The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III is set for this Saturday, the sixth of May. As this event, the peak of the ceremony surrounding the accession of our new Sovereign, has grown nearer, the woodworks have released a fairly predictable swarm of vermin intent on spoiling things as much as they can. Liberal Party bureaucrats circumventing proper procedure to quietly commission changes to our royal symbols to make them less evocative of tradition. Special interest groups trying to make what should be a solemn yet celebratory occasion embodying unity, stability, and continuity for each of His Majesty’s realms and for the whole Commonwealth, as was the Coronation of His Majesty’s late mother, all about them. Left-wing journalists calling our institution of monarchy “outdated” and “archaic”, which it, being timeless, can never be, suggesting that we “severe our ties” to it as if it were something external and not integral to our constitution, and defaming both the monarchy and our country as a whole by insisting that our history be read through the distorting lens of BIPOC racial grievance politics. Sadly, these latter have found a strange bedfellow in the person of Maxime Bernier, the leader of what they would absurdly describe as the “far right” People’s Party of Canada. For me, this last means that come the next Dominion election I will have one less option to vote for. While on most things, perhaps everything except this, where Bernier’s views differ from those of the present leadership of the Conservative Party I agree with Bernier, this is a deal breaker. No small-r republican will ever have my support, no matter how right he is on other things.
Bernier has allowed his objections to Charles the person blind him with regards to monarchy the institution. His objections to Charles have to do with the king’s views on certain controversial points. Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau is far further removed from Bernier’s views on these same points – and many others as well – than is our king. Imagine if Bernier had tweeted that because of his objections to Trudeau we should replace parliament with something else. This would be recognized instantly as a terrible suggestion. Yet the same bad reasoning – get rid of the institution because of objections to the person – is worse in the case of what Bernier actually said. The monarchy is a non-political – in the sense of party politics – office. It is therefore much worse to attack the institution because of objections to the officeholder based on partisan political views in the case of the monarchy than in the case of parliament and the prime minister.
It is because he approaches monarchy from the standpoint of Modern democratic assumptions – yes, populist nationalist assumptions, comically labelled right-wing by those seemingly unaware that the original right was anything but populist and nationalist, are Modern democratic assumptions, well within the boundaries of historical liberalism – that Bernier makes the basic blunder of failing to recognize that it is because the monarchy is non-democratic that it is non-political and that it is because it is non-political that it can both stand above partisan politics as a beacon of unity and serve as an anchor of stability for parliamentary government in the turbulent sea of Modern democratic politics, an institution far more important and valuable even than its ancient democratic complement of parliament, which only the basest of fools would want to mess with.. This mistake can be categorized with others common to those who have so imbibed the basic assumptions of the Modern Age that they simply cannot think outside that box and find it painful to even try. These mistakes all involve prioritizing that which, important as it may be to the moment, is fleeting and ephemeral, over that which is fixed, stable, permanent, and lasting. This is the consequence of turning our backs on the consensus of the wisdom of all of human tradition until yesterday and deciding that the marketplace is a better model for the whole of society than the family.
When we speak of stability and permanence with regards to human institutions, of course, we are referring to these qualities to the extent that they can be possessed by anything in our earthly, mortal, existence. Monarchy is the state institution that has demonstrated the largest capacity for such. Family is the most permanent social institution. While I am referring to family in the general sense of “the family”, the oldest and most universal social institution, specific families also have much longer lifespans than the individuals who belong to them in any generation. We are born into families that have been around a lot longer than us and, until very recently at any rate, those families raised us to behave in ways that would ensure they would be around long after we are gone, i.e., grow up, get married, have kids, raise those kids to do the same. Like living under the reign of a king whose Sovereignty has passed down to him from those who reigned over generations of our forebears this reminds us that we are not each our own individual selves the centre of the universe around which all else revolves and to whose wills reality must bend the knee. This is a reminder we are in constant need of now more than ever since we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us otherwise.
The recognition that everything is not about us, that we are part of things bigger, more important, and longer lived than ourselves, is, paradoxically, absolutely essential to our growth as individuals, not physical growth of course, but our development into our best possible selves, the selves we are supposed to be, the kind of growth that perfection in the original root meaning of the word points to and which in the language of the ancient thinkers consists of finding and accomplishing to the best of our ability our good, that is to say, our end, our purpose, the reason we are here on this earth. For we cannot find and serve our own small-g good, if we are solipsistic prisoners of our own selves. Our individual small-g goods are not, pace Nietzsche, goods we make for ourselves out of our own wills, but are that within us which answers to big G Goodness. We do not have to be able to conceive of Goodness in philosophical terms, but none of us will ever come near being the best version of ourselves possible without acknowledging Goodness as something that is what it is regardless of what we think, say, or do about it and something to which our will must bend rather than vice versa.
Goodness is often spoken of in connection with Beauty and Truth, both of which like Goodness are what they are regardless of us and to which our wills must bend. These are stable and permanent in the absolute sense. In philosophy and theology they are called the Transcendentals, which term means “the properties of being, i.e., that which is to existence itself what “red” is to “apple”, but as has already been stated, a philosophical understanding of these things is hardly necessary. The important thing to understand is that we don’t have a say in what Goodness, Truth and Beauty are and that we are to conform ourselves to these rather than to try to force them to conform to our will.
We live in a time when we are suffering the consequences of having done the exact opposite on a massive scale. Take Beauty for an example. Our cities look as one would expect them to after a century or so of architects and city engineers designing buildings and streets with the idea that Beauty must take backseat to utility. Our countrysides, while not affected as badly as our cities, show the scarring one would expect when those responsible for projects that affect the countryside share the same priorities as the aforementioned architects and city engineers. Is it any wonder, with such disregard for Beauty being shown by the engineers responsible for city and country alike, that so many others add to the problem by strewing garbage all over both? We have art and music that looks and sounds like what one would expect from a century or so of sculptors, painters, and composers who no longer saw the primary purpose of their vocation as being to create works of Beauty but to “express themselves” and “reach the people” even if that meant shocking them with ugliness. Bernier’s objections to Charles the person are based on His Majesty’s life-long outspoken environmentalism which, in the minds of Bernier and many who think like him, make His Majesty into someone like Bill Gates or Al Gore. Even if His Majesty was that type it would still be utter folly to wish to abolish the office of the monarchy because of such a quirk in the present officeholder, but it is also an ill-informed misjudgment of His Majesty. His environmentalism began as countryside conservationism rooted in his love of the Beauty of the countryside. His love for Beauty has manifested itself in a similar outspokenness with regards to the other things discussed in this paragraph. It would be difficult to read his defense of older buildings and architectural styles and his biting criticism of modernism and functionalism as anything other than a deep traditionalism. Similarly, if you consider everything he has said and done with regards to environmentalism instead of focusing in only on climate-related matters, it is quite evident that he is more of a Wendell Berry than a Bill Gates.
Late last week a bill cleared parliament, the first of several planned by the current Liberal government, that will have the effect of severely limiting Canadians access to Truth by giving the government the same, or even stronger, control over alternative sources of information online that they already exercise over the traditional media. This is not, of course, how the prime minister and his cult of followers talk about what they are doing. They say that this first bill is intended to protect “Canadian content” on online streaming services. They say with regards to their internet legislation as a whole that they are trying to protect Canadians from “online harms” such as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “hate”. If one were to make the mistake of taking this language literally and seriously one could be fooled into thinking that it is the opposite of Truth that the government is trying to keep from Canadians for “misinformation” and “disinformation” as these words are properly used mean information that is false. The Liberals, however, use these words to mean information that disagrees with whatever narrative they happen to be promoting at that moment and since that narrative is almost inevitably false it is Truth that ends up being censored as “misinformation” or “disinformation”. A Ministry of Truth never promotes Truth, it only suppresses it. It is always a bad idea, but especially so when coming from someone like our prime minister who never tells the Truth when a lie will suffice. Only a few days before the Online Streaming Act passed he told an audience that he never forced anyone to get a vaccination. This was a rather audacious lie considering there were not many world leaders worse than him when it came to imposing vaccines on millions by preventing anyone without one from having any sort of a normal existence. Many opposed this bill and will continue to fight it, in the courts if need be, and to his credit Bernier is a leading example of these. This was done, however, in the name of freedom of speech, and freedom of speech was championed, not because of its necessity to Truth (without freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak that which is false, we do not have the freedom to speak Truth, the parallel to the classical theological argument that without Free Will, including the ability to choose evil, we do not have the ability to choose the Good) but because it violated our individual rights. I don’t deny that individual rights are important, but they are a liberal value, and like all liberal values their importance is greatly exaggerated in this age. Truth is more important. Sir Roger Scruton wrote “beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations”. (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011) Imagine how different the fight against the Liberal Party’s plans to seize control of what we can say or see online would be if those fighting fought first and foremost in the name of Truth, the permanent and lasting value, and framed their arguments accordingly.
My hope and prayer for Max Bernier is that his eyes will be opened and that he will come to see that as important as all the things he has been fighting for are, what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”, both the truly permanent ultimate values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and the relatively permanent concrete human institutions such as the family and in the political sphere parliament and especially the monarchy which point us to those ultimate values, are more important and that he will repent of having allowed his minor objections to Charles the person to attack the monarchy and espouse small-r republicanism. Until such time, he will have to do what he does without my support.
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”.
After the second of two anni horribiles in a row, the Kalends of January is upon us once again. In the civil calendar this is New Year’s Day and in the sacred Kalendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. When I began to write I borrowed a custom from one of my favourite writers, the late Charley Reese, a curmudgeonly, common-sense conservative, op-ed writer from the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly syndicated column. At the beginning or end of each year he would write a column in which he talked about himself, his positions, the causes he supported, and the organizations to which he belonged. He encouraged other writers to do the same because he felt they owed it to their readers to regularly disclose these things so their readers would know where the opinions they were reading were coming from. Reese’s column would come out in late December or early January on a day his column was scheduled to appear. Since I self-publish my essays on a blog and can keep my own schedule I have always timed mine to come out on New Year’s Day.
I am 45 years old. I have lived in the city of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century. I have lived in the province of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, in the Dominion of Canada all my life. I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, and studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, about a half-hour south of Winnipeg.
There are two words that I regularly use to describe my general point of view in all of its aspects – political, theological, philosophical, cultural, etc. These are reactionary and Tory. The former has long been a term of abuse by progressives or leftists and I learned the habit of self-applying it from the late historian John Lukacs. When I do so, I use it more in the sense in which he used it, and in which Michael Warren Davis uses it in his just published The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough, than in the sense that in which Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, et al, use it, although by making this distinction I do not mean to disparage the latter who have written much that is worthy in criticism of the Modern and what has followed it. In this sense it means someone who looks back to the social, civil, and religious order of Christendom, the civilization that preceded Modern Western Civilization, and rather than finding there darkness from which he thanks Modernity for rescuing us, finds goodness and light and a solid place to cast his anchor so as to keep from being tossed adrift on the stormy seas of Modernity and Postmodernity. A reactionary then is very different from a conservative. The latter is usually someone who values Western Civilization only for the achievements of Modernity, distinguishing himself from progressives merely by the fact that the strain of Modernity he prefers, is the older, somewhat saner, form of liberalism, rather than that of the increasingly looney left.
From what I have just said about being a reactionary, it should already be clear that when I describe myself as a Tory I don’t mean a small-c conservative, although I usually agree with small-c conservatives in their disputes with progressives, much less a big-C Conservative. I mean it in the sense of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition as “one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig” and of T. S. Eliot’s description of himself, which reads like an update of Dr. Johnson’s definition, and goes ” an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.”
When it comes to the political aspect of being a Tory, the “royalist in politics”, I have been one all my life. Although a subtle distinction can be made between a royalist and a monarchist – the former denotes loyalty to royal blood, the latter denotes loyalty to and belief in the institution and office of the monarch – I will use the word royalist to encompass both meanings. I have always been glad that my country is a parliamentary monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state and the head of the family of nations, the Commonwealth, to which we belong, rather than a republic. Like Anthony Burgess, one of my favourite novelists who had similar views, “I hate all republics”, although I might make the long defunct Confederate States of America the exception that proves the rule, if only because the kind of people who would be most offended by my doing so are also the sort of people who irritate me the most. As I learned the history of my country, I was very pleased – I don’t like to use the word proud because Pride is the worst of all sins and vices – to know that Canada’s history diverged from that of our republican neighbour because we chose the way of the older virtues of Loyalty to the Crown and Honour, over that of rebellion and sedition in the name of new-fangled abstract ideals. I very much despise the way Modern man prefers abstract ideals over time -proven concrete institutions. I am very much the opposite of that in my thinking, which is why I will defend parliament, the time-honoured institution that legislates under the reign of the Crown, but not democracy, the abstract ideal, and insist that this distinction is crucial. It always infuriates me when certain small-c conservatives speak gushingly about democracy and disparagingly about the Crown. The Honourable Eugene Forsey was raised Conservative, but became a socialist, was one of the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (predecessor to today’s New Democratic Party), worked as research-director for the Canadian Labour Congress, and was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal by Pierre Eliot Trudeau. There were a great many issues on which his position was the polar opposite of mine. Nevertheless, he was a great defender of Canada’s constitution, about which he knew more than any other Canadian in history except the Fathers of Confederation, and of the monarchy and always called himself a “Sir John A. Macdonald Conservative”. I gladly acknowledge him to have been a brother Tory. I would not extend the same courtesy to such small-c conservatives as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, J. J. McCullough and Spencer Fernando who have expressed their preference for the republican form of government, even though on a wide battery of other issues I would agree with them. I would recommend that they all read John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown. The most totalitarian governments in history have been republics, the freest have been headed by monarchs. The more I have read and reflected on political science over the years, the more confirmed I have become in a royalism that was at first instinctual. A country needs a hereditary, unelected, head of state who is above partisan politics, and so can truly fulfil the role of the office of head of state, which is to represent the country as a whole, including not just all the various factions of those living in the present, but those who have gone before and who are yet to come as well. Only a king or queen can do this.
I had what for Canadians of my generation was a fairly typical mainstream Protestant upbringing. My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my grandmother on my father’s side subscribed to the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Brandon diocese, we were read Bible stories and said the Lord’s Prayer in school, and celebrated the two main Christian holidays. From the New Testament the Gideons gave me when I was twelve and Christian books I borrowed from the library, I gained a fuller understanding of Who Jesus Christ was, and why He died on the Cross and rose again. When I was 15 I placed my faith in Him as my Saviour. I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half later and a couple of decades after that was confirmed as an adult in the Anglican Church. Several years ago, Michael Coren, a writer who had been a prominent social and religious conservative, left the Church of Rome and joined the Anglican Church in which he was later ordained. Nowadays, whenever he appears in print, he can be depended upon to consistently take the wrong position on whatever hot button topic he has been invited to address. For Coren the move from Romanism to Anglicanism was a move from conservatism to liberalism, a move that I had suspected that he would one day take ever since I had seen him take the republican side in a in-print debate about the monarchy in the National Post years earlier. My decision to join the Anglican Church was very different from this. For me, it was the outcome of a deepening of my theological conservatism from a mere Protestant fundamentalism to a High Anglican orthodoxy.
There was an instinctual element to my theological conservatism as there was to my political royalism. Even before my conversion theological liberalism had repulsed me. By theological liberalism I don’t mean the making of theological arguments for politically liberal positions. I mean the approach to Christianity of those churchgoers who either pick and choose from the Creed what they want to believe and discard what they don’t (keeping heaven and getting rid of hell is an obvious example of this) or profess a “belief” in the articles of the Creed that looks more like unbelief in disguise (think of the sort of person who says he believes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but means by it something that did not require Jesus’ body to return to life and leave the tomb). This sort of thing disgusted me before I was a believer, and the disgust intensified when I became a believer. Over the years I have come to recognize in what I call hyper-Protestantism something that is akin to theological liberalism in attitude and spirit and arguably its immediate ancestor. Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond Protestantism’s rejection of what can be clearly demonstrated from Scripture to be the errors of the Church of Rome and rejects everything it associates with the Church of Rome which is not absolutely required by Scripture even if it is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, held by all the ancient Churches that go back to the unbroken Communion of Churches of the early centuries, from those early centuries to this day. I have come to be as repulsed by this attitude as by liberalism and as a consequence my theological conservatism has deepened and matured.
I hold to the fundamental truths of the Reformation as much now as ever. The first of these is that the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, is the inspired written Word of God, and as such its authority is infallible. The Church, whether it be the actual Catholic Church – all Churches that were once part of the unbroken Communion – or a particular Church, such as the Roman, that falsely claims to be the entire Catholic Church, is not infallible. The Bible, therefore, is the infallible standard of truth, to which the Church is held accountable. Hyper-Protestantism, however, takes this way too far. Rather than merely saying the Church is not infallible, it assumes the Church – not just the Roman Church but the actual Catholic Church – to be wrong about everything, unless it is clearly, in the most literal way possible, proven by Scripture, and takes the position that it is better for the individual believer to ignore the Church and rely directly upon the Holy Spirit for understanding the truth of the Bible. This, however, in effect, treats the private interpretation of the individual believer as infallible, which is a far worse error than that of Rome. The promise of Christ that the Holy Spirit would guide to all truth, was not made to the individual believer but to the collective society of believers the Church, in the persons of the Apostles whom He had set as governors over the Church. This did not make the Church infallible, but it means that personal interpretation must be subject to the teaching of the actual Catholic Church, just as the latter must be subject to the corrective authority of the infallible Word of God.
The second fundamental truth of the Reformation is that salvation in its spiritual sense of the restoration of the sinner to God’s favour, including such things as eternal life and bliss, pardon for sins, and righteousness in God’s eyes, is something that is utterly beyond the reach of our own efforts – we cannot achieve it for ourselves, earn it, or exchange anything for it – and so it has been freely given to us in the gift of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who in His Incarnation, life, suffering, and death did everything necessary to accomplish that salvation and in His Resurrection and Ascension demonstrated it to be complete. We merely receive our salvation as the gift it is in the only way a gift of this nature can be received – by faith, which is believing and trusting, believing the Gospel message that proclaims to us that God has given us a Saviour Who has taken away our sins, trusting Him to have accomplished for us what the Gospel says He has accomplished, which are, of course, the same thing stated two different ways. Our own works – our efforts to please God by what we think, say, and do – as important, essential and necessary, as they are, contribute nothing to our salvation, but rather flow out of our salvation as the effect of its liberating and transforming aspects and our way of thanking God for it. Our works cannot please God in any way, even the sense in which He graciously accepts the imperfect works of believers, if they are done with the intent of contributing to our salvation. The Reformers stressed this truth which is so central to the Johannine and Pauline writings of the New Testament against the the teachings of the Church of Rome which, by the sixteenth century, had fallen so far from the grace of God, that not only did its teachings make salvation resemble a carrot dangled in front of a horse from a stick, but its Patriarch even stooped to the sacrilege and blasphemy of trying to sell salvation as a fund-raiser. Hyper-Protestantism, however, in the name of this fundamental truth, rejects what the Scriptures and Catholic – not just Roman – doctrine clearly teach about the ordinary means God has appointed through which He works to bring the freely give grace (favour) Christ obtained for us on the Cross to us and to create in us the faith by which we receive it. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ establishes a religious society called the Church, which people became members of through the initiatory ritual of baptism, appointing His Apostles as governors over the Church and committing to them the ministry of the Gospel, which included both teaching and preaching and the administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the Gospel Sacraments. The Church, her Apostolic government, and her Gospel ministries of Word and Sacrament are the appointed ordinary means through which God works to bring the grace of Christ to us, and to create in us the faith by which we receive it. Hyper-Protestants reject this in the name of the Reformation truth of the freeness of God’s saving grace, but place themselves in a quandary with regards to the New Testament verses that taken literally, as hyper-Protestants usually claim they prefer Scripture to be taken, tell us that baptism unites us with Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4, Col. 2:12) and that the food that sustains our spiritual life is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (John 6:53-58) which, of course, is offered us as food only in the Eucharist. Since they see baptism and the Lord’s Supper as works, things we do in obedience to God in order to please Him, rather than Sacraments, things through which God works to bless us, they see works salvation in the literal meaning of these passages, and must twist them to fit their theology. Ironically, hyper-Protestants are themselves susceptible to the charge of works salvation. If they are Arminians, they make faith itself into a work by making it into an act of our will by which we meet God’s condition for salvation. If they are Calvinists, they teach that God gave Christ to save only a limited few elect, and that we can only know we are of this elect by seeing the evidence of it in our holy lives, thus essentially telling us to place our faith in our works instead of Christ. By contrast, the Catholic doctrine based on the literal meaning of the above passages is entirely consistent with the freeness of God’s saving grace if Sacraments are understand, as they have been since the Church Fathers – see St. Augustine especially – as a visible, tangible, way of preaching the Gospel, and if it is understood that God works through extraordinary as well as ordinary means.
In both of the above examples of hyper-Protestantism twisting fundamental Reformation truths to attack genuinely Catholic doctrine as well as Roman error it is obvious that hyper-Protestantism is fundamentally rebellion against the legitimate authority God has placed in His Church and not just the exaggerated claims of Rome. In rejecting the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to supreme authority over the entire Catholic Church, the Reformers were actually taking the Catholic position for early attempts by said Patriarch to assert such supremacy were clearly rebuffed in the Ecumenical Councils. Hyper-Protestants, however, reject the entire Episcopal College’s claim to authority over the Catholic Church. That claim, however, is founded in the Bible. Jesus Christ gave the government of His Church to the Apostles, which governing authority could only be passed on to others from those who had it before, which is precisely what we see the Apostles doing in the New Testament when they admitted others such as Timothy and Titus to their government over the lower Orders they, on their Christ-given authority had created, the Presbyters and Deacons. Dr. Luther taught the New Testament truth of the universal priesthood of all believers. Hyper-Protestants conclude from it that if all Christians are priests, then Christ could not have established a more specific priesthood and set it over His Church. This logic, however, would condemn the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament, because national Israel was also described as a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6). The accounts of the Last Supper, especially those of St. John and St. Luke taken together, make it quite clear that Christ established His Apostles as the new priesthood of His Church. Compare the ritual footwashing described by St John at the beginning of his account (13:3-18) with the ritual washing when the Aaronic priesthood was established (Ex 40:12, 30-31). Then note the institution of the Eucharist, the bread and wine of which clearly allude to the grain and drink offerings of the Levitical system, and which are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the One effective sacrifice to which the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed. If it were not already obvious that when the Lord told the Apostles to perform this rite He was telling them to do something only priests could do, note that the word St. Luke uses for “this do” in instituting the Sacrament while generally meaning “make this” or “do this” has a ceremonial meaning of “offer this”. The hyper-Protestant position smacks of the rebellious attitude of Dathan, Korah and Abiram.
The more I studied this the more I came to see how hyper-Protestantism led to theological liberalism, because the rejection of the legitimate albeit not-infallible authority Christ had placed in those He set over His Church and not just the false supremacy claimed by the Roman Patriarch was a step towards rejecting the infallible authority God had placed in His written Word. Latitudinarianism paved the way for deism and rationalism, and Puritanism became the ancestor of both political liberalism (the Whigs began as the successors to the Puritan party in Parliament) and leftism (the French Revolution, the template of all subsequent Communist totalitarian revolutions, was itself inspired by the Puritan rebellion against the godly King Charles I). This led me to place a much higher value on the ancient Creeds, the teachings of the Fathers, and the Councils of the early Church than I had before, and my theological conservatism matured into High Anglican orthodoxy.
The last two years have put a strain on these theological convictions, as the leaders, not only of the Anglican Communion, but the other Communions with an Apostolic ministry, have with few exceptions, submitted to the tyranny of the new false religion of Antichrist that has made an idol out of physical health to which it has demanded that spiritual health and wellbeing as well as psychological health and the health of society, economy, and community all be sacrificed. Abusing the Keys Christ gave to the Apostles – not just St. Peter – they have locked people away from the Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament, not because of unrepentant open sin, but because a respiratory disease that resembles the flu far more than it does cholera, the Black Death, or any of the other far worse historical plagues that nobody ever behaved this stupidly over has been going around. When they opened the Churches again, they imposed all sorts of “safety protocols” such as capacity limitations, social distancing, wearing masks, and in some cases, mercifully much fewer, vaccine passports , all of which are completely contrary to the example set by Him Who healed the sick that were brought to Him, including the infectious lepers, rebuked His disciples for sending the little children away, and promised that whoever comes to Him He would in no wise cast out. Some of these, especially the masks and vaccine passports, are chillingly reminiscent of St. John’s prophecy of the Mark of the Beast. Christ promised, however, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, and I pray that He will rescue her from this apostasy soon.
It is difficult to be a classicist in culture today in a practical rather than a merely theoretical sense because of the aforementioned false religion of Antichrist. The medical Beast has locked me out of museums, the Centennial Concert Hall where I used to attend the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Opera, or anywhere else where edifying culture might be found, except libraries, because I refuse to be bullied into taking his vaccine. Even if I were fully persuaded that the vaccine was 100% safe and effective I would not take it because the bullying manner in which it is being imposed on people is behaviour that ought not to be either rewarded or even tolerated by the civilized. When I look at what the Winnipeg Art Gallery currently has on exhibition according to its website, and the current season of the Manitoba Opera, the loss becomes somewhat more bearable. Having to miss Beethoven’s Fifth a little over a month ago and Haydn’s final symphony later this month is rather stinging however. On the popular culture front I am also shut out of the movie theatres. That is perhaps something to be thankful for. Movies and television shows have been noticeably declining in quality for decades and this has recently accelerated. Look at everything that is now being released through the online streaming platforms. Or better yet don’t. It is all trying to preach the message of “wokeness”, i.e., the racial superiority of people of colour, the sexual superiority of women, the normality of homosexuality and transgender identity and abnormality of heterosexuality and cisgender identity, the impending doom from climate change unless we all stop burning fossil fuels and start eating vegan, and other nonsense of the sort. On the plus side, plenty of classic older films, Shakespeare plays , and the like are readily available to stream as well, although the habit of spending all of one’s time watching a screen is not one that ought to be cultivated.
Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons
I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much. Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities. In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces. In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.
I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:
Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!
He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!
His one and only virtue,
I hate to say it but it’s true,
His one and only virtue is –
He’s not Wab Kinew!
That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug. On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg. The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives. They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner. The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.
Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday. At the latter he said that the statues would be restored. He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did. They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too. They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”. This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying. Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.
In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils. This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable. The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy. They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.
The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms. What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians. We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools. Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves. It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests. The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)
I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC. The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian. Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names. The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.
That ball has been picking up speed ever since. Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations. The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk. Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”. This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”. Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing. Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions. In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash. Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches. Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed. My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above. Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.
Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.
If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.
(1) English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans. It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic. The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made. All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens. Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them. To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.
