Feminism is the Enemy of Freedom and Justice

The most insightful commentary that I have run across on the recent media attempt to torpedo the campaign of Donald Trump with crude and lewd remarks he was recorded having made ten years ago is by Dr. Stephen Baskerville the Professor of Government and Director of the International Politics and Policy Program at Patrick Henry College. His article, entitled “The Sexual Revolution Triumphant”, which was posted at the Daily Caller on the Monday after the second presidential debate, makes the observation that both candidates are “not only products but pioneers of the Sexual Revolution, and together they personify its political dynamic.” Trump, Dr. Baskerville goes on to explain, represents the hedonism of the earlier stage of the Revolution. The later, political side of the Revolution eventually morphed into “the more aggressive and authoritarian feminism.”

The feminists were at first allies of the hedonists, Dr. Baskerville points out, but they “replaced the old sexual morality, defined by religion and enforced by social disapproval, with new political definitions of sin, defined by state functionaries and enforced by gendarmes” eventually creating a “political dynamic that both encouraged unrestrained sex and then punished men for engaging in it.” The success of the political side of the Sexual Revolution can be seen in the fact that in response to the Trump tape scandal, the outrage even of conservatives has not been expressed in terms of traditional morality but rather those of “the political ideology that has replaced it: ‘sexism,’ ‘misogyny,’ ‘sexual harassment,’ and other new political jargon that no one fully understands because it can be expanded to mean anything.”

What the liberal reporters who broke the story about the Trump tape hoped to accomplish, as I pointed out in my last essay, was to divide the Republican Party and, more specifically, to turn moral and religious conservatives against Trump. What Dr. Baskerville’s insightful observation about how conservatives have been using the jargon of feminist ideology rather than of traditional morality to condemn Trump’s remarks means is that to the extent that the liberal attack on Trump has succeeded in achieving its ends it has also succeeded in enlisting the champions of traditional morality and sexuality on the side of their mortal enemy feminism.

That feminism is the mortal enemy of more than just traditional morality can be seen in the follow up to the tape scandal. After the second presidential debate, in which Trump wiped the floor with Clinton, the media began publishing allegations of groping and other sexual misconduct against Trump. The allegations, by contrast with those made against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, are of exceedingly low credibility. The accused is an exceedingly wealthy, high profile businessman and celebrity, and thus a goldmine for anyone who could credibly bring a lawsuit against him over something like this, yet the accusations pertain to events that supposedly happened as far back as thirty years. One of the accusers seems to have lifted her accusation verbatim from a Velvet Underground song. The question of Trump’s guilt or innocence, however, is not what concerns me here, but rather how liberals and feminists responded to those who questioned the credibility of these accusations.

Let us use George Takei, the actor, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series and other versions of the franchise, as an example. Takei has a large social media following and is outspoken in his progressive opinions. On Friday, October 14th, at 7:22 am, Takei tweeted the following:

“If you ever wonder why sexual assault victims don’t come forward, just look what’s happening now to those who do.”

Let us now parse this interesting remark of Mr. Sulu’s and see what we can discover. Implicit in these snide and snarky words is the idea that we ought never to question the credibility of claims of sexual assault. If we question the credibility of those who make accusations of sexual assault, victims of sexual assault won’t come forward, therefore by questioning the credibility of accusers, we are preventing victims from obtaining justice. Shame on us.

Do you see where this kind of reasoning leads? To say that it is wrong to question the credibility of an accuser is to say that an accuser has the right to be presumed to be telling the truth. If that seems reasonable to you, then you need to recognize that giving accusers the right of presumption of truth is incompatible with another right long regarded as a bedrock principle of justice in Western Civilization and especially the English speaking world. That is the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

This principle, which goes back as far as the jurisprudence of the Roman Empire - ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (1) – has been fundamental to English Common Law for centuries. It is closely related to the principle that Sir William Blackstone, writing in the eighteenth century, formulated as “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” a principle that also has ancient roots. Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias, famously declared that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one. In the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, Abraham pled with the Lord not to destroy the wicked cities if ten righteous men could be found therein and He agreed. In the event, not finding even that many, He sent His angels to rescue Lot and his family, before the fire and brimstone fell.

These ancient and traditional principles are fundamental to our entire way of doing justice which, whatever its flaws may be, for all earthly justice is flawed, is superior to any system that has ever operated on the opposite concept of a presumption of guilt. These principles are far too important to sacrifice to the idols of feminist ideology.

Yet that is exactly what feminism expects us to do. George Takei did not just beam his sentiments out of thin air. The idea that those who accuse others of sexual harassment, assault and rape have a right to be believed, because questioning their veracity discourages victims from coming forward, is part of what feminists have been brainwashing their victims into thinking in gender studies classrooms for years. The result, naturally, of teaching a particular kind of accuser that she has the right to be believed, has been an avalanche of false accusations which have ruined the education, careers, and lives of many. Just ask the Duke University lacrosse team or the poor sap that Mattress Girl got her five minutes in the spotlight for defaming. These are the sort of things that come from allowing an ideological movement, whose leading personalities in the 1970s and 1980s made the absurd claims that all heterosexual intercourse is rape and that rape is an instrument whereby men as a class oppress women as a class thereby making all men culpable to have this much influence over the minds of youth.

Dr. Baskerville, in the article that I referenced at the beginning of this essay, argues that the success of the Sexual Revolution in replacing the clear language of traditional morality with the malleable and expansive ideological jargon of feminism, so that even supposedly conservative politicians feel compelled to use the latter rather than the former when condemning Trump’s locker room talk, is ominous because it is the nature of the new terminology to create a rationalization for a power grab on the part of the kind of radicals who find their champion in Hillary Clinton. This, along with what I have pointed out above about how feminism’s insistence upon a right of presumption of truth for accusers in sexual harassment/assault and rape cases would mean the abandonment of the basic principle of the right of presumption of innocence for the accused, demonstrates how feminist ideology is a threat to the principles of freedom and justice that have been essential elements of the tradition of Western civilized societies for centuries.

(1) The burden is on he who asserts, not he who denies.

Scandals

In May of 1973, as the Watergate scandal that would eventually bring down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon was in the early stages of unfolding in the press, our former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, addressing the House of Commons said “Honourable members know what has happened recently in the United States. Even making observations about it causes me very deep pain. The President has been a friend of mine for years. I wonder how many people in Canada who were going to abolish the monarchy are having second thoughts now about asking for a president?”

I, who very much share the Chief’s monarchist sentiments and preference for our own system of parliamentary government, cannot count the number of times since the current American presidential race began that I have been thankful that we are fortunate enough in Canada, to have a head of state who is above the political process and whose position is filled by good old-fashioned hereditary right of succession. No matter how loathsome our politicians are – and the present governing batch led by mindless media-whore Justin Trudeau are about as loathsome as they get – we can always look to our Sovereign and say God Save the Queen!

The Watergate scandal cost the United States the leadership of the statesman who was, in my opinion, the best president they had in the last century and a half. What Nixon was forced to resign over was less than what one of the present candidates has already done while serving in the administration of the outgoing president as Secretary of State. Nixon, having inherited a quagmire in the Vietnam War in which thousands of American lives had been wasted through the incompetence of the previous administration, brought America’s involvement in this conflict to an end in a way that minimized the damage to her national honour. By contrast, the former Secretary of State now running for president, through her ill-conceived support for Islamic rebel movements throughout the Middle East, helped created ISIS which is presently engaged in a jihadist war of terror against the rest of the world and, blaming the problems of the region on the Russian, Syrian, and Iranian governments actively fighting ISIS, proposes to solve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria that she helped generate, by pursuing the same failed policies in a way that could lead to the kind of direct US-Russia confrontation that statesmen spent the entire Cold War trying to avoid.

Late last week, as Wikileaks released documents showing that this candidate said one thing to audiences of Wall Street financiers and another to the general public – and advocated the practice of the same duplicity – the Washington Post, the liberal newspaper that had broken the Watergate story and which supports the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton attempted to generate a Watergate sized scandal for her opponent Donald J. Trump. They released a videotape from 2005, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush, prior to an appearance by Trump on NBC's Access Hollywood which Bush was co-anchoring at the time, could be heard on a bus having a rather crude and vulgar chat about women.

That Donald Trump had engaged in such a crass conversation probably came as a genuine shock to no one. There was much feigned shock over it, with nobody expressing more faux outrage than Hillary Clinton, who is no stranger to gutter talk herself. Trump apologized for the remarks which he described as “locker room” talk an expression which has long been around for the kind of unguarded and often lewd conversation which often takes place between men in informal settings in which women are not present. Clinton, deliberately parsing the expression in an overly literal way, cited coaches and athletes who tweeted that they never heard talk like that in their locker rooms. Her cheerleaders in the mainstream media, including the contemptible Anderson Cooper of CNN who co-moderated the second presidential debate at Washington University, St. Louis, two days after the tape was released, attempted to twist Trump’s words into something worse than boasting and obscenity. It is apparent to anybody who is both honest and in possession of a brain that Trump’s boast that “when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything”, while utterly distasteful, was not a declaration of entitlement to commit sexual assault but a statement of the fact that the fame and wealth that come with celebrity attract women.

Other than distracting people from the Wikileaks revelations about Clinton, the heirs of Woodward and Bernstein clearly had two objectives in publishing this story. Evident in the timing of the story was their hope to rattle Trump just prior to the second debate. This objective failed. When the matter came up at the beginning of the debate Trump apologized, repeated that it was just locker room talk, and pointed out that while they were condemning him for his words, Bill Clinton had been accused by a number of women of sexual harassment, assault, and even rape. He had arranged a pre-debate press conference with several of these women. Also present – and more relevant – was Kathy Shelton, a woman who had been raped as a twelve year old. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer who defended her rapist by attacking her character and sanity and who in a taped interview laughed and gloated over her victory in the case even though she was aware her client was guilty. Trump was able to prevent the scandal from dominating a debate in which he was able to get his message across – the need to concentrate on fighting ISIS rather than the other governments fighting her, the failure of Obamacare, the need for “extreme vetting” of refugees, etc. – while hammering away at Clinton over her emails, foreign policy failures, and mendacity.

The other objective, and probably the main goal of the scandalmongers, was to divide the Republican Party. In this they were more successful. Indeed, as Paul Ryan, John McCain, and other establishment Republican figures were quick to distance themselves from the Trump campaign and condemn their party’s candidate it became difficult to tell which group displayed the greater hypocrisy. Was it the Clinton Democrats, who for years have promoted sex instruction classes and contraceptive handouts in schools, who more lately have taken to insisting that boys and girls be allowed to use each other’s bathrooms and showers, who have basically done everything they can to undermine traditional Christian morality, and whose numbers include some of the most dirty-minded and foul-mouthed comedians, actors, singers and other celebrities imaginable, but who are now all of a sudden discovering their inner Mrs. Grundys? Or was it the mainstream Republicans who, having had the opportunity in 1992 and again in 1996 to nominate a man of high moral calibre with all the patriotic policies on trade and immigration that have been attracting supporters to Trump, rejected him and now, finding the policies that their grassroots voters have demanded being championed by a reality television and beauty pageant host are pretending to be surprised to find that his private conversation resembles that of a popular entertainer rather than that of a monk?

It was Republican politicians, of course, like Ryan and McCain who danced to the tune the media played. We await the outcome of November 8th to discover whether the religious conservatives in the Republican Party’s voting base find Trump’s off colour conversation of a decade ago so offensive that they would be willing to allow Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States. While one’s words do indicate one’s character, and character is an important consideration in evaluating a would-be leader, it is to be hoped that America’s conservatives – and her voters in general – have enough sense to weigh the shortcomings in character revealed by Trump’s raunchy talk against the shortcomings revealed by Clinton’s lying about her mishandling of classified information, her shedding crocodile tears over the humanitarian crisis she helped create in Syria while attempting to pin the blame on Russia, her making billions of dollars worth of arms deals with governments that happen to be big donors to the Clinton Foundation despite being aware that they are sponsors of terrorism, and countless other such corrupt abuses of office that could be pointed to and realise that not only do Clinton’s shortcomings outweigh Trump’s, they also are more directly relevant to the question of what kind of a president she would be. This is to be hoped because Western civilization is presently facing the existential crisis Jean Raspail predicted in The Camp of the Saints and to meet that crisis needs a Donald Trump at the helm of the United States and not a Hillary Clinton.

Whatever happens, it is undeniable that the level of American politics has been brought to a new low by this election. In reality, of course, politics has always been dominated by the pursuit of sex, wealth, and power and those who in the tradition of lofty philosophical discourse on politics that began with Plato two and a half millennia ago envision a political society organized towards the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must look elsewhere than to the popularity contests we know as democratic elections. For which reason I will close with the thought on which I began – thankfulness, that here in Canada we still have a Head of State who is above this degrading process, and of whom we can say, no matter how horrible our politicians are, God Save the Queen!

Hic et Ille V

The Prince and the Premier

As I have said in the past and will undoubtedly say again, contrary to the thinking of progressive republicans, royalty and all that it entails – kings and queens, princes and princesses, and the office of a reigning sovereign monarch - is more important and necessary now, in the age of democracy, than ever before. When the day to day running of the affairs of state is in the hands of officials who are chosen by popular election and are therefore, of necessity, politicians, people who by definition are more power-hungry, arrogant, and corruptible than anyone else, they must be humbled by being placed in the position of servants to the Crown. Treating them as servants of the people will not suffice. Every tyrant in the history of world has regarded himself as being the servant, friend, and spokesman of the people. Nothing is more gratifying to the ego of a politician, nothing feeds his deadly and dangerous hubris more, than the thought that he represents, speaks for and serves the people and that they love him for it. He must be forced to bend the knee to royalty for it is only this that keeps him in his proper place and checks the more unpalatable aspects of his nature.

We received an illustration of just this point last weekend. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived in Canada with their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, on Saturday for a week-long tour of the west coast of the Dominion. When they debarked from their plane in Victoria they were greeted by Canadian officials including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau, that smarmy, slimy, embodiment of everything that is wrong with the present era, oozing the sickeningly superficial saccharine charm for which he is notorious, attempted to “high five” the young prince and was rebuffed. Prince George demonstrated his good taste and breeding by refusing to even shake the hand of the low-life who is an embarrassment to Canada and a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister. Already at the age of three, the prince was able to put the haughtiest and most arrogant premier our country has ever known, in his place.

The Tycoon and the Witch

South of the border, due to the rebellious Whiggery of their forebears, our Yankee friends are not fortunate enough to have a royal Sovereign reigning over them and a royal family to keep their politicians in line. Consequently, they rely upon popular election to determine their head of state once every four years. This is one of those years and this Monday evening the first of the three debates between the Republican and the Democratic candidates for the office of President of the United States of America took place at Hofstra University in New York, moderated by NBC’s Lester Holt. The debate attracted more viewers than any other in the history of televised debates and will probably hold that record for quite some time having been something of a snoozer that is likely to discourage people from watching future debates.

In the period leading up to the debate, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton saw her eight point lead in the polls over Republican candidate Donald Trump shrink away to nothing. This was largely of her own making rather than to an improved performance on the part of Trump. As more and more damning information kept coming out about her compromising American national security by illegally using a private server for classified e-mails, how access to her while Secretary of State could be bought by large donations to the Clinton Foundation, and other such scandals, she did not help things by calling a sizable portion of the American public “irredeemable” and a “basket of deplorables” while speaking at a fund-raising banquet for the alphabet soup gang. Then, when she had to be taken away from the 9/11 memorial, the wall of media denial that there was anything to be concerned about in regards to her health collapsed. It turns out that all those midnight excursions on her broomstick to dance with the devil in mountaintop orgies had taken their toll, and she had come down with pneumonia.

The mainstream media, which is almost entirely on Clinton’s side, concluded after Monday night that she had managed to turn that around and to take back the momentum from Trump by defeating her opponent in debate. It is true that by the criteria ordinarily used to judge the outcome of a debate, Clinton did better than Trump. Trump did very well for the first portion of the debate in which he talked about trade and the disastrous consequences the trade deals of previous governments have had for American workers, but in the last two thirds of the debate wasted a lot of time defending himself on ridiculous rabbit trail matters like the Obama birth certificate and Rosie O’Donnell and missed a number of opportunities to go on the offensive against Clinton. Clinton definitely came across as the more skilled and expert debater which she, her team, and her echo chamber in the media all see as supporting the central argument in her campaign, namely that she has the experience and knowledge necessary for the position and her opponent does not. What they seem unable to see is that this also supports a key argument in Trump’s campaign – that she has been and is an entrenched part of the very establishment that has made all the bad decisions – free trade deals, lax border security, liberal immigration, the incompetent bumbling in the Middle East that has made ISIS into the threat it is today – that he has been railing against and that therefore, the experience upon which she bases her claim to being qualified to lead the country also disqualifies her. Trump made this very point Monday night when he said yeah she has all this experience but it is bad experience. This is a point which media liberals and other hard-core Clinton supporters will never understand but it is one that is likely to resonate with voters fed up with previous governments. It is their frustration that has been fueling the Trump train’s momentum which is why that momentum, to the consternation of the chattering classes, will probably continue to be built despite, or perhaps even because of, this debate.

The Attempted Lynching of Kellie Leitch

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who since 2011 has been the Conservative MP for the riding of Simcoe-Grey and who served as Minister of Labour and of the Status of Women in the last two years of the Harper premiership, has thrown her hat in the ring for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whether or not she should get the leadership, I do not know. I do not know, for example, where she stands on the constitution. Nobody should lead the Conservative Party who is not a firm supporter of our traditional parliamentary constitution of House of Commons and Senate under the reigning monarch. I am not saying that she is not such, just that I have no information on where she stands on these things.

Whether or not she should get the position, the controversy that the liberal and progressive left have generated over her position on immigration is absolutely absurd. Indeed, it was not even a stated position or proposal that sparked the attacks on her, but merely a question put in a survey to her supporters. The question was "Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?"

The question is a reasonable one and quite mild. It did not even ask whether immigrants should be required to hold Canadian values, just whether they should be screened for anti-Canadian ones. The majority, not just of Leitch's supporters but of Canadians in general would answer "yes." Yet the liberal and progressive left - including leftists in the Conservative Party like Chad Rogers and her former colleague Jason Kenney - shrieked, and wailed, and wrung their hands in despair that such a horrible, mean-spirited, thought could ever have been expressed by someone seeking to lead a major Canadian party.

The irony is undoubtedly lost on these liberals that by screening "for anti-Canadian values" Leitch means screening for ideas that are contrary to their own, that is the liberals' own, dearly beloved values like equality of the sexes, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism and all that other sappy nonsense. To acknowledge this would require that they acknowledge and address the fundamental contradictions in their own set of unrealistic beliefs. It is liberals who cherish "values", a term George Grant once pointed out had been taken from Nietzsche to refer to the constructions of our own wills that have taken the place of the eternal verities of goodness, truth, and beauty, and in Canada it has been liberals who have been telling us for decades what our "values" are. Conservatives cherish institutions, customs, traditions, and order over nebulous and malleable "values."

Imagine how the left would have howled had Leitch, instead of asking a survey question about screening for anti-Canadian values, instead outright proposed, as that great old Canadian political scientist, economist, social commentator and humourist Stephen Leacock once did that “we must see to it that our newcomers are British, or something so akin to it as to blend and fuse with the British Commonwealth as a natural part of it” (While There Is Time: The Case Against Social Catastrophe, McLelland & Stewart, 1945, p. 103). This was not a controversial proposal at the time and in fact reflected actual immigration policy, under both Conservative and Liberal governments, until the 1960s.

I would have no problem, were I running for Tory leader, with resurrecting Leacock's policy which, to anyone who treasures the rich heritage of English Common Law justice, ordered liberty and prescriptive rights, and parliamentary government all under and represented by the Sovereign Crown, it is a quite sensible safeguard against the erosion of these things. I will not be running for Tory leader, however, for to do so would require that I become a politician and I could never look myself in the mirror again if I were to do that.

Hic et Ille IV

Sad News

I learned this morning that Phyllis Schlafly passed away yesterday at the age of 92. Schlafly was a noted American conservative leader. She will probably be most remembered for leading the anti-feminist campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment – one of the few social conservative campaigns in the last half century to actually succeed in attaining its objective. In 1964, her book A Choice Not An Echo, called upon conservatives within the Republican Party to choose Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater as their candidate. Just as the title of Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences has endured as a slogan in the American conservative movement – regrettably, the book’s substantial content has not fared as well – so ought the title of Schlafly’s book to endure as a perennial reminder to purportedly conservative politicians, ever faced with the temptation to adopt progressive policies in order to “get with the times” and “appeal to the masses,” that they are supposed to present the electorate with an alternative to liberalism, not just alternative leadership to liberalism. Rona Ambrose and other leaders of Canada’s Conservative Party, I am looking in your direction as I write this. Most recently, Schlafly, who operated mostly through an organization she founded back in the 1970s called the Eagle Forum, has taken a strong stand on immigration and accordingly endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for the US Presidency. Her enemies, as far back as Betty Friedan in the fight over the ERA, accused her of being a hate-filled woman, an accusation that I have seen repeated in one or two headlines announcing her death – demonstrating once again, just how unclassy people who believe in a classless society can be – but like most if not all accusations of “hate” from the left, this was obviously a projection of their own feelings upon the object of their own hatred. She was a devout Roman Catholic Christian, whose writings I have enjoyed over the years. May she rest in peace.

Happy News

Angela Merkel’s sinister (that’s Latin for left) attempt to make the death of Western civilization through its own liberalism foretold in Jean Raspail’s dystopic novel The Camp of the Saints into a living reality has now backfired against her. Her party did poorly in the state elections in Germany this past weekend, coming in third in her own state, behind the AfD party which opposes the policy of national and cultural suicide through the embrace of the migration tsunami that Merkel has spearheaded over the last year and a half. Acknowledging that her decisions with regards to the “refugees” contributed to her losses at the polls, she has nevertheless doubled down and insisted that these decisions were right. Perhaps she ought not to be blamed for being a slow learner, however. It seems to be a common affliction in her country, which last year sentenced an 87 year old grandmother to ten years in prison for saying that Auschwitz was “not historically proven” to be a death camp, thus demonstrating that they learned absolutely nothing of value whatsoever from their twelve years under the tyranny of the Third Reich where people were imprisoned, or worse, for saying things the regime did not like. Hopefully, however, the trouncing Merkel got over the weekend shows that the Germans have learned a lesson or two from her misrule. Let us pray that the trend indicated by this election, and by the BREXIT vote in the UK a few months back, will continue, that the monstrosity that is the EU will be brought down, and the “Camp of the Saints” style death of Europe for which it had longed, averted.

Quis erit Caesar?

George Santayana famously stated that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The eighteenth century founders of the American Republic might have profited from this insight, had it been made prior to their own time. In their rebellion against the British Crown and Parliament, they envisioned the republic they built for themselves as a New Rome in the New World. The old Rome, having driven out the Tarquins with much greater grounds of complaint than the Americans ever had against King George III, created a vacuum in their constitution which periodically had to be filled by dictators, and which eventually was permanently filled by the Caesars. The lesson to be learned is that if you will not have your lawful king to rule over you, eventually you will have to bow your knee to Caesar. It is evident that the American Republic, having become an empire in the twentieth century, is now entering a phase of Caesarism and the question the Americans will be answering in their election this November is who gets to be Caesar? Will it be the decrepit old harpy, who thinks she is owed the position by virtue of her sex, who dishonestly wrangled the nomination of her party away from the more popular Bernie Saunders despite running while under criminal investigation, who thinks that by claiming that not knowing “C” stood for “classified” on the top-secret information she was so loose with as Secretary of State excuses her behaviour rather than demonstrating her to be incompetent to hold high office, who is the most corrupt candidate her party – the party of Tammany Hall and Joseph P. Kennedy, mind you – has ever known, and who with the blood of Serbs, Iraquis, Libyans, Egyptians and Syrians already on her hands from her warmongering as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, seems determined to go head to head against Russia? Or will it be the first candidate in decades not to dance to the tune of the one-world globalists and free traders, who is instead, to borrow the words of the late Phyllis Schlafly, presenting Americans with “a choice, not an echo”?

St. Mother Theresa and the Beast

Mother Theresa of Calcutta has just been canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Without calling into question her worthiness of the honour, I would merely observe that it is somewhat tainted by the fact that presiding over the canonization was a Pope truly worthy of the appellation the Reformers gave to his predecessors in the sixteenth century – Antichrist.

Some Good Reads

All of my writing time for the past couple of weeks has been occupied with material for publication elsewhere. I anticipate this will be the case for a couple of more weeks as well.

In the meantime I have some reading recommendations.

Mark Moncrieff of the blog "Upon Hope" has posted an essay entitled "Homosexuality and Conservatism" which I highly recommend. In a succinct manner, he discusses the radical change in public attitudes towards homosexuality, how this has come about, how the past status quo has been misrepresented as have the consequences of the revolution, and what the appropriate conservative attitude towards all this is.

The "Alt-Right" has received much media attention lately, thanks to Hillary Clinton's attack on them earlier this week. There have been several excellent responses to this from the Alt-Right itself, an online assortment of right-wingers who, as their label would suggest, present an alternative to mainstream conservatism - or cuckservatism - that is actually right wing. The blog Alt-Right has posted a video entitled "We Are the Alt-Right" with a descriptive paragraph that I will reproduce in full here:

Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different. Morality matters and degeneracy is real. All cultures are not equal and we are not obligated to think they are. Man is a fallen creature and there is more to life than hollow materialism. Finally, the white race matters, and civilisation is precious. This is the Alt-Right.

That seems to pretty much sum up what the Alt-Right - or at least the Christian segment of it - stands for and while progressives, liberals, and neoconservatives will no doubt be aghast that in the Current Year anyone would dare express, let alone hold, such beliefs, they seem to be pretty basic truths to me. Of course, to all of that I would add the even more important point that royal monarchy is the best form of government and that government by elected politicians ought only to be allowed when, as in the Westminster parliamentary system, the position the politicians are elected into is that of a servant - the literal meaning of the word "Minister" - of a royal master. The position of servant to a royal master is humbling, which elected politicians need the most. The position of servant of the people or the public, brings out all of their natural hubris.

Which leads me to my final recommendation. The royalist sentiments in my last paragraph are those of a Canadian High Tory, and while I am a representative of the right-wing of that species, there is a left-wing too. The best representative of it is Professor Ron Dart of the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbottsford, British Columbia. My essay, "High Tories, Left and Right" a couple of years ago was a review of an older book of his entitled The Canadian High Tory Tradition. The American Anglican Press has just released his The North American High Tory Tradition . I have reviewed this new volume for the upcoming issue of the Anglican Tradition and you can order the book which, despite its left-of-centre leanings at times is still well worth reading, directly from the publisher here.

Trump versus Clinton, Huntington versus Fukuyama

On the final day of the Democratic National Convention one of the speakers was Khizr Khan. Not the fifteenth century founder of the Sayyid dynasty in India, of course, but a Pakistani born immigrant to the United States. Khan condemned Republican candidate Donald Trump’s policies with regards to immigration as violating the American constitution. He talked about his son who had died as an American soldier in the Iraq War and asked what Trump had sacrificed.

Most of the discussion that this has generated over the last week or so has been long on emotion and short on fact. Although Khan had publicly attacked Trump, anything Trump said in response, no matter how reasonable, was condemned, because Khan was a grieving parent. One would think, from the propaganda that began appearing all over the progressive media, that Trump had been personally responsible for the death of Khan’s son. The irony is that Trump was against the Iraq War and has condemned it frequently throughout his campaign, while Khan’s own preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York voted for the war and thus was in part responsible for his son’s death.

That did not come up very often in the media’s anti-Trump fest. It did not fit the narrative. Nor did the fact that Khan had a personal motive other than the death of his son for attacking Trump. He is a lawyer who specializes in helping Muslims immigrate to the United States. He is also an advocate of Shariah Law who has been accused of having connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic organization that is the parent organization of terrorist group Hamas and which - with the support of the Obama administration and especially his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – has fomented revolution against several secular Middle Eastern governments which, when successful, has resulted in those governments being replaced by jihadist theocracies.

What is most interesting in all of this is the way in which the American election this year is turning out to be a contest, not just between the two individuals Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the alternate visions of post-Cold War geopolitics offered two decades ago by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington.

Fukuyama, who is currently a professor at Stanford University, was the author of a famous essay “The End of History?” which appeared in the September 1989 issue of The National Interest. He expanded the thesis of this essay into a book length treatise entitled The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. Fukuyama’s thesis was an update of the nineteenth century Whig Interpretation of History. He argued, that the triumph of the American-led free world over Communism in the Cold War, signalled, not just the end of that particular conflict, but the end of history itself in the sense that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism would become universally accepted and the basis of a new, world order. Fukuyama saw this outcome as both inevitable and desirable, and his vision of a Pax Americana – a new world order of liberal, democratic capitalism, benevolently policed by the American military – has been the basis of the foreign policy of every American administration since.

The late political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, saw the post-Cold War world as shaping up in a different way, and responded to Fukuyama’s book with an essay “The Clash of Civilizations”, published in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. He too expanded his thesis into a book length treatise, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which was published in 1996. He argued that conflicts between civilizations and cultures, however regrettable, were an inevitable recurrence in human history, which he viewed as being more cyclical, as opposed to the very linear understanding of history found in the original Whig Interpretation and Fukuyama’s thesis. The end of the Cold War, he believed, signalled the end of a particular kind of conflict, the ideological type that had characterized the Twentieth Century, but that other inter-civilizational conflicts would arise, and that the next one was likely to be between Western civilization and the non-Western world, especially the Islamic world.

Fukuyama’s thesis seems to me to be not just utter foolishness but dangerous utter foolishness. The Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant argued in Lament For a Nation (1965) that the world seemed to be headed towards a “universal and homogenous state” of American style liberalism, like the kind Fukuyama believed to be desirable, but observed that the ancients had believed that any such universal state would be a tyranny. If the ancients were right, as Grant believed as do I, then all the recent efforts to build a borderless, global, society, however well-intentioned they may be, are leading us down a path to darkness and misery.

Huntington’s thesis, by contrast, has been borne out by the events of the last two and a half decades. Western civilization is now in a clash with the non-Western, and especially the Islamic world, and those who believe in Fukuyama’s vision of universal, liberal, democracy are jeopardizing the West’s ability to survive, let alone win, this conflict. Observe, for example, the consequences of the attempts of the last two American presidential administrations to introduce liberal democracy to Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The overthrow of the Hussein government in Iraq and the weakening of the Assad government in Syria has led to much of these countries being taken over by the Islamic State, the most formidable jihadist opponent the West has yet faced, while Hamas was voted in by the Palestinians, remaining in control of the Gaza Strip, and Islamic theocrats have come to power in Egypt and Libya. Meanwhile, as we have seen over the course of the last two years, the vision of a global liberal order in which borders do not hinder the free movement of either people or goods and the ensuing relaxed attitude on the part of most Western governments to migration and border security, has internalized the threat from the Islamic world. The conflict between Obama-backed rebels in Syria and the Assad government there, created the pretext whereby droves of invaders, claiming to be refugees from this crisis, have overrun Europe while the number of large scale terrorist attacks on Western soil has been rapidly multiplying.

Fukuyama’s theory has generated a losing strategy in the conflict against Islam, a conflict in which Western civilization was already handicapped by the victory of its own liberalism in the Twentieth Century. That victory was not so much over the twin evils of Communism and Nazism (1) as over the traditions and religion of Christendom, i.e., pre-modern, pre-liberal, Western Civilization. For a thousand years Christendom fought against Islam’s relentless attempts to conquer it. There were notable losses – such as the defeat of the kingdom of Serbia by the Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christendom, in the following century – but there were also major victories – such as when Charles Martel’s Franks defeated the Islamic hordes at Tours in 732 and when the Holy League turned away the invading Ottomans before the gates of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in 1683. To Islam, the present conflict with the West is not something new but rather the renewal and continuation of its fourteen century long war of conquest against Christendom. The West, in which the Christendom that valiantly fought back against Islamic aggression has been replaced by a “Western Civilization” of modern, secular, liberalism, fails to understand this, and so is ill-equipped for the conflict.

The revival of Christendom would be the West’s best chance of surviving and winning this conflict. A Donald Trump presidency, in the American republic that is the centre of the modern liberal West, will not bring about a revival of Christendom. It would, however, be the second best thing, for it would mean the defeat of the Fukuyama inspired, idealistic, liberal triumphalism that, in its naïve belief that liberal democracy is destined to prevail over all its competitors, has been uniting the Islamic world, bringing it most fanatical proponents to power, and internalizing within the West, what was formerly an outside threat. Trump may be a crude, vulgar, egotist, with a tendency to speak before he thinks through what he is speaking about, but he is also a realist and a patriot, who understands that America and the West are in a war with Islam, in which open borders and unrestricted immigration can and will be exploited by the enemy for our own destruction. He is not ideologically committed to the idea that American liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of government and must become universal, and so has shown a willingness to get along with leaders like Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad who, while they may not govern in a way that American liberal democrats would approve of, have been fighting the jihadists and protecting the Christian communities in their own countries.

His opponent, by contrast, worked to destabilize the Assad government as Obama’s Secretary of State, which assisted the rise of ISIS at the expense of the safety of the ancient Christian communities in Syria, and has been rattling her sabre against Putin. Her assistance to rebel groups in Egypt against a government not pure enough by the standards of American democratic liberalism, brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in the mercifully short-lived, presidency of Mohammed Morsi. The consequences of her similar actions in Libya are well known. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq War for which she voted as Senator also contributed to the rise of ISIS, and the wars her husband’s administration – in which she had an unprecedented amount of influence as First Lady - fought against Yugoslavian/Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic – recently exonerated of all the charges made against him at the time – benefited Muslim groups in Bosnia and Kosovo who were allied with Osama bin Laden.

The Trump vs. Clinton presidential contest this fall, therefore, is also, in a sense, a contest between a realism that has a degree of similarity to that of the late Samuel Huntington and the pure liberal idealism of Francis Fukuyama, with the survival of the West in its clash with Islam hanging on the outcome.

(1) Liberalism had largely been colonized by Communism by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. As Tomislav Sunic remarked, in Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007) that “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”, an observation that seems rather justified when one compares the ten measures proposed in the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto with the accomplishments of which progressive liberalism is most proud in the United States and other Western countries. Historian John Lukacs has frequently made a similar observation about national socialism (of which Nazism is a contraction). Liberalism triumphed over these totalitarian enemies, in other words, at the expense of becoming the very thing it had defeated.

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.