May 2018

I have been waiting a long time to hear a more balanced “truth” about Canada’s Residential schools for Indian/Native/Aboriginal/First-Nations (etc., etc) children. Someday, I thought, voices will be raised in defence of the efforts those schools made to educate, feed, and shelter Indian children in need and help them transition to the realities of the European civilization that had become the dominant force in their lives.

Surely, it was not true that most native children had abusive experiences? Surely, many of them learned to read and write English or French, and math, and more, and then learned trades and some, at least, went on to learn professions?

I found it odd that in so many photos of Indian students in these schools, almost all look like clean, well-dressed, well-fed, happy kids. How come? Well, maybe just because many of them were?

In my previous post on Jonathan Kay’s article I included a couple of “Comments”, one by a fellow with in-depth experience on the Indian file who told us that the typical “genocide” narrative is simply wrong. So don’t believe it. And he directed us to documented proof of this – from our own government!

Now, thanks to an article “Letters to Senator Beyak .. Uncensored,” in C2C Journal  (April 16, 2018) by Toronto Journalist and author Robert MacBain, we learn that Senator Lynn Beyak has been vilified and demonized for collecting letters of praise for Canada’s residential schools from Native people who loved, and clearly benefited from, their school experience. Mr. MacBain is writing a book about all this, and it’s about time someone made this effort to correct the public record.  No one should ignore the need to call out abuses in human life, wherever found. But we should not withhold well-deserved praise and gratitude, either.

You can read more below to see some of these letters. They are a much-needed corrective.

(more…)

Visitors may find that this article on our present victim-hood culture makes useful distinctions between dignity, honour, and victim-hood that help us understand our present confusions.

None of these confusions would exist, of course, in a world of real crisis. Which is only to say that the concept of “a crisis,” whether personal or global, is itself always relative to the next worst possibility. Recall the man who fretted that he had no shoes, until he saw a man who had no feet.

I just finished reading a short, harrowing account by an English sailor who was on a ship that entered a bay populated by Nootka Indians on the Northwest coast of Canada in the early 1800s.

Dues to some earlier grievance against the Whiteman, the Chief ordered the immediate slaughter and beheading of the entire crew except for this fellow and his buddy, whom as blacksmiths, the Chief thought might be useful to the tribe for making metal weapons. Within an hour of his arrival, our sailor saw the severed and bloodied heads of his fellows – all 35 of them – lined up in a row on the deck of his ship.

Now that is a crisis!

At any rate, if we must arrange our thoughts surrounding our present petty grievances about each other, this article is helpful.

http://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/

Below is a link to a recent study that is going to help sink the egalitarian ship.

In the century and  half it has taken for Western liberalism to mutate from its original, eighteenth-century foundation in liberty, to its subsequent foundation in equality, to its present foundation in Libertarian-Socialism, there has been a persistent drum-beat announcing the “equality of the sexes.”

Egalitarian radicals have stridently insisted that human gender has no biological basis, and is simply “constructed” by individuals, according to how they feel and choose. This is an expression of what I have described elsewhere as the Triumph of the Will over Nature (see my article, “Getting Used to Fascism,” in The New Criterion, October, 2011).

Well, Nature continues to assert herself, as readers will discover in this study. Expect more of this science-based repudiation of egalitarian ideology. None of this is a surprise to any sensible person, of course.

I recall a statement from a researcher on biologically-based differences, long before the DNA revolution, stating that “Anyone who has raised both boys and girls and still thinks there is no difference between the genders has already withstood more evidence to the contrary than any scientific study could ever provide”

It will be interesting to see how/if the left has any response to this study.

https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-017-0352-z

Below, you will find very revealing “comments” on an article about the cult of the so-called “Noble-Savage” that was recently published in the on-line Journal Quillette, by Toronto journalist Jonathan Kay (himself now an Editor of this Journal). Kay’s article is here:

http://quillette.com/2018/04/22/canadas-cult-noble-savage-harms-indigenous-peoples/

The article is interesting, but in some cases poorly informed. I think he could have benefited from reading Professor Tom Flanagan’s book, First Nations, Second Thoughts (McGill-Queen’s, 2008), and also Widdowson and Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (McGill-Queen’s, 2008), prior to publishing his article. In the article, he offers some personal observations on Canada’s residential schools.

[As an aside – My own interest in this topic comes from the fact that I recently finished translating an Eighteenth-century French book that has never before been translated into English before, called Le Voyageur Français (1768), or, The French Traveler. It is a fascinating, but not very politically-correct rendering of Indian and colonial life in Canada in the mid-eighteenth century, and is presently under review by McGill-Queen’s University Press, with a view to publication before the end of 2018].

Now, back to Kay and Canada’s residential schools. Human nature being what it is, there were clearly some cruel abuses in Canada’s residential schools over the period of more than one hundred years. They were not run by angels. But there were just as obviously many wonderful stories of otherwise neglected children who thrived at these schools. At any rate, I have long been suspicious of much of the public account.

This began when my friend Rod Clifton, who taught for a year at a residential school in the far north of Canada, reported personally to me: “The children were often brought to our school straight out of the forest, dirty and hungry, their parents begging us to take them in. Sometimes they wandered in from the forest by themselves.”

(more…)

On the way to the annual Civitas Conference in Montreal on April 27th, I stopped in to do an interview with Professor Gad Saad. He is a fine fellow and a true Freethinker.

You can watch the interview here:

Below is my only slightly-edited reply to “Eli”, who kindly sent a comment on my first Podcast: “The Four Stages of Liberalism,” which is posted on this website. On re-reading my own reply, I would say that in a very short space it sums up the conclusion to which I have come with respect to mutations in the deep-ideology of the West. The “libertarian-socialism” I explain in my podcast is the most recent aspect of that mutation.

************

“Hello Eli. Thx for sharing your thoughts. Hard to answer all this in short space. But The deepest analysis I can manage is this:

The decline of the Christian religion and belief in the Kingdom of Heaven – perfect justice – in an afterlife, is still with us. But no longer in a theological form. God has left the building, so to speak. But all the hard-wiring remains.

So all those formerly and feverishly expecting justice in the Afterlife, are demanding it here and now, in this world, rather than in the next. This is called the “secularization thesis,” whereby the idealistic, justice-seeking left strives to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, because they no longer believe it is waiting for them in Heaven.

Hence, the West has put itself thru a couple of centuries of “expectational” radical politics and has slaughtered untold millions of people who resisted their perfect justice on earth story. Sad to say, The root of the revolutionary spirit in the West, has arisen from a secularization of the Christian ethos. Who would ever have guessed?

Here is a cool-headed evisceration of the Starbucks “racial” incident by Ben Shapiro, who applies his scalpel-like intellect to it.

Stay tuned ’til near the end when the black police chief states the facts. Looks like it was a case of defiant loitering, pure and simple. But, what an upside-down world. The two offenders got rewarded for it!

Give thanks that fair-minded, logically-astute people like Ben are around to correct the all-too prevalent intellectual and moral rot-by-media by which we are afflicted.

Fake news surrounds.

Here is an excellent piece from the excellent on-line journal Quillette, covering the heartbreaking Alfie Evans case, in which his caring and sensible parents were denied the right to make final decisions on the life and death of their beloved child.

http://quillette.com/2018/04/28/tragic-case-alfie-evans/

This sort of detail on the case is hard to find elsewhere, and the nuance must be understood before judging the outcome.

My own conclusion is that as long as parents are sane and caring, their wishes should be given moral and legal precedence over the dictates even of a caring law and State.

Better this doomed little boy should have died in the arms of his own loving parents as they desperately tried everything possible to comfort him and – maybe? perhaps? possibly? hopefully? – to fend off the inevitable, than to die in a hospital bed five days after the docs unplugged him from life-support, with the doors of his room padlocked legally against his own Mom and Dad.

The main fact to be noted is that the Court alone decided that Alfie’s life was not worth living. Alfie’s parents did not do this.  Some parents may have done. But Alfie’s parents did not. So the Court exercised what is called “substitute judgement“, which is a legal technique for subordinating the judgement of others, in this case Alfie’s parents – and thereby barred his own Mom and Dad from removing him to another facility (in this case, a hospital in Italy that had offered to care for Alfie  free of charge).

The technique of substitute judgement has terrible precedents in the history of the world. It is always the final step in converting a living human subject into a disposable, non-human object, that may be enslaved, beaten, or killed at will. It has been used extensively in every slave-regime that has ever existed, and is the most widely used technique today for denying the right to life of all unborn human beings.

That is why I have argued in many places that all the modern democracies are in fact slave-regimes of a new kind, because they rely on substitute judgement to deny the humanity of the unborn, thereby to make abortion legally acceptable. And they are forced to do so in order to sustain the ideology of egalitarian democracy. You can sustain a liberal democracy without an abortion right; but not an egalitarian one.

The argument runs thus: women bear the unequal biological burden of bearing and nurturing their children, and therefore can never be equal in liberty to the male citizens of a democracy unless they have a right to kill their own unwanted children in the womb. You see the thinking: If I have this baby, I will become unequal.

By using substitute judgement, the unborn child can be defined as non-human, aborted legally without conscience, and thereby removed as a barrier to a woman’s equality