banner.   Even having Hitler's terrible example to point to would have been much less effective if they launched their crusade against racism as an openly Leftist cause.   Had they done so, the fact that they were openly sympathetic to or even in ideological agreement with the Soviet Union, the regime that most resembled the Third Reich and which was guilty of similar crimes committed on an even larger scale would have been used to negate the Hitler example.   The Left, therefore, decided to use liberalism as its proxy in selling anti-racism to the public, knowing that once most people had been persuaded by the liberal argument against racism, they would be able to use the word as the weapon they intended it to be even though the meaning they attached to it would be very different from that against which the liberal case would be made.

 

The liberal case against racism gained widespread acceptance because it appealed to basic concepts of fairness that most people shared.   Each person was his own person, liberalism maintained, with his own strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments and failings, merits and demerits, virtues and vices, and ought in fairness to be treated by others on the basis of these rather than on generalizations about those who shared his ethnic ancestry and physical traits such as skin colour.    When liberalism condemned racism, it condemned an attitude and words and deeds expressing that attitude, of which anybody could be guilty, but only by holding that attitude, saying those words, and doing those deeds.   Disliking and mistreating another person because of his skin colour was racism, regardless of who the perpetrator was and who was the victim.   Being a light-skinned, Caucasian of European ancestry did not automatically make you guilty of racism, being what the politically correct now call a "person of colour" did not automatically make you a victim of racism.   When liberalism attacked laws, public policies, and practices as racist it was because they explicitly oppressed people on the basis of race, not because they were part of a civilization that had been created by a people that had been judged to have been racist.  In condemning racism, liberalism set as its ideal a world in which things like skin colour were regarded by everybody as being trivial and everyone of every race treated everyone else of every race, justly, decently, and fairly.

It was through these arguments and ideals that liberalism, hopelessly naïve as it obviously was, won popular support for its anti-racist cause.   Even as it was doing so, however, the Left was preparing to substitute its own, radically different, anti-racism for that of liberalism.     As early as 1932, William Z. Foster, who campaigned that year as the Communist Party USA candidate for American president until a heart attack forced him to withdraw and recuperate in the Soviet Union, outlined a plan to use racial division to further the end of a Communist takeover in the fifth chapter of his Towards Soviet America.     At the same time, Max Horkheimer and his associates of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt were beginning to develop what would become Critical Theory which would replace classical Marxism as the predominant mode of thought in the academic Left.   An associate of Horkheimer's, the music critic, philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno had led a team of sociological and psychological researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that put out The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, a book that purported to show that the typical, white, middle and working class, nuclear family of the day, was an environment in which children developed the title personality type, inclining them to become fascists.  This book became far more influential in academic circles than its merits warranted and those influenced would go on to create Critical Race Theory, an offspring of sorts of the original Critical Theory, and currently the theory that underlies the anti-racism of the Left.   Critical Race Theory rejects the colour-blind ideal of liberal anti-racism and, indeed, condemns it as racist.   However, to get to the point where the Left's kind of anti-racism, which was growing more extreme as it evolved, could exude any influence outside of academe, much less the sort of control it commands today, it needed liberalism to sell the public on the liberal version of anti-racism first.

The 1950s and the 1960s were the heyday of liberal anti-racism, for these were the years of the American Civil Rights movement.   Its enemy was Jim Crow, a melodramatic villain who between moustache-twirls and maniacal laughs, ran around the Old South tying black people to the railroad tracks of segregation.    Its leader was the photogenic and charismatic figure whom the Americans honoured yesterday, having decided that he is more worthy of having a civil holiday named after him than their first president.   His words dripped with liberalism in a nauseatingly sappy and saccharine way.  Take for example, these familiar excerpts from his most famous speech, given before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood...I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character...I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama...little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers".   Here you have the liberal anti-racist ideal of colour-blindness put in a nutshell.   

Now, it would be fairly easy to demonstrate that the liberalism of the Civil Rights Movement and its leader was an outward guise of moderation concealing something that was much further to the Left, as William F. Buckley and his colleagues correctly pointed out at the time.   There was very little about either man or movement in which the reality matched the image created by the new-at-the-time medium of television news and perpetuated in history classrooms ever since.   I have covered this ground many times before however, and for the purposes of this discussion it is the outward liberalism that is important.

 

 

It was this liberal ideal of colour-blindness, this vision of racial peace and harmony that won widespread popular support for the Civil Rights movement and thus broad acceptance of racism as a term of moral disapprobation.  The people who came to support the Civil Rights cause and to so disapprove of racism, therefore, did so because they understood racism to be anything from a prejudicial attitude to active mistreatment of others to unjust and oppressive laws that sinned against this ideal of colour-blind meritocracy and this vision of racial harmony.    

 

Twenty-five to thirty years ago it became apparent that Leftist professors in academe had an altogether different understanding of the word.   By this time, hip-hop music had become mainstream and its “gangsta” subgenre, featuring lyrics that glorified crime and violence, was rapidly approaching the same status.   Often the lyrics would express a violent hatred that was explicitly racial in nature but directed against whites.   While this matched the meaning that had become attached to the word racism in the liberal Civil Rights era, the Leftist academics of the 1990s denied that it was a form of racism.  It was a legitimate form of expression on the part of the oppressed, they would say.   Racism, they would add, was not just racial prejudice, but racial prejudice backed up by power on the part of the oppressor group.    This was criticized by conservatives such as Dinesh D’Souza (The End of Racism, 1995) as a dishonest change-of-definition tactic, although others, more familiar with the history of what around this time came to be dubbed “Cultural Marxism” were aware that the Left had begun working out this new theory of theirs before the liberal Civil Rights movement.    Back then, apart from conservative criticism this Leftist definition of racism was hardly heard outside of the Ivory Towers.   Its implication, however, that only whites could be racists, was starting to seep out into the wider community.

 

Today, the Left’s definition is the mainstream one, and we are being told that holding to the liberal ideal of colour-blindness is itself a form of racism.   We are being told that it is not enough to be merely “not racist”, as, presumably, a liberal who lived up to his colour-blind ideal would be, but “anti-racist”, that is, actively opposed to “systemic racism”.   “Systemic racism” does not mean, as many if not most of the politicians who have made ritualistic affirmations of its existence over the course of the last year seem to think it means, some lingering remnants of racism in the 1950s-60s liberal meaning of the word, but the idea that all the institutions and values of Western Civilization are intrinsically racist, implicitly if not explicitly, and serve to privilege all whites at the expense of all “people of colour” so that, whether conscious of it or not, all whites and only whites are racists and all “people of colour” are victims of racism.  

 

At the beginning of this essay I pointed out that the word racism does not match either the standard English meaning of the suffix –ism or the ancient Greek usage of the original root of the suffix.   Obviously, if racism now refers to the condition of being light-skinned and of European ancestry, this is all the more true.   Ironically, the Left’s anti-racist movement, which is now actively shoving this absurd definition of racism down everyone’s throats, is an ism in the standard English sense of a system of doctrine.   Equally obvious and ironic, is the fact that the Left’s anti-racism now itself meets the definition of racism as the liberals of the 1950s and 1960s used the term.   It does not want colour-blindness, it wants whites to see themselves as white and therefore guilty of “racism”, and it wants whites to see “people of colour” as “people of colour” and therefore victims of “racism”.   It does not want racial peace and harmony – only the kind of “peace” that consists of submission, submission on the part of all whites to all people of colour.   The ultimate irony in all of this, is that the Left’s anti-racism, is, unlike the “racism” it decries, a racism that is actually an ism.   It is a dark irony, because the last time a racist system of organized doctrine achieved anything close to the power of the Left’s anti-racism today, that system was National Socialism.    The Left’s anti-racism is also eerily similar to National Socialism in its totalitarianism, its desire to suppress all dissent and require all to submit to its every dictate.

 

From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, the basic problem with National Socialism was one of idolatry – it had substituted race and nation for God, thus making idols out of them.   Communism was no solution – it was officially atheistic and guilty of the same kind of atrocities as the Third Reich on a larger scale.   T. S. Eliot, in noting that “it is only in returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality” and that democracy by itself “does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike” made the well-known statement that “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin”.  The wisdom in Eliot’s assessment of the situation has, of course, gone largely unheeded since.

 

Today’s racial nationalisms, whether black or white, repeat National Socialism’s basic error of making idols out of race and nation, to which they add the error of confusing the two categories, a mistake Hitler never made.   The basic mistake of liberalism’s vision is best described as the naïve belief that we can have the “brotherhood of mankind” without first having the “Fatherhood of God”.    The Left’s anti-racism, however, dwarfs all of these other Modern and Postmodern heresies, including them within itself – it has made idols out of every non-white race and nation – while heaping others on top of them.   It is a religion which requires confession of a “sin” – being white – that one can neither help nor turn from, while offering only bondage rather than absolution to those who confess.   In rejection of Him Who offered Himself as the scapegoat to end all scapegoats (see René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1978) it has made white people into a scapegoat for “people of colour”, much as Hitler made the Jews into a scapegoat for the Aryans.    It is an evil crying out for condemnation and the test of the faithful in this day is whether they will find the courage to condemn it.