Tag Archives: Gerry T. Neal

The Antidote to False Religion

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               Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, January 26, 2023

The Antidote to False Religion

Everywhere we look in Western Civilization people are being forced to affirm the false doctrines of false religions and to bend their knees to idols.   A couple of years ago, in the insanity that ensued after George Floyd died in police custody, the genuflection was even literal.   Today there are several dogmas which if one does not uncritically accept them all, questions them, or argues against them one will find himself deplatformed, defenestrated, and the way things are going perhaps eventually decapitated.   Here are a few such dogmas:

I.                   The world’s climate is changing, the change will be for the worse rather than the better, it is all man’s fault and to atone for his misdoing man needs to accept a radical transformation of society and economy that will greatly lower his standard of living, eliminate most if not all of his personal freedom, and drastically reduce the size of his population.

II.                The traditional category of sex which divided people into male and female on the basis of biological differences is, despite its appearance of being essential to human reproduction, a false one, invented by those with power solely for the purpose of oppressing others.   The proper category is gender, which is what you think or feel that you are.   This may correspond to the sex you would have been assigned under the old system, or it may correspond to the other sex, or it may be something different altogether because it is all about you and your feelings and so there are in infinite number of possibilities.  Nobody else is allowed to in any way challenge your self-chosen gender and if somebody calls you by the wrong pronouns or the name your parents gave you before you chose a new one to fit your gender identity that person has committed the worst crime in the history of the world and should be completely and utterly de-personed and removed from society forever.

III.             Race is also a false category invented by white men to oppress all other people.   When white people speak of race or otherwise employ this category they should be told that they are being racist and that race does not exist.   They are not allowed to think of themselves as a race or a distinct group within mankind except if they think of themselves as distinctively evil which they are required to do.   Other groups can speak of race and think of themselves as races and are encouraged to do so.   White people aren’t allowed to call this racist and preach colour-blindness to these other groups.   White people are supposed to practice colour-blindness, except when they are required to  acknowledge their own wickedness and the virtuous racial self-awareness of other people.

IV.             If a new viral respiratory disease is circulating, even if poses no significant danger to anyone outside the group that is most vulnerable to all respiratory disease, it is alright for governments to suspend everyone’s basic freedoms of movement, association, assembly and religion, order them into isolation, shut down their businesses, and basically act as if there were no constitutional limits on their powers, in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.   It is alright for the government and the media to deceive the public and spread panic in order to get people to comply, but if anyone contradicts the official line that person is spreading dangerous “misinformation” and “disinformation” and needs to be silenced.

V.                The way to prevent mass shootings and other gun crimes, overwhelmingly committed with guns that are not legally owned and registered but rather stolen or smuggled, is to pass more gun legislation and take guns away from people who are overwhelmingly law-abiding.

VI.             The most important and valuable way in which  the people who in the old dispensation were called women but whom in the new are called birthing persons and can be of any gender can contribute to society is not by bearing and raising children as mothers but by seeking self-fulfillment in careers outside the home.   That many of them think and choose otherwise in no way contributes to the wage gap between what used to be erroneously called the sexes.   The only acceptable ways of explaining this gap are patriarchy, male chauvinism, and sexism.

VII.          When somebody commits a crime, unless it is a “hate” crime or the perpetrator happens to be white, Christian, male, cisgender, heterosexual or all of the above, it is not he who has failed society and owes society a debt the amount and manner of payment of which are to be determined by a court of law, but society that has failed him and owes it to him to rehabilitate him, no matter how long it takes, even if it takes the remainder of his natural life.

VIII.       While tobacco and alcohol, which for centuries in the case of the former and from time immemorial in the case of the latter, have been comforts enjoyed by people from all walks and stations of life even those who have had little to nothing else beyond the essentials of subsistence, have to be driven out of polite society and cancelled because they can have harmful effects on people’s health, marijuana should be enjoyed by all and a “safe” supply of cocaine, heroin and other opiates, methamphetamine and other hard narcotics along with a place and paraphernalia to use to them should be supplied by the government.

IX.             Masked thugs who go to lectures given by speakers with non-approved ideas and shout them down, disrupt the event, or intimidate its hosts into cancelling, and vandals who damage or destroy statues and monuments or who deface valuable art in order to make some sort of statement that nobody gets but themselves about the environment are all legitimately employing their “freedom of expression”, but if someone says something either in a lecture in person or online which disagrees with any of the tenets of the new progressive religion this is “hate speech” rather than “free speech” and he must be silenced.   Anybody who attempts to prevent the thugs and vandals from exercising their “freedom of expression” is a terrorist and should be treated as such.

X.                The primary purpose of schools should not be to teach children such basic skills as reading, writing, and mathematics, much less to teach them anything about history other than how many bad –isms and –phobias the leaders of their country were guilty of in the past.   Rather the primary purpose of schools is to encourage children, as early as possible, to choose a gender identity other than what would be their sex in the old, obsolete, way of looking at things, to expose them to every conceivable form of sexual behaviour as early as possible, and to instill in them anti-white prejudice or self-loathing if they happen to be white, along with Christophobia, cisphobia, heterophobia and misandry.   Teachers have a duty to do these things and should not be accountable to parents.

XI.             “My body my choice” is only valid in reference to when a birthing person, vide supra VI, wants to terminate his/her pregnancy, even though doing so means terminating the life of his/her unborn child.  The right of a birthing person to an abortion is absolute and not subject to limitations, unlike the rights of all people to life, liberty, and property.   “My body my choice” is not valid when medical experts tell the government we all need to be injected with man-made substances that have never before been used and for which there are no long-term studies because they were rushed to market in under a year.

XII.          Although the relative cost of commodities is determined by such factors as supply and demand – if there are a lot of apples and few bananas, this will make apples less expensive and bananas more so – this does not apply to the means of exchange, money.   Therefore government can print and spend as much money as it wants, this will not cause the price of anything else to go up.   If the prices of commodities such as food go up, this is because of greedy vendors, not the government.   Indeed, it is because of all the greedy businessmen who would prefer that only a few people be able to afford to buy their products rather than many or all people that government needs to keep doling out money so that people can buy things.   Although this does not cause the prices of things to go up, even if it did it would still be the right thing to do, despite the fact that rising commodity prices and devaluation of currency by the unit would harm the most the people that such government spending is supposed to be helping, those with the least purchasing power in society.

In Western Civilization, which is the name given in Modern times to what has become of what used be Christendom in the days since liberalism began to wax and Christianity began to wane there, these are the main tenets of the new religion that progressives have sought to establish in the place of Christianity.   That this is a fair characterization is evident from the way those who raise valid questions about the first tenet are treated.    If you point out that climate has constantly been changing throughout history, that human beings thrive better in warmer climates than colder, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather is to vegetable life what oxygen is to animal life, that despite irresponsible journalists’ efforts to portray every weather disaster that takes place as a “worst ever” moment recent decades have not experienced the most volatile weather on record nor have they been either the hottest or the coldest, and a host of other similar arguments you will likely be met with the accusation that you are a climate or a science “denier”.   This very accusation demonstrates that to your accuser the idea of man-made, apocalyptic, climate change is not a hypothesis that begins with observations, is supported by evidence gathered through experiments and test,  and rests upon such evidence while being open to being overthrown by other evidence, i.e., science, but an article of faith which we have a moral obligation to accept.

Now I am not opposed to articles of faith.   On the contrary, I think that for communities of faith such as the Christian Church, these are essential.   The articles discussed above, however, are not a statement of faith to which a community of faith akin to the Church asks its members to confess, but a set of beliefs to which progressives demand adherence from all members of every civil society in the West.   This is not a new phenomenon.   Progressivism began as an attack on Christian kings, the Christian Church, and the throne-altar alliance in Christendom and ever since the same progressives who scream “separation of Church and State” against the old order of Christendom have sought to wed the State anew to a different religion.   In early sixteenth century England this was the heretical form of Calvinist Christianity known as Puritanism.   Subsequent generations of progressives have pretended that their substitute religions were not religions at all but secular ideologies.   Communism is one obvious example of this.   The set of propositions that American liberals and neoconservatives claim define what it means to be an American, a citizen of the first country to have a separation of Church and State clause in its constitution, is another.

Now, while Americanism is in many respects less evil than Communism, the popular idea that the new false religion that we have been discussing is a rebranding and reworking of Communism is mistaken.      Communism and Communists contributed to its development, for sure.  Many of the dogmas of this new false religion were spreading through the academic world decades before they spilled out into popular culture, and the Marxists who outside the old Communist bloc had more influence in academe than anywhere else undoubtedly contributed to this.    Nevertheless, the new false religion of woke progressivism is more accurately described as a reworking of Americanism than it is of Communism.   It developed in the Western countries that aligned with the United States during the Cold War rather than in the former Communist bloc which has proven to be relatively immune to it.    While acknowledging that Cold War agents of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc had infiltrated the West and were working to undermine it from within – Joseph McCarthy was right about this – and that academic Marxists disappointed with the Soviet experiment  and the failure of the World Wars to produce Marx’s general revolution had begun revising their ideology in a more cultural and social rather than economic direction as early as the 1930s, the development of the new false religion is more directly a consequence of a) post-World War II American policy with regards to the rebuilding of Europe that tied assistance in rebuilding to indoctrination in American liberalism with the aim of preventing a resurgence of fascism, b) the United States’ having become the leading power in Western Civilization at the very moment that American liberalism was beginning to transform itself into an unhealthy obsession with racial and sexual grievance politics, and c) the concurrent emergency of mass communications technology as a medium for the spread of news and culture, newly manufactured for mass consumption in the United States.   Indeed, the central tenet of the universal propositional nationalism aspect of Americanism, i.e., that anyone anywhere in the world is potentially an American if he subscribes to the propositions that define America, is the seed from which the rotten plant of woke progressivism springs.   Implicit within the notion is the idea that someone who was born in the United States, to American parents, whose ancestors going back to the American Revolution were all Americans, but who does not believe all the American propositions is not himself an American or at any rate is less of an American, than a new immigrant or even someone somewhere else in the world who does subscribe to all the propositions.   All that is necessary for this to become woke progressivism is for the propositions to be changed from the classical liberal ones acceptable to “conservative” Americans to the sort of nonsense contained in the twelve articles enumerated at the beginning of this essay and for the emphasis to be shifted to the implicit idea (“you do not really belong if you do not agree that…”) rather than the explicit one (“you belong if you agree that…”).   While some might point out that in many places in Europe as well as in the UK and here in Canada this new false religion of woke progressivism has seemingly gone further and become more powerful than in the United States this does not rebut the fact that it is essentially a reworked Americanism but speaks rather of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the resistance to woke progressivism. Note that here in the Dominion of Canada, the most aggressive promotion of woke progressivism in recent years has come from the currently governing Liberal Party and especially its present leadership.  Ever since Confederation the Liberal Party has been the party that sought to make Canada more like the United States economically, culturally and politically.    The weakness of the resistance to its aggressive promotion of woke progressivism can be partially attributed to the fact that the only party in Parliament other than the Lower Canadian separatists that is not a party that takes part of the Liberal platform and pushes it further and faster than the Liberals themselves do, the Conservatives, have in recent decades been controlled by neoconservatives who share to a large degree the Liberals’ masturbatory attitude towards America and are consequently Liberal lite.     The Liberal Party is a textbook example illustrating the old maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.   The woke Liberals such as the current Prime Minister are constantly preaching the virtues of “diversity” to us even as in the name of that “diversity” they seek to impose a stringent and narrow uniformity of thought upon us.   As the great Canadian Tory historian W. L. Morton once observed, however, the ancient principle of allegiance to a reigning monarch upon which our Fathers of Confederation had wisely built our national unity already allowed for racial and ethnic diversity without the sort of pressure to conform that exists in an American-style compact society.    An updated version of this observation could be that a monarchical allegiance society, allows for racial and ethnic diversity without imposing such as a dogma of faith that everyone is required to believe the way Liberal dogmatic multiculturalism does, and so the older principle allows for a greater diversity, or a more diverse sort of diversity that includes diversity of thought, than does the Liberal cult of diversity.    

While I do not wish to belabor this point too much further I will observe that last week began with the entire United States with a few noble exceptions joining in the worship of a false idol.   American “conservatives” and liberals alike paid homage to someone they call “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” although he, like his father, was given the name Michael King at birth and he obtained his doctorate through serial plagiarism.   Everything else about the man was as phony as a $3 bill as well. He was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church even though he did not believe in the essential tenets of faith either of that Church or Christianity in general.   He was launched to fame as a crusader against segregation the year after the American Supreme Court had already dealt Jim Crow a death blow.   He talked a good talk about evaluating people on the basis of the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin in his “I have a Dream” speech, the only thing about him his “conservative” worshippers choose to remember, but the Civil Rights Act which he promoted and the passing of which was his biggest achievement laid the foundation for affirmative action, the racial shakedown industry, and every other sort of anything-but-colour-blind progressive race politics.   Similarly, he cultivated an image of himself as someone who practiced the kind of non-violent civil disobedience preacher by Thoreau, Gandhi, and the like, but there was a great deal of coordination between his talks and marches and sit-ins and the actions of those whose preferred methodology was looting, riots, and burning cities down.

We have looked at several of the tenets of the false religion that woke progressives seek to make the new established faith of the West.   We have also briefly looked at how this false religion evolved out of the earlier false religion of Americanism.   The title of this essay, however, is “The Antidote to False Religion”.  It is time that we turn our attention that.

The antidote to false religion is true religion.    The True and Living God satisfies the longing for the divine in the human heart in a way that none of man’s inventions, made with his own hands, can do.   The salvation man is in need of is spiritual salvation from sin, which has been given to us freely in Jesus Christ.   The salvation through political activism, legislation, and regulation that progressivism seeks is a poor substitute.  Unlike in the world of finance, where “bad money drives out good” as the law named for Sir Thomas Gresham states, in religion light drives out darkness, as it does in the literal sense.  Consider the ancient world.    St. Paul in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans describes the darkness of moral depravity into which the nations of the world had descended by turning away from the Creator into idolatry.   Much ancient discussion as witnessed in the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle focused on the question of happiness, how a man attains it, and how he can be rightly judged by others to have attained it.   The answer was not to be found in the pagan religions and the writings of Plato and the tragedies of Euripides, testify to a growing dissatisfaction with gods who were merely more powerful human beings with all the moral failings of mortals and, indeed, often more.   Calls had begun to arise for reforms of the pagan religion.   Into this darkness, St. John attests, the Word, Who became flesh and dwelt among us, shone as the Light of Men, satisfying the hunger and thirst attested to in the writings of the philosophers in a way that paganism, no matter how reformed, never could.   The darkness of today’s false religion was able to creep back in because over the course of the past several centuries, Western man was lured into once again putting his faith in the creations of his own hands, now called science and technology, through the promise of wealth and power.   Initially, the new idols seemed to impressively deliver on their promises but now they are starting to fail as all such false gods eventually do.   Man now stands at a crossroads.   The Light of Jesus Christ is still there calling him back.   Or he can plunge himself further into the darkness of the new false religion. 

There is a difference between the false religion of today and the false religion(s) of the ancient world.   Ancient paganism was pre-Christian, the idolatry in which men indulged before God sent His Only-Begotten Son into the world.   Concerning this idolatry St. Paul, speaking to the philosophers at Mars Hill, said “And the times of this ignorance, God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”.    The false religion of today is sometimes called post-Christian, that is to say, the idolatry into which men sink after they abandon the true faith of Jesus Christ.   A more Scriptural term for this might be Anti-Christ. 

It has often been said that someone who has turned his back on Christ is far harder to reach than someone who has not yet heard of Him for the first time.   This seems to be true and the difficulty may be greater when it comes to nations and an entire civilization rather than just individuals.   However this may be, the true religion has not changed and we must call those who have abandoned it back.

We started this essay by looking at several articles of the new false religion being dogmatically imposed upon us.  Twelve of these were given and this number was chosen for a reason.  Since the earliest centuries of Christianity, the true faith has been confessed in a statement we call the Creed from the Latin word for “believe”.   There are two basic forms of the Creed, the Apostles’ and the Nicene.  (1)  Ancient tradition says that the twelve Apostles themselves composed the Creed, each contributing an article.   Whether or not that is the case, the Creed consists of twelve articles, one for each of the Apostles.   The Nicene Creed, or more accurately the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, composed and revised at the two first Ecumenical Councils of the fourth century, is the most universal form being accepted by all the ancient Churches.   While this is a longer form of the Creed, it too contains twelve articles which mostly correspond to those of the Apostles’ (Article III of the Nicene Creed contains matter not found in the Apostles’, Article IV of the Nicene includes everything in both Articles III and IV of the Apostles’, the Descent into Hell is included with the Resurrection in the Apostles’ otherwise the Articles of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan are longer or fuller versions of the corresponding Articles in the Apostles’).

I intend, the Lord willing, to give each of these articles an essay-length exposition this year.  The text of both forms of the Creed will be commented on, with the essays following the order of the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed, covering Article III of the Nicene Creed under Article II.   I have not yet decided whether to do this over the next couple of months or whether to spread it over the year covering one Article a month.   Either way, the purpose of the series will be to remind people of the true faith so as to call them back from the false one.

Here are the twelve Articles of the Apostles’ Creed:

I.                    I believe in God, the Father almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth;

II.                And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;

III.             who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the Virgin Mary,

IV.             suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried.

V.                He descended into hell.
    The third day he rose again from the dead.

VI.             He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.

VII.          From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

VIII.       I believe in the Holy Ghost,

IX.              the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,

X.                the forgiveness of sins,

XI.             the resurrection of the body,

XII.           and the life everlasting. Amen.

(1)   The Athanasian Creed is not, properly speaking, a Creed, but is more like a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.   This can be seen in the fact that whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are both in the first person, expressions of what I or we, believe, the Athanasian is in the third person, a declaration of what must be believed. — Gerry T. Neal

  He that Hath No Sword, Let Him Sell His Garment and Buy One

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, January 13, 2023

  He that Hath No Sword, Let Him Sell His Garment and Buy One

Here in the Dominion of Canada, we are now in the eighth year of the federal premiership of Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau to use the unkind slur by which he is often called.   He came to power in the Dominion election of 2015 with a majority win for the Liberals and has managed to cling to power ever since with slim pluralities.  Despite, however, the fact that he has been in a position of minority government since 2019, he continues to govern like he has a clear, blank-cheque of a mandate, to do whatever he wants, no matter how unjust and divisive his various agendas turn out to be.

Take Bill C-21.   Please, take it.   This bill was tabled (1) early last year and had finished going through its first two readings around the beginning of summer in June.   The bill is the product of all the hot air that has been coming from the Liberal government since the multiple shooting incident in Nova Scotia in April of 2020.   Shortly after the attacks, Captain Airhead announced on the Communist holiday that a ban by Order-in-Counsel would take effect immediately on what he called “assault-style” weapons.    This was all a lot of smoke and mirrors.  Actual assault weapons of the kind that match the way the Prime Minister keeps describing them, i.e., weapons designed to kill as many people as possible in as short a period of time, were already illegal in Canada and had been long before the Nova Scotia shootings.   The “assault-style weapons” that he was going after were merely non-military grade rifles that had been made to look like military rifles for those to whom such an appearance had an aesthetic appeal.    Captain Airhead then began shooting his mouth off for the last three years about the need to make our streets safe from gun crime, even as he introduced or stuck to policies on everything from border control to mind-altering drugs to bail reform that had the opposite effect.   Bill C-21 if passed would amend various Acts of Parliament to enshrine a much broader gun ban than the one of 2020 into statutory law.   It would do absolutely nothing about making our streets safe from gun crime because these crimes are overwhelmingly committed with guns that are illegally obtained – as were the guns in the Nova Scotia shootings, incidentally – because they are already illegal.    None of these acts of the Trudeau Liberals, from the Order-in-Council of 1 May, 2020 to Bill C-21, have had or will have much of an effect on making Canadians safer from crimes either of the Nova Scotia variety or of the kind that afflicts our inner cities.   Those who are most affected by such empty, self-righteous, gestures are law-abiding Canadians who own guns that they acquired legally and have only used legally.   Liberals like the Prime Minister, Bill Blair and Marco “the Mendacious” Mendicino think nothing about unjustly and unfairly punishing such people for the crimes of actual gun criminals against whom they are either unable or unwilling to act.

All the criticism of Bill C-21 and its drafters in the preceding paragraph applied to the bill even before it went into Committee consideration after the second reading in the House which is where it presently stands.   During the Committee stage, however, the Liberals amended it in a way that made it much worse.    The amendment, which was introduced very late in the year, the Liberals apparently hoping to squeak the amended bill through Committee and its third reading before the House adjourned for Christmas and relying upon the amendment having been introduced just prior to the anniversary of the  École Polytechnique massacre to shield the move from criticism, greatly expanded the list of guns to be banned.  While the Liberals continue to shout “misinformation” and “disinformation” at anyone, especially His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, when they point this out, it is quite reasonable to conclude from the amended list of guns to be banned that rural Canadians, especially farmers and hunters, are being targeted here.    There are guns on the list that are clearly hunting guns and which are in no way connected to gun crime in Canada.   A traditional shotgun made by English manufacturer Webley and Scott for hunting birds is one such example.   There are many others.  (2)    Indeed, if you were to draw up a list of the most common guns used by farmers and hunters, you would find that many of the most prominent guns on the list are included in the amended version of Bill C-21.  The Liberal Party under its current management loves to turn Canadians against each other, to reward those who vote Liberal, and rub the noses of those who do not vote Liberal in Liberal laws, but here this backfired against them.   At present, as a minority government, they are propped up by the socialist party, the New Democrats, who agreed to support them in Parliament until the next Dominion election.   It is not just the Conservatives, however, who have a large rural base but the NDP as well.   While the NDP is led by urban socialists, much of their caucus represent northern ridings where reservations in which hunting remains a huge part of the way of life are to be found.   When the Assembly held an emergency session in early December and condemned the Liberal bill as an assault on their way of life the NDP had no choice but to join the Conservatives in opposing the Bill in its currently amended form.   When this happened, even the few Liberals who represent rural ridings felt free to break ranks with the leadership of their own party over the issue.   Call it a Christmas miracle.

While initially when faced with such opposition the government gave signs of being willing to make concessions, when asked a few weeks later about this the Prime Minister indicated that they intended to pass Bill C-21 and doubled down on accusing the Conservatives of “misinformation” and “disinformation” for telling the truth about how the bill would adversely affect law-abiding rural Canadians without doing anything about actual gun crime.   How this shall unfold in this New Year remains to be seen.

Earlier last year Captain Airhead made a remark in an interview that is quite revealing about the attitude he brings to this issue.   Appearing on an American podcast (Pod Save the World) he defended his government’s gun control policies and contrasted American and Canadian culture saying:

and we have a culture where the difference is, guns can be used for hunting or for sport-shooting in Canada, and there are lots of gun owners, and they’re mostly law-respecting and law abiding, but you can’t use a gun for self-protection in Canada. That’s not a right that you have in the constitution or anywhere else.

It would be interesting to know if he really believes this or if he was just shooting his mouth off without thinking.     It is, of course, nonsense.   Canadians do indeed have a constitutional and legal right of self-protection and when a right is explicitly spelled out as such in constitution and law the implicit corollary is the right to employ such means as the explicit right may require.   Trudeau may be under the mistaken impression that his father’s Charter is the Canadian constitution, a mistake about which I shall have more to say shortly, but even if we limit our discussion of the constitution to the Charter his statement would be wrong.   Section 7 of the Charter by spelling out Canadians right to security of the person, recognizes their right of self-protection.   Furthermore, the Firearms Act recognizes self-protection as a legitimate grounds for a firearms permit (Section 20) and the Criminal Code (Sections 34, 35) acknowledges the right to use force to protect one’s person and property. 

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, properly understood, of course, is not Canada’s constitution, but a part of Canada’s constitution that was added in 1982.   Even the British North America Act, which, contrary to what many mistakenly think was not repealed in 1982 but renamed (the Constitution Act, 1867), taken together with the Charter, is only part of our constitution.   In Canada, we have a constitution that is both written and unwritten, and the unwritten parts are the largest.   The Charter itself acknowledges that its enactment does not annul other rights and freedoms than those spelled out it in it, that Canadians had previously enjoyed as part of our constitutional heritage of Common Law and parliamentary monarchy.   The right to use firearms in self-protection was already part of that heritage before the American Revolution and was not invented by the United States.   The only thing distinctively American about the United States’ version of the idea of the right to use firearms in self-protection is the notion that the right is absolute.   That people have the basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and the necessary corollary right to protect the same, and consequently the right to the means to such protection was recognized by both the Tory (Sir William Blackstone) and Whig (John Locke) traditions before the latter gave birth to both the American Revolution and the Liberal Party, which, for all of Trudeau’s yap about American influence on Canada, has always been the party of Americanization.

There is a tendency in some Christian circles to misinterpret the teachings of Christ in way that is parallel to how Trudeau misinterprets the Canadian constitution and law.   These misguided brethren have the idea that not merely the use of guns but self-protection in general is forbidden believers by Jesus’ teachings (the Sermon on the Mount specifically), and example (He allowed Himself to be arrested, falsely accused, tortured, and crucified without resisting).  In an extreme form that is associated with the tradition of the far left radical wing of the continental Protestant Reformation this interpretation of Jesus’ teachings and example is taken to mean that Christians cannot serve as policemen, soldiers, or in any other office of the state that requires the use of force.

With regards to the Sermon on the Mount this misinterpretation arises from the basic error of failing to give due weight to Matthew 5:17-19 or to note how these verses apply to what immediately follows in the remainder of the chapter.   These verses are the warning not to think that Jesus had come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them.   They come before Jesus’ saying that one’s righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and His expansion upon what that entails with a series of six contrasts in which one variation or another of the words “ye have heard that it was said to them of old time” introduces a quotation from the Old Testament, and then Jesus introduces the other side of the contrast with “but I say to you”.   These latter words are ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν in the Greek.   δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν means “but I say to you” without the ἐγὼ and ἐγὼ like all other nominative case personal pronouns in Greek is only used for emphasis.   By emphasizing the first person pronoun in this way, in this sort of contrast, Jesus declares His Own authority in speaking to be on par with that of the Old Testament Scriptures.   This format could easily suggest to some minds that Jesus was telling His followers to disregard the Old Testament and listen to Him instead.   Verses 17 to 19 warn His hearers against taking His words in that manner. 

With regards to the first two contrasts, in which the Old Testament quotations are taken from the Decalogue, there is less need of such a warning since what follows the “but I say to you” intensifies the meaning of the quoted commandment.   The third and fourth contrasts, however, could easily be taken as contradicting the Old Testament commandments.    The quotations come from the civil portion of the Mosaic Law, the instructions with regards to divorce and swearing oaths.   Jesus tells His followers that anyone who divorces his wife except for the cause of fornication causes her and anyone who marries her to commit adultery, and tells them not to swear at all.   Verses 17 to 19 tell us that this is not to be taken as annulling the civil provisions of the Mosaic Law.   Therefore, when Jesus said “swear not at all” this had nothing to do with the courtroom, as those sects whose members won’t take the oath before testifying in court wrongly think, but with oaths in common conversation.   Swearing on a Bible to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” does not violate Jesus’ instructions.   Saying “by gum” in casual conversation does.   (3)

The same principle applies to the last couplet of contrasts.   In the first of these, the Old Testament quotation is the Lex Talionis “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”.  In the second the quotation is the Second Greatest Commandment, to love your neighbour.   Note that in this final contrast, in addition to the Old Testament quotation there is added the words “and hate thine enemy”, a false extrapolation from the Old Testament commandment, and it is this false extrapolation to which Jesus speaks with His “but I say to you” which here directly contradicts the unscriptural add-on with the instruction to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”.

It is Jesus’ “but I say to you” remarks in this last couplet of contrasts that is taken by some to mean that Christians are not allowed to protect themselves against violence.   What do verses 17 to 19 tell us about Jesus’ instructions to turn the other cheek?

The first thing to note, is that clearly verses 17 to 19 tell us that Jesus was not setting aside the Lex Talionis as the standard of criminal justice to be applied in a court of law.   Since that is the case, the extreme interpretation that says that Jesus’ followers are not serve as officers of law enforcement or any other state office the duties of which require the use of force is a twisting of the meaning of this passage.  

The second thing to note is that just as clearly “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” cannot be speaking about protecting oneself against the violent attacks of others.  This is because the right of self-protection was established in the Mosaic Law.   Exodus 22 is the operative passage.   If somebody breaks into another person’s house in the middle of the night, that person – the homeowner not the burglar – is not guilty of a crime if he uses lethal force against the housebreaker.   It was a limited right – it lasted only to daybreak after which the homeowner would be guilty, presumably because other options than lethal force would then be available – rather than an absolute right, but it is there and therefore,  we can conclude from Matthew 5:17-19, that the instruction to turn the other cheek does not forbid such self-protection.    Indeed, this should be apparent from Jesus’ very words.   The verb translated “smite” is ῥαπίζω and while this word did originally mean “strike with a stick” – it is derived from a noun meaning “stick” or “rod” – or “cudgel” or “thrash”, it later came to be used as shorthand for the phrase ἐπὶ κόρρης πατάξαι which more or less means “knock upside the head” and in writings contemporaneous with the New Testament generally means a “slap in the face”.   This is what it means here in the Gospel where the right cheek is specifically mentioned.   This particular combination refers not to an attack on the security of one’s person, but to an insult, the kind of insult that affronts one’s honour and challenges one to a duel.  To accept that challenge is to take a situation in which a confrontation has been building up in words and escalate it into violence, potentially lethal violence.   The response prescribed by Jesus, however, is one that would defuse such a powder keg.   It is quite perverse, therefore, to take Jesus’ words here as forbidding you from taking measures to protect yourself in situations that are already violent.

This brings us to Jesus’ Own example.   There are a number of important observations to be made.   The first of these is that Jesus clearly did not believe that the use of force is never called for in any situation.   Had He thought that way He would not have overturned the tables of the money-changers and drove the merchants out of the Temple.   The second, is that prior to His meekly submitting to arrest He commanded His disciples to procure for themselves the means of self-protection by selling their clothes if necessary (Luke 22:36, from which the title of this essay is taken).   The third is that His submission to being arrested, falsely charged, falsely convicted, tortured, and crucified was necessary because it was through these events that He fulfilled the purpose for which He came into this world in the first place, to offer Himself up as the propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.  

Related to this last observation is one that can be made about Jesus’ early followers, both in the New Testament and in the early centuries of post-New Testament Christian history.   While it is true that the early Christians submitted to being tortured, imprisoned, and killed for Jesus’ sake, the most important words here are “for Jesus’ sake”.   Jesus had warned His followers at various times, such as in the Olivet Discourse and in the earlier original commissioning of the Twelve Apostles (and later the Seventy), that thy would be persecuted in this manner because of His name and told them that they would be blessed and rewarded for this.   The early Christians rejoiced at the opportunity to suffer for Christ in this way.   All of this, however, had to do with their being treated in this way because they were Christians, because they publicly confessed and proclaimed Christ.   If a disciple were walking down a street in ancient Corinth and were pulled into an alley and beaten and robbed of everything he had on him and left to die, not because he was a Christian but because the robber who neither knew nor cared what his religious beliefs were wanted some quick cash, this did not make a martyr out of that disciple.   When the early Christians qua Christians, were persecuted, tortured, and killed in the name of the Christ they confessed, by submitting to such treatment they bore witness to that Christ, and by doing so persuaded many others of the truth of their faith.   Just as good came out of the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, in that His death paid for the sins of the world and made salvation available to all, so good came out of the martyrdom of His followers which contributed to the spread of the Gospel throughout the ancient world.   The willingness of the early Christians to submit to martyrdom or rather to embrace it – St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, is said to have yearned for martyrdom his entire Christian life and mourned when he survived earlier persecutions than the one in which he finally attained it – should not therefore be taken as evidence that they thought they needed to submit without resisting to any and every act of violence.   While the death of Jesus Christ accomplished the salvation of the world and the martyrdom of the early Christians helped the Gospel to spread like wildfire, most types of violent deaths – robbing someone for his wallet, murdering someone in a fit of rage, the cold-blooded assassination of your business or political rivals, killing someone in a drunken or drug-induced brawl, etc. – accomplish no such good.   To submit to such acts can indeed do evil to others.   If you give in to the demands of a bully, for example, he will generally not be satisfied and leave you alone, but will continue to bully you more and demand more of you, and will be emboldened to bully others, until someone stands up to him.   This applies to other forms of violent aggression as well.   Those who erroneously think that the teachings and example of Jesus and His early followers tell us that we ought to submit in non-resistance to every sort of violent crime are telling us that we should be content to allow our neighbours to suffer from society being overrun by violent crime.   That is an odd way of loving one’s neighbour.  The Second Greatest Commandment, of course, is to “love thy neighbour as thyself”.   If someone’s idea of loving himself is that he should allow everyone and everything to walk all over him, submit to every sort of affront to his human dignity, and let every imaginable sort of violent crime be perpetrated against himself, I would not place much stock in his love for his neighbour.

 (1)   This terminology might confuse readers from the United States if they are not aware of the difference between their usage and ours. In the Commonwealth to “table” a bill means to introduce it in parliament for consideration, i.e., to “put it on the table”.   In American parlance it has the opposite meaning, to remove a bill from consideration, or to “take it off the table”.

(2)   Amusingly, one gun which somehow made it onto the Liberals’ list of guns to be banned is something called the “Butt Master”.   This gun is pretty much the exact opposite of a gun designed to kill as many people as fast as possible.   It is a single use gun in the shape of a pen that has to be re-loaded each time it is fired.  Moreover, there has only ever been one of these in existence, the one still owned by its designer, Mark Serbu of Tampa, Florida.  

(3)  This is, of course, where the word “swearing” in the negative sense of the term comes from.   Originally, “swearing” in the negative sense meant the use of oaths outside of a courtroom.   Some older Canadians may still remember a time when they would be reprimanded for swearing for saying any of the various sorts of “by this or that” casual oaths.   Ironically, as the word came to take on the generic meaning of “language you shouldn’t use” so as to include cursing, which Scripture is also against, and barnyard or gutter slang about which the Scripture is silent, the sorts of phrases it originally and literally described, dropped out of what most people think when they hear the word. —   Gerry T. Neal 

ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι Ancient Greek for “Here I Stand

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Sunday, January 1, 2023

ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι Ancient Greek for “Here I Stand

It is the Kalends of January once again.   On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year’s Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.   On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when “eight maids a-milking” is one’s true love’s gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.   This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.   As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.   I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.   Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.  I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese’s recommendation in this matter.


This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.   It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.   It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say “see last year’s essay”.  The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation “Here I Stand” from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.   It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023,


I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by “Canada” is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.   If anyone is offended by this mention of our country’s founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it  no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.   I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated  pretty much smack in  the middle of the country.  While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.   I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.   In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.   This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour’s drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.   


I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.   That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.    This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being “born again”.   Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus’ nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term “believe”, so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus’ introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as “invite Jesus into your heat” and “make a commitment to Christ”.   Infer from that what you will.   My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.   I had had some religious instruction as a child.   My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.   No, this is not because I am extremely old – I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.   The Bible and the Lord’s Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.   At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons’ New Testament that I had been given – in school – when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.   I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.   We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.   When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.


While I was in still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.   Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.  Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.   I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism – a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith – they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.   Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.   That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.   I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: “In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”, which means “So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all.”  Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.   In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent’s canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.    While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church – and God has established authority in the Church – and her traditions – beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad – are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.    Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches – the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth – and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic – a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.   It holds the same view of Church history – that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history – that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah’s Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call “cults”, although ironically what distinguishes the “cults” from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.   I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.    Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.    Nobody has been able to devise a form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.   Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood – this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood, and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the  title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself  soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve “Apostle” for those directly commissioned by Christ.   This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.    Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient  sources.   While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don’t would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,  traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric – or perhaps autocentric – focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and  encouraging familiarity over reverence.


I describe myself as a Tory.   I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.   There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.   When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.   As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.   It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned  about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.   Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about “our democracy” but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.  While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.   Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.   The “Forms” that feature so prominently in Plato’s dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.   An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.   While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another – Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his  modified version of the Forms, were not in some other real but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied – for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.    Modern abstract ideals are not like that.   The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.   I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the “democracy” that is this kind of ideal.   In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about “our democracy” have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.   Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase “our democracy” more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.   Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because “democracy” as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.   No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.


Since this – believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality – is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.    I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.


Parliament needs monarchy.   The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.   He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.   There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.   Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by “proportional representation” – another abstract ideal – which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.   Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.   He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.   While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.   In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.   


When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.   This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.   This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by “conservative” the way they are essential to what I mean by “Tory”.    What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.    


The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.   While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.   Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century “Whig Interpretation of History” associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.   Indeed, the very concept of “progress” when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.   This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.   Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.    Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world – in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.  Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man’s fall into Original Sin.    Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.  While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.   In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history’s end.   Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.   It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.   I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most  valuable parts of our civilization’s heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.   Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.   The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.   The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.   In the early twentieth century a new “liberalism” emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.   The conservative movement that  arose in the United States after World War II  was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.   It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.


There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.   I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.   The first is the following:
– Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called “medical assistance in dying”.- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.- There are three genders – masculine, feminine, neuter – but these are properties of words not people.- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being – not so difficult to define now, was that?)- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.   If a child fails to learn he should be held back.   If he learns he should be rewarded.   If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.   If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.   The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.-  The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.   If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.   He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.   Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.   It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true “cruel and unusual punishment”.-  The guilt for crimes – again, real crimes of the type just listed – is the perpetrators and not society’s.-  Drugs of the type that alter one’s mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.   While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.- Government policy should be natalistic – encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population – and friendly to the traditional family – encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.   It should not do the opposite – promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.   It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.   If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.   If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.
That was the first set.   

The second is the following:
– Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.  If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if  the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.   Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.


The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.    Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.    This is yet another reason why I prefer “Tory” as I have explained it, to “conservative”.


Happy New Year!God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal

Premier Danielle Smith Spoke the Truth

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, November 25, 2022

Premier Danielle Smith Spoke the Truth

When Danielle Smith was chosen by the United Conservative Party of Alberta to replace Jason Kenney as their leader early last month and consequentially became that province’s premier she started off her premiership with a bang by giving an exceptionally great speech.    Even if we had not heard a word of it we would know it to be very good from the outrage it provoked on the part of Alberta’s socialists and the clowns in the legacy media, that is to say, the print and broadcast news outlets that predate cable news, talk radio, and the internet, which in Canada are all hopelessly corrupt having been bought off years ago by the dimwitted creep and lout who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office.    The best response to the legacy media, other than to cut oneself off from it altogether, is to look at what they are promoting and root for the opposite and to look at what they are saying and believe the opposite.   So when they began to howl and rage and storm and demand that Smith apologize for saying that the unvaccinated had experienced the most discrimination of any group in her lifetime, their reaction in itself was a powerful indicator of the truth of Smith’s words. 

It has now been a few generations since the old liberalism succeeded in generating a near-universal consensus of public opinion, at least within Western Civilization, against discrimination.   At the time the discrimination the liberals were concerned with was of the de jure type – laws and government policies which singled out specific groups and imposed hardships and disadvantages of various types upon them.    It was not that difficult, therefore, for liberalism to create widespread public opinion against it.   Since ancient times it has been understood that government or the state exists to serve the end of justice.   In Modern times justice has come to be depicted in art as wearing a blindfold.   This imagery is somewhat problematic – blindness to the facts of the case to be ruled on is not an attribute of justice but of its opposite – but is generally accepted as depicting true justice’s blindness to factors which should have no weight in ruling on a dispute between two parties or on the evidence in a case involving criminal charges against someone, factors such as wealth or social status.   If this latter is indeed a quality of justice then for the state to discriminate against people on the basis of such factors is for it to pervert its own end and to commit injustice.    This is what made the old liberalism’s campaign against discrimination so effective.  What they were decrying was already perceivably unjust by existing and long-established standards.

Liberalism, however, was not content with winning over the public into supporting their opposition to laws and government policies that discriminated on such grounds as race and sex.   Liberalism had set equality, which is something quite different from justice as that term was classically and traditionally understood, as its end and ideal and consequently with regards to discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc., they adopted a much more ambitious goal than just the elimination of existing unjust laws and policies, but rather set their sights on the elimination of discrimination based on such factors from all social interaction and economic transaction and as much as possible from private thought and speech.   Indeed it was this goal rather than ending de jure discrimination that was clearly the objective of such legislation as the US Civil Rights Act (1964), the UK Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 and the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977).   Ironically, having so expanded their anti-discrimination project to target private thoughts and actions the liberals had to move away from their initial opposition to the injustice of state discrimination.   The project of achieving equality by eliminating private discrimination required the cooperation of the state and laws and measures enacted by the state in pursuit of the ends of this project were themselves discriminatory albeit in a different way from the discriminatory laws to which the liberals had originally objected.

Today, decades later, the anti-discrimination project has become even further removed from the opposition to unjust laws that had won it broad public support.   “Discrimination” has ceased to be defined by specific actions or even general attitudes that underlie actions and has become entirely subjective.   Such-and-such groups are the officially designated victims of discrimination, and such-and-such groups are the officially designated perpetrators of discrimination, and discrimination is whatever the members of the former say they have experienced as discrimination.   Loud and noisy theatrical displays of outrage cover up the fact that a moral campaign against “discrimination” of this sort lacks any solid foundation in ethics, logic, or even basic common sense.

Liberalism, or progressivism as it is now usually called having given up most if not all of what had led to its being dubbed liberalism in the first place and adopted a stringent illiberalism towards those who disagree with it, has clearly gone off the rails with regards to discrimination.  If any discrimination deserves the sort of moral outrage that progressivism bestows upon what it calls discrimination today it is the sort of discrimination that the old liberalism opposed sixty to seventy years ago, discrimination on the part of the state.   If we limit the word discrimination to this sense then Danielle Smith was quite right in saying that the unvaccinated have been the most discriminated against group in her lifetime.  

In early 2020, you will recall, the World Health Organization sparked off a world-wide panic by declaring a pandemic.   A coronavirus that had long afflicted the chiropteran population was now circulating among human beings and spreading rapidly.   Although the bat flu resembled the sort of respiratory illnesses that we have put up with every winter from time immemorial in that most of the infected experienced mild symptoms, most of those who did experience the severe pneumonia it could produce recovered, and it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already very sick with other complicating conditions, our governments, media, and medical “experts” began talking like we were living out Stephen King’s The Stand.   Our governments enacted draconian measures aimed at preventing the spread of the virus that were more unprecedented – and harmful – than the disease itself.   They behaved as if they had no constitutional limits on their powers and we had no constitutionally protected basic rights and freedoms that they were forbidden to impinge upon no matter how good their intentions might be.   They imposed a hellish social isolation upon everybody as they ordered us to stay home and to stay away from other people if we did have to venture out (to buy groceries, for example), ordered most businesses and all social institutions to close, denied us our freedom to worship God in our churches, synagogues, etc., demanded that we wear ugly diapers on our faces as a symbol of submission to Satan, and with a few intermissions here and there, kept this vile totalitarian tyranny up for almost two years.    All of this accomplished tremendous harm rather than good. Towards the end of this period they shifted gears and decided to create a scapegoat upon which to shift the blame for the ongoing misery.   It was not that their contemptible, misguided, and foolish policies were complete and utter failures, they maintained, it was all the fault of the people who objected to their basic rights and freedoms being trampled over.   They were the problem.   By not cooperating they prevented the government measures from working.   Those who for one or another of a myriad of reasons did not want to be injected with an experimental drug that had been rushed to market in under a year, the manufacturers of which had been indemnified against liability for any injuries it might cause, the safety of which had been proclaimed by government fiat backed by efforts to suppress any conflicting information, or who did not want to be injected with a second or third dose after a previous bad experience, were made the chief scapegoats.   These were demonized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in terms and tone that call to mind those employed by Stalin against the kulaks and Hitler against the Jews.   A system was developed, seemingly by people who regard the beast in the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse as an example and role model to be emulated, whereby society was re-opened to everyone else, but the unvaccinated were kept under the same brutal and oppressive restrictions as earlier in this epidemic of ultra-paranoid hypochondria.   Indeed, some jurisdictions imposed new, harsher, restrictions on them.  

So yes, Danielle Smith spoke the truth.   Our governments’ attempt to shut the unvaccinated out of society as it re-opened from a forced closure that should never have occurred in the first place was indeed the worst case of discrimination by government to have occurred in Canada or the Western world for that matter in her lifetime.   Her critics in the legacy media know this full well of course.    Since they hate and are allergic to the truth, which they never report when a lie, a half-truth, a distortion, or some other form of mendacity will suffice, this is why they howled with rage and fury when Smith spoke it.   Hopefully, she will give them plenty more to howl at.   Posted by Gerry T. Neal Danielle Smith, discrimination, Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau, legacy media, Stephen King, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports

Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Saturday, February 19, 2022

Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground

 Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most.   His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.

This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff.   It is how he actually thinks.    It is not like we had no warning.

The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment.    This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted.   It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead.   It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.

In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest.   The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite.   His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates.   The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated.   Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on.   Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA.   There was no reasonable justification for this.   It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick.   The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.

Remember that.   The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest.    That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist.   Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years.   Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet.    The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw.    Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom.   Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced.   In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.   

The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest.   The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer.   The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd.    This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.

Note that I said “until this week”.   There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them.    This time it was violence by the state.     On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will.    Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them.    Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on  peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police.   Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas.   No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.

The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked,   The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC.   Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses.    The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet.    It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments.   The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.

His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well.   The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.     

Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.   

None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone.   Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership.   Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”.   Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.    When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy.   He did so with a straight face.   The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free.  The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea.   A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out.   Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few  private media companies who continue to do this.   He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him.   Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a  free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views.   Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.   

When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other.   It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship.   This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like.    Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.

By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before.    Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will.    Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all. —

Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most.   His answer was to praise the “basic dictatorship” of Red China.

This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff.   It is how he actually thinks.    It is not like we had no warning.

The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment.    This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted.   It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead.   It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead – his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever – would think this a good move.

In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine’s Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest.   The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite.   His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates.   The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated.   Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government’s claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on.   Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction – the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA.   There was no reasonable justification for this.   It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick.   The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.

Remember that.   The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest.    That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist.   Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years.   Vaccine mandates – telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don’t – are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet.    The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead’s father oversaw.    Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom.   Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced.   In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.   

The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead’s claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest.   The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer.   The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd.    This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.

Note that I said “until this week”.   There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them.    This time it was violence by the state.     On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab – and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation – he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister’s to give and take away at will.    Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them.    Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on  peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police.   Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas.   No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.

The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked,   The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead’s disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC.   Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses.    The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence – incitement – against the protestors – and their supporters – which can be laid at Captain Airhead’s feet.    It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead’s intention – bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments.   The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.

His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well.   The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead’s extra powers, and when Captain Airhead’s new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.     

Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.   

None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone.   Even if his remarks about China’s “basic dictatorship” were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership.   Whenever he praises our “democracy” by “democracy” he means “elected dictatorship”.   Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.    When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy.   He did so with a straight face.   The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free.  The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea.   A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out.   Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few  private media companies who continue to do this.   He has several times banned them from election debates – the courts had to overrule him.   Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a  free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views.   Such a media is indeed important to “democracy” in his sense of “elected dictatorship”.   

When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other.   It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister – William Lyon Mackenzie King – to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister’s Office into a de facto elected dictatorship.   This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King’s dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn’t like.    Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.

By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before.    Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will.    Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all. — Gerry T. Neal
Labels: Alexa Lavoie, Andrew Lawton, Freedom Convoy, GiveSendGo, Justin Trudeau, Matt Taibbi, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Pierre Trudeau, Tiananmen Square, William Lyon Mackenzie King

Canada’s “Conservatives”, Put Your Sabres Away and Give Your Heads a Shake

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Sunday, March 6, 2022

Canada’s “Conservatives”, Put Your Sabres Away and Give Your Heads a Shake

When Erin O’Toole was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and Candice Bergen – not the Murphy Brown actress, the Member of Parliament for Portage-Lisgar – was made interim leader, it began to look, much to my surprise, like there might be some hope for the party after all.   While the Freedom Convoy protest was underway in Ottawa, the Conservatives led by Bergen actually did their job as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for the first time since Captain Airhead became Prime Minister.   They dug in and stood on principle, calling him, the Prime Minister that is, to account for his inflammatory and entirely inappropriate response to the protest, and for his dangerous and illegal invoking of the Emergency Measures Act to crush the protest.   Then, as Captain Airhead’s tyrannical power grab was eclipsed by a crisis on the international stage, they did something so stupid that it completely erased the credit they had earned over the previous weeks.    They supported the government in its move to hinder Canadians from accessing information about the crisis other than that spun from an anti-Russia perspective and urged the government to expel the Russian ambassador.   By doing the former, they adopted the same condescending attitude towards Canadians that we have come to expect from Captain Airhead’s Grits and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s anti-working class socialists, i.e., the attitude of “you cannot be trusted to examine all the information available and come to an intelligent decision for yourselves so we will control what you can see and hear and tell you what to think”.   By doing the latter, they were essentially asking the Prime Minister to declare war on Russia.

Captain Airhead does not need this sort of crazy advice from Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   He gets enough of it from his deputy prime minister.   The only reason, other than the Lord’s command to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” for not wanting the ground to immediately open up underneath Captain Airhead and drop him screaming into the abyss, is the very practical reason that should that occur Chrystia Freeland would take his place.   Of all the ministers of the Cabinet, yes, including Captain Airhead himself, she is by far the worst.     Since that Cabinet includes such creeps as Bill Blair, Jean-Yves Duclos, Steven Guilbeault, Patty Hajdu, David Lametti and Marco Mendicino that is saying a lot. Moreover she is herself at her absolute worst when it comes to anything having to do with Russia, Ukraine and geopolitics in general., although she is almost as abysmal with regards to her actual current portfolio which is finance.

The worst cabinet minister

By offering the Prime Minister this advice and taking the stance they are taking the Conservatives are acting as if Stephen Harper were still their leader.   Presumably, they would not object to this characterization and regard it as a compliment.   It is not intended as such.   Stephen Harper was the best Prime Minister the Dominion has had since 1963 but this is not saying much.   The entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers have been terrible.   Harper was merely the least vile of them.  Even so he was bad enough that this writer vowed never to vote Conservative again as long as he led the party, intending, since the other options at the time were much worse, to follow the advice of the late, great, P. J. O’Rourke, i.e., “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards”.    Harper had his good qualities, and his bad qualities.   What can be seen of Harper on display in the present hawkish attitude of the Conservatives towards Russia is one of his worst traits.

Harper liked to boss other countries around and self-righteously lecture them about their internal affairs and their relationships with their neighbours.   This is a trait he shared with Captain Airhead.   Granted, there are a couple of big differences in the manner in which they did this.   Harper, for the most part, only lectured other countries on serious matters.   Captain Airhead lectures other governments for not being “woke” enough, that is to say, not conforming with the latest ridiculous and self-righteous form of identity politics promoted by the Cultural Maoists who dominate academe and the media, both news and entertainment.   Harper’s style was also radically different from Captain Airhead’s.   Harper came across as someone who was trying to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice “talk softly and carry a big stick” but miscalculating the softness of his tone while hoping that nobody would notice that he didn’t have the big stick.   Captain Airhead’s style is much more clownish than this.   It summons up the image of a scrappy little chihuahua running up to a much bigger dog that could easily bite his head off and obnoxiously yipping in its face before running to hide behind a big bruiser of a bulldog, with the bulldog representing either the “international community” acting in concert, or the United States.   It is not a good image for a leader of our country.

If even a tenth of what we have been fed by the newsmedia about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reliable – and that is a big if, because while all lies must contain some truth in order to be believable, a tenth is a much larger percentage than what we can usually expect from the media and that percentage goes down the more univocal the media is in its take on any given event – the Ukrainians are, of course, much to be pitied.   Having sympathy, however, for people who are suffering under an invasion and all its attendant woes, is not the same thing as having the ability to do anything about it.   Pretending that they are the same is both dangerous and stupid.   Especially in this situation.

Even the United States would be insane to go to war with Russia over Ukraine.    While my reason for saying this rests upon different factors that I will briefly explain later, let me add that the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided entirely had the United States behaved differently and better over the last few decades.   Although  Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is clearly guilty of invading another country, the explanation for his actions is not, as most politicians and media, both liberal and conservative, are claiming, his own imperialist ambition.   It is the response of the leader of a country that has been backed into a corner by American-NATO expansionism.  It is the response of a bear that has been poked one too many times.     

In a pact with the devil made in order to defeat the Third Reich, the Western Allies agreed to hand Eastern Europe over to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.   Almost immediately after this the Cold War began.   This conflict between the American and Soviet superpowers was necessarily “cold” because the nuclear arms possessed by both made a “hot” war unthinkable.   In the Cold War nuclear arms race, each side tried to get the better of the other by obtaining a first strike advantage – the ability to obliterate the other side’s capacity to retaliate.   Both sides had to settle, however, for the deterrent that was appropriately named MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.   The Cold War only came to an end when both sides, having entered into negotiations under American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to step back from the arms race.     

Before the Communist regime in Russia fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Ukraine became independent of Russia, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush and the other leaders of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in the Cold War to protect Western Europe against Soviet invasion – promised Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not seek to expand its membership further than the re-unified Germany.   Whether Bush was sincere in this promise or not is debatable.   The following year, the year in which the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, saw Operation Desert Storm, in which an American-led coalition went to war with Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  In connection with this action Bush declared his vision for a “new world order” in which a coalition of free, democratic, countries, led by the United States, would be the world’s police, acting against countries that aggressed against their neighbours in the way Iraq had.   As the implications of this unfolded in the two terms each of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, NATO was transformed from the defensive alliance it had been in the Cold War into the muscle enforcing America’s new, liberal international, world order.   In the process of accomplishing this the United States replaced both the anti-Communism of the Cold War era which opposed a totalitarian ideology and system rather than a nation and the diplomacy backed by strength of the Reagan-Bush era, with an arrogant and foolish anti-Russian attitude.   This manifested itself early in Clinton’s presidency when he decided to meddle in the conflicts in the Balkans that were tearing apart what from the First World War to the end of the Cold War had been Yugoslavia.   Ethnic hostility fueled these conflicts and invariably Clinton sided with Muslim groups, like those in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo against Christian groups, especially the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the group with the closest and deepest ties to Russia.   At the end of his presidency Clinton committed the war crime of ordering NATO to conduct an indiscriminate bombing campaign against Serbia.   At the same time he brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in violation both of the letter as well as the spirit of American and NATO assurances to Russia.

After Bill Clinton finished serving out his wife’s two terms as president – contrary to all of the rot one hears blaming the horrors of war on masculinity and patriarchy the military misbehavior of the Clinton administration, whose Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell “what’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it”, like that of the Obama administration, the current American administration, and even Captain Airhead’s Cabinet which can do nothing but posture, are all the clear consequence of estrogen poisoning and toxic femininity – he was followed by George H. W. Bush’s morally retarded son, who began his presidency by giving the digitis impudicus to Russia in the form of  withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and placing missiles in Poland.   He brought seven countries that had either been Soviet republics or Warsaw Pact members into NATO and in the last year of  his presidency declared Ukraine and Georgia eligible for NATO membership.  Russia could hardly have failed to notice that his and Clinton’s actions were moving America’s military reach closer and closer to their own borders.

The Obama administration with Hillary Clinton as its Secretary of State was even worse.   In 2014 they sponsored the second of two colour revolutions against Russia-sympathetic, elected Ukrainian governments – George W. Bush had sponsored the first.   In what was absurdly called the Revolution of Dignity that grew out of the Euromaiden protests, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from office in a coup carried out by groups like Svoboda, the party re-organized from the Social-National Party (yes, it was exactly what that sounds like) and the various groups of the so-called Right Sector coalition (the Banderite group Trident, the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense, Social-National Assembly, Patriot of Ukraine, and a few others, all of which were self-identified Nazi groups) with the backing and support of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.   While it would be going too far to say that the coup established a Nazi-style Reich regime in Ukraine – the new government was more of a US-NATO puppet regime – later in that year the Azov Regiment, which wears its neo-Nazism on its sleeve, quite literally, (1) was organized and incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.   The Ukrainian government has employed this unit in its harassment of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbass region of south-eastern Ukraine.   The Russian separatists in Donbass sought to join the Russian Federation in 2015 and were turned down by Putin.   After eight years of harassment by the Ukrainian government and its Nazi army their independence was recognized by Putin just before Russia launched her  invasion of Ukraine.   This came a matter of months after the present American administration renewed its efforts to bring |Ukraine into NATO with the clear intention of arming its border with Russia.

Had the United States not behaved in this way, had she not replaced her justified opposition to the evil ideology of Communism with an ugly, stupid and bigoted Russophobia and done everything in her power to drive the Russian bear into a corner and start poking at it with Ukraine being her most recent proxy, the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine could have easily been avoided entirely.

While this does not necessarily mean that Putin’s actions are justified, nor does it make the sufferings of the Ukrainians any less horrible, it does mean that neither the United States nor her allies have any moral ground to stand upon in condemning these actions.

In 2001, the United States and a coalition of her allies, including Canada, invaded Afghanistan with the intention of toppling the Taliban government there.   In 2003, the United States and a smaller coalition, invaded Iraq for the purposes of regime change.    Were these actions justified?

While this writer would answer no, at least with regards to the second war, most of those who saw both of these invasions as justified are among the loudest condemning Putin today.    The burden therefore is upon them to explain why the United States is allowed to invade countries and topple governments it doesn’t like while Russia is not allowed to invade a country that had belonged to her until 1991 to prevent the Americans from turning it into a military base with which to threaten her on her very doorstep.    One could take the ethical position that it is always wrong for one country to invade another, a position that is  commendable for its internal consistency, even though this writer does not believe it to be correct.   This position is not available to those who regard the invasions of Afghanistan and/or Iraq as justified.    Some might argue that it is wrong for one country to invade another, but it is alright for coalitions of countries under the supervision of some international agency to do so.   This would presumably be close to the answer that liberal Democrats in the United States and Liberals here in Canada would give.   Internationalists are prone to this sort of thinking.   It is obviously wrong, however.   If it is wrong for one country to do something, it does not become right when two or more agree to do it.   Indeed, it is arguably much worse.   It compounds the wrongness of each country invading on its own by involving the others and ganging up on the victim.   Others would try to argue to the effect that it is okay for “good guy” countries to invade “bad guy” countries but that it is not okay for “bad guy” countries to invade “good guy” countries.   This sort of thinking is puerile, a Modern version of the heresy of Mani, the result of reading too many superhero comic books and watching too many Hollywood action movies.   Sadly, it is all too ubiquitous among the post-Cold War generation of neoconservatives who unfortunately have been the most influential group when it comes to geopolitics in both the American Republican Party and the Canadian Conservative Party for the last thirty years. (2)

The ethical side of this conflict is not remotely as easily resolved as all of those jumping on the anti-Russia bandwagon – some going to absurd lengths, such as suggesting a ban on the works of Dostoevsky – think, although Edward Feser had made a strong case that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor a military response from the United States and allies can be justified by the terms of Just War.    Ultimately, however, it is the pragmatic side of the matter that dictates that the sort of response that many are calling for is utterly insane.

Even before the United States developed the first nuclear weapons and became the first and to this date only country to use them it was generally agreed that about the stupidest military move anyone could make was to attack Russia.   Two notorious conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth century and Adolf Hitler in the twentieth, successfully overran Europe before going to their doom by making precisely this mistake.   The advent of nuclear weapons, of which the Russians have their own formidable stockpile has not made attacking Russia any less of a suicidal thing to do. 

Unless the United States and other Western countries are willing to risk escalating the conflict into nuclear Armageddon there is not much they can do to back up their angry rhetoric against Russia which makes that rhetoric only so much empty posturing.

Such posturing is bad enough coming from the United States, a nuclear superpower.      It is simply clownish for Canadian politicians to engage in this kind of sabre rattling.    While clownish behaviour is about all we can expect from Captain Airhead and his horrid deputy,  we ought to be able to expect Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to, well, oppose the government when it is doing something this stupid instead of egging it on to take it to the next, far worse, level.

(1) Contrary to the lies of professional anti-hate “experts”, individuals and groups still crazy enough to align themselves with National Socialism today do so proudly and advertise the fact.   Most of the Ukrainian groups mentioned, including the Azov Regiment, for example, use or have used, the Wolfsangel and the swastika as symbols.   The Ukrainian groups are the real deal.   Groups like this in Canada and the United States are smaller, powerless, and generally, much like the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, consist almost entirely of government agents.   The two most publicized such groups in relatively recent Canadian history, for example, the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1960s and 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1990s, were creations of the Canadian government, in the case of the former the Liberal government working in conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress, in the latter case CSIS acting on the orders of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government.   The intent in both cases was to generate a Nazi-scare among the public.   In the earlier instance this was to gain public support for government measures taken ostensibly to suppress such groups but in reality to expand government surveillance and curtail certain civil liberties  and basic freedoms.   In the latter instance it would seem the motive was to discredit the right-of-centre Canadians primarily from the West who were exiting the Progressive Conservatives in dissatisfaction to form an alternative prairie populist party by smearing them through guilt-by-association with the Heritage Front which popped up right around the same time.  Professional anti-hate “experts” demonstrate the fraudulent nature of their profession in the way they do not focus their attention on real, self-identified, neo-Nazi groups like those in Ukraine but instead try to smear Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, populists, immigration reformers and basically anyone who disagrees with the left-liberal agenda as being closet neo-Nazis.    The same anti-hate “experts” who spent decades trying to get elderly Ukrainian Canadians stripped of their citizenship and kicked out of the country because they served the SS, usually as translators, often under duress, in the Second World War, despite no evidence that these men were guilty of war crimes, seem to have less of a problem with the present Liberal government’s providing funds and training for the Azov Regiment.   They provided the media with a condemnatory statement but did not pursue the matter with the vehemence with which they have persecuted the elderly Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers of Canadians.   Nor have they shown much interest in the Azov Regiment’s biggest cheerleader in Canada, the deputy prime minister, who has twice been denied entry to Russia or the Soviet Union as it was the first time this happened over her involvement with the Euromaiden seditionists and their predecessors.   It is true that accusing ethnic Ukrainians living in the West of Nazism is a KGB disinformation tactic going back to the Cold War – John Demjanjuk , the American equivalent of the elderly Ukrainian Canadians mentioned above, was a famous victim of just such a disinformation campaign, but in the case of the deputy prime minister, who cries disinformation every time her unsavoury connections in Ukraine are brought up the boy crying Wolfsangel happens to be right and her cries of disinformation have long ago been debunked by every researcher willing to dig into the matter.   Note that the anti-hate “experts” alluded to are heavily funded by the  Canadian Liberal government.

(2) I am using “neoconservative” in its American rather than Canadian sense here.   From the perspective of those, such as this writer,  who hold to traditional British-Canadian Toryism, all of American conservatism is neoconservative, being a form of liberal republicanism.  In the  context of American conservatism, neo-conservatives were originally Cold War liberals who moved to the right in the last decades of the Cold War when the New Left was in  its ascendancy in American left-liberalism.   While these were notably hawkish in comparison with some other elements of the American right, such as the libertarians, their hawkishness was nothing in comparison with the next generation of American neoconservatives who emerged in the post-Cold War era preaching American unipolarity, a vision that resembled George H. W. Bush’s new, liberal internationalist, world order, except that in it the United States is even more prominently at the top of the order, the sole global hegemon.     This is the sort of thinking that has been too influential in the American Republican Party and Canadian Conservative Party in recent decades.   George Grant warned that the world was heading towards just such an unipolar American hegemony in his Lament for a Nation (1965), reminding us that in the wisdom of the ancients a “universal and homogenous state” would be the ultimate tyranny. — Gerry T. Neal

The Donatist Dilemma & How This Church History Applies to Church Leaders’ Cowardice During COVID

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The Donatist Dilemma & How This Church History Applies to Church Leaders’ Cowardice During COVID

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The Donatist Dilemma & How This Church History Applies to Church Leaders’ Cowardice During COVID

In the early centuries of Christian history the orthodox had to contend with hundreds of heretical and schismatic movements.   Except among apologists and ecclesiastical historians, only a handful of these are remembered by name today.   Gnosticism, the first proponents of which challenged the authority and teachings of the Apostles themselves, was not the name of a specific heretical movement but the collective term for a large class of heretical movements.     Valentinianism, after Valentinus of Alexandria, was one such movement that was widespread in the second century and was the main heresy against which St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote.   The ideas that the term Gnosticism usually brings to mind today more properly belong to Marcionism, named after Marcion of Sinope.    Historians are divided as to whether Marcionism is properly classified as Gnostic or whether it is best regarded as a heresy that deviated from both Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity.

The heresies that are still widely known by name are the major heresies that were addressed by the four earliest ecumenical Councils, the two that put together the most basic and fundamental of Christian Creeds (1) in the fourth century, i.e., the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and the two that resulted in the Christological clarification of the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century, i.e., the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD).   In one way or another the heresies addressed by these Councils deviated from orthodoxy as to the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ.   Arianism, which takes its name from Arius of Alexandria and which was the principal heresy addressed by the Creed-forming Councils of the fourth century, denied the full deity of Jesus Christ and taught that He was a created being possessed of a lesser divinity than the Father.   Nestorianism, named after Nestorius of Constantinople, the principal heresy addressed by the fifth century Councils, stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point where the unity of His Person was compromised.   This latter is a good illustration of the general nature of heresy which is not, as is often supposed, merely “wrong doctrine”.   Heresy is a truth taken out of the context of other equal or more important, balancing truths, and so twisted by exaggeration into an error that is far more dangerous than something that it is merely and entirely false.   G. K. Chesterton in his biography of William Blake (1910)said that “A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run”.   T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods (1933) wrote that “the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right.”

If we were to poll Christians, asking them to name and rank a few of the early heresies, it is unlikely that we would find many for whom Donatism would be at the top of their list.   Indeed, while I hope I am too cynical and am completely wrong in this, I suspect that if we were to instead provide that name and ask people to identify it, many would associate it with Donatello, the fifteenth century Florentine Renaissance sculptor – or the Ninja Turtle who bears his name. 

Donatism has nothing to do with either sculptor or Ninja Turtle, of course.   It takes its name from the fourth century figure Donatus Magnus, a priest from the Berber settlement of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, which is now the town of Negrine in Algeria.   With Donatus and his followers, it was not a dispute over doctrine that separated them from the orthodox Church as it was with the aforementioned heresiarchs Valentius, Marcion, Arius and Nestorius and their sects, but rather a dispute over practice.   It would be more accurate therefore to describe Donatism as schismatic rather than heretical, although the schism, as we shall see, eventually corrupted the doctrine of the schismatics.   It deviated from orthopraxis (sound practice), however, in much the same way that heresy deviates from orthodoxy (sound doctrine) – by taking a part of sound practice and emphasizing it to the point that other parts fell by the wayside.    The part of sound practice they so over-emphasized was holiness or separation from the world. (2)

The Donatist schism had its origins in the persecution of Christians in the reign of Diocletian.   This was the largest and harshest persecution of Christians in the history of the Roman Empire.   Previous persecutions had usually been local affairs, conducted with the authority or at least toleration of a regional governor.   This one came down from the very top and in theory covered the entire Empire, although in actuality certain regions were far more severely affected than others.   The severity of this persecution made it unpopular which contributed to the Roman Empire’s reversing course ten years after it began and issuing the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and granted it protection against persecution.

North Africa was a region that was particularly severely affected by the Great Persecution, as it had been during the lesser persecutions of the previous century.   It was almost, in a sense, the epicentre of the Persecution.   In 302 AD, Diocletian had issued an edict outlawing the Manichaeans, ordering that their leaders be burned along with their books and any of their followers who didn’t recant.   The Manichaeans were the followers of Mani, a third century Persian religious teacher who blended ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, and whose teachings were noted for their dualism.   Their teachings had spread from the Persian Empire westward and had become particularly influential in the academic centres of Egypt and North Africa. (3)   Diocletian had been persuaded that they were a subversive movement acting on behalf of the Persian Empire to infiltrate and weaken Rome.   Later that year, Diocletian’s ire would fall upon orthodox Christians when St. Romanus, a deacon of the Caesarean Church, denounced the pagan sacrifices that took place in his court at Antioch.   He was already ill-disposed towards Christianity because he blamed Christian members of his court for the failure of his attempts at divination after the Roman victory against the Persians in the Battle of Satala and the renewal of peace with the Sassanid dynasty.   Diocletian was, therefore, already half persuaded when his co-emperor Galerius (4) began to talk him into extending towards orthodox Christianity the same policy he had taken towards Manichaeism – persecution with the end of total extirpation.   While he initially proposed a more moderate persecution, his resistance to Galerius’ proposal was overcome when the two sent away to the oracle at the Temple to Apollo in Didyma and were told that Apollo was silent because of the presence of Christianity in the Empire.   In February of 303 AD, he and his co-emperors began issuing a series of edicts that forbade Christians from assembling to worship and ordered the Christian Scriptures and other Christian literature to be burned, Christian Church buildings to be destroyed, and Christian clergy to be imprisoned and stripped Christians of all the legal rights of Roman citizens.

Although all Christians were targeted by this persecution, the clergy – the bishops and priests who led, taught, and officiated in the Churches – were particularly hit hard.   While many of these remained faithful to the point of martyrdom, many others did not.   These handed over their copies of the Bible to the Roman soldiers to be burned.    Often they handed over the names of other Christians as well.   This earned them the label traditores, meaning “those who handed over” which is the root of our word traitor.  (5)

Mensurius, who was Bishop of Carthage at the time, removed the Scriptures from the Church building and hid them in his own home, substituting heretical writings in their place for the soldiers to seize.    While he thus cleverly avoided becoming a traditor himself, this act was not exactly impressive to those who contrasted his example unfavourably with that of those who submitted to arrest, torture, and death.   It did not help his image any that the contrast was particularly great with his own predecessor in the See of Carthage, St. Cyprian, who had been martyred in the earlier persecution under Valerian, less than half a century prior to this.   Mensurius then forbade the Carthaginian Church from honouring as martyrs any who initiated their own martyrdom by defiantly turning themselves in to the Roman authorities.    Needless to say, he was far from being the most admired bishop in the Christian Church at the time.  

Mensurius died in 311 AD, about six years after the Great Persecution had begun to wane.   The Edict of Milan was still two years away, but North Africa was governed by Maxentius (6) who had already liberated the Christians.   Caecilian, who had served as archdeacon under Mensurius, was chosen as his successor, and among those participating in his consecration was Felix, Bishop of Aptunga.   Immediately this succession met with protest.   Caecilian had been an even more zealous advocate of Mensurius’ position vis-à-vis the voluntary martyrs than Mensurius had been himself and so was most objectionable to those who found that position odious.   These then claimed that his consecration was invalid because of the participation of Felix.   Felix had been absent from his See during the Persecution and so had avoided arrest.   The opponents of Caecilian accused Felix of being a traditor, and maintained that this invalidated the consecration.

The matter was appealed to Secundus, Bishop of Tigisis who was the closest Primate (7), and Secundus with the support of 70 other bishops ruled against Caecilian.    These then chose and consecrated Majorinus, who had been a lector in the Carthaginian Church, as bishop.   With two different groups claiming two different individuals to be the validly consecrated holder of the same bishopric, a schism was born.   Each side excommunicated the other, albeit on different grounds.   Those who supported Majorinus as the validly consecrated Bishop of Carthage maintained that those in fellowship with Caecilian were tainted by association with the sins of the traditor alleged against Caecilian himself and against Felix who consecrated him.   Those who supported Caecilian excommunicated those in fellowship with Majorinus on the grounds that their actions were schismatic.   This schism was very much a local affair as outside of North Africa the supporters of Caecilian were a clear supermajority.   The Patriarch of Rome was asked to look into the matter and with the backing of the Roman Synod he ruled in favour of Caecilian in 313 AD, as did the Council of Arles of 314 AD to which the decision was appealed.   These rulings were upheld in the ecumenical Councils later in that century.   Majorinus died two years after his consecration and was succeeded in the schismatic line by Donatus Magnus and so the schism came to take the name of Donatism.

The error of the Donatists, as we noted at the outset of this discussion, grew out of a matter of practice rather than a matter of doctrine.   When it comes to the actions of the traditores, orthodox Christians and Donatists were in agreement that it was reprehensible to collaborate with the persecutors of the faith by handing over Scriptures, sacred items, and the names of the brethren.   The Donatists, however, in their zeal for the holiness and purity of the Church, good things in themselves, insisted that the betrayal of the traditores forever disqualified them from being restored to their positions of leadership in the Church and thus invalidated their every ministry from administering baptisms to celebrating the Eucharist to, in the case of bishops, ordinations and consecrations of other bishops.   As easy as it is to see where the Donatists were coming from in this, had the Lord Jesus Christ thought the same way, St. Peter would never have been restored to his position as Apostle after he denied Christ three times on the evening of His betrayal and arrest, would never have been empowered to preach the sermon on the first Whitsunday through which  three thousand souls were converted, would never have opened the door to the evangelism of the Gentiles by bringing  the Gospel to Cornelius, and would not have written the two epistles under his name that are part of the Sacred Canon.   Yet even before the denial had taken place, indeed, just before the Lord predicted it, He said unto St. Peter “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Lk. 22:31-32).   After St. Peter had denied Him, and after He had risen from the dead, He called him to feed His sheep three times – one for each denial – and then, prophesying his eventual martyrdom, repeated to him the call to “Follow Me” (Jn. 21:15-19).   The difference between the Lord’s response to St. Peter and the Donatists’ response to the traditores shows us how their emphasis on holiness was at the expense of other elements of orthopraxis such as forgiveness and restoration and thus the equivalent of heresy in practice.   Ultimately, this error in practice translated itself into an error in doctrine, the error that the efficacy of the Church’s Ministries of Word and Sacrament as conduits of the grace of God is dependent upon the spotless purity of the ministers.   The controversy over this was still raging almost a century later when St. Augustine of Hippo, than whom there was no clearer and stronger expositor of the grace of God between St. Clement of Rome and the Reformation, answered the Donatists in his De Baptismo.

What message is there in this historical episode for our own day?

There are a number of parallels between the Diocletian Persecution and the bat flu madness of the last two years.   There are huge differences too, of course.   Whereas Diocletian and Galerius saw their persecution of Christianity for what it was – a deliberate attempt to extirpate the Christian faith and religion – the governments of the present day deny to themselves that they are doing anything of the sort.  Since they allow Christians and people of other religions to “worship” online, they have convinced themselves that their having forbidden Christians and those of other faiths to meet and assemble in person for much of the last two years is not the same thing as Diocletian’s outlawing of all Christian assembly.   Having convinced themselves of this, they have also persuaded themselves that in having Christian ministers arrested for holding services where their congregations could, well, congregate is not the same thing as when Galerius ordered bishops and priests to be arrested.   They obviously see no similarities between their attempts to prevent the spread of any information that disagrees with their narrow, official, narrative about the bat flu and, indeed, to stomp it out as “misinformation” and the Roman Empire’s efforts to burn all copies of the Christian Scriptures and other sacred literature.   Some would say that because with regards to each of these parallels the difference is that what the Roman Empire did was that much more severe the comparison is therefore inappropriate.   Others will, more astutely, note that this difference is what allows today’s governments to convince themselves that they are not engaged in persecution which self-deception makes what they are doing that much more dangerous than the open persecution of the Roman Empire or in more recent times of the Communist countries.

A similar comparison could be made between the response of the Churches to the almost universal medical technocratic tyranny of the bat flu scare and the actions of the traditores.   Again, there are huge differences, but not such as necessarily mean that the Churches of the present day come out favourably in the comparison.   Complying with an order from the state that the Church not assemble is, in one sense, not as extreme a betrayal of the faith as handing over the Scriptures to be burned and handing over the names of other Christians to those seeking to arrest them, but it is a betrayal in that the teachings of the Scriptures, as interpreted by the faithful in all places and all times from the Apostles to the present  (8) is that a state ban on Church assembly is a clear and obvious exception to the Scriptural injunction of civil obedience. (9)    If it is less extreme in this sense, it is greater in that it is far more widespread than that of the traditores was.    The compliance of the Churches with these tyrannical public health orders was almost universal.   The leaders of the Churches have undoubtedly persuaded themselves that they are not guilty of the same thing as the traditores and even that their compliance with this medical totalitarianism is virtuous, an act of sacrifice for the safety and wellbeing of others, especially the most vulnerable among us.    However, just as governments are capable of more and greater oppression and persecution when they have deceived themselves into thinking that they are acting for the public good instead of oppressing and persecuting people, so this self-deception on the part of the Churches compounds rather than mitigates the problem.    Those who regard their sinful betrayal of the faith not as a sinful betrayal of the faith but as a virtuous act of self-sacrifice are incapable of the repentance and confession that the orthodox Churches of the fourth century required from the traditores before their restoration.                                                                                                                                           

This leaves anyone who is trying to follow Christ in accordance with what historically and traditionally have been regarded as orthodox faith and orthopraxis and who has not bought into the Great Deception of the bat flu madness caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma.   To anyone trying to follow Christ in this manner, Church is essential not optional.   For almost two years, however, the leadership of the Churches have acted as if the opposite is true.   They have closed their doors, tried to get us to live a lie by pretending that watching a tiny Church service broadcast online and saying the words along with them is a form of assembling together as a Church (it is not), and allowed attendance on occasions that the public health tyrants permitted provided that a stringent list of requirements all arising out of a worldly spirit of fear that would drive the sanctity out of the Church were adhered to.   The Christian leaders who have most conspicuously and admirably resisted the public health tyranny have for the most part come from sects that are either extremely schismatic, enthusiastic (in the theological sense of the word which is not a good thing), heretical – sometimes grossly so – or all of the above.  

Should the public health scare ever end, what ought we to do?

If we wait for the leaders of our Churches to acknowledge and repent of the sins of betraying the faith and leaving us without the ministry of the Church in any real sense for the duration of the public health scare before resuming fellowship with them we will be waiting a very long time and run the risk of becoming Donatists in spirit, if not in letter.

If, on the other hand, we just try to pick up where we had left off in March 2020, forgetting the entire horrible interlude, and pretending that there was no betrayal or apostasy to forgive (since offering forgiveness in the absence of acknowledgement of wrongdoing cheapens forgiveness), we will have traded the Scylla of Donatism for the Charbydis that is its opposite.

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma short of the public health scare being brought to an end with the Second Coming of Christ in Glory to judge both the quick and the dead.   Whatever we end up doing, we should devote much prayer and contemplation to the matter.

 (1)   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Creed that was put together by and in the first two ecumenical Councils of the early Church, is the most basic and fundamental Christian Creed in that it is the only Creed universally accepted among all the Churches that can claim organic lineage from the Apostolic Church.   This is further attested to by the fact that the addition of a single word – filioque – to the Latin text of this Creed, was the most important doctrinal issue that separated the Eastern Greek-speaking Church from the Western Latin-speaking Church in the eleventh century.   The Apostles’ Creed is shorter and simpler than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, but it does not seem to have ever been as universally accepted and used as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan.     The traditional account of its origin – that it was composed on the first Whitsunday by the Apostles themselves, with each of the Apostles, St. Matthias having been chosen as Judas Iscariot’s replacement already, contributing one of the twelve lines – is very old.   St. Ambrose of Milan and Rufinus of Aquileia both spoke of it as a well-established account less than a century after the Council of Nicaea.     If true, this would be an incontrovertible argument for the priority of the Apostles’ Creed over the Nicene-Constantinopolitan as the basic Creed of Christianity (not that the two, which are very similar, and could almost be taken for the longer and shorter forms of a singular Creed, contradict each other), but if true, it would be difficult to explain how it fell so quickly out of use in the Greek-speaking Churches of the East.     In its earliest form, the old Roman Symbol used in the baptismal rite of the Church of Rome – in the sense of the Church particular to that city, not in the sense of the “Roman Catholic Church”, i.e., all Churches that remained in communion with the Roman Patriarch after the Great Schism and the Reformation – it predates the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and goes back to at least the early part of the second century.   Nevertheless, although a strong case can be made that it was originally written in Greek – see Rev. John Baron The Greek Origins of the Apostles’ Creed Illustrated by Ancient Documents and Recent Research (1885) for the case that the Greek text of the Creed that Marcellus of Ancyra brought with him to Rome during his exile was the original form – the history of its usage is almost entirely Latin and Western.

(2)   “World” is the word we use in English where the Greek-speaking Church used κόσμος.   In Scriptural and ecclesiastical usage these terms have a positive sense in which they are basically synonyms of “Creation”, i.e., everything God made.   The Latinized transliteration of κόσμος as “cosmos”, a synonym for “universe”, is a secularized equivalent of this.   This positive sense of these words can be narrowed to focus on one aspect of Creation if the context requires it.   For example, the world in “For God so loved the world” in John 3:16 is Creation but with a focus on the people who live in it.    There is also a negative sense in which these words are used by the Scriptures and the Church and this is obviously the sense intended when we speak of holiness as separation from the world.   In this sense, world or κόσμος means the fallen state of Creation, human sin or rebellion against God not merely as it touches each of us as individuals, in which case the word for it would be flesh as a rendition of the Greek σὰρξ in its specialized New Testament usage, but as it permeates and corrupts human organized society.

(3)   Manichaeism had a strong presence in these places both before and after the Persecution. St. Augustine, prior to his conversion to the orthodox Christian faith of his mother, had been associated with the Manichaeans for about a decade.  He had come under their influence as a student at the University of Carthage.   This was about seventy years after Diocletian had ordered Manichaeism rubbed out.

(4)   This was the period of the Roman Tetrachy.   Although Diocletian’s treatment of the Manichaeans and Christians was undoubtedly tyrannical, in one sense he behaved atypically for a despot and divided his power with others.   Two years after becoming emperor in 284 AD, he named one of his cavalry comrades Maximian his co-emperor, assigning the Western Empire to Maximian and governing the Eastern Empire himself.   Seven years later, he named two other co-emperors, Galerius and Constantius to serve as Junior Emperors under him and Maximian.    The Senior Emperors took the title Augustus, the Junior Emperors took the title Caesar. The Tetrarchy was short lived.  Constantius’ son Constantine succeeded his father in 306 and was awarded both imperial titles.    In less than two decades he had consolidated his reign over the whole Roman Empire, although the division between East and West was lasting and would re-assert itself after his reign.   A famous episode in the process of consolidating his rule was the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD in which he defeated Maximian’s successor Maxentius, leaving him the sole Western claimant to the Imperial title.  This was the battle in which in response to a vision he fought under a standard bearing the ☧, the Christian monogram formed by combining X (Chi) with P (Rho) the first two letters of the word Christ.

(5)   While the word “traitor” is derived from traditor(es), the word “tradition” comes from the same source as traditor.   The concept common to both is of something having been handed or given over.   The source is the Latin verb trado “I hand over, surrender”, tradere “to hand over, surrender”, a contraction of the compound formed by combining the preposition trans meaning “across” and the verb do, dare meaning “give”.   This verb takes the form traditus “having been handed over” in its fourth part, the passive perfect participle.   “Tradition”, which preserves the passive voice of this form of the verb, means “that which has been handed over” in the sense of that which has been handed down to us from those who have gone before us and lacks the perjorative connotations of traditor(es) which is formed from the same part of the verb, by modifying it with the suffix that indicates the agent of the action of the otherwise passive form and which is pejorative because the handing over indicated in this case was an act of cowardly betrayal.

(6)   Vide supra, note 4.

(7)   The Bishop of Carthage was also the Primate of North Africa but for obvious reasons could not adjudicate this case.   Secundus was Primate of Numidia.

(8)   This is the test of Catholicity – ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent – proposed by St. Vincent of Lerins in his famous canon – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all”) in Commonitorium 2:6.

(9)   The examples of Daniel when forbidden by Darius to pray to the true God in the sixth chapter of Daniel, and of the Apostles when forbidden by the Sanhredrin to preach and teach in the name of Jesus in the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts, set the Scriptural precedent followed by the Churches that continued to meet during the persecutions including the Diocletian. Posted by Gerry T. Neal

Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

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THRONE, ALTAR, LIBERTY

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2021

Technocracy Triumphant  — Manitoba  Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable.   There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible.   That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs.   If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge.   To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty.

Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1)   One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer.   The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1.    The evidence in these challenges was heard in May.   After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases.   For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”.

The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases.    In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling.   In paragraph 292 we find the following:

I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions.

This is very good and right.   The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.”   Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”.   Here is what followed:  

But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence.

This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged.   If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified.   If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”.    Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law.  (2)

In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice.   In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test.    The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause.     To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”.   Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s).  (3)  For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test.    Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office.   If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either.

The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic.  What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy.

Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.  (God in the Dock, 1948)

This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.  

That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge.   This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation.   These are sections 13 and 67.   Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures.   Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.  

Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional.   In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age.   He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”.   The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic.   In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that:

the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health  (first ruling, 12).

Does it ensure such an appropriate balance?   As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17).   Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it.

The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken.   The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health.   The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.  In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint.   The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder.   The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy.  This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.

The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”.   This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.

The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.”    Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”.

Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health.   Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter. 

It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism.   The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance.   The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good.   Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms.   Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around.

The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this.   This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions.   This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field.   The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them.   Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual’s expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.

Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians.   A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse.   Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power.   For this reason it is imperative than  in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances.   This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4)

This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms.    Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation.  (5)  When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes?

Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.   Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief.  Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”.   That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize.   The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.”   Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury.  That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum.   “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal.

Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better.   The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”.   The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”.   It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession. 

Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?  

Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?  

Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.  

The next sentence is even worse.    “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.”    So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament?   Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government’s not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.      

Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded.

Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good.   Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields.  Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision.   It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in Abraham Maslow’s proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.   A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health.   He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession.   In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated.  To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.   

Consider the words that George Grant in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society identified as encapsulating spirit of technological thought, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”  The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable.    Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and Oppenheimer’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be “when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A”.   A might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired.  (6)

It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity.

For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7)

 (1)   The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual:  Ross MacKay.

(2)   Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag – or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.

(3)   There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.

(4)   The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity.   The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people.   The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time.   Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time.   It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.

(5)  Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading.   Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated.   This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights.   With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1.  As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.  

(6)   Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths.   The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths.   However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths.   The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not.   Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing?   It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other.   The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage.   The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so.   Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive.  I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.

(7)   That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999).   In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986).   It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny.   Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s master of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people.   He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.POSTED BY GERRY T. NEAL 

A Fatal Confusion

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

A Fatal Confusion

Faith, in Christian theology, is not the greatest of virtues – that is charity, or Christian love, but it is the most fundamental in the root meaning of fundamental, that is to say, foundational.   Faith is the foundation upon which the other Christian theological virtues of hope and charity stand.   (1) Indeed, it is the foundation upon which all other Christian experience must be built.   It is the appointed means whereby we receive the grace of God and no other step towards God can be taken apart from the first step of faith.  The Object of faith is the True and Living God.   The content of faith can be articulated in more general or more specific terms as the context of the discussion requires.   At its most specific the content of the Christian faith is the Gospel message, the Christian kerygma about God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.   At its most general it is what is asserted about God in the sixth verse of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that “He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him”.  

Whether articulated in its most general terms or its most specific, the faith Christianity calls for us to place in God is a confidence that presupposes His Goodness and His Omnipotence.   This has led directly to a long-standing dilemma that skeptics like to pose to Christian believers.  It is known as the problem of evil.   It is sometimes posed as a question, at other times it is worded as a challenging assertion, but however formulated it boils down to the idea that the presence of evil in a world created by and ruled by God is inconsistent with God’s being both Good and Omnipotent.   The challenge to the Christian apologist, therefore, is to answer the question of how evil can be present in a world created by and ruled by a Good and Omnipotent God.    This dilemma has been raised so often that there is even a special word for theological and philosophical answers to the dilemma – theodicy.

Christian orthodoxy does have an answer to this question.   The answer is a complex one, however, and we are living in an era that is impatient with complex answers.    For this reason, Christian apologists now offer a simple answer to the question – free will.    This is unfortunate in that this answer, while not wrong, is incomplete and requires the context of the full, complex answer, to make the most sense.  

The fuller answer begins with an observation about how evil is present in the world.   In this world there are things which exist in the fullest sense of the word – they exist in themselves, with essences of their own.    There are also things which exist, not in themselves, but as properties or qualities of things which exist in themselves.   Take redness for example.   It does not exist in itself, but as a property of apples, strawberries, wagons, etc.   Christian orthodoxy tells us that while evil is present in the world, it does not exist in either of these senses.   It has no essence of its own.  Nor does it exist as a created property of anything that does.  God did not create evil, either as a thing in itself, or as a property of anything else that He created.   Just as a bruise is a defect in the redness of an apple, so evil is present in the world as a defect in the goodness of moral creatures.  

If that defect is there, and it is, and God did not put it there, which He did not, the only explanation of its presence that is consistent with orthodoxy is that it is there due to the free will of moral creatures.   Free will, in this sense of the expression, means the ability to make moral choices.     Free will is itself good, rather than evil, because without it, no creature could be a moral creature who chooses rightly.    The ability to choose rightly, however, is also the ability to choose wrongly.   The good end of a created world populated by creatures that are morally good required that they be created with this ability, good itself, but which carries with it the potential for evil.

One problem with the short answer is the expression “free will” itself.   It must be carefully explained, as in the above theodicy, because it can be understood differently, and if it is so understood differently, this merely raises new dilemmas rather than resolving the old one.    Anyone who is familiar with the history of either theology or philosophy knows that “free will” is an expression that has never been used without controversy.   It should be noted, though, that many of those controversies do not directly affect what we have been discussing here.  Theological debates over free will, especially those that can be traced back to the dispute between St. Augustine and Pelagius, have often been about the degree to which the Fall has impaired the freedom of human moral agency.   Since this pertains to the state of things after evil entered into Creation it need not be brought into the discussion of how evil entered in the first place although it often is.

One particular dilemma that the free will theodicy raises when free will is not carefully explained is the one that appears in a common follow-up challenge that certain skeptics often pose in response.     “How can we say that God gave mankind free will”, such skeptics ask us, “when He threatens to punish certain choices as sin?”

Those who pose this dilemma confuse two different kinds of freedom that pertain to our will and our choices.      When we speak of the freedom of our will in a moral context we can mean one of two things.   We could be speaking of our agency – that we have the power and ability when confronted with choices, to think rationally about them and make real choices that are genuinely our own, instead of pre-programmed, automatic, responses.   We could also, however, be speaking of our right to choose – that when confronted with certain types of choices, we own our own decisions and upon choosing will face only whatever consequences, positive or negative, necessarily follow from our choice by nature and not punitive consequences imposed upon us by an authority that is displeased with our choice.    When Christian apologists use free will in our answer to the problem of evil, it is freedom in the former sense of agency that is intended.   When skeptics respond by pointing to God’s punishment of sin as being inconsistent with free will, they use freedom in the latter sense of right.   While it is tempting to dismiss this as a dishonest bait-and-switch tactic, it may in many cases reflect genuine confusion with regards to these categories of freedom.   I have certainly encountered many Christian apologists who in their articulation of the free will theodicy have employed language that suggests that they are as confused about the matter as these skeptics.

Christianity has never taught that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom, freedom in the sense of right, in an absolute, unlimited, manner.   To say that He did would be the equivalent of saying that God abdicated His Sovereignty as Ruler over the world He created.    Indeed, the orthodox answer to the problem of evil dilemma is not complete without the assertion that however much evil may be present in the world, God as the Sovereign Omnipotent Ruler of all will ultimately judge and punish it.     What Christianity does teach is that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom subject only to the limits of His Own Sovereign Rule.    Where God has not forbidden something as a sin – and, contrary to what is often thought, these are few in number, largely common-sensical, and simple to understand – or placed upon us a duty to do something – these are even fewer – man is free to make his own choices in the second sense, that is to say, without divinely-imposed punitive consequences.    

Today, a different sort of controversy has arisen in which the arguments of one side confuse freedom as agency with freedom as right.    Whereas the skeptics alluded to above point to rules God has imposed in His Sovereign Authority limiting man’s freedom as right in order to counter an argument made about man’s freedom as agency, in this new controversy man’s freedom as agency is being used to deny that government tyranny is infringing upon man’s freedom as right.

Before looking at the specifics of this, let us note where government authority fits in to the picture in Christian orthodoxy. 

Human government, Christianity teaches, obtains its authority from God.   This, however, is an argument for limited government, not for autocratic government that passes whatever laws it likes.   If God has given the civil power a sword to punish evil, then it is authorized to wield that sword in the punishment of what God says is evil not whatever it wants to punish and is required, therefore, to respect the freedom that God has given to mankind.    Where the Modern Age went wrong was in regarding the Divine Right of Kings as the opposite of constitutional, limited, government, rather than its theological basis.   Modern man has substituted secular ideologies as that foundation and these, even liberalism with all of its social contracts, natural rights, and individualism, eventually degenerate into totalitarianism and tyranny.

Now let us look at the controversy of the day which has to do with forced vaccination.      As this summer ends and we move into fall governments have been introducing measures aimed at coercing and compelling people who have not yet been fully vaccinated for the bat flu to get vaccinated.   These measures include mandates and vaccine passports.   The former are decrees that say that everyone working in a particular sector must either be fully vaccinated by a certain date or submit to frequent testing.   Governments have been imposing these mandates on their own employees and in some cases on private employers and have been encouraging other private employers to impose such mandates on their own companies.   Vaccine passports are certificates or smartphone codes that governments are requiring that people show to prove that they have been vaccinated to be able to travel by air or train or to gain access to restaurants, museums, movie theatres, and many other places declared by the government to be “non-essential”.    These mandates and passports are a form of coercive force.   Through them, the government is telling people that they must either agree to be vaccinated or be barred from full participation in society.    Governments, and others who support these measures, respond to the objection that they are violating people’s right to choose whether or not some foreign substance is injected into their body by saying “it’s their choice, but there will be consequences if they choose not be vaccinated”.

The consequences referred to are not the natural consequences, whatever these may be, positive or negative, of the choice to reject a vaccine, but punitive consequences imposed by the state.    Since governments are essentially holding people’s jobs, livelihoods, and most basic freedoms hostage until they agree to be vaccinated, those who maintain that this is not a violation of the freedom to accept or reject medical treatment would seem to be saying that unless the government actually removes a person’s agency, by, for example, strapping someone to a table and sticking a needle into him, it has not violated his right to choose.  This obviously confuses freedom as agency with freedom as right and in a way that strips the latter of any real meaning.

What makes this even worse is that the freedom/right that is at stake in this controversy, each person’s ownership of the ultimate choice over whether or not a medical treatment or procedure is administered to his body, is not one that we have traditionally enjoyed merely by default due to the absence of law limiting it.   Rather it is a right that has been positively stated and specifically acknowledged, and enshrined both in constitutional law and international agreement.   If government is allowed to pretend that it has not violated this well-recognized right because its coercion has fallen short of eliminating agency altogether then is no other right or freedom the trampling over of which in pursuit of its ends it could not or would not similarly excuse.  This is tyranny, plain and simple.

Whether in theology and philosophy or in politics, the distinction between the different categories of freedom that apply to the human will is an important one that should be recognized and respected.   Agency should never be confused with right, or vice versa.

(1)   Hope and charity, as Christian virtues, have different meanings from those of their more conventional uses.   In the case of hope, the meanings are almost the exact opposite of each other.   Hope, in the conventional sense, is an uncertain but desired anticipation, but in the Christian theological sense, is a confident, assured, expectation.   It is in their theological senses, of course, that I mean when I say that hope and charity are built on the foundation of faith. — Gerry T. Neal

“My Body, My Choice”? http://cafe.nfshost.com/?p=6683

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THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

The Canadian Red Ensign

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

“My Body, My Choice”?

The slogan “my body, my choice” is not a new one.   It has been around for years and, until practically yesterday, everyone who heard it – or read it on a placard – knew who the person saying it –or holding the placard – was and what this person was talking about.    That person was someone who identified as “pro-choice”, the choice in question being the choice of a woman to have an abortion.

Those of us who were on the right side of the abortion debate, the side that generally went by the label “pro-life”, would answer this slogan by pointing out that it was not just the woman’s body that would be affected by the abortion.    The unborn baby inside her would also be affected.    Indeed, its life would be terminated as that is the essential nature of an abortion.    The pro-choice movement has gone to great lengths to disguise the true nature of abortion from itself, and from those women contemplating one.    They use euphemistic language like “reproductive rights”, “reproductive health”, and the like in order to depict abortion as being merely a routine medical procedure.    They object strenuously to efforts by the pro-life movement to shatter this façade and bring the true nature of abortion out into the open by, for example, showing graphic depictions of aborted babies.

It can no longer be assumed, when one hears the slogan “my body, my choice”, that the person speaking is talking about abortion.   Indeed, it is probably safe to say that if you hear that slogan today, the chances are that the person saying it is not talking about abortion at all.    This is because in the last couple of months or so the slogan has been adopted by a different group of people altogether, those who are on the right side of the forced vaccine debate and are bravely standing up to the mob which, scared senseless by two years of media fear porn about the bat flu virus, is supporting governments in their efforts to shove needles into everyone’s arms whether they want them or not.

The mob’s answer to this new use of the slogan, when they bother to respond with anything other than “shut up and do what you are told” is similar to the pro-life movement’s answer to the pro-abortion use of the slogan.   It is not just our bodies, they tell us.   It is our duty to do our part to take the jab in order to protect others from the bat flu and if we don’t do our part the government should force us to do so by making our lives as miserable as possible until we do.

Before showing how and why the pro-life movement was right in its answer to the slogan as used by the pro-abortion movement while the supporters of forced vaccination are wrong in their answer to the slogan, it might be interesting to observe another way in which these two seemingly disparate issues intersect.    Among those of us who are on the side of the angels against forced vaccination there are those who are merely against vaccines being coerced and there are those who have objections to the vaccines qua vaccines.   Those who object to the vaccines qua vaccines could be further divided into those who are against all vaccines on principle and those who have problems with the bat flu vaccines specifically.    The latter include a large number of traditionalist Roman Catholics and Orthodox, evangelical Protestants, and other religious conservatives.    One of the reasons more religious conservatives have objected to the bat flu vaccines is that the mRNA type vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna) are developed from research that used a cell line originally derived from an aborted foetus and the Johnson & Johnson viral vector vaccine used a cell line from a different aborted foetus in its production and manufacturing stage.

Now, let us consider some differences between these scenarios that render the pro-life movement’s response to “my body, my choice” valid, and the pro-forced vaccination mob’s response to the same invalid.

The pro-life movement objects that “my body, my choice” is not a valid defense of abortion because abortion causes the death of someone other than the woman choosing to have an abortion.    This is a strong argument because a) abortion always, in every instance, and indeed, by definition, causes such a death, b) the death is always of a specific someone who is known, to the extent an unnamed person can be known, and c) the death is always intentional on the part of the persons performing and having the abortion.   The opposite of all of this is true in the case of someone who rejects the bat flu vaccines.    Someone not getting a vaccine is never the direct cause of another person’s death.    An unvaccinated person can only transmit the virus to someone else if he himself has the virus.   Even if he does have the virus and does transmit it to someone else that other person is far more likely to survive the virus than to die from it.   This is true even if the other person is in the most-at-risk category.   It would be extremely rare, if it happens at all, that causing another person, let alone a specific other person, to die would be part of the intent in deciding not to be vaccinated.    Therefore, the argument that the pro-life movement uses against “my body, my choice” in the case of abortion, does not hold up as an argument against the same in the case of forced vaccination.

A second important difference is in how the expression “my body, my choice” is used by the two groups.   The pro-choice movement uses it against those who would prohibit women from having an abortion.   The opponents of forced vaccination use it against those who would compel everybody to take an injection.   To compel somebody to do something requires a much stronger justification than to prohibit them from doing something.    This is especially the case when it comes to medical procedures.   A reasonable justification for denying someone a medical procedure that is not urgently needed to save the person’s life from immediate danger is far more conceivable than such a justification for compelling someone to undergo a medical procedure.    In the case of the bat flu vaccines, the clinical trials of which will not be completed for another two years, many of which include mRNA which has never been used in vaccines before, which increase the risk of the heart conditions pericarditis and myocarditis, as well as thrombosis (blood clots) and Bell’s palsy, and which is for a respiratory disease that people who are young and healthy have well over a 99% chance of surviving and even those who are not young and healthy are far more likely to survive than not, the idea that compelling anyone to take these could ever be rationally justified is morally repugnant.

So we see that “my body, my choice” is weak and invalid with regards to abortion but is strong and valid with regards to forced vaccination (vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, etc.)    The only reason there is a mob supporting and calling for the latter today, is because people and businesses have been terrorized by the media and their governments and subjected to hellish lockdowns and restrictions for almost two years, are sick of it, would agree to almost anything to be rid of it, and so they jumped aboard the forced vaccination bandwagon when the public health mandarins said that we need vaccine mandates and vaccine passports to avoid another lockdown.   The public health mandarins are lying, however, as they have been lying since day one of the bat flu pandemic.  All that is needed for us to avoid another lockdown is for governments to start respecting our constitutional rights and freedoms and the constitutional limits on their own power.     They will only do this if we insist upon it.   Letting them get away with forced vaccination is not a step towards the return of freedom, but towards greater tyranny. — GERRY T. 19, FREEDOM, MRNA, TYRANNY, VACCINES