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.

Hillary: An Historic Campaign?

As a Canadian High Tory I do not approve of republics and presidents, much preferring our own parliamentary monarchy system in which the head of state, the representative of the country as a whole including past and future generations not merely those who cast votes in the present, is above the political process, having come to her position through a constitutional, hereditary, line of succession through which the sovereignty she possesses, exercised, for better or for worse, in her name by the elected government, is hers by prescriptive and divine right.

That having been said, this year’s Presidential election in the republic to our south is certainly an interesting and entertaining one, far more so than any other than I can remember in my life time. The primary season is now over, and the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties have been chosen. I have written about the Republican candidate, Donald Trump previously, and will likely do so again in the future. Today I would like to talk about the Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The news media has declared Clinton’s campaign to be an historic one, because she is the first woman to be the nominee of a major political party. The Hillary-sympathetic media will be attempting to get as much mileage out of this fact as they can, just as they got as much mileage as they could out of Barack Obama’s being the first black President, and if Americans fall for this trick twice it will demonstrate just how debased, degraded, and inane their system has become.

There are other better reasons for describing Hillary Clinton’s campaign as historic than her sex. There is, for example, the fact that she sought the nomination of her party while under investigation by the FBI for misdoings while Secretary of State. Has that ever happened before?

Actually, perhaps even this is not particularly history making. You might recall the word “Whitewater” being tossed around quite a bit when Clinton’s husband, Bill, was seeking the Democratic nomination in 1992. Whitewater was the name of a real-estate development company founded by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The purpose of the company was to buy up land to develop into vacation estates – which it sold, repossessed, and resold, fleecing people out of their money in an underhanded, but apparently legal, manner. The scheme eventually failed, and McDougal, who had been trying to keep it afloat with funds misappropriated from a bank he managed called Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, came under investigation just before the bank collapsed in the big S & L crisis. Bill Clinton was accused of using his influence as Governor of Arkansas to benefit Madison Guaranty. Hillary Clinton, as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, represented Madison Guaranty for much of this time. During the federal investigation of this scandal early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, many of the relevant legal documents mysteriously disappeared, eventually being discovered in the White House with the fingerprints of Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster Jr. all over them.

You remember Vince Foster don’t you? The colleague of Hillary’s from Rose Law, rumoured to have been her lover, who became Deputy White House Counsel only to turn up dead in Fort Macy Park six months into Bill Clinton’s presidency. After the body was discovered, and before the office was sealed, Hillary’s staff removed several boxes of documents. The death was ruled a suicide, but there is a reason that the term “Arkancide” was coined to describe a murder disguised as a suicide.

Whatever really happened to Vince Foster there is much blood on Hillary’s hands. In March of 1999, Hillary called up her husband from Africa and urged him to bomb Serbia. Bill did so – without the approval of the American Congress but with the support of other NATO leaders such as the UK’s Tony Blair and our own creepy Prime Minister at the time, Jean Chretien. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get”, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright declared. Albright was appointed, like so many other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, at Hillary’s choice. The excuse for the bombing was the accusation – later proven to be false – that the Serbian government was ethnically cleansing the Albanians in Kosovo. The bombing benefited the Albanian Islamic terrorist organization the KLA at the expense of Orthodox Serbia, which saw its infrastructure devastated and thousands of its civilians murdered by NATO bombs.

Speaking of American military interventions that should never have taken place and which had disastrous consequences, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York State, voted in favour of the Iraq War in 2002.

Then along came 2011. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State in the administration of Barack Obama, urged a “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. She got her way, an Obama led NATO bombed Libya, and Colonel Qaddafi was ousted and killed, and jihadists gained control of Libya. The following year those jihadists attacked the American embassy in Benghazi, killing the American ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and ten others. The consulate had requested that their security be beefed up, but the request had been denied by the State Department headed by You Know Who.

“Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?” Hillary Clinton asked in the speech she gave to the Democratic National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination, but it is a question that might properly be asked of her, considering her track record as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State and the bellicose language she uses when speaking of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the same speech, Hillary Clinton called the foreign policy ideas of her opponent “dangerously incoherent”, but her own could be described as “dangerously coherent.” They are the same failed ideas that have guided American foreign policy since the Presidency of George H. W. Bush. In the last two and a half decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forces of Islamic jihad have emerged as the biggest external threat to Western civilization. During that time, each American administration has thought that the appropriate way to handle this threat was to introduce more democracy into the countries that produce and support jihadists – unless their governments regularly do business with the administration and its friends – and to bomb the hell out of these countries. At the same time they have encouraged large scale immigration from all over the world, including Islamic countries. This policy would continue under a President Hillary Clinton. It is a policy that might serve the interests of the new, internationalist, globalist order, that every President since the first Bush has believed in, but from the perspective of anyone concerned about the safety and security of the United States, or the larger Western world for that matter, it is clearly a recipe for disaster, for converting an external threat into a much more dangerous internal one.

This, ultimately, is what this year’s election will be all about. If Americans want more of the same – more bombing countries overseas and more potential jihadists being allowed in – then they have Hillary Clinton to choose. If they want the opposite of this, then they had better consider voting for her opponent, for he is the first candidate of a major party in decades to offer anything different. That is the true historic first in this election.

What is your true Faith?

Do you call yourself a Christian?

If so, please permit me to ask you the following two questions.

If someone were to deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, to say that He did not rise bodily from the grave, would you want that person to be punished by the state with a fine or a prison sentence or to be driven from career and community and turned into a pariah?

The second question is the same as the first except that instead of denying the Resurrection of Jesus Christ the person in question denies that the Holocaust took place, or questions the veracity of certain elements of the Holocaust narrative, such as the death count of six million.

If your answer to the first question is yes then I would suggest you need to think through your faith. If you are a Christian then you yourself believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead for you cannot be a Christian without believing this. If you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead then you believe that this was an actual event. The truth of that event does not depend upon your faith or that of anyone else and therefore cannot be harmed by anyone’s denial. Nor should another’s denial be able to harm your own faith in the Resurrection if you recognize that your faith relies upon the truth of what you believe, rather than the other way around, and are well-familiar with the evidence for that truth. The denier, therefore, can only harm himself by his denial, and so the appropriate response on your part, as a Christian, is to testify to your own faith in the Living Christ and to pray that the eyes of the denier would be opened that he might see the light of the Gospel, be converted, and believe.

If a yes answer to the first question suggests that the believer is insecure in his own faith, a yes answer to the second question, especially when joined with a no answer to the first, indicates a far more serious problem. It indicates that the Holocaust is of greater importance to you than the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, that the Holocaust is now in the space which the Gospel ought to occupy in the heart of the Christian believer.

These are all things that Canadian Christians ought to keep in mind in hearing or reading the recent news story about one Monika Schaefer and contemplating what they ought to think about the whole affair.

Schaefer, the Canadian born daughter of German immigrants who were of the generation that saw the Third Reich, is a violin instructor in Jasper, Alberta who has run, unsuccessfully, as the Green Party candidate in the federal constituency of Yellowhead on several occasions. In June she posted a video on Youtube, in which she played the violin and apologized to her parents for believing their generation to be guilty of perpetrating the Holocaust which she has come to believe to be “the biggest and most pernicious persistent lie in all of history.”

As you have probably guessed, certain people are rather upset about this. The head of B’nai Brith, an organization which, if I had as little class as they have I would describe with a considerably greater degree of accuracy than they have ever seen fit to exercise, as a Christophobic hate group, demanded that the Green Party “must denounce Schaefer and distance itself from all Holocaust denying groups and individuals.” Of course the party did just that, declaring that “The Green Party of Canada condemns in the strongest possible terms comments by Monika Schaefer, a former candidate, regarding her views on the Holocaust” and that at the next meeting of their Federal Council they will hear a motion to revoke her membership. Elizabeth May, the party’s leader, declared her condemnation of Schaefer’s “terribly misguided and untrue statements,” saying that Schaefer “does not represent the values of the Green Party nor of our membership.”

The matter of whom the fringe, leftist, eco-crackpot Green Party kicks out of their movement is of no concern to me in and of itself, although I find B’nai Brith’s bullying political parties into kicking out people they do not approve of for reasons that have nothing to do with the party’s policies and platform quite irritating. Schaefer faces more than just being kicked out of her political party, however. Thanks to Ken Kuzminski, the president of the Jasper legion who, according to the CBC was at one time a friend of Schaefer’s, a charge has been filed against her with both the Alberta and the Canadian Human Rights Commissions. That yet another person may find herself the victim of the injustice of being punished for expressing forbidden thoughts at the hands of these Stalinist inquisitions is something which concerns and ought to outrage all Canadians.

The Canadian and provincial Human Rights Commissions are fundamentally un-Canadian institutions if by Canada we mean the Dominion of Canada that fought against Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich alongside the United Kingdom and the other countries in the great British family of nations between 1939 and 1945. The Dominion of Canada was established in 1867 by the Fathers of Confederation on the Loyalist foundation of preserving in the new country they were building, our rich British heritage including our parliamentary monarchy form of government, our Christian religion, our English Common Law, and the basic freedoms and legal rights that developed in the course of over a thousand years of history that included such highlights as the constitution of Alfred the Great of Wessex and the Magna Carta Libertatum. These Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals, which investigate and pass judgement upon the expressed thoughts of Canadians to determine whether they have committed what in the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984 was called “crimethink,” are foreign to that heritage and tradition, being much more at home in totalitarian ideological states like the Soviet Union, Red China, and North Korea.

It was the ideology that drove these states – the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, more commonly known as Communism – to which the Liberal Prime Ministers who governed Canada from 1963 to 1984 subscribed, secretly in the case of Lester Pearson, more openly in the case of Pierre Trudeau who was responsible for the Canadian Human Rights Act which established these Soviet-style tribunals. This ideology was an enemy of National Socialism, the ideology behind the Third Reich, but the enmity was that of bitter rivalry between virtually identical twin siblings. The only significant difference between the two was that National Socialism, being racist and nationalist, rejected the liberal universalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism of Communism. Otherwise they were revolutionary ideologies that attracted young thugs, hated the old, traditional, order, and established virtually identical party-ruled, police states that governed by fear and required everyone to at least give lip service to the tenets of their ideology.

The British family of nations, including the Dominion of Canada, was forced to make a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union in the war against the Third Reich, but the wisest of our leaders, such as Sir Winston Churchill, recognized that the ideology of the USSR was just as bad and dangerous as that of Nazi Germany and it would serve us well in this day to remember that the two ideologies were twins. Those who think that ideas like those of Monika Schaefer ought to be punished by law maintain that they hold this position to prevent a resurgence of National Socialism. The Nizkor website, on its home page, asks the question “Given the evidence…why do people deny the Holocaust?” which it answers with a quotation from some American neo-Nazi group “The real purpose of holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again.”

This, however, is clearly nonsense. The first holocaust revisionist was Paul Rassinier, a French Communist and pacifist, who joined the anti-Nazi resistance and was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Dora. The American history professor, Harry Elmer Barnes, who had Rassinier’s books published in English, was an American classical liberal. Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdooney, after reading Rassinier and Barnes, pointed to the claims of the standard Holocaust account which they disputed as an example of bearing false witness against one’s neighbour in his commentary on the Ten Commandments in his Institutes of Biblical Law. David Cole, who became a Holocaust revisionist in his youth, going to the site of Auschwitz to investigate after the fall of Communism in Poland, is a fairly mainstream American conservative and certainly no Nazi-sympathizer. None of these men had or have an interest in making National Socialism “an acceptable political alternative again.” Most holocaust revisionists, according to journalist John Sack, in an Esquire article from 2001 in which he described his encounters with David Irving, Ernst Zundel, and other revisionists at a meeting of the Institute for Historical Review, were simply ordinary people of German descent who did not want to think ill of their ancestors.

It would be more truthful to say that it is the influence of Communism, National Socialism’s rival sibling, that lies behind the suppression of Holocaust revisionism. Due to the similarity between the ideologies, it is therefore also true to say that those who want to see people like Monika Schaefer silenced, dragged before Human Rights tribunals, and punished for their views, are closer to the spirit of Adolf Hitler than those they seek to persecute. It has been pointed out that the adherents of these totalitarian ideologies often had no problem switching from the one to the other and it is interesting to note that when the Dominion of Canada was fighting Hitler at the side of Great Britain, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the author of the Canadian Human Rights Act who throughout his political career praised Communist tyrants like Mao and Castro, was riding around on his motorcycle, denouncing the war effort, with a German helmut on his head and a big swastika on his back.

Fellow Canadians, if any of the spirit of the old Dominion still lives on in you, I urge you not to remain silent while another Canadian is persecuted for expressing an unpopular point of view. It is those who wish to silence and punish Monika Schaefer, not Schaefer herself, who represent all of the things our country went to war to fight in 1939.

As for the Holocaust – make up your own minds about it. Read both sides – conventional history books, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of The European Jews – and those by the revisionists. David Cole, for example, has an interesting summary of his present views on the matter in the last chapter of his memoir Republican Party Animal. If you find the conventional history more convincing, believe it. If you find the revisionists have better arguments, believe them. If you cannot make up your mind, don’t be afraid to admit it and say that you just don’t know. Any of these options is fine. Just don’t let bullies like B’nai Brith tell you what to think.

Finally, Canadian Christians, when you see Holocaust revisionists being persecuted for their views, recognize this for the injustice that it is. This, and not the unevenness of the distribution of wealth, is what real injustice looks like. Do not be fooled by the wolves in sheep’s clothing, who preach social justice, while licking the jackboots of the ideology responsible for these injustices, an ideology that has been dedicated to the destruction of our faith since the moment its founder penned his foul Manifesto in 1848. If you do not want people thrown in jail or otherwise persecuted for denying the Resurrection – and you should not want that – then you ought to be opposed to their being persecuted for denying the Holocaust. Otherwise, you testify that the Holocaust is more important to you than the Resurrection, raising the question of where your faith truly lies.