Our civilized world is not made of stone, it’s made of sand, and one bad storm is all it will take. -Novelist David Mitchell –The Bone Clocks
By their full-throated support of the quasi-apartheid, “separate but equal” legal reality that governs the relationship between our Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal citizens, epitomized by the delusionally -named “nation to nation relationship” (“the nation-to-nation orthodoxy”), and by their full embrace of the false and pernicious idea that our forefathers stole Canada from its original owners and murdered and erased them in the process, (“the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy”), Canada’s elites have led the country into a decadent period of national weakness, delusion, demoralization and division.
Despite their lives of unparalleled modern, urban comfort and ease, the result of the hard work and sacrifices of both them and multiple past generations of Canadians, our best and brightest, to the bafflement and chagrin of ordinary Canadians, now falsely portray Canada as a land illegally and immorally stolen from Aboriginal peoples, the latter of whom, Canadians are told by their leaders, were genocidally murdered and erased during the commission of this grand racist theft.
A nation is a collective human organism. In its healthy state, like any vital organism, it grows, feeds off and assimilates things and peoples around it. In its healthy state it staves off threats to its powers and its very existence. When it becomes unhealthy it stops growing and a process of fragmentation and decay begins. It becomes sick. It no longer instinctively recognizes and fights off threats to its wellbeing. If it does recognize them, it is often paralyzed from stopping them.
Part of a nation’s decaying and sickening process is becoming gripped by elite and mass delusions and suffering a loss of pride and confidence in itself, its history and its accomplishments, accompanied by a new tendency towards passivity and self-abasement. As the French-Romanian writer E.M. Cioran wrote:
“A nation dies out when it no longer reacts to fanfares: Decadence is the death of the bugle.”
Another part of this decaying and sickening process is the absence of great men and women emanating from our elite classes- “heroes” or “righteous ones”- who in every healthy nation protect the heritage that made it great, embody its confident and expanding spirit and project it onto the citizenry. It’s an old Jewish shtetl saying that “Without a righteous man the village cannot stand.”
In Canada’s vital past there were such men who embodied and projected a universalist, national spirit: Champlain, Joseph Brant, MacDonald and Cartier, Laurier, Mackenzie King, St. Laurent, Lester Pearson and even Pierre Trudeau.
But the national spirit of Canada today, such as it is, is reflected not by the inspiring words and actions of nation-binding “heroes” or great men and women, or by leaders who project a positive national consciousness, but rather by race-obsessed, heritage and nation-debasing, delusional and divisive naysayers and apologizers, whose petty and unhistoric collective summing up of Canada’s essence is epitomized by the unanimous resolution of our national Parliament to the effect that Canada committed a genocide against Aboriginal peoples – that Canada is a nation of shame, not accomplishments.
By supporting the nation-to-nation orthodoxy and by supporting the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy, Canada’s elite classes, using purely intellectual weapons, have engaged in an illiberal intellectual revolt against their own country, and against the liberal sensibilities and settled notions of their fellow citizens -sensibilities and notions that are the bedrock of our country’s greatness and accomplishments. They have engaged in a revolt against our Western Enlightenment heritage, and by do doing so they hypocritically mock and spoil the heritage meat on which they daily feed and prosper.
Consistent with its delusional view of the Canadian State as having been built on illegal and immoral foundations, and consistent with the nation to nation orthodoxy, our political classes, with the support of all our other elite classes, on their own, without any underlying social consensus, as a form of unwarranted penance and reparations, have begun the state-weakening process of eroding and dismantling those foundations, by unilaterally transferring large portions of the Canadian State’s constitutional, sovereign powers to racially-exclusive Aboriginal bands and groups, who use those powers, not in the national interest, but only in their own selfish, racially-exclusive, country-harming interests.
The sole, sovereign powers of the Canadian State constitute the crucial wellspring of our rule of law, our personal security, our economic well-being and our liberal order generally. It is fundamentally injurious to the national welfare that these sovereign powers be diminished or derogated from in any way.
Canada’s judiciary, walking in lockstep with our political classes, has rejected its traditional duty to protect the Canadian State’s sole, sovereign, lawmaking authority, thus contributing to the undermining and enfeeblement of not only their own country, but of the very source of the judiciary’s own legitimacy and authority.
The Supreme Court of Canada has become an instrumentality for the defeat of constitutional government.
Like the out-of-control U.S. Supreme Court, the captive of right wing, big money, anti-democratic interests, our Supreme Court is the captive of left wing “progressive”, anti-democratic interests. The excessive and overreaching exercise of judicial supremacy by both Courts grants American and Canadian citizens/voters no realistic remedy for their diktat-by-minority, country-harming decisions.
Formerly, promoting universal equality under the law and safeguarding individual rights and freedoms were two of our judiciary’s highest, presumptive aspirations and purposes. No longer. Our judiciary is now fully behind the devolution of constitutional, sovereign power to Aboriginal peoples, making them a virtually co-equal ( but totally subsidized) branch of government with the federal and the provincial governments.
Our judiciary is now fully behind the nation-to-nation orthodoxy- fully behind the expansion of the separate but equal, race state paradigm for Aboriginal peoples.
For instance, by depriving 1.8 million Indigenous Canadians of their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on their home reserves and territories on the basis of illiberal, unscientific and utterly false race concepts, the Supreme Court, without a whisper of opposition or protest from any other of Canada’s elite classes, has rejected its historical stewardship duty to preserve Canada’s universalist, liberal, democratic order, and has further cemented in Canada as a true race state.
Epitomizing this judicial decay, the former Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court described non-Indigenous Canadians in a public speech as “uninvited guests” in Canada.
The causes of this national decay and sickening, which are manifestations of the history-forgetting, false sense of security resulting from seventy-five years of national peace and prosperity, are the same as those that throughout history have caused nations to decline and fall.
Some of these causes are the decline of civic life, (Edward Gibbon’s selfish and spoiled “languid indifference of private life”); cultural and historical illiteracy resulting in emotionalist, utopian and ideological delusions, like Canadian “genocide”, racial “Indigenous difference” and Indigenous, national “self-government”; politically and ideologically-compromised institutions; a collective loss of the crucial sense of tragic realism; “cognitive ease”, the process by which we avoid and resist inconvenient facts, resulting in the perpetuation of deliberate falsehoods in politics, academia and journalism, even amongst the judiciary; careerism trumping truth and common sense; the insidious provincialism of cosmopolitan elites; and ivory towerism, that in all its maddening abstraction ignores real problems involving real people who are suffering now, like the too-many, young, potential Aboriginal suicides . These suffering ones are being heartlessly abandoned by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elites in favor of merely verbal, false problems like “nation to nation relationships”, “decolonization” and “reconciliation”.
As these elites, inside their theatre of Canadian taxpayer-financed make-believe, play out their empty and divisive performative shows of faux morality, inanely prattling on about “systemic racism” and “white settler privilege”, these sufferers, outside in the adjacent alley, ignored, drowned out and unheard by the players and their ecstatically clapping audience inside, continue to descend into social chaos and to numerous ultimate tragic ends of it, including suicide.
The delusional Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy, which first gripped our political, academic and media elites, as a result of their shameful ignorance, cowardice, incompetence and inaction, has now spread to most Canadian institutions and large corporations, and through them all to large segments of the Canadian populace, to the alarming extent that it has now attained the ignoble status of warranting inclusion in an updated version of the classic book on the subject, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
The few informed and objective Canadians who see that the emperor is naked – who see the dangers to the nation and the real suffering of too-many vulnerable and marginalized Aboriginals in the alleyways of Canada- the reserves – and have the courage to speak out, are willfully ignored, marginalized, vilified or fired from their jobs. Consideration is now even being given by politicians that they be threatened with prosecution for respectfully and responsibly exercising their right of free speech.
Professor Tom Flanagan’s First Nations? Second Thoughts rationally and empathically debunked many aspects of the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy. To no avail. Its inconvenient truths have been willfully ignored by policymakers, academics and journalists.
Associate Professor Frances Widdowson’s books, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, and Separate but Unequal: How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency, cogent criticisms of the nation-to-nation orthodoxy, have been willfully ignored by the same people. She got fired by her university, Mount Royal University, for expressing on campus some of the eminently liberal and reasonable views set out in her books. Now, she is routinely banned just about everywhere from using any university or other public facility from giving speeches about academia’s hysterical and shocking suppression of free speech on all matters Aboriginal, and about her own harrowing personal experience of being so illiberally and inhumanely cancelled and suppressed by her own pathetic, cruel and cowardly University. There is indeed a free speech crisis in relation to Aboriginal matters, which our increasingly illiberal elite classes are causing, and which they are completely indifferent to.
Despite being persecuted herself, Ms. Widdowson, in the finest of Canadian democratic traditions, summons the stubborn strength and energy to fight for the rights of other Canadians who are being similarly persecuted for departing in some way from these Aboriginal orthodoxies.
It’s another sign of Canadian national decay that, as she fights for the rights of others, no one in a position of influence and power will fight for her rights.
The late Gordon Gibson (immediately below) described the situation of our Aboriginal peoples in modern 21st century Canada as being the country’s “greatest moral question”, a situation and a questionon which our elites are not allowing public debate!
Former B.C. provincial Liberal Party leader Gordon Gibson’s book, A New Look at Canadian Indian Policy: Respect the Collective-Promote the Individual, is a compelling argument against the nation-to-nation orthodoxy – the delusion that over six hundred Indian bands can each have an equal, independent “nation-to -nation” relationship with the federal government. This is the idea that underlies the Panglossian Justin Trudeau government’s enactment of the nation-weakening disaster that is UNDRIP. Because of its inconvenient truth-telling this cogent and coherent book has been similarly, willfully ignored by our elite classes.
Professor Rodney Clifton and Mark DeWolf both have positive, lived, personal experiences with residential schools. Because of its inconvenient truth-telling, their enlightening book, From Truth Comes Reconciliation, illustrating the many positive features of residential schools, is being willfully ignored by Canada’s elite classes.
C.P. Champion’s and Professor Tom Flanagan’s Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools), despite being an Amazon best seller, because of its inconvenient truth-telling about residential schools and the Kamloops Indian band’s unmarked-graves-of-murdered-children hoax, has been ignored since the first day of its publication by the mainstream media and by Canada’s elite classes generally. Grave Error does not even warrant an informative footnote under their Best Seller lists.
Grave Error contains rationally compelling- in fact unanswerable- essays by, in addition to most of the above, other brave, outstanding naked emperor-seeing, Canadian public intellectuals such as retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht, Professor Jacques Rouillard of the University of Montreal, retired University of Manitoba Professor Hymie Rubenstein and journalist Jonathan Kay.
Mr. Kay’s contribution to Grave Error, A Media-Fueled Social Panic Over Unmarked Graves, details the mainstream media’s “herd-mentality”, incredible gullibility and gross culpability for accepting uncritically and then recklessly spreading the Kamloops Band story (and later the calculated Band lie) of 215 bodies of allegedly murdered children being buried by their classmates in an apple orchard in the middle of the night, and somehow no word of that ever getting out for decades, and no complaints or reports of missing children ever being made!
This writer’s self-published book, There Is No Difference, a Nelson Mandela/Martin Luther King-themed argument against both the nation-to-nation orthodoxy and the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy, and for the phasing out of the Aboriginal reserve system, (which is the unmentionable prime cause of most Aboriginal social dysfunction and failure), is endorsed by retired Supreme Court of Canada Judge, Justice Jack Major. Justice Major was on the panel that unanimously rendered the Haida Nation decision, the subject of an entire, highly critical chapter in the book on the case.
Haida Nation is one the first of the many irresponsible, overreaching, constitution-altering Supreme Court decisions that, in the complete absence of any underlying political will or social consensus, have unilaterally handed self-interested, race-obsessed Aboriginal bands and groups an economy-crippling, de facto veto over all proposed resource projects in Canada.
Justice Major said of There Is No Difference: “Your There Is No Difference continues to impress me no doubt because I agree with it.” (Italics added.)
Justice Major’s endorsement of There Is No Difference can arguably be said to be an implicit statement of regret on his part for his concurring decision in this constitution and country-altering case. Regardless of the book’s merits, that alone makes There Is No Difference newsworthy. Yet despite academia and mainstream news outlets being made aware of this, Justice Major’s extraordinary and definitely newsworthy decision to in effect publicly agree with a citizen’s public criticisms of one of his own profoundly consequential decisions, remains ignored.
Hard-working and meticulous Aboriginal myth-busters Nina Green and Michelle Stirling are prime movers behind and contributors to the Indian Residential Schools Research Group. Their cogent and coherent articles on that website, and numerous other articles posted there by other thoughtful, naked emperor-seeing, articulate and caring (for the best interests of the vast majority of marginalized and powerless Aboriginal Canadians) contributors, have all been brought to the attention of politicians, prominent journalists, mainstream media outlets, especially the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and other elite persons and institutions, all to no avail.
Usually, the receipt of these articles does not even merit a response, so afraid are these people of the acknowledged receipt of them being deemed to fix them with knowledge of the compelling and unanswerable facts and opinions contained in them. The few responses received constitute mainly evasive, condescending gaslighting. So fearful of or indifferent to truth are these people!
It’s a true sign of a decaying liberal democracy when such good Canadians, with such good thoughts and ideas, all within the Western Enlightenment tradition, who are all trying to be constructive, active, citizen-participants in the Canadian democratic experience, are treated so shabbily and in such an unwelcome fashion by our elites.
The numerous falsities of the Chanie Wenjack story, upon which careers are being built, have been pointed out, to no avail.
Some of the many fabrications of the sainted Murray Sinclair, who pressured the RCMP not to investigate the preposterous alleged murder of 215 Kamloops residential schoolchildren, (described in Grave Error), only one of the ethically questionable actions this “great” Canadian has engaged in, have been exposed, to no avail. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, “the blaze” of his fame has driven away the dull, incurious or averted eyes of our elites from any “nice examination” of him.
The CBC lie that all Aboriginal children were “forced” to attend residential schools and other such lies about residential schools, have all been exposed, to no avail.
Nina Green, again to no avail, in an article in the truth-seeking Dorchester Review, has convincingly cast reasonable doubt on key elements of Phyllis Webstad’s simplistic and context-free Orange Shirt story, another basic fable upon which careers are being built and a lot of money is being made, which has been unquestioningly embraced word for word by our ever credulous, truth-indifferent elite classes and institutions.
Orange is now the colour that school children nationwide are being pressured to wear on September 30th of each year, the National Day for “Truth and Reconciliation”, where all these official lies and unofficial delusions are put on full display for most adult, non-Aboriginal Canadians, while forced-smiling outwardly, to mentally suffer and groan inwardly over.
On September 30th of each year, it’s like Maoist Red Book-waving time. It’s Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind in action, from sea to sea.
Virtually all other elements of the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy have been exposed as the lies and misrepresentations they are, all to no avail.
Our Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elite classes, against the will and liberal instincts of Canadians, are disastrously doubling down on the nation-to-nation orthodoxy and the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy, and like all purveyors of orthodoxy, they are brooking no public opposition to them.
In doing so our elite classes have shut their eyes and blocked their ears to the truth. They just don’t care about the truth. As they were content to stand silent while Senator Lynn Beyak was forced to resign from the Senate for uttering the truth that some good came from residential schools, so they are content to stand silent while conscientious and caring Canadians like Frances Widdowson are persecuted for trying to tell similar truths.
Ordinary Canadians see this every day and rightfully conclude that their elites have cut their ties with them- have abandoned them.
When ordinary citizens see their leaders unreasonably reject plain truths, facts, objectivity, nuance, balance and the “hear both sides” concept, as ordinary Canadians see happening in Canada every day, they lose faith in them. They develop an absolute, despairing sense of impotence. The social trust that must be present to hold the hierarchical social order together is lost. Given human nature, the emotions-inflamed citizenry, consciously or not, is licensed, disposed or driven to respond in irrational kind. A back-and-forth chain of unreason is started.
It is the stewardship duty of the leaders and elites of a liberal democracy to prevent this destructive and divisive chain of unreason from starting. – to maintain the “social scaffolding” that prevents the “beast” that lurks in all humans’ psyches from getting out.
By promoting the nation-to-nation orthodoxy and the Aboriginal theft-genocide orthodoxy- both orthodoxies based on race-thought and race preferences– hot button emotion-inflamers – our elites are waving red meat in front of the nose of the beast, which, at the sight and smell of it, strives to break out of the cage our social scaffolding has confined it to.
By promoting these noxious orthodoxies, our elites are basically opening the door of the cage. In so doing they are utterly and recklessly breaching this crucial, social-scaffolding, gate-securing, stewardship duty.
All this is civically very dangerous. If the citizenry doesn’t see “heroes” or “righteous men” amongst their natural leaders and elites who embody and project their core values, they become demoralized, lose that social trust, and feel leaderless. They often then instinctively seek out “heroes” elsewhere, often inadvertently in dark places and, at Canada’s potential civic peril, often not the same kind of great men and heroes as before.
Beware the sought out “hero” or “Strong Man”, who promises to redress the “wrongs” of the once deserving, (but no longer), natural governing class. America, where a similar elite, gatekeeping, stewardship failure is happening, is experiencing the potentially catastrophic consequences of this elites failure now.
A lot is civically rotten and dishonest in the race-State of Canada. Our leaders and elites are doubling down on these illiberal, divisive and demoralizing Aboriginal orthodoxies: so rotten, dishonest and seemingly intractable that our elites, who are the main cause, preservers and promoters of it, have deservedly lost the confidence and trust of the citizenry; so rotten that, seemingly, only the happening of a miracle (unlikely) or some kind of sudden, unexpected, traumatic, transformative event, the usual way a society’s unsupportable status quo ends when its leaders willfully persist in the direct face of evidence to the contrary in folly and wrongful conduct, will possibly end the rot and the dishonesty and give rise to some new form of Canadian existence.
This is to contemplate a situation, as stated, of potential great civic peril.
Tragically, it appears that the disease and the decay and the intractable, benignly racist fever poisoning the health of both the Canadian polity and the Canadian State must run its course. Against all reason our elites refuse to stop this doubling down.
The present problems and the worse problems to come will, in the dealing with them, necessarily cause some new form of “creativity” to arise.
It is clear that the reforms to end Canada as a race state, if they come, will only come if they are preceded by the happening of some sudden, overwhelming and transformative event or series of events: possibly a catastrophic external event, a profoundly serious and negative internal event, an economic crisis or some other similar great national trauma, having the zeitgeist-altering effect of changing Canadians’ body of opinions and the way Canadians view themselves and their Canadian world – having the effect of shocking both our elites and ordinary Canadians into the realization that something must change- the race-State reality of Canada MUST END. Only this kind of trauma or shock will break the fever- will break the intractable, illiberal, unaffordable, benignly racist status quo.
No one knows what the type and degree of that trauma- that dislocating, transformative shock- will be, or if the fever will break at all. No one knows if the changes will be for the better, or if they will result in substance in a more negative post-trauma situation. If the latter happens Justin Trudeau’s shallow vision of Canada being a “post national” state will have come to pass.
The future looks grimly uncertain.
Peter Best
Sudbury, October 18, 2024
(With acknowledgement to Egon Friedell’s startlingly provocative A Cultural History of the Modern Age.)