They're Laughing Now

But will the Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa elites be laughing when a pro-independence party takes power in Edmonton?  Quebec was able to black mail Canada into Trudeaupia, aided and abetted by Red Tory Ontario.  Perhaps the threat of an independent Alberta will snap this country out of its paralysis and move us toward freedom.  The West has always been pissed at Central Canada, heck it's practically a Canadian Archtype - the Angry Westerner or especially the Angry Albertan.  Are they serious this time?  Well, keep moving in the same direction (i.e. to the left politically and downward by all other measures) my fellow Trudeaupian subjects and we'll see how far we can push them.  Now there's a new national pastime!  Let's see how angry we can get the richest province in Confederation.  When they finally tell the rest of us to shove it, we'll say we're really sorry and promise not to steal as much from then as we did in the past.  Sure.  They'll believe us too.  You can't bribe Alberta, it's mostly their money anyway. 

As for me folks, when they go, if they go, I'm on the first flight to Calgary.  If all that's left of Canada is one province, then out of loyalty to Canada I'll leave this pathetic charade we're slowly becoming.  Before anyone goes off telling me that everyone in Cattle Country is a gun totin' Christian fundamentalist just itchin' to lock up the gays and hunt anyone who's skin colour is darker than pale white, shove it.  I don't buy it anymore.  I doubt Albertans are all that more religious than people in Ontario.  The religious / secular split is strongly related to the rural / urban split.  We're simply more effective here in Imperial Toronto at suppressing dissent.  "You still believe in God! How backward!"  Sure, and believing in the God called Government is somehow an improvement?  At this point in history the better elements among the Christian community are pro-freedom.  The secular elements in Canadian society are for the most part highly statist.  They've shown a complete unwillingness to act in the face of the gathering threats to our national security and economic well being. 

Times change, at other points in Western history overall and Canadian history in particular, the comparatively secular elements have been the pro-freedom faction.  Today the secularists have dropped the ball in the fight for freedom.  Had we followed the predominately secular left in the latter half of the 20th century not only would the Soviet Union have remained a global force but North American society would have collapsed.  The 1960s were not a period of liberation but anarchy.  In their initial stages the two have a similar feel and look, yet soon enough their differences become apparent.  All revolutions, as the truism goes, go too far.  This explains temporary excesses but not long-term disasters.  The French Revolution failed not because its intellectual leaders we're too radical - though that was certainly a problem - but because they had no plan. 

Rousseau's Great Legislator was merely absolutism without either legal or moral restraint.  When you pine for a dictator one will eventually come along, whatever protestations might be made about "liberty, equality and fraternity."  The law of single rule admits no equal, as Schiller reminded us.  What applied to the French two centuries ago applies to the radicals of the 1960s.  They had no plan.  They're goal, as far as they had one was, to paraphrase Orwell, a boot in the face of Western Civilization.  A nihilistic attack on the collected wisdom of two and a half millennia.  They're cover was the injustices of the past, as all revolutions.  The baby, sometimes quite literally given the declining birth rate, got thrown out with the bath water.

What does this have to do with Alberta?  If the main objection to the "Alberta approach" is that it is "too religious" then what is the alternative?  The pro-freedom secular faction in modern society is tiny, a collection of quarreling Objectivists, Austrians, Libertarians and a miscellaneous group that draws to a greater or lesser extent on those three, relatively new, traditions of thought.  The secular forces in Canadian society, and Western society in general, are committed to statism with an unthinking fanaticism.  They cling to the Golden Era of four decades ago and hope for its resurrection, so to speak.  Partly this is late middle aged nostalgia and partly a realization that they failed in many of their goals.  None of this is surprising.  How do you build on nothing and especially a nothing so openly and eagerly declared.

As for the "fundamentalists," yes they are a threat, perhaps a greater one long-term given that Christianity is an actual intellectual system rather than a series of disconnected slogans.  Still, the theocrats in waiting are a small minority and regarded with as much suspicion within the Christian community as from without. On a side point, the difference between the Christian West, or what's left of it, and the Muslim East, is that mainstream Christianity condemns and attacks its violent and fanatical fringe groups.  It does not give tacit support to those seeking to destroy liberal democracy.  This may change, we'll see.  It is also easier, in my experience, to challenge the average Christian's faith in Him than the average Toronto Liberal / NDPers faith in It - Government.  The former will usually give you a polite hearing, the latter will denounce you as a heretic to It and a traitor to Canada. 

For the time being I prefer my religionists straight rather than on the rocks with a twist of B.S.  If Colby Cosh is looking for a room mate, the e-mail address is on the left hand panel.