The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Anarchy in the Park

As noted on Tuesday, a group of aboriginals has occupied a section of Toronto's High Park. Ho-Hum. One of my hobby-horses is the idea of a slippery slope. You allow a certain thing to happen. A precedent gets created. Soon a very small thing becomes a very big thing. The welfare state began in much the same way with old age pensions. Who could object to giving money to old poor people? Then the next step was the Baby Bonus. Who could object to giving money to young families? Especially when we already give money to old folks. Three generations on we are facing fiscal insolvency of a scale usually only seen in the wake of a major military defeat. 

We are now speeding down another very slippery slope, the aboriginal extortion racket. It began - so far as Canada is concerned - at the time of Oka. Gingerly we passed by other landmarks such as Ipperwash and most importantly Caledonia. We have reached another landmark in the occupation of High Park. To put this in perspective High Park is about 8km from Queen's Park. It was easy for Torontonians to shrug their shoulders during the Caledonia Crisis. After all, Hamilton is a far away place. High Park is on the subway line.

There is so far no proof that an aboriginal burial ground lies beneath that section of High Park, or indeed anywhere in the area. Even should one be discovered it does not therefore follow that such land, used for well over a century now as a city park, should revert to its former usage. As Michael Coren points out an Oxford college is built over a medieval Jewish cemetery. Let the dead bury the dead.

The ancient burial ground is merely a pretext. In fact the Indian burial ground is the most cliched of pretexts. Nearly impossible to prove and possessing the magic force of white liberal guilt. You hear the indignant cries: "How would like us to build over your grandmother's grave?" Well I actually met one of my grandmothers. I have no idea who my great-great-great-great-grandmother was and neither do most people. Anyone buried in High Park would not even have that close a relation to the occupiers. Put it another way. If tomorrow morning old Publius was to drive down to the US and occupy the building site of an aboriginal casino, claiming on specious grounds that the graves of white people would be disturbed, how far would I get?

Racial solidarity is a nasty thing. Ayn Rand once described racism as barnyard collectivism. A collectivism so primitive and irrational that it could appeal only to the most backward of mindsets. The link between the Mohawk Warriors and the Mississauga aboriginals who once lived in Toronto is at best tenuous. In centuries past these tribes slaughter each other with little regret. They did so long before a European language was spoken on these shores. 

For extortion to work a threat must be placed over the victim. Since the aboriginal tribes ceased being a serious military threat to European settlement of this continent more than two centuries ago, the threat is of a different nature. Certainly these "protestors" can be quite disruptive to civilized life, especially in a dense urban environment. A nation capable of fielding - for nearly a decade now - a credible military force on the other side of the world is more than capable of disarming a few dozen thugs. The local police forces could easily do so with the resources at their disposal. Or are the SWAT teams solely for the closure of marijuana grow-ops?

From the Premier of Ontario - arguably the second most powerful man in Canada - down to the beat cops in Caledonia or High Park, a force far more powerful than any army holds sway. It is the power of moral superiority. The aboriginal occupiers lack everything, except the moral certainty that what they are doing is just and proper. The modern Canadian state possess everything except moral certainly. Confronted with the presence of posturing thugs it surrenders cravenly. Why? Because it believes them to be possessed of moral superiority over the remainder of Canadian society. They are a special class apart from other Canadian citizens.

This moral pretence is born of a distorted historical narrative. Accordingly to this narrative - taught diligently in the schools for at least two generations now - the North American continent was a primeval paradise whose inhabitants lived in peace and harmony for millennia. Into this Eden, populated by Rousseau like Noble Savages, entered the rapacious and wicked Europeans. The pale face stole, murdered and cheated the aboriginals out of their birthright. Since it is now impossible to restore "Turtle Island" to its pre-Columbian past, the occasional surrender of territory and the annual expenditure of billions of dollars are acts of partial atonement.

The historical reality is rather less stark. Yes the Europeans were at times quite rapacious. So were the aboriginals. The Myth of the Conquest perpetuated by academics and aboriginal grievance mongers is of their simple, naive and trusting ancestors outwitted and overwhelmed by European settlers. Nothing could be less true and more insulting to the aboriginals of that time. They were overwhelmed certainly but hardly cheated. The economic value of the land they surrendered became great only after it was developed by European settlers. It had previously sustained a few thousand individuals at an extremely low level of development for millennia. After the arrival of the Europeans Canada could sustain a population of 34 million with one of the highest living standards in history. 

The network of treaties established under the auspices of the Crown - and later the Dominion government of Canada - were not a snare to catch unwary aboriginals. Had the British Empire so wished it could have easily displaced the aboriginal population without the pretext of a treaty. Thousands of Acadians were moved by force only a few decades earlier. The British had the means but preferred to negotiate. Why? Because they were attempting to secure the new continent for settlement in the most peaceful and civilized way possible. A manner largely alien to the conduct of the aboriginal tribes.

They hoped in time the aboriginal populations would be absorbed into the new colonial societies. This hope - whatever we may think of it today - was grounded not in malice but benevolence. It was better to live in a modern society than in a stone age culture. That today's aboriginal "protestors" forsake few of the technological and economic benefits of western societies, while denouncing the ideas that allow such societies to exist, is a testament to the superiority of the cultures that displaced their ancestors. To those not blinded by the myth of the noble savage, there is a darkly amusing irony in modern day bigots attacking the crimes of the "white man" while speaking on a cell phone and using a laptop.

The goal of the High Park "protestors" is not land. It is to decisively establish in practice what has already been established intellectually in the minds of many Canadians. That the whole this country morally belongs to the aboriginal peoples. The rest of us live here by their sufferance. What Canadian society pays to the aboriginals will no longer be treaty obligations, or our pity for the state of the aboriginal, no it shall be rent. And who shall collect that rent? Why the leadership of the aboriginal people. Not necessarily the legally defined leadership of these tribes, instead it will be parallel powers like the Mohawk Warriors. We shall now live at the gracious permission of these new tribal chieftains. Welcome to the bottom of the slippery slope.

 

A Colony for Freedmen

Lincoln and the British:

It claims, among other things, that in 1862 Lincoln urged a White House audience of "free blacks" to leave the US and settle in Central America. He told them: "For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people." He went on to say that those who envisioned a permanent life in the US were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land – thus being suited to your physical condition".

The idea of sending American freed slaves "back" to Africa was originally proposed by Thomas Jefferson, whom Lincoln idolized. The idea found fruition in the country of Liberia. Interestingly, the American black settlers in Liberia soon began to behave much as European settlers in Africa would a few decades later, quickly establishing a political hegemony that would last until the 1980s. By the 1920s the League of Nations was investigating charges of slavery having re-emerged in Liberia. Plus ca change..

The Educated Voter

Mugabe's reign of terror continues:

Munyaradzi Gwisai, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s law school, was showing internet videos about the tumult sweeping across North Africa to students and activists last Saturday, when state security agents burst into his office.

The agents seized laptop computers, DVD discs and a video projector before arresting 45 people, including Gwisai, who runs the Labor Law Center at the University of Zimbabwe. All 45 have been charged with treason — which can carry a sentence of life imprisonment or death — for, in essence, watching viral videos.

Gwisai and five others were brutally tortured during the next 72 hours, he testified Thursday at an initial hearing.

(HT)

Well, at least Ian Smith isn't in power.

Let me confess that I'm an old imperialist. For the most part European imperialism was a good thing for the subject populations. This does not mean that the colonial powers did not exploit the native inhabitants, of course they did. Injustice is injustice. Life is also life. Czarist Russia has hardly Victorian England, though it was far superior to the Communist nightmare that succeeded it. The same can generally be said for Europe's former colonies, especially those in Africa.

Not perfect, but better than what else was on offer. Even the less enlightened colonial governments, the Belgians, the French and the Portuguese, offered the natives something resembling civilized government. A thing which few of these nations have seen since.

Freedom is indeed the right of all mankind, democracy, however, is simply a method of maintaining it. If history had proven absolute monarchy to be a better protection for individual rights, so be it. History, however, does not show that. It warns us about the dangers of concentrating power and of rulers who are unaccountable to their people. Mass democracy was a way of checking both problems. Power would be dispersed as far as possible among the people, and the rulers held accountable to a wide electorate. 

For mass democracy to work, however, you need an educated and civilized electorate. The pioneers in developing a stable mass democracy were the English speaking nations. In the United States, and the British settlement colonies, property and education were widely enough diffused that mass democracy was implemented easily and quickly. This was not the case with Britain itself, which possessed a large and semi-literate underclass.

With the steady expansion of the franchise in the nineteenth century, the British educated classes became anxious as to how intelligently the new voters would wield their ballots. To the Liberal statesman Robert Lowe, 1st Viscount Sherbrooke, the answer was clear and dramatic: "we must educate our masters." 

Lowe's solution, unfortunately, was government education. He was, however, deeply suspicious of trade unions and would have balked at the modern bureaucratic system of schooling. The sad trajectory of public education should not obscure the essential wisdom of Lowe's observation, that those who wield the ballot must be sufficiently educate to wield it intelligently.

There are, of course, no guarantees that even the best educated (as opposed to the merely schooled) will behave in an intelligent, rational or fair manner. On the whole an educated citizen is more likely to choose candidates for office in a wise and fair sighted manner. There was a time when democratic systems produced statesmen like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Peel and Gladstone, rather than the pragmatic power lusters that deface public life today. 

What Ian Smith feared was that in granting black majority rule, to a population that was tribal and illiterate, was that in short-order civilized life would collapse. That is what has come to pass in Zimbabwe. The process has repeated itself across Africa, the degree of descent determined often by the degree of insanity of the particular President for Life. In the last decade there was been a sort of African awakening, with the emergence of semi-free countries like Uganda, Ghana and Botswana, as well as a moderating of the continent's less palatable regimes. Still, much of Africa is a long way off, in terms of living standards and rule of law, than it was in 1960.

Ian Smith's failure was not in refusing for fifteen to grant majority rule in Rhodesia, it was in failing to "educate his masters." We shouldn't get too smug in Canada. While schooling is nearly universal, education is not. The seat warmers in our public high schools are the voters of tomorrow. People unable to understand basic math and history are unlikely to be able, or willing, to demand a balanced budget or a free government.