The Moral Cowardice and Idolatry Among Today's Christian Leaders

Almost a century ago, poet and critic T. S. Eliot famously remarked “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” This was in a Cambridge University lecture given in 1939, on the eve of the war that was precipitated by the short-lived alliance between these rival alternatives to God, the text of which would be included in the book The Idea of a Christian Society. Seventeen years earlier a young Eliot had decried the cultural and spiritual bankruptcy of post-First World War Western Civilization in the poem “The Waste Land.” Five years later he had found the roots he had been looking for – note that he would later write the forward to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots – when he converted to orthodox Christianity, joined the Church of England, and swore his oath of loyalty to the Crown becoming a British citizen. He had found the true path and in the words quoted above warned those who were pursuing materialistic ends and placing their hope in democracy of where their path would ultimately lead them.

It is just under eighty years since Eliot spoke those words and Western Civilization has not turned back to God in the interim. Indeed, it has become far more godless, materialistic and secular than anyone could have imagined back then, and in the process, despite Stephen Pinker’s recent arguments to the contrary, become far more crude, vulgar, and immoral. Sad to say, much of the blame for the state of our civilization belongs to the leaders of the church. If you read the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament you will be struck by the number of times a particular cycle recurs – the leaders of God’s people go whoring after heathen idols, the people follow them into sin, and judgement and a curse comes upon them and their land as a result.

That the leaders of the church in our day and age are just as prone to lead their flocks into worshipping the false gods of the day as the leaders of the ancient Israelites were is evident in the moral blindness or cowardice that so many have displayed in their response to the recent events in Charlottesville even while tooting their own horns about their great courage in daring to resist the evil of white racism. It requires no courage whatsoever to speak out and condemn white racism in this era. All you have to do is go along with the mob. The true test of your moral courage is whether or not you dare to condemn the anti-white racism that hides behind the mask of anti-racism. Those who do so risk incurring the wrath of both the mob and the corporate globalists. The vast majority of church leaders, even among the supposedly orthodox, have failed this test badly. This is because they have bowed the knee to the false deity that presides over today’s pantheon of idols – the idol of diversity.

The events in Charlottesville as reported by the mainstream media seem to have produced a wide-spread breakdown in moral reasoning. Which is interesting because the disparity between the facts and the interpretation placed on those facts by the media is particularly glaring when it comes to this incident. We are told that because the “Unite the Right” rally was unambiguously pro-white and because neo-Nazi and KKK-types were unquestionably among the participants that all of those participating in the protest were white supremacists, and that therefore because of who they were, and because one of the counter protestors, Heather Heyer, was killed, it is the organizers and participants of the rally who must be singled out for blame and moral condemnation over the violence that occurred that day. This is morally bankrupt nonsense. It confuses consequences with culpability – just because the former were unevenly distributed between the protestors and counter protestors with the most severe consequence of death falling to one of the latter it does not follow in the slightest that in the allotment of blame the largest share must go to the former. Worse, it requires the premise that if a group’s views are regarded as repugnant or even if those views actually are repugnant, it is to be blamed for the violence that ensues when another group attacks them.

The facts of the case are these: the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally went through all the legal hoops to get a permit to hold a legal demonstration; the antifa showed up armed and masked with the intention of shutting the demonstration down with violence; the Charlottesville authorities declared a state of emergency and ordered the police to shut down the legal demonstration; the police forced the demonstrators to evacuate the park, leaving them only one way out – through the antifa; and the antifa then attacked the demonstrators with baseball bats, clubs, homemade flamethrowers, and projectiles of various sorts. The man, James Alex Fields, who drove into the crowd injuring several and killing Heather Heyer may very well have been acting out of fear for his life rather than homicidal malice – that remains to be determined. What is clear is that the bulk of the blame for this event going violent is to be divided between the Charlottesville authorities and the antifa.

Although the media have been consistently portraying the antifa as “counter protestors” it would be more accurate to call them terrorists. They do not show up to picket, hand out literature, and forcibly but peacefully express their disagreement with those they consider to be racists. They show up masked and armed, to intimidate, harass, and attack, to block access and shut down events. Although “antifa” is short for anti-fascist, in their tactics they bear a far closer resemblance to the thugs who followed Hitler and Mussolini than do their opponents, which can be explained by the fact that they are generally fronts for Marxist-Leninist groups, Marxist-Leninism or Communism being the parent ideology of which Fascism and Nazism were mutant offspring. They claim they are fighting racism but you will never find them trying to shut down a lecture by a Marxist academic who calls for the abolition of whiteness or a concert by a rapper who explicitly calls for violence against whites in his lyrics. They show no sign of comprehending either that a racist might not be white or that a white might not be a racist but instead treat racist and white as if they are synonymous. This is itself, of course, a form of racism.

The voice of moral clarity in the aftermath of Charlottesville has been that of American President Donald J. Trump of all people. He unequivocally condemned white supremacism and neo-Nazism, but rightly distinguished between white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the one hand and those who were neither but participated in the rally to protest the erasure of history and the changing of culture. He did not shirk from calling out the antifa and allotting them the share of the blame that they so rightly deserve. This refreshing moral clarity was sadly lacking among many Christian leaders.

Take Timothy J. Keller, for example. Keller is the founding pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. An apologist and the author of numerous books, Keller has something of a celebrity status among evangelical Protestants. In an article for The Gospel Coalition that came out the same day that President Trump gave his press conference, Keller began by asking the question:

How should Christians, and especially those with an Anglo-white background, respond to last weekend’s alt-right gathering in Charlottesville and its tragic aftermath?

Note the words “especially those with an Anglo-white background”. Keller is guilty of the very racism that he condemns so vehemently in this article. Indeed, he is guilty of the worst form of racism possible – racism against your own people.

Later in the article, Keller commits gross eisegesis when he reads the modern political discussion of race into St. Paul’s address to the Epicureans and Stoics at the Areopagus in Acts 17. The Apostle was not addressing the Greek idea that other peoples were barbarian, when he said that God had made “of one blood” every nation on the earth, but rather was establishing that the God he was preaching and Whom he identified with their “unknown God” was not a tribal deity but the One True God Who created the universe and to Whom all people owe worship. Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe that Keller does not know this and that this was an honest hermeneutical error on his part rather than sheer mendacity in order to pander to the spirit of the times.

Keller makes reference to “the idolatry of blood and country.” Keller has written extensively about idolatry in his book Counterfeit Gods. There too he refers to the idols of blood and country or race and nation. Now, I have no objection to what Keller says about this form of idolatry. Obviously blood, country, race, and nation can be made into idols, as the history of the early part of the last century proves all too well. Let us return to the quotation from T. S. Eliot with which I began this essay. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Hitler, was the very embodiment of the idolatry of blood, country, race and nation. Note, however, that Eliot saw another option for God-rejecters in Stalin.

What I don’t see anywhere in Keller’s article – or his book for that matter – is any condemnation of the idolatry of those who brought the violence to Charlottesville on August 12th – the antifa. Again, it is easy to rail against the idols of blood, country, race, and nation, for these are the idols of a century ago. These idols were popular in the early twentieth century, but when they devoured their worshippers in the bloodbath of the Second World War, twentieth century man rejected them. He did not, however, turn back to the true and living God, but erected yet another idol – the idol of diversity. It is this idol whom the Stalinistic antifa worship and barring a revival in which there is a mass turn back to the true God, she, by the time her cult has run its course, will have exacted more in the way of blood sacrifices from her worshippers than her predecessors ever did. It is this idol that the faithful and courageous man of God is called to speak out against in our day and age. This is precisely what Timothy Keller – and far too many other – Christian leaders refuse to do, preferring to bow their knee to the new idol, just as the “Positive Christianity” cult that Keller rightly condemns as heretical, prostituted itself to the idols of the Third Reich.

Orthodox Christian teaching is that God divided the nations at Babel but in the Kingdom of God outside of history (the Fall to the Second Coming) He will gather “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne of the Lamb. Within human history, the Kingdom of God is represented on earth by the church, the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that accepts into its membership through baptism, anyone from any nation who believes in Jesus Christ. There is nothing in orthodox Christianity that requires us to support efforts to undo Babel politically, whether they be by dissolving the nations of the world into a global order of world federalism or by maximizing diversity within countries through mass immigration and then attempting to administer race relations bureaucratically. Indeed, to do this is to commit the utmost folly, to do the very thing most likely to exacerbate racial tensions, hostility, and violence. It is what the idolatry of diversity looks like.

Those who today are returning to the idols of blood, race, and nation are doing so because they have had a glimpse of the apocalyptic disaster that lies ahead of us if we continue down the path of the idolatry of diversity. Their solution is no solution – we must turn back to the True and Living God, through Him Who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.” It is not likely that this will happen, however, if Christian leaders continue, like Timothy Keller, to whore around with the idol of diversity, and to refuse to name the evil of anti-white racism disguised as antiracism, while hypocritically pretending to a moral courage they do not possess by reserving their vehement denunciations only for those evils the mob is howling after.

GTN Tory Classics No. 8: First They Came for the White Supremacists...

The essay that follows was originally shared through e-mail and Facebook on May 27, 2009. This should be kept in mind in reading the essay because there are many time references such as “this week” and “last year” which mean “this week” and “last year” as of the day the essay was written.

In 2008 a young couple here in Winnipeg had their children seized by the Child and Family Services after a teacher called CFS to report that the couple’s daughter had come to school with a swastika inked on her arm. The case finally made it to the courts in May of 2009. I wrote this essay the week the case opened. I had been disgusted although not surprised, earlier that week, with the commentary that had appeared about this case in the Winnipeg Free Press. The newspaper’s progressive columnists seemed to have been having a contest to see who could call the loudest for the cruficixion of the couple in question.

Child and Family Services is a government agency that I have long detested. It exists for no purpose other than to undermine parental authority within the family. Yes, I know that on paper their raison d'être is to deal with cases of child abuse. They are notoriously incompetent at handling this task however. There are clear cut cases of child abuse where all sane people would agree the government must step in to protect children from abusive parents – cases of sexual abuse and cases where the parents deliberately injure their children. This sort of thing the police can handle without the help of an agency staffed with arrogant social workers.

CFS, like similar agencies elsewhere, was not created out of a need for a special agency to deal with such cases. It was created because the increasingly totalitarian state wants to control our lives from cradle to grave and to do so it requires control over the raising of children. Thus the creation of agencies like the CFS, which exist to let parents know that it is by permission of the state that they are allowed to raise their children, that the state will be monitoring them, and that they will lose their parental privileges if they step out of line.

In this instance, where the CFS intervened because of a complaint about the family’s political views, it was a clear cut case of political persecution. This is something that we all should have been outraged over. It does not matter that the swastika is the symbol of an ideology, National Socialism, that all sane people consider to be repugnant. All sane people also consider Communism to be repugnant. If, however, a child were to show up in school with a hammer and sickle inked on their skin, does anyone seriously think a teacher would have called the CFS to complain? In the extremely unlikely event that happened, and the even more unlikely event that the CFS, staffed with people who were spoon-fed Marxism in their social “sciences” classes in university, actually took children out of a home because its parents were Communists, how do you think the columnists in papers like the Winnipeg Free Press would respond? Would they demonize the parents in print the way they did with the parents in this case? Of course not. The moment they got wind of such a thing happening they would be screaming “McCarthyism” as loud as they possibly could.

As the case progressed in the courts, further allegations of a different nature were made against the parents. Surely, however, such allegations cannot be considered credible coming from the CFS. It had taken children out of a home because of the political views of the parents and was now trying to cover its tracks.

The title of this essay is, of course, an allusion to Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who ended up in Dachau in WWII. The poem describes how the Nazis came for the communists, trade unionists, and Jews, and he kept silent being none of those things, and then when they finally came for him there was nobody to speak out for him. The reference to this poem struck me as an appropriate title for two reasons.

First of all, the act of the government taking children from a home because of the political views of the parents is far closer to the evil of the Third Reich than the mere use of the swastika symbol.

Secondly, progressives have devoted much effort over the last several decades to instilling anti-racism in us. This effort has been largely successful and one of the results is that now most of us turn a blind eye to evil when the victim can be shown to be a “racist”. Marxist thugs prevented a controversial speaker from giving a lecture at a university where he was invited to speak to people who wanted to hear him speak by blocking access to the lecture hall, shouting him down and intimidating his would-be audience? Ah, but he is a “scientific racist”, so that means the anti-racist thugs were just expressing their “freedom of speech” rather than denying the lecturer his. The owner of a website is brought before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and charged with violating Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act for something that was posted on his website, and he now faces a hefty fine, legal bills, and a gag order? Ah, but it was racist material that posted on his website, so it doesn’t matter. Children are taken away from their parents because of the opinions of their parents? Ah, but their parents hold racist opinions so it doesn’t matter.

So long as we continue to think this way, government agencies and thugs will continue to be able to do whatever they want to people, so long as they label them “racist”.

“But the parents really were racists, in this case,” someone who misses the point completely will object, “they identify themselves as white nationalists and drew a swastika on their daughter’s arm.”

Christopher Lasch, the “social conservative of the Left” who was professor of history at the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, wrote the following about such people:

The problem of racial intolerance is closely linked to fanaticism. Here again there is a good deal of complacency and self-righteousness mixed up in the fear of intolerance. The thinking classes seem to labor under the delusion that they alone have overcome racial prejudice. The rest of the country, in their view, remains incorrigibly racist. Their eagerness to drag every conversation back to race is enough in itself to invite the suspicion that their investment in this issue exceeds anything that is justified by the actual state of race relations. Monomania is not a sign of good judgment. But whether it spring from self-righteousness or panic or a mixture of the two, the assumption that most Americans remain racists at heart cannot stand up to close examination. The improvement of racial attitudes is one of the few positive developments of recent decades. Not that racial conflict has subsided, but it is a serious mistake to interpret every conflict as evidence of the retrograde outlook of ordinary Americans, as a revival of the historical intolerance that has played so large a part in our country’s history. The new racism is reactive rather than residual, let alone resurgent. It is a response, however inappropriate and offensive, to a double standard of racial justice that strikes most Americans as unreasonable and unfair. Since opposition to an “affirmative” double standard is routinely dismissed as racist, one reaction to this insult, from working- and lower-middle-class people harassed by affirmative action and busing and now from college students harassed by attempts to enforce politically correct language and thought, is to accept “racism” as a badge of honor, to flaunt it, with studied provocation, in the face of those who want to make racism and minority rights the only subject of public discussion. (Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democray, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995, pp. 90-91)

Here, in his last work, Prof. Lasch demonstrated far more insight into what makes these people tick than most typical leftists.

Canada and the USA, and virtually every other Western country have, after WWII, introduced:

1) Anti-discrimination laws. These forbid racial discrimination on the part of private businesses and property owners in certain situations. In practice they tend to be only enforced against whites.
2) Affirmative action policies, in which schools and employers discriminate in favour of non-whites against whites. These can either be imposed by the government or actions taken by companies themselves to ward off the threat of lawsuits under anti-discrimination laws.
3) Forced racial integration for lower and lower-middle class whites.
4) Liberal immigration policies that seem to be designed to deliberately alter the racial demographics of the countries that practice them.

These policies were all introduced by progressives. Conservatives should be the effective voice of opposition to these policies and the injustices contained within them. We have failed to be such and as long as we continue to fail those who are not willing to suffer in silence under such injustices will find other, less wholesome, movements and ideologies to speak for them.


First They Came For The White Supremacists…


By Gerry T. Neal
May 27, 2009

The big news this week, is the opening of the child-custody case that started last year here in Winnipeg, when Child and Family Services took a girl and boy into custody after the girl’s teacher reported that she had been sent to school with swastikas and racist words drawn on her skin. Following the seizure a debate arose over whether or not the state has any business taking children out of their homes because they don’t like the views of the parents. Now the legal answer to that question in Canada is going to be settled by the courts. The moral and just answer to the question, however, lies in hands other than those of the Canadian legal system.

That answer is clear, and that answer is a resounding no. When the government says that you cannot think a certain way, that you cannot hold a certain opinion, or that you cannot convey your thoughts and opinions to others, they are engaging in something called thought control. Thought control is the mark, not of a legitimate and just government, but of a totalitarian and tyrannical one. The most oppressive regimes of the 20th Century, the Communist governments of the USSR, Red China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. all engaged in thought control.

So, for that matter, did the Third Reich.

Which makes it all the more ironic the government is using people’s fears of Nazism as the basis for their experiments in thought control. What was it about Hitler’s regime that made it so terrible? I always thought that it was the fact that the Third Reich was a tyrannical regime with secret police and a fanatical leader-worship cult that encouraged people to turn in their parents, neighbors, and friends if they were suspected of disloyalty to the state, in which freedom was non-existent and the state was in the hands of a gang of petty thugs who ruled by fear. But apparently I was wrong. Everyone else seems to think it was because Hitler was a racist.

Stalin, who was our ally in WWII, ran the same kind of totalitarian state as Hitler. In fact Stalin’s regime killed more people, operated more prison camps, and ruled more ruthlessly than Hitler’s did. Communism’s total record of bloodshed, human suffering, and oppression makes Hitler’s look pretty small in comparison.

Yet you can be an avowed Marxist and remain respectable in academic circles. You can hang up the flags of murderous Communist regimes, wear T-shirts glorifying Communist mass-murderer “Che” Guevera, and praise Castro and Mao to high heaven, and nobody will say anything about it. Or, if somebody does say something about it they will be drowned out by the cry “MCCARTHYISM!!!”

The name of Senator Joseph McCarthy has become synonymous with “witch-hunting” but McCarthy never attempted to use the power of the state to persecute people merely for holding Communist views. He was dealing with a legitimate security problem – the infiltration of the American federal government by agents loyal to a hostile power. We now know, since the mid 1990’s declassification of the VENONA Project transcripts, that the problem was worse than he thought.

That is a remarkable contrast with the professional anti-racist “watchdog” groups and their liberal allies in the media and the schools. These people want the government to take action against people, not for violence, not for acts that hurt others, but for holding racist views. They want it to be against the law to express certain opinions. They want the courts to hand out harsher sentences for beating people up because of their skin color than for beating them up because they were being lippy and obnoxious. Now, apparently, they want children removed from their homes and put in the custody of the state, because the parents don’t kowtow to what liberals and the government say everybody is supposed to believe about race.

On Monday, as the custody case began before the Manitoba Court of Queens Bench in Winnipeg, social workers from Manitoba Child and Family Services informed the court that the girl had told them that “black people don’t belong” and that “black people should die” and that she gave a graphic description of how to kill a black person with a chain and spiked ball.

That’s pretty nasty stuff. Is this really what the parents in question were teaching their children, however? Or is this a case where the social workers at Child and Family Services, convinced by their ideology that “those evil racist Nazis” talk that way, interviewed the girl in such a way as to get answers that confirmed their own preconceived ideas. The latter is by far the most likely explanation. So likely that I would call it a certainty.

If you find that to be preposterous then you are obviously unfamiliar with the way social workers and government agencies like CFS think and operate. Ignorant, young idealists, enter social sciences programs in universities where their professors stuff their heads with Marxist ideology, and they emerge to take jobs with government bureaucracies convinced of the righteousness of their mandate to invade the private lives of ordinary people and boss them around for their own good. That is how the social worker is made.

The ideology the social worker is taught, identifies certain ideas and attitudes as pathologies that are harmful to society. These are ideas that are transmitted primarily by families, churches, and small communities, and which until very recently were universally regarded as healthy and normal. This reclassification of normal ideas as mental diseases provides a justification for government agencies to interfere in the workings of other societal institutions. It also allows those doing the state’s dirty work intruding on people in their homes, spying on them, and taking their children away, to feel good about themselves, to think they are doing something for the greater good.

In reality they are just obnoxious busybodies on a power trip.

What are these ideas that are being pathologized?

Do you have feelings of patriotic attachment to the ancestral people from whom you are descended and to the land they live in? Once considered one of the highest of virtues by the poets of our language, this attitude is now condemned as “racism”. Do you think that men and women have different natures leading them to behave differently and take different roles in society? If you do, you are now considered a “sexist”. More recently recognition of the obvious fact that the complementary nature of the sexes makes heterosexual coupling the norm, and same-sex attachments the exception, has been pathologized as “heterosexism” or “homophobia”.

These new ways of looking at old ideas began in the 1940’s and 50’s as part of a deliberate program on the part of neo-Marxists, such as those belonging to the Frankfurt School, to delegitimize the culture they believed was standing in the way of the revolution and the utopia they desired.

Obviously, this tactic is working well for the neo-Marxists. It is truly frightening how many young people are buying into their nonsense. Far more frightening than the thought that somewhere out there some family might be teaching its kids to admire Adolf Hitler.

More frightening yet, though, is the future of society if the government is allowed to take children away from their parents because the parents are “racists”. If it is “white supremacists” who have their children taken away today, whose children will be taken away tomorrow?

GTN Tory Classics No. 3: Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory

The term Pyrrhic victory comes from Pyrrhus of Epirus, a 3rd Century BC Greek king who fought against Rome. At the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, he led a coalition army against a Roman army of about equal strength. The battle lasted for two days and in the end Rome was routed, but Pyrrhus lost a huge portion of his own army in the process. After the battle, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked "One more such victory, and we shall be undone". A Pyrrhic victory is a victory won at a cost so high it means the ruin of the victor as well.

I wrote the essay that followed for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this essay I argue that the West won the Cold War against Communism at the price of becoming Communist ourselves. This essay also argues against the widely held but foolish idea that "Communism in theory" is noble and good and unrelated to the actual experience of 20th Century Communism.


Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory?


By Gerry T. Neal
October 20, 2009

This November 9th will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The significance of that historical event cannot be exaggerated. It marked the beginning of the end of the global conflict that had been raging since the end of World War II between the two superpowers that had emerged from that War to take the place of the great European powers that had been decimated by the World Wars. Two years after the East German guards abandoned the check stops and allowed free access through the gates of the wall the Soviet Union was no more.

Did the end of the Cold War mean that we had won and Communism had lost? Or was the “victory” of the West a Pyrrhic victory? In his 2007 book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Post-Modern Age, Dr. Tomislav Sunic pointed out that in Europe some authors had made the observation that “communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”. Is this in fact the case?

What was or is Communism? It was an ideology and a movement dedicated to bringing about a global revolution on the part of the working class that would establish an egalitarian society. It’s roots lay in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century philosopher whose ideas inspired the French Revolution which became the template for revolutionary movements that popped up all over continental Europe in the early 19th Century. One of those revolutionary organizations, the Communist League, commissioned German economist Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels to write a manifesto outlining the aims of their movement. The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in London in 1848. Less than a century later a party known as the Bolsheviks, dedicated to the ideology of Communism, seized control of the state in Russia, and turned the old Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under the leadership of tyrants like Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Communist Russia established a brutal system of totalitarian rule. Freedom to worship was severely curtailed by the officially atheist state. Artificial famines were created to inflict mass starvation and suffering upon the Ukrainians. A class of peasant known as the “kulaks” were made the official scapegoat of the Soviet state and targeted for persecution. Forced labor camps were set up all across the USSR. Long before Hitler came to power in Germany the Bolsheviks had set a record for state cruelty and oppression that the Nazis, brutal as they were, would never be able to top. It would, however, arguably be topped by the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong who in 1949 had driven out the Chinese Nationalists and conquered mainland China.

Show trials, Potemkin villages, concentration camps, artificial famines, mass executions of entire classes of people deemed to be enemies of “the people” because of their education, wealth, or religion, these were what Communism looked like in practice wherever it reared its ugly head, whether in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Cuba under Castro. The whole time this was going on, smug, ivory-tower, leftist intellectuals in America, Canada, the UK and Europe stuck their noses in the air at anyone who considered Communism to be a serious threat to human freedom and happiness.

These sort of things, we were told by leftist academics and Hollywood actors, are not what Communism is really about. Communism is really about equality and sharing and being fair to people. Only those with unearned wealth and power which they jealously guard for themselves while unfeelingly leaving other people to suffer could possibly be opposed to Communism.

Alright then. Lets look at Communism in theory.

The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels set forth the ideas and aims of the Communist Party, was a short document. It outlined Marx’s distinct view of history as progressing through a series of conflicts between oppressor classes and oppressed classes and his prediction that the next revolution, on the part of the proletariat (industrial working class), would lead to the abolition of private property (the root of all evil in Marx’s theory) and the establishment of a society where everything is owned in common and people contribute to the best of their ability and in accordance with their needs. In their second chapter, entitled “Proletarians and Communists”, Marx and Engels put forth a 10-point agenda for the Communist movement to achieve its goals.

What is interesting about this agenda is that 3 of the points have been completely accomplished in Western societies. The second point is “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth point is “Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” and the tenth point is “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc”.

Note that each of these points is a step towards statism. An income tax is a direct tax on the incomes of people that requires people to give detailed information about their employment and income to the government and which cannot be established apart from an intrusive government tax agency that keeps records on people and has the power to audit people like Revenue Canada or the IRS. When that tax is “progressive or graduated” that means that the government is telling certain people they are making too much money and so the government will take a larger share from them than from others. This tax was established in the United States in 1913 and in Canada in 1917.

A central bank is a tool for the government and bankers working in collusion with the government to confiscate everybody’s wealth without them actually coming up to you and saying “you have saved such-and-such an amount of money over the years, we are now going to take it away from you”. The Federal Reserve System was established in the United States the same year as the income tax and the Bank of Canada was established in the 1934.

Universal public education takes the responsibility for and control of the education of the young away from their parents and places it in the hands of the central state. When schools are paid for and controlled by the central government they become instruments whereby that government can undermine the authority of parents, churches, and other social institutions through state indoctrination. As of late, the public schools seem to be doing far more of that, than teaching kids to read, write, and do math, and imparting to them a basic knowledge of the literature and history of their society and of the world at large.

The other seven points of the Marx/Engels agenda have not been fulfilled so conspicuously and completely but with our estate taxes and government bureaucracies like the CRTC and FCC, and the ministries and departments of transport, it can be said of many of them that they are fulfilled in spirit if not in the letter.

The leftist academics might pipe in at this point and say “See, that proves our point, you can have Marx and Engels without the Gulag, and the killing fields, and the terror famine, and the Great Leap Forward”.

Lets take another look around us then. We don’t have apparatchiks but we do have self-important sycophantic bureaucrats galore. We don’t have yes/no elections on candidates from a single party. We get to chose between various brands of the same party so as to get the policies of Jack Layton under the label of Stephen Harper. We don’t have secret police knocking on our doors in the middle of the night and dragging us away because we have written scurrilous verse about our Leader. We do, however, have Human Rights Commissions, which investigate our actions and words to make sure they measure up to official human rights ideology and which summon us to trials where we are not entitled to legal counsel but where we can face penalties of up to $50 000 and life-time gag orders if we are convicted for just posting words on the internet. There are people in jails across Western Europe whose only crime was to question aspects of the historical account of the Holocaust. Instead of re-education we have “sensitivity training”.

What we don’t seem to have any more are the prescriptive Rights of Englishmen under English Common Law, whereby we are free to do whatever we want if it is not a crime clearly proscribed by law. The Common Law Rights of Englishmen further protected us by insisting that we, if detained by the state, have a right to be immediately presented with the charges against us, to have a judge rule on our detainment, to a trial before a jury of our peers, and if convicted to appeal our case up to Her Majesty herself. Apparently “human rights” trump those rights.

These all seem to have fallen by the wayside as our government has pursued the goals of progress, equality and “human rights”. It looks like Communism, whether in its stark, ugly, naked form in the USSR or Red China, or dressed up to look pretty in Canada and the United States, is simply incompatible with the long-standing British tradition of liberty.

If we value that tradition of liberty, maybe it is time we started asking our politicians to give it back to us, and to get rid of all the Communist innovations they have smuggled in over the last century. Otherwise, the West’s victory over Communism of 20 years ago, is a Pyrrhic victory indeed.