New Day? No Thanks, I’ll Take the Old(er)!

 

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a great deal of talk here in Winnipeg about the announcement that today’s big party at the Forks would be called “New Day” instead of “Canada Day”, would be a whole bunch of pissing and moaning about wrongs real and imagined inflicted upon the Indians instead of a celebration of our country, and would not include the usual fireworks celebration.   Interestingly, Sunday evening, while enjoying a coffee at Tim Horton’s and trying to read a chapter out of the book of Isaiah, I overheard snatches of conversation from a couple at a nearby table with regards to all of this.  The man was boisterously objecting to all of these changes, especially the cancelling of the fireworks.   The woman was defending the changes, toeing the progressive party line on the subject.  For what it’s worth, the man was an Indian and the woman was lily white.

 

Among the more prominent of the local critics of these changes – I add the modifier “local” because it has attracted commentary from across the Dominion, including Toronto’s Anthony Furey and Edmonton’s Lorne Gunter – are Lloyd Axworthy and Jenny Motkaluk.    The former, who from 1979 to 2000 was the MP for Winnipeg - Fort Garry then Winnipeg South Centre when the former was dissolved and the latter reconstituted in 1988, during which time he served as Minister for various portfolios in Liberal governments under Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, and later became president of the University of Winnipeg, the furthest to the left of the city’s academic institutions, expressed his criticism in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, a Liberal party propaganda rag that likes to think of itself as a newspaper.   The latter is one of the candidates for the office about to be vacated by Mayor Duckie whom she had previously but sadly unsuccessfully attempted to unseat in the 2018 mayoral election.   Ryan Stelter responded to Motkaluk with a column that appeared in the Winnipeg Sun – the local neoconservative tabloid – in which he defended the decision by the powers that be at the Forks, their reasons for the change, and basically argued that while the biggest party in the city has been re-named and re-imagined this does not prevent anyone else from celebrating the holiday as they like.

 

While I suspect Stelter of disingenuity – his argument is technically correct but does not address the real problems with the thinking behind the changes likely because he doesn’t want to be seen as dissenting from that thinking - I shall, nevertheless, be doing as he suggests and celebrating the holiday the way I like.     This means that like the crowd at the Forks, I will not be celebrating “Canada Day”.   Unlike the crowd at the Forks, however, I shall not be celebrating the atrociously progressive “New Day” either – perhaps they should have called it “New DIE” from the appropriate acronym for Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity – but shall be celebrating, as I do every first of July, Dominion Day.  This is Canada’s true national holiday and the first of July bore this name until the Liberals changed it in 1982.   Since the Liberals did not do so honestly and constitutionally – only thirteen members, less than a quorum, were sitting at the time that the private member’s bill changing the name was rushed through all the readings without debate in less than five minutes, hence the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s description of this as “something very close to sneak-thievery” – I think that continuing to celebrate Dominion Day rather than Canada Day is appropriate.   I am in good company in this.  The great Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies called Dominion Day “splendid” and Canada Day “wet” in reference to its being “only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink”.  

 

I will say this about Canada Day, however.   Like Dominion Day it is a celebration of our country as a whole.  Indeed, Dominion Day and Canada Day, are two different celebrations of Canada based on two different visions of what ought to celebrated about the country.   I will elaborate on that momentarily.   First I will point out the contrast.   Attempts at a post-Canada Day holiday, as this New Day would appear to be, seem to be attempts at having a celebration on the country’s anniversary without celebrating the country at all but rather celebrating progressive ideals and the group identities of groups within Canada who are favoured by the left while allotting shame and dishonour to the country (and to groups within it who are not favoured by the left).   Ironically, considering that the sort of people who think up this sort of thing are always going on about “inclusivity”, this is incredibly divisive.   It is also insane.

 

Canada Day is a celebration of the Canada of the Liberal vision.   That Canada is best described by the title of a 1935 history by John Wesley Dafoe, the Liberal Party promoter who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, Canada: An American Nation.   By deliberately omitting the word “North” Dafoe expressed his idea that Canada is essentially American – possessing the same culture and values as the United States, and on the same political trajectory historically, away from the British Empire and towards democratic republican nationalism, albeit pursuing that path through means other than war.   Those who share this vision of Canada have historically regarded the Liberal Party as the guardians of Canada’s journey down this path or, as it has often been stated, “the natural ruling party of Canada”.    This is what the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton derisively called the “Authorized Version”, the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History that was, before the Cultural Marxist version in which the history of Canada, the United, States, and Western Civilization is treated as nothing but racism, sexism, and other such isms, permeated academe, authoritatively taught in Liberal-leaning history classrooms, which were most of them.   What critics of the left-wing of the Liberal Party – the branch of the party most associated with the two Trudeaus and Jean Chretien – and particularly the neoconservatives who look for inspiration and ideas primarily if not solely to the American “conservative” movement, often fail to grasp is that this is the Liberal vision of Canada even when the party’s left-wing, which spouts the same sort of anti-American rhetoric as the American Cold War era New Left, is controlling the party, and perhaps especially so.   The symbols associated with Canada Day, such as the flag introduced by Lester Pearson in 1965, like the name of the holiday itself, are symbols that point to Canada while saying nothing about her history and traditions, symbols that were introduced by Liberals to replace older ones that also pointed to Canada but did speak about her history and traditions.   The historical events highlighted in this vision of Canada are events in which the Liberal Party led the country.   In recent decades the main one of these was the repatriation of the British North America Act of 1867 in 1982 and the addition to it of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   In repatriating the British North America Act, it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.   Everything asserted a few sentences earlier about the symbols associated with Canada Day is true of this change as well and the new name reflects the American understanding of the word “constitution”, i.e., a piece of paper telling the government what to do, rather than the traditional British-Canadian understanding of the word as meaning the institutions of the state as they actually exist and operate in a living tradition that is largely unwritten.   Similarly, it was the American Bill of Rights that the authors of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had in mind when they added this to the repatriated BNA, although, many of us have been warning for years and as is painfully obvious after the medical tyranny of the last two and a half years, and especially the harsh fascist crackdown on those peacefully protesting against this tyranny in Ottawa earlier this year, the Charter simply does not provide the same level of protection as the American Bill.     The Charter did not provide us with anything worth having that we did not already have by right of the Common Law and the long tradition of protected rights and freedoms associated with it including such highlights as the Magna Carta.    Furthermore, it weakened the most important rights and freedoms mentioned in it – the fundamental freedoms of Section 2 and the legal rights of Sections 7 to 14, institutionalized the injustice of reverse de jure discrimination – Section 15 b), and provided no protection whatsoever to property rights which in the older tradition which both we and the Americans inherited occupy the spot where the Americans put “the pursuit of happiness” in one of the founding documents of their tradition as it branched off from the older.  Perhaps the most significant single effect of the Charter was to transform our Supreme Court into an American-style activist Court which it had not been up unto that point.   The American Supreme Court has been activist so long that now, when it has finally reversed one of its most notorious activist rulings – Roe  v Wade – and returned the right to legislate protection for the lives of the unborn to the lawmaking assemblies from which it stole it in 1973, the American progressives whose causes have benefited from the vast majority of judicial activism have seen this as illegitimate judicial activism and have been behaving like extremely spoiled children who have finally received long-overdue discipline.   The point, however, is that these changes, arguably the most Americanizing of any the Liberal Party has ever made, were introduced by a Liberal government when the party was controlled by its left-wing, despite that left-wing’s Communist-sympathizing anti-American rhetoric.

 

Dominion Day is a celebration of the Canada that was formally established as a country when the British North America Act came into effect on 1 July, 1867.    The country was given the name Canada, which name, originally the Iroquois word for “village”, was mistaken by Jacques Cartier for the St. Lawrence region, then applied to the society of French settlers established there, then, after this French society and its territory were ceded to the British Crown by the French Crown after the Seven Years War, and the Americans seceded from the British Crown to establish their Modern, liberal, republic, became the name of two provinces of the British Empire, one French Catholic and the other English Protestant, located in this territory, the latter populated by the Loyalists who had fled persecution in the American republic.   These provinces were united into one in 1841, which proved almost immediately to be a mistake, and the search for a solution to the problems this fusion generated was one of the main reasons for Confederation in which the two provinces were separated once again, but made part of a larger federation of British North American provinces that was given the name common to both.   Dominion was the title the Fathers of Confederation gave the country that would bear the name country.   The title of a country, as distinct from its name, is supposed to tell you what kind of a country it is, that is to say, the nature of the constitution of the state.   If a country has “People’s Republic” as its title, for example, that tells us that it is a Communist, totalitarian, hellhole.   The “Dominion” in Canada’s title tells us that she is a parliamentary monarchy, a kingdom or realm under the reign of the monarch we share with the United Kingdom, governed by her own Parliament.   When the Liberals were waging war against the title “Dominion” from the 1960s to the 1980s, they maintained that it was a synonym for “colony” and was imposed upon Canada from London in the nineteenth century, but none of that was true.  The most charitable interpretation of the Liberals making these claims is that they were ignorant of history, an interpretation that would seem to be supported by the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s account, in his memoirs, of his attempts to educate his Liberal colleagues in the Senate about these things during this period, although a less charitable interpretation might be more appropriate for the top leaders of the party.   The reality is that the Fathers of Confederation had “Kingdom of Canada” as their first choice, were advised by London to pick something less provocative to our neighbours to the South, and chose “Dominion” as a synonym for “Kingdom” from Psalm 72:8.

 

Dominion Day, as a celebration of this Canada, is a celebration of a vision of Canada that is pretty much the opposite of the Liberal vision of Canada, and an interpretation of her history that is the opposite of the “Authorized Version”.   To call it the Conservative vision and interpretation of Canada would be very misleading, I am afraid, because, those who currently use the moniker Conservative are generally light years removed from Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier   Whatever you want to call it, however, it is the truer vision and interpretation of Canada.    The Confederation Project was not an attempt to do what the Americans had done in 1776 albeit without bloodshed.   It was an attempt to do the opposite of what the Americans had done – to take the provinces of the British Empire in North America, and build out of them a new country without severing ties with the United Kingdom and the Empire, using the Westminster Parliament as its model rather than devising a new constitution from scratch.   For the Fathers of Confederation in 1864 to 1867, as with the English and French Canadians who fought alongside the British Imperial army and its Indian allies from 1812 to 1815, and the ancestors of the same during the American Revolution four decades earlier, the threat to their freedom came from the American Republic, with its “Manifest Destiny”, cloaking its dreams of conquest in the rhetoric of “liberation”.   The British Crown and Empire were not tyrannical forces from which the Canadians needed to be “liberated” (1) but the guardian forces that protected Canadian freedom from American conquest.    The threat of American conquest did not just magically go away on 1 July, 1867.  The efforts of Sir John’s government in the decades that followed, to bring the rest of British North America into Confederation, to settle the prairies, and to build the transcontinental railroad that would unite the country economically, were all carried out with the threat of a United States hoping and wishing for him to fail so that they might swoop in and gobble up Canada looming over head.   Aiding and abetting the would-be American conquerors were their fifth column in Canada, the Liberals.   In Sir John’s last Dominion election, held in March 1891 only a couple of months prior to the stroke that incapacitated him shortly before his death, he faced a Liberal opponent, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who campaigned on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity”, which is more commonly called “free trade”, with the United States.   Sir John called this treason, pointing out that free trade would create an economic union that would be the wedge in the door for cultural and political union with the United Sates.   That very year Liberal intellectual Goldwin Smith published a book, Canada and the Canada Question, that argued that Confederation was a mistake, that economics is everything, that trade in North America is naturally north-south rather than east-west – this was effectively rebutted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937) – and that union with the United States was both desirable and inevitable.   Sir John won another majority government in his last Dominion election by vigorously opposing all of this.

 

Sir John’s victory over Laurier in 1891 demonstrated that his vision of Canada, rather than the Liberal vision, was shared not just by the other Fathers of Confederation but by most Canadians.  That this remained true well into the Twentieth Century was evident in how the Liberals were the most likely to lose elections in which they most stressed the free trade plank of their platform and in the Loyalist spirit demonstrated by the Canadians who rallied to the call of King, Country, and Empire in two World Wars.   Even the Grit Prime Minister during the Second World War, who had mocked the Imperial war effort during the First World War, who was the very embodiment of the Liberal continentalist free trader, and who was actually an admirer of the dictator who led the other side – following his brief interview with Hitler in 1937, Mackenzie King wrote a gushing entry about him in his diary, in which he described the German tyrant in almost Messianic terms, comparing him to Joan of Arc, and employing language that would have sounded just as creepy had Hitler turned out to be the man of peace he thought him to be – had enough of that spirit to do his duty and lead Canada into the war alongside Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth.   Unfortunately, one of the consequences of that conflict was that the United States became the leading power in Western Civilization and immediately began to reshape the West into its own image.   To make matters worse around this same time mass communications technology, especially the television, became ubiquitous both a) facilitating the permeation of English Canadian culture with the mass pop culture produced in the culture factories of Los Angeles, and b) greatly increasing the influence of the newsmedia, which had been heavily slanted towards the Liberals since even before Confederation when George Brown edited the Globe, which evolved into today’s Globe and Mail.   These are among the foremost of the factors which produced the shift in popular thinking away from the truer, founding, vision of Canada celebrated in Dominion Day to the Liberal vision celebrated in Canada Day.   They are also among the factors that led George Grant, Canada’s greatest philosopher, traditionalist, and critic of technology, to pen his jeremiad for our country, Lament for a Nation, in 1965.

 

If the exponential growth in media power due to the development of mass communications technology and the post-World War II Americanization of Western Civilization as a whole are responsible for the shift in popular thought to the Liberal vision, how then do we explain this subsequent shift to the new, “woke” Left view, in which Canada, and everything that traditional Canadians celebrated about her in Dominion Day and Liberals in Canada Day, are regarded as cause for weeping and gnashing of teeth rather than celebration?

 

While the media certainly had a role in this as well – they were the ones, last year, remember, who, when various Indian bands began announcing that they had found ground disturbances – and this is all that they have found, to this date – on the grounds of former residential schools or in unmarked sections of cemeteries, irresponsibly reported this as “proof” of a conspiracy theory about the residential schools having been death camps where priests murdered kids by the thousands – it is our educational system that must bear the blame for the fact that so many people were stupid and ignorant enough to believe this stercus tauri.  It has been sixty-nine years since Hilda Neatby wrote and published So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education in which she lambasted the education bureaucrats who in most if not all Canadian provinces had decided in the decade or so prior to her writing to impose the educational “reforms” proposed by wacko, environmentalist (in the sense of taking the nurture side in the nature/nurture debate rather than the sense of being a tree-hugging, save-the-planet, do-gooder, although he may have been that too), atheist, secular humanist, Yankee philosopher John Dewey upon Canadian public schools.    This meant out with a curriculum focused on giving children facts to learn, expecting them to learn them, and acquainting them with the literary canon of the Great Conversation so that by exposing them to the Swiftian “sweetness and light” of Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” they might be inspired to rise above their natural barbarism or philistinism and learn to think and ask questions and strive for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  It meant in with a curriculum that was “child-centred”, which in practice meant dumbed down so as to minimize or eliminate content of which the child cannot immediately recognize its pragmatic utility to himself, although Dewey and his followers, who were decades ahead of everyone else in terms of solipsistic, narcissistic, psycho-babble, dressed it up in terms of helping the child maximize his potential.   Those sympathetic to the methods of Dewey et al. thought of these reforms as a positive shift from a passive education in which the teacher gives the student the content to be learned and the student receives it to an active education in which the student is trained to learn by self-discovery.   Neatby recognized these methods for what they really were – the means of transforming schools from institutions that provide their students with the intellectual tools necessary to live in control of their own lives as free people into institutions that train people to be docile, unquestioning, members of a more planned, more controlled, and more collectivist sort of society.   Her warnings largely went ignored, although she was commemorated with a stamp twenty-two years ago.   Even though the environmentalist presuppositions underlying Dewey’s system have been thoroughly debunked in the intervening decades, his theories survive as the dominant educational philosophy, albeit having been periodically translated into the latest forms of newspeak.      Meanwhile university level academics have mostly stopped criticizing the way the schools under the new system are failing to prepare students for a university education, but have instead accommodated the universities to the situation by transforming them into indoctrination centres in which their unquestioning and docile but also navel-gazingly narcissistic “student” bodies have their heads stuffed with every conceivable form of left-wing group identity politics – there are entire divisions of universities now dedicated to specific forms of this – and the deranged post-Marxist crackpot left-wing theories – intersectionality, Critical Theory (Race and otherwise), etc. – that support them.   The subversion and perversion of our educational system just described is the reason so many were quick to unthinkingly and unquestioningly accept the media’s irresponsible claims that the discovery of soil disturbances by ground-penetrating radar constitutes proof of the conspiracy theory that government-funded, church-operated, schools were murdering their students in some giant plot involving the highest officials of church, state, and a host of other institutions, that a defrocked United Church minister (2) pulled out of his rear end decades ago.    It is the reason so many were willing to commit the chronological snobbery of judging ex post facto our country’s past leaders by the left-wing standards of today’s progressives, the injustice of accepting a condemnation of our country in which only the accuser has been allowed to be heard and the defence has been denied the right of cross-examination and of making a defence by the mob shouting “disrespect” and “denial” every time anyone raised a question or pointed out contra-narrative facts, and the impiety of thinking the worst of the generations that went before us.   Note how the words “colonialism” and “imperialism” are constantly on the lips of such people, being used negatively in precisely the manner described by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century in which he concluded that this usage, so different from how these terms are used by real historians, has reduced these words to “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers”.   This bespeaks the failure of the educational system.

 

So no, I will not be participating in any “New Day” that is the product of what passes for thinking in the minds of those whose acceptance of the left-wing narrative that our country is something to be mourned rather than celebrated testifies to the ruin of our educational system.    Nor, as an unreconstructed old Tory, will I be celebrating the Liberal vision for our country on “Canada Day”.   I shall once again raise my glass – or rather cup of coffee – to Sir John A. Macdonald and celebrate Canada’s true holiday, Dominion Day.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

 

God Save the Queen!

 

(1)     For all of Jefferson’s Lockean rhetoric about natural law, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed his 1776 accusations of “absolute tyranny” against George III and Parliament were nonsensical propaganda of the most risible sort, considering that the British government was one of the least intrusive governments in the world both at that time and in all of history up to that point.   

(2)     This is actually, in a twisted way, rather impressive.   It is far easier to be ordained in the United Church of Canada than to be defrocked.  

The Name of the Month

 It is the sixth month of the year.   The common name for this month is June, a name derived from Juno, the Queen of the Olympians in Roman mythology corresponding to the Greek Hera.   While occasionally one encounters a Christian who has a problem with the month’s name on the basis of this pagan origin, most of us are sensible enough to recognize that words take on new meanings, that “June” now simply means “the sixth month of the year”, and that one is in no way evoking the pagan goddess by calling the month after its common name.   The more educated among us will also recognize that the kind of reasoning used to condemn those who call the month by its common name would also condemn the writers of the New Testament who employ the word “Hades” to refer to the place the Old Testament calls “Sheol” because of the similar concept – a dark, shadowy, underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead – even though “Hades” as a name for the underworld is borrowed from that of the god who ruled it in Greek mythology, the god the Romans called Pluto.   A good rule to follow when trying to determine whether you are taking a principled stand for Christ or just being a nut is that if you are doing something that the Puritans, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoists liked doing, such as renaming everything, then you are probably just being a nut.

 

At any rate, June is certainly a better name than the alternative name that so many now use for this month.   The sort of people who identify themselves by one of the letters in the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY – and others, businesses and politicians mostly, who wish to be seen as supportive of the alphabet soup gang, refer to it as Pride month.   It was not that long ago that it was Pride Week.   Now it has grown into a whole month.   Originally there was a Gay before the Pride but at some point this was dropped presumably because the other letters in the alphabet soup had grown jealous of the G.   

 

The irony of this, for orthodox Christians, of course, is that of the two terms, Pride is by far the most objectionable.   Gay, which in this context does not have its older and, until well into the twentieth-century primary, meaning of light-hearted, cheerful, and happy, but rather its more recent and as of late sole sense of homosexual, denotes something that violates the standards of orthodox moral theology on the basis of both explicit Scriptural passages against it (Genesis 19, Leviticus 20, Romans 1, and Jude being the most obvious examples) and its deviation from the exemplary pattern of a man leaving his father and mother, being joined to his wife, and the two being one flesh.   Pride, however, is the name of the worst of all sins.

 

While the ancient Greeks did not have the same view of Pride as orthodox Christianity they did, in a way, anticipate the Christian point of view in their concept of hubris, which was a form of Pride.    It had various connotations depending upon context.   In early Greek literature it frequently designated words and acts by which men insulted and offended the gods with arrogant boasting.   Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the sea nymphs the Nereids, which brought upon her and her kingdom the wrath of Poseidon.   This was an example of this sense of hubris.   Numerous similar examples could be given, in each of which the person who offended the gods with his or her arrogance met with swift punishment, sometimes fatal, sometimes non-fatal but permanent, often involving a transformation.   The myth of Arachne whom Athena transformed into a spider for boasting that she was a superior weaver is an example of the latter sort.  So, for that matter, is basically every example of hubris related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.  Occasionally the punishment was thwarted, at least in part, by another agent.   In the aforementioned example of Cassiopeia, Andromeda was as much an object of Neptune’s wrath as her mother and to spare Ethiopia, Cassiopeia was told she would have to sacrifice Andromeda to a sea-monster.  The hero Perseus intervened and rescued the princess whom he then married.   In Greek mythology, both hubris and the divine wrath that punished it, like most abstract concepts were personified as divinities, Hubris and Nemesis.   A more general version of this same basic concept, that arrogance brings about one’s downfall, also appears in Greek mythology and literature of equal vintage.   Think of the myth of Icarus, the son of Daedelus, architect of the Labyrinth.   Daedelus, having offended his king, Minos of Crete, was imprisoned and escaped the prison with his son, on wings he constructed of wax and feathers.  Icarus, ignoring his father’s warnings, flew too high, the sun melted the wax, and he plummeted to his death.    It can also be found illustrated, along with other themes, in “The Tortoise and the Hare”, from Aesop’s Fables.   Aesop lived the century after Homer and Hesiod – he is believed to have been born only a few decades after the latter died – and this particular of his fables is of unquestionable antiquity, having been famously referenced, albeit with the details altered and with an entirely different point, by Zeno of Elea in one of those delightful paradoxes “proving” motion to be impossible.   

 

The Greek poets and storytellers who related the above myths stressed the offensiveness of mortal hubris to those above men, the gods.   One of the most well-known definitions of hubris to come down to us from ancient times is that of Aristotle.   It comes from the second book of his Rhetoric, a work that both defines the principles and rules and instructs in the art of persuasive speech.      This is the section in which Aristotle is exploring the usefulness of pathos – emotion – both on the part of the speaker and the audience, in making an argument.   His definition of hubris – which is generally rendered “insult” in English translation of Rhetoric – emphasizes its offensiveness in the opposite direction to that stressed by the ancient myths, i.e., to its human victims.   As translated by J. H. Freese it says that hubris “consists in causing injury or annoyance whereby the sufferer is disgraced, not to obtain any other advantage for oneself besides the performance of the act, but for one’s own pleasure”.   At first glance, it seems almost as if Aristotle were discussing something completely different from the hubris of Greek mythology and, indeed, he obviously had the laws of his city-state Athens in mind here.   In Greek law in general, hubris denoted a wide category of crimes.   The Athenian lawmakers had put more effort into defining the category than most and in Athenian law hubris consisted of crimes that deliberately inflicted shame upon their victims.   Some recent classical scholars have argued on the basis of this definition that our entire traditional understanding of the Greek concept of hubris is mistaken, an anachronistic reading of English usage and Christian concepts back into ancient thought.    This, however, reads too much into this one passage of Aristotle.   It is understandable that the legal connotations of hubris, in which its effects on human victims would be stressed, would be foremost in Aristotle’s mind in Rhetoric – consult Plato’s dialogues that feature Socrates interacting with the Sophists, or for that matter Aristophanes’ lampooning of Socrates himself in the Clouds, and it will quickly become obvious, as in fact, it is self-evident, that the main reason rhetoric teachers were in demand was because people wanted to win lawsuits in court.   

 

Aristotle was also the author of Poetics, the work that established the framework in which theoretical discussion of drama, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Aristotle – and everything he wrote, from the basic unities to catharsis has been subjected to rigorous debate - has been conducted ever since.   While other forms of poetry such as Epic, and of drama such as Comedy, are discussed, the bulk of Poetics, which is not a long work, pertains to tragedy.    Aristotle, remember, lived in the period immediately after tragedy had come to dominate the Greek theatre.   Two of the great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, had been contemporaries of Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, and of Socrates, Plato’s teacher, while Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, had lived into Socrates’ youth.   Tragedy, according to Aristotle, was a form of dramatic poetry that like Epic but in contrast with Comedy, involved an imitation (Gk. Mimesis) of the higher sort of character in serious events or actions, the purpose of which was to achieve a cleansing or purging (Gk. Catharsis) of the emotions, particularly of the fear and pity that the play was supposed to produce in the audience through empathy with the characters.   It had six parts – Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Song – and of these, the Plot, the most important of the six parts, had to involve a Reversal (Gk. Peripeteia) of fortune and circumstance from good to bad, brought about not by vice or depravity, but by a great error, weakness or failing (Gk. Hamartia) of the hero.    Hubris was the most common example of this Hamartia.  Hubris, as an Aristotelean tragic hero’s “fatal flaw”, is more recognizable as the hubris of Greek mythology than the legal hubris of the Rhetoric.   The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were, for the most part, retellings – in the case of Euripides often radical re-interpretations – of the older Greek myths.  

 

The Greek view, as I pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, anticipated the Christian view but was not identical to it.   This is evident in Aristotle.   By contrasting Hamartia, the general category to which hubris belonged, with vice and depravity, he spoke of it in terms that had a less harsh moral tone to them, although, interestingly, about a century after Aristotle, the Jewish scribes who translated the LXX for Ptolemy II Philadelphus would use it to render Chata, the basic Hebrew word for “sin” in the Old Testament, which led to it becoming the main word for “sin” in the New Testament.     Hamartiology is the designation of the study of the doctrine of sin in Christian theology.  It was the natural translation choice – both Chata and Hamartia have the same root meaning of an archer missing the mark he is aiming for – but when it comes to usage, Chata in the Old Testament has the same general connotations and tone that “sin” does in English, which is not true of Hamartia in Greek literature prior to the LXX and New Testament.   Thus Aristotle, using Hamartia, “missing the mark”, to mean the “mistake” “error” or “flaw” that brings about the Peripetia of his tragic hero – someone, whom he says, should be depicted as neither exceptionally virtuous or villainous – contrasts it with moral depravity and vice, whereas St. Paul, also alluding to the basic meaning of the word when he writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), does so after making the point with a series of Old Testament quotations that emphasize the depravity of the sinner (“their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth if full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood:” etc.).

 

Neither Aristotle nor the ancient Greeks in general thought of Pride in general in the same terms in which they thought of Hubris.   The former they thought of as a good thing, the latter as Pride taken to excess.   Excess, of course, was fundamental to Aristotle’s entire concept of Vice, just as moderation was to his view of Virtue.   A Virtue was the middle path of moderation between two Vices of excess.   Indeed, in Book IV of his Nicomachean Ethics, he speaks of Pride as the Virtue (Gk. Arete) that falls between a false humility and excessive Pride.   Spoken of in these terms, it means the acknowledgement of one’s own strengths, accomplishments, etc. as they actually are, as opposed to speaking of them as if they were less than they are in reality (false humility) or laying claim to greater strengths and accomplishments than one actually possesses (excessive Pride).   From this perspective, since people’s strengths etc. can be ranked in terms of best, various degrees of better, good, bad, various degrees of worse, and worst, for the person who actually belongs to the top rank of best to acknowledge such is ordinary Pride and not Hubris.

The Holy Scriptures, by contrast, never speak of Pride positively, in either Testament.   Nor do they ever speak negatively of humility.   To be fair to Aristotle, it should be noted that they never use these words with precisely the same sense that he gave them either and that the Scriptures do indeed place a high premium on speaking of things as they are.   The closest thing to even a neutral use of the word “Pride” in the Bible that I could find is Job 41:15, which describes the scales of Leviathan as his pride, although, since the sea-serpent discussed in that chapter almost certainly represents Satan, this may not be as neutral a usage as it seems.   Pride is the sin that brought about the devil’s fall.   This is explicitly stated by St. Paul in the New Testament (I Tim. 3:6), and if the traditional interpretation of Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-19 as God speaking to the devil through the human representatives of the kings of Babylon and Tyre and describing his fall is accurate (1), it is found in the Old Testament as well.   The Isaiah passage does not use the word Pride, but it is clearly the motive of the actions described.   The expression “thine heart was lifted up” in Ezekiel 28:17 essentially means “you became proud”.   Just as Pride led to Satan’s own downfall, it was the means he used to bring about the Fall of Man as well.  He tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by telling her that the only reason God had forbidden it to her and Adam was because it would open their eyes, giving them the God-like knowledge of good and evil, leading her to distrust God and to desire the forbidden God-like knowledge.   The Temptation worked by stoking and appealing to Pride.  When later, Satan unsuccessfully tempted Jesus, each of the three Temptations was an enticement to act based on Pride in one form or another.  

The Bible uses the word Pride to characterize the wicked (Job. 35:12, Ps. 10:2) and the foolish (Prov. 14:13).   It leads, like hubris in Greek thought, to a fall and to destruction (Prov. 16:8) and brings God’s judgement both upon Israel (Is. 9:8-12, Jer. 13:9)and the nations around her, (Ez. 30:6, Zech. 9:6) including or perhaps especially the powerful ones that she relies upon instead of God and which He uses as a scourge against her (Zech. 10:11).  It deceives (Obad. 1:3) and prevents the wicked from seeking God (Ps. 10:4).   To fear the Lord is to hate Pride (Prov. 8:13).   Interestingly, it is said to lead to shame and being brought low in contrast with humility and (voluntary) lowliness leading to wisdom and honour (Prov. 11:2, 29:23), which may be where Greek and Biblical thought on the subject were the furthest removed from each other.   Very interestingly, considering the occasion of this essay, is that Ezekiel gave it as the first example in his list of the iniquities that brought judgement upon Sodom (Ez. 16:49).   Jesus spoke of Pride as one of the things that comes from out of the heart and defiles a man (Mk. 7:22).   The cognate adjective proud is used less frequently and no differently.  

 

It is only when it comes to the conceptually related verbs “boast” and “glory” that we find references that are positive and these generally speak of a “boasting” or “glorying” that is fundamentally the opposite of the kind that would be associated with Pride.   Here are a few examples:

 

My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. (Ps.  34:2)

 

In God we boast all the day long, and praise thy name forever. Selah. (Ps. 44:8)

 

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. (Gal. 6:14)

 

While Greek thought with regards to hubris approached Biblical thought regarding Pride, it fell short.   The Greeks worshipped gods whom they thought of as being superior to mortal men in terms of strength and power but generally not in terms of righteousness and justice.   Indeed, it could be argued that Greek mythology generally presented the gods as men’s moral inferiors.   There are some exceptions to this among the ancient writers, but it was noticeable enough to attract attention, comment, and attempts at reform from Plato and Euripides among others.   Something like hubris that offended such deities, therefore, simply could not be thought of in the same terms as that which offends the True and Living God of the Bible, Who is man’s superior in every way, in the superlative and not just the comparative degree.   Since the Scriptures tell us that men were created Innocent by the True and Living God, but fell into sin which offends against Him Who is Supremely Perfect in His Holiness, Righteousness, and Justice, it can hardly be surprising that the same Scriptures universally condemn human Pride, and counsel sinful men to adopt an attitude of brokenness, contrition, and humility, warning them that if they lift themselves up in Pride He will bring them low, but promising that if they humble themselves in the sight of the LORD, He will lift them up (Jas. 4:10).    The Church’s traditional identification of Superbia – Pride – as the source of all other sin, the worst and deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, represents Scriptural thought faithfully.   In this as in many other areas, ancient Greek thought demonstrates how far human philosophy can go relying upon General Revelation, but also how far it falls short of the Special Revelation of the Scriptures and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  This is the Hamartia of human philosophy.

 

When it comes to the Pride that is contemporarily celebrated on the sixth month of the year, however, ancient Greek thought would condemn it as much as Christian thought.   This might seem paradoxical, in that the ancient Greeks were famously tolerant of some of the sexual conduct associated with Pride month, but as noted earlier the modifier which once qualified Pride was dropped years ago, the reference to the lesser sin which the Greeks tolerated being eliminated leaving only the name of the worst of all sins.   The arrogance of the current demands of the intolerant Left that everybody pay homage to the celebration or face “cancellation” is such than any of the ancient Greeks would have recognized it as hubris.  

 

It is best that we stick to using the name of Jupiter’s wife for this month.   Pagan in origin, thought it undoubtedly be, it is far less objectionable than the other alternative.

 

(1))   In my opinion the traditional interpretation is correct.   Although the early Reformers rejected it, it has strong Patristic support, going back at least as far as Tertullian and Origin in the second century.   That this interpretation may have dated back to the intertestamental period cannot be ruled out – there is insufficient evidence from the period itself.    The Church Fathers, however, relied upon a handful of New Testament passages that speak of the fall of Satan using language that suggests allusion to the Isaiah passage. The two passages in question use language that obviously does not apply literally to the kings of Babylon and Tyre and which it would be rather a stretch to apply to them in any metaphorical sense.

The Day the Stopped Clock Was Right

 

This Friday, the twentieth of May, will mark the twentieth anniversary of the day that Dr. Stephen Jay Gould was summoned to give an account of himself before the court of the Supreme Judge in Whom he professed unbelief.   For his sake, we can only hope that unbeknownst to the world the saving Light of the Gospel broke through the darkness of his heart at some point before that moment.

 

 

Dr. Gould, as you may have gathered from the preceding, was not a man with whom I agreed about much.   He was a biologist and paleontologist who taught at Harvard University.  He achieved fame among his scientific colleagues for his theory, co-authored with Niles Eldridge of Columbia University, of punctuated equilibrium.   To the general public he became famous as the kind of scientist who would appear on television – he played himself on The Simpsons once - occasionally hosting his own specials, and who would write books and essays that put science into layman’s language for popular consumption.    Evolution was a major – it would probably be fair to say, the major – focus of his career.  Not evolution merely in the sense of adaptation, the idea that living species exist in changing environments to which they must adapt in order to survive, which is both observable and obvious, but evolution in the sense of adaptation and natural selection being offered as the “scientific” answer to the question of why we are here.   Indeed, his and Eldridge’s punctuated equilibrium theory was a response to a common objection to evolution in this sense of the word, namely that the fossil record rather than indicating new species gradually evolving from other species over a long period of time, shows a remarkable stability within species through history.   The theory proposes that the evolution of new species takes place in short, rapid, bursts that occasionally take place in a history of biological life that is otherwise generally a stasis.    I am of the firm view that science in the sense of the natural sciences has no answer whatsoever to the question of why we are here and that this question is ultimately an ontological question admitting only metaphysical and theological answers.   Indeed, I go further and take the position that the true answer to that question is to be found in the words that begin the sacred canon of my own faith, as they do the sacred canon of the religion of Dr. Gould’s ancestors.   “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is how those words are rendered in the Authorized Bible.   In the original, the ancient tongue of Dr. Gould’s ancestral religion, they are בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ (this is pronounced "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz”).   Dr. Gould was militantly opposed to this answer, to its being offered as an alternative in academe, and to those like the late Dr. Henry Morris who maintained that it was the better answer from a scientific point of view.   My own disagreement with Dr. Morris was from the opposite point of view to Dr. Gould’s – that Dr. Morris conceded too much to Modern philosophy and assigned too much epistemological value to science by maintaining that science is capable of speaking to this question.   (1)

 

 

Interestingly enough, apart from his opposition as an evolutionist to creation, Dr. Gould was also noted for his long-running feud with certain other evolutionists, those who tried to use evolutionary biology to explain the behaviour of social species and human psychology.   The best known example of the former is probably Richard Dawkins, and of the latter most likely Steven Pinker, both men who like Dr. Gould write for popular audiences.    While as a creationist I don’t really have a dog in this fight and it might seem logical to suppose that if forced to pick sides I would choose Dr. Gould who despite his anti-creationism was less overtly hostile towards faith and religion than Dawkins I would be more inclined to favour his opponents because both his methods and motives I find to be repugnant.  Dr. Gould’s involvement in these controversies always seemed to have less to do with science than with his political views.   He was very left-wing in his politics, and while he would later distance himself from the overt Marxism of his father, early in his career at Harvard he became associated with Science for the People, a New Left organization of students and faculty that was notorious for its use of disruptive tactics on campuses and at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that are similar to those employed by Antifa groups today.   The group opposed what it called “pseudoscience” which in its usage essentially meant science that supported conclusions or was employed in ways with which Marxism disagreed.   It was in the context of his involvement with this group that Dr. Gould, like his Harvard colleague and fellow Science for the People activist Dr. Richard C. Lewontin, first came into conflict with another Harvard colleague, the late entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson.   In 1975 Wilson had published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a lengthy tome in academic textbook format, that blended ethology – the study of animal behaviour – with something that should probably be called sociology, i.e., the study of human social behaviour, although it resembled very little of what actually goes by this name –  synthesizing the two into a common field of social behaviour, animal and human, as explained by theories of evolutionary biology derived from the same research (George C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers, et al.) that Richard Dawkins would popularize one year later in his The Selfish Gene.   The book and the discipline to which it gave its name were both immediately condemned by Science for the People.   The condemnation took the form of an ad hominem attack on the author.   The closest thing to an argument that addressed his theories rather than his character was the accusation of biological determinism, an interesting accusation coming from people who were themselves committed to a materialistic view of the world and man. Mostly, however, it consisted of attacks on the author’s character, accusations that he was motivated by fascism and racism.   Signed by a number of left-wing scientists, including Stephen Jay Gould, the attack on Wilson was submitted to The New York Review of Books whose editor had the poor taste to publish it.   To their credit, Gould and Lewontin who formed the Sociobiology Study Group in opposition to Wilson, were at least willing to engage Wilson, Dawkins, et al., in open debate, and when, at one of the debates organized by their group at the annual meeting of the AAAS, Wilson was doused with water by activists from the far-left militant International Committee against Racism shouting “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”, Gould even apologized to Wilson and condemned the behaviour as inappropriate.   His own activist response to Wilson’s book, however, had undoubtedly paved the way for the more militant form of activist response that came later.    Furthermore, while he would later try to distance himself from this kind of activism, he would continue making ad hominem accusations of racism against other scientists.  His book length broadside against the study of human intelligence, especially its quantification and the consideration of hereditary components such as the g factor, The Mismeasure of Man, (2) first published in 1981, then expanded in 1996 to include an attack on Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray over their 1994 The Bell Curve is a case in point. (3)

 

 

The above, incidentally, demonstrates the fallacy of the widespread conservative contention that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) classrooms are somehow immune to the disease of academic wokeness to which the Humanities in all but the most traditionalist of campuses seem to have completely succumbed.   As far back as 1970s, activist scientific academics like Gould and Lewontin were attempting to have scientific theories condemned as pseudoscientific on the basis of their non-conformity to left-wing ideology and more specifically to the elements of left-wing ideology that are now so emphasized in wokeness.   STEM classes are clearly not invulnerable.   (4) Giving up the Humanities to the Left and concentrating on STEM, therefore, is clearly not a viable alternative to recovering a classics based approach to the Humanities in which contemporary thought and trends are held up to the standards of ancient civilization rather than the other way around.

 

 

Having said all of the above, it is not my purpose in this essay to concentrate on the many things over which Dr. Gould was wrong but rather on one thing he got right.   One of the very last things that he did was to edit the 2002 edition of The Best American Essays, an annual anthology launched in 1986 by series editor Robert Atwan (the original The Best American series, The Best American Short Stories, goes back to 1915)   As guest editor for the 2002 edition, Dr. Gould got to select twenty-five non-fiction essays from a larger list of candidates selected by the series editor from various magazines, reviews and journals published in the United States the previous year.   His selection was overall quite excellent – the first essay to appear in the anthology is “The Tenth Muse” by Jacques Barzun which had appeared in Harper’s in September 2001, discussing “Demotica”, i.e., the muse of popular culture.   Gore Vidal’s essay about Timothy McVeigh from the same month’s issue of Vanity Fair, which would also be included in the author’s own 2002 anthology Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace made the final selection.   So did John Sack’s “Inside the Bunker” from the February 2001 issue of Esquire.   This is the essay that I wish to stress.   Somebody had alerted me to this essay when it first came out.   I read it and have been referring people to it ever since.   It was certainly worthy of inclusion in this anthology and, given the volatile nature of the subject matter it took a degree of courage for Dr. Gould to include it.

 

 

John Sack passed away about two years after Dr. Gould.   He was a literary journalist, part of the group that were dubbed the “New Journalists”.   The foremost representative of this group would be Tom Wolfe – the guy who became famous for writing books with titles like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby but is probably best remembered as the guy who always wore immaculate white suits, Labour Day be damned.   Others included Hunter S. Thompson – the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didian.   Sack, whose work was published in places like Esquire, obviously, and the Atlantic, Harper’s and The New Yorker, was the war correspondent of the group.  Beginning with the Korean War, which he covered for Stars and Stripes after finishing his studies at Harvard, Sack covered every war in which his country, the United States, was officially involved until his death.  

 

 

Sack also authored a number of books and these tended to be quite controversial.   While covering the Vietnam War, for example, he had done a number of interviews with Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the American officer who was convicted of war crimes in regards to the My Lai massacre of 1968.   These became the basis of a book that Sack published in 1971.  This caused him all sorts of grief when the American government demanded he turn his materials over to them and testify in the case against Calley, and arrested and indicted him when he refused to do so.   One might think it would be hard to top that as far as controversy goes, but his 1993 An Eye for An Eye did just that.   As the titular reference to the Lex Talionis suggests, this was a tale of revenge.   The subtitle was “The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945”.    Set in Poland, in the last days of World War II and the period immediately after the war, in the time following the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe in which the USSR was ethnically cleansing the region of Germans, it tells of the internment camps that the Soviets set up under the NKVD/MGB in Poland, sometimes re-using camps captured from the Germans, in which they placed captured Germans, and over which they set as administrators several of the Jews who had been interned in the Nazi camps.   Canadian writer James Bacque had sparked controversy in 1989 with his Other Losses, which was about Germans who had died in internment camps administered by the French and Americans under General Eisenhower in roughly the same period (1944 on into the post-War period).   Sack’s book was for reasons that should be plain even more controversial.

 

 

Sack, it should be noted, was of Jewish ethnicity.  

 

 

Sack’s book, and the controversy it generated, gained him an invitation to speak at the 2000 conference of the Institute for Historical Review in California.   The Institute for Historical Review, founded by Willis Carto and David McCalden in 1978, (5) is an organization devoted to historical revisionism in general, with an emphasis on World War II revisionism, and more specifically what the late Gary North called “hard-core war revisionism”, the distinction between this and soft-core war revisionism being that the latter looked into questions of America’s entry into the war, whether it was justified and in the United States’ interest, and the duplicity of the Roosevelt administration in bringing it about (a less American-centric version of this can be found in the writings of A. J. P. Taylor) and the former looked into questions of extent, methodology and ultimate goal pertaining to the atrocities attributed to the Nazi regime.   Historical revisionism is the process of asking questions about conventional, generally accepted, accounts of historical events and suggesting and arguing for alternative accounts.   It is widely regarded as coming in two forms, one good and one bad, depending upon the motives and methods of the revisionist.   If the revisionist is seeking after truth, if he wishes to make the historical account conform more accurately to events as they actually happened, this is good revisionism.   If he is motived by ideology and wishes to make the historical account conform to his ideology even if this means falsifying it, making it conform less with events as they actually happened, this is bad revisionism.     The hard-core war revisionists of the Institute for Historical Review are almost universally reviled as being the worst of the bad kind of revisionists.   “Holocaust deniers” they are called by most historians, as if the Holocaust were an article of faith to be believed rather than a historical event to be discussed, an attitude which itself raises a number of rather interesting questions about the mainstream narrative.   While Sack did not hold revisionist views with regards to the Holocaust itself he nevertheless accepted the invitation to speak at the conference.   His article for Esquire early the following year was his account of that experience.

 

 

The distinction between good truth-seeking revisionists and bad ideological revisionists is not really of much value except when it comes to reminding revisionist historians of what they should be striving for.   Everyone, or at least almost everyone, engaged in historical revisionism is seeking truth and to make the historical record conform to events as they were.    Where ideological – or, to use slightly less loaded terms philosophical, religious, political – notions enter in is that they influence how we perceive and judge things to be true or not.   To lump all revisionists who ask questions about a specific occurrence such as the Holocaust into the bad ideological revisionist category is to oversimplify something that is actually quite complex and to commit an injustice in doing so.   It is widely assumed by those who revile the people whom Sack addressed that the very nature of the revisionism they are engaged in means that they could not possibly be motivated by anything other than anti-Semitism, racism, admiration for Adolf Hitler and a wish to revive his movement, and the like. (6)   Indeed, certain organizations and special-interest groups seem to think that “Holocaust denial” somehow makes the person who engages it complicit in the guilt of the historical crime he is said to deny.   In my country, the Dominion of Canada, where the Liberal government has announced its intention of criminalizing “Holocaust denial” progressives have long taken this even further.   Under our traditional system of justice, someone accused of a crime is entitled to the presumption of innocence and to a full legal defense.  Nobody would consider it appropriate to attack the defense attorney who is representing an accused murderer and treat his acting as counsel for the defense as if this made him an accomplice to murder.   In cases like this, we recognize that insisting upon the rights of the accused, even if the accused actually is guilty, is absolutely essential because without those rights we would all be helpless against anyone who wished to harm us with a false accusation.    There are many up here who seem to think that this does not apply to “Holocaust deniers” or other accused of some sort of “hate speech”.   Five years ago, Upper Canadian lawyer Barbara Kulaszka died.   She had been part of the defense team in the Zündel trials in the 1980s and since the death of the legendary Doug Christie four years previously had been the leading defense attorney fighting for free speech for those accused of “hate” in Canada.   A memorial service was held for her at the Richview branch of the Toronto Public Library in Etobicoke on the twelfth of July, 2017 but pressure was placed upon the library to withdraw from its agreement to allow the space to be used for this.   To their credit the library did not cave to this pressure.   Nevertheless, all those self-appointed anti-“hate” experts who think they have the right and duty to tell other Canadians what we are allowed to say and think, sent out the clear message to any lawyer who might be tempted to follow in the footsteps of Christie and Kulaszka in the future, that if they take on the cases of those accused of “hate” they can expect to find themselves smeared with the same accusations as their clients, with their funerals being given the Fred Phelps treatment when they die. (7)

 

 

Indeed, it was not just lawyers who received this message.   During the original Zündel trials of the 1980s and the James Keegstra trial of the same period, the question of whether it was right to put people on trial for their words and opinions was vigorously debated in the press and while many did, it was by no means expected of all who took the free speech side of the debate that they denounce both the views of Zündel and Keegstra and the men themselves for holding those views.   Today it is different.   The few opinion writers in the mainstream media who have criticized the present Liberal government’s plans to criminalize “Holocaust denial” have made sure to inform us of just how vile and despicable they consider the “deniers” to be.   Those, whether they be lawyers, writers or activists, who fight for a free marketplace of ideas against censorship and thought control and who stand up for those accused of committing verbal or thought crimes ought not to be assumed or expected to agree with everything said by those they stand up for.   If you are only willing to stand up for the right and freedom to speak of those with whom you agree then you either don’t understand or don’t believe in a free marketplace of ideas.   Neither should the defenders of freedom be expected to denounce individuals whose right to speak they are defending but who hold very unpopular views.   We would not expect a lawyer defending someone accused of a heinous crime to publicly denounce his client.   Indeed, we would consider it unprofessional and inappropriate of him to do so.   To make the denunciation and demonization of “Holocaust deniers” a requirement of those defending the “deniers”’ rights and freedom of speech if the defenders do not wish to be smeared with the same brush as those they are defending is no different from demanding such unprofessional and inappropriate conduct from a lawyer.   Or it is arguably worse because it amounts to insisting that advocates of the free marketplace of ideas agree to accept something that is the equivalent of price-fixing in the marketplace of goods and services thus fundamentally redefining the very idea of a free marketplace of ideas.   The arrogance of those who demand that we denounce the “Holocaust deniers” if we wish to be able to defend their right to speak freely without being suspected of agreeing with them would itself be sufficient reason for me to refuse to give in to such a demand even if it were not the case, as it happens to be, that given a choice of whom I would rather a) run into in a dark alley late at night, b) be stranded on a remote island with, or even just c) be invited to the same dinner party as, I would gladly choose the company of Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson, leaving aside the fact that these are all deceased, over the members of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network any day.    Indeed, even if the deceased gentlemen named had been the cartoonish villains, cackling wickedly as they tied women to railroad tracks and foreclosed on widows’ houses that they are depicted as having been, which I don’t think to be the case, they would still be more interesting and better company than the awful, pretentious, self-important, bores with which I just contrasted them.

 

 

The transition from healthy, vibrant, debate to this whole sick “you must denounce them or you are one of them” mentality was already underway when John Sack’s article came out and it was a breath of fresh air.   He began by telling how his curiosity was piqued by the invitation prompting him to accept it.  Then he told of his arrival in California to be told the secret location of the meeting at the last minute to avoid possible violence from the Jewish Defense League, the terrorist organization founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, subsequently led by Irv Rubin and his widow and based in the same state as the IHR, which had attacked the group in the past.   From there he moved on to discussing the other attendees and how normal they were – ordinary clothes, ordinary conversation:

 

 

All in all, the deniers that day and that weekend seemed the most middling of Middle Americans.   Or better: Despite their take on the Holocaust, they were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual.   Their eyes weren’t fires of unapproachable certitude, and their lips weren’t lemon twists of astringent hate.   Nazis and neo-Nazis they didn’t seem to be.

 

 

He gave his impression from his first day there as being that the people at the conference were not anti-Semites or Nazis, but the most ordinary of Americans, who like “everyone in America” believe “one or another ridiculous thing”.   Throughout the remainder of the essay he did not deviate from this impression but rather reiterated and reinforced it.

 

 

When it comes to his account of the actual lectures at the conference, he treated the views of the presenters fairly.   This is a remarkable contrast with how they are generally treated.   A couple of years before Sack’s essay came out, I read the book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which came out the same year as Sack’s An Eye for an Eye and was written by Deborah Lipstadt who was an Assistant Professor of Religion at Emory University when the book was released, becoming Professor of Modern Jewish and Religious Studies later that year.  My impression, and it was by no means only my own, was that Lipstadt was an activist rather than a scholarly historian.   She did not interact with the arguments of the people she was writing about and refute them.   Indeed, she made a huge deal about not doing so, on the grounds that had she interacted with their ideas and given reasons why they were mistaken, this would be debating them, and debating them would conceding that the Holocaust was open to debate.   It did not seem to occur to her that by doing so she removed the Holocaust from the realm of history and placed it in the realm of dogma, or that there was any inconsistency between this and her claim to be a professional historian.   Much like the anti-“hate” experts here in Canada, she came off as telling people that the “Holocaust deniers” were bad people and that rather than form our own conclusions about that by examining what they had to say for themselves, we should just take her word for it.   I refused to swallow that line of thinking and after looking in to what the people she so vilified had to say in their own words, concluded that one could not possibly form an accurate impression of their views from Lipstadt’s book.   By contrast, someone reading Sack’s essay would learn from the onset of the portion where he discussed what was said at the conference, that the “Holocaust deniers” do not deny Hitler’s anti-Semitism, that Jews were sent to concentration camps, or that a great many died and were cremated there.   When it comes to what the “deniers” do deny, that genocidal intent lay behind all of this, Sack gave his reasons for disagreeing with them, but also observed where elements of their argument – that the confession from the Auschwitz commandant was obtained by torture and that others confessed to things that nobody considers to be true – were correct.  

 

 

Of the speakers who spoke that weekend, Sack counted six “who’d run afoul of the law because of their disbelief in the Holocaust and the death apparatus at Auschwitz”.   After give short accounts of the first five, then thanking God that the United States has the First Amendment – how much longer this will the case now that Joe Biden has appointed a Ministry of Truth remains to be seen, although I suspect the American Supreme Court, if it survives the current progressive fury onslaught against it for wanting to allow states to ban baby murder again, will make short work of this – Sack went on to give a lengthy account of his interaction with the sixth, a man already mentioned in this essay with whom Canadians of my generation will be familiar assuming they paid any attention to the news while growing up.   Sack wrote:

 

 

The man’s name is Ernst Zundel.  He’s round-faced and red-faced like in a Hals, he’s eternally jolly, and he was born in Calmbach, Germany.   If you saw the recent movie about the Holocaust deniers, Mr. Death, he’s the man in the hard hat who says, “We Germans will not go down in history as genocidal maniacs.  We. Will. Not.”   He has become a hero to anti-Semites and, like every denier, has been called anti-Semitic himself, but it’s just as honest to say that the Jews who (along with God) oversee the Jewish community are in fact anti-Zundelic, anti-Countessic, anti-Irvingic, and, in one word, anti-denieric.   The normal constraints of time, temperance and truth do not obstruct some Jewish leaders from their nonstop vituperation of Holocaust deniers.   (8)

 

After providing examples of such vituperation from Elie Wiesel and Abraham Foxman, he then expressed his disagreement in these words:

 

 

Myself, I disagree with these Jewish leaders.  Most deniers, most attendees in their slacks and shorts at the palm-filled hotel, were like Zundel: people who, as Germans, had chosen to comfort themselves with the wishful thinking that none of their countrymen in the 1940s were genocidal maniacs. 

 

 

Sadly, if this essay was read by anyone with influence in the Canadian and American governments at the time, the point failed to sink in.   The year after this essay was included by Dr. Gould in the Best American Essays 2002 anthology the American government arrested Zündel, who had moved to the United States and married an American citizen, sent him back to Canada, where our government under the enhancement of its security certificate powers that Jean Chretien had introduced after the events of the eleventh of September, 2001, held him in solitary confinement, while a biased judge heard secret “evidence” that he – a non-violent man who had been the victim of terrorist violence on the part of the aforementioned Jewish Defense League back during his earlier trials – somehow posed a national security threat, and in 2005 he was deported to Germany, a country which, having learned absolutely nothing at all worth learning from the experience of totalitarianism under Hitler, put him on trial again, and sentenced him to five years in prison for “inciting racial violence”, which was their absurd interpretation of his having expressed his views about the Holocaust.   When Zündel died a few years back, Bono – neither Cher’s ex nor the front man for Irish rock band U2 but Toronto Sun neoconservative columnist Mark Bonokoski – apparently thinking himself not bound by the basic rules of human decency in this case, wrote an article in the opposite spirit of de mortuus nil nisi bonum dicendum est and heaped further abuse upon a recently deceased man whose treatment at the hands of our, the American, and the German governments was what was truly appalling, not the man’s eccentric views.    This was a textbook example in how not to be classy.

 

 

Sack, by contrast, was a class act all the way and in the last portion of his essay, which in addition to treating Holocaust revisionism as being a fundamentally defensive response to the anti-German attitudes that had arisen during and after the war, treated the over-the-top hate-filled response to it by, among others, Jewish leaders, as also being a phenomenon requiring explanation, Sack summarized his own address to the conference – about how hate, like its opposite love, is something that is not depleted by being given away but rather grows, and how anyone – Jew, German, whatever – can be brought to do horrible things if they indulge in it – said that it met with loud and long applause, and concluded by saying:

 

 

The conference ended on Monday.   No one was attacked by the Jewish Defense League.   The deniers (revisionists, they call themselves) meet next in Cincinnati, and they have invited me to be the keynote speaker there.   I’ve said yes.

 

 

The people Sack was writing about had been subjected to what can only be called dehumanization and demonization, for their dissent from the conventional historical account of the Holocaust of World War II.   The frequent targets of violence themselves, progressive – and even, much more to my disgust, conservative – commentators typically write as if this violence was justified and if these people themselves are committing some sort of violence by their opinions and words.   While “wokeness” and “cancel culture” have come under some much deserved criticism in recent years, albeit criticism that is insufficient and which should have started years earlier, any attempt to counter these things is bound to fail so long as those opposing this neo-totalitarianism tolerate this mistreatment of Holocaust revisionists.   Sack’s essay, treating them as the human being they are, and even intelligent and scholarly ones when such accolades are deserved as they are in the case of the historian David Irving, was a pleasant change from the toxicity that permeates most conventional discussion of this topic.   Sadly, it is to the best of my knowledge, the only essay of its kind to find its way into a mainstream publication to this day.

 

 

Dr. Gould was right to include it in Best American Essays 2002.   It would make my short list for an anthology of the best essays of the twenty-first century.    It was good to see a man who got almost everything else wrong his whole life finally get something right at the very end.

 

 

(1) Dr. John W. Robbins' " The Trinity Foundation - The Hoax of Scientific Creationism ", published in The Trinity Journal (July/August 1987) and which was originally a talk given to the Baltimore Creation Fellowship is a good summary of how the "scientific creationist" approach compromises Christian truth.   Among other things he points out that "scientific creationism" produced a definition of "creationism" so disconnected from the Bible and religion that it could have included Stephen Jay Gould.

 

(2)  A sizable portion of this book was devoted to an attack on the craniology of Samuel George Morton, an early nineteenth century American physician with a very big skull collection, which he measured and correlated with the intelligence of those who had provided these relics.   Proving Morton to have been a quack motivated by racist bias was an obsession of Dr. Gould's - he had devoted a paper to this same subject about three years before the book was first published.   Since nobody at the time Gould’s book came out derived his own work from Morton's this had all the appearance of a straw man.   Morton was long dead, obscure, held to a view of human origins – polygenism - that each of the human races arose separately and not from common stock - that has never been widely held, all making him an easy target.   Interestingly, though, two separate research teams examined Morton's skull collection, now the property of the University of Pennsylvania, and concluded the Gould was wrong in accusing Morton of sloppy measurements.     Another large portion of the book is devoted to Sir Cyril Burt.  Burt, who died about ten years before the first edition of The Mismeasure of Man was published, had been Professor and Chair of Psychology at University College London until his retirement in 1951.   After his retirement he had published a number of papers presenting research that supported the idea of a large hereditary component of human intelligence including comparisons made between twins, identical and fraternal, some who had been raised together, and others who had been separated at birth.   Shortly after Burt’s death Leon Kamin, who was Chair of Psychology at Princeton at the time, argued that something was wrong with Burt’s research because the correlation coefficients in several of his twin studies papers were identical even though they were dealing with subject groups of different sizes, implying that fraud was involved which implication was made in his 1974 The Science and Politics of IQ which attempted to portray psychometrics and herediterian concepts of intelligence as pseudoscience motivated by racist politics.   Kamin’s implied accusation of fraud was made explicit, expanded upon and made more sensational by Oliver Gillie a couple of years later who reported that he could find no trace of two women who had been Burt’s research assistants in the twin studies and had been credited with co-authoring or in a couple of cases sole authorship of papers on the results and suspected that Burt had made the two up.   When Burt’s authorized biographer Leslie S. Hearnshaw published his book in 1979, he accepted the charges against Burt.    Burt was much more recent than Morton and as was not the case with Morton his work had been very influential on the hereditarian psychologists who were active when Gould published his book – among others Arthur R. Jensen who was Professor of Educational Psychology at University of California, Berkeley, Richard Herrnstein, and Hans J. Eysenck of King’s College, London who had studied under Burt.   Gould, needless to say, treated the charges as an open-and-shut case.   The charges however, were far but proven.  Eight years after Gould’s book first came out Robert B. Joynson’s The Burt Affair was published by Routledge.   Joynson went over the whole case and concluded that the accusations of fraud against Burt were false.     The papers in which the alleged fraud was perpetrated were written during Burt’s long retirement, based upon data that had been collected between World War I and World War II.   His “missing” research assistants, Mary Howard and Jane Conway, had most likely been social workers who began assisting him when he was working as school psychologist for the London County Council, and thus were never found by those who were looking for them in the later period in connection with the University.   His accumulated research material was moved around a number of times during the war and required reassembling after.   This was a long process and Burt began publishing long before it was complete.   As more of the data was recovered, Burt updated figures where more information was available, and re-used the old figures when it was not, taking it for granted that it would be obvious this is what he was doing.   The correlations that are the most invariable are the ones that have the least to do with the matter over which Gould, Kamin, et al. accused Burt of perpetrating fraud.   Ronald Fletcher similarly concluded that Burt had been falsely accused in Science, Ideology and the Media (1991).   The fact that other twin studies done by other researchers fairly consistently yield data similar to Burt’s and which support his conclusions is difficult to explain if the accusations of fraud are correct.   Is everyone who engages in this sort of research a fraud motivated by racist politics?   Note that the scientists who have come to hereditarian conclusions have represented the entire political spectrum.   Arthur Jensen, for example, was a fairly conventional American liberal in the 1960s, at least until American liberals decided he had to be un-personned over his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article about IQ.   Conversely, those who hurl sweeping accusations against scientists engaged in psychometrics, sociobiology, or anything else that treats human nature as something other than a tabula rasa as being motivated by crude, racist, sexist, etc., politics all seem to come from the same place on the left wing of the political spectrum.    Their accusing others of basing their science on their politics looks a lot like what Freud called projection, don’t you think?

 

(3) Dr. Edward O. Wilson recounted the famous dispute with his colleague at length in his autobiography Naturalist (1994).   See also Dr. Ullica Segerstråle's Defenders of Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (2000).

 

(4)   This is an understatement.   Twenty-two years ago, when Celera and the publicly funded Human Genome Project announced the basic completion of their project of mapping the human genome, then-Celera CEO J. Craig Venter made an asinine remark about how this research had disproven the biological reality of race.   This sort of thing – that race is not a biological reality, because the genetic differences within what we call races is so much greater than that which can be found between the races and so race must be a social construct imposed upon biology for dubious social-political reasons – is now routinely taught in the sort of hard science classes that many conservatives think to be so resistant to academic wokeness.   It is an idea that comes straight out of the softer social sciences that were long ago taken over by Marxists.   It is nonsense.   As was observed at the time the exact same reasoning could be used to argue that sex is not a biological reality but a social construct.   A single chromosome determines whether someone is male or female.   The genetic variation between individuals within both sexes is much greater than this.   Little did anyone who pointed out this obvious flaw in the liberal argument then suspect that a couple of decades later the Left would indeed be insisting that there is no biological reality of sex, that there is only “gender” of which the individual is whichever the individual thinks he/she/it/whatever is, that men can be pregnant and menstruate, and all sorts of other similar and related rubbish.   

 

(5) Willis Carto is probably most remembered as founder and head of the Liberty Lobby which published a weekly tabloid The Spotlight with a right-wing populist editorial stance that specialized in stories about currency devaluation, bankers colluding against the public interest, the misdeeds of internationalist, globalist, organizations and think tanks, government cover-ups of various stripes, and basically the sort of thing that is generally considered “conspiracy theory” today.   Say what you will about this sort of material – and there is much that can be said both for and against it – articles from The Spotlight that appeared sensational and fringe, to put it mildly, when they first came out, have sometimes taken on the appearance of “they were on to something” from hindsight.   To give one example, in 1979 they ran a two-part interview with World War II veteran Douglas Bazata who claimed that he was approached by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the war era predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency – and asked to murder General George S. Patton, that he had turned Donovan down, but someone else had done it and arranged for it to look like an accident.    At the time it was widely assumed that The Spotlight and Bazata were both capitalizing on Brass Target which had come out the previous year starring Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, Robert Vaughn and Max van Sydow, which was the film version of Frederick W. Nolan’s novel The Oshawa Project (or Algonguin Project in the American edition) the plot of which centred around General Patton (played by George Kennedy in the film) being murdered and his murder disguised as an accident.   Much later, Robert K. Wilcox wrote a book-length argument that this is in fact what happened – Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (2008).   A few years later Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard also wrote a book on this subject, Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General (2014).   David McCalden the co-founder and first director of the Institute for Historical Research had been an activist with the National Front before moving to the United States.   While the political activism of both men lends weight to the organization’s many critics who say it is motivated entirely by political ideology its present director, Mark Weber, who has been in that role since 1995, is certainly a credentialed historian.   It was Weber who extended the invitation to John Sack on the suggestion of David Cole, as the latter revealed in his 2014 memoir Republican Party Animal.    Cole, who met McCalden towards the end of the latter’s life, ended up inheriting his papers and books and, taking up this line of research on his own, gained a certain degree of fame or infamy depending upon how you look at it in the 1990s as a Jewish Holocaust revisionist, which was regarded as a novelty even though decades earlier, before the Holocaust was elevated to the level of inscrutable dogma, there had been plenty of these in libertarian circles.   Threats from the JDL prompted him to recant in the late 1990s, after which he changed his name to David Stein and became a documentary filmmaker and an event organizer for Hollywood conservatives and Republicans who dropped him like a hot potato when he was “outed” as David Cole about a decade ago (mainstream conservatives are generally as useless as tits on a bull when it comes to standing up for people, even their friends, in situations like this).   Cole most certainly was not motivated by ideology of any sort.   Michael Shermer, the editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, and author of Why People Believe Weird Things a 1997 book in which acceptance of the conventional, secular, late twentieth-century, worldview is treated as critical thinking and various ideas outside of this worldview – the way Cole et al. thought about the Holocaust and my own understanding of creation which the author once shared before jumping from Christianity through various other religions to his present superstitious belief in science receive the largest sections – as irrational superstition, to which Stephen Jay Gould contributed a foreword and which for a while was a fairly popular crib for those who regard their university indoctrination as education, their conventional views as enlightened, and are looking for pat answer arguments to justify their smug feelings of intellectual superiority over others who disagree with them, called Cole a “meta-ideologue”, that is, someone who digs in to the deeper explanations underneath ideologies, which seems like it must be very close to how Shermer saw his own role in writing the book mentioned.

 

(6) Nobody, after all, could possibly have formed a skeptical opinion about the account of atrocities committed in the part of Nazi-occupied Europe that the Soviets drove the Nazis out of and which was occupied by the Soviets after the war and remained under Communist control until the late 1980s, because of questions about the reliability of information largely controlled by the government that perpetrated the Katyn Forrest Massacre (1940) and blamed it on the Germans, now, could they?  

 

(7)   It is interesting to note that the late Fred Phelps, the ultra-Calvinistic minister of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas who attained notoriety for picketing the funerals of homosexuals, decades earlier had been a lawyer who specialized in the same sort of cases – and on the same side – as the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic).

 

(8) Sack spelled Zündel’s name without the umlaut or the e after the u that is often used as a substitute for a u with umlaut in English transliteration of German names.   I have left it as he spelt it in quotations from his essay, but used the umlaut myself in other references to Zündel.