The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Multicult Democracy, Red in Tooth and Claw

Among the proles:

For instance, I thought the election was about the economy. And it was. But just below the placid surface of Ontario politics there is a sea of social tension and percolating class warfare that a riding like Don Valley West epitomizes. The northern half is home to the palatial mansions of the Bridle Path, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country, while the south is flanked by Thorncliffe Park, its rows of 40-storey tenements literally bursting with new Canadians and boasting the highest concentration of Muslims in Canada.

The north largely votes blue with the electoral map getting redder the further south you go. It’s your classic tug-of-war over the redistribution of wealth, but it is also ground zero in a major reckoning this country is going to have to come to grips with: What, if anything, constitutes Canadian values in a multiethnic country?

Straddling that divide would have challenged Mackenzie King himself. Naturally the pale faced WASPs of the Bridle Path want religion kept out of the schools, partly out of fear of the Muslim hordes and partly out of their deep seated suspicion of religion in general. This is not to say that the Scrooge McDucks of the Canadian Establishment are all militant agnostics. The pious among the upper 1% of the income spectrum tend to prefer the genteel confines of an Anglican or United Church. It's the enthusiastic religions that make them uncomfortable.

It is a maxim of modern Canada that the religious should be seen and not heard. The Christians should not be heard because they hold radical beliefs, which were once quite conventional. The Muslims should not be heard because they too hold radical beliefs, but radical beliefs (i.e. very socially conservative ones) that do not fit into the mushy concepts of multiculturalism. In the Cult of Multicult the villains are always old angry white folk with John Deere caps, the heroes are colourfully dressed and skinned immigrants.

The reality, as this thwarted PC candidate in Don Valley has come to understand, is that not all the immigrants are quite as smiley faced as imagined. She uses the term "reasonable accommodation." To those less enamoured with the Multicult ideal the word appeasement might come to mind. Not all the Muslim immigrants seek to retain the bigoted ways of their homelands. One congregant of a local mosque told candidate Andrea Mandel-Campbell:

What I don’t understand,” said one man, “is what an imam is doing in a public school. The girls should not be separated, we’re in the 21st century after all.” He went on to add, “That is also why I don’t think it’s right that my tax money goes to pay for the Catholic school system.”

One of the recurring themes in my multiculturalism posts is that it will likely be the immigrants who destroy the Cult of Multicult. A policy driven in no small part by white liberal guilt can only be destroyed by the objects of that guilt rejecting it. Of course the WASP elite could stop feeling guilty about their country's history, but let's not hope for miracles. A great number of the Muslim immigrants to this country have no desire to return to the barbarism of their homelands. They like their Canada peaceful, prosperous and essentially secular in its public institutions.

So you're a nominally conservative political candidate, and with the Ontario Progressive Conservatives the emphasis is on the word nominal, how do you handle this tricky issue? You could try the old Wilfrid Laurier approach and say that whatever our divisions we should above all be Canadian. That would, of course, be the correct approach. With some limited exceptions at the federal level, as with Jason Kenney's tweaking of the citizenship test, that is exactly the approach that is not being followed.

Appealing to our common Canadianism would imply we have a working definition. We once did. It was, however, a very British definition of being Canadian. This was not a contradiction. Most Canadians until the second world war thought of themselves as being culturally British, as opposed to Americans. This worked well enough until first the British Empire collapsed and then Quebec nationalism surged.

Our British identity was by the 1960s seen as horribly old fashioned. Britain was sliding down the league tables and so was the prestige of being British, even in the narrow cultural sense. With Quebec nationalism entering a militant phase it was decided that to modernize Canada, appease Quebec and integrate the wave of non-British immigrants that arrived after 1945, the British elements of the culture would be junked.

Away went the Red Ensign, the Maple Leaf Forever and pious talk about the Magna Carta. After briefly flirting with the concept of biculturalism, the Canadian political and cultural establishment decided to opt for multiculturalism. It seemed to solve the immediate problems at hand. Canada would get a new identity, the Two Solitudes would be downgraded to just two among many different ethnic groups, and the new immigrant groups would not feel alienated.

There is subtle difference between being cosmopolitan and being multicultural. Both believe in cultural diversity, the former, however, assumes universal values. I suspect that Trudeau had a cosmopolitan understanding of what Canada would become. The Canada as a sub-arctic Balkans was likely not his goal or that of multiculturalism's early advocates in this country.

Had the experiment in multiculturalism been accompanied by an insistence on maintaining a core Canadian identity, it likely would have worked out. The only plausible core identity in early 1970s was a British derived one. Even a generic check list of "modern values" has a certain slant: liberal democracy, individual rights, rule of law, market economies, equality between the sexes and religious toleration. Uncontroversial stuff, eh? Yet each of those concepts were either pioneered or evangelized by the British Empire. 

To much of the Canadian elite, once militantly pro-Empire, anything that smacks of British influence is now old fashioned and "colonial." That many of these values are now widely accepted in cultures that were never under the sway of Westminster does not register. This is about aging boomers reliving their adolescent rebellion against their parents generation. The cultural crises of today are seen through the lens of the 1960s.

If we are to cross the type of political divide seen in Don Valley West, and repeated elsewhere in Canada, there must be a push toward a common Canadian identity. This will mean a partial revival of the British inspired values of the past. Not a crude regurgitation of the past, but a recognition of where this country came from in order to better allow us to move forward. Few "new" Canadians will want to integrate into a country that does not believe in itself.

 

The Losers Game

Your humble correspondent spends a good deal of his waking hours reading. I sometimes forget to take note of what I'm reading and half-recall it the following day. "What was that guy talking about? The Euro burning down Europe or something? Was it in last week's Economist or this week's New Yorker?" I'll be honest and admit to a bit of blurring effect on the Publius brain. For reasons not entirely clear to me I've been going through quite a bit of African anthropology stuff. Stone age tribesman and their customs.  

Since most anthropologists, like most academics, lean heavily to the Left these articles tend to have small multiculturalist touches. Themes include the bemoaning of the loss of traditional cultures to the ravages of westernization, not so subtle mockery of western values and the quiet insistence that people who crap behind bushes and get married at thirteen are modern day "noble savages."

It's all a bit tedious but an overarching message comes across, the West sucks. Not all anthropologists believe this but there is enough of a tendency to be noticeable even to the casual reader. The admiration scholars have for cultures seems to be inversely proportional to their success. Primitive hill tribe barely able to survive the monsoon season? Moral paragons we should all aspire to imitate. The United States or the British Empire? Bastions of evil, if we may use so old fashioned a term.

This reverence for the primitive seeps out of anthropology into other fields. Whenever someone defends a particular western custom or practice, a frequent retort is that in the Oboto tribe, to use a fictional trope, they see things differently. Huh? What the hell do I care about the Oboto tribe? Never heard of them till you brought it up. Does that show my ignorance or the fact that good tribes persons of the Oboto really aren't that important.

The Oboto are an obscure example. They help show off the learning of the person doing the talking. It is a suggestion that Western values are not universal values. End message is that everything is relative. Yet none of this is particularly relevant or original. Anyone who pays attention to the news is quite well aware that Western values are not universal. It was not Swedish airline stewardesses or Portuguese mechanics who flew the planes on 9/11.

My lack of knowledge about the Oboto does not highlight my ignorance, only their irrelevance. Most people have heard of the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Indians, the Germans, the Dutch and the French. A fair selection of cultures. Why have your heard of them and not the Oboto? Because they are not losers.

I use the term loosely. I'm not saying that the Oboto are bad people, just not very successful. They are the small Mom & Pop shop of global culture. Not a bunch of hasbeens - like say the Greeks - or might yet be - like the Chinese - or people at the top of their game - the Americans. Neither they nor their ancestors have made much of an impact on human history. In short, they're a bunch of losers descended from other losers.

It is at this moment that someone at the back of the room, in all their purple apoplectic glory, screams racist. Notice that I didn't say where the Oboto live. Sounds vaguely African but it could be Asian, possibly even from the Americas. I also mentioned cultures whose practitioners are not all white and uptight. The Oboto are backward not because of their race but because of their culture. Ship 'em off to Eton at a young age and I suspect they'd come out like Englishmen.

Shipping 'em off to Eton would imply that they would learn something there that they wouldn't learn back in the homeland of the Oboto. Exactly. Britain, at least Britain before the Left got a hold of it, was one of the successful nations in human history. So it would seem to make sense to study successful cultures across the planet and through history, picking up on what worked and dropping what did not. Well it would make sense to you, me and most of the people reading this blog. It does not make sense to the multiculturalist.

I mean mulitculturalism in the sense of advocates of cultural relativism, not in the colloquial usage as describing a multiethnic or multiracial society. The latter is neither inherently a good or bad thing, the success of such a societies depends on the overarching political, legal and cultural framework. It works in North America for the most part, it doesn't really work much of anywhere else. While ordinary people may speak of mulitculturalism as ethnic diversity, the intellectual Left view it as society in which different cultural value systems are held to be of equal weight. The Oboto tribe = Danish.

Such relativism lifts up the Oboto but more importantly it lowers the Danes. It celebrates failure and denigrates success. We are asked, in its name, to celebrate the primitive and vilify the modern. It is the Big Lie of contemporary life. Few really believe it is better to live in a mud hut than a skyscraper. Their goal is undermine the culture of the skyscraper builders not to celebrate the tribesmen. The motivating impulse is one of envy. Multiculturalism really is for losers.

 

The Wars of the Tribes

The Cult of Multicult reaches contradiction:

The Toronto District School Board says it is meeting its obligation to accommodate students’ religious beliefs by allowing an imam to lead students in prayer on school property.

The board came under fire this week when a Hindu group that regularly criticizes Islam raised objections to Friday Muslim prayer sessions, which have been held inside a cafeteria at Valley Park Middle School in Flemingdon Park for about three years.

The impressive fact of this story is not that a Muslim group asked for special privileges, or that the Toronto District School Board folded to their demands, it's who is opposing this little breach in the separation of mosque and state. Not the descendants of Simcoe and Champlain. Nope. They're the ones who caved in for fear of being called the "R" word. They even invoked the Trudeau Charter for political cover. It's a Hindu association and a group of secularly minded Muslims. Welcome to modern Canada, where the immigrants are saving us from the immigrants. 

Nor are the anti-prayer groups defending their actions on religious lines. They are upholding good old fashioned separation of church and state principles. Somewhere George Brown is smiling. This story serves as a fascinating parallel to how religious freedom was established in this country. In the 1840s, after decades of sectarian wrangling, the various protestant churches reached an informal agreement that no church would have special government privileges. The public schools would be run along broadly secular lines, with religious instruction kept to Christian generalities. In time even this was dropped.

Unfortunately the French-Canadian Catholics failed to get the memo, and were obstinate in having their own government funded schools. To stay in power John A Macdonald cut a deal, as he so often did, to placate the sensibilities of the more militant of the two solitudes, plus the Irish Catholics who were becoming electorally important. That dangerous precedent has made it harder to oppose demands from other religious groups.

Government financed Catholic Schools are a sad exception to this country's mostly firm commitment to keeping public money out of religious hands. Luckily this group of Hindus and liberal Muslims have followed the path of free church men like George Brown, and not religious rent seekers like Bishop Strachan. 

Witness this bit of loveliness:

But Ron Banerjee, director of Canadian Hindu Advocacy, said his group has received support both from Hindus and non-Hindus who say the TDSB is going too far.

Islamic groups are “imposing their view and trying to change the rules, regulations, norms and values to accommodate themselves, and in the long-term, to spread their ideology,” he said.

“….Pretty soon we’re going to have 50 different ethnicities and religions asking for different accommodations.”

Let be me blunter than usual. If a white man, to say nothing of a white Christian, said the above he'd be immediately branded as a racist, even though this is a religious issue. Racist being the modern PC word for evil-doer. Why are two groups of relative newcomers to the Canadian "mosaic" putting in a firmer fight than the old stock Canadians? Because multiculturalism has precious little traction among most immigrant groups. Someone escaping from the South Asian caste system has a very firm understanding of the dangers of cultural relativism. There are certainly race or ethnic hustlers among these groups, but most are glad enough to be in a safe and civilized country. 

For reasons owing to the pretzel logic of political correctness, these non-European immigrant groups can, with some safety, attack multiculturalist inspired surrenders of our institutions. While all cultures are the same for the multiculturalist, those of the Europeans are less same than others. Thus a white man criticizing this affront to our traditions is a racist. A brown man doing the same is contributing to our intercultural dialogue. You can't call a non-white person a bigot, since only white people can be bigots. The contradictions inherent in the system will lead to its destruction.

For years people on the Canadian Right have quietly mumbled about the unassimilable nature of the new immigrant classes. Since this has been a complaint directed at every immigrant group to arrive in this country since the Irish Catholics showed up, I've generally taken the whole thing with a shrug. What about the radical Muslims! Yes, what about them. This country played a not inconsiderable role in beating back fascism and communism. Yet a group of primitive fanatics is going to do us in?

The enemies of free and civilized life are quite weak. Whatever strength they have comes from the cowardice of our intellectual and political elite, most of whom are of old stock descent. Their families have been here for generations, they are too ignorant and riven with self-doubt to defend the accomplishments of their ancestors. Thankfully for us, some of the "new Canadians" are ready to step into the breach. 

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.

 

Bless You Ezra

The guy's been on the air for less than a day...

When he ran the Jyllands-Posten drawings that some Muslims felt were disrespectful to the prophet Muhammad in his Western Standard Magazine five years ago, he was “prosecuted” by the Alberta Human Rights Commission which deemed his actions as hate.

When he showed them on his inaugural show, Levant, a columnist, lawyer and broadcaster, drew the ire of prominent Toronto Imam Steve Rockwell of the Downtown Mosque known as the Deedat Centre.

“If he wants freedom of speech why doesn’t he go up to a black man and use the N-word?” asked an angry Rockwell who found Levant’s actions disrespectful. “There is no absolute free speech. With freedom of speech there are rules.”

And Rockwell, who hosts The Call of the Minaret on Vision TV — and will appear Wednesday with Florida Koran-burning Pastor Terry Jones on the John Oakley Show on AM 640 Wednesday — said there are “consequences” for breaking them.

Interesting. Care to elaborate on that Mr Rockwell? What are these consequences exactly? Will you write an angry letter to the Toronto Star? Strike Ezra off your Christmas Card list? Sorry. That was offensive. As I've said many times before a belief system that can be offended by a series of rather mediocre cartoons does not deserve protection.

You do not have a right not to be offended in a free society. If only for the practical reason that anything can be said to cause offense. The overwhelming majority of Christians are routinely insulted in the MSM and at worst an occasional indignant e-mail gets sent out. My advice to Mr Rockwell is this: Suck it up princess and welcome to Canada.

With the exception of the Human Rights Tribunals - which I'm sure Stephen Harper will abolish the moment after he gets that majority, really and truly - adults in Canada are suppose to be able to take deeply offensive comments in the public square and shrug them off. If cartoons are offensive than anything is. Quite a few people find Mr Rockwell's comments deeply offensive. I do. But while I'm definitely a minority - in terms of my intellectual outlook - I'm not an officially recognized "minority" in terms of my religion (I have none) and in my race. Seven decades after defeating a nation that categorized its people on the basis of their race and religion we find ourselves now doing the same thing. 

The logic and industry of being offended is, of course, highly selective. I don't see too many people getting worked up when atheists complain that legislatures across the country begin their daily sittings with prayer. But again atheists are not known for flying planes into tall buildings. As a society we allow Bernie Farber to do his schtick - was that insulting? - because of a weird kind of collective guilt. It was certainly shameful that Canada refused to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Then again very few seriously thought that a civilized nation like Germany would engage in genocide. The thought was beyond the mind space of North Americans seven decades ago, perhaps it should not have been.

For the Islamist grievance-mongering industry guilt isn't going to be as effective, beyond the deference which most Canadians still hold to multicultural pieties.  A process which effectively exploits the good intentions and benevolence of the Canadian people. We're often too nice for our own good. This means we allow evils to flourish. With Islam - or at least the version that is easily offended by nearly everything - there is an element of fear. There is a sizeable chunk of the Canadian electorate whose response to Islamism is to hide, keep quiet and hope we are not noticed. Cowardice, however, does not change the outcome only the timing. 

Ezra Levant is a consumate showman. I do not say that as an insult. The Canadian Right needs talented showmen to highlight important issues. If  I was religious I would say that it was divine providence that the Human Rights Tribunals went after Ezra. Wrong dog to bite, eh? The Danish Cartoon story is five years old. The HRTs are in wide retreat, though they have not been destroyed yet. This is an old story and I'm sure Ezra knew it would provoke outrage from the usual suspects.

Some will say that he's milking the cartoons for applause from the Canadian Right, who are Sun News' natural constituency. Probably. That does not change the essential issue that there are still Canadians (if only in the strictly nominal sense of the word) who are offended by mere cartoons and who advocate censorship for hurt feelings. They feel wounded? Good. If Ezra needs anyone to pass the salt my e-mail is on the toolbar.

The overlooked victims of this bid for Islamist censorship are the overwhelming majority of peaceful and well-meaning Muslims. As Celestial Junk noted some time back:

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. 

This goes for Canada as much as for the world at large.  Most Muslims - as with most immigrants - come from backward countries with a weak, or non-existent, separation of religious establishment and state. They don't understand freedom, except perhaps as a floating abstraction. It is the duty and self-interest of Canadians to explain to those who come here the Canadian way of doing things. It is also our duty and self-interest to insist that Canadian norms are observed.

I would not go so far as to ban the burqa - you don't preserve freedom by curtailing it - and instead suggest using the tools of civil society: Condemnation and ostracism. Every private organization in this country has a moral right to discriminate on the basis of irrational belief. The HRTs notwithstanding. Walking around in a tent in modern Canada qualifies. Calling for the banning of the Danish cartoons is another example. Make a polite but firm point that primitive ideas should be left in primitive lands. When my parents arrived in this country in the 1970s the old stock WASPs had no problem making themselves very clear on the expected standards. Sometimes quite rudely. Their descendants have sadly lost their nerve. 

Multiculturalism isn't being kind to those who come here, it is instead being very cruel. The Cult of Multicult allows the vices of the Old World to flourish in the New. We would regard it as grossly immoral to allow immigrant children to be treated by tribal witch doctors, rather than by medicine based on scientific research. Why do we think nothing of teaching these children, in publicly financed schools no less, that Canada is no better than the uncivilized backwaters they just escaped?The rule of law, individual liberty and science are not personal preferences, they are the painstaking accomplishment of a thousand years of political and social progress. To risk losing all we have, for fear of offending some thin-skinned tribalists, is morally obscene. 

 

Tribal Medicine

Just one of those things...

Health care in the northern Manitoba community of Gods River is in such a state that the janitor has been running the X-ray machine, the community’s chief said Wednesday.

“A janitor in my community is tasked with conducting X-rays. You won’t see that at the Health Sciences Centre (in Winnipeg),” said Manto Sipi Cree Nation Chief Michael Yellowback, noting he himself got an X-ray recently that was conducted by the janitor.

Now in fairness this is an aboriginal reserve. Let me explain to our American readers. Canada's aboriginal reserve system is a network of taxpayer supported, racially based Third World ghettoes. While some have a semblance of representative government most are run by traditional tribal governments of nebulous authority and with minimal accountability.

From time to time criticism is raised of the appalling conditions on these reserves and the vast waste of money and well-being they entail. Should the critic be white he is immediately attacked as a racist. If the critic is an aboriginal he is immediately attacked as an Uncle Tom. Corruption and oppression protected by the iron wall of reverse racism. Any expectation of equality before the law, or plain human decency, is dismissed as an intrusion into the internal affairs of supposedly sovereign "nations," 

Finding out that a janitor is running pricey medical equipment on an aboriginal reserve is no great shock. Could be worse. Could be a traditional medicine man with no training at all. Who are we to judge other cultures? No matter that without the support of the Canadian taxpayer these little ghettoes would collapse within a fortnight.  

The aboriginal ghetto system is a glimpse into the life most people on this earth sadly live. Your identity is tribal not individual. Power is held in the hands of a small and largely hereditary elite. Some elites are more benevolent than others, but their positions are essentially unchallengeable. Just as Third World despots finance their regimes with western tax dollars, so do the reserve chiefs. The funds are made to flow by two powerful and complimentary forces: White liberal guilt and fear of retaliation.

The first is ease to understand. Western politicians pretty much admit that foreign aid is an apology for the actual and imagined crimes of European imperialism. That Canada never had any colonies is a point overlooked. It's the White Man's burden without Kipling's careful realism. The second element is less well understood. Most western voters don't imagine that tin pot African leaders are much of a threat to them. Too far away and too weak. Most Canadian voters think about the aboriginals in much the same way. Harmless victims in colourful costumes. 

As the current crisis in Libya is demonstrating to the world such tin pot regimes can be quite dangerous. Why are Britain and France so eager to control the situation in that thinly populated stretch of North African nothing? Well there is oil. That's always a useful thing. But there is oil in a lot of places. Many of those places are not run by tyrants quite as nutty as the Colonel. No, the real reason is that Libya is the cork in the bottle of sub-Saharan Africa. A full collapse of the Libyan state might send millions of black Africans rushing into Europe. That would destroy whatever is left of the European welfare state and likely spark race riots.

For Canadians - at least those paying attention - our Libyan crisis occurred five years ago in Caledonia. It was warning sign and a dangerous precedent. A group of militant aboriginals - acting with or without the sanction of their reserve's government - essentially seized control of a swath of Canadian suburbia. The militants succeeded brilliantly. This may inspire similar incidents in the future, or may even prevent them. Canadian politicians are an unusually spineless lot. The mere threat of another Caledonia may simply force a political cave-in to aboriginal demands without actual violence being necessary.

This makes the cause of actual reform on aboriginal reserves that much more difficult. What Canadian politician is going to risk taking on the racial grievance mongers, tribal militants and liberal self-flagellators in the MSM and push for accountable government?  The McGuinty government's appeasement of the Caledonia Crisis has ensured that money will continue to flow to these tribal ghettos. It will cost the average Canadian perhaps a few hundred more dollars a year on their tax bill. It will cost the aboriginals trapped in these reserve far more. Another generation of corruption, violence and janitors substituting as a medical technicians.

 

Clash of the Titans

Or a reasonable facsimile for modern Canadian politics:

Increasingly, Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau look like the future of their parties.

That’s not the same as saying they’ll be their parties’ leaders. That’s in the hands of card-holding party members and the fates. But each man carries in him something of the culture of his own political movement. Both will be around for many years yet. Their influence can only grow.

So much of Stephen Harper Conservatism is now run by, through, or on the sufferance of Jason Kenney that he has become his leader’s indispensable man, a C.D. Howe for a new and stranger age. 

Heavens. C.D. would have eaten Kenney for breakfast. I suspect the old Grit stalwart would have been impressed by Stephen Harper. A grumpy technocrat's grudging respect for another grumpy technocrat. Howe's background was engineering grain silos, Harper economics and public policy activism. At some level they both believed that smart people with flow charts can run the world. Thing is that Harper should know better.

Where Paul Wells nails it is in the concluding passage:

Quebec’s nationalist elites saw Trudeau as a laughable throwback to outdated values. So far he keeps beating them. Canadian conservatives see him as a laughable throwback to outdated values. His party will sink or swim on its ability to keep those values relevant in a new era. The Liberals’ silver-spoon multiculturalist will sink or swim with it.

This isn't as trite or obvious as it sounds. Trudeau is his father's champion. He assumed that mantle the moment he began that hysterical eulogy more than a decade ago. You might think a defence of Trudeaupian values in modern Canada is as redundant as coal marketing in Newcastle. The hand of the Charter, official multiculturalism, the Canada Health Act and an overly generous welfare state are very much with us. The force that inspired them, however, is dead. Government grows bigger through inertia, not passion.

Take Paul Martin's ill-starred proposal for a national daycare program. It's the sort of 1960s style big government solution to a fashionable problem of the day. It died a sad and lonely death, supplanted by a fairly modest Tory mandated tax credit. When Medicare was introduced its advocates were driven by an almost religious zeal. A zeal not unrelated to the fact that the program's leading advocate was a former Baptist minister. This wasn't just another government program, it was a moral crusade for social justice. Very few felt the same way about national nanny care.

What the younger Trudeau represents is an attempt to re-inject passion into the Trudeaupian project. Whether he succeeds or fails will say much about what Canadians expect from their government. Is it just Santa Claus, dispensing pork and subsidized social services, or should its ambitions be grander? Weaning people off the teat of big government isn't going to be easy because big government is easy. It promises all things to all people. A very pleasing lie.

The welfare state began as a project to alleviate suffering among the poorest of the poor. Its advocates soon realized that so expensive a program, which benefited only a small percentage of the population, would lack proper political support. Public housing, social assistance and food subsidies could be sold to the middle class as part of a package deal. Agree to fund these freebies for the poor, and the government would provide subsidized university tuition, socialized health care and superhighways to the expanding suburbs.

It was a political deal whose economics has been compared to an intergenerational ponzi scheme. Its architects little imagined that the birth rate would begin to dip below replacement level within a generation of its inception. This was mitigated by a reopening of our borders to immigrants. So long as the immigrants who arrived were high-skilled, or willing to acquire economically valuable skills soon after arrival, this new wave of post-war immigrants was a tremendous boon. The cost of their rearing had been borne by their mother countries. They arrived in the prime of life and were by nature people of higher than average ambition.

That was then. Today the ambitious have little reason to come to Canada and finance grandma Mackenzie's nursing care. Our economic and social life seems designed to discourage procreation among the old stock groups accustomed to high living standards. The welfare state is broke. The multicultural project has failed abysmally, its pieties ignored by the ambitious among the post-1968 immigrant groups, and cynically exploited by ethnic and religious grievance mongers. Justin Trudeau has yet to figure that out. The vital question is whether a critical mass of the Canadian electorate understands the new reality.  

Our Native Balkanism

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his freehold or liberties or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we pass upon him or condemn him but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Magna Carta

A judge has adjourned a murder trial in Thunder Bay after ruling it was impossible to convene a jury representative of the northern Ontario city's aboriginal population.

More than 100 people turned up for jury duty Tuesday, answering the call from the court system. But the judge ruled there weren't enough potential aboriginal jurors.

CBC Mar 16, 2011

So who are your peers? If you were a thirteenth century aristocrat, like the ones that brought King John to heel at Runnymede, a peer was a fellow aristocrat. A jury of your peers meant that your fate would be in the hands of men of the same social class, less easily cowed by the might of the King than a common peasant or town merchant.

Over the centuries the notion of peers was expanded to include all subjects of the Crown. Members of the aristocracy could still be tried by the House of Lord as late as 1948. For ordinary folk a peer was meant to be fellow private citizen - lawyers and some government officials were excluded - and an equal who understood the norms of the community they and the defendant lived in. Historically the meaning of peer was not suppose to be someone identical in background. A female defendant could not expect an all or mostly female jury. 

Are aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians peers? We have no formal aristocracy in Canada, so all citizens are equal before the law and therefore peers. Since 1956 all Status Indians have been citizens of Canada, so for legal purposes they are peers of non-aboriginal Canadians. That is until recently. Friend Darcey has noticed a trend:

The first time I read about a scenario involving not enough aboriginals for a jury was the case involving Winnipeg, Manitoba's Sydney Teerhuis in 2006. Sydney Teerhuis was a murderous sexual psychopath who had decapitated, castrated and disemboweled a homosexual lover and was placed on trial for second-degree murder. At the advent of the trial Sydney claimed that the jury selection process was discriminatory because aboriginals are unfairly being precluded from jury duty because of a stipulation prospective jurors can’t have criminal records and his lawyers threatened to launch a charter challenge. You see, Sydney wanted a jury of his aboriginal peers.

As Darcey goes onto ask, does that mean that every ethnic group is now entitled to a trial by members of the same ethnic group? If old Publius is ever charged with murder will I get a trial by other right-wing Portuguese bloggers with a penchant for Rudyard Kipling? The concept of jury by peer was born in a deeply hierarchical time when social class was all important, both in law and daily life. In our more legally egalitarian society jury of your peers means other citizens of Canada i.e. your legal equals.

There is an argument to be made that a peer should be someone who roughly understands your personal circumstances. A doctor would better understand the actions and motivations of a fellow doctor. This logic, however, goes only so far as the crime involves a specialized matter. A doctor being charged with criminal malpractice is something different than a doctor being charged with violently assaulting his wife. The former is a crime where technical knowledge and personal experience can give insight to the alleged conduct of the defendant. There is nothing particularly medical about wife beating. Certainly there is nothing uniquely aboriginal about murder.

Down this road lies legal and cultural balkanization. Before we get there, however, we will lose something very precious to our way of life, the right to trial by jury. India, despite having a common law system based on that of England, abolished jury trials shortly after independence. They increasingly found it difficult to find a jury of peers that would give relatively impartial verdicts.

In trials where members of different religious or ethnic groups were involved, the juries would vote along group lines. Under the mandate, British authorities refused to introduce jury trials to Palestine. The fear was of Arabs Muslims and Jews voting along group lines. Even today Israel, despite its common law background, has no jury system.

In a society as ethnically and racially diverse as Canada, our jury tradition cannot survive if a peer is to be understood as only a member of the same ethnic or racial group. Freedom - and the institutions that support it - cannot long survive in a multicultural society. A government of freedom requires a culture of individualism. 

 

Multiculturalism and Antisemitism

It's that time of the year people. It's Israeli Apartheid Week:

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), which begins on March 7, is a Canadian invention.

The first event was held at the University of Toronto in 2005. The following year, it included Montreal and Oxford. In 2007, it grew to eight cities; in 2008, to 24 cities; in 2009, to 38 cities; last year, to over 40 cities. This year, IAW will be held in over 55 cities worldwide.

So along with insulin, the pressure suit and four Canadian Prime Ministers, the University of Toronto has also added to the sum of human existence a globally respectable cover for anti-semitism. Some old fashioned world-class bigotry for a city and school with serious world class pretensions. 

I had largely left the University of Toronto by the time Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off. Still I know - in the sense of recognizing the faces and voices - the usual suspects behind it. Yes, as you've probably guessed, quite a few of the organizers are immigrants, or children of immigrants, from parts of the world where stray dogs have more legal rights than Jews. Many more have nice WASP-sounding names, the sort you'll still find in small town Canadian phonebooks. These little monsters are both home grown and imported.

The charge that Israel practices anything akin to Apartheid is risible. An Arab Israeli has far more rights than an Arab in any country in the Middle East. The residents of 1980s Soweto could only dream of being treated as fairly, and being granted the same opportunities, as Israel's minority groups. The anti-Israeli propagandists will tend to obscure this obvious truth with excessively detailed recitations of history.

There is nothing that so convinces the casual viewer, or listener, as lengthy expositions on obscure topics. A well dressed person blathering on about the Balfour Declaration gives the impression of erudition and seriousness. The topic of Middle Eastern land claims is sufficiently dry and complex to bore most people into semi-conscious agreement. 

The goal of these historical meanderings is not to convince the disinterested observer of the rightness of the Palestinian or Arab claims. Instead it is to implant in the minds of the impartial observer the idea that the region's interminable conflicts are ultimately about land. This positioning makes the Israelis seem unreasonable in their refusal to make concessions over land, no matter that such concessions might threaten the viability of the Israeli state. Why all this fuss? Just over a few acres of desert? 

The anti-Israeli propagandists are relying upon the ignorance of the typical Canadian. Watching media broadcasts - with their enlarged maps of Israel - the image is of a Jewish Goliath stamping on Palestinian Davids. As with the original article, the Davids are still Jewish. Israel is a tiny sliver of land besieged by nations who, given half the chance, have repeatedly tried to drive its population into the eastern Mediterranean. 

Whatever the historic details, the essentials are easily discernible. Israel is a free country which protects the individual rights of all its citizens. Its neighbours are tyrannies which oppress all their citizens, except the ruling elite. The Palestinian State is a terrorist government run by avowed killers bent on destroying the State of Israel. The organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week do not object to this Israeli policy or that, but to the very existence of the State of Israel. Here is an example of their propaganda. 

Carefully exempted from discussion of "Israeli Apartheid" is the nature of the State of Israel and its neighbours. Divorced from this context, and using selective quotations and bits of historical trivia, a portrait is painted of a regime of Jewish racial supremacy over the Arabs. In so many words they are accusing Israel of being run by the Jewish equivalent of Nazis. They even go so far as to argue that Israel has grown rich on the backs of the Palestinians. An absurdity given the poverty of the whole of the Arab world. 

The origins of the theory of "Israeli Apartheid" are partly in old fashioned anti-semitism. The very old story of the clever Jews exploiting the innocent and helpless gentiles. Its modern garb, however, is cut from multiculturalist cloth. This allows blatant hatred of Jews, under the guise of anti-racism, to be expressed openly and freely. We are not attacking the Jewish people, merely the inherent racism of Zionism. No mention is made, however, of the various Arab nationalism movements that have plagued the region for over a century, among whose accomplishments has been the gradual ethnic cleansing of Jews from most Arab countries.

To the casual observer multiculturalism is an umbrella term associated with tolerance, goodwill and a respect for other cultures. It is understood to be a philosophical system dedicated to fighting racism and promoting understanding. That is the image, at any rate, which has been projected. The idea's true philosophical pedigree is not so benign.

The first principle of multicultural theory is the rejection of objective truth. To the multiculturalist all truth is subjective i.e. dependent wholly on the individual or group. This is similar in nature to the relativism of Nazi and Communist ideology. There was Jewish science and Aryan science, not science. There was truth for proletarians and truth for the bourgeoisie. Everything else was just rationalizations for power. Talk of objectivity a smokescreen to hide the speaker's bid for power over others. 

The rejection of objective truth as an ideal left an intellectual vacuum. All men require some type of philosophical system, however loosely held together, to guide their actions. If truth cannot come from objective evidence then it must come from somewhere else. The traditional alternatives to truth are religious and collective. Either the priests or the tribal rulers, or both, will tell us what to think and how to act.

Racism had by the middle decades of the twentieth century ceased to be intellectually respectable. When nineteenth century intellectuals, mostly from continental Europe, began to turn against objectivity they had sought refugee in tribal nationalism. That had helped lead Europe to the brink of suicide twice, saved at the last moments by the intervention of the English speaking powers. Religion had ceased to be the respectable fount of truth in the wake of Darwin. A chastened Europe instead embraced anti-racism.

The elevation of one group over another another had lead to tribal warfare, with all the lethality of an industrial civilization. So the reaction against tribal chauvinism became a movement for the equality between all cultural, racial or tribal groups. Since objectivity was an illusion, there could be no legitimate reason for one group being better than another. All truth was collective and all collectives were equal, therefore any evidence to the contrary was racist. 

The State of Israel is a glaring affront to the Cult of Multi-Cult, just as West Berlin was an affront to advocates of communism. In Berlin were the same people, speaking the same language in the very same city with the only difference being their respective political systems. It was as close to a laboratory experiment as is possible in human affairs. Israel is another such experiment. A free and civilized people surrounded by primitive tribes obsessed by religious fundamentalism. The former has made deserts bloom. The latter has only made deserts. 

The fanaticism which drives the enemies of Israel in the West is fear. Their grand theory of humanity, the Big Lie of Multiculturalism, is exploded by the continual triumph of Israel. Its victories in battle, the success of its artists, entrepreneurs and scientists put into the shade the whole of the Arab world. No one can believe that all cultures are equal after honestly viewing the modern Middle East. Israel is a fact so stubborn it must be tarred, feathered and ultimately destroyed. 

 

Unacceptably So

How did this guy become a Member of Parliament? Oh, right:

Trudeau blasted the Conservatives for using the term "barbaric," even though it's been in the guide since 2009. Forced marriages are the only new item on the list.

"There's nothing that the word 'barbaric' achieves that the words 'absolutely unacceptable' would not have achieved," Trudeau, the Liberal immigration critic, said.

"We accept that these acts are absolutely unacceptable. That's not the debate. In casual conversation, I'd even use the word barbaric to describe female circumcision, for example, but in an official Government of Canada publication, there needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality."

Let me make a prediction, though it's not much of a leap. Trudeau has just handed the Tories a club to be used in the next election. A very nice one too. One of the weak points in the Conservative Party's image is so-called "women's issues." In practice this means that the Conservatives - like conservatives in general - don't genuflect to the feminist pieties of the day. This is spun by the Left and the MSM so that the Conservative Party wants women barefoot in the kitchen, like back in their sepia version of the 1950s. Never mind that back in the actual 1950s John Diefenbaker appointed the first woman to the federal cabinet. History is not really a strong point of the Canadian Left. Too many dead white males, and the odd dead white female.

So come the next election Stephen Harper will say, with perfect sincerity, that a prominent figure within the Liberal Party, a possible future leader of that party, does not believe that honour killings and female circumcision are barbaric. Cue the Tory spin doctors:

"Despite Trudeau's opposition, we make no apologies for letting immigrant women know their rights. We won't turn a blind eye to the abuse of immigrant women, even if the Ignatieff Liberals prefer we err on the side of political correctness," said Alykhan Velshi, a spokesman for Kenney.

You can almost hear the violins. Nicely played Alykhan. That's a Highland name, right? I thought all Conservative Party operatives were WASPs? Someone at the Albany Club must have really screwed up.

Trudeau, in fairness, isn't trying to turn a blind eye. What the son of Pierre is trying to do is much worse. He's refusing to call a mutilating act an act of mutilation, preferring to think of it as merely a "absolutely unacceptable" act. Like when the waiter puts the salad fork on the wrong side of the plate at a posh restaurant. Or when the dry cleaner gives you someone else's dress pants. You could just call the waiter an incompetent, or the dry cleaner a goof, but we should use "responsible neutrality" in our language.

To most sane people mutilation and honour killings are barbaric. Unless those people are trying to win elected office in a country that has practiced official multiculturalism for nearly two generations. It isn't that Justin Trudeau is pro-mutiliation, he is on the record as finding it "absolutely unacceptable," or perhaps on a really ornery day "totally unacceptable." In a fit of rage the future Liberal leader - it's only a matter of time and the Grits are desperate - might even say that mutilating young girls is "totally absolutely unacceptable." But that might provoke an angry letter from the Canadian Council of Genital Mutilators and Honour Killers, so I'm sure Justin's handlers will have some valium handy.

Why mince words? Because "barbaric" is a loaded worded. It implies there is something called civilization and civilized behaviour to go with it, the opposite of which is barbarism. When your hear the word barbaric a mental image is called forth, of men in red coats coming upon native girls about to be sacrificed to pagan gods. Very imperialistic. Very Euro-centric. None of that in Trudeau's Canada, either father or son.

The corrosiveness of multiculturalism is partly in assuming that all cultures - and therefore cultural values - are equal, and partly in the moral relativism that it spreads. We can no longer call something barbaric, for it implies that we think of ourselves as civilized men and women. That's a value judgement too far. Something which is impossible to a post-western westerner like Justin Trudeau.

 

An Old Idea and a New Word?

This sounds familiar:

Amid increasingly strident criticisms of multiculturalism, both in Canada and abroad, a group of Quebec intellectuals is proposing an alternative that could save an idea that has become part of the national fabric.

Interculturalism is being branded as a new model for integration and a solution to some of the anti-immigrant backlash that has accompanied the debate in Quebec over the accommodation of minorities.

Interculturalism takes for granted the centrality of francophone culture. From there it works to integrate other minorities into a common public culture, all while respecting their diversity.

Where have I heard this before. Let me think. Oh, right. It's the melting pot. Except without all those nasty American connotations. The respecting minorities addendum is just politically correct boilerplate for the anglophone market. The Quebecois have never bought into multiculturalism.

They believe that Quebec Francophone culture is superior to the pale-imitation Americanism of the ROC. You don't want to know what they think of the non-European cultures that have washed up along the St Lawrence. Politically correct does not translate well into French. Still, it's good to see the melting pot being dragged out of the closet, even if it is to appease Quebec nationalists. To those victims of modern public education in the audience, let us recall the origin of the term:

What then is the American, this new man?" that the American is one who "leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, 1782

Not every culture melted quickly or completely. The blacks were, of course, largely excluded from the process. Still there was a recognizable type called American. Back in 1945 Frank Sinatra, then rather young and very liberal, sang The House I Live In:

The house I live in,

My neighbors white and black,

The people who just came here,

Or from generations back;

The town hall and the soapbox,

The torch of liberty,

A home for all God's children;

That's America to me.

The song became a hit in 1945. A film featuring the song earned a special Academy Award and Golden Globe. Both film and song certainly recognized diversity - no one had any doubts that Sinatra was Italian - but everyone was ultimately American. The one in the many. A little bit earlier in 1908, the playwright Israel Zangwill gave the melting pot its textbook definition:

Understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to – these are fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

Boilerplate stuff in 1908. Today, in our more tolerant era, monologue like that might get you in front of a Human Rights Tribunal, along with any stray rotten tomatoes from the Toronto Star crowd. The God stuff alone would likely generate a class action from the Canadian Association of Village Atheists. All that "fires of God" stuff is obvious incitement to religious warfare. Unless the author was clearly from a non-Judeo-Christian background. 

The idea of a melting pot was, at least initially, trying to make a virtue out of a necessity. In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson was sceptical of encouraging immigration. The new comers would not understand the American way of life, leading to political instability. Jeffersonian caution soon gave way to demographic necessity. The northern Europeans taming the New World were certainly fecund - unlike their modern day descendants - but not fecund enough. The vastness of the continent was going to require pretty much anyone who was willing to show up. The preference was for white Christians, but in a pinch Jews and Chinese might do.

The Canadian experience was similar, with the notable difference that the immigrants were expected to become British. By 1867 Canada had achieved about the same critical mass as the American colonies in 1776. We hung around in the British Empire for about another eighty years, eventually graduating from low-level colonial flunky to senior partner. When the Empire collapsed the general Canadian reaction was of bewilderment. We didn't leave the Empire, the Empire left us. This meant that it look longer for a Canadian identity to form. It was still in the process of coming together when multiculturalism struck. Thus the greater damage it has done to us compared to the United States.

Does "interculturalism" have legs? In Quebec probably. It's respectable cover for dumping Trudeau-era multiculturalism, something which even the son of Pierre seems to be cool with doing. In the ROC it would only be a half-way house. A step to assuage the squeamish before the whole idea of multiculturalism is put into the ashcan of history. The choice that we face is a stark one. Either we are to accept Diefenbaker's ideal of One Canada, or we elect for ourselves the fate of a vast sub-arctic Balkans. Without a common cultural center, this is a house that cannot stand.

 

The WASP Suicides

Disasters have a starting point. Either with a place or group. Contrary to popular understanding, the disaster of multiculturalism did not begin with the post-1960 wave of immigrants who arrived in this country. They constituted too small and weak a grouping to have much influence on public policy. Multiculturalism was a cultural and political policy adopted by this country's ruling elite. Then, as now, that elite is mostly composed of people whose ancestors came from the British Isles.

While this country is far more diverse today than it was half a century ago, that diversity extends only so far up the journalistic, political and academic ladder. This is largely due to the tendency, natural among most immigrant groups, to focus on developing immediate practical skills, rather than more ethereal concerns.

The Moral Triumph

As regular readers will have noticed, this blog has dedicate a fair number of electrons in recent weeks to multiculturalism. We are at the beginning stages in Canada of a cultural war, between those seeking to maintain the Big Lie of multiculturalism, and those seeking to defend Canadian culture and tradition. The former is - at best - a dangerously naive idea that all cultures are of equal objective value. The latter is a system of values that upholds individual rights, separation of church and state, free speech, rule of law and a basic market economy. 

What is going on in Canada is only one small episode in a wider struggle across the western world. It is as if, on its deathbed, the nations of Europe and North America began to question the path that had led them hence. In Germany, France and Britain there have been official rebukes to multiculturalism. So far these have only been pro forma declarations of what the general public had already come to understand but was often afraid to say openly.

It will take decades of fighting to remove multiculturalism, and its fountainhead moral relativism, from the sinews of western nations. Two generations of school children have been taught its catechisms. Millions of semi-integrated immigrants exist - living is not the word - in government housing projects across the West. Too welfare dependent and too unskilled to fully join their host societies, they are both dead-weights and tinderboxes. This is a big mess.

Multiculturalism and its Discontents

It's not who you think. Follow:

Salim Mansur:

Proponents of multiculturalism do not use an objective standard as the basis by which they judge or rank cultures, and conclude all cultures are equal.

[…]

The entire edifice of multiculturalism is, hence, based on a lie. For we know from history and experience that all cultures are not equal, and if it were so, then the culture of Islam in North Africa, for example, would be on par with the culture of Europe across the Mediterranean.

Calgary Herald:

Mahfooz Kanwar, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, says he has some better ideas.

"I'd tell them, this is Canada, and in Canada, we teach music and physical education in our schools. If you don't like it, leave. If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law," said Kanwar, who is a professor emeritus of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

Tarek Fatah:

“The Canadian multicultural model has failed, as the British model has,” said Fatah. “When first generation (Muslims) are more loyal to Canada than the second generation, then we have sufficient evidence to say that multiculturalism has failed.”

Gurmukh Singh:

Amidst all this, it is ridiculous when politicians describe multiculturalism as a celebration of this country’s diversity. They hop from a Chinese festival to a Pakistani enclave party and call it a celebration of diversity. But has anyone seen one ethnic group join another to celebrate this diversity?

When there is little social and economic interaction among various ethnic enclaves, what is there to celebrate about this so-called multiculturalism? It is pure segregation. 

Your humble correspondent does not agree with every word put forward by the above gentlemen, but we're pretty much on the same page. In fact I've made many of the same arguments, deep here in the heart of the Imperial Capital. The reaction I've gotten? 

RACIST!!!!!

But I'm a white western European male, the descendant of imperialists and colonizers. These subversive thoughts are not allowed to this particular class of Canadians. Don't feel too sorry for me. The worst that can happen to old Publius is some dirty looks at parties. The above writers have real guts. The Canadian ethnic and racial grievance mongering industry is a profitable one. To defy it, especially with such élan, is a very brave act. At best they'll be denounced as Uncle Toms. Worst, they'll be physically attacked.

Like the lady says, more Pavilions at Folkfest. 

This Week at the Gods: Multiculturalism

Through out this week we will be featuring several posts on multiculturalism. These posts - as well as previous posts on this topic - will be tracked in the Categories section on the righthand toolbar. I understand that this focus on one topic may test our readers' patience. This is, however, a complex and serious issue. It's repercussions are being felt through out the Western world today.

They can be seen in Caledonia and on the streets of every major Canadian city. We are at the beginning of a cultural war in this country, between defenders of Canada and multiculturalism's advocates, profiteers and fellow travellers. The comments, in recent weeks, of major western leaders have touched a chord with electorates and the media. This has been the best opportunity in decades to challenge the Cult of MultiCult. Best to push now and push hard.  

 

Regards,

 

Publius

 The Gods of the Copybook Headings