Justin Trudeau and the Banderites

A dimly lit hall. Enthusiastic crowd. A screechy harangue from the podium. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s association with Nazism was made manifest a second time!

Fresh from applauding a member of the 1st Galician Division of the Waffen SS in the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau gave a bizarre performance the following day, on September 23, 2023, at the Fort York Armoury, in Toronto.

More importantly, to his left hung a large banner.. It read in Cyrillic, ГЕРОЯМ СЛАВА (Heroyam, or Geroyam Slava), or “Glory to the Heroes!”

It’s a response to a Banderite (Nazi) call; the first part might be more familiar: СЛАВА УКРАЇНІ (Slava Ukraini), “Glory to Ukraine.” The response is, “Glory to the Heroes.”

This cry was popularized by none other than the Ukrainian Nazi, Stepan Bandera, and became his slogan. Both his organizations, the Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA), allied with the Nazis, used this call-response and it is now closely identified only with them. Bandera established it as the “Ukrainian” version of the Nazi call-response, “Heil Hitler-Sieg Heil.”

We just need to recall that both the OUN and the UPA carried out many atrocities against Poles and Jews and the Roma and fellow Ukrainians, while the crimes of Bandera are legend, and need not be repeated here, as I have discussed all this earlier. Suffice to say that it is impossible to speak of modern Ukraine without the Nazis—current Ukrainian national life is saturated by Hitlerism.

Is PM Trudeau again going to say that he knew nothing about the banner hanging right before him? That Anthony Rota, the ex-Speaker of the House of Commons, made his way into the Armoury to hang it up? Or, more likely, in Trudeau’s mind, Putin did it?

What we are really witnessing is the barking of violent rhetoric, all justified by blurting out “Ukraine.” In other words, all manner of hatred can now be concealed by the “morality” of supporting Ukraine. This violence has become a habit of mind among all the Canadian and Western ruling elite—enthusiastically repeated by Trudeau, as this speech bears witness. This is why the members of the Canadian Parliament all stood, cheered and applauded the Nazi visiting them in House of Commons.

The Armoury performance by Trudeau was Hitlerian in delivery as well—the exaggerated gestures, the angry facial expressions, the modulated shouting (though truth be told, Hitler was better at all this than Trudeau can ever hope to be, despite his stint as a drama teacher); and then came the copium and the hopium—handing out $9 Billion is going to defeat Russia. Perhaps in a saner moment, Trudeau might want to ask himself how much winning from the Ukrainians the USA bought with $112 Billion (the real amount is likely a lot, lot more, since the Pentagon is hopeless at math)?

Worse was the applauding crowd before him, listening to his ranting (did all the 338 clappy, happy members of Parliament tag along?), and no one noticed the banner? Truth be told, it was sneaky, being in Cyrillic.

The Russophoba that Trudeau yelled out stems from the deeply neo-Nazi views of the Ukrainian regime in Kiev, and within Ukrainian society itself, which do not see Russians, or anyone East of them, as humans.

For example, on August 4, 2023, Aleksey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, stated: “I’m fine with Asians, but Russians are Asians. They have a completely different culture, vision. Our key difference from them is humanity.” Ukrainians are humans, while Russians, because they are Asians, are not.

Then, on September 14, 2023, Zelensky’s top aide, Mikhail Podoliak, observed: “What’s wrong with India, China, and so forth? The problem is that they are not analyzing the consequences of their steps, these countries have weak intellectual potential, unfortunately… Yes, they invest in science. Yes, India has launched a lunar rover presently and is now trekking on the surface of the Moon, but that does not indicate that this country fully comprehends what the modern world is about… China should be interested in Russia disappearing, because it is an archaic nation that drags China into unnecessary conflicts… It would be in their interest now to distance themselves from Russia as far as possible, take all the resources it has, and take part of the Russian territory under their legal control. In fact, they will do that.” Again, Asians are racially inferior; and since Russians are Asians, ergo, etc.

On September 28, 2023, Vovan & Lexus, the brilliant Russian pranskters, posing as ex-President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, spoke with the transgender Ukraine ex-spokesman, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (born Michael, now a creature no longer human; merely a “billboard” for Wokery), who very precisely and clearly stated what is commonly believed in Ukraine, because it is taught in their schools: “Russians are not Europeans… Russians are Asian, and ultimately, they do come from the Mongols. They do come from a grouping of people who want to be slaves and want to be led, just as it was from the days of Genghis Khan. I wish the rest of Europe and the Western world understood that Europe ends at Ukraine. We are protecting European values and Western values the same way those did hundreds and thousands of years ago when the Mongols came in…. Every Russian that supports Vladimir Putin’s decisions are not human. These people are not human. They are enemies of humanity, in fact… we’ve been asking the Western world since the days of your presidency, sir, to make certain they understood the threat of these non-humans” (transcript via KanekoaTheGreat).

These are the people Trudeau is paying $9 Billion to. These are the views that ground his own scream-fest: “…because the cost on Canadians, on our lives on our…(?) will be so much greater if Putin wins this war, we will and have to stand every single day until Ukraine wins this war.”

Ukrainians must win because they are humans; Russians are not. Notice the attempt at cleverness with the “cost” involved. If Russians win, they are going to “cost” Canada a lot more. How? Right now, it’s the Ukrainians who are costing Canadians $9 Billion, not the Russians. Rather than pointless gymnastics with economics, it is far easier to explain Trudeau’s words as an extension of Ukrainian Russophobia. For Trudeau, people like Danilov, Podoliak and Ashton-Cirillo must win, because these people can build a better world, a world that he can truly believe in. And he’s ready to put his tax-payers’ money where his mouth is.

Far more sinisterly, it’s better to pay Ukrainians to go and die so that Putin can be defeated (the only goal of the West), rather than send out Canadian troops to get the job done (laugh track, please).

Ukrainians are defending “democracy” and “our values” (Danilov, Podoliak and Ashton-Cirillo), so we don’t have to fight for both over here—and therefore the money we give them is the “best defense investment ever made,” since the Ukrainians are more than happy to die for “us.” You see, the more Ukrainians that die, the more democratic and freer we become. How much Ukrainian blood is your “freedom” worth—just ask yourself. Put another way, how many Ukrainians will Trudeau’s $9 Billion kill? How many Russians? What will Trudeau have really bought?

As noted, Trudeau’s words are an extention of Ukrainian Russophobia that in turn stems from the false assumption of racial superiority, which has been taught in Ukrainian schools for many decades: that Western Ukrainians are racially and linguistically completely different because they are direct descendents of Vikings and therefore Germanic and therefore superior. This myth was cultivated by Banderites in order to endear themselves to the Nazis (it never worked, as the Nazis rightly knew them to be only Slavs, while the Ukrainians went overboard to show assumed “Germanic” kinship, especially when it came to brutality, which often astonished even the Nazis).

More bizarely, versions of this myth are constantly repeated in all of Western media, including independent (sane) media, where Eastern Ukraine is always called “ethnically Russian,” a meaningless term which only strengthens Ukrainian self-aggrandizing racial fables. All Ukrainians are “ethnically Russian.” There are no other kind.

The truth is that the Ukrainian language (previously, and correctly, known as “Little Russian” or Ruthenian) is best understood as a dialect of Russian, therefore firmly and only Slavic. Russian and Ukrainian today are mutually intelligible. Ukrainian is not a Germanic language; no part of it is. It has no Germanic traces; no vestige of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. In other words, the Vikings left no trace in the Ukrainian language (unlike English, for example, which is richly marked by Old Norse, as is Norman French). Nor is there any Viking (Germanic) DNA to be found among modern-day Western Ukrainians (who claim to be Viking descendents). They are all purely Slavic like their Eastern kinsmen whom they despise for being racially inferior Asians (Russians). Ironically, for these Western Ukrainians, Russians proper have greater racial kinship with Germans than they do. So, it would seem Western Ukrainians deeply hate themselves and take this hatred out on Russians in order to “feel” superior. A variant dialect has been mythologized into a “racial difference;” and, sadly, it is this mythology that is the ideological fuel driving the war being waged by the Kiev regime.

And it is this muddled Banderite mentality that Trudeau wants to win. For him, Banderites embody the “truth” that he can back with other people’s money. This is the world that all of the West is supporting with its money and arms. Why should the Russians, therefore, not see this conflict in Ukraine as the West’s new Operation Barbarossa?

Do we still need to wonder where Nazism is thriving the most in Canada? It is thriving among people like Trudeau and the entire ruling class that stood clapping and adoring an old Waffen SS veteran, because their minds find affinity with the Nazis when it comes to Ukraine, since the entire Western endeavor is founded upon Russophobia, upon a deep racial difference (Russians are not Europeans); and because the West is indeed engaged in a war to annihilate Russians. The longer this war goes on, the more Nazi Canada and the West will become. This is the same Cold War mindset that forgave the Nazis everything because they made good allies against the new enemy, the Russians.

But this overwrought exhibition by Trudeau is also best viewed for what it is—alongside the brilliance of Charlie Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel, because Charlie knew how to skewer such types.

So, here’s to Justin Adenoid Hynkel, who can’t seem to get enough of the Nazis… Geroyam Slava, Mr. Prime Minister!


C.B. Forde writes from rual Canada.


Monuments to Ukrainian Nazis in Canada

Given the fact that Ukraine and Nazis are again making news, it is important to point out that there are indeed commemorative monuments to Ukrainian Nazis in Canada, located where the Ukrainian populations are the greatest. The reasons for such monuments are known to the Ukrainian community alone, but so it is essential to make a record of them here, along with a hint at what those being commemorated did back in the days of World War Two.

Roman Shukhevych

Statue of Roman Shukhevych. (Outside of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, north Edmonton, Alberta. Source).

“Ukrainian partisans and their allies burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. Churches full of worshipers were burned to the ground. Partisans displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies, to encourage remaining Poles to flee… It was this maimed OUN-Bandera, led by Mykola Lebed’ and then Roman Shukhevych, that cleansed the Polish population from Volhynia in 1943” (The Reconstruction of Nations).


1st Galician, 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS

Monument to 1st Galician, 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery, Oakville, Ontario. Photo: Sam Fleming/RSJ)

“The 14th Division of the Ukrainian SS surrounded the village Huta Pieniacka from three sides… The people were gathered in the church or shot in the houses. Those gathered in the church—men, women and children—were taken outside in groups, children killed in front of their parents. Some men and women were shot in the cemetery, others were gathered in barns where they were shot” (British archives).


Monument to the Glory of the UPA

Monument to the Glory of the UPA
(St. Volodymyr Cemetery, Oakville, Ontario)

“One of their major tasks as UPA partisans was the cleansing of the Polish presence from Volhynia. Poles tend to credit the UPA’s success in this operation to natural Ukrainian brutality; it was rather a result of recent experience. People learn to do what they are trained to do, and are good at doing what they have done many times. Ukrainian partisans who mass-murdered Poles in 1943 followed the tactics they learned as collaborators in the Holocaust in 1942: detailed advance planning and site selection; persuasive assurances to local populations prior to actions; sudden encirclements of settlements; and then physical elimination of human beings. Ukrainians learned the techniques of mass murder from Germans. This is why UPA ethnic cleansing was striking in its efficiency, and why Volhynian Poles in 1943 were nearly as helpless as Volhynian Jews in 1942. It is one reason why the campaign against Poles began in Volhynia rather than Galicia, since in Volhynia the Ukrainian police played a greater role in the Final Solution” (The Reconstruction of Nations).


Monument to the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division

14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division (St. Michael’s Cemetery, Edmonton, Alberta).

“On that day, early in the morning, soldiers of this division, dressed in white, masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery. SS-men of the 14th Division of the SS ‘Galizien’ entered the village, shooting the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, mostly women and children, were divided and locked in barns that were set on fire. Those who tried to run away were killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head Commission described the morbid details of the act. The crime was committed against women, children, and newborn babies” (The Institute of National Remembrance. Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation).


Is Canada now a Nazi State?

Canada today is a monstrous Woke machine, finely calibrated to yield the globalist new world order of green economics and eugenics (aka, gender equality, transgenderism, euthanasia). This machine was constructed by the wildly popular Canadian prime minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the father of Justin.

Political systems do not really disappear; they may fall into disuse for a while, until someone finds a use for them, and they reappear in a fresh iteration. Globalism is a fresh iteration of Nazism, for the two have the same core; they vary only in detail, because they must fit into the time-period in which they exist. Thus, the mistake often made by commentators is a lazy one, whereby Hitler and his Germany become the blueprint for comparison, while the core is never noticed, which defines both. What did Hitlerism seek to achieve? A purified humanity (eugenics), inhabiting a purified earth (environmentalism), a process facilitated by the state.

And what is the core of globalism? Less and better humans (eugenics), on an earth purified from the pollution of human activity (environmentalism).

Both Hitlerism and globalism function on the perfection-imperfection relationship—the former must continually seek out and destroy the latter. This is labeled “progress;” a better definition is the “great replacement,” in which anything marked as “imperfect” is to be replaced by the “perfect.” The agency doing the marking and the replacing is the state.

Eugenics for globalism is the marking of imperfect humanity (European, aka, “white”), which must be severely husbanded so that it can only exist on the margins. The perfect humanity is non-white, which must be given to dominate the earth. The only difference between Nazism and globalism is in the marking: “Jew” is now “white.” The end result is the same—the annihilation of humanity.

Canada is the chief architect and conniver in this globalist program—and thus Canada is now a Nazi state by another name (“democracy” and “our values”), for it seeks to achieve what eugenics and environmentalism will bring about—a green Hell—inhabited by non-white peoples bunched up from all over the world. The original Canadians of British and French origin (Old Stock Canadians), who built the Canada whose reputation whose glow yet lingers in people’s minds, have largely disappeared, having been drowned in legalalized, mass migration (the government imports 1,000,000 people every year, from the third world into Canada; a vast number, given Canada’s small population). And the finest enthusiast that this program has is Justin Trudeau.

To be clear, in the current Canadian political scene, all parties are complicit in the broader program of globalism—all will actively work to serve it well. It matters little whether the label is “liberal,” “conservative,” “green,” “socialist,” and even “communist”—none can escape the machine; rather, none want to. And Canada is eager to take this machine worldwide, for it has just launched a UN declaration to fight “disinformation.” Only people applauding Waffen SS veterans can really know what the truth is. Everyone else is the enemy.

In Canada, politically, there is only one glimmer of hope—the People’s Party of Canada, and its leader Maxime Bernier. But their biggest challenge is how to overcome the monstrous machine.


W.O. Munce writes from Canada.


O Canada!

My home, my heart, my kith and kin, are found in Niagara Falls, New York. The mighty River connecting the Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, punctuated by the thunderous cataracts and roiling rapids, forms a magnificent natural demarcation between my native soil and the Dominion of Canada.

Growing up I breathed the air of Canada. Along the Lower Niagara River my family has two abodes that look across the deep green-blue waters towards our great neighbor. I cannot think of home without thinking of Canada.

My earliest memories are filled with innumerable crossings of that erstwhile friendliest and longest unguarded border in the world. My family loved Canada for its English charm and easy going pace. We marveled at its deep lakes, sandy beaches, picturesque villages, ice wine and red sunsets. As a young boy my friends and I could ride our bicycles unaccompanied across the international bridge spanning the fearsome gorge below. There was always a customs and immigration booth to pass through. In those bygone days no passport nor even identification was demanded. It was just a friendly exchange: “Hello boys, how long will you be with us in Canada?” Bygone days in sooth.

At age eleven I experienced my inaugural high adventure foray into the wilds of Ontario. My first canoe trip was with my father and brothers during a rainy yet stunning October to a land speckled with a thousand glacial lakes: the Algonquin Highlands. There I learned how to survive in the forest; to navigate a straight course in a gusty headwind on lakes such as the great Opeongo; portage a heavy wooden canoe on my shoulders for miles and at the end drink straight from the pristine water without concern. In Canada I learned to split wood to reach its dry core, treasure the invaluably flammable paper-thin birch bark and sap of the pine to light a fire with one match in a downpour.

Paddling the virgin lake country, we learned to sing the hearty songs of the French-Canadian voyageurs of old in the very waters they explored and trapped for the Hudson’s Bay Company: Let every good fellow now join in a song! Vive la compagnie! Success to each other and pass it along! Vive la compagnie!

Amongst the sugar maples, blue spruce and silver birch the air was fresh and exhilarating. Along the streams we would traverse beaver dams; and in the grassy shallows of lakes behold the royal moose towering and unassailable. On occasion we would come across the sober warning of black bear tracks. I have heard the howls of wolves in the midnight darkness, and the haunting call of the loon on the misty lakes at twilight. Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver, where the mighty moose wanders at ease; blue skies and rocky shores, I will return once more…

In the deep sleep of Winter we would head into that forbidding Northland to snowshoe through waist deep powder across frozen lakes dotted with wolf tracks, using shovels and axes to hack through ice three feet thick so as to slake our thirst on the coveted fresh water beneath. Pitching our tents and crawling into double sleeping bags we proved that a man can survive the dark, windy night at 20 degrees below zero. Emerging from those cocoons in the bitter morning air was a test of the will. My brother and mentor, affectionately dubbed “Pierre le Voyageur,” was always first to rise and awake the crew with his uncanny ability to imitate the rooster’s crow, a rather unsettling, slightly charming talent.

In my sixteenth year – unforgettable and defining in my life – Pierre led us on a high adventure canoe trip that commenced 1,000 miles North of my home. Down the Missinaibi River for ten arduous days of dawn to dusk paddling we went, through a terrain of scrappy mosquito infested evergreens that the harsh climate stunted at 15 feet tall. We ended that epic voyage at the river’s tidal mouth as it emptied into the lower reaches of James Bay, near an isolated village named Moosonee. My paddle’s keen and bright, flashing like silver, swift as the wild goose flight, dip, dip and swing…

A dozen trips to Quebec introduced me to the past glory of French colonial Catholicism, holy shrines and the marvel of the autumnal Canadian colors. In the Western Provinces I have beheld the bright sun illuminating the golden wheat of the Albertan Great Plains, the snowcapped peaks of the Canadian Rockies and the lush vales of British Colombia.

On a 2,000-mile trek from the Old Dominion State through Yankee Maine and the picturesque Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, I stood at the magic, towering cliffs of the Bay of Fundy and watched the roaring 20-foot tide rapidly engulf the shore line I had just walked. We followed Le Chemin Français of tragic Evangeline’s Acadie, and ate fresh lobster every day for a week. Sailing six hours across the sea, past breaching whales, we at last reached the Island of Newfoundland, the Easternmost point of Canada and a sovereign Dominion in its own right until 1949.

Northward we journeyed up its Western Peninsula into the sub-arctic climate whereat is located L’Anse aux Meadows and the lost Norse settlement of Vinland. Mountainous icebergs drifted southward in the distance, giant sentinels from far off Greenland. At L’Anse stands a bold and imposing statue of the Catholic Viking Leif Erikson, with leather helmet atop his head and the mighty cross of Christianity on his breast. – the first European to set foot in the New World, fully 500 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Across the strait lay remote, forbidding Labrador.

Canada is a mythic land, a proud member of the vast and vestigial British Commonwealth and the second largest nation on Earth. Yet it is a land whose people have been steadily strangulated by socialism’s ever-tightening grip.

In normal times, most people cannot even identify the Prime Minister of Canada. But history will long remember the infamous name of Justin Pierre Trudeau. He is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Catholic by heritage yet traitor to throne and altar, he has traded the aurora borealis for the rainbow and defended and promoted the corruption of his land via a globalist, pro-abortion trumpeting of the anti-Christian new world order.

Capitalizing upon the tragedy of covid, he and his fellow subversives have ushered in a paranoid and dictatorial regime. Out of a purported concern for the health of his citizens he is crushing them with an iron fist. Exactly how does a thinking man take seriously the assertions of a pro-abortion party that prattles on about protecting human lives? This ideology has dug a moat around a huge segment of society, not only to exclude them from society, but to deny their very humanity and take their lives.

They have dulled minds with marijuana even as they inject bodies with mRNA. The inclusive Prime Minister has been steadily broadening his circle of the excluded; for under the banner of “inclusivity” those who dissent from the Narrative are having their civil liberties systematically eroded.

This societal cancer is in truth international. It is the anti-God and therefore the anti-human party. It demands compliance, acquiescence to government fatwas, domination and control of body and soul – all this in the name of the public health and that ever deceptive inclusivity. Leviathan has been bloated by its exploitation of the plague.

The world watches as an unlikely coalition of Canadian truckers have led a resistance and a straightforward appeal to stop the madness and end all coercive, destructive mandates that do harm even as they pretend to do good.

The reaction of the Prime Minister is revealing and history must learn from it; for he is becoming ever more tyrannical and actually invoked the Canadian quasi-equivalent of a war powers act. He attempted to freeze the bank accounts of Canadian protesters and threatens to pursue dissenters from the party orthodoxy, even those who give aid and support. Disturbing footage immortalizes images of mounted Canadian police plowing through and knocking over political recusants in Ottawa.

Justin Trudeau has apparently lost his mind (or perhaps has revealed it), publicly villainizing those Canadians who oppose his policies as racist, misogynist, extremists, Nazis and sect members. Yet these are his own people.

Against the force of a government drunk on power have arisen the patriotic red-blooded truckers of Canada who are standing up for all Canadians and by extension, for all men born free. Today we are all Canadians.

Canada is the second largest country in the world but has the population of California. It is fair to speculate whether it is being used as a test case to see what it takes to condition a populace for abject compliance. We must take note and be deeply concerned because that same ideological virus is infecting the body politic of our land as well.

As a boy I learned the beautiful Canadian National Anthem attending hockey games when the Buffalo Sabres would face off against the Toronto Maple Leafs or Montreal Canadiens in our War Memorial Auditorium. Hearing those two proud hymns sung one after the other in a genuine moment of international friendship has left a deep mark upon my psyche.

The traditional, exquisitely beautiful Canadian anthem contains a prayerful stanza and a chorus that so suppliantly appeals to Almighty God that it verily moves the soul:

Ruler supreme, Who hearest humble prayer,
Hold our Dominion within Thy loving care;
Help us to find, O God, in Thee
A lasting, rich reward,
As waiting for the better Day,
We ever stand on guard!

God keep our land, glorious and free!
O Canada! We stand on guard for thee! O Canada! We stand on guard for thee!

My friends, now is the time to join Canada’s booming chorus of patriotism, for freedom’s sake…


Father Francis M. de Rosa is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia. A graduate of Niagara University, the Ateneo della Santa Croce in Rome and Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, he also holds a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. He was ordained in 1997 and is the pastor of St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Colonial Beach, Virginia.

After The Anti-Racist Struggle At Trinity College – The Wokeness Crown

There is nothing novel about the gravamens of “anti-Black racism” that Mayo Moran, the Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, has been laying down over the last half year. Indeed, it is rather disappointing how pedestrian her pronouncements have been. When Canadian university faculty and administrators were swept up in the Great George Floyd Moral Panic of 2020 in May and June, Moran like others declared that she had suddenly discovered wide-ranging racism plaguing Trinity and announced plans for complete therapy.

As elsewhere, Moran is now taking this movement in its logical direction of abandoning deliberation and procedure in favor of revolutionary action. In November 2020, she promised that the “recommendations” due to be made by an “anti-racism task force” by the end of the year would be treated not so much as recommendations as commandments: “Our goal is to begin implementation as soon as possible.”

The idea that there is a crisis of “anti-Black racism” at Trinity, or elsewhere on Canadian college campuses, is absurd, and everyone knows it. Alongside First Nations students, black students are the most coddled and privileged members of the campus community. When three black Trinity students of the college’s Multicultural Society wrote in the university newspaper this summer about the intolerable suffering of “anti-Black racism rampant in the dining hall, the quad, and on the front steps” of the college, the most they could come up in specifics was that they had “heard of” some black students being treated rudely during orientation.

When I went to Trinity, being treated rudely during orientation was one of the purposes of the exercise, creating solidarity with one’s fellow classmen and good-natured connections to upper classmen. The three black students would have Trinity redesign its orientation with special rules for the treatment of black freshmen, surely an ironical aim for a group devoted to “inclusion.”

The other charge of pervasive anti-black racism the students made was that Trinity student groups – which include the Trivia Association, the James Bond Society, and the Garlic Bread Society – had not issued pro-Black Lives Matter statements during the summer. These non-compliant student groups, they charged, were “rooted in hate and further the exclusion of Black students at Trinity.” From what I can tell, their Multicultural Society did not issue a letter of condolence on the death of Sean Connery in deference to the feelings of the James Bond Society either. Shocking.

The totalitarian face of any political movement is never so clear as when it demands complete deference to its agenda from others in a pluralistic world. Like Provost Moran, these three students believe that the purpose of a university or college is to take a position on controversial social issues of the day and then rigorously enforce conformity among all students – sort of like the Marxist doctrines that animated the BLM movement in the first place.

In good Leninist form, the students also warned darkly that “people are choosing to protect their own images rather than acknowledging their faults” without naming anyone in particular. Perhaps sensing the threat, the college’s three main student leaders stepped down and apologized for their skin color: “As white and privileged leaders, we are the very people who have benefited from these institutions. We wholeheartedly believe that these structures need to be taken down.” This was the only blatantly racist episode that Trinity experienced over the summer, but of course it was the sort of performative virtue-signalling that progressive administrators like Moran look upon with loving kindness.

To charges of rampant racism, student radicals at the college later added rampant misogyny and “classism” (to be distinguished from classicism which these students may not have heard about in their years of thought reform at Trinity). This new Holy Trinity – race, class, and gender – has now replaced the older one that sought God’s truth.

Following the cue of the “white and privileged” students to “take down” the 170-year old college, Provost Moran and her “task force” are running headlong into a transformation of Trinity from a place of education into something truly sinister. There is already a student-led “Trinity Anti-Racism Collective” formed this year, and if its writ is as large as the Provost’s actions suggest, the college might simply rename itself accordingly as part of its Woke rebranding.

Such a renaming would at least help the shrinking number of intellectually curious high school students – as opposed to those adept at the virtue-signaling, performative moralizing, and careerist box-checking – to begin seeking out alternative places for a serious education. The list of elite colleges in the U.S. that have suffered this fate is a long one and Trinity may soon join them. Along with the disappearance of top students will go a disappearance of the “excruciating whiteness” that the organizers of the Trinity Multicultural Society insisted forced them to mobilize in 2018. During the current academic year, just 2 of Trinity’s 10 student leaders are white. Surely there will be no more excruciating whiteness once the whites have been sent packing. This is of course a problem from Trinity because there is wide evidence that top-performing high school students will avoid ethnic ghettos where the majority group has been ethnically cleansed since those places will not help them to thrive in mainstream society or to form valuable social connections.

So why care about this predictable response from Provost Moran and her anti-racist task force, any more than we care about similar developments elsewhere on Canadian college campuses? Isn’t this just the way the campus has gone, and the evidence that Canadians interested in freedom of thought and speech and a vigorous contest of ideas in the search for truth should no longer expect to find it in taxpayer funded universities and colleges?

Two reasons suggest otherwise.

One is that Trinity, like some other legacy institutions of education in Canada, holds a special place because of its deep lineage in the Canadian tradition. What happens there is more emblematic of a core shift than, say, similar developments at a newer or more experimental institution, or for that matter at Provost Moran’s alma mater, the UBC English Department whose June Statement of Solidarity Against Anti-Black violence promised with illiberal ferocity to eliminate “scholarship that still valourizes whiteness and settler-colonial ideas of European civilization.” We don’t expect much of the UBC English Department, which regularly suspends classes so that its students can rush to the barricades to support the latest social justice cause. But if excellence and academic freedom and merit cannot survive at Trinity, they will not survive anywhere in Canada.

More practically, there are substantial intellectual lineages of which Trinity is the steward that risk annihilation by Provost Moran’s new fanaticism. Over the summer, the college’s library was “re-evaluated and reshaped” according to an official notice, to downplay its main holdings in Canadian history and literature and emphasize the new party doctrine which the Provost helpfully enumerated as “anti-racism, anti-oppression and equity.” Surely it does not take a history degree to feel alarmed when political movements show up at the library spoiling for a fight with the stacks. Book burnings in the Quad anyone?

In particular, the Trinity library is steward of the Upjohn-Waldie Collection, which is no mere trifle in Canadian heritage. The collection includes rare books from late medieval Europe such as a 1473 book on the education of princes and a psalter of the same year. Priceless manuscripts from the early Renaissance include two first edition publications by Martin Luther and printed in 1520 and 1531, and a 1623 printing of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. The collection harbors one of the best holdings of early exploration accounts of Canada, such as a 1728 printing of John Gatonbe’s A Voyage into the North-West Passage Undertaken Anno 1612, and Alexander Mackenzie’s 1801 Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Laurence Through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans. There is a 1787 Book of Common Prayer in Mohawk, a critical early resource documenting that language, and a first edition of Joseph Conrad’s 1942 collection of nautical stories, The Tremolino.

I dwell on these precious holdings because libraries and collections are not inert, but rise or fall depending on how they are stewarded and celebrated. The Trinity library staff spent their entire summer “reevaluating” to promote the latest Woke Studies novels, as well as reading and promoting hate-filled screeds by black American racialists. Trinity’s precious holdings, especially that Mohawk prayer book, may soon be charged with “valourizing whiteness and settler-colonial ideas of European civilization.” The iconoclastic destruction of Trinity’s Upjohn-Waldie Collection, by indifference and erasure even if the books survive in some forgotten vault, seems only a Provostial missive away from “immediate implementation.”

Of course, the world will not fall because Trinity (or McGill, or Queen’s, or Dalhousie) falls. But the wave of illiberalism that Provost Moran is leading is an important signpost in this larger trend. As goes Trinity, we might say, so goes Canada. “After the Struggle, the Crown”, reads the college moto from 1851. Queen Moran is now hastening to the throne after her struggles against phantom racism at Trinity. I prefer an older college motto, that of the Trinity Literary Society that came into being in the 1840s, and has recently become a focal point for the Trinity revolutionaries that Moran has unleashed: Feros Cultus Voce Formare. “To tame wild manners by power of the voice.” Canadians as a whole need to tame the wild manners of campus barbarians with the voices of their strong opposition.

A native of Calgary and a graduate of Trinity College, Bruce Gilley is professor of political science at Portland State University.

The image shows an etching of Trinity College by Owen Staples, c. 1930.

Universities As Political Actors: The Case Of UBC

You would think that with all the looting, the statistics showing blacks are 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, the billions of dollars white taxpayers have paid to create the best possible schools for blacks, the decades of affirmative action, the endless celebration of black culture in the media, the presence of blacks in almost every advertisement, the rap music on Sunday mornings in CBC radio — you would think that universities might reflect critically, for once, about black and white relations in the West in light of the destructive George Floyd riots.

But instead universities are already announcing they will intensify their celebrations of the black race and their condemnation of “institutional white racism.” Just like Porn Hub and every major corporation from Bank of America to Nickelodeon, university presidents across Canada are announcing they will increase their commitment “for the recruitment, retention and support of Black students, staff, and faculty”, including the allocation of “Excellence Chairs to Black Studies.”

Let’s examine one case from which these cited words are taken: The University of British Columbia, the third biggest university in Canada. It started with a rather odd tweet sent on May 31 by president Santa Ono to the UBC community of himself playing a “song” in his cello dedicated “to George Floyd & everyone who is suffering today from racial injustice.”

The next day he released an open Letter to the UBC Community, “Together against Racism and Injustice” announcing that his office plans “to diversify our community at every level through defined programs.” What could Santa Ono mean by the words “at every level” considering that white students are currently a minority at UBC, every member in the Faculty of Arts is a leftist, there are numerous institutes and programs dedicated to diversity, and there is a massive “Equity and Inclusion Office” with an army of 23 professional race-hustlers working every day to “assessing, planning, developing, and monitoring” efforts to make UBC “diverse and inclusive”?

We are not joking, whites are already a minority at UBC. In 2015, the Vancouver Sun reported that only 35% of the student population was white, with white males accounting “for only about one in six students.” The proportion of Chinese students alone was 39 percent. We can safely assume there are less white students in 2020. Will a lower percentage of white student applicants be admitted to make space for foreign students who pay significantly higher tuition fees? It is well known that university administrator lust after the much higher fees of international students to finance their hyper-inflated salaries and bloated diversity offices. For the record: international students at UBC numbered 16,322(!) for the 2017/18 calendar year, of which the majority were Chinese.

Ono says he wants to “ensure adequate resources to implement the goals and actions of the Inclusion Action Plan.” This plan was implemented by UBC’s Executive in December 2019. Its basic goal is to attract and retain “the best and brightest students, staff, and faculty from around the world.” Never mind the immorality of a program dedicated to enticing the “best and brightest” from the Third World, we know that this program is inherently anti-white. Contrariwise, why does Ono write in his Letter to the UBC Community that he wants to meet with “Black Caucus and the Asian Canadian Community Engagement Group”, as well as the Indigenous community, without a word about meeting an European ethnic group?

Massive Diversity Infrastructure At UBC

“We will be organizing a series of public engagements focused on anti-racism”, says Ono. What could this possibly entail if not an all out war against white students? The Equity and Inclusion Office, as I said, is already engaged every day in “institution-wide efforts to create a supportive environment for working, learning and living where respect, diversity, opportunity and inclusion are valued.”

And this office is the tip of a massive iceberg. Here is a list of some of the academic programs and institutes dedicated to “principles of equity and social justice,” “ethnicity and immigration”, “equitable outcomes”, “transformative knowledge”, etc:

This is not all. “UBC has academic programs and concentrations specifically addressing Aboriginal topics and many courses with significant Aboriginal or Indigenous content.” All the courses in the Department of Sociology are dedicated to cultural Marxism with a long list of courses on “Culture and Power; Race, Ethnicity and Immigration.”

The Department of History has a few courses on European history, which consist mostly in condemnations of white imperialism, whereas the descriptions of courses on Asia and non-whites generally are positively about their achievements, backed by multiple courses on “Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism; Gender, Sexuality, and the Body; Migration, Borderlands, and Transnational History; Culture/Power/History; First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous History.”

The School of Social Work is all about “critical transformative knowledge” against “white racism.” There is a little Institute of European Studies which is distinctly preoccupied with immigration and the threat of “right wing populism” in Europe. You don’t believe me? Take a look at their “Speaker Series” for the calendar year 2019/20, you will find titles such as “Radical Diversity: Postmigrant Perspectives on Art, Culture and Politics.” Here is one of their Talks: “Right-wing Populism and Climate Change in Europe.”

Most of the student clubs at UBC are non-political in orientation, but the political ones are into radical leftist politics and diversity, and quite a few are dedicated to the promotion of the race of Asians, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and other ethnic groups. A few clubs are about the culture of ethnic Europeans but these are apolitical, folksy like, very subdued.

The incredible bias that exists at UBC against white male students was well documented by the prolific student activist in Canada, Franz Kurtzke, as we reported at CEC a few months ago. Kurtzke, a philosophy student at UBC, has filed 11 anti-male and anti-white discrimination claims against UBC.

Ono and Yip

There is no point going over the rest of Ono’s points, which consist in nothing more than robotic statements we read all day from dull academic administrators about “diversity and inclusion.” It is really irresponsible for someone whose expertise revolves around the rather trivial subject of “eye inflammation” without any background in the Social Sciences and the history of Canada to talk about the “deeply rooted racism in Canada.” How can this charlatan insist that “UBC itself is not immune to racism and injustice” given the overwhelmingly obsessive dedication of UBC to diversity? One cannot but conclude that Santa Ono is seeking to wipe out every remaining feature of UBC’s Euro-Canadian character.

When he put together this contrived tribute “to George Floyd” did he even do some research about this case? Had he done so he would have found out that Floyd was a meth addict, cocaine addict, beat and robbed a pregnant woman, a porn star, served 5 years in prison, tested positive for Covid-19, and resisted arrest. This is not to justify his death. I just find it beyond comprehension that UBC is planning to intensify the ethnocide of whites in honor of this character. Does he not know that a university is an institution created by whites for the purpose of advancing to the next generation highest achievements of humans?

His Chinese wife, Wendy Yip, who is a public figure, hired as “UBC Ambassador”, actually tweeted the other day a link to an Asian group claiming “that the fact that so many people are avoiding Asian food it’s just a sneaky new form of racism.” She has been regularly implying in tweets that White Canadians are “racist” because they are eating less Asian food since Covid-19 was unleashed upon the West by the Chinese Communist Party. Neither one of them has ever objected to the Chinese demographic replacement and mass imprisonment and torture of the Uighur minority in China. How about one talk about the incredibly inhuman and barbaric practice of dog eating by the Chinese? 10 million dogs and 10 million cats are devoured by the Chinese per year, with thousands boiled alive.

One cannot but conclude that the goal of Santa Ono is to bring to completion the ethnocide of Euro-Canadians at UBC at the same time that he promotes stronger research partnerships with the Communist Party of China.

Email Santa Ono: presidents.[email protected]

Here are some suggested questions to ask this university president who claims his office is open to the public:

  • Why do you think that UBC needs to build even more its massive infrastructure againast “white racism”?
  • What evidence do you have that Canada remains “deeply rooted in racism”?
  • Why do thousands of international students from Asia and Africa come to study in racist UBC?
  • Why hundreds of thousands of immigrants crave to inhabit white created countries if they will suffer from white supremacists?
  • Why does he never say a word about promoting diversity in Asia?

This article appears courtesy of the Council of European Canadians.

Ricardo Duchesne has been interviewed in the Postil. He the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians.

The image shows a poster by He Kongde, dated September 1965. The caption reads: “The struggle of all the people in the world against American imperialism will be victorious!”

Privatize The Highways

There were problems with highway closures at both ends of Canada. The crisis is over for now, but perhaps we can learn something from this difficulty. Indeed, it will occur again.

Things were so bad in Newfoundland that military troops had to be brought in to engage in blizzard cleanup. Part of this effort was devoted to road clearance.

What is going on at the other end of Canada? A few days ago, there were highway closures in relatively balmy British Columbia. In the Lower Mainland parts of Highway One were covered with sheets of black ice. There were more accidents than you can shake a stick at, particularly in the section of this major roadway between Chilliwack and Abbotsford, B.C.

What was the word from the B.C. Ministry of Transportation? There were lots of excuses, good ones, but gridlock, slowdowns, jack-knifed trucks and fender benders were the order of the day.

According to Ministry of Transportation South Coast regional director Ashok Bhatti: “We are using calcium chloride and a combination of techniques, but it has been challenging … We are hitting it with everything we’ve got.”

He continued: Work has been done overnight, but to no avail. With temperatures below -15C and winds that blow salt and sand off the road, no solution was in the offing.

In the event, safety and transportation were restored when the temperatures rose, and, thanks to the rain, the ice, snow and slush were swept away.

Notice what is missing here? There was no vestige of competition. The presumption of the Ministry was that they were in charge, there was no possible other option, they were doing their best to rectify the situation.

Other firms in other industries, too, face difficult tasks. This occurs all throughout the warp and woof of the economy. Sometimes failure occurs elsewhere as well. But, in the private sector, there is always a “fail-safe” mechanism undergirding the entire process: competition. If a given firm faltered, there would be others anxious and eager to take its place. Moreover, different companies could try alternative strategies. If one of them worked, others could follow suit.

But not on the nation’s highways. There, monopoly, central planning, was the only possibility.

What might have been done had competition been allowed. That is, if there were privately owned highways?

One possibility would be the “conga line:” a long line of specially fitted tractors, one after the other, brushing away the ice. This is the technique utilized at some airports. These vehicles travel at a snail’s pace, but at least roadway connections could remain open. “Slow but sure” is perhaps better than nothing at all. If need be, it would not be beyond the scope of private enterprise to use actual military style tanks as snow plows.

Another is to place metal that can be heated just below the concrete of the roadway. People with sloped driveways use this method of melting the snow and ice. The difficulty here is that this is a tremendously expensive option. Costs could be reduced by treating only one lane in this manner instead of all three, but, even so, the expenses would be vast. Would it be worthwhile to maintain automobile travel and reduce accidents? This is something only the free marketplace can answer. This is at basis an entrepreneurial matter.

Are There Other Options?

It is difficult for a mere economist to anticipate the market. If shoes had always been the province of government, and a wild and crazy free enterprise economist had advocated privatization, the objections would come thick and fast. How would resources be allocated between sneakers, slippers, boots and other kinds of footwear? Where would shoe stores be located? How many of them would there be? Who would supply shoe laces?

In the event the market addresses all these difficulties, these are non-problems. And so would it be in the case of roads. Yes, highways are long thin things. People think their provision must necessarily fall to the government. But railroads exhibit similar geographical elements. Privatization in that realm is not unknown.

There are perhaps more important reasons for engaging in this process than black ice. In Canada, some 4,000 people perish each year in motor vehicle accidents. Competition between road owners, as in the case of every other good and service known to man, would undoubtedly lead to improvements in this regard too. Fatalities are not at all the product of drunken driving, speed, vehicle malfunction, driver inattention; those are only proximate causes.

The ultimate cause is the inability of the road managers to deal with these challenges. How could they do so? This can only be speculative, as in the case of shoes, but, perhaps private highway owners could address not velocity, but its variance. Instead of minima and maxima speed limits for the entire highway, do so for each lane.

For example, 120 kilometers in the left lane, 100 in the middle, and 80 on the right. Would this reduce traffic fatalities. Hard to tell. The problem is, such experiments are not now undertaken. They would be, under free enterprise.

Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics, College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, and senior fellow at the Mises Institute. He earned his PhD in economics at Columbia University in 1972. He has taught at Rutgers, SUNY Stony Brook, Baruch CUNY, Holy Cross and the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of more than 600 refereed articles in professional journals, two dozen books, and thousands of op eds (including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and numerous others). He lectures widely on college campuses, delivers seminars around the world and appears regularly on television and radio shows. He is the Schlarbaum Laureate, Mises Institute, 2011; and has won the Loyola University Research Award (2005, 2008) and the Mises Institute’s Rothbard Medal of Freedom, 2005; and the Dux Academicus award, Loyola University, 2007. Prof. Block counts among his friends Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard. He was converted to libertarianism by Ayn Rand. Block is old enough to have played chess with Friedrich Hayek and once met Ludwig von Mises, and shook his hand. Block has never washed that hand since. So, if you shake his hand (it’s pretty dirty, but what the heck) you channel Mises.

The image shows, “A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur,” by Claude Monet, painted 1865 or 1867.

Ricardo Duchesne: The Necessity Of A Common Ground

This month, we (TP) are pleased to interview Dr. Ricardo Duchesne (RD), a Canadian scholar, who writes about the importance of Western culture and civilization. Dr. Duchesne recently took “early retirement” from his tenured position at the University of New Brunswick so he could enjoy the opportunity to think critically about current politics and the history of Western Civilization, freed from the anti-intellectual and anti-Western atmosphere prevailing in Canadian universities.

TP: Welcome to the Postil, Dr. Duchesne! Could you give us a little background of your experiences as a professor in Canadian academia leading to your decision to take early retirement? You have been burdened with various baseless yet pernicious labels. Do you think this is simply weaponized language to win rhetorical points, or do you think this is a symptom of something graver – the rise of mass conformity in the West, i.e., the death of freedom?

RD: Like almost everyone in academia, I was a leftist throughout my student days and for about 10 years after I began teaching in 1995. My disengagement with the left was not a two-step transition from left to right.

Over the course of many years, I travelled the entire political spectrum from Soviet Marxism and Third World Communism to Western Marxism and New Left politics, from mainstream liberalism and postmodernism to neo-conservatism, and from these establishment views to the realization (around 2012/13) that the supreme political issue of our times was the forced diversification of all Western nations through mass immigration.

Mind you, through these changes in ideology I have remained attached to Western individualism. I was really bothered by the way leftists (pretending to be liberals) had manipulated the principle of minority rights into a call for the diversification of Western lands through the importation of millions of individuals from diverse cultures and races. I could not accept the claim that a program of diversification implemented from above with little democratic consultation was concomitant with the fulfillment of liberal-democratic ideals.

There is nothing in the philosophy of liberalism that requires one to accept mass immigration. One can be a firm believer in individuals rights in the same vein as one rejects the ideology of diversity. The Western nations that fought in WWII against Nazism had very strong immigration regulations.

I came across the term “cultural Marxism” around 2011-12. This term, it seemed to me, captured the politics of the left quite well in pointing to the fact that contemporary leftists were far less concerned with class economic issues than with the transformation of the culture of the West, the traditional heterosexual family, the “Western-centric” curriculum, the values of the Enlightenment.

The left was no longer identifying the ruling elites in economic terms but primarily in sexual and racial terms. The academic left was far less concerned with improving class relations than with attacking whites as a race and claiming that all cultures were morally and intellectually equivalent.

It was obvious to me that the often-used concept “Dead White Males” was a direct attack on the legacy of Western civilization, the high culture of this civilization, right inside the institutions of “higher learning”. It was an attack with malicious double standards, of which the most unfair standard was the prohibition of any ethnic identity by whites except negatively against its “white privilege” — in the same vein as minorities were celebrated in racial terms as “vibrant” and as progressive “victims” fighting “oppression” by whites.

I had no problem with the left arguing that Nazism was unacceptable because of its racism, but it was obvious to me that we were dealing with a new leftist ideology that would have us believe that any strong admiration for Western history and its achievements was tantamount with racism against those who were from non-Western cultures.

I could see how in academia students were being thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that any positive cultural identity on the part of Europeans was immoral and illiberal. I realized that multiculturalism was about encouraging other races to be proud of their cultures in the same vein as Westerners were expected to show pride in their increasingly multicultural nations, in the celebration of other cultures and races.

As liberalism came to be dominated by cultural Marxists, the use of racial categories became a staple of the left, weaponized to promote the forced diversification of Western nations. Immigrant diversity grew imperceptibly at first in the 1960s/1970s, as other leftist movements, women’s rights, civil rights for blacks and indigenous peoples, environmentalism, and anti-war movements, played the dominant role.

But from the 1990s on, with increasing momentum, immigrant diversity became the established religion it is today. Across the West no one is allowed to question the pathological the idea that INCREASING (without any set limitations) racial diversity through IMMIGRATION is “the greatest strength” of the West.

I think I would have survived in academia if I had restricted myself to the questioning of feminism, and multiculturalism, in the name of assimilation to Western culture by immigrants. I know a few conservatives in academia who vigorously question many aspects of the left.

What is prohibited above all else is any critical thinking about the diversification of the West through immigration. Both the left and the right side of globalism support diversity. When one questions diversity, one is going against the entire establishment.

Since the left successfully linked immigrant diversity with promotion of racial equality, and since globalist neocons agreed with them, anyone who questions immigrant diversity is automatically categorized as a racist who is fighting racial equality, even if you believe, as I do, in minority rights.

Your use of the phrase, “the rise of mass conformity in the West,” is spot on, insofar as it refers to the utter lack of dissident thinking in the West on the question of diversity. The spread of transsexualism undoubtedly poses an immense threat to our civilization, but I think one can survive in academia questioning trans politics, as the success of Jordan Peterson testifies and the success of magazines like Quillette.

TP: In your pivotal book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, you dismantle the arguments of various historians who seek to deny the West its exceptional character. Could you acquaint our readers with some of these arguments and how you have taken them apart?

RD: Denying the exceptional character of the West has come along with the promotion of multiculturalism. There are legitimate scholarly questions about the rise of the West that predate multiculturalism, but it is hard to deny that efforts to downplay the achievements of the West intensified as multiculturalism spread in the 1990s.

Advocates of a multicultural world history openly admit today that it is morally wrong to teach about the exceptional character of the West to a diverse classroom. This is why the teaching of Western civilization, a requirement across most colleges in the United States some decades ago, is now a rarity; and those who still teach Western civ are very careful to portray the West as a civilization “connected to the rest of the world”.

The basic argument of “revisionists” (such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Jack Goldstone, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, David Christian, and multicultural historians generally) is that the West was only different in acquiring the resource-rich lands of the Americas, subjugating African and Asian lands with its gun-powder technologies and aggressive colonialism.

Currently, most of the experts are focused on the comparative economic histories of Asia/China and Europe/England, under the supposition that economic differences are the real issue. Europe/England, they insist, was barely, if at all, ahead of Asia/China before the “great divergence” brought by the Industrial Revolution after 1750s/1820s.

These two major regions were similarly developed in their technologies, markets, state organization, and agrarian productivity, with Asia/China standing slightly ahead until Europe managed to surge ahead in the eighteenth century thanks to colonial empires and readily available coal supplies.

Even someone like Gregory Clark, not a multicultural historian, views all preindustrial societies as equally “Malthusian,” improving productivity very slowly, never achieving sustained improvements in their living standards, because every advance was consumed by higher rates of surviving children. He, and multicultural historians, believe that all preindustrial civilizations were fundamentally alike in their inability to achieve technological changes capable of outpacing population growth. Multicultural historians also believe (but not Clark) that Europe was “lucky” in acquiring colonies to finance a revolution that finally allowed it to escape the Malthusian limitations that prevailed throughout history before the Industrial Revolution.

It was not hard for me to show – which is telling since no one else thought about it — that China was the beneficiary of its own colonial expansion around the same time as Europe colonized the Americas. China extracted masses of resources from territories in the southwest, including the very sizable territory of Manchuria in the north. China acquired vast amounts of American silver through its positive balance of trade with Europe, in addition to American tropical goods.

But the key counter argument I make is that the Industrial Revolution was only one divergence among many others that should be traced back to the ancient Greeks. While it is true that, before the Industrial Revolution, the standard of living in the world’s civilizations barely rose above subsistence, except for a tiny minority at the top (and in this respect all civilizations were alike in their Malthusian limitations), we should not ignore achievements in scientific reflections, democratic politics, arts, music, historical consciousness, military strategies and organization.

As it is, you can’t ignore the role of mechanistic science in the making of steam engines, which were crucial to the industrial take off of the late eighteenth century. James Watt’s steam engine rested on new scientific principles about the connection between heat and motion.

Some revisionists reluctantly acknowledge this connection but they assume that China would have developed this technology if the right economic incentives were in effect, the prices of the factors of production, or cheap access to coal. But this ignores the immense intellectual breakthroughs involved in the rise of modern Galilean and Newtonian science, the many ideas which had to come together before Newton could come up with his mechanistic world view.

There is no question that the Second Industrial Revolution after 1850, associated with chemical industries and electricity, would have been impossible without the periodic table, the science of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, which were totally absent in the non-Western world.

These modern scientific ideas, moreover, presupposed ancient Greek deductive reasoning, geometrical proofs, the logic of Aristotle and the subsequent scientific ideas in Hellenistic times in the fields of mathematics, solid and fluid mechanics, optics, and physiology, as argued in Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had To Be Reborn (2003).

We can’t ignore either the fact that the Hellenistic period was followed by the theory of impetus of medieval times and the introduction of algebraic notation in the early Renaissance, to name a few key ingredients that created the conditions for modern science.

We should mention as well the creation of universities for the first time in history with legal autonomy, proper standards for the acquisition of degrees and with a curriculum heavily infused with logic, mathematics, grammar, theology, and philosophy. In other words, there was continuous development in scientific knowledge, and rationalization, from ancient to medieval to renaissance to modern times, and from this science to the First and the Second Industrial Revolution.

In Uniqueness I also go beyond the science-modern industry connection, to write about the importance of the Greek miracle, Roman rational law, rise of autonomous cities, and a legal system with many types of laws – feudal, manorial, mercantile, urban, canon, and royal law — the European discovery and mapping of the globe, the Enlightenment, and other cultural developments that bespeak of a civilization far more dynamic and creative.

One of the things I talk about lately is the European invention of all the disciplines taught in our universities: history, geography, geology, economics, archaeology, botany, physics, biology, chemistry, paleontology, and many other fields. This fact alone speaks volumes about how different the West was.

TP: Would it be correct to say that self-loathing is now an orthodoxy of Western culture? If so, what do you think is the origin of this self-hatred? Why does the Western mind now choose to denigrate, and even deny, its own existence?

RD: I addressed this question in Uniqueness in terms of how the Western idea of progress was rejected from about the 1960s onwards, replaced with the opposite idea of regression. Marshall Sahlins, Margaret Mead, Marvin Harris, among others, come up with the idea that history had regressed away from the “affluent, egalitarian, and peaceful” world of hunters and gatherers to the American capitalist empire with its pollution, increasing inequalities, and threat of nuclear war.

I attributed this to the rise of a number of interrelated ideological currents, history from below, postmodernism, cultural relativism, feminism, identity politics, and dependency theory. The left came to view the West as the promoter of world inequality, an empire that rose on the backs of Third World peoples, a destroyer of nature with its capitalism, an elitist culture that was dismissive of the contributions of people “from below”, and a believer in metanarratives that excluded the stories of “the Other”.

I explained how these ideologies were rooted in the Western proclivity for continual self-reflection, criticism of its assumptions, re-examination of past ideas. What made the West so creative was turned against the West itself from the 1960s on.

The trust in reason, which brought modern science and the Enlightenment, came under suspicion — reason came to be seen as “one dimensional”, inherently “instrumental”, uncaring of nature and the “knowledges” of Indigenous peoples, and Eurocentric.

With the spread of multiculturalism in the West, it was no longer a matter of identifying the limitations of reason, as the Romantics, Heidegger, and the Existentialists had done; it was a matter of identifying the West as such with “logocentrism” and the creation of binaries that excluded other ways of being, less exploitative ways of life.

In the affluent world of the 1960s, young people bought these naïve ideas, even as the evidence was coming in that hunters and gatherers were the most violent peoples proportionate to their numbers, and news about the far worse environmental pollution in the Soviet Union, China, and non-Western nations, and the suppression of equal rights and persistence of despotic rule.

The self-loathing of Westerners is an extremely strange phenomenon without parallels in human history, and it came precisely at the peak of achievement of this civilization. Today I am inclined to think that this attitude has roots in the peculiar, and contradictory, psychology of whites to see themselves as the moral care takers of humanity at the same time as they see the ways of other humans as more authentic and good-natured.

But we can’t ignore the role certain individuals played in pushing white guilt, in making a whole generation believe that the West cheated its way to greatness, and that the West is now morally obligated to the rest of the world, and that it must perform penance by diversifying itself and replacing its “white supremacist” past.

TP: In your book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, you continue to present the history of Western uniqueness, by way of a frontal attack on academic Marxism. In light of this, could you explain what you mean by the West’s “Faustian soul?”

RD: Unlike Uniqueness, Faustian Man was written after I became aware that immigrant diversity was the main agenda of the left and the establishment right. This book, which was also intended for a wider audience, gets into the ideology of cultural Marxism, and how this term can be effectively used to identify all the major ideological currents of the West.

However, in this book I did not attribute the uniqueness of the West to differences in average IQ between races and ethnic groups. I felt that the term “Faustian man” from Oswald Spengler was a more fruitful way to grasp the intense creativity of the West.

This term refers to a type of man who is always looking for ways to transcend ordinary life, to find the explanations for the nature of things, to subject accepted beliefs to critical reflection. There is a rationalizing tendency in this soul in the way that Max Weber observed since ancient Greek times in polyphonic music, perspective painting, architecture, theology of Christianity, historical documentation, military organization, bureaucratic administration, and modern capitalism.

But Spengler was astute in going beyond Weber’s protestant ethos, and seeing that the driving impetus behind this rationalization was not some calmed intellect peacefully sitting on a chair, or some religious figures coming onto the scene in modern times, but a “soul”, or a psychological energy inside Western man, with origins in the early Middle Ages (though I think the origins go further back in time) to break through the unknown, achieve immortality, strive upwards into the heavens, imagine infinity, and achieve incomparable deeds through al life of arduous endeavours.

I elaborate in Faustian Man how this soul should be traced back to the aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans in the context of their way of life in the Pontic steppes, their initiation of horse-riding, co-invention of wheel vehicles, dairy diet, and other material attributes, including their unique aristocratic form of rule wherein the ruler was seen as “first among equals” and in which the highest goal in life was performance of heroic deeds for the sake of immortal fame.

It is not that other cultures, such as the Huns and Mongols from the steppes, lacked all these attributes. I try to explain how these cultures came under the influence of more advanced despotic civilizations, losing their aristocratic tendencies; and, it has to be said, we are not talking about absolute differences in kind — the differences that matter in history are differences in degree.

TP: The Central Asian origins of the West is a theme that is also dominant in your thinking, in that you do not shy away from the Indo-European roots of Western man. Are there specific characteristics which led to Indo-European (IE) dominance, from the borders of China, to India, to Ireland, and beyond? In other words, is it possible to define an “Indo-European mind?”

RD: Let me add to what I already said about Indo-Europeans that in Faustian Man I have a chapter which contrasts the historical significance of the Indo-European to the non-Indo-European nomads. I argue that the impact of such nomadic peoples as the Scythians, Sogdians, Turks, and Huns never came close to the deep and lasting changes associated with the “Indo-Europeanization” of the Occident.

While Indo-Europeans were not the only people of the steppes organized as war bands bound together by oaths of loyalty and fraternity, they were more aristocratic and they did retain their aristocratic forms of rule as they moved into higher levels of state organization, and they did thoroughly colonized Europe with their original pastoral package of wheel vehicles, horse-riding, and chariots, combined with the ‘secondary-products revolution.’

In contrast, the relationship between the non-Indo-European nomads with their more advanced sedentary neighbors was one of ‘symbiosis,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘trade,’ and ‘conquest,’ rather than dominion and cultural colonization.

One of the ways I try to get into the Indo-European mind is to read books about their myths and their heroic poetry and songs, such books as West’s Indo-European Poetry and Myth and Watkins’s How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of IE Poetics, going back to a prehistoric oral tradition. Although this subject needs more investigation, one of the points I note is that IE poetry exhibits a keener grasp and rendition of the fundamentally tragic character of life, an aristocratic confidence in the face of destiny, the inevitability of human hardship and hubris, without bitterness, but with a deep joy.

I note as well that Indo-European stories show both collective and individual inspiration, unlike non-Indo-European stories from the steppes, which show characters functioning as collective representations of their communities. In some sagas there is a clear author’s stance, unlike the anonymous non-Indo-European sagas. The individuality, the rights of authorship, the poet’s awareness of himself as creator, is acknowledged in many ancient and medieval sagas.

TP: In your work, you are also a very disciplined critic of multiculturalism. Why do you think the West has created multiculturalism? And why is anti-white racism now another orthodoxy of Western literary and scholarly elite?

RD: Multiculturalism on its own is fine if one is reflecting about the co-existence within the boundaries of a nation state of more than one ethnic group, say, three or four groups long established in the nation. One can accept Pierre Trudeau’s identification of Canada as multicultural in 1971 in light of the multiple European ethnic groups co-existing in Canada, including small Asian, Black, and Indigenous groups.

I have no problem with a multiculturalism that recognizes the cultural presence of long established cultures within the nation state alongside the dominant Anglo/Quebecois cultures, and the right of individual members from other cultures to express their own traditions as long as such recognition does not entail the proliferation of full blown cultures with their own quasi state; although in the case of Quebec and Indigenous peoples this may include granting them some autonomy in their own territories within a federal system.

The problem is that Trudeau was not thinking of Canada as it was then; he was thinking of a future Canada that would open its borders to new cultures in the world. He was thinking about breaking up the domination of both Anglo and Quebecois Canada, delinking the nation-state from these two ethnic groups, turning these cultures into private affairs, individual choices, while pushing multiculturalism as the official culture.

Trudeau, however, never anticipated the way multiculturalism would become an anti-white movement, and he never called for the rise of full-blown cultures, but believed that multiple cultures could express themselves within a Western political culture of equal rights, rule of law, and democracy.

But with his son, Justin, there is now talk of a “post-national” Canada that downplays even its “Western” liberal heritage, or interprets this heritage from a cultural Marxist perspective to mean that Canada should accommodate the cultural ways and political inclinations of other peoples inside the nation, including the “indigenization” of the curriculum in our universities, and the marginalization of “Eurocentrism” in the Arts and Sciences.

As you know, the introduction of multiculturalism in Canada was part of a widespread phenomenon in the West, with some states not identifying themselves as officially multicultural but nevertheless opening their borders to non-Europeans peoples. The common glue that held European immigrants in the past was their Christianity and common historical experiences in Europe.

But once the borders are opened to multiple traditions and religions, multiculturalism inevitably follows. All the talk about Canada being a “mosaic” and the US being a “melting pot” is over – the US is no less a mosaic today than Canada.

Multiculturalism is the order of day at the level of states or municipalities in the US, and across most schools and universities, and in the media. We are just witnessing the beginnings of cultural divisions, the inability of governments to hold their nations together as the cultural landscape is broken apart with the dissolution of common cultural experiences, common historical memories, heroes, and religious beliefs.

Without a common history, religion, and deep culture, beyond mere political liberalism, individuals cannot find a common ground, a sense of collective identity, which is indispensable for humans in their search for meaning, for something beyond their pleasures and daily careers. They become instead mere private consumers without roots, easy to manipulate by corporations – which brings me to how it is that both the left and the right came together in their support of immigrant multiculturalism, but for different reasons.

The globalist right wants mass immigration because it increases shareholder earnings in terms of lower wages, the total market value of goods and services generated from a growing population, real estate development, shopping malls, highways, and dollar stores. It cherishes docile consumers and workers without a strong national identity who can identify with any generic global brand. CEOs love academic ideas about inclusiveness and diversity, a universal-ingroup identity in which humans from all races and sexual orientations become equally attached to their banks, FB pages, Google searches and Twitter accounts.

The globalist left, on the other hand, is obsessed with fulfilling the ideal of equality, which now means fighting “systemic racism”, which it equates with the very existence of white majorities in Western nations. It claims to be fighting for the human rights of everyone, the right of refugees and poor immigrants, to come to Western nations, against “privileged” whites who greedily want these nations all to themselves.

They are global socialists who believe that immigration will balance per capita incomes across the world, releasing population pressures in the Third World, while providing ethnic votes for leftist parties in the West.

The left at least provides ideals for individuals to live for, and this is why it still attracts so many young individuals. The smart right-wing globalists realize this, and this is why they promote leftist ideals, their continuous struggles for the equalization of all things.

But the left is now nihilistic, too individualistic in its pursuit of individual identities, breaking apart all common identities, ethnic, national, sexual, thus leaving individuals stranded alone with anarchic and undisciplined values as the only glue.

So both the right and the left have converged in their agreement that Western nations must be diversified and that whites who question this program are racists who want to reign supreme over other races, even though no nation outside the West is expected to include other races within their nations, and dissident whites don’t want to rule over other races but only to protect their cultural heritages and identities across the West, against mass immigration, which does not preclude some immigration and individual rights for everyone.

TP: Your critique of multiculturalism finds its fullest expression in your book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. In many ways, Canada has enthusiastically embraced the rather eccentric ideas of one scholar, namely, Will Kymlicka, who is very much the “Godfather” of multiculturalism. Why has Canada adopted Kymlicka’s vision as its own, so that it now seeks to become a “post-nation?”

RD: Kymlicka did not originate the idea of multiculturalism. He effectively rode a multicultural wave making the argument that multiculturalism is not inconsistent with a version of liberalism that values community attachments and rejects the libertarian idea that individuals can fulfill their goals as private consumers and producers in the market place.

Humans have a “deep need” to belong to a community; they are inherently social beings who make choices and fulfill themselves as individuals inside a common culture. Kymlicka employed these “communitarian” ideas (well-established within a branch of Western liberal thought) to push the idea that multiculturalism could provide the community ties for immigrants coming to Western societies from different cultural backgrounds.

Anglos in Canada, he began to argue in the 1990s, already had their cultural communities; we should not expect immigrants to assimilate to the “dominant” Anglo culture since immigrants come with their own cultural traditions; instead, we should allow them to retain and cherish their customs, folkways, languages, religious beliefs – so long as these cultural ways were not inconsistent or ran counter to the liberal principle of individual rights.

But when one looks closely at what Kymlicka means by the “dominant” Anglo culture in Canada, he really means a deracinated neutralized sphere consisting of modern economic amenities, infrastructure, legal rules, and liberal political institutions.

He actually calls for Anglos, and, I would argue, Euro-Canadians generally, to forgo their deep cultural traditions, their heritage in Canada, the idea that they were the founders of this nation; for a future Canada that will have a neutral public sphere, bereft of the religious symbols of Euro-Canadians, without special public holidays for Anglos, or public attachments to songs, without an “Eurocentric” anthem, etc. in order to make a new Canada that is fully welcoming towards the cultures of immigrants. Euro-Canadians must set aside their cultural memories and customs, and adopt multiculturalism as their culture, adopt a culture that celebrates the cultures of immigrant minorities.

Because the Quebecois are a minority in Canada, they can affirm their cultural heritage in Quebec, preserve its distinctive character, but the Quebecois too (in Kymlicka’s view) should accommodate immigrants with different cultures, and start educating their children to be multicultural. Indigenous peoples too should be allowed to achieve some territorial autonomy within a loose federal system where they can affirm their unique cultural ways and preserve their heritage.

They add to Canada’s multiculturalism. Immigrant minorities are not expected to create their own autonomous territories but are to be granted group cultural rights in addition to their individual rights, i.e., affirmative hiring, dual citizenship, TV stations, government funding for the preservation and enhancement of their cultures, special loans to establish businesses, and a new curriculum away from the heritage of Euro-Canadians.

Meanwhile, Anglos will enjoy individual rights only, downplay their collective traditions in Canada for the sake of a new multicultural culture. Immigrants, Quebecois, and Indigenous peoples can interpret multiculturalism as a call for them to enhance their particular cultures, whereas Anglos (and Euro-Canadians) can only interpret multiculturalism as a call to embrace the “vibrant” cultures of others.

So, there is a huge double standard in Kymlicka, to the point that he thinks Euro-Canadians should not be allowed to speak out against diversity, speak out in defence of their heritage in Canada, on the grounds that such attitudes are “racist” against minorities. Immigrant minorities should be celebrated for speaking out in defence of their cultures.

Anglos and Euro-Canadians should be condemned for not accepting the creation of a new Canada with many collective immigrant cultures. Kymlicka regularly refers to the majority Anglo culture as a culture of “colonizers,” “racists,” and “conquerors” while using pleasant words such as “pride” and “culturally meaningful lives” when speaking about minority cultures.

Kymlicka says that Canada must “never be allowed” to be “white and Christian again”. Not just Canada, however. He has spent most of his academic career giving talks in Europe promoting the “incredibly successful model of Canadian multiculturalism”, calling upon Europeans to diversify themselves through mass immigration.

He is disingenuous in the way he makes his students believe that he is merely calling for minority rights in Europe, and that multiculturalism is intended only as way of protecting these rights. But it is obvious that his theory of multiculturalism – for which he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars by way of grants and government prizes – was intended as part of a program to diversify all European nations through immigration. Government and corporations pay him handsomely for papers explaining how Europe should be thoroughly diversified.

He argues that it is racist for any European nation to retain its heritage and not accept millions of Africans, Muslims and Asians. He completed his PhD under the Marxist Gerald Cohen, who wrote a highly celebrated book in the 1970s on historical materialism. He regularly uses the cultural Marxist phrase “slow march through the institutions” in reference to the imposition of multicultural norms across Western societies, inside government institutions, private companies, the media and schools.

All the while he claims that his ideas are about the actualization of the ideals of “liberal democracy”. But he is clearly of the view that no one should be allowed to question diversity, that Europeans should not be allowed to defend their heritage, and that only minorities-to-become-majorities have a right to collective cultural identities right inside European nations. He is a cultural Marxist who has enriched himself by promoting the ethnocide of Europeans.

TP: In this book, you carefully examine Canada’s Franco-British heritage. While it is true that Quebecois culture remains resilient, why has Canadian English culture entirely collapsed?

RD: Simply put, the Quebecois have a stronger sense of collective ethnic identity, a sense that being a Quebecois is about speaking a language, having strong Catholic roots, unique customs, foods, songs, memories; whereas Anglo Canadians came to identify their culture as individualistic per se. This does not mean Anglos have no cultural identity; they did in their connections to Britain, and then to their experiences and uniquely developed customs in Canada along with other English-speaking Canadians.

But still, they are of the view that their culture is about “individual liberties”. This left them far more susceptible to leftist attacks against their past historical “crimes” and the need to become more inclusive. But this is happening to the Quebecois as well, certainly the ones in Montreal and among the globalist elites; they now think that speaking the French language is good enough to be a good Quebecois and that an immigrant from a former French colony can be more Quebecois than an English-speaking person with deep family roots in Quebec.

TP: Do you think Canada will continue to exist as a nation?

RD: No. Canada is undergoing the most radical transformation in its history right now, and so is Britain, France, Italy, Australia, United States, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, and other Western nations. The transformation is due to imposition of immigrant diversity.

You can’t have multiple races and cultures in large numbers co-existing within the same nation state without a strong ethnic majority providing some cohesion to the nation. Justin Trudeau was implying as much when he said Canada was a “post-nation”.

Similar statements are being made in other Western nations as they are thoroughly diversified. Donald Trump is a civic nationalism; he values the liberal culture of his country, its achievements and historical memories; he does not like painting the American past in negative terms, and when he says “make America great again” he means “again” not because he wants to return to the past but because he values the past and believes that the leftist attacks on America’s past should not go unchallenged.

You can’t be a great nation without respecting your history, the founding peoples, the accomplishments of your ancestors. But in Canada we don’t have a populist movement; the culture from top to bottom is dominated by the left, and the left now hates national identities of any kind including civic identities based on Western liberal values, never mind a strong cultural identity that cherishes the cultural traditions of Canada in a deep way.

Canada will die as a nation with a unique identity. Separatist regional tendencies should be expected, but it depends how much these regions are diversified, since the Canadian government is implementing a well-orchestrated plan to diversify rural towns beyond the major cities; and, once this happens, all the regions will look alike in their diversity, multiple cultures without any common glue to even be able to create smaller national identities out of the regions.

In other Western nations we will have similar trends, but I do anticipate a counter movement by the native French, Italians, possibly Australians, and perhaps later on the Germans. Not sure about Sweden and Britain, but I can’t believe the British will disappear without a fight. Brace yourself for coming civil wars.

TP: What lies ahead for you personally? Is there another book on the horizon? What are you researching?

RD: As you know, I took early retirement after I experienced an “academic mobbing” (to use the term an expert on work place mobbing used in an article he wrote about my case) at my former university where I had been a professor for 25 years. I have more time to do pure research and get involved in politics.

I am currently writing my fourth book, and it will be about the psychology that brought Western civilization its greatness. I believe that the discovery in ancient Greece of the mind, the realization that humans have a faculty that is uniquely theirs and is the source of our knowledge, and that truth can only emerged out of this faculty in communication with other minds, rather than handed down through blind traditions, enacted by gods, or mysterious forces beyond our comprehension, is a key to Western uniqueness.

Westerners became increasingly conscious of their consciousness, aware that they can affirm themselves as an “I” in contrast to that which is not-I. Their aristocratic attitudes played a big role in nurturing this psychology, which entails a disposition not to submit, to prostrate in front of any authority however much one may rightfully respect worthy authorities; it means not allowing one’s being to be swallowed up by the world around, by nature, the demands of the body, knowing what belongs to the I and what belongs to the not-I.

This is a multifaceted, long drawn out development with roots in the prehistoric world of Indo-Europeans, with increasing levels of self-reflection exhibited throughout Western history. It is a view that does not deny the civilizational decline that accompanies affluent cultures but which looks to the degrees to which humans have attain or expressed themselves consciously as high as possible in the order of nature.

TP: Thank you so very much for sharing your thoughts and ideas with our readers. We sincerely appreciate you giving us this opportunity.

The image shows, “The Anger of Achilles,” by Jacques-Louis David; painted in 1819.

A Journey Without Distance – Reflections of a self-professed Libertarian

Recently, I have been reflecting on my journey as a self-professed Libertarian and the shifts in my thinking that have occurred over the past twelveyears as a Libertarian party member. I have noticed more frequently that some colleagues with whom I have shared common views in the past on policy topics are no longer in alignment with my views. 

I acknowledge that I have changed. I have slid in and out of various “camps” of Libertarian conviction over the years. My experience within the Libertarian movement, which has been responsible for my evolving views, has included: 

I was elected Chairman of the Ontario Libertarian Party (OLP) in 2017 with the mandate to recruit and prepare 124 OLP candidates for the June 2018 Ontario Provincial election (the Conservatives won a majority under Doug Ford and handed a humiliating defeat to the incumbent Liberals under the highly unpopular Kathleen Wynne); 

As the Libertarian candidate for my home riding, I learned much from being a political ‘insider’ as I had in fiveprevious occasions as a Libertarian candidate; 

Proclaimed by the former OLP Leader as the party’s “most prolific writer” (mostly on Facebook), I witnessed and learned from thousands of responses to the Libertarian content about which I wrote. [Note: social media has proved to be the best way to reach the public with our message since all mainstream media outlets consider every other party except for the three top contenders to be irrelevant and non-newsworthy.]

This personal reflection has been partially inspired by Canadian author William D. Gairdner’s book THE GREAT DIVIDE, Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. It addresses a phenomenon that seems to exist at every point along the left-right continuum of political engagement, and even within political parties. The theme of his book is: “The populations of the democratic world, from Boston to Berlin, Vancouver to Venice, are becoming increasingly divided from within, due to a growing ideological incompatibility between modern liberalism and conservatism. This is partly due to a complex mutation in the concept of liberal democracy itself, and the resulting divide is now so wide that those holding to either philosophy on a whole range of topics: on democracy, on reason, on abortion, on human nature, on homosexuality and gay marriage, on freedom, on the role of courts … and much more, can barely speak with each other without outrage (the favourite emotional response from all sides). Clearly, civil conversation at the surface has been failing – and that could mean democracy is failing.” 

Mr. Gairdner’s observations hit home to me personally because of my experience with the mini-divides that exist within the Libertarian parties with whom I have been associated. The perspective of time will help to explain my point. 

When I first joined the Ontario Libertarian Party in 2007, the atmosphere within the leadership team and the party’s most enthusiastic supporters was one of rigorous adherence to the body of Libertarian ideas that tended to the extreme: Anarcho-Capitalism. Often abbreviated as “Ancap,” it is considered a faction of libertarian political philosophy that promotes individual freedoms, private property, and free markets through the removal of government. “Removal” implies wholesale privatization of all government institutions so that they must compete with non-government service providers for business without relying on the immense benefit of guaranteed tax funding to support them. 

In those early days, the OLP comprised a small group on members who were mainly greying white men who shared the dream of attaining a virtually (if not entirely) government-less society. After being elected to the Executive Committee as Member at Large (MaL) around 2010, I concluded that the OLP was operating primarily as a men’s club that liked to talk about attaining political success and influencing opinion across broad communities of voters, but their goals were out of reach so long as the organization stumbled along making next to no progress. 

 During those early years, I also began reading extensively to deepen my understanding of Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics which was an essential pillar undergirding any possibility of achieving and sustaining a Libertarian society if it was to ever be realized. Authors like Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek, Hans Herman Hoppe, Tom Woods and others with predominately Ancap leanings all had a profound impact on my outlook as a Libertarian. Their ideas were inspiring to say the least, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they will never be widely accepted in our western democracies. 

In 2012, a new leader of the OLP was elected–Allen Small. I came to know and respect Allen when he had also been a MaL on the Executive Committee. As a former high school teacher, Allen had the attributes and talents that I felt would help the OLP to make progress as a political entity. 

Over the next six years, Allen lead us through two elections. Both of these elections marked record-breaking results unseen since the OLP had been founded in 1975. Allen worked closely with Rob Brooks, an experienced political campaign manager from another party, to shape a new election platform designed to make it appear less extreme and more attractive to a broader community of supporters. Allen was also the driving force behind building a larger social media following which was crucial to our growth. His legacy as the most successful Leader of the Ontario Libertarian Party in modern times is one that has set a high bar for future leaders to surpass.

During Allen’s tenure, I continued to read and gradually took a renewed interest in the OLP. As I held a very demanding job, my time was limited and I was unable to offer much assistance in support of Allen’s efforts. My views on Libertarianism had also begun to shift again, and they can be best described as politically-pragmatic because I came to accept the notion that proven methods of political messaging were essential to improve electability. However, I was still privately sympathetic to Ancap ideas. In retrospect, I was gradually becoming more “minarchist” as I continued to emerge from my earlier Ancap cocoon.

Minarchism is generally viewed as a libertarian political philosophy which advocates for the state to exist in forms that function solely to protect citizens from harm, aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud. During the OLP buildup to the June 2018 election, I felt compelled to condense and simplify my personal understanding of what it means to be a Libertarian. Ultimately, I settled on the following statement and I printed it on my business card as OLP Chairman: “Libertarians defend and protect individual persons (their mind, body and efforts) and their property from intentional and unwanted harm and aggression imposed by others including those employed by the state.”

Another shift in my thinking was also taking place as I actively campaigned on our 2018 election platform which featured a new Non-Government Options emphasis in our Libertarian vision. Integral to this vision was the necessity to introduce competition into the “public services” markets. For it to work, it is essential to eliminate all regulations that empower public institutions to operate on a monopoly basis. This will put the power of choice back into the hands of our citizens so that they can be free to patronize their choice of available service providers who best serve their unique needs and preferences. Furthermore, for citizens who prefer that services in health care or education (for example) be provided by the government, they are free to opt in as a “government customer” and pay their share of the taxes needed to sustain government operations. Conversely, for citizens who decide that they are best served by “non-government” service providers who will surely emerge to meet market demand after existing anti-competition regulations are repealed, these people will not be required to remit taxes; they can apply these tax savings to buy private insurance policies or make direct payments to providers. I refer to this form of Libertarianism as “free choice minarchy.”

The reasons why I remain a “free choice minarchist” today is because of the obvious advantages it brings to all voters. First, for citizens who choose “non-government” service providers, payments will not be managed by an inefficient, impersonal, expensive and often inflexible “middle man”–the government bureaucracy that collects our hard-earned money through non-optional taxation.

Second, free markets have a proven history of spawning business model innovations and prudent capital investments in order to control costs and improve the pricing and quality of their products as well as their customer service reputations. All of this is derived in direct response to the ever-present forces of competition.  It’s no mystery that “the customer is king” in competitive businesses, but the same cannot be said within government operations. 

Third, everyone gets what they want by being free to choose from viable alternatives. The thinking goes that it is none of my business what my neighbour wants to buy and it’s none of my neighbour’s business concerning what I prefer, so why should any drama exist between us as to how we meet our needs and preferences. 

Fourth, government expenses are directly proportional to the number of regulations that are “on the books” and must be enforced with expensive resources. By eliminating all pro-monopoly regulations, the government will have lower enforcement costs and thereby require less money from taxation and/or public debt. 

Fifth, this approach eliminates the element of “autocratic rule by one-size-fits-all” policy implementations which have always been the result of every election in our history. People differ in every conceivable way, which is why businesses adapt and adjust constantly to find new ways to serve customers profitably. It stands to reason that when government monopolies eliminate all consumer choices, they take on the same problems for which anti-trust laws were created to break up private sector monopolies. This double standard is hypocrisy at its most obvious. Governments must no longer operate under the protection of biased legislation if we are ever to expect service levels to improve in quality and decrease in cost. 

After running in six elections as a Libertarian candidate, I am asked often why I continue to do it given our history of attaining less than 1% of the popular vote. Recently, I have been asking myself the same question. Here’s why.

Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party of Canada (PPC) has achieved impressive success in 5 short months since last September 2018 to build a nation-wide party complete with EDAs (Electoral District Associations) in every riding across Canada. Neither the OLP nor the Libertarian Party of Canada (LPoC) has accomplished anything even close in spite of being in existence for over 4 decades. Bernier’s fund-raising ability is extraordinary. His ability to attract followers and media attention dwarfs ours. He has shown me what can be done under the right leader and the level of highly motivated talent that such a leader can attract. It is a demoralizing comparison to me as a long time OLP and LPoC member. 

I consider the PPC platform shown on its web site as “Libertarian lite” insomuch as it seeks “Less Government” just as a Libertarian minarchist does. In other words, our directions are the same but only the degree of change is different. 

After reading Right Here, Right Nowby former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (for whom I have great respect), I am convinced that Harper’s incremental approach to public policy change is wise. Policy results can be tested from small first steps and evaluated/adjusted before further steps are taken. This is the right approach for any elected Leader who wants Less Government and one that I would hope for if a Libertarian, PPC, or Conservative Party is elected in the upcoming federal election.

For my final, and maybe most significant consideration, I fall back on the reasons why I entered politics in the first place–my daughters. I had come to the conclusion years ago that I could not consider myself a responsible parent if I was not prepared to act to defend and protect my children from threats. To me, the greatest threat to their future has been and continues to be the unopposed and relentless growth of government power, scope, size, and cost at every level of government. The threat is manifest in an enormous set of fiscal, social, and cultural risks that will surely eat away at the quality of Liberty in their lives through no fault of their own. 

Years ago, I reasoned that we do not live in a true democracy unless at least one genuine Less Government option appears on every election ballot at every level of government. Since the only true Less Government option has been the Libertarian ballot choice, I have chosen to be that candidate in my riding when no one else was prepared to do so. I knew that I had no chance to be elected, but I felt that at least there would be one voice in each election to argue the reasons why continued government expansion was dangerous to everyone and why Less Government is the only viable antidote to these risks. 

Sadly, there has never been an election in Canada that featured a Libertarian candidate on every ballot in every election riding. The best effort so far was achieved last June when the OLP ran an Ontario-wide election campaign with 116 candidates for 124 ridings even though we operated on a shoe-string budget of about $40,000. (Note: the campaign budgets for the largest four Ontario parties was subsidized with tax dollars under the Per Vote Subsidy resulting in campaign cash windfalls of $5.1 million (Liberals), $4.1 million (Conservatives), $3.2 million (NDP) and $640,000 (Green Party). The other 22 so-called “fringe” parties that had registered with Elections Ontario for the June election and had complied with all of its campaign rules, required paper filings and fee payments, did not qualify for funding. If you are asking yourself why you were not aware of the 22 parties, you now know part of the story: running elections and reaching the public with campaign messaging is very expensive and “fringe” parties are put at a significant disadvantage to the major parties by tax subsidies.

As you can see from the above, my political path has been meandering even though I have remained a card-carrying Libertarian. As Mr. Gairdner pointed out, politicians and their most ardent supporters generally dig in for the long haul in support of their partisan convictions and are frequently loathe to budge even a smidgeon from their ideological perch. 

There are likely as many Libertarians who hold stubbornly to their views, proportionately speaking, as there are ardent Liberals and Conservatives. Politics is certainly a messy business and it is easy to see why so many people avoid the topic in “polite company.”

The photo shows, “Unveiling the Statue of Liberty,” by Edward Moran, painted in 1886.

The Curious Death Of Canada

Is it right for a state to legally sustain and promote a social experiment, based upon an idea now thoroughly derided and debunked, and implemented by political will rather than the will of the people? Is it ethical to have a law that permanently binds race to culture? Is it good for people to live in politically defined structures of abnegation so that various expectations of an ideology may be met?

Sadly, Canada is the only state in the world that can firmly answer, “Yes,” to all three questions. Why? Because it is multicultural by law. (Australia is as well, but its implementation of this ideology is different).

Other western nations have flirted with multiculturalism, but they have had the wisdom not to sanction it by law). And even more sadly, Canada sees multiculturalism as its defining characteristic, its very identity as a state, so that it cannot help but fall into absurdity, with its mantra, “unity” through “diversity.”

An entire country defined by one social experiment – and a failed one at that? Is this the best that Canada can do to overcome Voltaire’s observation that it is nothing more than “quelques arpents de neige…a few acres of snow?”

Indeed, Canada has evolved into a place where all its hopes and even all its fears are placed upon political parties. What has Canada become?

First and foremost, it is a state. It is no longer a nation. That is an important distinction, because the state and the nation are not synonymous, despite the amalgam, “the nation-state.”

By way of political philosophy, a nation is defined as one community, with a shared history and culture – or, in the words of Ernest Renan, the nation is “a soul, a spiritual principle.”

The state, on the other hand, is a political alliance of individuals who share one geographical space defined by borders.

Canada has no community with a shared history, and therefore it has no culture, for culture is a consequence of history – culture cannot, and certainly should not, be created by governments through and by political means. And, Canada certainly has no soul, no spiritual principle which might define why it must exist as a nation.

Therefore, Canada is a state, in which the government aggregates people through immigration for its own ends – to sustain a tax base, because the population within its borders can no longer renew itself through biological means.

As Kant points out, such an aggregation cannot make a community, cannot build a nation – because a nation must be a moral community. And there cannot be diversity in morality. Is Canada, therefore, becoming a failed state whose only raison d’être is economics?

Of course, the very idea of a nation is a moral one (in that a nation should be greater than the sum of its economic capability and its geography). Nations embody values and therefore specify morality.

This is why some nations are better than others – this is why the flow of immigrants is westwards – millions of Canadians do not seek to migrate to other parts of the world. Why? Because the western world embodies a set of ideas and principles of morality that have historically proven to yield not only the best social results, but also the best economic results. Good ideas and good morality do create wealth, prosperity, freedom, happiness. Bad ideas do not.

A few years back, the philosopher, Marcello Pera established multiculturalism as the political version of a failed ideology, namely, relativism.

Briefly, relativism insists that history is useless because we are better than the past – because we have benefited from progress.

History is filled with our benighted ancestors who followed regressive ideas that we now have to fix and make right, while shaking a scornful finger. We are smart; they were dumb; and there is nothing they can do about it. Since we are progressive, we will build a much better world by getting rid of all the tired-old notions.

It is obvious how thoroughly ingrained relativism has become, for it passes for much of popular thinking. Perhaps progress is the most damaging legacy of eighteenth century Enlightenment, whereby everything modern is better – because it is not old.

We have only to look to one of its gravest consequences – hyper-capitalism and the devastation it has wrought not only socially, but environmentally. Each year is divided into four quarters, and each quarter must be more profitable than the last.

Relativism also maintains that there is no such thing as truth, because truth is what you make it. So, things like morality, or values, simply become personal choices, expressed as individual rights, because no one truth, morality, or value is better than any other.

Thus, there can be no universal (transcultural) morality or set of values which may be considered as being better than another because there is no point of reference. Paul Feyerabend succinctly summarised all this in a catchy phrase, “anything goes.” It is all a matter of lifestyle, everyone’s opinion is valuable and important – because personal opinion is all that we are capable of.

Aside from the immediate contradiction that relativism falls into – that what it says is actually “true” (a transcultural moral principle) and that this “truth” is good for everyone on this planet (a universal judgement). Therefore, it ends up doing precisely what it denies. But there are far graver deeper fallacies.

First, there is social paralysis. If all cultures are the same, then an evil culture cannot be denied, let alone criticized or defeated.

Second, there is paralysis of judgement. If all cultures have equal value, then there must be an external value system, which must be true to be applicable – but such a system, relativism says, does not exist.

Third, if all cultures are valid, then change itself is denied, since abandoning one culture and moving to another does not lead to any change at all.

Fourth, if all cultures are valuable and worth preserving (by government intervention), then cultures become prisons, from which escape is impossible – your DNA , not your mind, determines who and what you are – forever.

Why? Because you can never say that one culture is better, and more preferable, than another. This is the reality of multiculturalism – a relentless, grim determinism – precisely what relativism supposedly sets out to destroy.

It is often argued that multiculturalism builds tolerance, that it neutralizes the perceived harmful effects of religion, that it strengthens secularism, that it sustains democracy by promoting individual freedom.

Such statements are typical of ahistorical diktats. Tolerance is not a consequence of multiculturalism; rather, it is a virtue deeply embedded in the very fabric of the West’s (ignored) history – Christianity. Multiculturalism cannot explain a very basic fact – that religions create culture.

But by promoting all cultures, multiculturalism legitimizes all religion. Therefore, multiculturalism cannot further secularism (whatever that may be) because it entrenches and promotes all religions – and all world religions are religious at very core.

As for the relationship between multiculturalism and expressions of individual freedom, it is simply an illusion. How can an ideology, which imprisons people (because of their DNA) into their geographical places of origin, claim to be a liberator?

This is a tragic deception – because multiculturalism demands a total submission of the individual to his/her culture. This deception becomes clearly obvious if we consider a recent example. There was much uproar over women fully hiding their faces in veils.

Relativism in all its splendour was invoked – with reminders of personal freedom, the right to choose (if women can legally be topless, then they can legally go about fully veiled), and so forth.

But no one wanted to ask the much harder question – why does a fully-veiled woman refuse to change? Because she does not wish to participate in a non-Muslim world – she will be forever absent from the non-Muslim public sphere.

However, she is simply following the expectations of multiculturalism by fully submitting to the demands of her culture (as she interprets it), not as an individual – but in accordance to the expected behaviour of her sex in her culture.

Thus, multiculturalism does not mean freedom, democracy, individuality for everybody – it is simply a method to help Canadians with British DNA to overcome their own guilt of being historically Christian – because good relativists that they are, they imagine that are not yet free enough, secular enough, individual enough, progressive enough.

Quebec, of course, fully understands that if it starts playing the multicultural game, it will have to abandon its narrative of being historically unique in North America and learn to accept that it is just like any other culture carried over by immigrants. This is why Quebec has always been a fellow-traveller on the great culture experiment.

In effect, the larger, British culture of Canada is expected to be multicultural. The various immigrant communities (which behave like mini-nations) are firmly expected to be mono-cultural.

Perhaps it is now time to ask a fundamental question – why must Canada continue to cling to multiculturalism? Is it simply to say that because of it Canada is not like the “melting Pot” of south of the border?

Is Canada really as fragile as that? Is it simply to demonstrate to the world that Canada is a “world-leader” when it comes to being on the “cutting-edge” of modernity? Is it to assert that it is profoundly post-Christian and entirely secular?

The fact remains, no country in the world wants to be multicultural. They want to be nations. They do not want to lose their spiritual essence, their soul.

In a very strange twist, multiculturalism spawns that which it sets out to dismantle – cultural superiority. Government-endorsed propaganda expounds “pride” in one’s DNA-ingrained culture, and people are avidly encouraged to be “proud” of however they want to romanticize “the old country.”

The old moral concept of humility has long been replaced by the strident political one of “pride.” Whoever dare say that he is truly humbled to be a Canadian?

 

The photo shows, “The Death of Jane McCrea” by John Vanderlyn, painted in 1804.