Barbaric Cultural Practices

Earlier this year, and especially during the long federal election campaign, the Liberal and New Democrat parties, the liberal media, progressive bloggers, and other assorted lefties, were able to get a lot of mileage out of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices”. The previous government, led by Stephen Harper, had banned the wearing of the niqab during citizenship oath ceremonies in 2011, a ban which was struck down by a Federal Court.* Harper’s government vowed to take the matter to the Supreme Court and then, in the last month of the election campaign, promised to establish an RCMP tipline for reporting cases of “barbaric cultural practices”.

The progressives condemned this as racist and xenophobic. Harper, they maintained, was appealing to fear, negativity, and hatred, and this was “unCanadian” because Canada is the land of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. Actually, Canada was nothing of the sort prior to the premiership of Trudeau the Elder, which began in 1968. It was the Trudeau Liberals who created the new Canada of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism – that is to say tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that were imposed on the country from the top down, administered by arrogant bureaucrats, and protected by the suppression of dissent. The older, traditional, British Canada was a much superior country.

The merits of the older British Canada, and the rather odious nature of the kind of “tolerance” and “diversity” introduced by the Trudeau Liberals which make a mockery of the ordinary meaning of these terms are, of course, beyond the understanding of today’s progressives. Nor do they seem to be capable of grasping that it is one of their own chief ideals that Stephen Harper was fighting for in his campaign against “barbaric cultural practices”.

This is not intended to be laudatory of Stephen Harper. The ideal in question is that of the equality of the sexes, or, as the progressives now insist upon mislabelling it, “gender equality”, an ideal I do not share with Harper or the progressives and, indeed, regard as worthy only of ridicule. Auberon Waugh put it best, I think, years ago when he wrote:

I have never understood how equality can be said to apply, except in the most superficial sense. to any human relationship. By this I do not mean that we are all graded in some divinely-imposed pecking order, but that our essential differences make talk of equality meaningless. Study of the sexes is bound to identify the differing characteristics of each, and I cannot see how anything useful is achieved by asserting that chalk is equal to cheese, or should be equal to cheese and must be made equal.

I don’t believe in “gender equality” but the progressives all seem to believe in it and none of them more so than that vapid young twit who is our new Prime Minister and who has made a grand gesture of support for this ideal in the way he chose the Ministers for his new Cabinet.

These same progressives accused Stephen Harper of waging a “war on women”. Which, however, actually accomplishes more for the fairer sex – choosing your Cabinet Ministers on the basis of their sex so you can have an equal number of men and of women, or actively trying to keep such practices as honour killings and female circumcision from becoming prevalent in Canada? It is practices like these, which target the female sex, that the Harper government condemned as barbaric.

In 2011, the year the Harper Conservatives won a majority government, the federal government updated the “Discover Canada” brochure that is given to those who wish to immigrate to and become citizens of Canada. Among the changes was the addition of forced marriage to the following list: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence” and goes on to say that those who commit these things will all be severely punished under our criminal law. Now that last part may have been more a statement of wishful thinking than an accurate description of how our criminal justice system actually functions but that is beside the point. “Spousal abuse”, runs both ways, and in fact there is recent evidence that women are more likely to be abusive in relationships than men, which, of course, would have come as no surprise to Rudyard Kipling, but this too is beside the point as the government clearly had male-on-female abuse in mind when it put that into the pamphlet. For that is what all of these “barbaric cultural practices” have in common, they all target females. The title of the subsection of the brochure that this is found in, by the way, is “The Equality of Women and Men”.

At the time, Justin Trudeau, then Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Shadow Minister for Immigration condemned the Harper government for the use of the word “barbaric”, even though it was not itself a new addition to the publication. He received so much negative feedback over this he was forced to make a retraction the next day.

Every time the Harper government spoke of “barbaric cultural practices” it was with regards to practices in which women are treated cruelly or unfairly. The niqab controversy was no exception to this although the face veil is obviously not on the same scale as murdering one’s daughter or sister because she shamed the family by having a boyfriend, dressing inappropriately, or being raped, or removing a young girl’s clitoris to prevent her from growing up to become promiscuous. While I may not think much of the “gender equality” Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau both believe in, unlike Mr. Trudeau four years ago, I have no problem agreeing that these practices are utterly barbaric. Indeed, one of the things most objectionable about the false ideal of equality, is that those who believe in it tend to make a big deal out of peccadilloes while letting major injustices like these slide.

Consider the example of feminism. “The women’s movement” is a modern phenomenon, whose raison d'être is to promote the rights of women. Yet it has never concentrated its efforts on fighting honour killings or cliterodectomy or anything of the like. Instead, it has focused on such things as the “glass ceiling” and the “77 cents on the dollar” and to combat these largely imaginary bogeys, has created a barbaric cultural practice of its own, i.e., abortion on demand. It could be argued that this is because feminism is a movement which began in, grew up in, and still mostly belongs to, the Western world where the former practices were mostly unknown until quite recently. That is the whole point, however. That a revolutionary movement seeking radical societal transformation in the name of women developed in the West, where it really only became a force after women had been given the vote and barriers to their education, owning property, and having professional careers had for the most part disappeared, and not in parts of the world where girls have their genitals mutilated and may be murdered by their relatives if they “shame” their family is because the modern Western mind has been thoroughly permeated and polluted by the false ideal of equality.

Ironically, feminism is part of the larger progressivism which is itself responsible for practices like female genital mutilation and honour killings, once unknown in countries like Canada, becoming more and more common in large Western cities. For progressivism is not just about the equality of the sexes, it is about the equality of races and cultures as well and for decades now, what this has meant, is that it has insisted that all cultures ought to be equally welcome in Canada and other Western countries. This is what the first Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy of “official multiculturalism” was all about and it is clearly the reason that the younger Trudeau, heir to this dogma in which he was undoubtedly indoctrinated from an early age, initially took a foolish offence to the description of forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and honour killings as barbaric a few years ago. To call these things barbaric is to say that all cultures are not equal after all, which, of course, they are not.

Trudeau and other progressives are no more capable of admitting this than they are of admitting that there is a fundamental contradiction in their ideology – that equality of the sexes and equality of cultures are mutually incompatible ideals. They can be rejected together with consistency – which is my own position – but they cannot be consistently affirmed together. Stephen Harper got this partially right, the Trudeaus have always gotten it completely wrong, and Canada has paid a heavy price for their error.

*It has been drawn to my attention that I was mistaken in thinking that the ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal was based on the Charter. The ban, which was an instruction from the Ministry to the judges administering the citizenship oath rather than a law, was overturned because it conflicted with an older rule that requires such judges to give maximum religious freedom in the swearing-in ceremony. Thank you to the person who noticed and notified me of this factual error.

The ISIS Crisis Comes to Canada

In my last essay I talked about how an alliance of Western countries, including Canada, was coming together to fight ISIS or the Islamic State, a jihadist terrorist organization that has seized a large chunk of territory in Iraq and Syria, declared itself a caliphate, and has been kidnapping young women, committing ethnic cleansing against groups like the Yazidis, beheading Western journalists and behaving atrociously in general. I talked about how the rise of ISIS was made possible by the folly of the current American President and his predecessor. The governments of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, while despicable in many respects, were capable of keeping jihadist groups like the one that became ISIS in check. In their confidence in the ability of liberal democracy to create a new and better world, George W. Bush removed Hussein and Barack H. Obama threw his support behind the rebels seeking to oust Assad. I talked about how the war against ISIS was being fought on behalf of an unworthy cause, of liberalism, the disease that is killing Western civilization from the inside out, rather than Christianity, the faith which resisted Islam’s onslaught on the Western world from the Battle of Tours to the Gates of Vienna. I also talked about how the Bush doctrine of taking the fight to the terrorists, i.e., waging wars overseas to wipe them out before they can attack us at home is the mirror image of what we ought to be doing. We should be trying to keep jihadists out of Western countries so that we do not need to waste Western lives and Western money waging war overseas. Dr. Srdja Trifkovic has said that “The victory will come not by conquering Mecca for America, but by disengaging America from Mecca and by excluding Mecca from America” (1) and if we substitute “Western civilization” for “America” I think that is about right.

Within days of having completed this essay another aspect of the problem presented itself.

On Monday, October 20th, a young man named Martin Couture-Rouleau ran down a couple of Canadian soldiers with his Nissan Altima inthe Quebec city of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. One of these, a fifty-three year old Warrant Officer named Patrice Vincent, died from the injuries the next day. After the attack Couture-Rouleau called 911 to boast of what he had done “in the name of Allah”, then took off in his vehicle with the police in hot pursuit and ran into a ditch, escaped his vehicle, attacked the cops with a knife, and was shot down dead. He had converted to Islam last year, renamed himself Ahmad LeConverti, and had his passport confiscated because he wished to go overseas to join ISIS.

Two days later, another young man named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, went to the National War Memorial in Ottawa and shot Corporal Nathan Cirillo, one of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, from behind with a rifle. He then fled the scene of the murder, arrived at Parliament Hill, jacked a vehicle which he drove to the Peace Tower, entered the Parliamentary buildings and engaged the House of Commons security forces in a gun fight in the Hall of Honour before being taken down by Sergeant-at-arms Kevin Vickers. Zehaf-Bibeau had converted to Islam ten years ago.

These incidents, which were apparently unrelated, present another aspect to the problem in that the perpetrators here were home-grown. Couture-Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau were Canadians, and not just in the same sense that Omar Khadr, who had been born in Toronto, to a family that raised him in Peshawar, Pakistan and Jalalabad, Afghanistan is a “Canadian”. They were both born and raised in Canada, to Canadian families, and were brought up in mainstream Canadian culture. Their conversion to Islam was one side of a coin, the other side of which was a rejection of the society into which they had been born and its culture.

Now clearly a strategy that focuses on keeping jihadists out of the country with a sensible immigration policy and strong border security cannot prevent attacks from homegrown terrorists who have rejected the country, society, and culture into which they were born and have by choice embraced the culture of jihad. Indeed, a preventative strategy against this sort of attack is likely to prove elusive. Measures like tightening up security in places that are at high risk of being targeted and increasing domestic surveillance can only do so much and come with a heavy cost in terms of freedom lost. We have only just now, in the last few years, began to recover the freedom that was stolen from us by the father of the present leader of the Liberal Party back in the 1970s and can scarcely afford to lose any more.

Speaking of Trudeau père, it was he who in 1971 declared Canada to be officially multicultural. This is a huge part of the problem we are dealing with. Multicultural, as Trudeau used the term, means something more than mere cultural plurality. Culturally, a society can be either homogenous or plural. There are different kinds of homogeneity and plurality. The city-states of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy had one type of cultural homogeneity, the nation-states of post-Renaissance Europe had another. The Roman Empire, in which a multitude of local cultures were tolerated so long as they recognized the supremacy of Rome was a different kind of cultural plurality from that which came about in Britain when the king of Presbyterian Scotland inherited the throne of Anglican England.

Canada has always been a culturally plural country. In the original Confederation of 1867 there were four provinces, three of which were primarily English and Protestant, one of which was French and Roman Catholic. The plurality, the Fathers of Confederation had in mind for the country they established, was a plurality along the lines of that which then existed in Austria-Hungary in which culturally distinct nations were joined by a common loyalty to a Christian royal House. This is not the kind of plurality Trudeau had in mind when he declared Canada to be multicultural.

Trudeau’s multiculturalism is a pluralism based upon the idea of equality – that all cultures are equal. This is not the same thing as saying that under the Crown all citizens have the same rights and are subject to the same laws regardless of their culture. The latter idea is not culturally neutral but is distinctive of certain cultures and not present in others. If all cultures are equal then a culture that contains this idea is no better for doing so than a culture that does not and the opposite of this concept is equally valid. The only way in which all cultures could be equal would be if all cultures were equally worthless. Multiculturalism or cultural egalitarianism is cultural nihilism.

This applies to religion, which T. S. Eliot rightly said was the heart and centre of culture, as well. Religions do not all teach the same thing. Therefore, the only way in which all religions could be equal would be if they were all wrong. This would seem to be exactly what many progressives think or at least assume, even if they are unwilling to admit it. This assumption could only have developed in the vacuum created by the loss of faith in the religion that has been at heart of Western culture and civilization for almost two millennia. Perhaps that vacuum might help explain how two young men, born and raised in the Western country of Canada, could so reject their country, its culture,and the larger civilization to which it belongs as to embrace, in a zealous and violent way, the religion that has sought to conquer that civilization by force since the seventh century. If Trudeau fils is still looking for "root causes" of jihadist violence that is one he might consider.

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(1) In Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terror May Yet Be Won In Spite of Ourselves, (Boston: Regina Orthodox Press, 2006).

Enoch Was Right

Forty-five years ago today, the Conservative Political Centre for the West Midlands met in a room in Midland Hotel, in Birmingham.  It was a small meeting, not the kind that would ordinarily attract much media attention.   The man addressing the meeting, however, was no ordinary man, and his speech was no ordinary speech.  It would be the talk of the nation for days, weeks, even years to come.  It would earn the speaker, an articulate, well-educated intellectual, of High Tory convictions, the love of the lower and middle classes, and the hatred of the progressively inclined, academic and media elites.  It was due to this speech that dock workers, union members, and other manual labourers would march in defense of the most outspoken advocate of free enterprise since World War II and prior to Margaret Thatcher.

The Man

The man speaking that day was John Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, South West, the constituency he had represented since 1950. (1)   He had twice been Minister of State for Health in the government of Harold Macmillan.  In 1968, however, the Labour Party was in power and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.  The Conservatives, led by that wettest of the “wet Tories”, Edward Heath, were in Opposition, and Powell was Shadow Secretary for Defence   Until he gave the speech, that was.  April 20^th was a Saturday that year.  On Sunday April 21^st, a vivid Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, replacing him with Reginald Maudlin, the Deputy Leader of the Party.  Powell would never again hold a position within a Conservative Cabinet, government or Shadow.   The rift between him and the Conservative Party leadership, especially Heath, would never be repaired.   In 1975 Heath was replaced as Conservative leader by Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Powell’s who had advised Heath against firing Powell and who expressed agreement with the controversial speech in her memoirs, (2) but by this time Powell, while remaining a Tory by conviction, had left the Party in disgust over the way Heath had betrayed his Party’s principles and platform in his premiership and had compromised British national sovereignty by bringing the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community.  

 

Powell had been born in Birmingham, the city of his famous – or infamous, depending upon your perspective – speech, in  June of 1912, three years after the marriage of his parents.  His father, Albert Enoch Powell, of Welsh descent, was an elementary school teacher and later principal.  His mother, Ellen Mary Powell, nee Breese, a policeman’s daughter who had been a teacher herself before her marriage, was a woman of immense scholarly aptitude, who had taught herself classical Greek, and who encouraged this same trait when it manifested itself early in her only child.  He won an early scholarship to King Edwards’, a grammar school in Birmingham, when he was only thirteen.  He initially entered as a science student, but transferred to the classical form after one term.  In the break between, under his mother’s tutelage, he learned two years worth of Greek in two weeks, catching up with his fellow students.  (3)  

After graduating with distinctions in Latin, Greek, and Ancient history, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge with several scholarships,  where he studied Latin under A. E. Housman, the classical scholar more famous as the poet author of A Shropshire Lad, and read the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.   Nietzsche had become the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was only 24.  Powell acquired an ambition to beat his then-idol’s record.   He did not succeed in this, but he came close to matching it.  He became full professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia in 1937 when he was 25.   The following year his Lexicon to Herodotus was published by Cambridge University Press which also published, early in 1939, his History of Herodotus.  His career as a classical scholar was already well-established but events of that same year, would lead to the resignation of his professorship in a romantic answering of the call of duty.   On September 3^rd, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany.  On the following day, Powell resigned his position and caught a flight back to England, determined like the character of Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s novels, to offer his services to King and country.

Powell was more successful in this than the fictional Crouchback, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a private in October of 1939, being promoted to lance corporal while still in basic training, and then selected to be trained as an officer.  This training began in January 1940 and lasted four months, after which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the General List, to be shortly thereafter transferred into the Intelligence Corps.  This pattern of promotion continued throughout the war until he attained the rank of brigadier.   Stationed in Cairo, Algiers, and Delhi, he developed an ambition to become Viceroy of India and a lifelong dislike of the Americans, whom he correctly believed were trying to bring down the British Empire as well as the Axis Powers.

When the war ended, Powell had the pathways of two careers in which he had already achieved success open before him.  He could have retained his commission and continued to climb the ranks of the military.   He could have gone to Durham University, where he had been elected Professor of Greek and Classical Literature to resume an illustrious career in classical scholarship.   Instead, he resigned both commission and professorship to go into politics, initially with the idea of achieving his goal of becoming Indian Viceroy.

Powell was, by instinct and conviction, a Conservative, or, to use the term he preferred himself, a Tory.  His excellent definition of a Tory was “a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions.” (4)   In defending the authority of institutions which he had instinctively revered from his earliest days, he grounded it in the concept of prescription, i.e., legitimacy derived from tradition and tested and established through long usage.   It was because the Conservative Party traditionally embodied these concepts and not because he was particularly impressed with the way the Party handled the reins of government when in office that he sought to become a Conservative candidate for office.   He was added to the candidates list and, while he lost his first bid for office in Normanton in 1947, he was given a job in the meantime in the Parliamentary Secretariat and later the Conservative Research Department where he met Pamela Wilson, at first his secretary, later his wife and the mother of his two daughters.  His next candidacy, was in Wolverhampton.  One Sunday evening, on his way home to his Wolverhampton apartment, he heard the bells of  St. Peter’s Collegiate Church.  Although Powell had lost his faith as a youth,  become an atheist, and then an admirer of the notoriously antiChristian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he responded to the summons and entered the church to hear Evensong.  He found himself drawn to participate in the worship, and after that regularly attended the church each Sunday.  He soon abandoned his atheism to become a devout if idiosyncratic High Anglican. (5)   In 1950 was sent to the House of Commons by the electorate of Wolverhampton South West to begin his new career as a statesman.

As mentioned previously, Powell served as a minister in Macmillan’s government.  What most distinguishes his Parliamentary career, however, is his erudite and articulate speeches.   Although he is remembered today chiefly in connection with one issue in particular, he was hardly a single-issue controversialist.     When the Macmillan Conservatives introduced the Life Peerages Act he spoke out against it.   The Conservative leaders behind the Act, regarded it as a means of preserving the House of Lords through modernization.  The Labour Party rejected the Act on the same grounds, because they wished for more radical modernization.  Powell, however, regarded it as the first step towards the democratization of the House of Lords.  This would be an unacceptable redundancy, Powell argued, in which the two Houses would both be representatives of the same electorate, creating a constitutional crisis over which of the two is rightly representative.   He championed traditional, hereditary, peerages, soundly arguing that it was prescription that legitimized the authority of the Lords, just as prescription was the basis of the authority of the Crown and even of the elected assembly.

At the time the leaders of the Conservative Party had agreed to support the Keynesian and socialist economic policies brought in by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge after the war. Powell, however, broke with the Post-War Consensus, to insist that Keynesianism generated inflation, to call for monetarist reforms to combat such inflation, and to preach the virtues of private enterprise and the free market.

At the end of the war Powell was still an imperialist.  After India achieved independence in 1947, however, he was convinced the Empire could no longer be maintained and adopted a nationalist approach to foreign policy similar to that of  the Taft Republicans in the United States.  In the Cold War he opposed both the Communism of the Soviet Union and the hubris of the Americans.  His British nationalism led him to oppose the UK’s entry into the EEC in the 1970s and to take up the cause of Unionism in Northern Ireland.   It was also intimately related to the position he took in his most famous speech.

The Speech

The subject of the talk, that would earn Powell the love of the masses, the ire of the fashionable, progressive, chattering classes , and his place in history was immigration and racial strife.   His enemies accused him of trying to incite racial strife by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment.   The reality is quite different.  In fact, he as actually trying to prevent racial conflicts and violence by warning that such would be inevitable if large scale immigration continued.   The progressive-minded, without listening to or reading the text of his speech in its entirety, responded to the selected excerpts highlighted by the media and accused him of racial prejudice and of promoting discrimination against new immigrants and their descendants.   In reality, Powell declared in the speech what he consistently maintained throughout his political career, that British subjects and citizens were entitled to the same rights and protections under British law, regardless of whether they had arrived on British soil yesterday or whether they lived where their ancestors had lived since the days of Alfred the Great.   It was the Labour government of Harold Wilson, Powell insisted, that was trying to create special privileges for new immigrants at the expense of born and bred, white British people, through their proposed Race Relations Bill.  The second reading of this bill was scheduled for the Tuesday after the speech.

The speech itself was masterfully constructed.   He began by declaring that “the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”  (6)  The statesman, however, encounters difficulties in performing this function, because preventable evils lie in the future and are not perceived as being as pressing as present evils, leading to the “besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”   The statesman must rest this temptation, for if he does not he will “deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after”. 

Having thus prepared his listening audience for predictions that they might find unpalatable he launched into his subject by recounting a conversation which had taken place a week or two previously between himself and one of his constituents.  His interlocutor was “a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries” who had expressed dissatisfaction with the direction in which Great Britain was going and a desire to emigrate and to see his children and their families settled overseas.   The genesis of this seemingly rather unpatriotic despair, Powell quoted in the man’s own words, as the feeling that  “in this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Later in the speech, he quoted at length from a letter he had received describing the plight of another of his constituents.  The lady who wrote to him, told him about an elderly woman, who had begun renting rooms in her house to make ends meet after losing her husband and sons in the war, but who was now the only white on her street, the other, including her tenants, having moved away as the neighborhood filled up with immigrants.  Without the rent income, and unable to get her rates reduced because of an unsympathetic government, she was now subjected to threats, abuse, vandalisim, and the taunts of “Racialist” from immigrant children who followed her whenever she went to the store.  

 

Nothing in Powell’s address seems to have infuriated his critics, whether from Labour or among the “wet” leadership of his own Party, more than these anecdotes.  Ostensibly, the reason for this is that the most inflammatory rhetoric, the kind most vulnerable to the charge of racism, in the whole speech is contained within them.   Yet the glaring fact that in neither case was the rhetoric Powell’s own but rather that which had quoted from ordinary people who had spoken or written to him does not seem to have mollified his enemies’ rage in the slightest.  If anything it increased it.   One can only speculate as to why this would be so.  The Labour Party has always tried to present itself as being the voice of the ordinary, common, working, Briton, and presumably did not appreciate this lesson in how out of touch their thinking actually was with that of the very people they claimed to represent.(7) Those Conservative leaders who were enraged by the speech appear to have made the same mistake in reverse.   Powell’s  views on immigration were, as he himself pointed out in the speech, the official position of the Conservative Party, and men like Edward Heath, Quintin Hogg, and Edward Boyle appear to have seen Powell’s statement of that position as an embarrassment.  They misjudged the tremendous amount of popular support that actually existed for their own party’s position and jumped on the rhetoric Powell had quoted as an excuse for not acting on that plank of their platform, claiming, quite unreasonably, that Powell’s speech had made the subject of immigration untouchable.

Whatever his opponents may have thought, by including these quotations in his speech, Powell demonstrated his willingness to take seriously the concerns of ordinary British people, in his own constituency and elsewhere, that through forces beyond their control, including the inertia or even malice of their own government, they were becoming strangers in their own country. This was a refreshing change from the attitude of the typical modern intellectual who believes that such fears should be treated as irrational, dismissed and ignored, or changed through an aggressive campaign of social engineering on the part of government, church, media, and institutions of education.

In fact, the bulk of Powell’s speech demonstrated that such fears are far from being irrational in the sense of being contrary to fact and reason.  Noting that in some areas mass immigration was producing a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history”, he cited the Registrar General’s calculations that within fifteen to twenty years, there would be three and a half million immigrants and their descendants in the UK.  From these figures, he extrapolated that by the year 2000 the number would be between five and seven million, and pointed out that these would not be distributed evenly throughout the country, but would rather be concentrated in certain areas.

He made it clear that the problem is not immigration qua immigration but is rather a matter of scale. “[N]umbers are of the essence” he stated for:

the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

He was also careful to distinguish between an immigrant, someone who entered the country with the purpose of settling there, and someone who entered the country to visit or to study, with the intention of going back home.   The problem, then, was not that alien people were entering the country, or even that alien people were entering the country to stay, but rather that the latter were coming in so fast and in so large numbers that it was transforming the country, or at least the parts of it where the immigrants were concentrating.   Later in the speech, after quoting from the letter about the widow who had lost her tenants and was experiencing harassment, he made another point that is logically connected to the idea that the scale of immigration was the problem.  This was with regards to the integration of immigrants.  Integration, he said, means that the immigrants “become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.”   Physical differences such as colour make integration “difficult though, over a period, not impossible”, and of the new coloured immigrants there were “many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.”  Nevertheless, it was, he said “a ludicrous misconception” to think that was true of the majority of them.  The large scale of immigration and the concentration of immigrants in particular areas, was, of course, a deterrent to integration, which Powell noted, although he brought it up in the context of discussing the Race Relations Bill, an even greater deterrent to integration.

Since the increase in the immigrant population would make it harder and harder to deal with this as time went on and it was happening at such a rapid rate that it was a matter of urgency that it be dealt with immediately.  The government could deal with it in a simple way, he declared, first by “stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow” and second by “promoting the maximum outflow”, noting that these suggestions are “part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.”    By “promoting the maximum outflow” he did not mean kicking people out of the country, but rather encouraging the re-emigration of those who wished to go, and providing them with “generous assistance” to do so.   He did not know how successful such a program would be because “no such policy has yet been attempted” but he noted that immigrants in his constituency had approached him, on occasion, asking for such assistance to return to their country of origins.

After discussing the possibilities of a re-emigration policy, he turned to “a third element of the Conservative Party’s policy” by way of introducing the subject of the Race Relations Bill.   That third element was that the law and the government ought to treat all citizens the same and not practice discrimination.   This, he said:

does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

That, of course, was exactly what the Wilson government was setting out to do with its Race Relations Bill.   The supporters of this bill – among whom, Powell singled out the press and the ecclesiastical authorities for specific mention – were completely mistaken.  The bill was not a two-way street and was not intended to be.   It was being enacted to protect the new immigrants from discrimination on the part of the white British.  This kind of legislation was not only unnecessary, it completely mistook the situation and who needed protection from what.  The new immigrants were not in the same situation as American blacks.  The latter had been brought to their country as slaves before the country even existed, and who had gradually been emancipated, enfranchised, and given full citizenship rights.   The new immigrants, however, had entered the UK with full citizenship rights.  Their entrance was “admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought” and it was the existing populace that was feeling the adverse effects as:

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

Now the Race Relations Bill was set to make things even worse, being:

a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

Powell’s analysis of the problems inherent in mass immigration and anti-discrimination legislation and his proposed solutions were quite reasonable.  This is not what attracted the attention of the media and the British nation.  It was rather, in addition to the anecdotes referred to above, the apocalyptic tone in which he set his predictions of future evils.  The admission of immigrants at such a high scale was an act of national suicide:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The Race Relations Bill would give the immigrant communities a loaded weapon to use against their unarmed citizens.   Powell expressed his reaction to this in the most famous line in the entire speech, the one which caused it to be dubbed “Rivers of Blood”:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. (8)

The Parallel Voice

In that line, Powell compared his premonition of unnecessary racial strife due to mass immigration and the Race Relations Bill to the ominous prophecy of the Sybil in Virgil’s Aeneid.   From the perspective of hindsight, a more apt comparison might have been to Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, or to Laocoon the Trojan priest.  Having been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but having spurned his erotic advances, Cassandra had been cursed by the jilted god, who made it that her warnings would not be believed.   She warned against accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks, as did Laocoon.  The warnings went unheeded.  Likewise, Powell’s warnings were disregarded by those with the authority to put his recommendations into action.

He was not the only one to fill the role of Cassandra with regards to immigration.  In 1973, a novel entitled Le Camp des Saints was published, written by French author Jean Raspail.  An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published a couple of years later.   The novel, set in a “near future”, told of an armada of one hundred ships, that had set out from Calcutta laden with thousands of the poorest of the poor and destined to arrive at the French Rivera on Eastern Sunday.   As the ships slowly make their way, the French debate what to do about it.   Leftist elites, in the government, the church, and the media, declare that the immigrants must be welcomed.  They declare the ships to be carrying “The Last Chance for Mankind” and utter banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now” but are basically given free reign to spread their views because the one right-wing publisher left in France, refuses to print anything about the matter except a map of the progress of the ships, and a countdown to the “moment of truth”, i.e., their arrival.  

Throughout the book various people who believe in France and French civilization, oppose the leftist consensus.  One of these is a man who had immigrated from India years previously but who had integrated into French society.   These gather in the home of one of their number, a retired professor whose house overlooks the beach where the ships have landed, and make a last stand for France and Western civilization, as it crumbles all around them, brought down by the burden of a liberal guilt that had rendered the West incapable of fighting to ensure its own survival against hordes armed with their own pitiable condition.

The Retrospect

How do Powell’s predictions appear in hindsight, forty-five years later?

If anything, he appears to have erred on the conservative side in the sense that the things he predicted have come true on a much larger scale.

The Race Relations Bill passed and, like similar anti-discrimination legislation in the United States and Canada, it has been used in exactly the way Powell predicted, as a weapon against white people.   It is more than just the anti-discrimination legislation, however.  A complete double-minded attitude towards race, racial prejudice, and even racial hatred has developed in the UK, North America, and other Western societies.  What is forbidden of white people is tolerated and in some cases even praised when directed against white people.

Powell’s described the United Kingdom’s admission of immigrants on a large scale as the act of a nation “engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”, i.e., committing national suicide.   Immigration rates have continued to be high and an additional factor has joined high immigration to contribute to the national suicide of Great Britain, i.e., a decline in British fertility rates.   Declining fertility and high immigration are a deadly combination.   For a nation, which is a living, collective, entity, to survive, its present generation must continue to be primarily descended from its past generations.   People from other nations can enter a nation and become integrated into the nation without threatening the nation’s survival, but if the nation takes to bringing in immigrants on a large scale to offset its own failure to reproduce, it will die.  

To maintain that mass immigration and multiculturalism have been good for the United Kingdom or any of the other countries that have adopted them is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore reality.   The traditions and institutions of these countries have been undermined and in some cases changed beyond all recognition.  There has been a loss of a sense of continuity, and with that, of a sense of community.   With this erosion of social capital and increase in alienation have come the unnecessary ethnic strife that Powell strove to prevent.

 

It is not fashionable to say it, but it is nonetheless true, that Enoch was right!

(1) My main source for the biographical details about Enoch Powell contained in this essay is Simon Heffer’s Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998, 1999). This is a comprehensive biography, which, while not an “official” biography, was written with the cooperation of its subject, who made his archives available to its author, with the stipulation that his most private papers would be accessed only after his death. I have also consulted Patrick Cosgroves’s The Lives of Enoch Powell (London: The Bodley Head, 1989).

(2) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 146.

(3) By the end of his life, he could fluently speak English, French, German, Greek (modern and classical), Italian, Latin and Urdu, read Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Welsh, and was learning Hebrew.

(4) This is in response to the question “Can you tell me what it is to be a Tory?” in the interview he granted to Naim Attallah in 1992. http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/ Variations of this same basic definition can be found throughout his various speeches and interviews

(5) The idiosyncrasy is most noticeable in his Biblical scholarship, which he took up as his primary pastime after his career as a statesman.

(6) The text of the Birmingham speech is available to read on The Telegraph’s website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

(7) To give the devil his due, while the Labour Party as a whole was vehement in its denunciation of Powell and his speech, there were exceptions. Michael Foot, later to become leader of the Labour Party, whose friendship with Powell crossed the vast divide between their different views and parties and survived the speech, said that Powell had been tragically misunderstood. Another Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, cancelled a speech he had been invited to give at Birmingham University after the school reneged on an invitation to Powell. Mayhew told the school bluntly “People who believe in free speech and practice it should stick together whatever their other differences. If Birmingham University won’t have Enoch Powell they can’t have me.” (quoted in Heffer, op. cit., p. 472, italics added)

(8) According to Simon Heffer, in the actual address Powell quoted the line “Et Thybrim multo spumentem sanguine” from Virgil’s Aeneid, in its original Latin first, and then translated it, but provided only the translation in the press release. Heffer, p. 454.

The Menace of Multiculturalism

The term culture is derived from the same Latin root as the verb cultivate, which refers to the act of plowing a field so as to prepare it for being sown. We use the word culture to refer to that which metaphorically “cultivates” the mind and character. This is especially true when we use the word culture in a limited sense to refer to literature, philosophy, the fine arts, and serious music. These things are “culture” because they are supposed to develop the intellect. We also speak of the traditions and habits which characterize an entire community – its language, its religion, its particular ways of doing things – as its culture. These too “cultivate” the mind and character. A community’s language is the means by which its members communicate with each other. Its customs are its prescribed ways of behaving in certain situations which facilitate social interaction. It is by learning these things that a person becomes capable of living as a full member of his community.

Culture, therefore, is vitally important to both a community or society and to its individual members. For the community it is necessary both as an adhesive which holds its individual members together and gives them a sense of unity and as a lubricant which eases social interaction so as to minimize friction and make it possible for its members to live together in community. Culture also enables the individual to identify with a group larger than himself and provides him with what he needs to get along as a member of the group.

A community is by definition monocultural, i.e., possessing a single culture shared by all its members. A community is not just a neighborhood, a place where people live in propinquity to each other regardless of whether or how they interact. To be a community, people living together in one location, must also interact in such a way as to form a social unity. The very term community points to a group of people sharing something in common, and one way of defining culture is as that which a community shares, which binds them together as a community. Therefore a community is monocultural.

This does not mean that every member of a community is absolutely identical to each of the others, having all the same mannerisms, all the same habits, attending all the same events, etc.

It does mean, at the very least, that a community has one language in common which is used for communication within the community, regardless of what other tongues individual members of the community might also speak.

What is true of a community is not necessarily true of a society or a polity. Societies and polities are usually large units which include more than one community. A polity is a group of people, living in a particular territory, under the sovereign authority of one law administered and enforced by one government. In ancient Greece cities were sovereign polities (the words polity and political come from the Greek word polis meaning city). Today most polities tend to be countries, i.e., large territories governed from a capital city. A society is what we see when we look at the group of people that make up a polity from a different angle, one which encompasses all forms of social organization and not just political sovereignty.

Sometimes polities and societies are, like communities, monocultural. Greek city-states and the European nation-states which evolved during the Late Medieval – Early Modern period are examples of these. In other instances, polities can be culturally pluralistic. There are different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic.

An empire is one form of a culturally pluralistic polity. The Roman Empire, for example, consisted of all the different people groups of the Mediterranean world who had many different languages, religions, and cultures. Their cultural plurality was tolerated by Rome so long as they submitted to the authority of Roman Law, the Senate and the Caesars. In an empire, many cultures co-exist, but one culture is dominant.

Another way in which different cultural communities can co-exist within the same polity or society, is in a decentralized confederation, with a strong degree of local self-rule. The Swiss Republic is an example of this.

Another form of cultural pluralism, is the kind which has existed in my country Canada, since its confederation in 1867. When Canada came together as a country, there were three major ethnic groups within Canada. These were French Canadians, English Canadians, and native Canadians. French Canada had been won from France by Britain during the Seven Years' War. The king had guaranteed the Canadiens their language, religion (Roman Catholic) and culture in return for their loyalty and allegiances. This angered the leaders of several of Britain’s colonies in North America, particularly the ones which had been formed by the virulently anti-Catholic Puritans. They rebelled against their king, declared their secession from the British Empire, and having won their independence formed the American Republic. Not all members of the 13 colonies agreed with the treasonous actions of their leaders. Those who remained loyal to the king and to Britain, fled north after the American Revolution. These United Empire Loyalists, and the inhabitants of British colonies such as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which had not joined in the American rebellion, became the English Canadians. Native Canadians were members of tribes which had made treaties with the British Crown.

The common factor that made it possible to unite these groups into one country, was allegiance to the Crown. It was out of loyalty to the Crown that the English Canadians had not joined with the Americans in their revolution, it was the Crown which had guaranteed the culture of French Canadians in return for their allegiance, and the Crown with which native Canadians had signed their treaties. The Fathers of Confederation established the country, as a confederation of provinces and territories, with a parliamentary government under the Crown.

So there are a number of different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic in contrast with a community which is by definition monocultural.

There is another form of cultural pluralism that we hear a lot about today. That is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is not just a synonym for cultural pluralism. Whereas other forms of cultural pluralism often “just happen” in the sense that they arise as a consequence of history, multiculturalism is a doctrine with true believers, and an official policy enforced by the state. There is one other major difference between multiculturalism and the kinds of pluralism we looked at above.

The cultural pluralism of the Roman Empire, the Swiss Republic, and the Dominion of Canada was not a threat to the cultural homogeneity of communities within these historical polities. The same cannot be said for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of these communities.

Multiculturalism is the political doctrine that declares that while political, legal and economic unity are good, cultural unity is bad, and a country should have no cultural unity other than a commitment to plurality, and that all cultures are equal.. It is also the official policy of encouraging large scale immigration from as many different cultures as possible while also encouraging immigrants to keep their original cultures rather than assimilate into the communities to which they are immigrating.

Multiculturalism is a doctrine which contradicts itself in many ways. While it declares all cultures are equal, it does not treat all cultures equally. It encourages immigrant groups to stick together and form culturally homogeneous enclaves, while breaking up the cultural homogeneity of the communities into which the immigrants are moving. People who live in a community which was formerly homogeneous but into which large numbers of immigrants have moved, find that it is more difficult to order meals in the restaurant down the street or buy groceries in the local grocery store because the servers and cashiers have trouble speaking the language of the community. Then they find that their tax bills have gone through the roof because the government is offering these same immigrants government services and education in their own language. If they complain about all of this, they find themselves denounced as “racists”.

In Canada, Pierre Eliot Trudeau declared the country to be “officially multicultural” in 1971. This was not just a government acknowledgement of the historical cultural pluralism mentioned above which has existed in the country since Confederation. When Trudeau had become prime minister he began an aggressive immigration recruitment campaign with the purpose of changing the demographics of the country. This and the new policy of multiculturalism to discourage assimilation, was an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of communities within English and French Canada.

It was also during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau that the symbol of unity between the different cultural communities within Canada came under attack. They removed “Royal” from the title of as many government institutions as they could get away with and did everything they could to portray our ongoing attachment to the monarchy as something archaic, belonging to the trappings of our “colonial past” which we needed to move beyond in order to fully mature as a country.

This year is the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the first monarch to open a session of Canadian parliament in person. She has visited our country several times, the latest visit being two years ago. Last year, Prince William and his new bride Kate, visited Canada after their wedding. Later that year, Prime Minister Harper, restored the “Royal” to the titles of two branches of our Armed Forces and ordered all of our consulates to hang the Queen’s picture in a laudable effort to emphasize our country’s royal heritage and ongoing ties to the Crown.

In the commentary surrounding these events, leftists whined and cried about how this was an insult to all the new Canadians who came from outside the British Isles. It did not seem to occur to them that if honouring our royal family and our Queen is an insult to new immigrants then their petulant, left-wing attack upon the monarchy is an insult to all Canadians who were born and grew up as subjects to the Queen. Or if it did occur to them it did not matter. Although all cultures are equal under multiculturalism, some, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Of course it makes no sense to say that to honour Canada’s traditional monarchy, our Queen and our royal family, the symbols, as we have seen, of unity between the different cultural communities which formed our country, is an insult to new Canadians. These immigrants, after all, left countries over which the Queen did not reign to move to a country over which she does reign. Surely if anyone is insulting the new Canadians it is the leftists themselves, who arrogantly profess to speak for them, by attacking the tradition they chose to move into.

Multiculturalism, then, while professing to be a belief in the equality of all cultures, attacks the cultures of the countries which adopt it and promotes the cultures of new immigrants instead. There is an interesting consequence of this which Western countries which have adopted multiculturalism have had to face in recent years. Sometimes, the culture of the new immigrants is less compatible with pluralism than the culture which is being undermined by multiculturalism.

One of the fundamental elements of culture is religion, and multiculturalism has been adopted in Western countries whose historical, traditional, religion is Christianity. Indeed, multiculturalism could not have arisen anywhere else. This is because multiculturalism is a progressive and liberal doctrine and progressivism and liberalism are secular, Christian, heresies, i.e., Christian teachings which have been twisted and distorted and then secularized. One Christian doctrine is that of the future Kingdom of God on earth. One version of this doctrine is post-millennialism, which teaches that the mission of the Church is to establish this Kingdom prior to the Second Coming of Christ. Progressivism, the idea that through reason, science, and government policy man can gradually eliminate evil and suffering from the earth, is basically a secularized post-millennialism. Another Christian doctrine is that each person is created in the image of God and has worth in the eyes of God. It is because of this doctrine that the Western and especially the English system of rights and freedoms protecting the person from the abuse of power developed. Liberalism, which provides an alternative explanation for these rights and freedoms by positing a hypothetical individualistic state of nature out of which society arose through voluntary contract, is another form of a secular Christian heresy.

Progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity. This does not mean that Christians should embrace progressivism and liberalism as manifestations of Christ’s teachings, as some misguided clergy teach, or that we should blame Christianity for the ruin of Western civilization wrought by progressivism and liberalism, as some misguided rightists teach. For the other side of the coin is that while progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity, neither could they have evolved within a culture in which the Church had maintained its authority and orthodox Christian faith had not begun to decline. They are not orthodox Christian doctrine but secular Christian heresies.

Just as progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a Christian culture in which Christianity had gone into decline, neither could multiculturalism have come into existence apart from progressivism and liberalism. Multiculturalism is progressive in that its advocates believe that by declaring all cultures to be equal and societies to have no core culture apart from a commitment to pluralism that the evil of oppression of one cultural group by another can be eliminated (1). It is liberal in that it separates culture from its social and communitarian role and makes it a matter of individual preference.

Multiculturalism is also, far more hostile to Christianity than to any other religion. It demonizes Christians who are brave enough to stand up for orthodox Christian doctrine and morality. It does not so demonize Islam, and in recent years left-wing multiculturalists have been outspoken opponents of what they call “Islamophobia” despite overwhelming evidence that Islam is far more incompatible with their ideas of tolerance and diversity than Christianity.

Herein can be seen one of many dangers multiculturalism poses to the societies which adopt it. When the official doctrine is that all cultures are to be considered equal it is difficult if not impossible to screen out cultural incompatibility in the immigration process. Under multiculturalism, it is the person who points out that somebody from Culture X is more likely to declare a holy war and start blowing up buildings than somebody from Culture Y, who is penalized for being a “bigot”.

The biggest threat to a society which multiculturalism poses, however, is that it undermines communities. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists scream, and in some cases this is true. It is not true of all kinds of diversity however.

A community is a stronger community if it contains teachers, doctors, farmers, policemen, grocers, builders, and people of many other professions, than if it consists only of people from one profession or if everybody tries to do everything for himself. This kind of diversity strengthens the community. It is the kind of diversity St. Paul spoke about when he compared the Church to the body of Christ in the 12th chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, and said that just as the body is one but is made up of many organs, so the Church is one but is made up of people with different roles and gifts given by the Holy Spirit. This diversity is a diversity within unity, and it is unity that St. Paul stresses in this chapter.

A community would not be a stronger community if the people in one house spoke German, in the next Lithuanian, in the next spoke Mandarin, and in the next spoke Swahili, and there was no language in common. Nor would it be a stronger community if everybody in the community followed a different calendar than everybody else. Problems would arise if what one person understood to be a friendly gesture, his neighbor understood to be an insult to his mother and a challenge to a duel to the death. This kind of diversity is not a strength and it is fatal to a sense of community. It too is illustrated in the Bible – in what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the tongues of the builders.

It is beneficial for a country to have strong communities. There is less crime and a greater sense of trust between neighbors in a small, largely homogeneous, village than in a large, very heterogeneous, city. In the former, people can leave their homes and cars unlocked, never in the latter. The less a country has to rely upon its laws, the police, courts and prisons, the better.

Multiculturalism, by making culture a matter of individual preference, and embracing diversity at the expense of unity, prevents culture from serving its social function, of uniting and strengthening communities. It is truly a menace.




(1) In reality, multiculturalism is more likely to generate hostility between different cultural groups.

Populism Part Three: Treacherous Elites

In Part One I explained why I don’t like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and why, although I agree with many of the specific policies they support, I don’t much care for the populist “Tea Party”. In Part Two I objected to the core concept of modern democracy – that the will of the people is sovereign – as being a version of “might makes right” and to populism – the kind of movement which attempts to gain influence by the strength of numbers through accusing elites of betraying the public interest – because it unleashes the violence and domination through force which is inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty. Not wishing to be entirely negative, I have briefly mentioned a few of the things I, a traditional Tory, support. These include the classical idea that good government consists of harmonizing the good of the whole with the good of the parts and balancing the good of the individual with the good of the community, the good of the few with the good of the many an idea enshrined in the concept of a mixed constitution, of which the British/Canadian parliamentary monarchy is the outstanding example. Populism, which makes the democratic “will of the people” the dominant principle, is the enemy of the harmony and balance enshrined in our tradition of parliamentary monarchy.

There is a question, however, which needs to be asked. If populism is defined as a movement which purports to speak for “the people” against “the elite” and accuses the elite of betraying or conspiring against the public good, what should our response be when the populist is right about the elites?

This is very important question. Elites are easy targets for ridicule, attack, and outright scapegoating. This is partially due to the fact that the numbers of the elite are by definition few. It is also due to the fact that there is a widespread if ethically wrongheaded notion that it is “fair game” to attack the very rich, the very powerful, the very skilled, and the very strong in ways that would be considered unfair and even bullying if done to the poor and the weak. For this reason, we would do well to take populist accusations against elites with a grain of salt. In doing so, however, we must not fall into the mistake of thinking that elites can never be guilty of the accusations populists level against them.

This is especially important today because we live in an era in which evidence of elite betrayal abounds on every side. An obvious example can be seen in the way several large banks and corporations, which were on the verge of failing three years ago when the American economy did a nosedive following the bust of the housing bubble, asked for and received bailout money from the American government, then turned around and gave large bonuses to their executives, even while laying off thousands of employees.

As annoying as this example of collusion between arrogant economic and political elites to enrich themselves at the expense of the public is it is by no means the worst example of elite betrayal. Other examples include the inflation tax, the outsourcing of jobs, the mass importation of immigrants, the attack on traditional moral values and culture, and the loss of national identity and sovereignty due to official multiculturalism policies and the construction of a new world order.

The inflation tax is an effect of the expansion of the money supply. When the money supply is expanded the value of money per unit decreases relative to the goods and services which can be purchased with money. Since takes a while for the market to adjust to the expansion of the currency the first people to use the new money – governments and banks – are able to spend the new money when it has the purchasing power per unit of the old currency. As it circulates it loses purchasing power - and so does the money in your wallet and in your bank account. This amounts to a transfer of wealth from you to politicians and bankers.

The erosion of the value of our money and savings which is inflation is most noticeable to people when prices of consumer goods which everybody purchases on a regular basis begin to rise. If these prices do not rise – and even go down – it will take longer for people to notice that their money is not worth as much as it used to be. There are ways of keeping the prices of consumer goods down in periods of inflation. You could find a way of increasing production for example. Or you could move your factory to somewhere where there is an abundant supply of cheap labour and few regulations. Or you could import an abundant supply of cheap labour into your own country.

The first option is the best. In the right set of circumstances a businessman can introduce new technology which speeds up and increases production in his factory by so much that he can lower his price per unit, while increasing both his overall profit and the wages of his workers.(1) There are limits, however, to when and where you can do this. In recent decades corporations have opted for the other two methods with the help of governments who have made free trade agreements and passed liberal immigration policies. Academic elites have joined political and economic elites in this because if there is one area where “capitalists” and “socialists” come together it is in support of free trade and liberal immigration.

Liberal immigration policies tend not to be received well by the people of the country whose government introduces them. And for good reason. Such polices look suspiciously like an attempt to put into practice Bertolt Brecht’s bad joke about “dissolving the old people and electing a new one”. (2) To prevent widespread discontent with large scale immigration from threatening the entire program the political, academic, and media elites have engaged in a decades long campaign of positive and negative propaganda. The positive propaganda in favour of multiculturalism presents “diversity” as a good to be desired for its own sake. The negative propaganda uses terms like “racism” and “xenophobia” to intimidate critics of wide scale immigration and multiculturalism.

Here is how the negative propaganda works. To most people the term “racism” conveys the meaning of an irrational dislike of somebody else for no reason other than that his skin colour is different from your own. Similarly, the term “xenophobia” means an irrational fear of strangers, of people who are different from you. When the government, schools, and media constantly use these terms to explain away opposition to liberal immigration and multiculturalism they are taking what is in fact a perfectly healthy, normal, and rational way of thinking and pathologizing it, i.e., declaring it to be a mental disorder. Thus the fact that people have an entirely legitimate right to be concerned that their government is actively trying to replace them, their children, and their grandchildren with immigrants is buried under mountains of abusive name-calling.

This proved to be so successful a method of silencing criticism that it was used elsewhere. All of a sudden, all sorts of ordinary, rational ideas were now given nasty labels and treated as mental defects. Do you believe that the most fundamental division of labour among human beings, between women who bear and raise children and men who protect and provide for them, arises naturally out of the simple biological fact that women are the ones who get pregnant and not out of an all-male conspiracy to oppress all women? If so, you are a “sexist” or a “male chauvinist”. Do you believe that the fact that men have external tube-shaped genitals and women have genitals that are openings which are the right size and shape to put the male genitals in and the fact that doing so is the means of propagation of the species means that men are made for women and women for men? Then you are now a “homophobe” or a “heterosexist”. At least in the eyes of the elites in charge of the news and entertainment media, the educational system, and the state.

To summarize the charges so far, the actions of banking and political elites have eroded peoples’ savings through inflation but corporate elites have kept prices relatively low by outsourcing jobs and importing cheap labour with the help of laws passed and treaties signed by political elites while academic and media elites have, with the support and backing of the other elites, attempted to sell this to people in the ideological package of “multiculturalism” and have browbeaten those who weren’t buying with accusations of “racism”. The actions of the elites in each of these cases is an unjustifiable betrayal of the common good of the societies to which the elites belong

What would motivate elites to turn against their own societies in this way?

Christopher Lasch, who was professor of history of the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, in his final book wrote that the American “privileged classes” had:

[R]emoved themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure—of business, entertainment, information, and “information retrieval”—make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline. (3)

This is also true of the elites of other Western countries. It is notable that the decades in which everything described above has taken place saw the integration of economies on a continental (Common Market, NAFTA) and global (GATT, WTO) scale and the establishment of quasi-governmental bodies at the global level (the UN, the International Court, etc). While the kind of conspiracy theory that suggests that this 20th and 21st Century movement towards a new world order is entirely the result of plotting carried out in secretive meetings of the ultra-elite should be regarded as overly simplistic at best it would be erring in the opposite direction to absolve the elites of all active complicity in this new direction history has taken. The idea that the emerging new order on the global scale might be the means of achieving utopian goals such as world peace and universal prosperity is a vision far more common among the elites than among other people. Hence the transfer of elite loyalty that Lasch noticed, from particular communities, societies, and countries to this new international order.

Having pointed out several ways in which elites – political, academic, economic, etc. – have betrayed the common good of our societies, and offered the transfer of elite loyalty to the emerging international order as an explanation, this leaves us with the question of how to respond. I phrase it that way rather than “what to do about it” because I am not such an optimist as to assume that something can be done about it.

Populism, at least in the sense we have been looking at of a mass movement demanding that the will of the people be met, is not the answer. In parts one and two, we saw how populism and the concept of popular sovereignty are threats to prescriptive, constitutional order. Yet our objection to the new world order and the actions of the elites described above is based upon the fact that these things also threaten the constitutional order and common good of our societies. To use the one to fight the other is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

In the previous essay I distinguished between two senses of the word “democracy”. There is modern democracy, which knows of no mixture with other principles or elements, but which insists upon the will of the people being absolutely sovereign. There is also however, the kind of democracy in which the constitution prescribes that elected representatives of the people participate in the governing of the country alongside aristocratic and royal elements. In this kind of constitution, democracy is balanced by other principles which are just as important, and is one element of many.

It is the idea that the “will of the people” is sovereign which is the problem with modern democracy and it is this idea which makes populism a dangerous movement and a threat to constitutional order. Is a populism conceivable that does not include this element? A populism which confronts elite misdoings by insisting, not that the “will of the people” be submitted to, but that their rights within the established order be respected and not violated?

These questions are not mere exercises in semantics. When a movement is built on the idea that the will of the people is absolute and must be obeyed there are no limits to what the movement will demand. The will of the people must be provided by the leaders of the movement – for the people have no will of their own – and populist movements of this nature are the means by which one elite, deriving its strength from its skills in rhetorical manipulation of the masses, challenges another which derives its strength from its wealth. In such wars of the elites, the good of the community is likely to fall by the wayside.

When a popular movement is based upon the idea that a community and a society is established for the common good – the good of all its members – and is therefore based upon a set of mutually understood and respected rights, privileges and obligations between the individuals and the groups which make up the community, there are limits to what the movement can demand. When it charges elites with betraying the common good and demands that the rights of the people be respected it must itself respect the tradition and constitution to which it is appealing.

It is the common people who are hurt the most when the social and moral order of a society collapses. It is the common people who are most dependent upon the security and stability an established, permanent order provides. When law and order breaks down and crime rates soar it is not the elites who are the primary victims – it is people in the middle and especially the lower classes. When traditional morality comes under attack, illegitimacy rates soar, and marriages break up, it is again the lower classes who are hit the hardest because these things are major contributors to multi-generational poverty.

Yet in spite of all of this, populist movements which purport to speak for the common people against the elites, frequently embrace revolutionary rhetoric and conceive of themselves as being against the established order of society.

Populism, because of its revolutionary potential, is naturally a left-wing phenomenon. There have been right-wing populist movements in the 20th Century, but the kind of popular movement I am suggesting here must be something different. It would have to have a populist element – it is challenging the elites after all – but this cannot be the dominant element. It must be a very small-p populist, conservatism, rather than a right-wing populism.

Exactly what such a movement will look like in actual practice is something that remains to be hammered out. It will require a great deal of serious thought as to what exactly a counter-revolution, Maistre’s “opposite of a revolution” looks like. All of this is outside of the scope of this essay, as is the question of whether such a movement could possibly succeed. (4) We must not confuse the categories of “that which it is possible to succeed in” and “that which is worth doing”, however. Fighting for what is left of our civilization and the moral and social order it is built upon, is always worth doing, even if doing so permanently relegates us to the realm of what the late Samuel Francis, borrowing an expression from Leonard Cohen, called “beautiful losers”.

(1) Lets say you own a factory that employs 10 people and produces 500 units of product a day. That is 50 units of product per employee. You sell the product at $15 a unit receiving a total of $7, 500 for a days worth of product. You pay your employees $150 a day each, which works out to $18.75 per hour or $3 per unit of product. In total you pay them $1,500 a day, and you have $1,500 of other expenses a day. This leaves you with $4,500 profit per day. Now, imagine someone invents a machine that increases the productivity of your plant by 300%. Your factory now produces 1,500 units of product a day. You lower the price of your product to $10 a unit. You are now receiving $15,000 for a days worth of product. You triple the wages of your employees to $450 a day each which brings your payroll up to $4,500 a day. The cost of purchasing and running the machine causes your other expenses to go up to $2,000 a day. Your profit is now $8,500 a day. You have increased your profit, while becoming an unusually generous factory owner who pays his workers $56.25 an hour, and cutting the cost of your product at the same time.

While the numbers I placed into the hypothetical example above are absurd fictions the point remains valid. Under the right circumstances, through increasing productivity, you can make profits and wages go up while lowering the price of your product. This does not mean, of course, that it can be done under any circumstances, with any product. The great blindness of many present day liberal (capitalist) economists has been their belief that man’s science and technology will solve every problem and continue to lead us into a future of ever increasing prosperity for everyone.

(2) Bertolt Brecht was a 20th Century German poet and playwright of Marxist convictions. After the Soviets and the East Germans suppressed a popular uprising through force, he wrote a poem entitled “The Solution”, the English version of which can be read here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-solution/ . The final sentence of the poem, the question “Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?” is for obvious reasons, widely quoted among opponents of present day, large scale, liberal immigration.

(3) Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 45. In this book, which was completed while the author was dying and published shortly after his death, the author argues for a number of ideals, such as egalitarianism which I do not share, some of which I consider to be quite foolish, and against some principles, such as the principle of hierarchy which I would regard as essential to a functioning civilized society. He approvingly quotes Orestes Brownson’s call for the abolition of hereditary property on the grounds that it is incompatible with democracy. Lasch (and Brownson) may very well be right about this but the abolition of inheritance is even more incompatible with Lasch’s own view of the family as a “haven in a heartless world”. One of the main concepts of The Revolt of the Elites is that meritocracy and the ideal of “social mobility” are responsible for sidetracking America from its original vision of egalitarian democracy. What these concepts actually do, Lasch argues, is give the elites the idea that they are wealthy on the basis of their personal merit alone and therefore are under no obligation to contribute to the common good. While there is some truth to this, I, who do not believe equality to be desirable in anything other than a right to justice from before the law, would argue for social mobility precisely for the reason that it helps validate a stratified society, which is desirable for other reasons. Despite all this, Lasch’s argument that the detachment of current elites from any sense of belonging and loyalty to their societies has led to their support for liberal moral, social and cultural agendas that are against the common good of their societies, is a helpful one.

(4) Full consideration of this question must involve thought about the very nature of history itself. Modern thinking about history has been dominated by the concept of progress in various forms, from the Marxist view of history as a constant struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” destined to culminate in the classless, property-less, society of communism, to the Whig history of theory in which events are constantly moving towards universal, peaceful, liberal democracy. George Grant, in Philosophy in the Mass Age, described how this concept of progress arose through the secularization of the Christian view, inherited from the Hebrew, of history as time given meaning as the flow of events towards ends determined by God. In the modern concept of progress, man has replaced God as the determiner of the ends of history. To believers in this doctrine, it is foolishness to resist the flow of history, and wickedness to attempt to move against the flow. This is the doctrine held by the elites who are overseeing the dismantling of traditional, Western civilization and the construction of the new global order. While I do not accept the doctrine of progress, especially where it identifies historical inevitability with justice (“it has to happen this way therefore you are wrong to oppose it”) a mere negation is not enough. What is needed is an alternative understanding of history.