The Triumph of the Donald

Eight years ago, Dr. Thomas Fleming, then editor of Chronicles Magazine, wrote that no matter who won that year’s presidential election the outcome was known – the victor would be the worst president in American history. This was an understandable prediction. The candidates that year were John McCain for the Republicans and Barack Obama for the Democrats. The former was a warmongering hawk who was likely to have started a World War. The latter was a man who had an agenda of racial division and strife that he tried to hide behind a façade of substance-free, positive sounding tripe about hope and change.

This year the Democratic Party put forward as their candidate someone who was a combination of the worst elements of both John McCain and Barack Obama – Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mercifully, it is Donald John Trump and not her, who has just been elected the next president of the United States.

The media, which has treated Trump’s campaign as a joke from day one, and has predicted his failure every step of the way up until this last evening when it became evident that he would win the required number of electoral college votes is now trying to figure out how they could have been so wrong and how to explain Trump’s victory.

They need look no further than the writings of a late colleague of the aforementioned Dr. Fleming, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, one-time award winning editorial columnist with the Washington Times and political editor of Chronicles. A traditional Southern conservative and a sworn foe of political correctness, Sam Francis was also a brilliant student of Realpolitik and the Machiavellian elite theory of power politics as articulated by ex-Trotskyist-turned-Cold Warrior James Burnham. Accepting Burnham’s thesis in The Managerial Revolution, that the paths of socialism and capitalism had converged and a new type of society that was neither and both had emerged led by a new elite of technocratic managers and bureaucrats, Francis attributed the problems he saw in late twentieth century America to this new elite. He brilliantly diagnosed the combination of the breakdown of law and order and border security with the tyranny of political correctness, bureaucratic overregulation, and the surveillance state as anarcho-tyranny – a synthesis of anarchism and tyranny. In the theories of liberal sociologists Donald Warren about MARs – Middle American Radicals – Francis believed he had found the solution to the problem. The exportation of their jobs through free trade, the importation of their replacements through mass immigration, and their being heavily taxed to pay for a welfare state while being targeted by anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, and political correctness in general, had potentially radicalized middle class white Americans. A populist nationalist could tap into this potential to fight against the new order. Francis’ friend Patrick J. Buchanan, columnist and former speech writer for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, attempted to do this three times in 1993, 1996 and as a third party candidate in 2000.

Buchanan, unfortunately, came nowhere near the White House and so Sam Francis, who passed away eleven years ago, did not live to see his arguments bear fruit.

The reason why the same populist, nativist, platform that failed to produce a Buchanan presidency has carried the Trump train all the way to the White House is evident in this year’s presidential race. To win, Trump had to first fight off all the other contenders – each preferred by the Republican Party’s own establishment over himself – for the Republican nomination. Then in the general election he had to fight the Democratic Party, a united mass media, the powerful financial interests behind Clinton, and more often than not the establishment of his own party. To do this required a particular combination of credentials which only Donald Trump possessed.

First, as a very successful businessman he was extremely wealthy – enough so that he did not have to rely upon the financiers to whom he would otherwise be indentured and no different from any other politician. The same could be said of Ross Perot – but Perot chose to run as an independent and third party candidate, paths that lead to nowhere.

Second, as the host of the popular reality/game show The Apprentice, Trump was a world famous celebrity and therefore not someone who could simply be silenced or ignored.

Finally, Trump had the combination of sincere patriotism, sheer egotism, and unrelenting determination sufficient to weather everything that his powerful enemies threw at him.

It was only someone with this particular combination who could capitalize on Francis’s MARs strategy and carry it through to victory.

I cannot recall a time when the outcome of an election pleased me more than this one. That may seem odd, coming from someone who is neither an American nor a republican, but is rather a Canadian Tory who can only tolerate popular democracy when it is mixed, as it is in our parliamentary system, with hereditary monarchy. For that matter I have long been of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s opinion that the ideology which is nationalism is a dangerous substitute for the virtuous sentiment that is true patriotism. Donald Trump does not strike me as being an ideologue, however – it was amusing to hear a representative of the Democratic Party interviewed on CBC after the third presidential debate talk about Trump’s ideology, as if he had one – and on practical matters such as immigration and free trade the difference between patriotism and nationalism is somewhat moot. There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this, I confess – I have long loathed Hillary Clinton, everything she stands for, and the type of people who have been backing her. It is very satisfying, however, to see someone who has his country’s good at heart, on matters like trade and immigration, win out over the forces of globalism and political correctness that have seemed undefeatable for decades.

On November 8th, 2016 the American voting public sent a very clear message – to both Hillary Clinton and the politically correct, corporate globalist elites. That message, put simply, was “you’re fired!”

Now that Donald Trump has been elected president the question will be whether he will do all the things he has promised to do. There are many that say that he won’t – but they also said through this entire race that he would never be able to win this primary or that one, that he would never be able to secure the Republican nomination, that he would never be able to defeat Hillary Clinton – and he proved them wrong at every turn. Hillary Clinton, with her combination of all the bad traits of both John McCain and Barack Obama, had she won, would have been the worst American president in all of history. Donald Trump, if he accomplishes even a fraction of what he has set out to do, may very well go down in history as their greatest and best president ever.

Mel Hurtig and Canadian Patriotism and Nationalism

I was sorry to read, a couple of days ago, about the death of Mel Hurtig. Hurtig, who was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, started out as a bookseller, then moved into the book publishing business. The Canadian Encyclopedia, which he originally published in three hardcover volumes in 1985, is undoubtedly the work for which he will be most remembered, although he went on to write several books himself after he sold his publishing company in 1992.

While Hurtig was a man with whose overall views – very progressive and left-wing – I largely and vehemently disagreed, I did agree with him on the issue which was most important to him, the theme that ran through all of his books and which was the basis of his electoral campaign in the 1993 federal election as the leader of the short-lived National Party. That was the election that saw the Progressive Conservatives, which had formed the government since winning a large majority in 1984, decimated, and the Liberals returned to power. The Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, in betrayal of their own party’s traditional economic nationalism, had negotiated the US-Canada Free Trade deal with the American government in 1988, and Chretien’s Liberals, true to their own history as the party of continentalism and free trade, negotiated its expansion into NAFTA in 1994. Hurtig believed that this would lead inevitably to Canada’s economic, cultural, and political subjugation to and eventually absorption into the United States of America, a destiny he opposed with his whole heart and fought with the weapon in the use of which he was most skilled, that which is proverbially stronger than the sword, his pen.

On this matter – both that free trade would lead to Canada’s absorption into the United States, informally at least, if not formally – and that this is an outcome to be lamented and opposed – I fully agreed – and agree – with Hurtig. Having said that, I would like to make a comparison with an earlier generation of Canadian patriots who were concerned about the disappearance of the country they loved.

Hurtig’s fears that Canada was being pulled closer and closer into the American empire, expressed in such books as The Betrayal of Canada (1991) and The Vanishing Country (2002), were anticipated in 1965, by Lament For a Nation, by Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant. The premise of Grant’s book was that the fall of the Diefenbaker government in 1963, in a Parliamentary confidence vote in which the Liberals, NDP, and Social Credit united against Diefenbaker on the matter of his refusal to allow Washington D. C. to dictate Canadian policy in the matter of the arming of the Bomarc missiles, spelled the end of a Canada that was sovereign and independent of American control. This, Grant argued, was to be lamented because the Canadian project – the establishment in North America of a country which, by retaining the British tradition that the United States had rejected in her Revolution as well as preserving the French Catholic tradition in Quebec, preserved links to the pre-modern heritage of Christendom and classical antiquity that the thoroughly modern, liberal, tradition of the United States did not – was a worthy project, something good to be treasured in itself.

The Canada that George Grant loved and lamented, in other words, was a different country from the Canada that Mel Hurtig loved and fought for. Grant, despite his irritating partial sympathy for ideas and movements that any intelligent person ought to be able to recognize as pure evil masquerading as naïve stupidity – socialism, pacifism, and feminism – was a conservative, and the Canada he loved was the Dominion of Canada, a Christian parliamentary monarchy, with a rural, small-town, society, and a Victorian morality.

John Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister whose defeat prompted the writing of Grant’s book, was also concerned about the future of the country he loved, which concerns were expressed both in These Things We Treasure (1972) and his three volume memoir One Canada, (1975) especially the third volume. In Diefenbaker’s case, the threat to Canada came not from the United States, but from Canadian Nationalists in the Liberal Party. These seemed determined to strip Canada of her heritage and replace it with one of their own manufacture, as when they replaced the Red Ensign, which had been baptized Canada’s flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in World War II, against which move Diefenbaker led the Opposition in Parliament. It was more than just the replacement of symbols, however. Diefenbaker feared that the nationalists, in their contempt for the British heritage that is the source of our parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, were undermining both the Crown and Parliament and moving Canada towards a dictatorship of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. These same concerns had been expressed about an earlier generation of Liberal nationalists, by John Farthing in his Freedom Wears a Crown, edited by Judith Robinson and published posthumously in 1957. History has proven these concerns to be well justified.

Mel Hurtig, who ran for the Liberals in Edmonton in the 1972 election, was a Trudeau Liberal. The Canada he loved was the New Canada, the result of the revolution-within-the-form carried out the by the Liberals under the leadership of Soviet dupes and traitors Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in the 1960s and 1970s. The nationalists of the New Canada seem to think that by taking all the bad ideas of the American Hollywood Left to their absurd extremes and rebranding them as “Canadian values” they are somehow promoting a Canadian identity that is distinct and independent from the United States. To a Tory patriot like myself, it seems that the way to accomplish that goal is by rediscovering the heritage of the Old Canada, the Canada that appears in the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies, and which survives to a certain extent, mostly in our rural communities.

The goal itself, however, is one that both the patriots of the Old Canada and the nationalists of the New share against those who wish to see Canada further integrated into a new, America-dominated, global order, and for his faithfulness to that goal, Mel Hurtig well deserves to be honoured. May he rest in peace.

The Tory and Patriotism

One of the most familiar remarks of Samuel Johnson, as recorded by his biographer James Boswell, is that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Lest anyone think that his remarkable subject was impugning the virtue of patriotism, Boswell explained that it was false rather than true patriotism, of which Dr. Johnson was speaking. This clarification would have been unnecessary for anyone who had read “The Patriot”, a tract addressed to the electorate of Great Britain that had been written and published by the famous lexicographer and wit in 1774, an election year, and the year before he made his famous remark. In that pamphlet, Dr. Johnson explained what true patriotism was and how it could be distinguished from patriotism falsely professed to cover up baser qualities, motivations, and actions. He defined a patriot as “he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest” and declared that “no man can deserve a seat in parliament, who is not a patriot,“ for “no other man will protect our rights: no other man can merit our confidence.” (1)

Dr. Johnson was a Tory – a classical conservative who supported traditional royal and ecclesiastical authority against radical, revolutionary, and modernizing forces – and two years after his pamphlet was published, thirteen of Britain’s colonies in North America declared their independence from the Crown and Parliament, launching the war in which the revolting colonists, fighting against the Tories who remained loyal to their king, would take upon themselves the name of patriots. This revolution grew and developed out of the kind of patriotism Dr. Johnson had dismissed as false and so “The Patriot” can be read as a judgement on the American Revolutionaries as well as the Parliamentary Whigs. It stands to this day as the best worded statement of the Tory view of patriotism in the English language.

Such a statement is more needed now than when it was first written. For while Dr. Johnson wrote against politicians who cloaked themselves in patriotism to hide their unworthy motives and goals, the two and a half centuries since have seen the rise of far greater threats that call for a strong dose of true patriotism as their antidote. Six years after the Treaty of Paris brought the American Revolutionary War to an end another revolution broke out in France, the first of the revolutionary movements that would target royalty, the nobility, and the established Church in the name of “the people” in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and which would ultimately produce the terror states of Nazism and Communism, foreshadowed in the Reign of Terror in the French Republic of the mid-1790s. These movements were inspired by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in his call for a revolution that would establish a state in which the will of the people would be sovereign and all opposition to that will would be brutally supressed became at once the father of modern democracy and of totalitarianism. He also became the father of what in the nineteenth century would be dubbed nationalism.

Although many confuse the two, nationalism is not patriotism. Nor, for that matter, is it right-wing in the historic and traditional sense of this term although it is widely thought to be so today. The historic right is identical with Toryism and stood for royalty, nobility, the established church, organic community, tradition, and a concept of the common good that encompassed all of these things. Nationalism, from the French Revolution through to the Third Reich, was opposed to all of these things and allied with democracy, revolution, totalitarianism, and in the case of the Third Reich, socialism. It is the inevitable product of Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty when the idea of the people is equated with that of the volk, the nation, or the ethnic group, as it was almost universally so equated until 1945.

The difference between nationalism and patriotism was best explained by two Catholic, monarchists, from central Europe who taught in the United States, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and John Lukacs. (2) Just as the French Revolutionaries had joined mutually exclusive concepts when they included both liberty and equality in their motto, Kuehnelt-Leddihn explained, so have those who speak of “blood and soil”. Blood, nationalism, and equality, go together he argued, for “blood is an equalizing and generalizing factor”, as do soil, patriotism, and freedom because “the soil makes free men (the peasant and the landed nobleman are free)”, but the two sets do not mix well with each other. (3) Furthermore, nationalism is argumentative, he maintains, for the nationalist is always trying to prove his nation to be superior, whereas patriotism is not for:

Just as an intelligent man would never try to argue that his parents were the “best in the world,” so the patriot considers his attachment to his country a matter of loyalty. (4)

Lukacs put it this way:

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people,” justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. (5)

Patriotism is the feeling of attachment and loyalty one has to one’s home as extended to his country. Edmund Burke, a friend of Dr. Johnson’s although, ironically, almost certainly one of those he had in mind when he spoke of the false patriotism that is the “last refuge of a scoundrel”, notably remarked that:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. (6)

This affection for home that, taken to a larger scale, becomes patriotism, is one that we naturally develop unless something happens to prevent its development and it is inseparably tied to another natural affection, our love for our family. It is the fact that our family, our loved ones, live there, that makes a place our home, for apart from this it would be merely a house, a building. Therefore, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Lukacs are right to say that the focus of patriotism is on soil rather than blood, the true love of country cannot exclude one’s countrymen any more than love of home can exclude one’s family.

It is vital that we recognize this because a much greater threat than nationalism has developed in Western civilization. Since 1945, liberalism and the left have held up Adolf Hitler’s example as having permanently discredited the idea of volk or nation, i.e., a group connected by ties of blood, language, culture, and history, at least for Western countries. At the same time they continue to affirm the basic idea that was the foundation of both Hitler’s nationalism and his socialism – Rousseau’s concept of popular sovereignty, despite the fact that this concept is far more closely tied to the form of despotism Hitler practiced than the idea of nationality and that this concept, divorced from that of the volk or nation, produced despotism on an even larger scale in the Communist countries. (7) The result has been the permeation of Western civilization by a perverse ethnomasochism. If nationalists insist on the superiority of their own race, culture, and nation over all others, this ethnomasochism insists on the superiority of all other peoples and cultures to their own and expresses a death wish for its own people and culture. This is far more morally reprehensible than even the most jingoist of nationalisms, but, like the envy at the heart of socialism, it hides behind the mask of virtue - or at least what modern minds mistake for virtue in the empty concept of tolerance. Roger Scruton has described this ethnomasochism as oikophobia, giving this word the meaning of “the repudiation of inheritance and home”. (8)

From the Scylla of nationalism, which sacrificed millions in war to its idols of race and nation, we would appear to have escaped only to fall into the gaping maw of the Charybdis of ethnomasochistic oikophobia, (9) which would sacrifice all Western peoples and cultures to its own far deadlier Moloch.

Faced with these modern alternatives, the Tory looks to the ancient virtue of patriotism, the natural love for home extended to take in one's country, complete with people, customs, and institutions, as the antidote to both these poisons.


(1) It can be read online here: http://www.samueljohnson.com/thepatriot.html
(2) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was Austrian, John Lukacs is Hungarian. In addition to being Roman Catholic monarchists, with a respect for bourgeois liberalism and a contempt for democratic populism who were refugees from totalitarian regimes in their home countries, both men were professors of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, Lukacs being picked by Kuehnelt-Leddihn as his successor, when he returned to Europe in 1947.
(3) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd: Or Procustes at Large, (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1943) p. 196. Kuehnelt-Leddihn originally had this book published under the penname Francis Stuart Campbell. That liberty and equality are mutually exclusive is, of course, the theme of his Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Times (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers Ltd., 1952).
(4) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, (Washington D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990) p. 199.
(5) John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 36.
(6) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Vol. 1, (Paternoster Row, London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1834), pp. 398-399. Reflections was originally published in 1790.
(7) Modern despots like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, practiced tyranny on a larger scale than history has ever known before. These dictators saw themselves as the embodiments of Rousseau’s “general will” and in Hitler’s case, his power was derived from his demagogic ability to mesmerize the masses and rally them behind him.
(8) Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), p. 24.
(9) Several movements that call themselves "nationalisms" today are defensive responses to ethnomasochistic oikophobia. The negative portrayal of nationalism in this essay should not be taken as applying to these except in cases where they unmistakably join the concept of the nation with that of Rousseau's "sovereign people" as in nineteenth to early twentieth century nationalisms.

Canadian Nationalism

PART ONE: Patriotism and Nationalism




Patriotism, as neo-Thomistic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, is a virtue.(1) Not everyone would agree with Dr. MacIntyre on this and those who disagree will often respond by quoting the Eighteenth Century lexicographer and raconteur Samuel Johnson who said “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Dr. Johnson himself, however, would have agreed with the proposition that patriotism is a virtue. For this particular nugget of wit, as for so many others mined from the ample lode contained within Dr. Johnson’s personal conversations, we are indebted to James Boswell who recognized the treasure in his friend’s repartee for what it was and dutifully recorded it for posterity. In this instance Boswell thought it necessary to explain the comment and wrote:



But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest. (2)



Now Boswell’s interpretation of his friend’s words is not infallible and even if it were “Dr. Johnson says so” would not be sufficient to settle the question of the virtuous nature of patriotism one way or the other. For evidence that Boswell’s interpretation of this particular remark is correct, however, we need look no further than Johnson’s pamphlet “The Patriot” written against the claims to patriotism on the part of the rebelling colonies and their Whig supporters in Parliament on the eve of the American Revolution. (3) Similarly, we have no lack of evidence in support of the proposition that patriotism is a virtue (4). Patriotism belongs in the category of natural loves, like the live of parent for child and child for parent. While a person may devise a theoretical argument against such love it is difficult to fathom why one would wish to do so.



If patriotism is a virtue is nationalism also a virtue?



To answer that question we need to understand what the difference is between patriotism and nationalism. The difference is difficult to understand because although the two concepts are similar, so much so that some people use the terms interchangeably, they belong to entirely different categories. Patriotism is an attitude of the heart, a habit of thinking, a character trait. Nationalism, on the other hand, is an ideology, a set of beliefs that has been thought out and formulated. Nationalism has a definite history which can be, and has been, written down and explained in an orderly fashion. Its sources can be traced, there is a relatively recent period in which it was first formulated and expressed, then a period in which it was propagated and acted upon. You could not write such a history for patriotism. Nationalism spreads as messengers convey its ideas and make converts who, if they are of a different country, adapt it to suit their purposes. Patriotism, however, is a sentiment that occurs naturally among peoples in all places and times. A history of patriotism could only be a collection of independent stories.



Nationalism, therefore, cannot be a virtue. A virtue is a positive character trait, a pattern of right thinking or behaving which has become habitual. It is neither a virtue nor a vice to accept a set of ideas, although whether or not one does so may be influenced by one’s virtues and vices. For this same reason, nationalism cannot be a vice either. Unlike patriotism, it does not belong in the general category of which good examples are virtues and bad examples are vices.



What this means is that the proper question is not whether or not nationalism is a virtue but whether it is a good or a bad ideology.



That question assumes, of course, that ideologies come in good and bad. That is not an assumption that everyone would accept. The term ideology has been around for a little over two centuries and in that time it has seldom been applied to something the speaker considers to be laudatory or even neutral. It is usually used to refer to the ideas of one’s opponents rather than to one’s own ideas.



Michael Oakeshott in his essay “Rationalism and Politics” wrote about the impact of modern rationalism upon political thought. He describes the rationalist as someone who stands “for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason’” and as the enemy of “authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual”. The rationalist “falls easily into the error of identifying the customary and the traditional with the changeless” and so rejects the “tradition of ideas”. Ideology, according to Oakeshott, is what the rationalist replaces the “tradition of ideas” with. Ideology is “the formalized abridgement of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition”. It contains only “technical knowledge”, i.e., knowledge “susceptible of precise formulation”, because the rationalist rejects all other forms of knowledge. (5)



Oakeshott’s definition of ideology is a negative one, but not in the same way other definitions of ideology are negative. Karl Marx, for example, regarded ideology as a tool of oppression, a set of beliefs drawn up by the propertied classes and believed by the working classes in order to maintain the existing division of power and wealth. (6) In Oakeshott’s essay, the problem with ideology is not that it is bad in itself, but that it is the result of the deliberate impoverishment of knowledge and wisdom that is rationalism. Rationalists who were “men of real political education” might produce works which were valuable, which were “abridgements of a tradition”, but “from which, nevertheless, the full significance of the traditional inevitably escapes”. The example he gives of this is classical liberalism which he describes as “the ideology which Locke had distilled from the English tradition.” (7)



Nationalism is an ideology in Oakeshott’s sense of the term. Kenneth R. Minogue has called it “the foremost ideology of the modern world” (8). It is a fairly simple ideology too. Its basic concept, indeed, its only essential concept, is that of the sovereignty of the nation. The implications of this concept vary greatly from one instance of nationalism to another. ll nationalists insist upon the sovereignty of their own nation, some, would extend the principle to other nations as well. Nationalism can take the form of an assertion of a nation’s independence and self-determination against forces that seek to subjugate it, whether they be great imperial powers in the traditional sense, or the forces of internationalism and globalism in the present era. It can also, however, be used to justify the domination of others. It can be used to justify wars of conquest against foreign peoples and it can be used to demand that regional and local loyalties and interests within the nation itself must take the backseat to the national interest.



If nationalism is an ideology, and ideology is an abridgement of a tradition, then it follows that nationalism is an abridgement of a tradition. The pre-modern tradition taught people that they owed allegiance to their king but which placed that allegiance in the context of other loyalties, some of which were nearer and dearer than loyalty to the king, others of which transcended that loyalty. Nationalism abridged that tradition by making the highest object of one’s loyalty the nation as represented by the institutional state.



Nationalism is inferior both to the tradition which it, as an ideology, abridges and to patriotism, the natural love for one’s country which flourishes best in the context of that tradition. “The nation” is an abstract concept and by making it the highest object of loyalty nationalism subordinates concrete objects of loyalty, such as one’s family and friends, to an idea. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a love for one’s country that grows out of one’s love for the concrete people and places that are nearest to him. Edmund Burke described it this way:



To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. (9)



Since the nationalist makes the nation, an abstract object of his own construction, the object of his affection, it is possible for a nationalist to actually hate his country. According to Kenneth Minogue this is, in fact, a much observed characteristic of nationalists. (10) This is not something that could ever be true of a patriot. A patriot loves his country because it is his country not because he identifies it with an ideal. His love for his country is of the same nature as his love for his family, a love which is not blind to faults but which also does not require one to pretend those faults don’t exist. (11)



Nationalism shares the flaws which are common to all ideologies, in particular the tendency to try and force an imperfect reality into an artificially constructed ideal mold. In the age in which we live, however, it is difficult to be a patriot without being a nationalist to some degree or another. The modern age, the age of rationalism and ideology, was also the age of the nation-state. Patriots of countries born in the modern age often find it convenient to express their patriotism in terms of nationalism and in this new global era in which internationalism threatens the dissolution of national identities, nationalism will become increasingly necessary to the patriot.



PART TWO: The Two Canadian Nationalisms



In my country Canada, which is now celebrating its 145th birthday, nationalism has been an important force since day one. This is also true of the United States of America, Germany, Israel and indeed it must inevitably be true of any country that has its origins in the Modern Age. Nationalism takes a different form in every country in which it arises. This is as true of Canada as it is of any other country and in fact there are two distinct forms of Canadian nationalism, one which was present in the country from the beginning, the other which arose in the Twentieth Century. By Canadian nationalism I mean nationalism which regards Canada as a whole as a nation. I am not counting Quebec nationalism, nationalist movements among Canadian aboriginals, white or black racial nationalism, or any other version of nationalism which might have a presence in Canada but which has a nation other than Canada itself as its object.



National unity is a goal of all forms of nationalism. Nothing brings a country, or any other group for that matter, together like an outside threat and for this reason nationalism is usually at its strongest when the country is under such a threat. In the case of both Canadian nationalisms the perceived threat to the country was American imperialism. The American imperialism which the first Canadian nationalism opposed was imperialism in the literal, traditional, sense of the term. Two hundred years ago, the United States declared war against Great Britain and in the ensuing two and a half year conflict, the Americans on several occasions invaded and tried to conquer the British territory to their north, including what is now Ontario and Quebec but which at the time were Upper and Lower Canada. These attempts did not succeed and the invaders were turned back but in the decades to come American journalists and politicians would speak of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to conquer and govern the entire continent of North America. The cultural, economic, and political divisions in the United States split that country into two warring factions from 1861-1865. The sympathy of Britain and her North American provinces lay with the South to whom some assistance was granted and so when the North was victorious there was fear of a retaliatory strike against British North America. Thus the cumulative experience of the 19th Century led to a reasonable fear of American imperial conquest. The movement to unite the provinces of British North America into a new country kicked into high gear and a little over a week prior to the second anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Queen Victoria signed the British North America Act into law. On July 1st of that year the Act came into effect and a new country, the Dominion of Canada, was born.



The fear of American imperialism which gave strength to the original Canadian nationalism was a legitimate and reasonable fear considering the history of the 19th Century prior to Confederation. The second kind of Canadian nationalism also uses fear of American imperialism but the “imperialism” it warns against is not literal military conquest and subjugation but the cultural and economic influence of the United States. This second Canadian nationalism was born in the post-World War II period. The two world wars had brought about a tremendous shift in global power. Britain and France had lost much of their influence and Germany, of course, was completely crushed. The Second World War had left the world divided into two spheres of influence centred around the two superpowers that had emerged from the war, the United States and the Soviet Union. Canada, like Britain and the rest of the free world, was within the sphere of American influence.



There were, of course, legitimate reasons for Western countries to be concerned about rising American influence. The loss of their own cultural identities and traditions and the spread of the corrupting influence of Hollywood culture would be two examples. The second Canadian nationalism did not focus on these concerns, however. Indeed, it arguably did more to undermine Canada’s traditions and identity than American influence. The institutions of the country established by Sir John A. MacDonald and the other Fathers of Confederation in 1867 came under heavy attack by the new wave of Canadian nationalists. They falsely accused those institutions of indicating colonial subjugation. The country’s official name was “The Dominion of Canada”. The new Canadian nationalists said that this denoted colonial status, that “dominion” was synonymous with “colony”. In fact, the name had been chosen out of the Bible (Psalm 72:8) by the Fathers of Confederation, after their British advisers suggested that their original choice of a name “the Kingdom of Canada” might defeat the purpose of Confederation by provoking an American act rather than securing the country against it. “Dominion” was chosen as a synonym for “kingdom” to denote a country that was and thankfully still is a constitutional monarchy. Canada’s flag was the Canadian Red Ensign, which contained the Union Jack in the canton and the Canadian coat of arms on a red field. This was the flag Canada’s soldiers had fought under in the Second World War, a war we had entered under our own Parliament’s declaration, and which was militarily our country’s greatest hour. Lester Pearson denounced this flag as a symbol of colonialism and insisted that we be given a new one.



Lester Pearson was the first Prime Minister to represent the new Canadian nationalism and his premiership began after the fall of the premiership of the last Prime Minister to represent the old Canadian nationalism, John G. Diefenbaker. The way in which the Diefenbaker premiership fell reveals a great deal about the new Canadian nationalism and the sincerity of its fear of American imperialism.



John G. Diefenbaker, the leader of the Conservative Party, became Prime Minister in 1957 with a minority government, then won the 1958 federal election with the largest majority victory in Canadian history up until that time (it still is the largest in terms of percentage of seats, in terms of numbers of seats Brian Mulroney’s subsequent majority win in 1984 was larger). In 1962 he won again, but with a minority. His government was defeated in 1963 when Lester Pearson, leader of the Liberal Party, proposed a vote of no-confidence in the government. Diefenbaker lost the vote and the general election was called which ushered Lester Pearson and the Liberals into power.



What was the issue that prompted Pearson’s call for a vote of no-confidence?



The Diefenbaker government had controversially scrapped the Avro Arrow program after accepting Bomarc missiles from the Americans as part of a NATO defense project. The American government then began putting pressure on Diefenbaker to accept nuclear warheads for the Bomarc missiles. Lester Pearson had loudly spoken in favour of accepting these warheads. After much wavering, Diefenbaker said no, that he did not want American nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. This brought upon the vote of no-confidence.



If the new Canadian nationalists like Lester Pearson were as concerned as they professed to be about Canada’s independent identity is it not odd that they would oppose Diefenbaker on this? Canada’s greatest philosopher, George Grant certainly thought so. In his most celebrated book, Lament for a Nation, he argued that the absorption of Canada into the American empire was unfortunate but inevitable and pointed to the way Diefenbaker was brought down as the ultimate evidence of that inevitability. The subtitle of his book was “The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism”. (12) Grant’s nephew, former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, has suggested that his jeremiad was premature, written at a time when Canada was just beginning to assert her national identity. The evidence Ignatieff offers is less than convincing, however. It consists of a long list of progressive and left-wing innovations. (13) These do not make a national identity and have done more to divide the nation than to unite it.



After the fall of the Diefenbaker government, Pearson’s Liberals formed the government and the Liberal Party remained in power until 1984, except for the half a year when Joe Clark was Prime Minister. During this time they downsized the Canadian armed forces considerably and committed much of the armed forces to the peacekeeping service of the United Nations. The inevitable result of this was that Canada became more and more dependent upon the United States for her own homeland security.



What this tells us is that the Liberal Party, during the Pearson/Trudeau years when it embraced the new “Canadian nationalism”, remained fully committed to turning Canada into a satellite of the United States. This is visible to see despite the fact that these left-wing “Canadian nationalists” affected an anti-Americanism of the most vulgar and bilious sort, the kind rightly condemned by French philosopher Jean-François Revel in his 2002 book Anti-Americanism. (14)



John Diefenbaker, of the older, more genuine, school of Canadian nationalism, was frequently accused of anti-Americanism. His response was to say “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian”. In his memoirs he wrote “I believed in a Canada free from the directing influence of the United States—a belief that served to emphasize my devotion to the Monarchy in Canada and to the Commonwealth relationship.” (15) He also made it absolutely clear, in his memoirs and other writings, that when it came to the conflict then raging on the world theatre between the United States and her allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union and her satellites on the other, our place was on the side of the United States. In contrast, the new school of “Canadian nationalists” mocked our country’s British traditions and connections and placed Canada firmly under the influence of the United States in practice, while shouting their contempt for her – and sometimes their open sympathy with her Communist enemies (16) – from the rooftops.



Whereas Diefenbaker, who like our first Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald was a Tory of the Disraeli school, saw Canada’s national identity in terms of her traditions, institutions, and her place in the Commonwealth, the new “Canadian nationalists” saw Canadian national identity as something which the federal government needed to artificially engineer for us in order to make us different from the United States. To hear such people talk one would think that Tommy Douglas’ single-payer health care system is what makes Canada Canadian. (17) One wonders what these idiots are going to do now that Barack Obama has introduced socialized health care to the United States.



What our country is sorely in need of today, almost a century and a half since Confederation, is a revival of the older school of Canadian nationalism.



Happy Dominion Day

God save the Queen







(1) “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” was the title of the Lindley Lecture given by Dr. MacIntyre to the University of Kansas in 1984, which the University published as a 19 page pamphlet later that year. In this lecture Dr. MacIntyre answered the question in the affirmative by challenging the liberal morality which demands a “no” answer.



(2) I am quoting from the 1965 reprint of the 1953 new edition of the Oxford Standard edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in which this quote can be found on page 615. The incident in question occurs in the entry for Friday 7, April 1775.



(3) http://www.samueljohnson.com/thepatriot.html



(4) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2010/07/for-queen-and-country.html



(5) The essay “Rationalism and Politics” by Michael Oakeshott, originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1947, can be found on pages 1-36 of Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays (Metheun & Co LTD: London, 1962).



(6) Interestingly, revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel, who borrowed many ideas from Marx, inverted his concept of ideology. Sorel argued that revolutions were led by rising elites who required ideological doctrines to motivate and control their forces.



(7) Oakeshott, p. 27.



(8) Kenneth R. Minogue, Nationalism (Metheun & Co LTD: London, 1969) p. 8.



(9) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Gateway Edition (Henry Regnery Company: Chicago, 1955), pp 71-72.



(10) Minogue, pp. 22-23. Among the examples Minogue gives are John Maynard Keynes description of Clemenceau at Versailles as having “one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least” and General Beck’s remark about Hitler that “This fellow has no Fatherland at all.”



(11) G. K. Chesterton in an essay entitled “A Defence of Patriotism” which is the sixteenth chapter of his book The Defendant wrote that “'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.”



(12) George Grant, Lament For A Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, Carleton Library Series, (Carleton University Press: Ottawa, 1970) .   The first edition of this book came out in 1965.



(13) This can be found in the chapter on George Grant in Michael Ignatieff’s True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada (Viking: Toronto, 2009).



(14) Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism (Encounter: San Fransisco, 2003). This is the English translation by Diarmid Cammell. The French edition came out in 2002.



(15) John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada: Volume I: The Crusading Years 1895 to 1956 (MacMillan of Canada: Toronto, 1975), p. 140.



(16) Pierre Trudeau, the favourite Prime Minister of the new school of Canadian nationalists, was a noted Communist sympathizer, an admirer of Chinese Communist tyrant Mao Tse-tung and a friend of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.



(17) William Christian in his biography of George Grant writes, with regards to the vote that brought down the Diefenbaker government “George knew at once where he stood in this crisis. The night before the key vote he phoned Tommy Douglas, the NDP leader, to try to persuade him not to defeat the government.” William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1993), p. 241. The phone call failed. The left-wing NDP and the right-wing Social Credit both supported the Liberal vote of no confidence. This, of course, has nothing to do with the merits or demerits of Douglas’ socialized health care, but it is rather ironic when one considers the context in which Douglas’ name is most likely to arise today.

When Duty Calls

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (1) - Horace, Odes, Book III, 2:13

Lucy Maud Montgomery is best remembered for her novel Anne of Green Gables which tells the story of a spirited and imaginative orphan girl adopted, by accident or providence, by an elderly brother and sister who raised her on their farm in Prince Edward Island. Anne of Green Gables was the first of a series of eight novels in which Montgomery continued to tell the story of Anne Shirley. The final book in the series (2) Rilla of Ingleside which was published in 1920 is set during the first World War.

The main story in Rilla of Ingleside concerns Rilla Blythe, Anne’s youngest daughter, who is forced by the war to mature into a responsible adult from the vain and frivolous person she seems to be at the beginning of the novel. In the background to this story there is an ongoing commentary on the events of the war by the characters of the novel. While some of the commentary, such as that of Dr. Gilbert Blythe and the Presbyterian minister James Meredith is more educated and informed than that of others, such as that of Blythe housekeeper Susan Baker, there is a general consensus in support of Britain and of Canada’s contributions to the war effort and against the Kaiser. The Blythe boys each feel the call to do their duty to “king, country, and empire” and are ultimately supported in this by their family, friends and neighbors. The only significant dissenting voice is of an unlikable character, Mr. Pryor, derogatorily nicknamed “Whiskers-on-the-moon”, an elder in the church who is an avowed pacifist. His only significant appearance in the story other than in the disapproving conversation of others is in the 20th chapter, where he is invited to pray at a joint prayer meeting of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in support of the war. His “prayer” ends up being a pacifist lecture when is abruptly ended when Norman Douglas, the fiery, opinionated, village infidel who is by far the most likeable character of the book, wrings his neck.

While this is a work of fiction, L. M. Montgomery generally sets her stories in what is recognizably the late 19th –early 20th Century Canada that she knew and experienced. The picture she draws of a community coming together to sacrifice for and support their country in war is a picture of the real Canada of almost one hundred years ago.

There is quite a contrast between that day and our own. Hawks and doves are still among us, and each group is still smugly certain of its own righteousness and of the wickedness of the other. It is the attitude of everybody else, the people who are neither pacifists nor members of war’s cheerleading squad, that is different. Pacifism is no longer held in contempt and barely tolerated. Our attitude towards war has completely changed.

Why is this?

It has to do, I believe, with changes in the way we think about war and the way we think about our relationship to our society. Let us consider these in turn.

For quite some time now it has been customary around the time of Remembrance Day to talk about the soldiers we are remembering and honouring as those who died “for our freedom”. This way of speaking has become so familiar to us that we may not immediately recognize what is wrong with it.

The soldiers we are honouring did not go to war to fight and die for “our freedom”. They went to war to fight and die for “their country”. The difference between these two phrases is of tremendous significance.

If we say that we are fighting a war for “our freedom” what do we mean by “our freedom”?

If the enemy we are fighting against is trying to conquer our territory and enslave our people then “our freedom” could mean “the freedom of our country”. If this is what we mean then fighting for “our freedom” is one way in which we fight for “our country”.

This is not the only possible meaning of this expression, however. When we speak of fighting for “our freedom” we could mean by “our freedom” the liberal concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. If that is what we mean then when we speak of our soldiers as having fought and died for “our freedom” we mean that we are honouring them for fighting and dying for a political ideal, an abstract concept, rather than for a real, concrete community.

If this is what we mean then we are completely out of touch with the nature of the call of duty our soldiers answered when they went to war and with the reason why it is important to honour and remember them.

Unfortunately, it seems to be this second sense that is intended by those who tell us to remember the soldiers who died for “our freedom”. This is because in the 20th Century the idea became widespread among teachers, media commentators and other opinion-formers that it is more noble to fight and die for ideals and higher values than for something as concrete and everyday as “my country”.

Now perhaps you are thinking that such a notion represents an advancement towards enlightenment in our thinking about war. Is it not better to fight for things like justice, freedom, and truth which are eternal, universal, values than to fight for your country?

The answer is no it is not.

Human nature has both a creative and a destructive side. It is man’s creative side, which is the source of art, music, and literature, that responds best to universal values of this kind. These values inspire creative man to reach new heights and this is what makes the difference between a culture and a civilization.

War, however, is a manifestation of man’s destructive side. This does not need inspiration. Rather it needs to be contained and directed so that its harmful energy does the least amount of damage and, if possible, serves the good of the community. For this reason it is better for people to fight for their families, their homes, their friends, their neighbors, their communities and their countries than to fight for things like justice and truth.

It is noble to die for an ideal only when you willingly allow yourself to submit to the injustice of being killed for that ideal. In that case you are a martyr. If you combine the willingness to die for an ideal with the intention of killing others for your ideal you are not a martyr but a fanatic.

Look at what happens when you start to think about war as being fought for universal values. You take what is a conflict between two human societies and you escalate it to the level of a cosmological battle between good and evil. When you think of war as being fought for the benefit of your country you still ask the old questions of just war theory. Do we have just cause to go to war? Are we fighting in a just manner? When you think that you are fighting for good against an enemy who is the embodiment of evil those questions become irrelevant. If you are “good” and your enemy is “evil” all that matters is that you utterly destroy your enemy.

This exponentially multiplies the destructive potential of war. Human beings instinctively recognize this and for this reason universal values and ideals are incapable of stirring the martial spirit the way the call to fight, for kith and kin, heart and hearth, queen and country can.

Lord Thomas Babbington Macauley, the 19th Century British poet, historian and statesman may have been a Whig, but he showed an understanding of what moves men to lay down their lives in battle in his retelling of Livy’s account of the story of Horatius Cocles in his Lays of Ancient Rome:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

“The temples of his Gods”. It would be unthinkable that anyone today would write these words in the spirit in which Macauley intended them. It is almost universally accepted, in Western society today, that wars should not be fought for religion.

This is because Western countries have become increasingly secular. The state has become more powerful, a wall has been erected between it and the church, and religion, no longer seen as being primarily the corporate worship of a community, has been relegated to the sphere of the private individual. If religion has any value in the contemporary way of thinking it is as a means of making higher values real to the individual, thus providing him with spiritual inspiration.

If we think about religion in those terms then fighting for religion is no different than fighting for ideals. Is this the right way to think about religion however? Secularism has become so widespread that we have perhaps forgotten just how unnatural it is.

Religion, throughout history, and in our own societies until very recently, was not primarily a personal matter between the individual and God. It was a social institution which had a social function. Religion was the heart of the community, the community at worship, the institution which presided over births, coming of age ceremonies, marriages and deaths, which provided a society with its most basic rules and its fundamental identity.

When we think of religion in those terms then a man who fights and dies “for the temples of his Gods” is a man who fights and dies for his community and society, not a man who fights for abstract ideals. This is the difference between fighting for religion and fighting over religion.

As our societies have become secularized religion’s role in war has been greatly misrepresented. How often have we heard from disciples of this new school of militant atheism that religion is “the cause of most wars”? This is, however, utter nonsense. When Xerxes tried to conquer Greece in the early 5th Century BC, when Athens went to war with Sparta for 30 years at the end of the same century, when the Macedonian kings conquered everything between Greece and Persia in the 4th Century BC, and Rome went to war with Carthage for control of the Mediterranean World in the Punic Wars of the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC, when Sulla and Marius, Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, Octavian and Mark Anthony went to war with each other in the civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic, was religion the instigator? Was it religion that drove on conquerors like Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler? Of course not.

Religion has a vital role to play in war but it is seldom the instigator. Religion’s role is to unite a society, to rally the community and the country together in support of the war effort, to remind us of our duties and obligations towards our society. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing, and ultimately a necessary thing.

The possibility of war will always be present. While we should always pray for and seek out non-violent solutions to disputes between countries, we should not be so naïve as to think that this will always be possible. It is in man’s nature to go to war and the only way to achieve the goal of the elimination of war is by eliminating human beings from the planet.

Various proposals have been made in the name of “world peace” in the last century. Disarmament, the elimination of weapons and armies, has been one of them. The privatization of religion has been another. None of these proposals can bring about world peace because the cause of war lies elsewhere. All these proposals can do is to make the country that adopts them ill-prepared when war arrives.

A country should always be prepared to fight a war, although it should not go out of its way to look for one. If war comes, the country will be in a position of danger. That danger may not be very serious – it all depends upon the strength and goals the enemy. However more or less serious it may be, it will be there, because the state of being at war is by definition the state of being in danger. It is at this point that we are expected, whether we are soldiers going off to fight, or those supporting them at home, to unite behind our country. We have a moral obligation to do so.

We may not like the people who are in government when war comes. Our duty, however, is to our country, which is more than just its government. We may think the war is a mistake, is being fought for stupid reasons, and is against the best interests of our country. That does not negate our duty.

Think of the American aviator and patriot Charles Lindbergh. Before the United States entered the second World War Lindbergh was a leader of and spokesman for the America First Committee which promoted America’s noninvolvement in the war. When the United States was attacked by the Japanese Empire on December 7, 1941, however, his arguments against the war became irrelevant and he sought to rejoin America’s air force. A vindictive FDR ordered that his request to be recommissioned be denied but despite this he voluntarily flew a number of fighter missions as a civilian volunteer.

The men we honour this weekend were men who knew and understood their duty to their country. They knew that life was about more than just earning a living and having fun. They had not fallen into the trap of thinking that they were self-made individuals who owe everything they have and enjoy in life to their own merit and effort. Nor had they fallen into the trap of thinking that the life, the world, and their society and community, owed them a living. They understood that their blessings in life came ultimately from God and immediately from the civilization and culture, the country and the society, the community and neighborhood, the family and the home they were born into, grew up in, and lived in. When the call to do their duty, take up arms, and lay down their lives on behalf of their country came, they heard it in their hearts and answered.

In doing so they bequeathed to us a duty, the duty to honour and remember them, and to follow should that call ever come again.

(1)"It is sweet and right to die for one's country".

(2) In the sense of the internal chronology of the narrative. It was the sixth to be published.

Their Duty and Ours

Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because 'tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.

Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we'll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save. – A. E. Housman (1)

On November 11th, 1918 the Allied commander-in-chief and the German secretary of state signed the Armistice which brought the fighting in the first World War to an official end in a railway car in Compiègne Forest in Picardie, France. The following year, His Majesty King George V issued the following proclamation:

To all my people:

Tuesday next, November 11th, is the first anniversary of the armistice which stayed the world-wide carnage of the four preceding years, and marked the victory of right and freedom. I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of that great deliverance and of those who laid down their lives to achieve it.

To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this feeling it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the armistice came into force, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities. During that time, except in the rare cases where this might be impractical, all work, all sound and all locomotion should cease, so that in perfect stillness the thoughts of every one may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.

Thus November 11th came to be Armistice Day. After the hostilities, which were renewed in 1939, were brought a more decisive close in 1945 the day was renamed Remembrance Day in countries loyal to the British Crown. This change reflected the desire for a more general memorial of those who made the ultimate sacrifice at the call of king and country.

Although Remembrance Day is only 91 years old it embodies concepts which are much older, concepts which have been part of human society since time immemorial. One such concept is the concept of duty. It was out of duty that the men we honour on Remembrance Day gave their lives. It is out of duty that we who live keep their memory alive.

What is duty?

Duty is the sense that one owes a particular service to others. Society would fall apart without duty. Parents have duties to their children, children have duties to their parents. Spouses have duties to each other. Our highest duty is to God. Our second highest duty is to our country.

We, as members of a particular society and country, are part of a whole that is larger than ourselves, a whole that embraces not just those living today, but generations past and generations yet to come as well. Our leaders, owe a duty to our country, to see to it that our country is not endangered and the lives of its young people spent fighting wars for frivolous reasons.

When, however, our country finds itself at war, duty calls upon our young men to go out and fight and if need be die for our country. This is a duty that cannot be fulfilled apart from a willingness to sacrifice all one is, has, and hopes to be and gain. Unflinching bravery to the point of death is not something which can be bought. There is no quid pro quo that society can offer in return.

We honour them for their sacrifice, for honour and glory have always been the reward of valour. Some would prefer that we did not do this. They argue that to honour courage in battle is to glorify war, and hence to encourage and perpetuate it. Therefore, they say, in the interests of ending war and bloodshed, we should not glorify it. Such people are tragically and foolishly mistaken.

Men have always recognized that war is a horrible thing, the cause of bloodshed, death, destruction and sorrow. That has not prevented men from fighting wars. War is a product of human nature. St. James, in the first verses of the fourth chapter of his general epistle, identified lust or desire, as the root from which fighting and war springs. Desire is located in the human heart and cannot be eliminated by schemes to make war a thing of the past.

We cannot eliminate human nature without eliminating human beings entirely, a rather high price to pay for world peace. We should not go about provoking and instigating war, but we must be ready to defend our country in war if the need arises. For this reason, we must continue to honour those who have laid down their lives for our country in the past.

We too, you see, owe a duty to our country and a duty to the soldiers whose memory we collectively honour on Remembrance Day. We owe it to them to preserve the country they died for, a patrimony for their descendants and ours. We owe it to them to raise up future generations with the character and sense of duty they themselves displayed, so that should the call of duty come again, there will be those to answer it.

We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.

"God save the Queen" we living sing,
From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.

(1) The lines in the epigraph are the second, third, and fourth stanzas of A. E. Housman’s poem 1887, also known as “From Clee to heaven the beacon burns” (the first line of the poem). It is the first poem in Housman's A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896. The lines quoted at the end of this essay, are the sixth through eighth stanzas of the same poem. The celebrations referred to throughout the poem are, as the title indicates, of the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation.

For Queen and Country

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

Within the question asked by these well-known lines which open the sixth canto of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel lies a declaration. That declaration is simply this: that it is natural, good, and virtuous for a man to love his country. The man who does not has a dead soul.

The term for “love of one’s country” in English is patriotism. This word is derived from the Greek work patris and its Latin cognate patria both of which mean “homeland, native country”. Their most literal translation would be “fatherland” as they are themselves derived from pater which means father in both languages. Unfortunately however, that once innocuous word suggesting the “land of one’s fathers” now has sinister, nasty, connotations that are quite foreign to its original meaning.

From its etymology it would appear that patriotism is an affection whose proper object is a place rather than a people. It is this which is the primary difference between patriotism and nationalism, which latter term indicates affection for the people one is connected to by ties of ancestry and cultural heritage. Patriotism, however, does not denote love for one’s homeland as separate from one’s people but as distinct from one’s people. Barren territory cannot command “true patriot love”. The country the patriot loves is the homeland upon which is built the civil society to which he belongs.

Twenty-six years ago Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre, who at the time was the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and who currently is the O’Brien Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was invited to give the Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. The subject of the lecture he gave was “Is Patriotism a Virtue”?

If, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the standard by which we are to judge the answer to that question is liberal morality, the answer must be no. Liberal morality is the reigning system of ethics of the Modern Age. According to liberal ethics questions of right and wrong can only be answered by reason applied impartially and universally. Dr. MacIntyre argued that there are five central positions to liberal morality:

[F]irst, that morality is constituted by rules to which any rational person would under certain ideal conditions give assent; secondly, that those rules impose constraints upon and are neutral between rival and competing interests—morality itself is not the expression of any particular interest; thirdly, that those rules are also neutral between rival and competing sets of beliefs about what the best way for human beings to live is; fourthly, that the units which provide the subject-matter of morality as well as its agents are individual human beings and that in moral evaluations each individual is to count for one and nobody for more than one; and fifthly, that the standpoint of the moral agent constituted by allegiance to these rules is one and the same for all moral agents and as such in independent of all social particularity.


According to Dr. MacIntyre, if we accept such a moral standpoint, we are required to treat patriotism not as a virtue but as a vice. However, Dr. MacIntyre goes on to argue, liberalism is not the only way to understand morality.

Three years prior to giving that lecture, Dr. MacIntyre’s book After Virtue had been published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In this book Dr. MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment Project which had spawned the now ubiquitous system of liberal morality was doomed to failure because of its rejection of basic Aristotelian ethical concepts. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had written that virtue or moral excellence is like excellence in anything else. The purpose of a roof over your house is to protect you from the elements. A “good” roof does this well, as opposed to a roof which leaks and does its task poorly. Fishermen, farmers, police officers, etc. are “good” fishermen, farmers, and police officers to the extent that they fish, farm, and enforce the law, well. Likewise, Aristotle wrote, a man is virtuous when he fulfils the purpose of man, and fulfils it well.

By rejecting that Aristotelian teleology, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment Project had stripped morality of its necessary framework and foundation, and left it at the subjective whims of the individual resulting in moral chaos. He pleaded for a return to Aristotelian virtue.

In his lecture on patriotism he spelled out an alternative to liberal morality, that was particular where liberalism is universal. According to this alternative view “it is an essential characteristic of the morality which each of us acquires that it is learned from, in and through the way of life of some particular community.” Moreover, the goods “by reference to which and for the sake of which any set of rules must be justified are also going to be goods that are socially specific and particular”. Finally, it is only in the context of a community that we can be moral at all. Morality is difficult for human beings, and:

[I]t is important to morality that I can only be a moral agent, because we are moral agents, that I need those around me to reinforce my moral strengths and assist in remedying my moral weaknesses. It is in general only within a community that individuals become capable of morality, are sustained in their morality and are constituted as moral agents by the way in which other people regard them and what is owed to and by them as well as by the way in which they regard themselves.

Thus:

Loyalty to that community, to the hierarchy of particular kinship, particular local community, and particular natural community, is on this view a prerequisite for morality. So patriotism and those loyalties cognate to it are not just virtues but central virtues.

In the remainder of his lecture Dr. MacIntyre defended this alternative morality in which patriotism was indeed a virtue. Acknowledging the liberal argument that patriotism would require an uncritical attitude towards one’s country, he answers it by saying that what is permanently exempted from criticism is “the nation conceived as a project, a project somehow or other brought to birth in the past and carried on so that a morally distinctive community was brought into being which embodied a claim to political autonomy in its various organized and institutionalized expressions”. An uncritical attitude towards one’s country’s current leaders or laws is not required, and indeed, there are certain extreme circumstances where the survival of the country might inspire the patriot to take drastic actions against it’s current leader. Here MacIntyre pointed to Adam von Trott, a Christian conservative, German patriot, who tried to bring down Hitler in order to save Germany (which resulted in his arrest and execution in 1944).

Some Christians, who would not ordinarily be expected to sympathize with the ideas of liberalism, might be alarmed at the particularist system of morality MacIntyre defended in his lecture. Their fears, that particularism might lead to moral relativism, are groundless. Christianity’s requirement that we be just to all men does not exclude particular loyalties. “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men”, St. Paul wrote in the sixth chapter of his epistle to the Galatian Church, which he immediately followed up with “especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” The universal hortatory subjunctive in the first part of the verse does not exclude the amplified particular application in the second. St. Paul’s epistles are in fact full of particular duties being enjoined on certain people towards other specific people – duties of husband to wife, and wife to husband, of children to parents and parents to children, etc.

In the third chapter of his epistle to the Church in Philippi St. Paul speaks of our citizenship in heaven. He does not say, however, that it is our only citizenship, and excuse us from participation in and our duties to the temporal societies to which we belong. To interpret this verse that way would be as wrong as it would be to interpret Christ’s remark “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” as saying that we should not display filial piety.

St. Paul did not disavow his temporal citizenship by declaring his citizenship in heaven. In the Book of Acts St. Luke records how St. Paul, after having been arrested in Jerusalem, and about to be scourged, told the centurion who was guarding him “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” Later, when he appeared before Festus, he invoked his right as a Roman citizen to have his case heard before Caesar.

St. Paul was not the kind of man who would claim the privileges of earthly citizenship while denying the duties that go along with it. In his epistle to the Church in Rome he commands obedience to temporal authorities and goes so far as to identify their role as enforcers of the law as being ordained by God.

Aristotle wrote that it was the nature of a virtue to be a mean between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency. It follows from this, that if the virtue of patriotism consists in loving one’s country, then there are two accompanying vices, loving one’s country too much or in the wrong way, and not loving one’s country enough.

The vice of not loving one’s country enough can manifest itself in indifference to one’s country’s survival or well-being, refusal to take up arms in defense of one’s country should the call of duty arise, or the manifestly perverse form of preferring another country, even the enemy of one’s country, to one’s own.

The vice of loving one’s country too much can also take many forms. It could take the form of jingoism or hostility towards other countries. It could take the form of blind support for all the policies of one’s government even when they are manifestly wrong, stupid, evil and deleterious to the well-being of the country. It could take the form of an ideological nationalism that demands that all other loyalties, to family, God, and local community, take second place to loyalty to country.

Those who are prone to the last mentioned form of excess would do well to remember the words of Edmund Burke:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

Patriotism is a natural affection. We love our family members, not because we can make a rational argument for it or even because we are commanded to (which if we are Christians we are) but because it is natural to do so. It is part of who we are to form bonds to the people who are closest to us, to the parents who raise us, to the siblings we grow up with. It is through forming these bonds that we learn how to form bonds of friendship to our acquaintances and neighbors in everyday life. We also develop attachment to places. We grow to love the houses we grow up in, the countryside, and the various buildings – school, grocery store, post office, etc. in which live our everyday lives. From these attachments to the people and places we know best, our love for our country, which encompasses them and countless other similar communities, is formed.

It is normal, right, and virtuous to form such attachments.

As for those who don’t, we will return in closing, to the words of Sir Walter Scott::

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.