Thanks to the actions of J. Brandon Magoo, the bumbling nincompoop who is the nominal head of the American republic, and, with apologies to Ann Coulter, B. Hussein Obama, who almost certainly is the puppet master pulling Magoo’s strings, the world is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been. To be more precise, these are the two latest in a string of American presidents including the younger Bush and whichever Clinton was really calling the shots between 1993 to 2001 (most likely Hillary as Bill seemed to be caught with his pants down too often to be the one actually wearing them) who for whatever unfathomable reason, possibly having something to do with Russiophobic ethnics having too much influence in their administrations, made a point of poking the Russian bear with a stick by encouraging anti-Russian hostility on the part of her closest neighbours. In the cases of Bush and Obama, they went so far as to overthrow Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and replace them with anti-Russian ones by sponsoring colour revolutions in 2004-2005 and 2014 respectively. Donald the Orange is the exception among the American presidents of the last quarter century which is one of the reasons the Bushes and Clintons and Obamas and Magoos all hate him so much. Instead of the business as usual of enriching themselves by minding the rest of the world’s business, promoting instability in one region and war in another, he took the position that the United States should mind her own business.
Vladimir Putin is the excuse that these bellicose warmongering rejects from both the Peace Academy and the School of Just War have pointed to in order to justify their ramping up anti-Russian rhetoric to levels that were not seen even in the Cold War in which that country was run by a regime committed to a cold-blooded, murderous, atheistic, totalitarian ideology. A former agent of the legendary secret police of that regime, Putin has led Russia in either the office of prime minister or president – he has alternated between the two – since 1999. If one were to take seriously what the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Magoo crowd say about him, one would think that he was the corpse of Adolf Hitler, re-animated and zombified by voodoo magic, and hell bent on the quest to conquer the world, seize its lebensraum, and eat its brains. But then if one were to take that crowd’s opinion seriously, one would have to think that the other Vlad, Zelenskyy that is, the president of Ukraine who jumped into that role after starring in a cheap Ukrainian comic television series in which he played a high school teacher who, well, jumped into the role of president of Ukraine, is a champion of freedom and Western values. Considering that most countries in Western civilization are currently celebrating every form of sexual perversion imaginable in the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins it is possible that Zelensky actually is a champion of “Western values.” He is certainly not a champion of freedom but rather the same sort of autocrat that they, rightly or wrongly, have accused Putin of being ever since he first took office.
There would neither be a president of Russia nor a president of Ukraine had an earlier revolution not driven the legitimate claimant to the allegiance of both Russia and Ukraine from his throne then brutally murdered him and his family. I recently reminded a friend that contrary to all the false ideas of the Zeitgeist of the Modern Age government legitimacy does not come from elections, from the “consent of the governed.” Quite the contrary. People, not having legitimate governing authority over each other, cannot delegate such to their representatives. All a government can obtain from the support of its people is power, the ability to compel through the force of numbers. Authority, the legitimate right to lead, can only be passed on from those who had it before. Moreover, legitimate governing authority on earth should be representative in form of the government of the universe in heaven. (1) God is the King of His Creation. Legitimate earthly government is the government of kings, who receive their authority by inheritance from those who went before them and pass it on to those who come after them. The opposite of the Modern “consent of the governed” theory of legitimacy is actually the case. Take my country, for example, the Dominion of Canada. We are a Commonwealth Realm, over which King Charles III reigns, Parliament in Ottawa legislates, and a cabinet of ministers of the Crown chosen by Parliament governs. Parliament is a democratic institution, obviously, but democracy is not the source of its legitimate authority. It is the other way around. Democracy derives whatever legitimacy it has, in our Parliament, the other Commonwealth Parliaments, and the Mother Parliament in the UK, from the king who authorizes Parliament. Yes, most people don’t think about it this way, but most people are wrong. Parliament’s value consists not in the fact that it is democratic, but in the fact that its worth has been proven over a very long period of time, and that worth consists of this, that it takes the power represented by popular support, the potentially dangerous and destructive power that in the wrong hands is what we call “mob rule” and enlists it in the service of law and order by tying it institutionally to legitimate authority. (2)
The last legitimate king to reign over Russia which at the time included, as it historically had, Ukraine, was Tsar Nicholas II of the House of Romanov. He abdicated early in 1917 when the first wave of revolution broke out in Russia but the incompetence of the government that was set up in his place meant that the problems, other than World War I, that had produced the discontent exploited by the first wave of revolutionaries persisted and in the follow up revolution of October 1917 the Bolsheviks, an evil gang of terrorists that was committed to the atheist, socialist, ideology of Karl Marx, and which consisted mostly of members of minority groups that had ethnic and religious grudges against the Russians, the Russian Orthodox Church, and their emperor seized power. The largest such minority group represented was Jews, a fact that people who have more zeal against anti-Semitism than brains don’t like being pointed out because they think that nobody is capable of recognizing that neither “all Jews are Bolsheviks” nor “all Bolsheviks are Jews” logically follows from it (unfortunately, since all the schools seem to be teaching people today is gender confusion, sexual perversion, and racism against white people, rather than the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they may have a point). They then fought a five and a half year civil war to keep and consolidate that power after which they transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. Early in the civil war, in the summer of 1918, agents of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, murdered Tsar Nicholas, his wife Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children, and their attendants in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg where they had been held captive. Their bodies were taken to the nearby Koptyaki forest and disposed of in such a way that the burial site was not discovered for decades.
In 1981, a few years after the discovery of the burial site, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia recognized the murdered Imperial Family as martyrs and in 2000 they were formally canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. This was most appropriate. Ivan III Vasilyevich took the throne as Grand Prince or Duke of Moscow in1462 and ten years later married Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of Constantine III Palaiologos, the last Byzantine Emperor who died defending his capital Constantinople against the forces of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. Upon this marriage Ivan took the title Tsar, a Russianized form of “Caesar” the title of the Roman Emperor (the Byzantine Empire was the eastern Roman Empire), and while it would be nonsense to claim that he was Constantine’s heir through marriage as there were others in line before Sophia the Tsars did indeed take over from the Byzantine Emperors the role of royal protector of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Tsar Nicholas II, therefore, was in the same position of royal protector with regards to the Russian Orthodox Church when murdered by her enemies that King Charles I had been in with regards to the Church of England when murdered by her enemies in 1649. King Charles I was canonized by the Anglican Church when the provinces of York and Canterbury met in Convocation for the first time after his death when King Charles II was enthroned in the Restoration of 1660. (3)
The Romanov heir, who for obvious reasons would not be a descendent of Nicholas II but the closest other kin, has not yet been restored to the empty throne of the Tsar. Almost a quarter of a century after the canonization of Nicholas II and family it is about time that this be done. Then the illegitimate offices of the presidents of Russia and Ukraine could be done away with as both countries swear allegiance to their legitimate ruler bringing the conflict to an end. Putin could be given a minister’s office in the legitimate government of Russia. Zelensky could go back to his true calling as a television clown. Then Magoo, Obama, and our idiot prime minister Captain Airhead would have to either mind their own business or find somebody else’s business to mind that is less likely to result in mushroom clouds appearing everywhere.
(1) This is extraneous to the subject of this essay, which is why I am putting it here in a note, but the Church’s worship on earth is supposed to be patterned on worship in heaven too. See Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) for the case for this and an account of what that looks like.
(2) Stephen Leacock put it this way “This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy; this, too, by the simplest of political necromancy, the trick of which we now ex pound in our schools, as the very alphabet of political wisdom.” – “Greater Canada: An Appeal” which can be found in TheSocial Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays edited by Alan Bowker (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973).
(3) There is a direct connection between these martyrdoms in that the Puritan revolution and murder of King Charles I in the seventeenth century was the inspiration of the Jacobin revolution and murder of King Louis XVI in France in the eighteenth century which in turn inspired the Bolshevik revolution and the murder of Nicholas II in the twentieth century. King Louis XVI would be another royal martyr although it would have been the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna at the time whose role in relation to the Roman Catholic Church would have more closely approximated that of Charles I to the Anglican Church and Nicholas II to the Orthodox Church. — Gerry T. Neal
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Don Mclean, American Pie
It is very hard to maintain one’s composure when speaking to ordinary Canadians about the disaster in the making that is Canada today. I have engaged personally and via email over the last two years with literally hundreds of my fellow countrymen from all walks of life on the subjects of the national debt, the deficit, the sunsetting of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the draconian and illegal Covid and vaccine mandates and the turbo maladies that flow from them, the various repressive bills sieving through Parliament, the vicious and lying government and media campaign against the Trucker Freedom Convoy, and the unconscionable behavior of the most vindictive, incompetent and unpatriotic prime minister in the history of Confederation.
With precious few exceptions—“precious” is a key word here—I have come away in a state of profound depression. Some readers of my writings as well as everyday interlocutors have accused me of pessimism, which may be true. I recall a remark of Leonard Cohen’s: “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet.” Sometimes I feel completely drenched.
I’ve found the great majority of my correspondents do not know the difference between the debt and the deficit. They draw a blank when I mention the Charter or the Nuremberg Code, let alone Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the Great Reset. None have researched the deception or willful ignorance among our politicians regarding the Covid mandates and not one has examined the harmful and even lethal nature of the vaccines and booster shots. None I’ve spoken to have even heard of SADS—Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, which emerged post-vaccine.
Bills like C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18, which are dictatorial measures designed to muzzle and censor the average citizen, are little more than arcana unworthy of consideration. Most people are indifferent to, or approving of, the push for legislated mask mandates, “a result of a compliant populace,” Cory Morgan writes, “willing to shrug their shoulders and give up personal liberties with little complaint.” The government and medical profession’s targeting of parents who resist the sickness of transgenderitis in order to provide a normal life for their children does not appear to move many Canadians.
For the most part, they are not clear on the frivolous invocation of the Emergencies Act and tend to agree that the government was right in acting against the peaceful and legitimate truckers’ demonstration, to freeze bank accounts and to imprison Convoy organizers on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Nor are they aware that Canada’s chief justice, Richard Wagner, a Trudeau appointee, has violated the principle of judicial neutrality in condemning the trucker protest, thereby putting himself, so to speak, out of court. They have taken the false flag operations against the truckers at face value and naïvely fall for the profusion of spurious Internet “fact-checks” demonizing the convoy—those “typical blue-collar folk, doing real work for a living,” writes Rex Murphy, “a representative group of Canadian citizens with relevant and pressing concerns.”
Nor are they familiar with the Liberal finessing of the related Commission of Inquiry. Convoy lawyer Brendan Miller, for example, was removed from the Inquiry after asking embarrassing questions of the government and objecting to its redacted documents. And as expected, the hearing ended with the government presenting no relevant information, justifying its position, and relying on what Director of the National Citizens Coalition Alexander Brown wittily called, adapting a famous phrase from Hannah Arendt, “the banality of bureaucratic abuse.” The entire operation was an exercise in futility.
They do not know that Justin Trudeau has bought off the press with handsome tax rebates and emoluments, and most have declared their intention to vote for him again. Rampant inflation is laid at the door of Vladimir Putin rather than at Trudeau’s reckless economic policies, energy shutdowns, pandemic over-spending, skyrocketing carbon taxes, anti-farming animus, and record borrowing. They believe in the canard of global warming and they are still convinced that the unvaccinated are viral shedders, though we now know that the vaccinated are the major transmitters. And they are proud to be Canadians, “the best country on earth,” as all too many have proclaimed.
Aspects of what I regard as citizen failure are, of course, to be found almost everywhere, but rarely to the extent that we observe here. Ontario MPP Joel Harden put it in a nutshell on Canada’s Remembrance Day, November 11: “The most formidable check on all politicians are active and engaged citizens who are the lifeblood of any democracy.” We still have our heroes, but they are a visibly shrinking minority. The lifeblood is seeping away. In the words of John Mac Ghlionn at The Epoch Times, “the environment that Trudeau and his colleagues have created [is] one steeped in paranoia and suspicion. They have managed to turn a once respectable country into a surveillance state.”
In some respects Canada under Trudeau is gradually becoming a vassal state.
In thrall to the globalist agenda, Ottawa will introduce legislation to achieve net-zero GHG (greenhouse gasses), at a prohibitive cost to both energy and agricultural production. Yet, according to government statistics, Canada generates merely 1.5 percent of global GHG emissions. Needlessly decarbonizing the productive sector will eventually impoverish the country, as it did Sri Lanka, which seems increasingly to be the prime minister’s ambition. (The fascinating theory of abiotic oil, of course, is dismissed out of hand.)
Another of the scandals we are presently facing is called MAID or Medical Assistance in Dying. This new euthanasia program, which the World Medical Journal describes as “normalizing death as ‘treatment’ in Canada,” is affecting not only the disabled but the elderly, the poor and the homeless as well. Euthanasia, as Stephen Green writes in PJ Media, “the weeding out of undesirables by official means, has been a tenet of progressive ideology from the very beginning,” a system that “encourage[es] suicide over treatment.”
Canada has become the contemporary poster boy for this outrageous regime. Put bluntly, people who no longer recognize the country they grew up in have only two options: to leave or to die.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that Canadians are abandoning the countryin ever-growing numbers. Remaining in Canada depends on whether one considers it to be politically salvageable. For those who have settled elsewhere, the answer is a clear No. For these emigrants, this is not a question of weakness or moral defeat but of simple clarity. It can be said, to adopt George Grant’s injunction, that they are living with courage, for it takes courage to leave everything behind and begin anew in unfamiliar surroundings. They have taken the measure of the situation and do not expect a supine and stupefied citizen body to awaken to the reality of its condition.
Canada is now an immigrant-ridden and fissiparous country, the majority of its people wallowing in obliviousness and proud, it would seem, of their deference to authoritarian dictate. Perhaps the only solution, if there is one, is prairie secession, the goal of the Wexit movement, which appears to be gathering some momentum. The prairie provinces would make a viable and prosperous independent country. Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but discontent is mounting.
Whether or not the movement prospers, there are encouraging signs of pushback against federal government ordinances. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular have served notice they intend to resist Trudeau’s energy policies, the threat of a digital ID rollout, and the likelihood of renewed vaccine mandates and passports. Once the energy and agricultural backbone of the nation, and presently under the enlightened leadership of Danielle Smith and Scott Moe, respectively, these two provinces currently represent a silver lining in a massively dark cloud.
But one thing should be obvious by now: we cannot go back to the status quo ante. The levee is dry.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. His most recent volume of poetry, The Herb Garden, appeared in 2018 with Guernica Editions. His manifesto, Reflections on Music, Poetry & Politics, was released by Shomron Press in 2016. He has produced two CDs of original songs: Blood Guitar and Other Tales and Partial to Cain on which he was accompanied by his pianist wife Janice Fiamengo. His latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House, London, 2019.
Canada’s “Conservatives”, Put Your Sabres Away and Give Your Heads a Shake
When Erin O’Toole was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and Candice Bergen – not the Murphy Brown actress, the Member of Parliament for Portage-Lisgar – was made interim leader, it began to look, much to my surprise, like there might be some hope for the party after all. While the Freedom Convoy protest was underway in Ottawa, the Conservatives led by Bergen actually did their job as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for the first time since Captain Airhead became Prime Minister. They dug in and stood on principle, calling him, the Prime Minister that is, to account for his inflammatory and entirely inappropriate response to the protest, and for his dangerous and illegal invoking of the Emergency Measures Act to crush the protest. Then, as Captain Airhead’s tyrannical power grab was eclipsed by a crisis on the international stage, they did something so stupid that it completely erased the credit they had earned over the previous weeks. They supported the government in its move to hinder Canadians from accessing information about the crisis other than that spun from an anti-Russia perspective and urged the government to expel the Russian ambassador. By doing the former, they adopted the same condescending attitude towards Canadians that we have come to expect from Captain Airhead’s Grits and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s anti-working class socialists, i.e., the attitude of “you cannot be trusted to examine all the information available and come to an intelligent decision for yourselves so we will control what you can see and hear and tell you what to think”. By doing the latter, they were essentially asking the Prime Minister to declare war on Russia.
Captain Airhead does not need this sort of crazy advice from Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. He gets enough of it from his deputy prime minister. The only reason, other than the Lord’s command to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” for not wanting the ground to immediately open up underneath Captain Airhead and drop him screaming into the abyss, is the very practical reason that should that occur Chrystia Freeland would take his place. Of all the ministers of the Cabinet, yes, including Captain Airhead himself, she is by far the worst. Since that Cabinet includes such creeps as Bill Blair, Jean-Yves Duclos, Steven Guilbeault, Patty Hajdu, David Lametti and Marco Mendicino that is saying a lot. Moreover she is herself at her absolute worst when it comes to anything having to do with Russia, Ukraine and geopolitics in general., although she is almost as abysmal with regards to her actual current portfolio which is finance.
The worst cabinet minister
By offering the Prime Minister this advice and taking the stance they are taking the Conservatives are acting as if Stephen Harper were still their leader. Presumably, they would not object to this characterization and regard it as a compliment. It is not intended as such. Stephen Harper was the best Prime Minister the Dominion has had since 1963 but this is not saying much. The entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers have been terrible. Harper was merely the least vile of them. Even so he was bad enough that this writer vowed never to vote Conservative again as long as he led the party, intending, since the other options at the time were much worse, to follow the advice of the late, great, P. J. O’Rourke, i.e., “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards”. Harper had his good qualities, and his bad qualities. What can be seen of Harper on display in the present hawkish attitude of the Conservatives towards Russia is one of his worst traits.
Harper liked to boss other countries around and self-righteously lecture them about their internal affairs and their relationships with their neighbours. This is a trait he shared with Captain Airhead. Granted, there are a couple of big differences in the manner in which they did this. Harper, for the most part, only lectured other countries on serious matters. Captain Airhead lectures other governments for not being “woke” enough, that is to say, not conforming with the latest ridiculous and self-righteous form of identity politics promoted by the Cultural Maoists who dominate academe and the media, both news and entertainment. Harper’s style was also radically different from Captain Airhead’s. Harper came across as someone who was trying to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice “talk softly and carry a big stick” but miscalculating the softness of his tone while hoping that nobody would notice that he didn’t have the big stick. Captain Airhead’s style is much more clownish than this. It summons up the image of a scrappy little chihuahua running up to a much bigger dog that could easily bite his head off and obnoxiously yipping in its face before running to hide behind a big bruiser of a bulldog, with the bulldog representing either the “international community” acting in concert, or the United States. It is not a good image for a leader of our country.
If even a tenth of what we have been fed by the newsmedia about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reliable – and that is a big if, because while all lies must contain some truth in order to be believable, a tenth is a much larger percentage than what we can usually expect from the media and that percentage goes down the more univocal the media is in its take on any given event – the Ukrainians are, of course, much to be pitied. Having sympathy, however, for people who are suffering under an invasion and all its attendant woes, is not the same thing as having the ability to do anything about it. Pretending that they are the same is both dangerous and stupid. Especially in this situation.
Even the United States would be insane to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. While my reason for saying this rests upon different factors that I will briefly explain later, let me add that the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided entirely had the United States behaved differently and better over the last few decades. Although Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is clearly guilty of invading another country, the explanation for his actions is not, as most politicians and media, both liberal and conservative, are claiming, his own imperialist ambition. It is the response of the leader of a country that has been backed into a corner by American-NATO expansionism. It is the response of a bear that has been poked one too many times.
In a pact with the devil made in order to defeat the Third Reich, the Western Allies agreed to hand Eastern Europe over to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. Almost immediately after this the Cold War began. This conflict between the American and Soviet superpowers was necessarily “cold” because the nuclear arms possessed by both made a “hot” war unthinkable. In the Cold War nuclear arms race, each side tried to get the better of the other by obtaining a first strike advantage – the ability to obliterate the other side’s capacity to retaliate. Both sides had to settle, however, for the deterrent that was appropriately named MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. The Cold War only came to an end when both sides, having entered into negotiations under American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to step back from the arms race.
Before the Communist regime in Russia fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Ukraine became independent of Russia, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush and the other leaders of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in the Cold War to protect Western Europe against Soviet invasion – promised Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not seek to expand its membership further than the re-unified Germany. Whether Bush was sincere in this promise or not is debatable. The following year, the year in which the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, saw Operation Desert Storm, in which an American-led coalition went to war with Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In connection with this action Bush declared his vision for a “new world order” in which a coalition of free, democratic, countries, led by the United States, would be the world’s police, acting against countries that aggressed against their neighbours in the way Iraq had. As the implications of this unfolded in the two terms each of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, NATO was transformed from the defensive alliance it had been in the Cold War into the muscle enforcing America’s new, liberal international, world order. In the process of accomplishing this the United States replaced both the anti-Communism of the Cold War era which opposed a totalitarian ideology and system rather than a nation and the diplomacy backed by strength of the Reagan-Bush era, with an arrogant and foolish anti-Russian attitude. This manifested itself early in Clinton’s presidency when he decided to meddle in the conflicts in the Balkans that were tearing apart what from the First World War to the end of the Cold War had been Yugoslavia. Ethnic hostility fueled these conflicts and invariably Clinton sided with Muslim groups, like those in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo against Christian groups, especially the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the group with the closest and deepest ties to Russia. At the end of his presidency Clinton committed the war crime of ordering NATO to conduct an indiscriminate bombing campaign against Serbia. At the same time he brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in violation both of the letter as well as the spirit of American and NATO assurances to Russia.
After Bill Clinton finished serving out his wife’s two terms as president – contrary to all of the rot one hears blaming the horrors of war on masculinity and patriarchy the military misbehavior of the Clinton administration, whose Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell “what’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it”, like that of the Obama administration, the current American administration, and even Captain Airhead’s Cabinet which can do nothing but posture, are all the clear consequence of estrogen poisoning and toxic femininity – he was followed by George H. W. Bush’s morally retarded son, who began his presidency by giving the digitis impudicus to Russia in the form of withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and placing missiles in Poland. He brought seven countries that had either been Soviet republics or Warsaw Pact members into NATO and in the last year of his presidency declared Ukraine and Georgia eligible for NATO membership. Russia could hardly have failed to notice that his and Clinton’s actions were moving America’s military reach closer and closer to their own borders.
The Obama administration with Hillary Clinton as its Secretary of State was even worse. In 2014 they sponsored the second of two colour revolutions against Russia-sympathetic, elected Ukrainian governments – George W. Bush had sponsored the first. In what was absurdly called the Revolution of Dignity that grew out of the Euromaiden protests, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from office in a coup carried out by groups like Svoboda, the party re-organized from the Social-National Party (yes, it was exactly what that sounds like) and the various groups of the so-called Right Sector coalition (the Banderite group Trident, the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense, Social-National Assembly, Patriot of Ukraine, and a few others, all of which were self-identified Nazi groups) with the backing and support of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. While it would be going too far to say that the coup established a Nazi-style Reich regime in Ukraine – the new government was more of a US-NATO puppet regime – later in that year the Azov Regiment, which wears its neo-Nazism on its sleeve, quite literally, (1) was organized and incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard. The Ukrainian government has employed this unit in its harassment of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbass region of south-eastern Ukraine. The Russian separatists in Donbass sought to join the Russian Federation in 2015 and were turned down by Putin. After eight years of harassment by the Ukrainian government and its Nazi army their independence was recognized by Putin just before Russia launched her invasion of Ukraine. This came a matter of months after the present American administration renewed its efforts to bring |Ukraine into NATO with the clear intention of arming its border with Russia.
Had the United States not behaved in this way, had she not replaced her justified opposition to the evil ideology of Communism with an ugly, stupid and bigoted Russophobia and done everything in her power to drive the Russian bear into a corner and start poking at it with Ukraine being her most recent proxy, the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine could have easily been avoided entirely.
While this does not necessarily mean that Putin’s actions are justified, nor does it make the sufferings of the Ukrainians any less horrible, it does mean that neither the United States nor her allies have any moral ground to stand upon in condemning these actions.
In 2001, the United States and a coalition of her allies, including Canada, invaded Afghanistan with the intention of toppling the Taliban government there. In 2003, the United States and a smaller coalition, invaded Iraq for the purposes of regime change. Were these actions justified?
While this writer would answer no, at least with regards to the second war, most of those who saw both of these invasions as justified are among the loudest condemning Putin today. The burden therefore is upon them to explain why the United States is allowed to invade countries and topple governments it doesn’t like while Russia is not allowed to invade a country that had belonged to her until 1991 to prevent the Americans from turning it into a military base with which to threaten her on her very doorstep. One could take the ethical position that it is always wrong for one country to invade another, a position that is commendable for its internal consistency, even though this writer does not believe it to be correct. This position is not available to those who regard the invasions of Afghanistan and/or Iraq as justified. Some might argue that it is wrong for one country to invade another, but it is alright for coalitions of countries under the supervision of some international agency to do so. This would presumably be close to the answer that liberal Democrats in the United States and Liberals here in Canada would give. Internationalists are prone to this sort of thinking. It is obviously wrong, however. If it is wrong for one country to do something, it does not become right when two or more agree to do it. Indeed, it is arguably much worse. It compounds the wrongness of each country invading on its own by involving the others and ganging up on the victim. Others would try to argue to the effect that it is okay for “good guy” countries to invade “bad guy” countries but that it is not okay for “bad guy” countries to invade “good guy” countries. This sort of thinking is puerile, a Modern version of the heresy of Mani, the result of reading too many superhero comic books and watching too many Hollywood action movies. Sadly, it is all too ubiquitous among the post-Cold War generation of neoconservatives who unfortunately have been the most influential group when it comes to geopolitics in both the American Republican Party and the Canadian Conservative Party for the last thirty years. (2)
The ethical side of this conflict is not remotely as easily resolved as all of those jumping on the anti-Russia bandwagon – some going to absurd lengths, such as suggesting a ban on the works of Dostoevsky – think, although Edward Feser had made a strong case that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor a military response from the United States and allies can be justified by the terms of Just War. Ultimately, however, it is the pragmatic side of the matter that dictates that the sort of response that many are calling for is utterly insane.
Even before the United States developed the first nuclear weapons and became the first and to this date only country to use them it was generally agreed that about the stupidest military move anyone could make was to attack Russia. Two notorious conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth century and Adolf Hitler in the twentieth, successfully overran Europe before going to their doom by making precisely this mistake. The advent of nuclear weapons, of which the Russians have their own formidable stockpile has not made attacking Russia any less of a suicidal thing to do.
Unless the United States and other Western countries are willing to risk escalating the conflict into nuclear Armageddon there is not much they can do to back up their angry rhetoric against Russia which makes that rhetoric only so much empty posturing.
Such posturing is bad enough coming from the United States, a nuclear superpower. It is simply clownish for Canadian politicians to engage in this kind of sabre rattling. While clownish behaviour is about all we can expect from Captain Airhead and his horrid deputy, we ought to be able to expect Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to, well, oppose the government when it is doing something this stupid instead of egging it on to take it to the next, far worse, level.
(1) Contrary to the lies of professional anti-hate “experts”, individuals and groups still crazy enough to align themselves with National Socialism today do so proudly and advertise the fact. Most of the Ukrainian groups mentioned, including the Azov Regiment, for example, use or have used, the Wolfsangel and the swastika as symbols. The Ukrainian groups are the real deal. Groups like this in Canada and the United States are smaller, powerless, and generally, much like the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, consist almost entirely of government agents. The two most publicized such groups in relatively recent Canadian history, for example, the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1960s and 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1990s, were creations of the Canadian government, in the case of the former the Liberal government working in conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress, in the latter case CSIS acting on the orders of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government. The intent in both cases was to generate a Nazi-scare among the public. In the earlier instance this was to gain public support for government measures taken ostensibly to suppress such groups but in reality to expand government surveillance and curtail certain civil liberties and basic freedoms. In the latter instance it would seem the motive was to discredit the right-of-centre Canadians primarily from the West who were exiting the Progressive Conservatives in dissatisfaction to form an alternative prairie populist party by smearing them through guilt-by-association with the Heritage Front which popped up right around the same time. Professional anti-hate “experts” demonstrate the fraudulent nature of their profession in the way they do not focus their attention on real, self-identified, neo-Nazi groups like those in Ukraine but instead try to smear Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, populists, immigration reformers and basically anyone who disagrees with the left-liberal agenda as being closet neo-Nazis. The same anti-hate “experts” who spent decades trying to get elderly Ukrainian Canadians stripped of their citizenship and kicked out of the country because they served the SS, usually as translators, often under duress, in the Second World War, despite no evidence that these men were guilty of war crimes, seem to have less of a problem with the present Liberal government’s providing funds and training for the Azov Regiment. They provided the media with a condemnatory statement but did not pursue the matter with the vehemence with which they have persecuted the elderly Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers of Canadians. Nor have they shown much interest in the Azov Regiment’s biggest cheerleader in Canada, the deputy prime minister, who has twice been denied entry to Russia or the Soviet Union as it was the first time this happened over her involvement with the Euromaiden seditionists and their predecessors. It is true that accusing ethnic Ukrainians living in the West of Nazism is a KGB disinformation tactic going back to the Cold War – John Demjanjuk , the American equivalent of the elderly Ukrainian Canadians mentioned above, was a famous victim of just such a disinformation campaign, but in the case of the deputy prime minister, who cries disinformation every time her unsavoury connections in Ukraine are brought up the boy crying Wolfsangel happens to be right and her cries of disinformation have long ago been debunked by every researcher willing to dig into the matter. Note that the anti-hate “experts” alluded to are heavily funded by the Canadian Liberal government.
(2) I am using “neoconservative” in its American rather than Canadian sense here. From the perspective of those, such as this writer, who hold to traditional British-Canadian Toryism, all of American conservatism is neoconservative, being a form of liberal republicanism. In the context of American conservatism, neo-conservatives were originally Cold War liberals who moved to the right in the last decades of the Cold War when the New Left was in its ascendancy in American left-liberalism. While these were notably hawkish in comparison with some other elements of the American right, such as the libertarians, their hawkishness was nothing in comparison with the next generation of American neoconservatives who emerged in the post-Cold War era preaching American unipolarity, a vision that resembled George H. W. Bush’s new, liberal internationalist, world order, except that in it the United States is even more prominently at the top of the order, the sole global hegemon. This is the sort of thinking that has been too influential in the American Republican Party and Canadian Conservative Party in recent decades. George Grant warned that the world was heading towards just such an unipolar American hegemony in his Lament for a Nation (1965), reminding us that in the wisdom of the ancients a “universal and homogenous state” would be the ultimate tyranny. — Gerry T. Neal
TORONTO. November 28, 2018. The trial of YOUR WARD NEWS editor Dr. James Sears and publisher Leroy St. Germaine on charges under Canada’s notorious “hate law”, Section 319 of the Criminal Code opened this morning in Toronto before Judge Richard Blouin. The two newspapermen are charged with wilfully promoting “hate” against two privileged groups; namely, Jews and women. Sec. 319 charges are very seldom laid and, as Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression which is supporting Dr. Sears and Mr. St. Germaine, pointed out to a CBC reporter, they are only ever laid against Christians or people on the right side of the political spectrum
Crown Attorney Robin Flumerfelt offered an overview of the case with a vehement denunciation of the political views of the zany satirical YOUR WARD NEWS. “The paper also contains repeated claims of a worldwide, blood-thirsty Jewish conspiracy, court heard. Imagery, for example, depicts Jews as devils with serpent tongues and reptilian hands. Among its themes, the prosecution said, was that Jews were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Holocaust was a myth invented by Jews to strengthen their control of the world, and the glorification of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. ‘These are examples of the communications that the defendants made available to hundreds of thousands of homes without being asked,’ Flumerfelt said, calling their actions an ‘overwhelming breach’ of the Criminal Code,” the Toronto Star (November 28, 2018) reported.
The rest of the day was taken up with the testimony of Professor Derek Penslar, who teaches Jewish history at Harvard University. His report found that YOUR WARD NEWS is anti-semitic and expresses admiration for Adolf Hitler. True, YOUR WARD NEWS is critical of Zionist power and certain conspiratorial people like George Soros, who are Jewish and, true, that it does speak sympathetically of Adolf Hitler, but the legal question is whether its satirical views and cartoons, meant to burst the bubbles of the pompous, wilfully promote “hatred” or action. Penslar ticked off a number of historical events involving Jews including their major role in the creation of communism and the perpetration of mass crimes and murders under Soviet communism and the role of crypto-Jews, not Moslems, in the genocide of over a million Armenians in Turkey in World War I. He didn’t directly say that these accusations were false. The offence seems to be accusing groups of Jews or even individual Jews like the Rothschilds or Soros of bad things.
During cross-examination by defence lawyer Dean Embry pointed out: “Nowhere in YOUR WARD NEWS does it say that all Jews were responsible for the murder of 50,000,000 Christians in the former Soviet Union.”
Saying that Jews behave as an “entitled” group is anti-semitic, he insisted. As well, he stated: “I don’t believe claims of the deeds or the Rothschild Bank have any basis in reality.” Moreover, “George Soros supports liberal causes financially” in his view. He was emphatic: “The holocaust happened” and “Fred Luchter is a fraud.” Mr. Leuchter was an expert in execution devices used in U.S. prisons. Ernst Zundel commissioned him to visit Auschwitz surreptitiously and examine the alleged gas chambers. His Leuchter Report found no chemical or forensic evidence of mass extermination.
YOUR WARD NEWS frequently states that it doesn’t hate Jews but wants them to be saved by embracing Jesus. For instance, as Mr. Embry pointed out to Professor Penslar YOUR WARD NEWS states that today’s Jews cannot be blamed for the involvement of some of their ancestors in the slave trade. “You can find Christian love in YOUR WARD NEWS.”
The Crown’s expert witness disagreed: “I read such statements as attempts at self-exculpation.”
He called YOUR WARD NEWS “very 21st century. The multi-coloured cartoons” are engaging and there is a lot going on in the conversation bubbles.
Court proceedings were briefly interrupted at exactly 12:00 noon, when a portly Robert James, a former YOUR WARD NEWS employee, leaped up and shouted: “Get these two assholes out of here. Get the Mossad to take them out!” referring to the defendants. James has been struggling with personal demons for over a year and has charged that Dr. Sears is an agent of Vladimir Putin. He is charged with making threats against Dr. Sears and his family and doing over $10,000 in damage vandalizing Dr. Sears car. He is under bail conditions to avoid all contact with Dr. Sears. At one point he was supposed to be called as a Crown witness. A police officer escorted him from the room.
Judge Blouin immediately reacted: “I issue an Order that Robert James is banned from the courtroom.” He warned that any such disruptions of court decorum would not be tolerated.
the anti-free speech Toronto Anti-Hate Network put out a Facebook alert to supporters. However, experienced courtroom observers saw no members of the AHN or of several Zionist lobby groups that pressured for these charges to be laid.
Canada’s New Immigration Minister Welcomes Russian Homosexuals As “Refugees”
Chris Alexander, Canada’s new Minister of Immigration is off to a bad start with an announcement that Canada will welcome Russian homosexuals who claim persecution.
Canada’s new Refugee Class
LifeSite News (August 13, 2013) reports: “Canada’s newly appointed immigration minister said that Russia is wrong in restricting homosexual propaganda aimed at youth and indicated that refugee claims by Russian homosexuals will be given serious consideration by the Conservative government.
Speaking at a Canadian citizenship ceremony in Surrey, B.C. on August 12, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has made its position on the Russian laws against homosexual proselytizing known and that Russian refugee claims ‘related to this particular issue will of course be looked at very seriously by our very generous system.’
‘This is a rights issue and Canadian values… require us to speak up when those rights are violated in gross ways,” Alexander said according to a Global News report. ‘We are going to speak out about Russia’s inappropriate actions in this area until the situation improves.’ …
Campaign Life Coalition gives Alexander a “caution” status for his voting record on life and family issues. …
Alexander voted against Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312 to study whether a child in the womb is a human being based on the preponderance of evidence from modern medical science.
He voted for Bill C279, the ‘transgender & transsexual empowerment bill which added the radical concepts of “gender identity” and ‘gender expression’ as protected rights in the Human Rights Act and Criminal Code.
Prime Minister Harper recently waded into the mainstream media frenzy surrounding the Russian law banning homosexual propaganda, suggesting that Russian authorities are cracking down on people because they are homosexual.
“I think it’s important to recognize there are some controversies in this matter, but the reality is that our position is that we don’t imprison or kill people for acts committed freely between adults,” Harper said according to a Globe and Mail report.
‘We don’t imprison people for their expressing political positions. I think our position in this regard represents the position of Canadians and they expect that we speak in favour of these rights,’ he added during a speech in Miramichi, New Brunswick.
However, homosexuality itself is not prosecuted in Russia. Instead the Russian government recently voted, 436 to 0, to ban homosexual propagandizing by foreign or domestic activists.
The new law prohibits the promotion of homosexuality, and other deviant sexual behaviors, among minors by making it illegal to give children ‘information aimed at forming non-traditional sexual behavior among children, suggesting this behavior is attractive, and making a false statement about the socially equal nature of traditional and non-traditional relationships.’
Individuals using the Internet to spread homosexualist propaganda can be fined up to 5,000 roubles (US $155); officials can be fined up to 10 times that amount. The maximum fine is one million roubles (US $30,800).
Foreigners found in violation of the law can be arrested and held for up to 15 days before being deported.
The legislation will effectively outlaw ‘gay pride’ festivals and stop attempts by foreign homosexualist activist groups to normalize their lifestyles or campaign for same-sex legal recognition in Russia.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin defended the bill, saying that while it is ‘necessary to defend the rights of sexual minorities,’ Russian public opinion must also be respected. A state-sponsored poll found that 88 percent of Russians agree with the homosexual propaganda ban.
Under the law, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who is on record for promoting homosexual rights as a key component of Canada’s foreign policy, could theoretically run afoul of Russian law.
Last year Baird told the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations that he is ‘aggressively’ pursuing what he called Canada’s “principled, values-based” foreign policy.
As part of that effort, Baird said that he is working with western countries to promote homosexual rights in countries around the world where ‘violent mobs … seek to criminalize homosexuality,’ and to make Canada “a welcoming haven for homosexual refugees.”
REAL Women of Canada recently blasted Baird for trying to impose what it describes as ‘his own perspective on homosexuality’ in foreign countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and Russia that have passed laws aimed at preserving the traditional family structure.
“Just who does John Baird think he is, using taxpayers’ money to promote his own personal agenda and endeavouring to set standards for the laws of foreign countries?” asked Gwen Landolt, National Vice-President of REAL Women of Canada, in an August 8th press release.
REAL women slammed Baird for ‘working extensively behind the scenes to prevent Russia from passing legislation designated to protect Russian minors from homosexual propaganda.’”
The Conservative government’s militant adoption of a key lank in the Obama foreign policy — promoting homosexual rights around the world is most peculiar. Many members of Harper’s caucus and vast numbers of his supporters are social conservatives. The Prime Minister’s assertion: “We don’t imprison people for their expressing political positions,” is laughable. Brad Love is in prison today solely for the non-violent expression of his political views. Arthur Topham an anti-Zionist blogger may face the same fate in an upcoming trial under Sec. 319 of Canada’s Criminal Code the notorious “hate law” which bans precisely that — political opinion, if is harshly critical of privileged minorities.
Let’s be quite clear: Since the time of President Brois Yeltsin, homosexual activity among adults is not illegal in Russia. The news laws simply outlaw homosexual advocacy or recruitment.
Has the Tory Government become a captive of the homosexual lobby? There are some disturbing signs it has. In the wakw od Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko warning athletes heading for the 2014 Winter Games at Sochi to refrain from “homosexual propaganda” spurred Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird to sputter: “This mean-spirited and hateful law will affect all Russians 365 days of the year. … It is an incitement of intolerance, which breeds hate. And intolerance and hate breed violence.” (Globe and Mail, August 2, 2013)
The Globe and Mail editorial board, which is a virtual arm of the homosexual lobby, of course, approved. In an editorial entitled “Russia’s curious pre-Sochi crackdown”, The Globe (August 5, 2013) enthused: “Canadians should be encouraged by their government’s vocal stance in defence of the gay, lebian and transgendered communities in other countries.”
Frustrated Conservative party supporters and backbenchers will note the absence of any comparable concern about countries where Christians are routinely massacred, like, say, India where Hindu extremists frequently murder of burn out Christian villagers.
In an equally disturbing and related issue, the Tories have made a judicial reference to the Supreme Court of Canada asking for guidance as to how much the Senate can be reformed without seeking provincial consent. The Globe and Mail (August 1, 2013) reports the government’s disturbing argument and train of thought: “The government asked the Supreme Court to adopt a flexible approach to determine how its Senate reform plans jibe with the Canadian constitution — just like years ago when it ruled in favour of allowing same sex marriage. ‘Slavish adherence to original intent has been rejected by this court … in, for example, the Same Sex Marriage Reference, where the court held that the understanding of ‘marriage\ that prevailed in 1867 should not be determinative of our present day understanding,’ the government argued.” That’s right. The Constitution doesn’t mean what its words mean; it is to be interpreted flexibly to mean whatever the cultural communists on the Supreme Court want it to mean.
As we observe the triumph of the homosexual agenda in Ottawa, even under a nominally “conservative” government, we are revolted at the gall of the revolutionaries on the Supreme Court, who, in ruling that Christian traditionalist activist and homosexual critic Bill Whatcott should be gagged, insisted that homosexuals were a “vulnerable” minority, likely to be intimidated or silenced by Mr. Whatcott’s few hundred pamphlets.
Finally, the much persecuted Mr. Whatcott comments in his blog:
“Hmmm, it just occurred to me, five months ago my so-called “hate speech” conviction, imposed by a kangaroo tribunal in Saskatchewan was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada. I was made liable for a big fine and all of the Kangaroo Commission’s court costs. My so-called “hate speech” was actually accurate medical and social facts on the downside of homosexuality and the good news that God is able to set homosexuals free.
From the point of view of logic, my speech on important moral and political issues related to homosexuality seems more meritorious to me than the right to show gay propaganda to children over their parent’s objections. My speech was directed at the general public, not primary school children.
Maybe, I could qualify as a refugee to Russia? God knows the Marxism being imposed on Canada is starting to feel stifling!”
Contact Info:
Immigration Minister Chris Alexander Constituency Office 100 Westney Road South, Unit E101, Ajax, Ontario L1S 7H3 Phone: 905-426-6808 Fax: 905-426-9564 Email: chris.alexander@parl.gc.ca
Prime Minister Stephen Harper House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0A6 Phone: 613-992-4211 Fax: 613-941-6900 E-mail: stephen.harper@parl.gc.ca
Canada’s new Refugee Class