“Both/And” and “Because…Therefore”

The expression via media has often been used to describe the Anglican position with regards to Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other.  It is a positive expression that evokes Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean, the path of virtue from which if you veer off in either direction you fall into one of two ditches of opposing vices.  It is misleading, however, in that it suggests that the Anglican position is neither Catholic nor Protestant but something in between.  The classical position of the reformed Ecclesia Anglicana – the English Church, planted early in the first millennium, as reformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – however, is not a neither/nor but a both/and.  If we are to continue to use the expression, therefore, it needs to be with the explanation that it means our Church is both Catholic and Protestant and not that it is neither one nor the other. 

 

Obviously for the Anglican Church to be Catholic, Catholic cannot be defined by communion with or submission to the Patriarch of Rome commonly called the Pope.  St. Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century defined the faith of the Catholic Church as that “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”, that is, what the Church as a whole has taught and believed since the Apostles, excluding that which has been unique to one location or to one time period.  In accordance with this principle, the English Reformers looked to the undivided Church of the early centuries as normative when carrying out their reforms.

 

Similarly for the Anglican Church to be Protestant, Protestant cannot mean what it often means in online “Catholic versus Protestant” debates, that is, North American evangelical.  Since North American evangelicalism tends to take as normative the doctrines of dissenting separatist groups that grew out of the Puritan movement that was discontent with the conservatism of the English Reformation and demanded more radical reforms to conform the Church to the model of Calvin’s Geneva it would make little sense to define Anglican Protestantism this way.  We should also be cautious about using the Five Solas to define Anglican Protestantism.  The Five Solas are a twentieth century formulation, drawn up by Calvinists who wanted a five-point summary of the doctrines of the Reformation to correspond to the five-point summary of their doctrine of predestination.  The Anglican Church in the Reformation agreed with the Lutherans and Calvinists that the Bible is the supreme authority to which the Church must conform her doctrine and that the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ is received by faith and not earned by works or merit.  In her Articles of Religion, however, she does not use the type of language found in the fifth article of the Belgic Confession of Faith when expressing the supremacy of Scriptural authority but speaks rather of the sufficiency of Scriptures (1).  In the English version of the eleventh article (the original text of the Articles of Religion was in Latin), sola is rendered as “only” rather than “alone”, which, with the exception of one marginal note, is also how Archbishop Cranmer consistently referred to the doctrine in the homily to which the article points (2).  The distinction, while small, is not insignificant.  “Only” usually excludes others from a class or category while “alone” usually indicates their absence.  Therefore, to convey in English that faith is the sole means whereby we receive the gift of saving grace (3) without suggesting that it exists in a vacuum apart from repentance, love, works and the like in the human heart, the “only” of the Anglican formularies is to be preferred over the “alone” that is usual with other Protestants. 

 

The Anglican Church to which the both Catholic and Protestant via media belongs, it needs to be pointed out, is the orthodox portion of the Anglican Church and not the part that has succumbed to the revisionist theology that is usually called liberalism.  Liberalism, despite naming itself after the virtue of generosity implying a kind of broadmindedness, is neither/nor with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than both/and.  Moreover, it is not neither/nor in the sense the literal meaning of via media implies, the occupation of middle territory between, but neither/nor in the sense that it rejects much that is common to both Catholicism and Protestantism in their classical senses.

 

I have recently read three books which all affirm the “both Catholic and Protestant” understanding of the Anglican tradition.  The first of these is a short monograph entitled The Anglican Way: Evangelical and Catholic which was written by the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon and was first published by Morehouse - Barlow in 1983.  The edition I have is the 2010 edition put out by WIPF & STOCK of Eugene, Oregon.  The second is entitled Reformed Catholic Anglicanism which has multiple contributors and which was edited by Charles F. Camlin, Charles D. Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper.  It was published by the Anglican Way Institute which is an outreach of the Church of the Holy Communion Cathedral (Reformed Episcopal Church) in Dallas, Texas in 2024.  The third is The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the Most Reverend A. Michael Ramsay, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury.  This book was written early in Ramsay’s ministry, long before he became the Anglican Primate, and was first published in 1936 by Longmans and Company.  I read the 2010 edition put out by Hendrickson Publishers of Peabody, Massachusetts.  In the cases of the last two books, it is the e-book editions for Kindle that I have and which I read.

 

I will defer further discussion of the second and third books to future essays and focus on Toon’s for the remainder of this one.  The author of this book was an Anglican priest and theology professor originally from the Diocese of Liverpool who ministered in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life, where he led the American version of the Prayer Book Society.  Other books of his that I have read in the last two years are his Knowing God Through Liturgy which is a sort of devotional guide to the Book of Common Prayer and his Neither Archaic nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer and Public Worship co-written with Louis R. Tarsitano which defends the ongoing use of the Elizabethan language of the Prayer Book against the recent trend for “updated” liturgy (I found his argument for retaining the singular pronoun for addressing God as more theologically proper than using the numerically generic “you” quite compelling). I have also recently read the 2012 Gedenkschrift (4) that Roberta Bayer edited entitled Reformed and Catholic: Essays in Honor (sic) of Peter Toon.  Just how important the theme of the book under consideration here was to Toon is indicated by the fact that the title of this memorial collection was chosen to evoke its subtitle.

 

The book is not a long one.  Its ninety-four pages are divided into a preface and two introductory chapters, followed by Part One: The Evangel, which has two chapters, Part Two: Catholicity, which has two chapters, and Epilogue which in its listing in the Table of Contents confusingly looks like a third chapter to Part Two, and two Appendices. 

 

In the first chapter in the introductory section entitled “God’s Call” Toon expresses the both/and approach to Anglicanism in terms of the Church’s call:

 

In other words, the call of God to the Episcopal Church in these times, when the one Church of God is sadly divided, is that it should be simultaneously evangelical and catholic.  This does not mean that she is to be evangelical in her preaching and catholic in her liturgy.  It is not a matter of being sometimes evangelical and sometimes catholic.  The Church is called to be catholic and evangelical all the time in all that she is and does. (p. 11)

 

For the remainder of the chapter Toon elaborates on this by talking about how an evangelicalism that neglects “the wholeness of the one Church in space and time. The beauty of Liturgy, the symbolic power of sacraments, the depth of spirituality, and the episcopate as a sign of unity” (p. 12) and a Catholicity in which “the treasure of the Gospel is lost somewhere in thick layers of tradition which reach back into the dim past” (ibid) both fall short. “There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (p. 13) he reminds us, for “Without him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity” (ibid).  “What we have to guard against” he writes “is the rejection of either the achievement of Christ in creating the Gospel or the continuing achievement of Christ in ruling and directing the Church throughout history” (p. 14).

 

The two chapters in the first part, “The Evangel”, are entitled “By Grace Alone” and “By Faith Alone.”  Clearly, the sixteenth century Reformation takes precedence over the North American revival experience in defining the word “Evangelical” for Toon. (5)  He begins the first chapter by asking “Have you been accosted by an enthusiast who asks you, ‘Are you saved?’” (p. 29) and says:

 

If you are a baptized Christian then you ought to say: ‘In Christ Jesus my salvation is completed and complete; because of the indwelling Spirit in my heart I am in the process of being saved; and, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return from heaven at the end of the age to raise the dead, I look forward to salvation at the end of the age.’  

 

From this staring point, in which the fullness of Gospel salvation is contrasted with the North American evangelical tendency to think of salvation as a single event within the experience of the individual Christian, Toon proceeds to contrast North American evangelicalism’s individualistic understanding of salvation with the way “The Kingdom of God, a phrase much on the lips of Jesus, can be seen and presented only in this-worldly terms: the bringing of justice into human affairs” (p. 30) that is characteristic of liberal “Christianity”.  Toon notes, however, that the reduction of the Christian message to a certain type of political and social activism that is so evident on the part of the World Council of Churches, is matched by the way American evangelicals tend to identify the opposite kind of political and social activism with their understanding of Christianity.  Both, he says, need a deeper understanding of the basic human problem of which the full salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is the solution, “a weakness, a fundamental gone-wrong-ness which in both the individual and in society” (p. 32) which in classical theological language is called “Original Sin.”  Toon writes:

 

The human race was created by God to enjoy spiritual union and communion with himself.  Where this does not exist then there is a fundamental problem.  For the human being is made to enjoy a relationship both with his Creator and with the creatures whom God has made.  Only with right relationships with God, with human beings and with creation can a person find wholeness or salvation.

 

These relationships are broken by the problem with the human condition that is Original Sin or gone-wrongness or, as Toon also suggests, the classical concept of hubris understood in a corporate sense as affecting the entire race.

 

Having identified what we need saving from, Toon then goes on to talk about the right language with which the Church needs to present the Gospel of salvation.  I opened this essay by talking about how the Anglican via media needs to be understood as both/and with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than neither/nor and this is the topic of Toon’s book as a whole. (6) Here, Toon draws another such distinction without noting the parallel.  I found it to be a particularly excellent way of explaining the distinction between the way the Gospel should be proclaimed and the mistaken way in which it often is so I provide a lengthy quotation of it:

 

This mistake can best be illustrated by considering two types of sentences.  The first type we may call an ‘if…then’ statement.  Here are several examples.  Speaking to a child at table we say, ‘If you eat your meat and potatoes, then you can have some ice cream’.  To a child at school we say, ‘If you pass your examinations, then we will buy you a bike’.  To a young person starting work we say, ‘If you do your work well then we will see that you get promotion’.  Finally, we all are familiar with the politician who says, ‘If you vote for me then I will do for you what you want me to do’.

 

This form of statement, with the understanding it encapsulates is necessary for human society.  But we make a major mistake if we present or understand the Gospel of God on this basis.  In other words, if we make ‘believe’ or ‘repent and believe’ into a condition which we ourselves must fulfil by ourselves in order to get the rewards of God’s salvation, then we pervert the Gospel! It is far better to think of the promise of salvation from God, as it is described in the New Testament as being of the structure, ‘because…therefore’.  Here are a couple of examples, ‘Because there is a free national health service, go into hospital for your operation’; and ‘because the day is warm and the sand is clean go and bathe in the sea’.  So the message of salvation is something like this: ‘Because Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose for your acceptance with God, therefore you are saved’.  And, ‘Because God has provided salvation for you in Jesus Christ, therefore you are to believe and to receive this salvation’. And, “Because God loves you and will love you, therefore you are to accept his love’.

 

You can see the difference between the ‘if…then’ and the ‘because…therefore’ approach.  The first encourages us to think that we can do something to contribute to our salvation, while the second reminds us that salvation is, from beginning to end, the gift of God; and the gift is not earned but rather gratefully received and accepted.  We do not ourselves offer to God our religion, our good works, our pious thoughts, and our good endeavours so that he will accept us.  Rather we gratefully receive.  We believe God and his promises concerning salvation, and then, out of sheer amazement and gratitude to him for his wonderful salvation, we live a life of love towards him and our neighbour. (pp. 32-33)

 

Toon is absolutely correct that this is the way in which the Gospel ought to be presented and what he has captured here is really what the Reformation was all about.  He follows this up by applying it to repentance in which he provides a helpful illustration of the true purpose of repentance – telling people that they are forgiven will not be understood and appreciated if they do not recognize and accept that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. (7)

 

In the first chapter, “The Anglican Experience” of the second part of the book, Toon gives his account of Catholicity.  He begins by objecting to the Roman Catholic Church “calling itself ‘the Catholic Church’”, i.e., sans Roman,  because “Catholicity is not confined to that community” (p. 63).  He then provides a “brief word study” of the words “ekklesia” (literally “assembly”, it became the name of the Christian society and therefore “Church” in English) and “catholic” (Gr. katholikos), correctly noting that “catholic” is first applied to ekklesia by St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century and that as applied to the Church it came to have the primary connotations of universality (“the world-wide Church in contrast to the local congregation”) and orthodoxy (the faith of the world-wide Church as opposed to the heresies of separatist sects). (p. 63-64).  “To receive and accept the Church as it has existed, and as it has believed, taught, confessed, and worshipped, is the beginnings of true Catholicity” he writes. 

 

In subsequent sections he fleshes this out.  He reminds us “that it was the catholic Church, with its imperfections, that gave recognition to what we now call the canon of the New Testament” (p. 66) and while his claims for the Church in this regards are far more modest than those of the Latin and Greek Churches, he adds:

 

Parallel developments in the Church in this same general period of time included the general recognition of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter (=priest) and deacon, the centrality of the Eucharist as the main act of worship on the Lord’s Day, the creation of creeds (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene) and the recognition of apostolic tradition (having reference to both the succession of sound teaching and to the historical, personal, succession of bishops). (ibid).

 

He warns against claiming too much from history, pointing to the example of Roman Catholicism as doing this by seeing in the historical development of the See of Rome into the papacy ruling the entire episcopate and the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of Mary proof of divine approbation of the same and argues for the Church’s indefectibility rather than infallibility. (pp. 67-68)   Then, in discussing how the Church of England’s Catholicity is reformed, i.e., from “deviant and exaggerated developments and expressions” (p. 68) that had entered the Church in the period prior to the Reformation, he lists twelve examples of elements of the Catholic tradition that the English Reformers made a point of retaining, in some cases even when their Continental counterparts did not.  The list can be found on pages 68-69, I won’t reproduce it here, but will merely note that it is basically an expansion of everything mentioned in the previous block quote.

 

In the second chapter of this section entitled “Pertinent Examples” he provides extended discussion of the topics of “Bishops”, “the Liturgy of the Eucharist” and “Visible Unity”.  I disagree with his saying under the first heading that “A careful reading of the New Testament reveals that it does not describe or prescribe a single pattern of ordained ministry in the apostolic churches” (p. 76) as it seems quite clear to me that the three-fold ministry is present in the New Testament where it is originally Apostles, presbyters, and deacons, with St. Timothy and St. Titus later assuming the governing role of the Apostles in the office to which the title of bishop (overseer) would very shortly after become attached. (8)  Toon argues for the plene esse view of the episcopate that bishops are necessary for the fullness of the Church, but their absence doesn’t necessarily de-church a body (pp. 77-79) to which I have no objection. (9)  Under the second heading, he begins by observing that the basic structure of the Eucharistic liturgy goes back to the earliest days of Church history and by providing a list of its basic elements (p. 80).  He then draws out the significance of it all – that it is as the very name Eucharist indicates “a great thanksgiving to the Father for all he has done and is doing”, an anamnesis, “the living and effective sign of the sacrifice of Christ, accomplished once for all on the Cross of Calvary”, which includes “an invocation of the Holy Spirit”, and is “the communion of the faithful” (p. 81).  He notes how “the doctrine of Christ presented in the Nicene Creed” is fundamental “to the structure, content and ethos of the developed Eucharist celebrated in the Church over the centuries” (p, 82) and observes that the significance of the Sursum Corda (the vesicles and responses that introduce the Sacramental portion of the liturgy) and shortly thereafter the introduction to the Sanctus is that “we are invited to share in Christ’s heavenly worship through our union with, and in, him” (p. 82).  He reminds us that worship is not supposed to be something we do privately in our pews but is a corporate act (p. 83).

 

Overall it is an excellent introduction to the evangelicalism and Catholicity of the (orthodox) Anglican tradition.

 

(1)   There is also a noticeable difference between how the distinction between the canonical books and the “Apocrypha” is handled in the Thirty-Nine Articles and how it is handled in the Belgic Confession in both of which the relevant article is the sixth.

(2)   Cranmer’s original version of the article just names the doctrine and refers to the homily, the Elizabethan revision provides an account of the doctrine.  In both versions the homily is called “The Homily of Justification”.  The homily referred to is the third in the first (1547) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, more commonly called Book of Homilies, and its actual title is “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour from Sin and Death Everlasting.”

(3)   This does not contradict the idea of Sacraments as means of grace.  Sacraments are means by which grace is given, faith is the means by which it is received.  Dr. Luther likened faith to the empty hand which receives a gift.  Sacraments, in this analogy, are hands of the Giver not the recipient.  Sacraments share the role of the Word, of which St. Augustine of Hippo said they were a visual form, not the role of faith.

(4)  The same thing as a Festschrift (a collection of essays in honour of somebody) but published posthumously.

(5)   Toon’s background, prior to his entering the Church of England and her ministry was Methodist.  He began his ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, the first bishop of which was the very Calvinistic evangelical J. C. Ryle about whom Toon co-wrote a biography.

(6)   Toon saw the both/and approach as different from the via media rather than a different interpretation of it.

(7)   Repentance has far too often been preached in a way that blasphemes the character of God.  Have you ever heard a sermon in which sinners were encouraged to soften the heart of God with their tears or heard of such a sermon?  That this misrepresents the character of God can be seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  While the title character when he determines to return home devises a speech “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” he is forgiven by his father before he utters a word of it “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”.  The son’s contrition did not produce the mercy and forgiveness in his father’s heart – it was already there.  What it did do was move him to seek his father where forgiveness was already awaiting him.  The error that attributes more to repentance than this goes back very early but this does not make it less of an error.  As early as the Apostolic Fathers the question of whether serious sins after baptism can be forgiven arose.  One answer was that they could, but only once.  That this would mean that the Jesus Who commanded His disciples to forgive up to 70 times 7 (and He did not mean that they were free to not forgive the 491^st time as the Puritan preacher in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights thought) was less forgiving than He required His sinful disciples to be did not seem to occur to such as the author of the Shephard of Hermas.  A more common answer was that they could be forgiven, but that only after a lifetime of repentance and that the forgiveness was less certain than that offered in initial baptism.  This was based on a misreading of the tenth chapter of Hebrews.  The antiquity of these views does not make them Catholic – remember, there are two other tests. The second of these wrong answers produced bad fruit such as the deferral of baptism until the deathbed (Emperor Constantine is a notable example of this) and ultimately the Catholic tradition rejected these bad ideas and a better understanding of grace prevailed.  Satisfaction for sins after baptism is not made by us in our always far from what it should be repentance.  It was made once for all by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.  This Sacrifice is the source of the grace conveyed in the one-time Sacrament of baptism.  It is also the source of the grace conveyed in the repeated Eucharist.  Since it is the same once-for-all Sacrifice the believer confessing his sins in accordance with John 1:9 can be as sure of forgiveness of his post-baptismal sins as of that of his pre-baptismal sins.  Scottish Barthian theologian T. F. Torrance in his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers was quite critical of the Fathers of the second and third centuries for the weakness of their understanding of grace  However, the words from Edmund Burke about accumulated wisdom and the self-correcting power of tradition that Russell Kirk liked to quote seem appropriate here “the individual is foolish…but the species is wise” and just as orthodox Trinitarianism triumphed over Arianism by the end of the fourth century so grace ultimately prevailed around the same time as well.

(8)   The thing, the three-fold ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to the three-fold ministry of the Old Testament Church (High Priest/Priest/Levite), is present in the New Testament.  The only reason there is any dispute about this is due to the words that name the three orders and even there presbyter and deacon when used for offices in the ministry (the words can just mean “elder” and “servant” in a general sense) refer to the same offices to which they have traditionally been applied.  What is disputed is whether episkopos (literally overseer) or bishop is used of the office of the presiding presbyter who shares in the Apostolic governance as in the later tradition (SS Timothy and Titus as examples) or of all presbyters (as its usage in the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus would suggest).  Either way, however, the governing office itself is present in the New Testament and if the word that would become its title was not yet restricted to it in the New Testament this in no way invalidates the later usage of the term since it had to be called something and “overseer” certainly describes the role.

(9)  The alternate views are that the episcopate is esse (no Church without it) and bene esse (it is better if the Church has it but a Church can be a Church even in the fullest sense without it).  Plene esse is how most High Churchmen understood it prior to the Oxford Movement.  The only caveat I would offer is that for a Church to be a Church but in a less than full sense because it lacks the Apostolic episcopate it must have an organic connection to the Church of Jerusalem.  While bishops in Apostolic Succession are one form of organic connection and so every Church with them has an organic connection they are not the only such connection. A Church planted as an extension of an older Church (and so on back to the Church of Jerusalem) does not lose this organic connection although it sustains an injury if it loses its bishops such as occurred with the (German) Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Reformation.

Is Orange the new Red?

Do you remember the story of Jacobo Árbenz?

 

Árbenz was elected the president of Guatemala in 1950 and entered that office early in 1951.  His primary policy and the focus of his presidency was agrarian reform.  What this meant was that large sections of farmland that were currently not under cultivation were expropriated by the government and handed over to poor farm workers.  To Americans this smacked of Communism and certainly there was a resemblance in that the redistribution of wealth was involved.  There were also differences in that unlike Communists Árbenz compensated the large landowners whose property he seized and that, unlike in Communism, the seized land did not become communal property but remained private, albeit redistributed to a larger number of owners.  Somewhat ironically his program lined up, in desired outcome albeit not in means, with that of the literary group known as the Vanderbilt Agrarians or Twelve Southerners whose 1930 anthology/manifesto I’ll Take My Stand inspired Richard M. Weaver whose 1948 Ideas Have Consequences sparked a renaissance of Burkean thought in the historically liberal United States of America.

 

Among those for whom the similarities between Árbenz’ version of agrarianism and Communism outweighed the differences was the United Fruit Company which had something of a monopoly on the banana trade in that part of the world – Guatemala was a “banana republic” in the literal sense of the term – and from whom much of the redistributed land was seized.  The company lobbied the American government to intervene and plans were drawn up to do so in the last days of the administration of Harry Truman.  It was during the presidency of Truman’s successor, however, Dwight Eisenhower, that the Árbenz government was toppled in 1954.  Eisenhower’s Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles who had previously been the United Fruit Company’s lawyer.  His brother Allen, whom Eisenhower named director of the CIA, oversaw the coup, and also had connections to United Fruit.

 

Needless to say the Eisenhower administration, especially the Dulles brothers, and United Fruit all portrayed the CIA coup as an action taken to prevent the Communist takeover of Guatemala.  Ironically, however, of the two presidents involved in this story, it was Dwight Eisenhower, not Jacobo Árbenz who was most likely an actual Communist.

 

Robert W. Welch Jr., who after his retirement from his career as America’s Willy Wonka had founded the John Birch Society to combat Communism in 1958, in 1963 privately published a book entitled The Politician.  The book, which grew out of a letter that Welch had privately circulated a decade earlier, has remained in print and was given the subtitle “A look at the political forces that propelled Dwight David Eisenhower into the Presidency.”  Welch argued that Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”.  Russell Kirk quipped in response “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer” and quoting this witticism became William F. Buckley Jr.’s stock response to Welch’s allegations. The editor of National Review had broken ties with Welch and the JBS, ostensibly over the book although more likely over the society’s opposition to the Vietnam War.  While Kirk had undoubtedly coined a clever phrase, Buckley’s use of it was a way of avoiding having to answer Welch’s actual case against Eisenhower.

 

Of course, someone could argue that no such answer was necessary because when it comes to allegations the burden of proof is on the accuser and Welch’s evidence fell short of being the definitive proof that, say, a leaked copy of the Communist Party membership roll with Eisenhower's name on it or the testimony of ex-Communist Party members that he had been active at their meetings, would have been.  In McCarthy and his Enemies (1954), however, Buckley and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell had examined the cases of those whom Senator Joseph McCarthy had named and showed that if it could not be proven that each of these was a card-carrying Communist it could at least be demonstrated that there was cause in the vast majority of the cases for flagging the individual as a potential security risk.  If Buckley had applied this same standard to Welch’s book, he would have found it less easy to dismiss.

 

It was not merely that Eisenhower had made a couple of bad decisions here or there that one could argue had in some way or another been to the advantage of the Soviet Union.  He had a consistent pattern of acting in ways that primarily benefited the Soviets, a pattern established before his presidency, even before the Cold War itself, in World War II.  About a year or so before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (sic), Eisenhower had been brought to the attention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by his daughter after she had attended a party in which the young officer had filled her ears with gushing, sycophantic, praise of her father.  FDR, note, wore his pro-Communism on his sleeve, having been the first American president to recognize the Bolshevik government, having recalled an ambassador who told the truth about conditions in the Soviet Union and replaced him with one who sent back lying reports about the paradise that Stalin was creating and whose equally deceitful memoir became the basis of a vile pro-Stalin propaganda film that FDR ordered made, who believed that he and Stalin had such an affinity that he would be easily able to manipulate the Soviet dictator (the reality was the other way around), and whose bureaucracy was so filled with Communist agents in extremely high positions that had Joseph McCarthy been a senator at the time instead of an air-force tail-gunner and had he made the same allegations he would make during the 1950s and on the same scale, he would have been guilty of grossly underestimating Soviet influence in the American government.  FDR’s government advanced Eisenhower through the military ranks far more rapidly than his skill or experience supported.  The rate accelerated after the United States entered the war and half a year later he became commanding general of the American army’s European Theater (sic) of Operations.  A year and a half later he was named Supreme Allied Commander. 

 

By the time the United States entered the war, Hitler had already broken his pact with Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, and so the Soviet Union was now one of the Allies as well.  Stalin requested that another front be opened up as soon as possible to relieve the pressure on the Russian army and this was not an unreasonable request under these circumstances.  Prior to D-Day, however, there was much argument over where that front should be.  Sir Winston Churchill wanted a Mediterranean invasion that would approach Germany through Italy and the Balkans.  Eisenhower and his superior, General Marshall, however, backed Stalin’s demand that the second front be opened up in France.  The Americans and the Soviets won out in the end, but the success of the Norman invasion does not prove them to have been right.  One of the reasons Churchill wanted a Mediterranean front was to prevent, or at least lessen, one of the less pleasant consequences of the Allied victory, namely the fall of Eastern Europe into the hands of the Soviets. 

 

While Eisenhower’s insistence on France in itself does not prove that he wanted Eastern Europe to fall behind what Churchill would soon dub the “Iron Curtain” his subsequent actions did nothing to clear him of the charge.  After D-Day, Eisenhower’s “broad front” strategy prevented commanders who wished to move faster and end the war quicker, most notably General Patton, from doing so.  In Patton’s case, he cut his fuel supplies in August 1944 and then ordered him to assume a defensive position. If Eisenhower had other motives at the time than slowing the Western Allies so the Soviets could advance from the East this cannot be said of what happened when the fall of Germany was imminent in April 1945.  At this point Eisenhower halted the Western Allies at the Elbe River and called up Stalin and told him to take Berlin.  While Eisenhower claimed that this is what had been agreed upon prior to the invasion, Churchill disputed this claim.  Eisenhower had received requests from German cities that lay in the path of the Red Army asking that they be allowed to surrender to the Americans instead.  Eisenhower denied these requests, much like the civilian government of the United States denied the surrender requests that Japan had been sending General Douglas MacArthur for over a year before the United States committed the single greatest atrocity of the war when she dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

 

Meanwhile, discussions were underway as to the next steps to be taken after the war was won.  In 1944, a proposal for imposing a Carthaginian peace on Germany was made.  It was called the Morgenthau Plan after Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury under whose name the initial proposal was distributed, although Morgenthau’s assistant, Harry Dexter White was the brain behind it.  White, who would later dominate the Bretton Woods Conference that gave birth to the IMF and the World Bank, was identified by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as an informant of the Soviet spy rings they had been associated with.  These allegations were verified quite early and the post-Cold War publication of the Venona Project findings and the opening of the Soviet archives have established the matter beyond a reasonable doubt.  The Morgenthau Plan, if it had been enacted, would have left Western Europe much more vulnerable to Soviet invasion.  While Eisenhower would downplay his connection to the Morgenthau Plan later, Welch cited Morgenthau’s former assistant Fred Smith, as identifying Eisenhower, who hosted Morgenthau and White on 7 August, 1944, as having “launched the project.” 

 

Welch also quoted Eisenhower himself, from his memoir Crusade in Europe (which was ghost written for him by Joseph Fels Barnes, an American journalist who had been the American director of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a think-tank that served as a Communist front, and who had been named as a Communist by Whittaker Chambers), as having said at that same meeting “Prominent Nazis, along with certain industrialists, must be tried and punished.  Membership in the Gestapo and in the SS should be taken as prima facie evidence of guilt.  The General Staff must be broken up, all its archives confiscated, and members suspected of complicity in starting the war or in any war crimes should be tried.”  This, was eventually acted out at Nuremberg.  At the Tehran Conference, when Stalin and Roosevelt made ghoulish remarks about a post-war “victor’s justice” involving the summary execution of random German officers, Churchill walked out in disgust (it was Stalin, not the American president who went after him and appeased him with the excuse that Solomon put in the mouth of the “mad man who casteth firebrand, arrows, and death”) and after the Nuremberg Trials his son Randolph, speaking in Australia called the executions of the German officers murder and said “They were not hanged for starting the war but for losing it. If we tried the starters, why not put Stalin in the dock?”  This was not a popular opinion then and it is less popular now in this day and age in which questioning the received account of the other side’s atrocities in that war is absurdly treated as a crime itself but the Churchills recognized what we have allowed to sink into Orwell’s memory hole, that putting those you have just defeated in war on trial before a newly created court that could not possibly have any legitimate jurisdiction was not in accordance with the principles that, however often they may have been ignored, have informed our civilization’s ideas of law and justice since classical antiquity although it fits quite neatly into the Soviets’ barbarous idea of justice.  The American who was most outspoken in expressing this forgotten truth at the time was Senator Robert. A. Taft of Ohio, the son of former American president William Howard Taft.  The story of his bravery on this occasion can be found in the final chapter of Profiles in Courage, ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Ted Sorenson.  Senator Taft, incidentally, was Eisenhower’s chief rival for the Republican Party’s nomination in the election that put Eisenhower into the White House.

 

The most inexcusable of Eisenhower’s war-era pro-Communist activities, however, was his involvement in the forced repatriation of refugees from Communism.  This is often called “Operation Keelhaul”, which is the title of the fourth chapter of Welch’s book as well as of the book-length treatment of the matter by Julius Epstein, although as an official designation this name was more limited in scope, applying to a specific set of operations that were carried out for about a year after the war, while the entire program of repatriation to the Soviets began before the war ended and extended, in some cases to as late as 1949.  Count Nikolai Tolstoi entitled his excellent book about this matter Victims of Yalta.  The whole sordid affair, however, went far beyond what was agreed upon at Yalta and, indeed, began in 1944 before the conference had even taken place.  By the time it was over, up to five million ex-patriots of Soviet-occupied territory, including territory that had only just become Soviet-occupied in the war, were turned over to the Red army to face torture, the prison and labour camps administered by GULAG, and death.  Nor, as Eisenhower apologists have been known to claim, were these all or even primarily, Russians who had defected to Hitler’s army (in the case of those who did meet this description, American Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, one of the more responsible negotiators, in the talks leading up to the Yalta agreement pointed out that to meet Stalin’s demands would violate the Geneva Convention which required that these, captured in German uniform, be treated as Germans).  They included people from lands that Hitler had captured who had ended up in his camps, from which they were “liberated” only to be surrendered to Stalin.  They included soldiers who, individually or as bands, had fought in the war alongside American and other Allied forces, but for all that were turned over to Stalin’s army at his request, by Eisenhower’s orders.  They included patriots from the countries that the Red Army overran on Stalin’s march to Berlin who had put up a fight against the Soviet takeover but, before their countries fell, surrendered to the Americans instead only to be turned over the Soviets by order of Eisenhower.

 

From all of this, which pertains only to Eisenhower’s actions as a military commander and of which I have given merely a small sampling of what Robert Welch provided in the first five chapters of his eighteen chapter book, it should be evident that Buckley’s own standard concerning the Joseph McCarthy allegations as articulated in Buckley’s own book, had been met by Welch with regards to Eisenhower.  Indeed, suppose one was trying to prove the opposite of what Welch claimed, trying to demonstrate that Eisenhower was a solid anti-Communist.  The evidence is far less abundant, to put it mildly.  Eisenhower claimed to be anti-Communist in his run for the American presidency but that took place long after the time when openly hug-a-Red types like FDR could be elected president four times in a row.   The Cold War was underway and anyone hoping to win had to present himself as an anti-Communist.  Eisenhower basically claimed to be an anti-Communist by association by making Richard Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials as the investigator in the Alger Hiss case were impeccable, his running-mate.  Apart from his association with Nixon, the strongest evidence for Eisenhower’s anti-Communism was his deposing of Árbenz who, as we have seen, was not a real Communist and who was removed for reasons that had nothing to do with real anti-Communism. Outweighing this phony example of Communist-toppling is another example of regime change from the same era.  From 1957 to 1959, the Eisenhower administration, including the same Dulles brothers who pushed for the removal of Árbenz pursued a policy of weakening the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and supporting the revolutionaries.  Dulles’ CIA even provided training and arms to the revolutionaries.  Ezra Taft Benson, leader of the heretical Mormon sect and Eisenhower’s Agricultural Secretary, tried to persuade the Eisenhower administration to abandon its support for the revolutionaries and the deaf ears he kept encountering eventually persuaded him of the truth of Welch’s thesis.   In 1959 the revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, came to power and declared their allegiance to the Soviet Union.  For a book length account of the American government’s responsibility for this outcome see The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution, the memoir of Earl E. T. Smith, who was the American ambassador to Cuba during the period of the revolution.

 

On 3 January, the American air force bombed Venezuela while a team of American agents infiltrated the country, captured its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and removed them from Caracas to New York where they were charged with various crimes having to do with narcoterrorism.  When I heard the news, Guatemala in 1954 came immediately to mind. 

 

In both incidents, the American government removed the president of a Latin American country.  Both times they justified their actions by accusing the removed president of the greatest evils of the day – Communism in the case of Árbenz, narcoterrorism in the case of Maduro, although defenders of the American government’s actions also frequently call Maduro a Communist.  In the case of Guatemala the American government’s real motivation was the economic interests of United Fruit.  In the case of Venezuela, it was, as the American president openly admits, all about the country’s oil which had been nationalized by Maduro’s predecessor.  In both cases, the American president was himself likely a Communist.

 

In 1987, Donald Trump visited the Soviet Union, ostensibly to make a deal to build a hotel in Moscow.  Alnar Mussayev, a Kazakhstan politician who served in the KGB during the 1980s, claimed last year that Trump had been recruited as an asset by the KGB during this visit and given the codename “Krasnov”.  While Trump’s political opponents, the Democrat Left, have been accusing him of being a Russian puppet for years, Mussayev’s claim is somewhat different.  When Hilary Clinton, et al., accused Trump of being controlled by Russia, they were thinking of Russia as a nation, a post-Communist country which, in their eyes, had gone down a dark path since the break-up of the Soviet Union.  The KGB, however, was not merely a Russian national agency, but a Communist agency.

 

It is 2026 now and the Soviet Union has supposedly been gone for thirty-five years.  I stress the word “supposedly.”   In his 1995 book The Perestroika Deception, Anatoliy Golitsyn warned that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a façade intended to lull the West to sleep as a late stage in a long-term Communist strategy of deception thought up decades earlier.  The Communist Party and its KGB enforcers remained firmly in charge, Golitsyn argued.  As crazy as this may have sounded, the credibility of the book was greatly enhanced by Golitsyn’s earlier, 1984, New Lies for Old, which also warned of a long-term strategy of deception thought up by the Communists in the late 1950s.  This book contained many predictions, most of which were fulfilled by the early 1990s.

 

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, had been a career KGB agent before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and his entry into politics.  That he has been in charge of Russia, alternating as prime minister and president, for the past quarter century, adds further credibility to Golitsyn’s claim that the KGB, and the Communist Party behind it, remained in power after the supposed Soviet breakup.  If Mussayev is right about Trump, then Communism once again has an agent in the White House, as it did at the time Golitsyn says the Communists agreed upon this strategy.  The difference is that at that time, Communism was regarded as a serious threat, today it is regarded as a thing of the past, a defeated foe, making a Communist agent in the White House that much more of a threat.

 

Of course, even if Mussayev was talking out of his rear end and Trump is not a KGB chess piece in a game the Communists have been playing since the 1950s, he is still the world’s biggest jerk.  This is another thing common to him and Eisenhower.  Suppose Welch’s interpretation of Eisenhower’s actions was as off-base as Buckley and Kirk claimed it was.  He still ordered the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union.  He still supported the revolution that put Castro into power.  Communist or not, he was a real bastard.

 

Maduro may very well be as bad as Trump’s zombie cheerleaders claim him to be.  Indeed, I’d be surprised to hear that he wasn’t.  That does not make the Trump administration’s actions right.  The United States does not have some kind of universal jurisdiction to act as policeman, prosecutor, judge and executioner for the entire world.  Nor should her acting like she does be tolerated by the rest of the world.

 

One of Krasnov’s predecessors, John Quincy Adams, while serving as James Monroe’s Secretary of State, famously declared “America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”  While Adams’ idea of a United States that minded her own business rather than everyone else’s was not absolute – it was not until a couple of decades later that he repudiated his belief in the repugnant doctrine of Manifest Destiny, i.e., America’s supposed destiny to subjugate everyone else in this hemisphere to the rule of the United States, and then, for reasons other than that he perceived the inconsistency between this and his nobler idea of a United States that minded her own business – it remained influential into the first half of the twentieth century.  World War II was believed to have killed it, nailed its coffin shut, and buried it. Adams’ words, however, were revived after the end of the Cold War by those who thought that the United States should roll back her military presence throughout the world and who rejected George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “New World Order”, announced in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in which the United States would lead a coalition of nations in policing the world against actions such as Hussein’s. 

 

These were generally those on what passes as the Right in the United States – the United States having been founded on the ideology of liberalism by deists who rejected everything the real Right stood for, i.e., royal monarchy, an established Church, and the rest of the institutions and order of pre-liberal Christendom – who dissented from the neoconservatism that had come to dominate the American Right by the end of the Cold War.  A note to readers from my own country, while we use “neoconservative” to refer to Canadian “conservatives” who define their “conservatism” in American terms rather than those of the more authentic Toryism of our own country and the larger British Commonwealth, in the United States “neoconservative” refers to a group of pundits, who had been part of the New York Intellectuals in the period leading from the war into the second half of the twentieth century and as such had been on the Left with views ranging from those of FDR type New Dealers to Trotskyism, who in response to the development of the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, realigned themselves with the American Right.  This American neoconservatism blended what was basically a Manichean view of the world as a battleground between the forces of Good and a reified Evil with a Nietzschean view of “might makes right.”  Practically, however, its ideas were that the rest of the world was entitled to American liberal democracy, that the United States had the duty to provide the rest of the world with American liberal democracy, whether they wanted it or not, even if it took all of America’s bombs and bullets and boots on the ground to do so, and especially if it meant regime change in a country whose government Israel wanted removed.  This belligerent and ignorant hawkishness became even more pronounced as American neoconservatism entered its second and third generations.  Those who quoted John Quincy Adams in response to the neoconservative takeover of the American Right were called paleoconservatives (Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Thomas Fleming, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Gottfried, et al.,) and paleolibertarians (Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, et. al.,) and when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States the first time this was widely regarded as a victory for them and a defeat for the neoconservatives who generally opposed Trump.

In Donald Trump’s third bid for the American presidency in 2024, however, he had the support of these same neoconservatives.  This, as became evident before Trump was even inaugurated the second time, signalled that The Apprentice, White House Edition, 2.0 would be very different from the original and not in any way that could be described as an improvement.  In the new iteration Trump has been acting as if he were elected president of the world rather than merely of one country and that the rest of the world has to bow to his wishes or be forced to do so either by his preferred means of economic force, such as tariffs, or if necessary by more conventional military means.  The only county he does not seem to think he has the right to boss around is Israel, the very country the American neoconservatives place at the top of their pecking order above their own.

Let us now return to the thesis I have been suggesting in this essay.  It was never very likely that the Communist Party would achieve its goal of world-wide Communism by means of the Soviet military.  The establishment of a world-wide Pax Americana under the United States as the sole superpower, however, was a likely outcome of the Cold War and it might serve Communism’s end better than the Red Army ever could if the break-up of the Soviet Union was the elaborate ruse Golitsyn painted it to be and if a KGB agent recruited in the perestroika and glasnost phase of the Communist strategy were to become the American president as it entered its end game.  Should someone raise the objection that it makes no sense for an extremely wealthy businessman like Donald Trump to be a Communist agent, I would answer that such an objection displays ignorance of the history of Communism.  From 1848 when wealthy cotton merchant Friedrich Engels co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx to 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution was financed by German and American bankers (see Anthony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution) to the very end of the Cold War it was always capitalist money that kept Communism afloat.  Has not the open policy of the People’s Republic of China for decades been to finance Communism with capitalism?

 

We have become too used to thinking of Communism and capitalism in terms of the Cold War paradigm which portrayed them as enemies that are each the polar opposite of the other.  In such a paradigm it would be difficult to explain the thinking of the American president just prior to the Cold War.  What made FDR so naïve when it came to Stalin?  It was his conviction that despite the differences in state structure and economy, the United States and the Soviet Union were ultimately on the same side and not just in the sense that they were both at war with the Third Reich but in the sense that they were both Modern countries to whom the future belonged as opposed to older powers whose day had passed into which category he placed the other Allied powers.

 

From the perspective of those of us who are still Tories, who still cherish what the original Right stood for, who still believe in kings, orthodox Christianity, the Church, roots, tradition, honour, loyalty, chivalry and all the old pre-mercantile virtues, FDR’s point of view was in a sense more correct than that of the Cold War paradigm.  This correctness did not lie in its more positive assessment of Stalin and Communism, but in its identifying the Modern spirit of progress that united the USA and USSR as outweighing the differences between their economic models.  We, however, would say that what FDR celebrated, we decry because this Modern spirit has been the enemy of all we hold dear for centuries.   Communism is more open and upfront about this hostility, being officially atheist rather than merely officially secular, but this arguably makes capitalism the more dangerous of the two.  Capitalism is better as an economic model because it is not based on calling what is protected as a good by God’s Law, property, an evil, like Communism is, but both systems openly worship and serve Mammon. 

 

Trump’s critics on the Left typically liken him to Hitler.  Of course they have been doing this all along and they do this to everybody.  The comparison, therefore, had more weight to it when it was made this week by podcaster Joe Rogan.  The thing about Hitler is, while most contemporary thought likes to imagine that it was Nazi distinctives, things which set Nazism apart from other systems like Communism, that made it so bad, the reality is that it is the much larger group of areas in which Nazism was indistinguishable from Communism – a totalitarian state that governed by fear enforced by secret police and prison camps, etc. – that made it so bad, which is something Sir Winston Churchill certainly understood.  Rogan compared ICE, the immigration enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security, to the Gestapo.  He could have added the Cheka, the NKVD, or any other of the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police.  The comparison is quite valid.  An organization empowered to hide behind masks, stop individuals in their daily lives and demand to see their papers is behaving exactly like these Nazi and Communist agencies.   Granting an agency powers of this sort seems to be more designed to harass and intimidate American citizens than to deal with the very real immigration problem the United States, like other Western countries, faces.  It was George W. Bush rather than Trump who created ICE, but the sort of disregard for the rule of law and reasonable limitations on powers that Rogan was commenting on is increasingly characterising the second administration of the man who only a few days ago told an interviewer that his own morality was the only limit on his power.

 

From a sound Tory perspective, it is not that this sort of thing has finally come about in the United States that is surprising so much as that it took so long for it to happen.  The American Revolution was based on the same toxic notions that Edmund Burke rightly referred to as “armed doctrines” when they were shortly thereafter re-used to produce the French Revolution which very quickly brought about the Reign of Terror.  T. S. Eliot wrote in 1939 “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”  Today they will have to make do with Krasnov the Orange.

More Assorted Reflections

The first Assorted Reflections can be found here.

- Although Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the people against “tyranny”, it was King Charles I who had the love and support of the common people. The Jacobins, likewise, declared themselves to be the champions of the poor of France, even though in the cahiers detailing their grievances the poor of France had not called for the overthrow of the monarchy, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in fact more popular than the men who deposed them, the Revolution was instigated by a cousin of the king, and most of its leaders were upper class intellectuals. Marxism considered itself to be the voice of the proletariat (factory workers) despite the fact that its founders were a pseudo-philosopher (Marx) and a factory owner (Engels), it has always been led by intellectuals, and has never drawn significant support from the actual working classes, who generally suffered the most wherever it came to power. Similarly, the feminist movement appointed itself the voice of the female sex, although it has never spoken for family oriented women who make marriage and children their top priorities and is overtly hostile to Christian women who believe the Sixth Commandment applies to both sexes. The claims of black activist groups to speak for all blacks and of the Anti-Defamation League to speak for Jews are further examples of the same.

- From its beginning feminism has drawn inspiration from both liberalism (classical) and Marxism, with some feminists leaning more toward liberalism, others towards Marxism, but with a general alignment to the liberal-left. The liberal-left has always been inclined towards democratic and small-r republican institutions of government – an inclination which in no way conflicts with its inclination towards totalitarianism. Within such institutions, feminism had to fight for the right of women to vote and to hold elected office. Conversely, we on the conservative-right have traditionally been inclined towards the institution of hereditary, royal, monarchy. This institution has allowed for reigning and even ruling queens and empresses since the dawn of human history.

- Feminism has strange priorities. On New Year’s Eve, 2015, gangs of migrants harassed, assaulted, and in some cases raped large numbers of women in Cologne and other German cities. The feminist outcry over this was insignificant, almost non-existent in comparison to the loud noise they are currently making over Brett Kavanaugh, the charges against whom are unsubstantiated and suspiciously timed. Indeed, most feminists have jumped on the “migrants welcome” and anti-Islamophobia bandwagons, proving that while politics makes strange bedfellows, intersectionality makes the strangest bedfellows of all.


- While I do not take the position that women ought to be kept barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, I do think a case can be made that this is what should be done to feminists. Especially the male feminists.


- It has been reported for a couple of weeks now that Her Excellency, Julie Payette, is less than happy with her position as Her Majesty's vice-regal representative in the Dominion government and that others are less than happy with her performance in that role. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that she was chosen for the position by the Liberal Party. The Grits, and especially the Trudeau branch of the party, have long lacked both an understanding of and an appreciation for the office of the Governor General and the grand, traditional, institution of royal monarchy it represents. So, when it falls to them to choose the next Governor General, they don't look for the person best suited to represent the Queen in Canada - which is the actual, constitutional, purpose of the office - but for someone to be the face of Canada, as they envision it, which is constantly changing, to the world. There is a simple solution to the problem. I have long maintained that while the Canadian Senate is badly in need of reform, the reform it needs is reform that respects and is consistent with the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us in 1867. The complete overhaul of the Americanized, Triple-E, model proposed by the old Reform Party is unacceptable. The most necessary reform could be accomplished simply by removing control over who is recommended to be appointed to the Senate from the Prime Minister's office. Having the provinces, rather than the federal government, recommend the appointees to the Senate seats allotted to them would be an obvious way of doing this. Similarly, it should not be the Prime Minister who advises the Queen as to who her representative should be. Indeed, unlike the Senate, in the case of the Governor General's office it was not established in Confederation that the Queen would appoint based on recommendation from the Prime Minister's office, but rather, until the Statute of Westminster the appointment was made on recommendation by the Imperial Privy Council. In the Liberal Version of Canadian history this is regarded as a step forward in the evolution of Canadian nationhood. This is because the Liberal Version falsely superimposes America's story - the story of former colonies forging a new national identity after severing the imperial connection - upon Canada. Canada's true story is the exact opposite of this - the story of Britain's loyal North American colonies, English-speaking Protestant and French-speaking Catholic, coming together to create a new nation that would deliberately retain the connection, that would in time become more familial than imperial. Since so many Canadians do not know our own story, transferring the right of recommendation from the Canadian PMO back to London would not sell in this day and age, but that is not the only option that suggests itself. The Queen's Canadian Privy Council, minus the current Prime Minister and Cabinet, is the appropriate body to make the recommendation.


- Mazo de la Roche, at one time Canada's most popular novelist (she also wrote plays, short stories, and a memoir), had very strong views as to who was qualified to be Governor General. According to her biographer Ronald Hambleton she believed the office should be restricted to the aristocracy and preferably a member of the royal family. De la Roche is buried very close to the grave of Stephen Leacock in the churchyard of St. George the Martyr at Sibbald Point in Sutton, Ontario. Both were traditional Canadian Tories - royalists, who believed in Canada and her British institutions and connection, and were suspicious of American liberal republicanism. With her reverence for nobility and the aristocratic ideal, so obviously on display in her Jalna books, de la Roche was more properly the High Tory. Apart from his royalism and his views of race and sex, Leacock's dissent from egalitarianism was in the direction of individualistic meritocracy. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Canadian Low Tory.


- Canada's British institutions and familial connection have historically been means to the end of preserving Canada's independence from the United States. The reverse is also true, that the cause of maintaining Canada's independence from the United States has been the means to the end of preserving her British institutions and familial connection, valued as goods in themselves. The main weakness of Canadian Toryism, apart from the fear of being seen as too right-wing by the electorate that has led to far too much left-ward drift over the years, is that while it always recognized the first point, it seldom fully grasped the second, which is the more important of the two. John Diefenbaker was an exception to this. John Farthing, whose Freedom Wears a Crown articulated and defended the point, was another. Neither man was properly appreciated by the Conservative Party.


- Conservatives of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries looked back to the eighteenth century statesman Edmund Burke as their prophet. Ironically. Edmund Burke was a member of the Whig (liberal) Party. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. The ideas that conservatives most respect in Burke are his defence of the British monarchy and established Church, his condemnation of "armed doctrines", his revision of social contract theory to make the "contract of each particular state" into a "clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society" that is a "partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," and the local patriotism of his "little platoons," all of which come from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, written late in his career, and which better reflect Tory convictions than those of his own party. Indeed, this sharing of ideas has gone both ways. Thomas Hobbes, who introduced social contract theory to begin with, and David Hume, the noted eighteenth century skeptic, are both recognized as significant contributors to the development of the ideas of classical liberalism, but politically both were affiliated with the Royalists/Tories. In Hume's case this only really comes out in his History of England. At any rate, excellent as many of Burke's "neo-Tory" insights in the Reflections are, conservatives would do better to look to his friend the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the oft-quoted Dr. Johnson, as their eighteenth century prophet. T. S. Eliot was one conservative who recognized this, and his famous statement "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics" consciously echoes Dr. Johnson's definition of a Tory.


- Canadian conservatism began as an adaptation of British Toryism. It was royalist, but, due to the greater denominational differences that have been here since before Confederation (French Canadians were predominantly Roman Catholic, English Canadians were traditionally English Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, with a sizable number of English Methodists and Baptists and Irish Catholics, and smaller numbers from other denominations) it was less associated with church establishment than its British parent, although it was far from being secular, and Canada, contrary to the claims of certain ignorant Grits, has no tradition of separation of church and state. Since the 1950s, and the birth of the American conservative movement (as recently as 1950 Lionel Trilling could write "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition"), Canadian conservatives have tended either to borrow ideas from American conservatives (Canadian neo-conservatives) or to emphasize the differences between Canadian Toryism and American conservatism and try to re-align the former with socialism, progressivism, and the left (Red Tories). Both tendencies are mistakes, in my opinion. Contrary to some clever arguments from the Reds and the examples of lovably eccentric individuals like George Grant and Eugene Forsey who were able to blend religious conservatism and the Tory love of Canadian institutions with otherwise left-wing views in their personal philosophies, there is no natural affinity between Toryism on the one hand and socialism, progressivism, and the left in general on the other. Canadian neoconservatives, however, have had the perverse tendency to pick out of the big tent of American conservatism, the ideas that are least compatible with our own Toryism and neglect those that are the most. That big tent originally consisted of classical liberals or libertarians (liberals in the nineteenth century meaning of the term), ex-Communist Cold Warriors, and traditionalists like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. The traditionalists borrowed from British classical conservatism as many ideas as they could compatibly incorporate into a liberal republic. Obviously, these are the American conservatives most compatible with our own Toryism. They are also the most neglected by Canadian neo-conservatives. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider how neglected they are in their own movement. Their role in the big tent was largely supplanted in the 1970s and 1980s by the New Right and (American) neo-conservatives. The New Right was an alliance between populist-nationalists and the Religious Right. There was some overlap in position between the older moral and social conservatism of the traditionalists which corresponded closely to that of British and Canadian Tories but the predominantly evangelical/fundamentalist Religious Right more often seemed to be a revival of Puritanism, the theocratic Calvinism that had been the first form of liberalism before it went secular, and the Tories' oldest enemy. The American neo-conservatives were New Deal, liberal, Democrats who defected from the left when the New Left became pro-Soviet and pro-Palestinian. These became the arch champions of American, neo-imperialistic, militarism. It is from the classical liberals and American neo-conservatives that Canadian neo-conservatives have borrowed the most. The Religious Right has had much less of an impact, perhaps because of the large influence of social justice theology on our evangelicals, although interestingly the socially and morally conservative George Grant, usually considered a Red Tory, was willing to look on the Religious Right as allies in the fight against abortion and euthanasia. With the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, the populist-nationalists, with the backing of a sizable portion of the Religious Right, rose to ascendency in the big tent of American conservatism, much to the disgust of the Republican Party elite, an alliance of the neo-conservatives, classical liberals (except the Trump-supporting paleolibertarians), and a minority of the Religious Right. Already in Canada we see signs of this impacting us, with Doug Ford leading the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to victory on a populist-nationalist platform, and now Quebec having given a majority government to a party which, like Maxime Bernier's proposed new federal party, blends classical liberalism with populist-nationalism. What this entails for the future of Canada and Canadian conservatism remains to be seen. I will still be holding on to my classical, Canadian, Toryism with a willingness, as always, to entertain worthy ideas from any of these other varieties.

- The elements of genuine moral and social conservatism are the beliefs: a) in an unchanging and universal moral order or natural law with fixed standards of right and wrong (C. S. Lewis’ “Tao” from The Abolition of Man), b) that tradition, through which the accumulated wisdom of the past is passed down to us, is a more reliable guide to these standards than private, abstract, reasoning, c) that the cultivation and nature of right habits of behaviour (virtues) is more effective than the imposition of rules at producing right decision-making and that while the information transmitted in the process of cultivating such habits necessarily includes some rules, the bulk of it cannot be codified as rules and can only be learned from example, which is best accomplished in the home with the support of the teaching ministry of the church, and d) that the government’s role is the “ministry of the sword”, by which it makes and enforces the laws that uphold the peace, order, and justice that provide the civilized framework for all of the preceding points. The popular perception of moral and social conservatism, however, has largely been shaped by the New American Religious Right, the most immediate direct ancestor of which was the Prohibition movement which grew out of the Temperance Movement supported by evangelical and fundamentalist revivalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often forgotten today that Prohibition was considered to be a Progressive cause, both big and small p, at the time, and also had the support of the Social Gospel movement (theological liberalism) and first-wave feminism. Indeed, in Canada at least, the latter was largely responsible for Prohibition passing – the provinces generally voted Prohibition in immediately after feminism won the franchise for women in World War I and then voted it back out again once the men returned from overseas. While Prohibition did have its supporters among Conservatives, the most traditional Tories and the churches most associated with classical conservatism, the Anglican Church which at the time was still “The Tory Party at prayer” and the ultramontane Roman Catholic Church of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, opposed it. Stephen Leacock gave lectures against it pro bono public! There are significant differences, of course, between the Prohibition movement and the New Religious Right. The former sought to impose on society a new law, the complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages, which was not grounded in tradition, had not been part of mainstream Christian orthodox moral theology (it belongs rather to the Islamic tradition) and which, despite the best efforts of Rev. William Patton to prove otherwise, clearly contradicts the Scriptures. The latter was a response to a moral revolution that removed long-standing, traditional rules, which are supported by orthodox Christian moral theology. There is nothing in its opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and the ongoing sexual revolution with which genuine moral and social conservatism would disagree, but in its presentation it evokes the image of previous evangelical backed moral crusades, such as Prohibition and the seventeenth century Puritanism that would put a man in stocks for kissing his wife in public when he returned from a three year voyage on Sunday, an unattractive image to say the least.


- David Lane was a disturbed individual who rejected the Christian faith in which he was raised for a revived, Nordic, paganism and embraced a violent racialism and was eventually sent to prison for the crimes he committed as a member of the Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group that supported its activities with funds obtained through armed robbery. Obviously a man who any sane person would consider to be utterly repugnant. What is interesting, however, is that if you take the "fourteen words" meme attributed to him, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", and substitute any other colour or racial identity for "our" and "white" you will end up with a statement that would be considered unobjectionable, non-offensive, acceptable, laudable, and even an essential goal of social policy by liberals, progressives, and other self-identified "enlightened" people. Make the substitution and you will see what I mean. This provides us with a challenge for the soi disant "enlightened." Either admit, that despite its unsavoury origins and associations, there is nothing objectionable in the content of the “fourteen words” meme or disavow all the other racial identity politics that you support.

- Another white nationalist meme is that of “white genocide.” It purports to explain the observable phenomenon that has sometimes been called “white death,” i.e., the vast shrinking, over the last century, of the Caucasian percentage both of the total world population and of the populations of historically white countries, that has accelerated after the post-World War II Baby Boom as white fertility has dropped and white populations have been aging without reproducing themselves, relying instead upon immigration to replace themselves. The explanation offered by the “white genocide” meme is that this is due to the plotting of some racial enemy. Although there certainly are leftists who express their hatred of white people in genocidal terms, an obvious example of which being Noel Ignatiev, and genocide would be an apt description of what is being done to the whites of Zimbabwe and South Africa, the phenomenon as a whole is probably better described as “white suicide.” The white nationalists are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “who is doing this to us” they should be asking “why are we doing this to ourselves.” The answer is liberalism.

- Forty-five years ago, in the eerily prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, French author Jean Raspail warned of the coming death of Western civilization through an invasion of the masses of Third World poor aided and abetted by a suicidal white liberalism. The author was not a populist-ethno-nationalist, at least not primarily, but rather a traditional Roman Catholic and a legitimist royalist. Perhaps this explains his insightful prescience.


- Both the left and the right believe that ethnocentrism has both a healthy and a toxic form. Where they disagree is over what constitutes the difference between the healthy and toxic. The right would say that a healthy ethnocentrism is the kind of in-group loyalty that promotes and facilitates social cohesion, trust, and cooperation whereas toxic ethnocentrism is characterized by a paranoid distrust and violent hatred towards other groups. The left is more simplistic. For them it is a matter of skin colour. If you have the wrong skin colour, white, your ethnocentrism is toxic, no matter what form it takes, if you have the right skin colour, all others, it is healthy, even if it is expressed in paranoid and hateful terms.

- Today “enlightened” seems to mean “uncritically following the latest trends and fads in modern philosophy.” Come to think of it, that’s what it meant in the days of Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau, as well.


- Finding economic truth boils down to one question: who is the most competent to make the decision? If it is a decision that primarily affects the individual and his family, then the individual and family are under most circumstances the most competent to make the decision. There are obvious exceptions of people who lack the rational facility to make their own decisions, but for the most part this stands true. Conversely, if it is a decision that primarily affects the good of the country as a whole, the government is the most competent to make the decision. Again there are obvious exceptions, such as when the government consists of arrogant, egotists, obsessed with reading everything through the lens of the latest trend in progressive and politically correct ideology, but generally it is the case. The doctrine of laissez faire or economic liberalism is the error of thinking that the individual is competent to make all decisions (and that the common good of the whole country is thereby brought about through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”). Socialism is the error of thinking that the government is competent to make all decisions, including those that individuals and families should be making for themselves. The latter is by far the worst error of the two, but they are both errors.


- When someone says "satire is dead" they generally mean that things so bizarre have been happening in reality that it would be pointless to parody them. Satire is dead, but for an entirely different reason - the widespread influence of liberal, progressive, and left-wing thinking. The left does not get satire, because the left is incapable of distinguishing between basic human imperfection and huge evils that demand immediate rectification. This is because they refuse to accept the basic Christian truth that human history, between the Fall and Second Coming, is the history of people with the fundamental flaw of Original Sin, and that perfection cannot be expected on this earth and in time. Therefore, their response to any perceived imperfection is "this is unacceptable, it must be smashed, crushed, destroyed, and replaced with perfection." The point of satire, however, is to help us live with our imperfections, by allowing us to laugh at them. The political, social, religious, and cultural institutions that make for the good and civilized life are not perfect, but they can never be perfect, so rather than smashing them, crushing them, and razing them to the ground, let us laugh at their imperfections, so that we can appreciate them, warts and all. This spirit is completely foreign to the progressive. This is also why the greatest satirists - Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Stephen Leacock, and Evelyn Waugh to give a few examples, have been Tories.