Throne, Altar, Liberty
The Canadian Red Ensign
Friday, August 23, 2024
On Owning the Left’s Abusive Labels
About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.” They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action. While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter. A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact. They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.” If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.
A couple of months ago David Warren said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.” He was absolutely right about that, as he usually is about most matters. See his piece from last month entitled “Annals of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the sadly long defunct Idler on this silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not.
By labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they said about the Campaign Life Coalition. The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby. By social conservative, I mean approaching issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known as Christendom. While they address a range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their efforts, and that is abortion. They would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group. While I share their position I prefer the negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life. Abortion is murder, as any person capable of sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter. It is therefore a bad thing and the right thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it. The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side in the capital punishment debate. The right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty. Admittedly, there are good practical reasons for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never be trusted with that power. My point, however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered “far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty extreme standpoint.
The CAHN, like most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current leadership and the New Democrats. When it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets. They have opposed the introduction of any restrictions on abortion. Three years ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example. But no, the Left voted as a block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right” to be limited even to prevent discrimination. Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who claim to oppose all discrimination.
Let us return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the position of the Left in terms of life and death. Almost thirty years ago Pope John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then, liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since. Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of murder. The return of the Liberals to power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician assisted suicide violated Charter rights. The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously regarded as appropriate for it. Even more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the medical treatment they were seeking. The program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying. If government programs had theme songs it would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning with M, M*A*S*H. The theme song, the lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.” From the standpoint of those who support and are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane, rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed appear to be “extreme.”
Again, Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by people like that.
The expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense. It is derived from the concept of political thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the further left you are. This is a concept that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole was identified classical liberalism (individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state, socialism). By this standard, the more of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is. Indeed, in some presentations of this spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no state is the furthest position to the right. Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism (Nazism). National Socialism, however, was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the points contrasted was aligned with the left pole. National Socialism was a European rather than a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left” had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum arose. This is because they were taken, not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French Revolution. Supporters of the Revolution were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right. The “Right” therefore, in French political usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather than the Bourbons for example). It was basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England. National Socialism, which opposed the traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right” of classical liberal republicanism. This is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American meanings of Right are to each other. The expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity to it.
The Left’s determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point where they are incapable of extracting themselves today. It makes no difference to the Left if those they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in nature. Once again the labelling says more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation of that extreme position on race.
To understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of the racialism of the actual National Socialists. He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.” Idolatry is what happens when man turns away from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships and serves instead false gods of his own construction. Through worshipping and serving these false gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32). Christianity called mankind out of the darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9) It is hardly a coincidence that National Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically (theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation. This does not mean that race and nation, which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through them to devils.
The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was. What it wishes to conceal is that the idols it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served. Like the National Socialists they worship at the altar of race and nation. There is a difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most part their own. Moreover, they are actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations. This is the true nature of what the Left calls anti-racism. It is a worse form of this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists. Implicit within the Commandment to honour our fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors. The Second Greatest Commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves. Neighbours means those in proximity to us, and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise. From this it follows that the idolatry of the race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s own race and nation. It can be safely predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes of Communism.
To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” The call to do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary one, a call to turn back the clock. The irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical European sense of Right. The irony is due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language. In neither American nor European usage does it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual and the less on the collective, including the collective of race. In the classical European sense of the Right, political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation are invited and called to join. The further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.
The classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for whom the principles of neither Right are sacred. The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional continental form. If holding this position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label. My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.
If invocation of the saints were my regular practice, I could think of no better way of closing this essay than with “Colonel Sibthorp, pray for us.” Posted by Gerry T. Neal
at 2:49 AM