Dilbert Gets Downsized

 

Scott Adams began writing his comic strip Dilbert in 1989.   The strip quickly became popular but I was not a regular reader until it was in its tenth year.   Then on Thursday, 9 September, 1999 the first panel of the strip had Dilbert in the office of his Pointy-Haired Boss saying “I found some numbers that support your strategic plan”.   In the second panel he adds “I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it.”   In the final panel he says “The timeline is on this Mobius strip” which he hands to the Pointy-Haired Boss who responds by saying “Good work”.   I found this to be so hilarious that from that point on Dilbert,  Dogbert, all the assorted other –berts, Wally, Alice, the Pointy-Haired Boss, and company joined Garfield, Snoopy, and Dagwood on the list of characters to whom I would turn for a laugh every time a newspaper was before me.  

 

It appears that most newspaper readers are no longer going to be able to do this.   Over the last week hundreds of newspapers dropped Dilbert and over the weekend the syndicate that carried it dropped it as well.   Here in Winnipeg the strip had been carried by the Winnipeg Free Press which announced on Monday that it was dropping it thus removing the last remaining reason for anyone to ever again pick up a copy of that paper.  Of course with newspaper readership as low as it is pretty soon many of these newspapers are likely to be out of business while Dilbert will still be available to its fans online.   Indeed, I hope that not merely many but most or all of the newspapers that dropped Dilbert will soon be filing for bankruptcy.   Any newspaper that would drop Dilbert for the reason for which it has been dropped is, in my opinion, a rag its community would be better off without. 

 

The media mob that is gunning for Scott Adams has been crying “racist” over remarks he made on his podcast.   Now before looking at what he said and why it is being labelled “racist” a few words are in order about accusations of racism in general.  

 

When someone is accused of committing a crime we hold a trial in which he is given the opportunity to confront and cross-examine his accusers and to mount a defence.   The burden of proof is placed upon his accusers and the bar is set as high as it can go.   The prosecutor must establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.   If the prosecution fails to do so then the accused is entitled to an acquittal.   This is called the principle of the presumption of innocence – that someone accused is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.   This is an ancient principle going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.   While not universal it is the next thing to it, being affirmed in one form or another by all of the Abrahamic religions and being a keystone to the concept of justice embodied in the Common Law of the British Commonwealth and the United States.   It is an essential protection against those who would seek to turn the law into a weapon to destroy their personal enemies through making false accusations.

 

There has never been an equivalent to the principle of the presumption of innocence for non-criminal accusations. It had not been thought that one was necessary.  It was assumed that the worst things people could be accused of were crimes - murder, rape, robbery, etc. – and that therefore accusations of things that were non-crimes would be lesser accusations that would do less harm to the accused’s reputation than criminal accusations.   It was similarly assumed that the socially and culturally imposed consequences of doing things society frowned upon but which were not prohibited by criminal law would be less severe and damaging than the penalties inflicted by the courts upon law breakers.   These assumptions are far less valid today than they were decades or even just a few years ago.

 

In the last three quarters of a century progressive liberals have coined the terms “racism” and “racist” and convinced the public that “racism” is worse than the worst crime and that “racists” are worse than the worst criminals.   Through doing so, they have persuaded the public to be largely indifferent or approving of the way they treat people they accuse of being “racists”.    The way they treat accused “racists” is to utterly destroy them economically and socially.   Since the same progressive liberals have done everything in their power to strip the criminal justice system of any real teeth when it comes to punishing actual crimes this in effect makes the consequences of an accusation of “racism” far more damaging than the consequences of a criminal accusation.    Furthermore, they have managed to attach a presumption of guilt to accusations of “racism”.   By doing all of this, they have successfully bypassed the safeguards in our traditional justice system protecting people from those who seek to use the law and courts as weapons to destroy their enemies through false accusations by establishing an alternative way of destroying their enemies through accusations.   Indeed, they have been so successful at this that they have created a battery of similar weapon words with which to crush and destroy their enemies.

 

The anemic opposition to progressive liberalism that is mainstream “conservatism” has chosen a strategy of responding to this by trying to turn said accusations against their creators and saying that it is the progressive liberals who are the “real racists”.    The most that mainstream conservatives have been able to accomplish through this has been to score a few points against their opponents in academic debates.    What is desperately needed is for the opponents of progressive liberalism to abandon this form of the fallacy of tu quoque that affirms the very false presupposition that, having been instilled in the public mind, enable progressivism to weaponized words in this manner.   Instead they should be attacking those presuppositions, exposing this system of destroying people through weaponized words as being fundamentally unjust, and stripping words like “racist” of their power to destroy.

 

Let us now take a look at the accusations against Scott Adams.   In his Real Coffee with Scott Adams podcast he was commenting on the results of a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports.    The poll asked Americans whether “it’s okay to be white” and reported its findings by race.   The number of blacks that did not agree that “it’s okay be white” was just under 50%, and while these were divided almost equally among those who outright disagreed and those who were not sure, those who outright disagreed were the larger percentage, 26% as opposed to the 21% who were not certain.   Adams, in response to this said that while he had been identifying as black for years – this seems to be an ongoing joke about the translunacy that has engulfed Western culture since the apogynosis of Bruce Jenner – this poll had led him to reconsider this decision because it amounted to joining a hate group and advised whites that the best advice he could give them was to “get the hell away from black people”.

 

Those who have been denouncing Adams in print over the last week all seem to share the same defect in their ability to reason.  Everything Adams said was reasonable if the Rasmussen Reports poll and its results are taken at face value.   If you don’t agree with “it’s okay to be white” than you either think “it is not okay to be white” or “it might not be okay to be white”, the first of which translates into “whites should not exist” and the second into an openness to the idea that whites should not exist.   It is entirely fair to interpret someone’s saying that someone else should not exist as an expression of hate and it is also fair to interpret the expression of uncertainty as to whether someone should exist or not as expressing a weaker form of the same hate.   When a poll, therefore, tells us that such hate exists among 47% of a population it indicates that said population has a serious problem with hate.  Adam’s advice to the objects of this hate is actually quite moderate.   He advised them to get away from those who hate them, not to hate them back or launch some sort of preemptive hate strike against them. 

 

Adams’ denouncers, unsurprisingly, have taken the position that what one thinks of the expression "it's okay to be white” should be based upon who purportedly coined the phrase rather than what the phrase means.   According to self-appointed and self-important anti-“hate” watchdog groups, the slogan “It’s okay to be white” was coined by “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” on 4chan.   Therefore, according to these supposed experts, the right thing to do is to denounce the slogan because of the people who came up with it.   This way of thinking, applied by Adams’ denouncers to the Rasmussen poll, means that the 47% of blacks polled who did not agree with the statement were in the right because they were disagreeing with “white supremacists”.   This is ridiculous, however, for many reasons.   Whether or not we agree or disagree with a statement ought to be based on the truth or not of what the statement says not on who said it.   Statements that in terms of their content are true and good do not become otherwise through contamination by those who say them.   If it were otherwise, and “it’s okay to be white” were somehow contaminated by the white supremacy that those who coined it are accused of holding, then “black lives matter” is similarly contaminated by the looting and rioting and vandalism of the movement that coined it as its slogan and “every child matters” is contaminated with the Christophobia that spawned the arson and vandalism of almost seventy churches in the biggest hate crime spree in Canadian history.   Indeed, if the 47% of black respondents to the Rasmussen poll who did not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white” are to be applauded because of the alleged origin of the statement then what does that say about the 53% of black respondents who agreed with it?

 

The Rasmussen poll did not ask people what they thought of the people who originally coined the phrase “it’s okay to be white”.   It did not even mention them.   Rather, it asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement.   Scott Adams took the poll at face value and rightly drew from it the conclusion that an alarmingly large number of black people openly express some degree of hate towards white people and that this is cause for concern on the part of those targeted by that hate.   His response to the poll was reasonable.   His accusers’ response to his podcast was not.   Unfortunately his accusers were many and powerful and so Dilbert will no longer be available in the comics section of most newspapers.   Once again the humourless, self-righteous, watchdogs of anti-racism will have robbed countless people of something that brought a smile to their face and mirth to their hearts.

 

As Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light would say:  Darn them all to Heck!

Real Journalism?

 

Let us imagine that at some point in his youth Bartley Kives received a visit from the News Fairy who told him that someday, if he was very, very good, she would grant his wish and he would become a real journalist.   Kives, however, after high school went on to receive a degree in sociology from the University of Winnipeg.   It is very difficult to take a degree in sociology from anywhere without squashing your conscience like a chirping little annoying bug.   When the school is the University of Winnipeg it is virtually impossible.    While signing away your soul in a blood contract with Mephistopheles and Karl Marx may not actually be a formal requirement for the degree, it would seem to be de rigueur. 

 

For almost two decades Kives reported and wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, covering pretty much everything from music to city politics to restaurants.   While occasionally the Winnipeg Free Press has employed a real journalist – Ted Byfield, believe it or not, worked for the paper back in the fifties and, of course, the late, great Tom Oleson graced its pages until shortly before his death almost ten years ago – for the most part Manitoba’s “paper of repute” has preferred hack writers that mindlessly toe its party line.    On issues that pertain to the Dominion of Canada as a whole, that party line is and always has been, Liberal, both big and small l.   In John Wesley Dafoe’s day the paper existed to promote the Grits’ agenda of Americanizing Canada and turning her into a vassal satellite of the United States.   When the federal Liberal Party was taken over by Communist operatives in the 1960s – Lester Pearson, who had been a Cambridge Five style Soviet spy when attached to our embassy in Washington D. C. in World War II, and Pierre Trudeau who had led the Canadian delegation to a Communist economic conference in Moscow in 1952 and who never met a Community tyrant he didn’t love and adore and fawn over – the paper dutifully followed its party into the fever swamps of the far left.   Radically opposite as those two positions seem, they were united in their contempt for the traditional constitution of Canada and for the Common Law freedoms of Canadians.  John Farthing showed in Freedom Wears a Crown, (1956) how the policies of the earlier, Mackenzie King Liberals, had undermined freedom and paved the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   A decade earlier Eugene Forsey, after his doctoral dissertation was published, had debated the very same issues with Dafoe, making mincemeat out of the partisan publisher. On the provincial level, where the Grits have been mostly a non-entity for the larger part of a century, the paper has tended to support the NDP. 

 

In more recent years Kives has been reporting locally for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.   Abandoning the overt and heavy progressive bias of the Winnipeg Free Press is hardly a requirement for employment at the CBC.    Although the publicly funded Crown broadcaster is supposed to fairly represent the views of all Canadians it has long behaved like “anybody but the Conservatives” was its official policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at the moment in either Parliament or any of the provincial legislatures. 

 

The Progressive Conservatives have been in government in Manitoba since 2016 and the CBC, like the Winnipeg Free Press, has been striving to unseat them ever since.    Coincidentally or not 2016 was also the year that Kives was brought onboard CBC Manitoba.   In 2019, the efforts of the media failed and the Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, were returned to power in an early provincial election.   The following year the bat flu pandemic struck, and the media in general, and Kives in particular found in it a stick with which to bludgeon the provincial government.

 

Now if, as has been thought to be case for centuries, it is the role and duty of the fourth estate to hold government accountable, to ask it the tough questions, to shine a light in every dark corner of the halls of authority, to expose all the secrets, to speak truth to power, does this not mean that the News Fairy has returned at long last and turned Kives into a real journalist after all?

 

Alas the answer is no.

 

It would be one thing if he really were asking Pallister and his chief health mandarin Brent Roussin the hard questions.   Questions like:

 

Do you recognize any constitutional limits to your powers that remain in effect even in an emergency?

 

In your opinion are the fundamental rights and freedoms of Manitobans their own property or something that is permitted to them by your government as you see fit?

 

How much mental, social, and economic damage would the lockdowns have to do before the cost of the lockdowns exceeds the cost of doing nothing at all?

 

How far would government restrictions have to go before you would admit they have gone too far and crossed a line that should never be crossed?

 

Kives does not seem to be interested in the answers to questions like these however.   He does not even seem to be interested in questions like those that Pallister groupie, Josh Aldrich of the Winnipeg Sun, is occasionally willing to interrupt his sycophantic boot-licking to ask about why the government has been consistently picking on small businesses and restaurants, which are not significant sources of transmission, with its public health orders.

 

No, the only questions Kives seems to be interested in are “why didn’t you lock us down again faster?” and “why didn’t you lock us down again harder?”

 

The theory that Kives appears to be operating on, based upon much of his recent commentary but especially “Lockdown 3, the one everyone could foresee” from the 8^th of May, and last Sunday’s “In Manitoba’s darkest days, the premier casts shade”, is that the province’s slapping down a hard lockdown as fast as possible last spring was a success, that their gradually increasing the restrictions in stages in the fall as the case numbers rose only to see them continue to rise was a failure, and that therefore they should have locked down the entire province hard as soon as they saw case numbers start to rise again this spring.  

 

One problem with this theory is that while Manitoba’s initial hard lockdown did indeed, seem to work, last spring, other provinces and other jurisdictions in other countries that tried the same thing at the same time, met with failure instead, and had the sort of results that we saw in the fall.   What is the explanation for this difference?

 

The most obvious explanation is that the virus had only just arrived in the province and had been caught before it had begun to spread in the brief period in which it was capable of being contained in this manner.      If this is indeed the true explanation, then last spring’s success would not have been duplicable in the fall.   All an earlier and harder lockdown would have accomplished would have been to make the lockdown that much worse in its harmful and destructive effects.  

 

Anybody familiar with the history of infectious disease and the way quarantines work should be able to grasp this.   Quarantines control the spread of infectious disease by either a) keeping it out in the first place or b) containing it so that it doesn’t spread.    The former is what the traditional method of placing ships and their passengers and cargo under quarantine before letting them into a country was designed to accomplish.   The latter is what the kind of quarantine where a doctor locked you into your house for a couple of weeks and had your neighbours drop food off on your doorstep when you had the smallpox or measles or some such thing was designed to accomplish.    The strongest quarantine of the latter type was the kind the French called the cordon sanitaire, where an entire city or region was sealed off, in the hopes of preventing the disease from spreading outside the area.   This practice was depicted in a fictional example by Albert Camus in The Plague (1947).   In more recent real life it was used in several places to contain the original SARS virus and Ebola.   What governments around the world have attempted to do with the lockdown model since last spring is something radically different from these traditional quarantine methods.   Indeed, it could be called the inversion of a quarantine.    It is not designed to keep a disease out of a country or contain it locally because it is imposed on societies where the disease is already present and spreading.   It is not imposed merely upon the sick and those known to have been in contact with the sick while contagious but upon all healthy members of a society, thus causing a ton of collateral damage.   It is not remotely as effective as traditional quarantines – last year’s experiment demonstrated that countries and regions that rejected the lockdown model did not end up being the countries and regions most devastated by the disease or even being significantly worse off than countries and regions that locked down.  In some cases they fared slightly better with regards to the disease itself and in all cases avoided the tremendous harmful effects of the lockdown.

 

Kives’ commentary is padded with tear-jerking rhetoric about the “deaths of hundreds of grandfathers and grandmothers”.   How many of those grandfathers and grandmothers died, not because of the disease this overhyped virus causes, but because of the extreme loneliness and despair created by being forced into social isolation in the name of saving their lives?   This is the sort of question a real journalist would be asking.   A real journalist would also be interested in all the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters lost to opioid and other narcotic overdoses and suicides brought about by social isolation and/or the loss of the business in which all of their life’s work and savings had been invested caused by lockdown experiment.   Anyone interested in such people would not be so quick to shoot his mouth off about how the government has not been doing enough by not locking down fast enough and hard enough.

 

Where Kives does get it right is in raising questions about Brian Pallister’s stock excuse for how bad the province has done in the fall and again this spring.   In his remarks on Sunday, for example, Kives said:

 

The premier and public health officials routinely state that Manitobans are simply not following the rules at a time when community spread makes it difficult for people to avoid the virus in the workplace and elsewhere.

 

He then quoted an ICU physician from Winnipeg to the effect that most of her patients had been trying to follow the rules.

 

It is, of course, disgusting for Pallister, Roussin, and their underlings to continuously scapegoat ordinary Manitobans in this way.     To scapegoat is to blame someone else for your own failure.   The provincial government has failed Manitobans and not the other way around.   The government’s failure, however, is not a matter of them not suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms severely and quickly enough.   It is rather their refusal or inability to consider the myriad of options other than preventing us from socializing with one another until everyone is vaccinated.   

 

On Tuesday, the 25^th of May, a number of Manitoban physicians held a press conference in which they talked about “tens of thousands” of Manitobans who are suffering and dying, waiting for surgeries and cancer tests, because the hospitals are too busy dealing with bat flu patients.   They begged the province to issue a stay-at-home order and to order all “non-essential” businesses to shut down.   Sure enough, come the evening news, there is Bartley Kives on CBC, gushing all over these doctors and uncritically sympathizing with their plea, even though he was supposed to be reporting rather than editorializing.

 

“For nearly two months”, Kives said, “doctors have been pleading with the province to enact tougher restrictions to prevent the crush of COVID patients from getting out of hand.   Those pleas largely went unanswered.”

 

Who is he trying to kid?   For the nearly two months in question, I have watched as what little of Manitobans’ constitutional rights and freedoms as were left to us after the previous six months of Code Red have been whittled away as the government has given in to demand after demand from these doctors who are largely sheltered from the harmful effects of the fascism for which they are asking.

 

Doctors, as a rule, live in houses rather than apartments or single-rooms, and so, a stay-at-home order, restricting them to their homes outside of work hours and grocery shopping, would simply not be as confining to them as it would to the thousands of other Manitobans far more adversely affected by such an order.   Doctors are pretty much the hottest commodity in the marriage market and so, even though their notoriously insufferable egos keep the divorce rate high, a stay-at-home order would simply not leave them as completely isolated from human social contact as it would the thousands of people in the province who live alone.    Lockdowns do not threaten the livelihoods and savings of doctors – they will continue to rake in their highly overinflated salaries for the duration, with all the overtime they could dream of to boot.

 

Perhaps if a law were enacted requiring any doctor, journalist, or politician that calls for a lockdown to experience that lockdown in its harshest rather than its mildest form – confine them to a single room, not just their home in general, deny them contact with their immediate family, strip them of their salaries, for the duration of the orders they request – they would think twice before asking the government to place burdens on their neighbours that they are not willing to lift themselves.

 

Earlier, in his 8^th of May commentary, Kives had quoted Brent Roussin as saying, when he announced the third lockdown:

 

“We need to have these restrictions be the least restrictive that we need for that time.”

 

The necessity to which Roussin was likely alluding is that created by the requirements of our constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1986 Oakes ruling.   It is indeed, required, the Supreme Court ruled, that when the government has a legitimate reason for limiting our basic rights and freedoms, that the limits it so imposes be as few as possible.   A real journalist who believed it to be the fourth estate’s duty to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people by sounding the alarm and calling the government out whenever it overstepped the constitutional boundaries on its powers, would have grilled Roussin on his claim that the restrictions he has imposed have indeed been minimal.

 

Kives, however, took the opposite approach of insisting that the government could have and should have done more.

 

Is it just me or did I see his nose grow a little in his last news segment?

 

He’s got a long way to go, I am afraid, before the News Fairy makes him a real journalist.  

Roussin’s Victims

 

The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home.   We have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the Wuhan bat flu.   One type of protest, such as that which took place in Steinbach on the 14^th of November, expresses opposition to the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights.   The other type of protest expressed the views of the socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan Thorpe.   Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths we have seen since September.

 

 

My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already knows.   I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters' basic position.   I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed at those protests.

 

 

While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.

 

 

When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread.   Indeed, it has a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread of the virus.   This is because the government has the power to do tremendous evil as well as good.

 

 

Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is in itself a good and worthy goal.   Stopping and slowing the spread of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable.  Slowing the spread of the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise be the case.   That can hardly be regarded as desirable in itself.   Quite the contrary in fact.   Whether this is an acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved, depends upon a couple of considerations.

 

 

First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing the spread of the virus in saving lives.   If the method is not effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic is much less tolerable.

 

 

Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.   If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out the pandemic.

 

 

Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a good end, such as saving lives.

 

 

With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear that any lives have been saved in this way at all.  Indeed, at the beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase “flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that it would not decrease the total lives lost  but merely spread them out so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once.   This, in my opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.

 

 

This brings us to our second criteria.   The means by which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good.   On the contrary, they are positively evil.  They inflict all sorts of unnecessary misery upon people.  Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save lives.   This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were valid.   The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.  

 

 

Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat to be “non-essential”.  It forces people to act against their nature as social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical wellbeing.   Mens sana in corpore sano.   The longer people are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation will erode away at their mental health.   Phone, e-mail, and even video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.

 

All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being imposed.   The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation.  The government has kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among other things, hope, to close.    This is evil of truly monstrous proportions.    It can only lead to death – whether by suicide, addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.   

 

 

The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are wrong-headed about everything.   The government does not become morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving lives.   Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes one health complication too many.

 

 

Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.

 

 

Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just numbers but people.   This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by manipulating their emotions.

 

 

Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?

 

 

What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you cancelled his job as "non-essential", took away  his social life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation?   Do you not realize that he is a person as well?

 

 

In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu.   In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood.

 

History Repeating Itself

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said the early twentieth century Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. There is a popular aphorism that says “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” While the meaning of the high-brow remark is not exactly the same as that of the low-brow saying the two are complementary and both happen to apply to what I am about to discuss.

The Winnipeg Free Press, which some people still think is a real newspaper for some reason, made the same story its front page headline every day from Monday to Friday last week. While the story was presented under the guise of investigative journalism it seems to me that agitprop would be a better term for it. It is all about how a local member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves has been purportedly recruiting for some neo-Nazi organization called “the Base.” I won’t bore you with the details as I doubt whether a word of them ought to be believed by anyone who isn’t a gullible fool.

Why the extreme skepticism, you may ask?

Speaking for myself, the fact that it was the Winnipeg Free Press that was doing the “reporting” is more than sufficient grounds for skepticism. In my opinion that rag is little more than a Liberal Party disinformation sheet and has been ever since the days – 1901 to 1944 – when it was edited by John Wesley Dafoe. This particular story, however, would have been ringing alarm bells even if a newspaper with an as-of-yet unimpeached record for journalistic integrity could be found somewhere on the planet and had been the one to break the story. Allow me to explain why.

How many of you remember the Heritage Front?

I suspect that name will be familiar to most Canadians who were old enough and attentive enough to have been following the news in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is a good chance they will also remember the organization’s front man, Wolfgang Droege, a man who was depicted as being pretty much the in-flesh personification of all the images and associations that the words “neo-Nazi” are intended to conjure up. Droege and the Heritage Front received an awful lot of airtime on the news, back then, because the media was trying to scare us into thinking that there was an imminent danger of a Fourth Reich being erected on Canadian soil.

How many of you who remember the Heritage Front also remember the name Grant Bristow?

Here I suspect the number will be far fewer, although he too was in the media spotlight for a brief period of time. Bristow was the man behind Droege – the co-founder, organizer, and security chief of the organization. He was also an undercover agent of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Services or CSIS which, ever since it took over the role from the RCMP in 1984, has aspired to perform for Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa the same services which both MI6 and MI5 perform for Her Majesty’s government in London. Bristow’s activities in the Heritage Front and his involvement with CSIS were both exposed by the Toronto Sun in 1994.

So why was a government spook one of the top officers of what was believed to be a neo-Nazi organization?

The facts can be interpreted one of two ways. The first explanation is that CSIS had infiltrated a burgeoning neo-Nazi movement in order to gather informative and/or neutralize any potential threat that it posed. The second explanation is that Bristow’s mission was to create a realistic looking neo-Nazi menace to frighten the public.

Before you discard the second explanation as a paranoid conspiracy theory, consider the previous neo-Nazi scare that had taken place in the 1960s.

In 1965 a man named John Beattie founded something called the Canadian Nazi Party, and the alarmist wing of the liberal media had a field day. For the next couple of years they kept the spotlight on this tiny group, reporting its every action, and blowing everything way out of proportion like a bunch of Chicken Littles trumpeting the imminent fall of the sky. The progressives demanded that the government step in and do something before this group, whose miniscule rallies they had magnified to the scale of those Hitler held at Nuremberg, took over Canada and imposed its agenda of racial purification on the country. This blitzkrieg of media disinformation culminated in the October 1966 issue of MacLean’s magazine. The cover story was an insider’s report on Beattie’s party by a man named John Garrity. The following is from his first paragraph:

I was more successful than I expected. I became a trusted officer of the party—its local Heinrich Himmler—though I've managed to avoid being linked with the nationwide publicity that has made the name of John Beattie, the unemployed clerk who is the party's leader, familiar to most Canadians.

Garrity’s story was eerily similar to Bristow’s. Each man befriended a would-be Führer, infiltrated his inner circle, and became the behind-the-scenes Himmler to his Hitler. In both cases the liberal media took a tiny molehill and blew it up into a huge mountain, but apart from the efforts of the moles, Garrity and Bristow, it is unlikely that there would have been even a molehill – just a couple of random, lone-wolf, racist fanatics.

There was one notable difference in the two cases. Whereas Bristow was working for the government, Garrity was employed by a private organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress. Not that there were not also government infiltrators. This was two decades before CSIS was formed but the RCMP, arguably a much more competent agency, was handling this sort of thing back then, and it is unthinkable that they would not have also had a mole or two. Given the infinitesimal size of the group, it seems to have resembled nothing so much as the World Council of Anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s novel in which a Scotland Yard detective infiltrates the anarchist movement and is elected to said Council only to discover that every other member is also an undercover policeman.

At any rate, while the Canadian Jewish Congress was a private organization, it was working very closely with the Liberal Party, which was the governing party in the Dominion at the time, as, unfortunately, it is now. In the same year that Beattie founded the Canadian Nazi Party – indeed, the same month – Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed a Special Committee to study “hate propaganda” and report back to the Minister of Justice with recommendations as to potential legislation. The Canadian Jewish Congress had been petitioning Parliament to pass such legislation for years prior to this. Maxwell Cohen of McGill University was named chairman and among its seven members were a vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the then executive editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, and a far left journalist and law professor from Quebec whom Pearson was about to bring onto the front stage of Canadian federal politics. This was not an objective committee that would look into the question of whether or not there should be legislation against hate propaganda, it was a very left-leaning committee that would start from the conclusion that there ought to be legislation against hate propaganda and devise reasonable sounding arguments that the Minister of Justice could use to sell the idea to Parliament.

Do I really need to point out how having an organization called the Canadian Nazi Party all over the news would facilitate that process?

The reasons why the Canadian Jewish Congress wanted hate speech laws passed don’t really need to be explained as they are fairly obvious. The reasons why the Liberal Party leadership was set on passing such laws do require an explanation. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were, after all, supposed to be among the basic pillars of classical liberal political philosophy. Most people would probably acknowledge that there are reasonable limitations on even these basic freedoms but hate speech laws are not among them. Laws against the incitement of violence and other criminal behaviour were already on the books and were sufficient to cover the incitement of racially motivated violence and crime. Hate speech laws were not necessary, therefore, to deal with such incitement, and would only serve the purpose of suppressing the expressions of thoughts which certain people did not want expressed.

The Liberal Party, historically, was the party that wanted to move Canada away from her British roots and connections into a closer relationship with the United States – or, as the old Tories such as George Grant and Donald Creighton liked to put it, to sell us out to the Americans. This was bad enough, but at the time of which we are speaking, the leadership of the party had fallen into the hands of ideologues of the totalitarian far Left. Lester Pearson, according to the highly credible testimony that Elizabeth Bentley gave to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1951, had been an aware and willing participant in the Soviet spy ring she operated while he served in the Canadian embassy in Washington D. C. during the war. If he kept his far left ties hidden, the so-called “three wise men” that he brought into the Liberal Party for the 1965 election, the aforementioned Pierre Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand wore theirs on their sleeves. Under Pearson’s patronage they rapidly rose in the ranks of the Liberal Party and Trudeau was, from his entrance into federal politics, groomed by Pearson to be his hand-picked successor as Party leader and Prime Minister.

The free expression of ideas, which had been so important to classical liberals like J. S. Mill, was of no value or consequence to this kind of leftist, except insomuch as it pertained to the expression of their own ideas. Communists, whenever and wherever they seized control of a state, used its power to brutally suppress all dissent to their new order. In the 1960s, the hard Left was itself undergoing an internal transformation as it shifted its focus from economic class to race, sex, etc. and so “hate speech” laws were particularly appealing to them. So was the idea of dangling a perpetual Nazi threat before the public. What better way to distract people from the perpetual menace of the many-headed hydra that had sprung from the seed planted by Cromwell’s Puritans, grown into Jacobinism, evolved into Bolshevism, and which was rapidly spreading throughout the globe, than by keeping them fixated on the threat of a rival totalitarianism which resembled Communism in almost every way, but which had died, at least insofar as being a real threat to civilization goes, with its Führer in 1945.

The same issue of MacLean’s that featured Garrity’s story also contained an article by Blair Fraser entitled “Hate”, which told about the Cohen Committee, its report which had been submitted to the Minister of Justice in November of 1965 and brought before Parliament early the following year, and Pearson’s promise at a press conference that hate speech legislation was on its way. The article was filled with specious arguments designed to allay the Canadian public’s fears that such legislation would be a threat to freedom of speech. Fraser was wrong in his prediction that such laws would be passed by the following year but he was only off by three years. Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and Prime Minister in 1969 and the following year acted on his own recommendations as a member of the Cohen Committee and introduced the legislation that added Sections 318 to 320 to the Criminal Code.

Let us recap: the leadership of the Liberal Party was determined to pass “hate speech” laws, it appointed a Special Committee to come up with a report to persuade Parliament to approve such laws, while selling the Canadian public on these laws was left to the media, which for the most part serves as a propaganda arm of the Liberal Party. Conveniently, the jobs of both the Special Committee and the media were made easier by the appearance on the scene of the Canadian Nazi Party, whose leader was propped up behind the scenes by a private investigator working for the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had long wanted hate speech legislation and was working closely with the Liberal Party towards achieving that end. It is difficult, for anyone capable of adding two and two together and coming up with four, to avoid the conclusion that the Nazi scare of the 1960s was a fake scare, created to make hate propaganda legislation an easy sell.

The uncanny resemblance of Bristow’s story to Garrity’s strongly suggests that the second Nazi scare was a fake scare too. The motive is not as obvious as with the first scare but consider the following facts. During Pierre Trudeau’s long premiership, the Liberal Party had shifted government policy drastically to the left on immigration, abortion, homosexuality, preferential treatment for victims of “discrimination” in employment, and a myriad of other social, cultural, and moral issues. The Grits had never had to take these policies to the polls because the New Democrats were even further to the left and the Progressive Conservatives, under Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark, and Brian Mulroney were completely dominated by the wets and easily intimidated by accusations of racial, religious, sexual, and cultural bigotry. Then, in 1987, the protest movement that had been growing in the West in response to the Liberals’ heavy-handed imposition of their leftist agenda, the non-opposition to that agenda provided by the Progressive Conservatives, and Ottawa’s arrogance in general, formed the populist Reform Party of Canada. For a time, at least, the Reform Party was willing to take relatively right-of-centre positions on some of these issues, and that frightened both the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals were terrified of having to take their radical agenda to the polls and find out what Canadians actually thought of it. The Progressive Conservatives were – with good cause, as events proved – afraid that their voting base would defect to the Reform Party. (1) The Heritage Front was formed in 1989 and the liberal media immediately tried to tie it to the Reform Party. The plot of Liberal Party strategist and anti-racist activist Warren Kinsella’s 1997 Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network revolves around such supposed connections.

The question, then, of who exactly CSIS was serving, when its agent Grant Bristow helped found the Heritage Front, is rather moot. The Progressive Conservatives, who were in power in Parliament at the time, had a motive for creating a new fake Nazi threat. The Liberal Party which had created CSIS – the Act forming the new intelligence agency passed Parliament one week before Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister – and to which civil servants have an obnoxious tendency to be loyal regardless of who the governing party in Parliament happens to be, also had a motive. Both parties had the same motive – to smear the right-populist Reform Party by association. If I had to bet on who was ultimately responsible, however, my money would be on the Liberals.

Under its present leadership the Liberal Party is the furthest to the left it has ever been. It is in power in Parliament at the moment, but the next Dominion election is in October and the wave of popularity that swept this government into office four years ago has been ebbing fast, due to its own overweening arrogance, gross incompetence, and a huge scandal in which it’s unethical and perhaps criminal behaviour has been exposed. It has resorted to accusing the leadership of the Conservative Party of links to “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” It has also expressed its desire to bring back something similar to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which was repealed by Parliament six years ago. Section 13 defined it as an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone or internet anything “likely” to expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of membership in a group protected against discrimination. Worded that broadly, it covered virtually any negative criticism of such groups, and unlike the hate speech provision of the Criminal Code, did not come with a presumption of innocence for the accused or the right to any sort of real defense. It was a terrible law, far more in keeping with the totalitarian mindset of actual National Socialism than with the principles of justice and freedom enshrined in our traditional Common Law. Earlier this year, the government instructed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to conduct a study of the dissemination of hate on the internet – in other words, to come up with arguments for bringing back Section 13, or even something worse, if that is conceivable.

Now, a newspaper that served the Liberal Party faithfully for over a century, just happens to have discovered a neo-Nazi organization that nobody has heard of before but which is supposed to have embedded itself in the Canadian Armed Forces. Yeah right. Sometime, probably years down the road, it will be revealed that this “Base” is as much a phony set-up as the Canadian Nazi Party and the Heritage Front were – mark my words.

If we fail to remember the past and allow ourselves to be fooled by this nonsense for yet a third time, then shame, shame, triple shame on us.

(1) I was one of the defectors. I eventually grew disgusted with the Reform Party and allowed my membership to lapse – on the verge of its final merger with what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party. This disgust had nothing to do with the Reform Party’s right-of-centre positions, real or imagined, which if anything I would have preferred more of, but with its hostility to our Loyalist heritage which it illogically blamed for the country’s slide into far-leftism, its indifference to the monarchy, and its barely concealed, anti-patriotic, preference for the constitution, institutions, and traditions of the United States over our own.

Yes, It Is the Twenty-First Century. So What?

The local left-liberal newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, recently ran an article on the angst, humanists, atheists, and agnostics were feeling over the Christian faith of Devon Clunis, the chief of the Winnipeg Police Force. Several people wrote to the editor to comment on this. One of the letters printed on November 12th, attributed to the pseudonym “OBSERVER6” asked “Why, in the 21st century, are these practices still around?” The practices in question were those of offering Bibles to police recruits and using material prepared by John C. Maxwell in leadership seminars.

OBSERVER6’s remark is a variation of words that are frequently used by progressive, forward-thinking people as a one-size fits all answer to everything they find objectionable. Those words are “this is the twenty-first century”. The number of situations in which progressives seem to think this is an unanswerable argument is astonishing.

Do you still believe the teachings of the Christian faith? If so, do you allow your Christian faith to affect how you live your life in every aspect, publicly as well as privately, including professionally and politically? “Get with the program”, the progressive says, “This is the twenty-first century” as if the truth of Christianity and the validity of Christ’s claims as Lord over the entirety of the lives of His believers are determined by the date on the calendar.

Do you think that men are men and women are women, that it is more meaningful and more important to be a man or a woman than it is to be an “individual”, that men and women are different and complementary rather than equal and interchangeable, and that men are made by God and nature for women and women for men? If so, you are really out of step with the times and the progressive will say to you “This is the twenty-first century.”

I could go on giving other examples but I think you get the idea.

As an argument “This is the twenty-first century” makes little sense. Whether a person ought to believe the teachings of Christianity or not does not depend upon what year, decade, century or even millennium it is. It depends upon whether or not those teachings are true. Did Jesus of Nazareth, after being crucified by the Romans to appease the Jewish mob, rise from the dead? If so, this validates His claim to be the Christ, the Son of God come down from Heaven to save mankind, which in turn validates everything else He ever said. As it so happens, the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth did indeed rise from the dead is very strong – strong enough that more than one, convinced skeptic who set out to disprove it ended up converting. The empty tomb that prevented the account of the Resurrection from being snuffed out by the Romans and Jewish leaders in the first century, the transformation of the Apostles from the men who fled at Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion into men who went to their deaths as martyrs for their conviction that He had risen from the tomb, the five hundred plus eyewitnesses that St. Paul could refer to as being still alive when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthian church, and indeed the conversion of St. Paul himself, from a man hostile to the faith to its foremost proponent due to an encounter with the Risen Christ, provide a very strong case indeed for the truth and historicity of the Resurrection of Christ. The truth and historicity of the Resurrection and of Christianity itself do not diminish the longer in time we are removed from the event. Indeed, the truth that the Son of God came down from heaven, lived among us, was crucified and rose again, cannot help but be the most important truth in human history and will remain that way throughout human history. Indeed, the fact that we are in the twenty-first century since these events took place – note that we date the centuries from these events – makes it more important than ever that we believe these truths and live our lives accordingly because one of the things Jesus said, that is verified by His being the Son of God, which in turn is verified by His having risen from the dead, is that He will come back to judge the living and the dead, and event which inevitably grows nearer the further removed from His Ascension that we get.

When progressives say “this is the twenty-first century” to dismiss Christianity, traditional ethics, private property, the differences between the sexes, monarchy, the survival of Caucasian ethnicity, and everything else from the past that they despise, they are clearly not making a valid argument as far as sound reasoning goes. They are expressing an attitude, an attitude held by all progressives, and by far too many who would not consider themselves to be progressive. Thanks to C. S. Lewis we have a term for that attitude – “chronological snobbery”.

In Surprised by Joy Lewis tells how he himself had held this attitude in his earlier days, how he had dismissed old ideas and customs as belonging to older and therefore outdated periods. He was cured of the attitude by his friend Owen Barfield who demolished all the assumptions it rests upon. Lewis described chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”.

Now it is true, to an extent, that we have more knowledge in the sense of accumulated information available to us in the present than was available in the past. I say “to an extent” because information is lost as well as accumulated with the passing of time. This fact, however, calls for a very different attitude than that of chronological snobbery. . The knowledge that we have available today that was not available in the past is knowledge of the past – the knowledge of what has been thought and said, done and accomplished, discovered and accumulated, by all the generations that have preceded us. This ought to command an attitude of respect towards the past – not an attitude of “who cares what they thought in the past, we know so much more today.”

Of course people thought things in the past that are not true. People continue to think things today that are not true. I do not mean the things that have held over from previous ages that are dismissed with “this is the twenty-first century” but ideas that are modern, progressive, and in keeping with the prevalent spirit of the present age. An ideas being new and modern, is no guarantee of its being true, and an ideas being old and unfashionable is no guarantee of its being false.

Indeed, if it were to come down to a question of the presumption of truth, with regards to ideas that cannot be demonstrated to be false, then the presumption of truth ought to go to ideas that are older in the sense of having been held for long periods of time in the past (as opposed to older in the sense of having been thought up millennia ago and discarded in the first generation) rather than to ideas that are new and innovative. Their having endured the passing of ages past, is an argument in their favour, rather than against them.

So the next time some progressive tries to dismiss a timeless truth as being outdated by the fact that it is "the twenty-first century" congratulate him on being able to read the date on the calendar and ask "So what?"

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?