New Day? No Thanks, I’ll Take the Old(er)!

 

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a great deal of talk here in Winnipeg about the announcement that today’s big party at the Forks would be called “New Day” instead of “Canada Day”, would be a whole bunch of pissing and moaning about wrongs real and imagined inflicted upon the Indians instead of a celebration of our country, and would not include the usual fireworks celebration.   Interestingly, Sunday evening, while enjoying a coffee at Tim Horton’s and trying to read a chapter out of the book of Isaiah, I overheard snatches of conversation from a couple at a nearby table with regards to all of this.  The man was boisterously objecting to all of these changes, especially the cancelling of the fireworks.   The woman was defending the changes, toeing the progressive party line on the subject.  For what it’s worth, the man was an Indian and the woman was lily white.

 

Among the more prominent of the local critics of these changes – I add the modifier “local” because it has attracted commentary from across the Dominion, including Toronto’s Anthony Furey and Edmonton’s Lorne Gunter – are Lloyd Axworthy and Jenny Motkaluk.    The former, who from 1979 to 2000 was the MP for Winnipeg - Fort Garry then Winnipeg South Centre when the former was dissolved and the latter reconstituted in 1988, during which time he served as Minister for various portfolios in Liberal governments under Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, and later became president of the University of Winnipeg, the furthest to the left of the city’s academic institutions, expressed his criticism in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, a Liberal party propaganda rag that likes to think of itself as a newspaper.   The latter is one of the candidates for the office about to be vacated by Mayor Duckie whom she had previously but sadly unsuccessfully attempted to unseat in the 2018 mayoral election.   Ryan Stelter responded to Motkaluk with a column that appeared in the Winnipeg Sun – the local neoconservative tabloid – in which he defended the decision by the powers that be at the Forks, their reasons for the change, and basically argued that while the biggest party in the city has been re-named and re-imagined this does not prevent anyone else from celebrating the holiday as they like.

 

While I suspect Stelter of disingenuity – his argument is technically correct but does not address the real problems with the thinking behind the changes likely because he doesn’t want to be seen as dissenting from that thinking - I shall, nevertheless, be doing as he suggests and celebrating the holiday the way I like.     This means that like the crowd at the Forks, I will not be celebrating “Canada Day”.   Unlike the crowd at the Forks, however, I shall not be celebrating the atrociously progressive “New Day” either – perhaps they should have called it “New DIE” from the appropriate acronym for Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity – but shall be celebrating, as I do every first of July, Dominion Day.  This is Canada’s true national holiday and the first of July bore this name until the Liberals changed it in 1982.   Since the Liberals did not do so honestly and constitutionally – only thirteen members, less than a quorum, were sitting at the time that the private member’s bill changing the name was rushed through all the readings without debate in less than five minutes, hence the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s description of this as “something very close to sneak-thievery” – I think that continuing to celebrate Dominion Day rather than Canada Day is appropriate.   I am in good company in this.  The great Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies called Dominion Day “splendid” and Canada Day “wet” in reference to its being “only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink”.  

 

I will say this about Canada Day, however.   Like Dominion Day it is a celebration of our country as a whole.  Indeed, Dominion Day and Canada Day, are two different celebrations of Canada based on two different visions of what ought to celebrated about the country.   I will elaborate on that momentarily.   First I will point out the contrast.   Attempts at a post-Canada Day holiday, as this New Day would appear to be, seem to be attempts at having a celebration on the country’s anniversary without celebrating the country at all but rather celebrating progressive ideals and the group identities of groups within Canada who are favoured by the left while allotting shame and dishonour to the country (and to groups within it who are not favoured by the left).   Ironically, considering that the sort of people who think up this sort of thing are always going on about “inclusivity”, this is incredibly divisive.   It is also insane.

 

Canada Day is a celebration of the Canada of the Liberal vision.   That Canada is best described by the title of a 1935 history by John Wesley Dafoe, the Liberal Party promoter who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, Canada: An American Nation.   By deliberately omitting the word “North” Dafoe expressed his idea that Canada is essentially American – possessing the same culture and values as the United States, and on the same political trajectory historically, away from the British Empire and towards democratic republican nationalism, albeit pursuing that path through means other than war.   Those who share this vision of Canada have historically regarded the Liberal Party as the guardians of Canada’s journey down this path or, as it has often been stated, “the natural ruling party of Canada”.    This is what the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton derisively called the “Authorized Version”, the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History that was, before the Cultural Marxist version in which the history of Canada, the United, States, and Western Civilization is treated as nothing but racism, sexism, and other such isms, permeated academe, authoritatively taught in Liberal-leaning history classrooms, which were most of them.   What critics of the left-wing of the Liberal Party – the branch of the party most associated with the two Trudeaus and Jean Chretien – and particularly the neoconservatives who look for inspiration and ideas primarily if not solely to the American “conservative” movement, often fail to grasp is that this is the Liberal vision of Canada even when the party’s left-wing, which spouts the same sort of anti-American rhetoric as the American Cold War era New Left, is controlling the party, and perhaps especially so.   The symbols associated with Canada Day, such as the flag introduced by Lester Pearson in 1965, like the name of the holiday itself, are symbols that point to Canada while saying nothing about her history and traditions, symbols that were introduced by Liberals to replace older ones that also pointed to Canada but did speak about her history and traditions.   The historical events highlighted in this vision of Canada are events in which the Liberal Party led the country.   In recent decades the main one of these was the repatriation of the British North America Act of 1867 in 1982 and the addition to it of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   In repatriating the British North America Act, it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.   Everything asserted a few sentences earlier about the symbols associated with Canada Day is true of this change as well and the new name reflects the American understanding of the word “constitution”, i.e., a piece of paper telling the government what to do, rather than the traditional British-Canadian understanding of the word as meaning the institutions of the state as they actually exist and operate in a living tradition that is largely unwritten.   Similarly, it was the American Bill of Rights that the authors of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had in mind when they added this to the repatriated BNA, although, many of us have been warning for years and as is painfully obvious after the medical tyranny of the last two and a half years, and especially the harsh fascist crackdown on those peacefully protesting against this tyranny in Ottawa earlier this year, the Charter simply does not provide the same level of protection as the American Bill.     The Charter did not provide us with anything worth having that we did not already have by right of the Common Law and the long tradition of protected rights and freedoms associated with it including such highlights as the Magna Carta.    Furthermore, it weakened the most important rights and freedoms mentioned in it – the fundamental freedoms of Section 2 and the legal rights of Sections 7 to 14, institutionalized the injustice of reverse de jure discrimination – Section 15 b), and provided no protection whatsoever to property rights which in the older tradition which both we and the Americans inherited occupy the spot where the Americans put “the pursuit of happiness” in one of the founding documents of their tradition as it branched off from the older.  Perhaps the most significant single effect of the Charter was to transform our Supreme Court into an American-style activist Court which it had not been up unto that point.   The American Supreme Court has been activist so long that now, when it has finally reversed one of its most notorious activist rulings – Roe  v Wade – and returned the right to legislate protection for the lives of the unborn to the lawmaking assemblies from which it stole it in 1973, the American progressives whose causes have benefited from the vast majority of judicial activism have seen this as illegitimate judicial activism and have been behaving like extremely spoiled children who have finally received long-overdue discipline.   The point, however, is that these changes, arguably the most Americanizing of any the Liberal Party has ever made, were introduced by a Liberal government when the party was controlled by its left-wing, despite that left-wing’s Communist-sympathizing anti-American rhetoric.

 

Dominion Day is a celebration of the Canada that was formally established as a country when the British North America Act came into effect on 1 July, 1867.    The country was given the name Canada, which name, originally the Iroquois word for “village”, was mistaken by Jacques Cartier for the St. Lawrence region, then applied to the society of French settlers established there, then, after this French society and its territory were ceded to the British Crown by the French Crown after the Seven Years War, and the Americans seceded from the British Crown to establish their Modern, liberal, republic, became the name of two provinces of the British Empire, one French Catholic and the other English Protestant, located in this territory, the latter populated by the Loyalists who had fled persecution in the American republic.   These provinces were united into one in 1841, which proved almost immediately to be a mistake, and the search for a solution to the problems this fusion generated was one of the main reasons for Confederation in which the two provinces were separated once again, but made part of a larger federation of British North American provinces that was given the name common to both.   Dominion was the title the Fathers of Confederation gave the country that would bear the name country.   The title of a country, as distinct from its name, is supposed to tell you what kind of a country it is, that is to say, the nature of the constitution of the state.   If a country has “People’s Republic” as its title, for example, that tells us that it is a Communist, totalitarian, hellhole.   The “Dominion” in Canada’s title tells us that she is a parliamentary monarchy, a kingdom or realm under the reign of the monarch we share with the United Kingdom, governed by her own Parliament.   When the Liberals were waging war against the title “Dominion” from the 1960s to the 1980s, they maintained that it was a synonym for “colony” and was imposed upon Canada from London in the nineteenth century, but none of that was true.  The most charitable interpretation of the Liberals making these claims is that they were ignorant of history, an interpretation that would seem to be supported by the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s account, in his memoirs, of his attempts to educate his Liberal colleagues in the Senate about these things during this period, although a less charitable interpretation might be more appropriate for the top leaders of the party.   The reality is that the Fathers of Confederation had “Kingdom of Canada” as their first choice, were advised by London to pick something less provocative to our neighbours to the South, and chose “Dominion” as a synonym for “Kingdom” from Psalm 72:8.

 

Dominion Day, as a celebration of this Canada, is a celebration of a vision of Canada that is pretty much the opposite of the Liberal vision of Canada, and an interpretation of her history that is the opposite of the “Authorized Version”.   To call it the Conservative vision and interpretation of Canada would be very misleading, I am afraid, because, those who currently use the moniker Conservative are generally light years removed from Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier   Whatever you want to call it, however, it is the truer vision and interpretation of Canada.    The Confederation Project was not an attempt to do what the Americans had done in 1776 albeit without bloodshed.   It was an attempt to do the opposite of what the Americans had done – to take the provinces of the British Empire in North America, and build out of them a new country without severing ties with the United Kingdom and the Empire, using the Westminster Parliament as its model rather than devising a new constitution from scratch.   For the Fathers of Confederation in 1864 to 1867, as with the English and French Canadians who fought alongside the British Imperial army and its Indian allies from 1812 to 1815, and the ancestors of the same during the American Revolution four decades earlier, the threat to their freedom came from the American Republic, with its “Manifest Destiny”, cloaking its dreams of conquest in the rhetoric of “liberation”.   The British Crown and Empire were not tyrannical forces from which the Canadians needed to be “liberated” (1) but the guardian forces that protected Canadian freedom from American conquest.    The threat of American conquest did not just magically go away on 1 July, 1867.  The efforts of Sir John’s government in the decades that followed, to bring the rest of British North America into Confederation, to settle the prairies, and to build the transcontinental railroad that would unite the country economically, were all carried out with the threat of a United States hoping and wishing for him to fail so that they might swoop in and gobble up Canada looming over head.   Aiding and abetting the would-be American conquerors were their fifth column in Canada, the Liberals.   In Sir John’s last Dominion election, held in March 1891 only a couple of months prior to the stroke that incapacitated him shortly before his death, he faced a Liberal opponent, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who campaigned on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity”, which is more commonly called “free trade”, with the United States.   Sir John called this treason, pointing out that free trade would create an economic union that would be the wedge in the door for cultural and political union with the United Sates.   That very year Liberal intellectual Goldwin Smith published a book, Canada and the Canada Question, that argued that Confederation was a mistake, that economics is everything, that trade in North America is naturally north-south rather than east-west – this was effectively rebutted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937) – and that union with the United States was both desirable and inevitable.   Sir John won another majority government in his last Dominion election by vigorously opposing all of this.

 

Sir John’s victory over Laurier in 1891 demonstrated that his vision of Canada, rather than the Liberal vision, was shared not just by the other Fathers of Confederation but by most Canadians.  That this remained true well into the Twentieth Century was evident in how the Liberals were the most likely to lose elections in which they most stressed the free trade plank of their platform and in the Loyalist spirit demonstrated by the Canadians who rallied to the call of King, Country, and Empire in two World Wars.   Even the Grit Prime Minister during the Second World War, who had mocked the Imperial war effort during the First World War, who was the very embodiment of the Liberal continentalist free trader, and who was actually an admirer of the dictator who led the other side – following his brief interview with Hitler in 1937, Mackenzie King wrote a gushing entry about him in his diary, in which he described the German tyrant in almost Messianic terms, comparing him to Joan of Arc, and employing language that would have sounded just as creepy had Hitler turned out to be the man of peace he thought him to be – had enough of that spirit to do his duty and lead Canada into the war alongside Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth.   Unfortunately, one of the consequences of that conflict was that the United States became the leading power in Western Civilization and immediately began to reshape the West into its own image.   To make matters worse around this same time mass communications technology, especially the television, became ubiquitous both a) facilitating the permeation of English Canadian culture with the mass pop culture produced in the culture factories of Los Angeles, and b) greatly increasing the influence of the newsmedia, which had been heavily slanted towards the Liberals since even before Confederation when George Brown edited the Globe, which evolved into today’s Globe and Mail.   These are among the foremost of the factors which produced the shift in popular thinking away from the truer, founding, vision of Canada celebrated in Dominion Day to the Liberal vision celebrated in Canada Day.   They are also among the factors that led George Grant, Canada’s greatest philosopher, traditionalist, and critic of technology, to pen his jeremiad for our country, Lament for a Nation, in 1965.

 

If the exponential growth in media power due to the development of mass communications technology and the post-World War II Americanization of Western Civilization as a whole are responsible for the shift in popular thought to the Liberal vision, how then do we explain this subsequent shift to the new, “woke” Left view, in which Canada, and everything that traditional Canadians celebrated about her in Dominion Day and Liberals in Canada Day, are regarded as cause for weeping and gnashing of teeth rather than celebration?

 

While the media certainly had a role in this as well – they were the ones, last year, remember, who, when various Indian bands began announcing that they had found ground disturbances – and this is all that they have found, to this date – on the grounds of former residential schools or in unmarked sections of cemeteries, irresponsibly reported this as “proof” of a conspiracy theory about the residential schools having been death camps where priests murdered kids by the thousands – it is our educational system that must bear the blame for the fact that so many people were stupid and ignorant enough to believe this stercus tauri.  It has been sixty-nine years since Hilda Neatby wrote and published So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education in which she lambasted the education bureaucrats who in most if not all Canadian provinces had decided in the decade or so prior to her writing to impose the educational “reforms” proposed by wacko, environmentalist (in the sense of taking the nurture side in the nature/nurture debate rather than the sense of being a tree-hugging, save-the-planet, do-gooder, although he may have been that too), atheist, secular humanist, Yankee philosopher John Dewey upon Canadian public schools.    This meant out with a curriculum focused on giving children facts to learn, expecting them to learn them, and acquainting them with the literary canon of the Great Conversation so that by exposing them to the Swiftian “sweetness and light” of Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” they might be inspired to rise above their natural barbarism or philistinism and learn to think and ask questions and strive for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  It meant in with a curriculum that was “child-centred”, which in practice meant dumbed down so as to minimize or eliminate content of which the child cannot immediately recognize its pragmatic utility to himself, although Dewey and his followers, who were decades ahead of everyone else in terms of solipsistic, narcissistic, psycho-babble, dressed it up in terms of helping the child maximize his potential.   Those sympathetic to the methods of Dewey et al. thought of these reforms as a positive shift from a passive education in which the teacher gives the student the content to be learned and the student receives it to an active education in which the student is trained to learn by self-discovery.   Neatby recognized these methods for what they really were – the means of transforming schools from institutions that provide their students with the intellectual tools necessary to live in control of their own lives as free people into institutions that train people to be docile, unquestioning, members of a more planned, more controlled, and more collectivist sort of society.   Her warnings largely went ignored, although she was commemorated with a stamp twenty-two years ago.   Even though the environmentalist presuppositions underlying Dewey’s system have been thoroughly debunked in the intervening decades, his theories survive as the dominant educational philosophy, albeit having been periodically translated into the latest forms of newspeak.      Meanwhile university level academics have mostly stopped criticizing the way the schools under the new system are failing to prepare students for a university education, but have instead accommodated the universities to the situation by transforming them into indoctrination centres in which their unquestioning and docile but also navel-gazingly narcissistic “student” bodies have their heads stuffed with every conceivable form of left-wing group identity politics – there are entire divisions of universities now dedicated to specific forms of this – and the deranged post-Marxist crackpot left-wing theories – intersectionality, Critical Theory (Race and otherwise), etc. – that support them.   The subversion and perversion of our educational system just described is the reason so many were quick to unthinkingly and unquestioningly accept the media’s irresponsible claims that the discovery of soil disturbances by ground-penetrating radar constitutes proof of the conspiracy theory that government-funded, church-operated, schools were murdering their students in some giant plot involving the highest officials of church, state, and a host of other institutions, that a defrocked United Church minister (2) pulled out of his rear end decades ago.    It is the reason so many were willing to commit the chronological snobbery of judging ex post facto our country’s past leaders by the left-wing standards of today’s progressives, the injustice of accepting a condemnation of our country in which only the accuser has been allowed to be heard and the defence has been denied the right of cross-examination and of making a defence by the mob shouting “disrespect” and “denial” every time anyone raised a question or pointed out contra-narrative facts, and the impiety of thinking the worst of the generations that went before us.   Note how the words “colonialism” and “imperialism” are constantly on the lips of such people, being used negatively in precisely the manner described by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century in which he concluded that this usage, so different from how these terms are used by real historians, has reduced these words to “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers”.   This bespeaks the failure of the educational system.

 

So no, I will not be participating in any “New Day” that is the product of what passes for thinking in the minds of those whose acceptance of the left-wing narrative that our country is something to be mourned rather than celebrated testifies to the ruin of our educational system.    Nor, as an unreconstructed old Tory, will I be celebrating the Liberal vision for our country on “Canada Day”.   I shall once again raise my glass – or rather cup of coffee – to Sir John A. Macdonald and celebrate Canada’s true holiday, Dominion Day.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

 

God Save the Queen!

 

(1)     For all of Jefferson’s Lockean rhetoric about natural law, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed his 1776 accusations of “absolute tyranny” against George III and Parliament were nonsensical propaganda of the most risible sort, considering that the British government was one of the least intrusive governments in the world both at that time and in all of history up to that point.   

(2)     This is actually, in a twisted way, rather impressive.   It is far easier to be ordained in the United Church of Canada than to be defrocked.  

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.

Government Hubris

Last December, at the annual pre-Christmas open house at the Manitoba legislature, I shook Premier Brian Pallister’s hand, congratulated him on his re-election, and told him to keep up the good work. Today, I wish I could take all of that back. Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Manitoba. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election, and have voted Progressive Conservative in every provincial election since I was old enough to vote. I do not think that I will be voting for them again for as long as Pallister leads the party. Indeed, I am contemplating actively and aggressively campaigning against their re-election. It is not that I think any other party would govern better. I do not. It is not that I wish to see Wab Kinew become premier of Manitoba. The very thought of that happening turns my stomach. I regard Kinew and the socialist party that he leads with greater disgust and contempt than anything that ever fell to the ground from the backside of a horse. It is rather that in my opinion the way Pallister has been talking and behaving over the last three weeks demands punishment. I am getting really, really, sick and tired of the arrogant, drunk-with-power, threatening tone of Brian Pallister and of his chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Pallister ought to have listened to Her Majesty’s marvelous speech on Sunday and learned from her how to speak to the public in a time of crisis. Indeed, all of our provincial premiers and the Dominion premier should have done so. That, of course, assumes that they have the capacity to learn. This is a very big assumption indeed. Our Sovereign is a lady of class and breeding, whereas our politicians, at the risk of unfairly insulting livestock, all give the impression of having been raised in a barn. I have many times written about the distinction between authority and power. Here we have that distinction perfectly illustrated. The Queen in her address to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth spoke with authority. Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin, who never open their mouths without bossing us around, slapping further restrictions down on us, and threatening us, only understand power.

Brian Pallister declared a provincial state-of-emergency at a much earlier stage of the COVID-19 outbreak than his counterparts in most other provinces. This occurred on Friday, March 20th, at which point in time Manitoba had seventeen confirmed cases of the virus, all of whom were people who had contracted the virus while travelling out of province. In declaring the state of emergency Pallister and Roussin limited gatherings to fifty people, required businesses to impose an one to two metre gap between patrons, limited the number of people theatres and dining facilities could seat, and closed all bingo and gaming, as well as gyms and other “wellness centres.” Roussin threatened everyone who did not obey these rules with fines up to fifty thousand dollars – five hundred thousand for corporations – and six months in prison. Pallister, in a truly odious press interview, in which he acknowledged but brushed off concerns that these measures were draconian, encouraged Manitobans to spy and snitch on each other.

Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the province has climbed slowly. It is only very recently at the beginning of April, that Roussin announced that the early stages of transmission within the community, as opposed to bringing it in from the outside, had been detected. At that time there were one hundred and twenty seven confirmed cases. It was before that, however, that he and Pallister had begun tightening the existing restrictions and imposing new ones. Indeed, that very day a two week order for all businesses and services that the provincial government deemed “non-essential” to close came into effect. The order had come down a couple of days earlier. Even prior to that, the government had decreased the number of people allowed to gather to ten. This took place about the time that the first death from COVID-19 in the province occurred – there have been two as of the time of this writing. The first death was of an elderly woman who had been in Intensive Care since the first phase of the provincial shut down. Her death would not have been prevented had Pallister and Roussin imposed the ten person limit on March 20th. Her death would not have been prevented had “non-essential” businesses been ordered to close on March 20th. Tightening the restrictions was not a rational act, but rather a sign that the exercise of absolute power had gone to the chief public health official’s head.

By the first day of this week the confirmed cases in Manitoba had risen to two hundred and three. On Monday, one additional case brought the number to two hundred and four. Eleven people have been hospitalized, seven of whom are in Intensive Care. The very same day, Roussin’s tone jumped to a whole new level of arrogant, totalitarian, bossiness. Issuing threats of police enforcement, this Grinch-like creature stole Easter and the Passover from Christians and Jews. Having already closed the Churches and synagogues, he now ordered the faithful not to have “family dinners and get togethers.” “Everyone needs to adhere to the public health orders” he said “and that includes faith-based organizations.” Which is simply another way of saying that he thinks that his commandments overrule those of God.

That doctors, in the sense of physicians, think they are God has long been a stereotype and, like most stereotypes, contains a great deal of truth. For this reason, it is dangerous to give them any sort of civil authority. It goes to their heads a lot quicker than it does other people.

To those, like this writer, who grew up reading novels by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess, and others warning us against totalitarianism, as well as the non-fictional accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest of the very real totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it is hugely offensive that today, Her Majesty’s free subjects in this province of Manitoba, in the Dominion of Canada, cannot go to the grocery store without being forced by authoritarian goons to wait, six feet apart, in a line outside the store until they are told to enter. Once inside the store, their every move is policed by the store Gestapo, until they enter a similar line at the checkout. These conditions belong in Communist countries like the former Soviet Union, not in a Commonwealth realm.

Dr. Roussin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is furthermore a huge violation of medical ethics. The fact that everyone else is doing it in no way excuses him. What principle of medical ethics could be more fundamental than primum non nocere, which principle is enshrined in the vow to abstain from harm in the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos? (1) Yet every conceivable form of harm – psychological, spiritual, ethical, social, civil, and physical, including death itself - is the inevitable result of a lengthy, enforced, universal shut down of society.

The tighter the restrictions become, the more rules are imposed upon us, the longer we are kept from our friends and family and Churches, and forced to violate our nature as Aristotle’s “social animal”, the greater the harm caused by the anti-COVID measures will be. There will be this significant difference, however, between the deaths from COVID-19 complications that these measures might be preventing and the deaths from domestic violence, suicide, and murder that these measures will cause if maintained for too long. Nobody, except perhaps the government of Red China, could be legitimately blamed for the former. The blood of the latter will be upon the hands and heart and soul of Dr. Brent Roussin and Premier Brian Pallister forever.

(1) The principle, in the familiar wording, comes, interestingly enough, from another work of Hippocrates entitled Of the Epidemics. In the Oath, of course, it is turned into a vow: ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν

That Old Egyptian River

Dougal MacDonald, an assistant lecturer at the University of Alberta, has been the subject of much controversial discussion recently over some posts he made on Facebook last month. In these posts he denied the historical reality of the Holodomor.

Holodomor, for those not familiar with the term, although it sounds like a neologism, a portmanteau coined to create a word similar to Holocaust, is in fact a Ukrainian term that means “killing by hunger.” It describes the same event that, before the fairly recent importation of the Ukrainian term, we English speakers called the Terror Famine. This was the man-made famine by means of which Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. Those interested in the history of this event are advised to read either Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine (1986) or Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).

Mr. MacDonald described the Holodomor as a “myth” that was created and spread by the Nazis to discredit the Soviet Union. These comments led to protests by the Ukrainian Students Society, calls for him to be fired, and his being denounced on Twitter by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.

Inevitably, comparisons have been made between Mr. MacDonald’s views and those which earned such notoriety for Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. The contrasts, however, strike me as being more interesting than the comparisons.

First, Mr. MacDonald’s posts unquestionably deny the Holodomor. By contrast, the majority of those who are described as Holocaust deniers by progressives, the media, Jewish activist groups, and antiracist organizations are people who have only questioned elements of the conventional Holocaust narrative such as the total number killed and the means, and regard themselves as revisionists rather than deniers.

Second, while progressives maintain that all “Holocaust deniers” are admirers of the Third Reich who through some weird sort of guilt-by-association share in that regime’s culpability for the crimes they supposedly deny, this is manifestly not the case. Paul Rassinier, one of the first “Holocaust deniers” if not the first, was himself a survivor of Buchenwald having been a part of the anti-Nazi resistance in occupied France who was later captured. In the United States, the first to give Rassinier’s revisionist arguments a hearing and a degree of acceptance, were not the Hitler worshipping followers of George Lincoln Rockwell, but the old kind of American liberals who had rebranded themselves libertarian when American liberalism went statist in the New Deal, a large percentage of whom were Jewish. Such vehement anti-statist, anti-war types as Harry Elmer Barnes and Murray N. Rothbard can hardly be credibly described as “Nazis”. A number of Christian theologians – limiting ourselves to the Protestants, R. J. Rushdooney, Gary North, and Kurt Marquart are just three of the more prominent – found Rassinier’s version of events the more convincing and spoke out against the non-revisionist version as a violation of the Ninth Commandment. These men were not Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers either.

Dougal MacDonald, however, is clearly a Communist. In this year’s Dominion Election he was the candidate for the Marxist-Leninist party in the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, and has run for that party in previous elections as well.

Third, in response to the controversy, the University of Alberta pointed out that MacDonald was not speaking on behalf of the University and emphasized the commitment of the University to academic freedom and the freedom of its faculty and staff to express different and controversial points of view. While this is exactly the position they ought to be taking, can you imagine them talking this way if one of their instructors had been accused of denying the Holocaust rather than the Holodomor?

Maybe if his name was Mohammed.

Fourth, there is not the slightest degree of credibility to MacDonald’s Communist claim that the Holodomor is propaganda manufactured by the Nazis. The Terror Famine itself began in 1932. In March of the following year, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones went to the Soviet Union, snuck into the Ukraine, and recorded what he personally observed of the famine in his diaries. At the end of that month he issued a press release informing the world of the Terror Famine. At this point in time Adolf Hitler had only been Chancellor of Germany for three months. The newspapers that carried Jones’ report, such as the Manchester Guardian, the flagship newspaper of classical English liberalism, were hardly sympathetic to the Nazi movement, much less controlled by it. Indeed, the same newspaper had published an earlier, anonymous account of the famine, which had appeared two weeks prior to Hitler’s becoming Chancellor! The author of the anonymous account was Malcolm Muggeridge who had travelled to the Soviet Union the previous year at a time when he was still sympathetic to the Communist cause. Furthermore, the work of confirming these early accounts and providing a full, detailed, account of the Terror Famine was carried out by researchers with no ties to the Third Reich or sympathy with that regime, decades after it had fallen and been utterly discredited.

Should, however, someone wish to maintain that the Soviet regime exaggerated the accounts of Nazi atrocities for its own purposes, he would have plenty of grounds upon which to base this claim.

First, the Soviet Union was a very active participant in the Nuremberg Trials. They provided a judge, an alternate judge, and a chief prosecutor to the proceedings, as did the UK, USA and France. American Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft observed at the time that the kind of justice being administered in these trials far more closely resembled the Soviet notion of justice than the Anglo-Saxon justice of the UK and the USA. This suggests that Soviet influence over the trials far exceeded that of its one-vote-in-four. The “confessions” portion of the evidence for the Nazi atrocities is largely taken from these trials.

Second, it was the Soviets and not the free Western Allies, who “liberated” the part of Europe in which the death camps were located and kept that part of Europe under Communist slavery until the fall of the Iron Curtain. (1) This meant that for forty years after the war, access to the places like Auschwitz that were the sites of Nazi atrocities, and hence to a major source of information about what went on there, was under Soviet control.

Third, the Soviets were demonstrably spreading disinformation about Nazi war crimes and through this means quite successfully manipulating Western governments and Holocaust victim groups to act as their unwitting agents against those the Soviet regime had marked for revenge as late as the 1970s and 1980s. It was in these decades, the last of the Cold War just prior to the Soviet Union’s fall, that the KGB began targeting Ukrainian ex-patriots in Canada and the United States by accusing them of having been Nazi war criminals. In most cases the accusation was based upon the Ukrainian in question having been forced to serve the SS in some capacity or other – translator, guard, etc. – when the Nazis overran the Ukraine. In one case, the most famous of them all, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio was falsely accused of being a specific war criminal, “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. In each case the “useful idiots” such as the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice and the Canadian Jewish Congress, danced to the tune the KGB played. The CJC began hounding the Canadian government to revoke the citizenship of several elderly Ukrainians. Just this week the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the final appeal of one such man. The OSI stripped Demjanjuk of his American citizenship and extradited him to Israel, where he was charged with the war crimes of “Ivan the Terrible” and convicted. On appeal, however, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the evidence proved conclusively that another man, and not Demjanjuk, had been “Ivan the Terrible” and overturned the conviction. Greatly to their credit, the Israelis refused to have any part of it when the KGB’s stooges then accused Demjanjuk of having committed war crimes as a guard at Sobibor. If the Soviets were spreading false information pertaining to Nazi war crimes in order to manipulate people in the West and accomplish their nefarious purposes at the end of the Cold War, there is no good reason to believe that they had not been doing this since the beginning of the Cold War. (2)

Considering the above, it makes zero sense whatsoever that the taboo on suggesting that the Holocaust account be revised to take into consideration the likelihood of Soviet tampering remains so absolute. It makes even less sense, if there can be anything less than zero sense, a sort of sense deficit, that, with a possible controversial and unprincipled exception for members of the Muslim community, the taboo has increased in strength since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, someone who says that the Nazis killed only 5, 999, 999 and a half Jews, runs the risk of being labelled a "Holocaust denier" and subjected to a campaign of vilification on the part of people mercilessly determined to ruin him, his life and reputation, job and career, family and social standing. It is greatly to our shame that we have tolerated this kind of persecution in our country.


There are many today who rightly object to the form of mob mentality known as cancel culture. Somebody decides to take offence at something that another person has said, calls that other person out, using one of the many weaponized words that progressives have manufactured for precisely this purpose – “racist”, “xenophobic”, “anti-Semitic”, “sexist”, “homophobic” and more recently “transphobic” are the most common of these – and the howling hordes of the easily outraged quickly assemble to carry out the metaphorical – for now – lynching of their victim. Canadian legend, Don Cherry, who for the past four decades had provided the first intermission entertainment for views of Hockey Night in Canada, was recently and disgracefully, made the victim of just this sort of mob attack.


Those who oppose cancel culture today ought, if they were around, to have fought tooth and nail against the persecution of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. That is where it all began. To paraphrase, and very appropriately if I do say so myself, Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Holocaust deniers and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Holocaust denier.”


What began with the persecution of the Holocaust revisionists and has grown into the cancel culture of today is an outright assault on one of the most basic principles of the Canadian tradition. In the debates during Confederation, Sir Richard Cartwright said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.” In the 1930s on the eve of the Second World War, Donald Creighton, Canada’s greatest historian, declared that free speech had for generations been considered “the proudest heritage of the British peoples.” (3) In the name of that heritage, Creighton opposed both the Toronto Police’s clapping down on Communists and the provincial government of Ontario’s demands that Frank Underhill be dismissed from his position at the University of Toronto over his socialist, pro-American – at the time these would not have been considered mutually exclusive – and anti-British views. Creighton, who was an old-fashioned, ultra-conservative, pro-British Tory, had no sympathy either for Communism or for his arch-nemesis Frank Underhill, but he understood that free speech was too important a heritage to allow to be jeopardized.

Some, noting the very objectionable double standard that is applied to Holocaust revisionists on the one hand and those with views like Dougal MacDonald on the other, would eliminate the double standard by extending the taboo against “Holocaust denial” to “genocide denial” in general. To sin further against freedom of speech, however, is hardly a solution. The problem with the double standard is not that some people are allowed to “get away” with saying things some consider to be offensive, rather it is that we allow others to be persecuted and destroyed for the views they hold and the words they say. A general taboo against “genocide denial” would sin not only against freedom of speech, but against that keystone of justice as it has long been understood in the English-speaking world, the right of the accused to presumption of innocence, the importance of which right can hardly be said to decrease when the accused is no longer an individual, but an entire nation or even an entire civilization.

Those who insist that “denial” of this-or-that, whether it be the Holocaust, genocides in general, or whatever idée de rigueur such as climate change that progressives happen to be currently fixated on, constitutes a grave moral offence place upon others a moral duty to affirm each of these things. To morally require the affirmation of tenets of faith from its membership is the prerogative of a creed-based faith community. What we are seeing looks very much like the creation of a new, post-Christian, civil religion. Orthodox Christians and classical liberals who oppose any blurring of the distinction between civil society and faith community both have good reasons, albeit rather different ones, to find this disturbing.

I am beginning to develop a strong suspicion that somewhere far away, in the realms of eternal woe, Adolf Hitler is laughing at the way in which some of the countries that at such a huge cost to themselves defeated him almost a century ago are now throwing away their most treasured rights and freedoms out of fear of offending his victims. If some people have their way, Joseph Stalin will be joining him in that laugh very soon.

(1) The distinction between extermination camps or death camps and those which were merely concentration camps was not made by revisionists but is part of mainstream Holocaust history. The former, such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were never located on German soil, but rather in German-occupied Poland. Camps on German territory, such as the Dachau camp in Bavaria that was liberated by the Americans, were concentration camps. Poland was overrun by the Soviets and remained under Communist control behind the Iron Curtain until 1989.

(2) Anyone familiar with “Operation Keelhaul”, the most disgusting outcome of the Faustian compact made with Stalin at Yalta in which the Western Allies agreed to hand ex-patriots who had fled the Soviet Union and ended up in Hitler’s camps back over to Soviet tyranny, will recognize sickening echoes of it in the way Canada and the United States allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing the KGB’s dirty work for them in this. For those unfamiliar with Operation Keelhaul, I refer you to Julius – that’s Julius not Jeffrey – Epstein’s book by that title from 1973, and Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta, published four years later.

(3) I found the Creighton quote on page 149 of Donald Wright’s, Donald Creighton: A Life in History, published by the University of Toronto in 2015. Wright writes approvingly of Creighton’s stand for free speech, as well he ought. Unfortunately, he failed to live up to the principles of his subject himself, and earlier this year was one of the University of New Brunswick faculty whose signature could be found on a letter condemning their former colleague Ricardo Duchesne for dissenting from the usual academic politically correct tripe on ethno-political matters and, hence, writing far more interesting things than any of them ever dared to put out.

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.