Abstract Flags

 

One of the bad habits of the age in which we live is the habit of turning abstract terms into flags, running them up the pole, and demanding that everybody salute them or be denounced as a traitor. 

 

This habit can be found on both sides of the political spectrum.   This is, for example, what neoconservatives do with the term “liberty” and its synonym “freedom”.   Up until about a century ago it was self-identified liberals who did this these terms but that is the nature of neoconservatism.   Irving Kristol defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”.  Neoconservatism is yesterday’s liberalism.   Think back two decades to the events of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that ensued.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his supporters all maintained that 9/11 had been an attack on American “liberty” by people who hated Americans for their “freedom” and that their “War on Terror” would be fought on behalf of said freedom.   They ran freedom up the flagpole, demanded that everyone salute, and denounced everyone that was not 100% behind everything they were doing as a traitor to liberty.

 

By turning “freedom” and “liberty” into flags, and proclaiming their allegiance to them, however, they avoided accountability for how their actions were affecting the actual freedoms and liberties of American citizens.   In order to fight the “War on Terror” on behalf of the abstract flag of “freedom”, they permanently and exponentially expanded the powers of their government and created a national surveillance state.   It is a strange sort of “freedom” and one that does not much resemble the traditional understanding of the word that can be defended in this way.  

 

This, of course, is the problem with this habit of making flags out of abstract terms.   Allegiance to the term as a flag is required of people, but it is all that is required, not any sort of consistent, intelligent, understanding of the term.

 

Progressives are just as prone to this bad habit as conservatives.   Indeed, they are much worse.    In the previous example it was noted that the abstraction the neoconservatives were saluting as a flag had originally been run up the pole by liberals, who are progressives and this is true of most of the abstractions that today’s conservatives salute.   Progressives are the ones who make the abstract terms into flags, then, when they have decided that the flag they were saluting yesterday is no longer “modern” (1), they abandon it to the conservatives and make a new one.   “Democracy” is an abstract flag that progressives created and neoconservatives adopted even though the progressives have not abandoned it.   Both sides frequently accuse the other of betraying “democracy”.   This is one reason, among many, why I try to avoid saluting this particular flag, and insist that I believe in the concrete institution of parliament under the reign of a royal monarch, that has proven itself through the test of time, rather than abstract ideal of democracy.

 

At the present moment the primary abstract flag that progressives are saluting and demanding that the rest of us show our allegiance to is that of “diversity”.   This, of course, raises the question of what kind of diversity is in question.   The term is used in a myriad of diverse contexts, from speaking of someone whose outfits are radically different from day to day as having a diverse wardrobe to a farmer who plants diverse crops as opposed to only wheat or only barley to my own use of the word at the beginning of this sentence.   The diversity that progressives demand our allegiance to today is a very specific kind of diversity.   It means diversity of the population in terms of categories of group identity.   Race and cultural ethnicity are the most obvious such categories.   Sex ought to be the least controversial such category, in that no human population could last longer than a generation that is entirely of one sex, and all societies except for mythical ones like the Amazons, have been sexually diverse in the traditional sense.   Progressives have turned it into the most controversial category, however, by demanding that everyone show their allegiance to diversity of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.

 

In practice, the progressive insistence that we all salute the flag of diversity translates into a requirement that we accept the propositions a) that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing to a society and b) the more diversity of this kind a society has the better off it will be.   Here again, we find the habit of making flags out of abstract ideas shutting down intelligent thought concerning those ideas.   Both propositions are obviously false.   Consider the first proposition.  The much more nuanced statement that there are positives and negatives to both cultural and racial heterogeneity (diversity) and homogeneity, that each conveys distinct advantages and disadvantages upon a society, and that the advantages and disadvantages of each must be weighed against those of the other can be defended intelligently.   So can the assertion that after such weighing, the advantages of diversity outweigh its disadvantages and the advantages of homogeneity, although the opposite assertion can also be intelligently defended.    The proposition that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing cannot be intelligently defended.  Even if it could, however, and further, we were to concede it to be the case, the second proposition, that the more diversity the better, would by no means follow from the first.   Plenty of things that are good in themselves turn bad when taken to excess.   Indeed, in classical Aristotelean ethics, vices (bad habits) are formed by indulging natural appetites that are good in themselves to excess, and in classical Christian theology heresies (serious doctrinal errors concerning tenets of the Gospel kerygma as summarized in the ancient Creeds) are formed by taking one tenet of the faith, true in itself, to excess.

 

More important, for the purposes of this discussion, than what is included in the “diversity” to which progressives demand our allegiance, is what is excluded.   It is quite clear, from the way progressives respond to those who dare to raise points such as those raised in the previous paragraph, that diversity of thought or opinion is not included in the diversity they praise and value so highly.   Indeed, this entire bad habit of turning an abstract idea into a flag is very inconsistent with the idea of diversity of thought or opinion.   Yet, for anyone who values freedom in the political sense as it was traditionally understood, this is surely the most important kind of diversity of all.   For that matter, for parliamentary government or democracy, in any sense of the word that is consistent with a free society, to function, diversity of thought must be the most important kind of diversity.

 

While this does provide a further illustration of how progressives, in raising new abstract flags, abandon those they saluted in days gone by, it has long been observed that even when liberals, the progressives of yesterday, expressed a belief in diversity of thought, their practice often contradicted it.   Remember that famous line of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover there are other views”?  He made this statement, in one form or another, numerous times, and I don’t know when he first said it, but the oldest version of which I am aware comes from his Up From Liberalism, first published in 1959.   “Duke” Morrison, the legendary actor who under the stage name John Wayne starred in countless films from The Big Trail in 1930 until The Shootist in 1976, in an interview with Tony Macklin in 1975 said:

 

I have found a certain type calls himself a liberal.   Now I always thought I was a liberal.   I came up terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist, when I listened to everybody’s point of view that I ever met, and then decided how I should feel.  But this so-called new liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your point of view and they make a decision as to what you think and they are articulate enough and in control of enough of the press to force that image out for the average person.

 

If this could be said of liberals back in 1959 and 1975 it is all the more true of today’s progressives.   

 

One way in which this is evident is in their exclusionary rhetoric.   Progressives, especially those who hold some sort of office of civic authority, have become increasingly prone to issuing proclamations about how such-and-such a thing they disapprove of has “no place” in our community and society.  It would be one thing if what they were so excluding were things like murder, robbery, and rape which would meet with broad disapproval in pretty much any society in any time and place.   In most cases, however, they are speaking of some “ism” or “phobia”, usually one that has been that has been newly coined.   What these neologisms have in common is that each of them is defined in a special way.   On the surface, these “isms” and “phobias” appear to refer to varieties of crude bigotry but they are applied by progressives in actual usage so as to include all forms of dissent from the sacred progressive dogma that identity-group diversity is always good and that more identity-group diversity is always better, no matter how respectfully and intelligently that dissent is worded.   A couple of months ago the Orthosphere blogger who writes under the nom de plume Bonald after the reactionary philosopher who wrote against the French Revolution and its aftermath provided us with some disturbing insights into the implications of the growth of this sort of rhetoric.

 

Another way in which the progressive Left’s increasing rejection of the most important form of diversity for those who want to live in a free society with a functioning parliamentary government is in its use of the terms “denial” and “denier” as derogatory epithets for those who disagree with its dogmas.

 

This has become fairly standard practice whenever progressives run into disagreement on a wide assortment of matters.   The implications of this use of these terms are that either a) what progressives are asserting is so self-evidently obvious that one would have to be stubbornly, stupidly and willfully ignorant to disagree, b) we are under a moral obligation to believe what the progressives say and therefore are committing a moral offense in disagreeing, or c) a combination of a) and b).    Since progressives are not the authorities of a religious communion to which we all belong and have no legitimate authority to set dogma, the second of these implications is absurd.  Since progressives use the “denial” and “denier” epithets to avoid answering well-reasoned and evidence backed arguments against their positions the first of these implications is also ridiculous.

 

This becomes quite comical when the progressive assertions pertain to matters that have a large scientific component.  For decades now, anyone who has questioned the progressive narrative that states that due mostly to the emissions of greenhouse gasses by livestock and human industry the average temperature of the earth has risen and cataclysmic climate change is impending unless the population of the world is radically reduced, we all become vegans, and we stop using fossil fuels for energy has been labelled a “denier”.   A rather convenient way of avoiding answering difficult questions such as “why should climate change be assumed to be for the worse rather than the better, especially since historically human beings have thrived better in warm periods than cold ones?” and “why, since the earth’s climate has hardly been constant throughout history to the point that advocates of your theory have stooped to doctoring graphs of the historical data to hide this fact, should we expect it to remain constant now and be alarmed about the observed rise of about a degree in the earth’s average temperature over a century?”   In the last year and a half we have seen progressives accuse anyone who questions whether it is either good or necessary to sabotage the economies of every country in the world, drive small businesses into bankruptcy while enriching the billionaires who control the big online businesses, cancel our constitutional rights and freedoms, brainwash everyone into looking upon other human beings primarily as sources of contagion, exponentially accelerate the problem of people substituting their smartphones and computers for real, in-person social contact, establish anarcho-tyrannical police states in which acts that are bona in se and absolutely essential to healthy social and communal life are turned into mala prohibita crimes and hunted down with greater severity than real crimes that are actually mala in se, and bribing and blackmailing people into accepting an experimental new gene therapy in violation of the Nuremberg Protocol, all in order to combat a pandemic involving a virus that has proven to be less lethal than the vast majority of previous pandemics for which no such extreme measures were ever considered, let alone taken, of being a “COVID denier”.    To be fair, plenty of “conservative” political leaders, including the premiers of my own province (Manitoba), Alberta, and Upper Canada have all done the same, but the progressives have been much more monolithic about it.   The reason this is so comical is because real “science”, as anybody who understands the word knows, does not make dogmatic statements and therefore admits of no “denial”.   The comedy is greatly enhanced when those denouncing “COVID deniers” or “climate change deniers” advise us to “follow the science” or “listen to the science” as if “science” made dogmatic proclamations, or when they say “the science is settled” when, by the prevalent litmus test of the philosophy underlying science, for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, and therefore, science can never be settled.   Less funny and more sad, is when someone like Anthony Fauci or Theresa Tam admits the real nature of science, that it is always evolving, but uses this to back up a claim to absolute obedience of the nature of “you should unquestioningly obey my orders at any given moment, even if it contradicts what I told you to do the moment before” as if he, or allegedly she in the case of Tam, were Petruchio and the rest of us were Katherina the shrew.

 

It is far less comical when progressives impose a narrative interpretation on their country’s history in order to undermine the legitimacy of their country and its institutions and attack its historical figures, and then accuse those who point out the holes in their narrative of “denial”.   In this case, the progressives are walking in the footsteps of the French Jacobins, the Chinese Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge all of whom wrought tremendous devastation, destruction, and disaster upon their countries by insisting that their history was irredeemably corrupt and needed to be razed to the ground, along with all of the countries’ institutions.   This is what the progressives that infest Canada’s university faculties and newsmedia, both print and electronic, have been attempting to do in Canada for a couple of decades with their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools.   In the real past, the past as it actually happened, these were boarding schools, initially founded by Christian Churches as a missionary outreach to Native Indians to provide their children with the kind of education they would need if they were to thrive in the modern economy.   The Indian chiefs of the nineteenth century wanted just this kind of education for their children and so, at their insistence, the stipulation that it would be provided by the Dominion government was included in all of the treaties.   Accordingly, the government funded and expanded these schools, as well as making provisions for day schools on the reserves.   If Indian parents neglected to send their kids to the day schools, the government would make the kids go to the residential schools, but initially it was mostly the kids of the chiefs and the elders of the bands who were sent to the schools at their own parents’ insistence.   By a century later, however, the government was making these schools serve the double function of schools and foster group homes for Indian children whom child welfare social workers had removed from their homes to protect them from such things as physical abuse.   Through utterly contemptible methodology, including a “victim centred” approach to testimony that could just as easily have been used to produce an equally damning picture of the schools to which wealthy, elite, white kids were sent, or for that matter schools of any sort because for any school you can always find alumni for whom the experience was something horrible to be “survived”, and which is completely in violation of the standards by which truth and guilt are assessed in the courtroom and the historical process, progressives spun a cock and bull narrative in which all the bad experiences in the schools were made out to have been the intent of the schools’ founders, administrators, and the Canadian government, and the  purpose of the schools was interpreted as the elimination of Native Indian cultural identities.   The progressives then used this narrative interpretation to claim that all of this was the moral equivalent of what the Third Reich did in its prison camps in World War II or what was done to the Tutsis in the last days of the Rwandan Civil war, which would have been a reprehensible claim even if the facts admitted of no other interpretation than that of their narrative, which is not even close to being the case.   The progressives insist that everything else in the history of Canada, especially anything traditionally seen as a great and positive achievement of either English or French Canadians, must take a backset to their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools and that Canadians of all ethnicities, but especially English and French Canadians, must perpetually live in shame and submit to having their country “cancelled”.   In the last month or so the progressives have kicked this up a notch by claiming falsely that the discovery of the location of abandoned cemeteries on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School – and more recently the Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan – was a “shocking” new discovery (that such cemeteries were to be found has been known all along – an entire volume of the TRC Final Report is dedicated to this) and, irresponsibly to the point of criminal defamation of past Canadian governments, the Churches and the school administrators, faculty, and staff, that the graves constitute evidence of mass murder, the least plausible explanation, by far, of the deaths of the children.

 

For several weeks now Chris Champion, author, historian, and editor of the history journal the Dorchester Review, one of the few publications in Canada still worth reading, has been attacked by progressives over tweets made on the journal’s Twitter account challenging this narrative.   Sean Carleton, who is associated with the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Manitoba, accused the Dorchester Review of being a “straight up garbage, genocide denialism, outfit” for agreeing with the Final Report of the TRC that “the cause of death was usually tuberculosis or some other disease”.   Janis Irwin, the Deputy Whip for Alberta’s NDP, also denounced Champion as “reprehensible and disgusting” for expressing this agreement with the TRC’s Final Report, and demanded that Jason Kenney scrap the K-9 social studies curriculum on the preparation of which, Champion had advised the Albertan government.   While this sort of thing is to be expected from those of Carleton’s and Irwin’s ilk, about a week ago the CBC, the Crown broadcaster paid for out of the taxes of all Canadians, ran a story by Janet French of CBC Edmonton,  full of quotes from people such as the Alberta NDP Education Critic, Sarah Hoffman, Nicole Sparrow who is press secretary to Kenney’s Education Minister, Kisha Supernant who is an archeology professor at the University of Manitoba, and Daniel Panneton of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, all expressing how appalled they were at Champion’s disagreement with the progressive, Canada-bashing, narrative, this time in an article that appeared on Dorchester Review’s website under his byline on June 17^th and which pointed out just how inappropriate the comparisons the narrative makes between the residential schools and what happened in Europe in the 1940s are.    

 

In his article, which is well-worth reading in its entirety, Champion wrote:

 

It is ridiculous to compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD.   And it is equally false and unjust to act as if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was a child-abuser or sexual predator. 

 

All of this is absolutely true and, it is worth noting, the second sentence is quite consistent with the TRC Report in which the testimony of those who experienced sexual abuse is overwhelmingly of the type in which older students were the abusers, sadly the common experience of boarding school students of all types.  Which is why all of Champion’s detractors quoted in the CBC article do not answer his arguments but merely accuse him of bigoted attitudes and “denial”.   “One photo of smiling children does not negate thousands of survivors’ stories”, which Kisha Supernant is quoted as having said, is the closest thing to an attempt at an answer that appears, although anyone who reads Champion’s article from beginning to end – since the CBC article appeared the same day it is questionable as to whether those quoted had done so – will know that nothing in the article negates the testimony of those whose experience at the residential schools was bad, only the spin by placed on that testimony by the progressive narrative, a narrative, incidentally, which itself negates the testimony of no small number of alumni of these schools whose experience was positive.

 

The progressives who have been attacking Champion and the Dorchester Review talk as if they think that someone who tells a story of having suffered victimization, especially of the sort that can be attributed to some prohibited “ism” or “phobia”, has a right to have “their truth” in current progressive lingo accepted without question or cross-examination.  A certain type of feminist makes this claim explicitly with regards to females who claim to have been sexually harassed or assaulted.   This sort of thinking runs contrary to the principles of courtroom justices, such as the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, principles which exist for very good reasons, to prevent courts of law from being used as instruments of abuse by false accusers.   This kind of talk, however, is a rhetorical device that dishonestly equates criticism of the progressives’ ideas, interpretations, and narratives with criticism of personal testimony incorporate into these narratives.  

 

In all of these examples of progressive dismissal of their critics as “deniers” we can see how progressives have moved increasingly further away from the diversity of thought and opinion that is the most important diversity as far as the freedom of society and the functioning of parliamentary government goes.    In the last example, the diversity of thought they condemn as “denial” is disagreement with their narrative interpretation of the history of the residential schools, a narrative interpretation that they are presently using to attack the foundations and institutions of Canada, an attack which if it succeeds and follows its historical precedents will not bode well for freedom and parliamentary government in this country.   This makes the way progressives have run “diversity” up the flagpole and are constantly demanding that we salute it into a kind of sick joke.

 

Perhaps it is time we all got over this bad habit of turning abstract ideas into flags.

 

 

 

 (1)   In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, (1932) Basil Seal, having fled England to avoid the duties his mother was insisting he take up, is invited to help modernize the country of Azania by its Emperor Seth, an old Oxford friend of his.   He tells Seth “we’ve got a much easier job than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…” to which the Emperor asks “what is all that” and is told “just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern”.

The Book of Revelation and the Present Situation

 

If someone were to take a poll of orthodox theological historians about which book of the Holy Bible, Old and New Testament, we ought to approach with the greatest amount of humility and the least amount of dogmaticism with regards to its interpretation, I suspect that the Book of Revelation would win hands down. It might even be a unanimous vote. 

The Apocalypse – Greek for “revelation” – of St. John is considered by most Biblical scholars to have been the last book of the New Testament to have been written. It was certainly the last book to be received into the canon by the Church. Its author identifies himself as “John” and traditionally he is believed to have been the St. John who was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles and also to have been the author of the fourth Gospel and the three Johannine epistles. I have no quarrel with the traditional view and find the so-called “higher critical” arguments against the traditional ascription of authorship for these, or any other of the canonical Scriptures for that matter, to be utterly unconvincing. In the ninth verse of the first chapter he mentions that he was in exile for his faith on the isle of Patmos. The persecution that put him there is usually believed to have been that which occurred in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in the last decade of the first century, although some have argued that it was that which occurred in the reign of Nero. If the latter are correct, this would place the composition of the book around the same time as that of the book of Acts.

The book begins with St. John having a vision in which Jesus Christ appears to him in His heavenly glory and gives him seven messages to be sent to the Churches in Asia – Asia Minor, that is, which is now Turkey – to whom St. John also addresses the book as a whole. These occupy the second and third chapters, after which he has a vision in which a door opens in heaven and an angelic voice summons him up to the throne of God. There he has an extended vision of events filled with vivid imagery taken from the various prophetic books of the Old Testament. These begin with Jesus Christ, depicted as both the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” and the “Lamb that was slain”, taking the scroll that is in the hand of God, being the Only One worthy of doing so, and opening the seven seals one at a time. After this seven angels blow their trumpets. The final trumpet introduces the next seven angels who have the seven bowls of the wrath of God, but before they are poured out upon the earth there is an interlude in which a drama plays out involving a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and crowned with twelve stars, the Son to Whom she gives birth, the seven-headed, ten-horned, red dragon who is “the devil and Satan” and who seeks to devour the Child and wages war against St. Michael and the angels in heaven before being cast out, a beast which rises out of the sea having the same number of heads and horns as the devil and who receives great power and authority from the devil, and a second beast who arises out of the earth with horns like a lamb but who speaks like a dragon, and who makes a great idol of the first beast, makes the whole world worship it, and forces them to bear the mark of the beast. The bowls of wrath are then poured out upon the world, the harlot “Babylon” who rides the beast is destroyed, the armies of the world gather to fight at Armageddon, at which Jesus Christ, leading the armies of heaven, returns to the earth, casts the beast and the false prophet (the second beast) into the Lake of Fire and binds the devil for a thousand years. After the thousand years the devil is released, wages one last war against God and His saints, is judged and cast into the Lake of Fire, after which the Final Judgement of the dead takes place before Christ’s Great White Throne and the lost are cast into the Lake of Fire. This all culminates in a vision of the new heavens, the new earth, and the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city which descends to the earth to be the eternal home of the redeemed.

Apart from the thousand years of the twentieth chapter, which is the subject of debate between the amillennialists (that it is figurative of the period between Christ’s two comings), the premillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age to be inaugurated by the Second Coming) and the postmillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age which will culminate in the Second Coming), the final chapters of Revelation largely pertain to the elements of eschatology about the substance of which, albeit not necessarily the details, there has been a general consensus among orthodox and traditional Christians – the Second Coming itself, and the Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell).

 It is the part between the letters to the Churches in the second and third chapters and the Second Coming in the nineteenth that causes most of the trouble. Do the colourful images in these chapters depict people and events from the first century when the book was being written as the Preterists say? (1) Are they a picture of the whole of human history between the First and Second Comings as the Historicists say? Or do they refer to events and persons yet to come in the period immediately prior to the Second Coming as the Futurists say? Is it, perhaps, a combination of all three options? (2)

The reason that I suspect the Book of Revelation would win our hypothetical poll is that throughout the Church’s history there has been no lack of individuals who have both held to the Futurist interpretation of the book and read the people and events of their own time into it, saying that those people and events are the final fulfilment of those prophecies. This has frequently been accompanied by date-setting for the Second Coming – despite the clear warnings against this in the Olivet Discourse – even if it is of the evasive sort that tries to get around said warnings by saying “Jesus said we don’t know the day or the hour, but He said nothing about the week, month, year, decade etc.” This has given the Futurist interpretation a bad name among many theologians, although the majority of Futurists have not been this irresponsible.

Having said all that, I do not wish to make the case for any particular interpretation of Revelation here, but to make the point that the eerie correlation between what is going on at present and the thirteenth chapter of Revelation ought to be sounding warning bells regardless of how we interpret Revelation.

To illustrate my point, allow me to note that there are people out there who deny the existence of evil spirits. Such people may be rationalist, materialist, unbelievers, or they may be the kind of “Christian” who likes to cherry-pick everything that is positive from the Christian worldview and omit the negative. Either way, how would such people regard a Satanic temple or any other religion dedicated to the worship of evil spirits?

The answer is that they are not likely to regard such cults significantly differently from those of us who affirm the existence of evil spirits. To join such a cult is to make the conscious choice to side with evil. This ought to be a problem even for people who deny the existence of spiritual entities personifying that evil. 

Half a year ago, almost the whole of the world was shut down in order to “flatten the curve” of the spread of COVID-19, an experimental new strategy that in many ways resembled past Communist revolutions albeit on a global scale. Everyone was placed under a sort of house arrest, with day passes allowed for business arbitrarily deemed to be “essential.” The basic freedoms that we have long regarded as fundamental to our civil order in the Commonwealth Realms and most other Western countries such as the American republic were clearly classified by the “powers that be” who dictated this whole “lockdown” as “non-essential.” A glance at what was considered to be “essential” and “non-essential” tells us what we need to know about the spirit moving those powers. Businesses that produced and sold the goods necessary for maintaining our physical lives were declared to be essential, but libraries, art museums, symphony orchestras and everything that elevated those lives from that mere physical level were regarded as non-essential. Abortuaries, marijuana shops, and plenty of other businesses that promote vice and self-destructive behaviour were labelled essential, but Churches where the Word of life is proclaimed and the Sacrament of life distributed were at the top of the non-essential list. Family gatherings, real life social interaction, community, and basically everything traditionally regarded as good, were treated as crimes and outlawed. When the restrictions began to be eased, Churches were left closed longer than almost anything else. Clearly, the spirit moving the powers behind the lockdown is that which the Book of Revelation describes as a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns.

We are now several phases into the re-opening in most places. There has now arisen, however, a demand for a new restriction. Our governments are being pressured to make it mandatory for people to wear masks over their lower faces in public places. Many of the businesses that remained open during the lockdown required their employees to wear masks, especially if they were involved in directly serving customers. Now some of these same businesses, even in the absence of public orders, are requiring their customers to wear masks. Last week, for example, Walmart made mask-wearing mandatory at all of their Canadian locations. The World Health Organization, which pooh-poohed the efficacy of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, has thrown its weight behind mask-wearing, and the public health officials such as Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States who seem incapable of thinking independently of the WHO, have likewise done an about-face on the matter. Celebrities have been enlisted as part of a massive media campaign to shame people into wearing masks. If those who would make masks mandatory get their way, nobody will be able to buy or sell unless he wears a mask. The similarity between this and Revelation thirteen, noting especially verses sixteen to seventeen, is remarkable, even if the present situation involves a mask and that in the book involves a mark. Regardless of whether one reads Revelation thirteen as being about the first century Roman Empire (Preterist) or about the empire of the Antichrist who will rule just prior to the Second Coming (Futurist) this is cause for alarm. For even if the beast of Revelation is a figure of the past whose time has long come and gone, he is hardly an example worthy of emulation. In Revelation he and all who take his mark end up in the lake of fire.

One does not have to believe that we are seeing the final fulfilment of Revelation thirteen according to the Futurist interpretation, or even hold to the Futurist interpretation, to have a deep, spiritual, theological, and ethical problem with the totalitarian spirit of the present day and with mandatory masking. Revelation thirteen is grounds for opposing such things regardless of one’s interpretation of Revelation.

(1) Full Preterists would apply this to the entirety of Revelation including the last four chapters. Full Preterism is the claim that all Scriptural prophecy was fulfilled in the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Full Preterism is not an interpretation available to the orthodox for it denies that Christ “will come again to judge the quick and the dead”, which, being affirmed by all of the Creeds, has clearly been regarded by the Church as belonging to the esse of the faith rather than to the adiophora since the earliest centuries. 

(2) Another interpretive option is the Spiritual/Allegorical interpretation in which the events of Revelation are regarded as depicting the spiritual conflict in each believer’s life – think John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Derek Sloan Asked the Right Question!

Derek Sloan, the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hastings - Lennox and Addington in Upper Canada, has gotten the panties of the press prostitutes all twisted into a knot. Arming themselves with the print and cyber, verbal equivalents of torches and pitchforks, they have formed a lynch mob and demanded that Andrew Scheer, the Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, which is Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in the present Parliament, hand him over to them.

His offence was to tweet out a video asking a very valid question about Dr. Theresa Tam, the Dominion's Chief Public Health Officer. The question was one of whom does she serve, Her Majesty's free Dominion of Canada or the Communist regime of Red China. Those who are howling for his head say that this is racist.

Yet, they themselves are the ones focusing on Dr. Tam's race, ethnicity and skin colour.

That Mr. Sloan's question is not a racist one can be easily demonstrated by the fact that the very same question can be legitimately asked of the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, or, as some like to call him, Justin Trudeau. About seven years ago, he was caught on tape blithering on like the idiot he is, about how he much he admired the "basic dictatorship" of Red China, in response to a question about what country he admired the most. His father, who had been head of a delegation of Canadian Communists invited to a summit in the Soviet Union back in the days of Stalin, was noted for expressing similar sentiments. He gushed and fawned over the Chinese dictatorship at a time when Mao Tse-Tung himself was still dictator. Would it be racist to ask of Captain Airhead if he is serving Red China rather than Canada?

"That's different", the lynch mob will scream.

Why is it different?

The only discernible difference is that Captain Airhead is lily white, with a French last name, and is descended from French and English Canadian stock. Dr. Tam is of Asian race and Chinese ethnicity. She was born in Hong Kong, however, when it was still a Dependant Territory of the United Kingdom and she was raised in the UK. This is not a background likely to result in allegiance to the Communist regime in Beijing.

"That's our point exactly", I can hear the blood-thirsty anti-Sloan gang, crying.

Yes, but you are missing mine.

The reason the question with regards to Dr. Tam is valid, is not because of her race and ethnicity, but because of her connection to the World Health Organization. The WHO is led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who previous to his current gig, was a high-ranking official in a murderous, genocidal, ethno-Communist regime in Ethiopia in the crimes against humanity of which he was fully participant, and who owes his new position to the Chinese regime. From the very beginning of this coronavirus outbreak the WHO has been acting as if it were the official propaganda organ of the Communist Party of China. At first, when China was downplaying the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan, and silencing those who tried to speak out, the WHO simply repeated what the Chinese government was telling them. Then, when they sealed off Hubei province from the rest of China and world leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States began to take notice of what was going on, the WHO ridiculed the idea that travel in and out of China might not be safe and should be restricted. Dr. Tam, who has been a member of multiple WHO committees and who was named Canada's Chief Public Health Officer two weeks minus one day before Tedros Adhanom took over the WHO is part of the WHO's oversight committee on health emergencies like this one. She is a member of the committee that recommended against travel restrictions. She told Canadians at the time that we were at low risk from this disease. Finally, when the virus had spread around the globe and the WHO declared a pandemic, it advised its member nations to follow Red China's example in containing the virus, by imposing essentially Communist restrictions on movement, association, and assembly on their entire populations. The countries that ignored the WHO's advice every step of the way are the countries that have handled the pandemic the best.. Multiple governments around the world are now demanding an investigation into the WHOs behaviour. The Communist regime in China is "firmly opposed" to such an independent review. Note that the countries that ignored the WHO from the beginning of the COVID-19 panic were for the most part the countries that were hit the hardest by the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2005. The Kingdom of Sweden which had only five cases and no deaths from the original SARS is an exception. The Dominion of Canada is the exception in the other direction. We had the most cases of SARS and deaths from SARS of any non-Asian country. Yet, unlike Taiwan and Singapore, we have been slavishly obeying every dictate of the WHO. It is entirely reasonable to think that our Chief Public Health Officer's being on the committee that decides WHO recommendations might be the reason for that. This very weekend she has been regurgitating the WHO's warnings against relying on "herd immunity" despite that strategy's having worked for Sweden, and a lot better than the WHO strategy has been working elsewhere.

Derek Sloan's question is both valid and appropriate.

Captain Airhead was quoted by the Globe and Mail as saying that Mr. Sloan's remarks "have no place in our country."

On the contrary, it is Captain Airhead's totalitarian attitude - that those who think differently from him on matters such as these have no place here - that truly does not belong in Canada, or any other free Commonwealth realm. He should take his crummy attitude somewhere where it does belong. Like Communist China for example.

Condemn Captain Airhead – But For the Right Reason

Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as unimaginative types like to call him, has received a lot of much deserved criticism this week. As was the case in the notorious “blackface” scandal of last year’s Dominion election, in which it was revealed that on at least three occasions he had worn skin-darkening makeup which, had any of his subordinates or opponents done, would have resulted in him requiring that they resign and be sent in permanent exile to the land of perpetual shame, a hypocritical double standard was the problem.

Captain Airhead, like his Communist father before him, hates the rights and freedoms of Her Majesty’s free subjects in Canada and the Common Law tradition from which they arise. C. S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy has the Tisroc of Calormen utter these words to his Grand Vizier and to his son Rabadash “It is very grievous…Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.” This is very similar to the sentiment of Captain Airhead, except that he is the Grand Vizier, which is another name for Prime Minister, and it is his own country’s freedom that he hates.

In what used to be called Christendom, but is now called “Western Civilization”, people who hate freedom tend to hate Christianity. Christianity teaches that God, after liberating Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, made a Covenant of Law with them, and promised that one day He would make a New and better Covenant, which promise He fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, events which took place on the anniversary of the original Passover, and which brought spiritual liberty to the entire world. St. Paul, especially in his epistle to the Romans but in many of his other epistles as well, emphasizes that through our union with Christ in His death we die to the sin which enslaved us and that through our union with Him in His Resurrection we are raised to the new life, which is a life of liberty. This is the reason why totalitarians have always hated Christianity above all other religions.

Needless to say, the Christian Passover, known as Easter in countries with Germanic languages, and Pascha everywhere else, which commemorates the liberation of the world from spiritual bondage in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is not the favourite holiday of freedom haters.

With all the necessary apologies to Dr. Seuss, the following is what I suspect went down in the Prime Minister’s residence as Lent drew to a close and Holy Week approached. Captain Airhead, whose heart and whose brain are at least two sizes too small, was stewing away and saying to himself “I’ve got to stop Easter from coming, but how?”

So he consulted with Hajdu, he consulted with Tam, he called on his Cabinet to think up a plan.

Then Captain Airhead, he had an idea – a terrible, monstrous, horrendous idea.

Said Captain Airhead:

“I know what I’ll do, I’ll frighten them all with catching bat flu. The virus from China is now over here, I’ll shut down the country for over a year. I’ll close all the churches, I’ll close all the schools, I’ll close all the libraries, malls, parks and pools. I’ll close all the businesses, except grocery stores, I’ll clear out the sidewalks, and lock all the doors. I’ll scold them and nag them and boss them around, I’ll bully, I’ll badger, I’ll act like a clown. After eighteen months straight of only TV, they all will forget that they ever were free. And then when Easter is just round the bend, I’ll tell everybody ‘Stay home this weekend!’”

He’s a mean one, that Captain Airhead.

Well, we all know what happened. After telling Canadians to sacrifice their Easter plans, he then took off from Ottawa to Harrington Lake, Quebec to be with his family at their cottage for the weekend.

Did Captain Airhead’s heart and his brain grow three sizes that weekend?

Sadly, I’m afraid not. He still insisted that the rest of us give up Easter, put our lives on hold, and surrender our freedoms to the total control of the public health officials.

He has not escaped criticism in the press for his double standard, but that criticism, or at least the portion of it that I have read, has all been rather wrongheaded in my opinion. It has taken the form: Trudeau told all the rest of us to sacrifice our Easter plans, therefore he should have sacrificed his own. It should have taken this form instead: Trudeau was not willing to sacrifice his own family plans for Easter weekend, therefore he should not have told all of the rest of us to do so.

The problem is not that he spent the weekend at the cottage with his family. That at least is a human thing to do. The problem is that he has been bullying and threatening and scolding the rest of us into giving up our lives and our freedoms. That is a despotic thing to do.

Should the fourth estate finally start criticizing Trudeau for piling on rule after rule on top of an already excessive heap of rules, this will be the first sign of our recovery from our true affliction, which is not some batty coronavirus from China but a lack of appreciation of our fundamental rights and liberties.