Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
The Convoy and Captain Airhead
For those in the Dominion of Canada who still actually believe, as opposed to paying mere empty lip service to the idea, that freedom is a basic human good the legal protections of which must not be jettisoned in a state of emergency, the events of the preceding week have been most encouraging. Indeed, as can be seen in the Monday column “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now”, by Dr. Ron Paul, the long-time Congressman from Texas who throughout my life time so far has been by far the most consistent advocate of personal freedom against the encroachments of government to have served as an elected representative in the federal government of our southern neighbour, they have inspired freedom lovers outside of our borders as well as within.
As you are undoubtedly aware, for the past two years most governments around the world have been trampling all over the basic freedoms of the people they govern. The justification offered for all of this was the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in March of 2020. A new flu-like virus, related to the SARS virus of twenty years earlier, had passed from bats to humans, either through a wet market or experimentation in a laboratory, and had caused an epidemic in Wuhan in China late in 2019. Early in 2020 it had begun rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world. Even then, the information necessary to respond rationally without panicking was available. We knew that the people most at risk were the same people who are most at risk from any circulating disease – the really old and the really sick, although the danger to them was a bit more severe with this one. We knew that while it could produce an intensively painful form of pneumonia, most people who contracted the virus would survive it, with many experiencing only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Our governments, however, told us that because the virus was spreading so rapidly, our hospitals, emergency rooms, and intensive care units were in danger of been swamped, and so they were going to order us all to stay home for two weeks, to go out only for “essential” purposes like buying groceries or medicine, to close our businesses if they were not “essential” as the governments defined “essential”, and to worship and carry out all social interaction online. We were told that we would need to do all of this to slow the spread of the disease – to “flatten the curve” – in order to prevent the swamping of the health care system. Very few seemed to notice the obvious problem with this – that if the health care system were swamped it would recover, that if hospitals, emergency rooms, and ICUs were burdened beyond their capacity this would not mean their ultimate irrecoverable failure and destruction, and that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to treat everything else as expendable and sacrifice it all to prevent a temporary flooding of the health care system.
Since our governments were allowed to get away with this unprecedented and tyrannical experiment at containing a respiratory disease – previous generations of mankind knew better than to arrogantly think they could do any such thing – they kept on doing it for the last two years, imposing restrictions and lockdowns every time there was a spike in the number of people testing positive for the virus. When vaccines were invented for the bat flu virus in less than a year and given emergency authorization for use things got worse rather than better. Our governments had been telling us that the strategy of restrictions and lockdowns would need to continue until vaccines were available. Since the lockdown strategy was itself new and experimental, and was clearly causing more harm than the virus itself – as even our public health officers would admit in moments when they were relaxing restrictions rather than tightening them – and no one had been able to develop a vaccine for this kind of virus in the past this was highly dubious, to say the least. When the vaccines were available, instead of saying “you should all return to your lives now, because we have vaccines to protect you from the virus if you want them” our governments began taking measures to coerce into being vaccinated those whom they could not persuade to be vaccinated voluntarily.
This took the tyranny to a whole new level. While their telling us we could only “worship” online, could only meet with members of our own household, etc. made mockeries out of our freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, these attempts to coerce us rather than convince us to accept an inoculation, were an outright assault on our basic right to the security of our persons. Our governments do not want to pass laws telling women they cannot have abortions on the grounds that such laws would violate a woman’s right to bodily autonomy even though abortion involves the deliberate taking of the life of another human being. Euphemistically, those who support this status quo refer to this supposed right to have an abortion as a woman’s “reproductive rights” or her “right to make choices about her own reproductive health”. Yet these same people seem to have no problem with telling everybody – men, women, whatever – that he must have a newly invented substance that has not yet completed its clinical trials injected into his body. They claim to respect that whether a person does so or not is his choice. Then they turn around and tell him that if he does not choose the way they want him to choose they will take away his right to participate in society until he makes what they say is the “right” choice. This mobster-like bullying, of course, is itself a reason why refusing these demands is the morally right decision and complying with them is the morally wrong decision.
While we have not experienced this tyranny in its worst possible form here in the Dominion of Canada – our sister Commonwealth Realms of Australia and New Zealand have had it much worse – we have had to take it in combination with the insufferable arrogance of our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead. This is rather the opposite of Mary Poppins’ old line about how “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Captain Airhead has outdone himself in the realm of arrogance – a truly spectacular feat – when it comes to the vaccine coercion, for he has turned it into a form of scapegoating that makes it look like he was sitting around reading Mein Kampf and thinking something to the effect of “hey, you know, this guy gained tremendous public support by talking this way about the Jews, a disliked minority, maybe I should try the same with the unvaccinated.” Except that the thought as it formed in his own mind would have been much less coherent. Captain Airhead does not have the capacity for extended rational thought even of such a perverse type. Captain Airhead began telling Canadians in the last couple of waves of the bat flu that these waves are all the fault of the unvaccinated. Since the vast majority of Canadians were vaccinated – the vaccination campaign had been a record-breaking success – he was in effect telling Canadians “your vaccines won’t work unless everyone is vaccinated.” Rather than admit that his pandemic and vaccination policies had been a failure from beginning to end, he opted to taking an utterly stupid position in order to blame his failure on people he thought he could get away with abusing, in the hopes of turning the hostility of Canadians fed up with all this pandemic nonsense onto them. For weeks, he and his sycophants in the media, have been telling us that Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the unvaccinated, and trotting out polls ostensibly saying that most Canadians would support even more draconian measures being taken against the unvaccinated.
While behaving in the aforementioned disgusting manner, this increasingly petty tyrant turned on the very people he had held up to us as heroes – to the extent he was capable of holding anyone other than himself up as a hero – at the beginning of the pandemic. On top of vaccine passports – those vile “show me your papers”, Mark of the Beast-style cards/QR codes that limited access to pretty much everything except grocery stores and pharmacies to the vaccinated – he began adding vaccine mandates where he could, and pressuring the provinces to add them where he had no jurisdiction. One of the very first vaccine mandates to be widely brought in across Canada restricted work in the field of health care to the fully vaccinated. Thus, those “front-line” nurses and other health-care providers, lauded as heroes two years ago, were told that unless they took a shot that they were not persuaded was in their own best interests to take, they would be out of work. When many opted to lose their jobs rather than submit to this bullying and tyranny, the effect of the vaccine mandate was obviously to increase the pressure on the health care system rather than decrease it. Now Captain Airhead has imposed a vaccine mandate on long-haul truckers crossing the border with the United States, either in collusion with the Biden administration or prompting the latter to do the same in retaliation. His government has also dropped hints that it is looking at a similar mandate for inter-provincial transportation. Two years ago Captain Airhead was telling Canadians to thank truckers who did not have the option of staying at home and were “working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked”. Now he was telling them their services were not wanted unless they allowed him to dictate their medical choices. This is what has prompted the long-overdue backlash we have been seeing over the last week.
Early last week, or the last day of the week prior to last if you wish to be precise, convoys of trucks set out from British Columbia heading towards Ottawa. By the end of the week, similar convoys from every province of the Dominion were joining them. As this armada of trucks descended upon the capital, everywhere they went supporters turned out in droves to cheer them on. It was dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” and its purpose was quite straightforward. It was a protest demanding the repeal, first, of the cross-border vaccine mandate for long haul truckers specifically, second, of vaccine mandates in general. Many of the truckers, like all salt-of-the-earth type decent Canadians, also want Captain Airhead to step down.
About the middle of the week Captain Airhead dismissed the convoy with the sort of language we have come to expect from him. He said “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they’re expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country”. The best way to answer that is to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi (2017) as saying “Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong.” To briefly parse the latter part of Captain Airhead’s remarks, obeying government orders to stay apart for two years is the opposite of being there for each other, there is no such thing as “the science”, science, sans definite article, is a tool to be used and not a leader to be followed which real scientists would be the first to tell you, and agreeing to government measures that limit to the point of eliminating your and your neighbour’s freedoms of assembly, association, and religion and bodily autonomy helps destroy rather than ensure our rights, freedoms, and values. It is the first part of the remarks, however, that are of most interest to us here. It was apparent already on Wednesday when Captain Airhead said this and is unavoidable now that the convoy of truckers is a sizeable representation of a much larger segment of society and anything but “small” and “fringe”. As for their “unacceptable views”, the only views that the truckers espouse as a group are that it is wrong and unacceptable for the government to be telling people they need to take a foreign substance into their bloodstream and punishing them if they don’t do it. Prior to the pandemic, this was the consensus viewpoint in the free world. As recently as last year Captain Airhead espoused those same views himself. He opposed vaccine passports and mandates into the spring of 2021 calling them “divisive” and saying that this is not how we do things in Canada. His complete flip-flop on the matter occurred at the time that Canada was emerging from the particularly harsh lockdown of winter-spring 2021, provinces were introducing vaccine passports, and they were polling well as they seemed to offer, to the vaccinated at least, a return to something resembling the normal. It was around this time that Captain Airhead, faced with a Parliamentary order to hand over un-redacted documents regarding the dismissal of a couple of scientists from the virology lab in Winnipeg, documents he was so desperate to keep out of the hands of Parliament that he sued the Speaker showing his total contempt for Parliament and unfitness to serve as Prime Minister, was contemplating asking for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election. When he ultimately went the latter route, arrogantly thinking he would be handed a majority government – the election, which nobody else but him wanted, restored the status quo ante – he tied his future political prospects to mandatory vaccination. What arrogance, what hubris, what chutzpah to declare that his having abandoned his opposition to mandatory vaccination less than a year previously made that opposition into “unacceptable views”!
The Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday and Captain Airhead fled the city saying that he had come into contact with the bat flu and needed to self-isolate. Then on Monday, after a weekend in which the truckers and their supporters had expressed their opposition to the vaccine mandates and other tyrannical pandemic measures without burning buildings down, looting stores, toppling monuments, or otherwise behaving like the kind of protestors Captain Airhead embraces and supports, Captain Airhead announced that he – triple vaccinated as of earlier that month – had tested positive for the bat flu, and that he would be speaking to the nation about the trucker protest. When he gave his address, did he say “boy, I was wrong, I got all my shots and I still came down with the virus, maybe I should humble myself and talk to these truckers, who represent a lot more Canadians than I thought”?
Hardly. He doubled down on his insults, his arrogance, and his claims, obviously debunked by the fact that the most recent wave of the bat flu driven by a variant that infected more people in just over a month than previous variants had in a year producing a situation where, by contrast with previous variants, almost everyone has either had the bat flu or knows someone who had it, came after a record-breaking supermajority of the populace had been fully vaccinated, that vaccination is our only way out of the pandemic. He said that “Canadians at home” were “watching in disgust and disbelief at this behaviour, wondering how this could have happened in our nation’s capital after everything we’ve been through together”. He said this even as the results of the Angus Reid poll conducted over the weekend, results that showed that majority opinion in Canada had switched away from support for his policies to wanting all Covid restrictions lifted – the position of the truckers – were being released. He spoke of those who “hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless”. This was hardly typical of the behaviour of the demonstrators – were it otherwise the evidence would be all over the media – and is mighty rich coming from someone whose policies have ruined small businesses across the country while benefiting large multinationals, driven people into homelessness and destitution, and made life exponentially harder for the homeless (strict capacity limitations on homeless shelters and the closing of public spaces have, throughout the pandemic, corresponded with the winter months). Wearing his “Mr. Tough Guy” mask, he declared that “we” – he should have used the singular, as that is what he meant, but he is not smart enough to recognize that holding the office of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister does not give him the right to use the royal “we” and that having lost his majority government in 2019, failing both then and in 2021 to win even a plurality in the popular vote, and now having lost majority support for his policies he should not presume to speak for Canadians in general – “would not be intimidated”. His conveniently timed need to self-isolate in a non-disclosed secure location speaks rather loudly to the contrary. “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans” he said. Whereas protestors whose causes he has embraced over the past couple of years have toppled and beheaded statues, burned down churches, and committed real acts of vandalism, what he refers to here is the placing of a removable sign on the Terry Fox memorial. As for the dishonouring of the memory of our veterans, I would say that the last two years of him trampling all over the freedoms those veterans fought for is far more dishonouring to their memory than a few protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
His focus, however, was on smearing the protestors with accusations of racism. A few weeks ago, a clip of him giving an interview prior to last year’s Dominion election re-surfaced, in which he accused the unvaccinated of being “racists” and “misogynists” and asked whether Canadians should “tolerate these people”. This dehumanizing language brought upon him vehement condemnation, at home and abroad, nor did the hypocrisy of the person of whom photographic – and video – evidence of his having worn blackface – and on one occasion full body brown skin makeup – on at least three separate occasions surfaced in the 2019 Dominion election calling other people “racists” go without notice. Whereas accusing opponents of “racism” and “sexism” is a standard progressive tactic in Captain Airhead’s case there appears to be a personal element to it. Knowing that he is guilty of not living up to his own progressive ideals – and, indeed, falling short of them in ways that are truly spectacular, as you can see by asking yourself how many people you know who have worn blackface even once – he projects his guilt onto others, in this case onto the unvaccinated he was trying to scapegoat and otherize in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, more often onto the country of Canada prior to his “enlightened” premiership.
In his speech, he concentrated on such things as the single person at the rally carrying a flag bearing the symbol that his own father reportedly wore on his jacket while dodging the draft to fight in the war against the regime whose emblem that symbol was. Since nobody has been able as of yet to locate the person who brought this flag to the protest nobody knows whether he did so as an expression of agreement with the ideology the flag represents or, perhaps more likely, to make the statement that the Prime Minister’s actions resemble those of the regime that flew that flag. Either way, it is obvious to everyone – and I suspect this includes Captain Airhead and his sycophants, as much as they claim otherwise – that the person with this flag represented nobody at the rally but himself. Another person at the rally carried the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the United States seven years before Confederation. Progressives maintain that this flag is as objectionable as the first mentioned through a tortured reductionism that reduces all the differences that had been driving the two regions of the United States apart for a century prior to that to a single racially sensitive issue. Within living memory – indeed, quite recent living memory – that flag was a universal symbol, not of racism, but of rebellion, employed as such even in countries with no discernable connection to the history, culture, and issues pertaining to the conflict that produced it. This notwithstanding, the fact that the other protestors were filmed objecting to its presence clearly demonstrates that this person too, whatever his intent, did not speak for anyone but himself.
What many people may not realize is that in any large size protest against progressive policies there will always be one or two people with symbols of this type. Progressives themselves make sure of this. While in some cases it is a matter of outright infiltration – a progressive activist, or a government agent provocateur will join the protest and do or say something to bring opprobrium upon the protest as a whole – it also has to do with the way progressives a) introduce policies that are unjust to certain whites – working class whites, middle class whites, prairie farmers and other rural whites – but not to others such as journalists, academics, and technocrats where their own white supporters can be found, b) proclaim any backlash against such injustice to be “racist”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist” etc., in the hopes of radicalizing the backlash so that c) they can point to the symbols of such radicalism, when they inevitably appear in larger protests against progressive policies that have nothing to do with racial issues whatsoever as a means of smearing the entire protest.
In this case, Captain Airhead’s efforts and those of his controlled media have failed on a truly grand scale. The protest was too large and too obviously racially and ethnically diverse – predictably so, considering that what the media dubbed “vaccine hesitancy” is more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups – for Airhead’s remarks to be taken seriously by anyone with an iota of intelligence.
Captain Airhead, his fellow progressives, and their media spokesmen have spoken of the trucker protest as a threat to Canadian democracy. Many supporters of the convoy have said, by contrast, that it is democracy in action. In a way both are right and both are wrong. What we have actually been seeing is two different understandings of democracy come to a clash. There are many different ways of understanding democracy. In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, there was a form of direct democracy, in which the democratic assembly, consisting of all corporate members – citizens – of the city, voted on every public matter. In most societies with a form of democracy – and all complex societies with a form of democracy – that democracy has been representative democracy, where the citizens vote for representatives, who then form the government. Republican governments such as that of our neighbour to the south are a representative form of democracy. The House of Commons in our parliamentary form of democracy is also a representative form. Populism, in which a grass-roots movement forms – often behind a charismatic leader – to make demands of the government is another form of democracy.
Captain Airhead’s understanding of democracy is an extremely corrupt perversion of representative democracy. It is basically that every few years there is an election and whoever wins the election, at least if it is a Liberal, can then do whatever he wants until the next election, constitutional limits on his powers be hanged, because he is the choice and voice of the people. The truckers protest is populism in its best possible form. The popular movement is not demanding that anything be taken away from anybody else, merely that what was stolen from them – and from every Canadian – their basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion and above all their right to reject with impunity the demand that they take a foreign substance into their body – be returned immediately.
Note the perspective of this writer. I am not positively inclined towards democracy as an ideal. I love and support my country’s traditional governing institutions, including our reigning monarchy and our democratic parliament, but with parliament I insist upon this distinction – I love and support it because it is a traditional governing institution and thus one that has proven itself over the ages and not because it is democratic. Indeed, I belong to that “small fringe minority” of people with “unacceptable views” who agree with the consensus of the pre-modern tradition, classical and Christian, that democracy is the worst of all forms of government not the best, reject completely the modern liberal idea that legitimate government authority is that which is given to the government by the people (John Locke’s attempt to argue this against Sir Robert Filmer in his Two Treatises failed – even his fellow utilitarian liberal Jeremy Bentham could see that Filmer had the better of the arguments – and was thoroughly rebutted by the Rev. Charles Leslie, who demonstrated in his The Rehearsal that the legitimate authority of Parliament came through the Magna Carta from royal charter, not popular consent) along with the liberal idea that the individual person’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property come with the individual person into society from a pre-social state of nature (because there is no such thing as pre-social state of nature – society is part of man’s created nature – the rights of life, liberty, and property are real and bestowed by God, not the deistic God of Locke, but the True and Living God of Christianity), and hold in utter derision and scorn the modern equation of democracy with freedom (except when democracy is defined as self-government, and explained not in terms of the constitution of the state but the concept of subsidiarity – that the every decision should be left to those most locally competent to handle it rather than centralized in the state) because history clearly demonstrates that the size and intrusiveness of government grew exponentially after the modern heresy of popular sovereignty caught on and that governments that see themselves as the “voice of the people” have far less respect for those people’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property than kings who hold their authority by hereditary right and sacred oath. (1) Recognizing these neglected truths does not incline one to much sympathy with populism.
These are exceptional times however. Modern liberalism, in rejecting the ancient consensus that democracy was the mother of tyranny, believed that legal and constitutional recognition and protection of the rights of minorities was sufficient to guard against the problems the ancients had seen in democracy, which Alexis de Tocqueville summed up in his concept of the “tyranny of the majority”. They failed to foresee the day when a professed liberal – the leader of the Liberal Party, as a matter of fact – would loudly espouse the rights and protections of “minorities”, but understand by that term “people of certain skin colours”, “women” (over 50% of the population), “people of certain ethnic and national backgrounds”, “people of certain religions”, “people of certain sexual orientations” and “people of certain gender identities”, while despising completely minorities in the sense the original liberals intended, the dictionary sense, of numeric minorities. For all of his empty talk about protecting “vulnerable minorities”, Captain Airhead has felt completely free to dehumanize, otherize, scapegoat, and stir up hatred against those whom he has been unable to convince to voluntarily take a bat flu vaccine, because they are a numerically tiny fragment of the population. The “unvaccinated” are the true “vulnerable minority”. Mercifully, what we are seeing in this populist truckers protest, is not the kind of demagogue-driven mob action that has been the historical norm for populism, but Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, coming together to send Captain Airhead the message, loud and clear, that he does not speak for them, and to demand that government start respecting the basic freedoms of all Canadians once again. This is a cause most worthy of our support. — Gerry T. Neal
God save the Queen!
God bless the truckers!
(1) This week began with Royal Martyr Day, the anniversary of the death of a godly king who was murdered by religious fanatics who, having gained control of Parliament, believed that they had the right to do whatever they want. King Charles warned that those who in their fanatical belief that they were the voice of a popular sovereignty went to war against his rights as sovereign king, would not hesitate to trample over the rights of anyone else. Those who deposed him proved him right on this during the mercifully short-lived Cromwellian Interregnum, as did those who followed their example – the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, and the Communists, beginning with Russia in 1917 and spreading from there to about a third of the world in the last century before their collapse.
