Tag Archives: Gerry T. Neal

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Is Orange the new Red?

Do you remember the story of Jacobo Árbenz?

Árbenz was elected the president of Guatemala in 1950 and entered that office early in 1951.  His primary policy and the focus of his presidency was agrarian reform.  What this meant was that large sections of farmland that were currently not under cultivation were expropriated by the government and handed over to poor farm workers.  To Americans this smacked of Communism and certainly there was a resemblance in that the redistribution of wealth was involved.  There were also differences in that unlike Communists Árbenz compensated the large landowners whose property he seized and that, unlike in Communism, the seized land did not become communal property but remained private, albeit redistributed to a larger number of owners.  Somewhat ironically his program lined up, in desired outcome albeit not in means, with that of the literary group known as the Vanderbilt Agrarians or Twelve Southerners whose 1930 anthology/manifesto I’ll Take My Stand inspired Richard M. Weaver whose 1948 Ideas Have Consequences sparked a renaissance of Burkean thought in the historically liberal United States of America.

Among those for whom the similarities between Árbenz’ version of agrarianism and Communism outweighed the differences was the United Fruit Company which had something of a monopoly on the banana trade in that part of the world – Guatemala was a “banana republic” in the literal sense of the term – and from whom much of the redistributed land was seized.  The company lobbied the American government to intervene and plans were drawn up to do so in the last days of the administration of Harry Truman.  It was during the presidency of Truman’s successor, however, Dwight Eisenhower, that the Árbenz government was toppled in 1954.  Eisenhower’s Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles who had previously been the United Fruit Company’s lawyer.  His brother Allen, whom Eisenhower named director of the CIA, oversaw the coup, and also had connections to United Fruit.

Needless to say the Eisenhower administration, especially the Dulles brothers, and United Fruit all portrayed the CIA coup as an action taken to prevent the Communist takeover of Guatemala.  Ironically, however, of the two presidents involved in this story, it was Dwight Eisenhower, not Jacobo Árbenz who was most likely an actual Communist.

Robert W. Welch Jr., who after his retirement from his career as America’s Willy Wonka had founded the John Birch Society to combat Communism in 1958, in 1963 privately published a book entitled The Politician.  The book, which grew out of a letter that Welch had privately circulated a decade earlier, has remained in print and was given the subtitle “A look at the political forces that propelled Dwight David Eisenhower into the Presidency.”  Welch argued that Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”.  Russell Kirk quipped in response “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer” and quoting this witticism became William F. Buckley Jr.’s stock response to Welch’s allegations. The editor of National Review had broken ties with Welch and the JBS, ostensibly over the book although more likely over the society’s opposition to the Vietnam War.  While Kirk had undoubtedly coined a clever phrase, Buckley’s use of it was a way of avoiding having to answer Welch’s actual case against Eisenhower.

Of course, someone could argue that no such answer was necessary because when it comes to allegations the burden of proof is on the accuser and Welch’s evidence fell short of being the definitive proof that, say, a leaked copy of the Communist Party membership roll with Eisenhower’s name on it or the testimony of ex-Communist Party members that he had been active at their meetings, would have been.  In McCarthy and his Enemies (1954), however, Buckley and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell had examined the cases of those whom Senator Joseph McCarthy had named and showed that if it could not be proven that each of these was a card-carrying Communist it could at least be demonstrated that there was cause in the vast majority of the cases for flagging the individual as a potential security risk.  If Buckley had applied this same standard to Welch’s book, he would have found it less easy to dismiss.

It was not merely that Eisenhower had made a couple of bad decisions here or there that one could argue had in some way or another been to the advantage of the Soviet Union.  He had a consistent pattern of acting in ways that primarily benefited the Soviets, a pattern established before his presidency, even before the Cold War itself, in World War II.  About a year or so before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (sic), Eisenhower had been brought to the attention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by his daughter after she had attended a party in which the young officer had filled her ears with gushing, sycophantic, praise of her father.  FDR, note, wore his pro-Communism on his sleeve, having been the first American president to recognize the Bolshevik government, having recalled an ambassador who told the truth about conditions in the Soviet Union and replaced him with one who sent back lying reports about the paradise that Stalin was creating and whose equally deceitful memoir became the basis of a vile pro-Stalin propaganda film that FDR ordered made, who believed that he and Stalin had such an affinity that he would be easily able to manipulate the Soviet dictator (the reality was the other way around), and whose bureaucracy was so filled with Communist agents in extremely high positions that had Joseph McCarthy been a senator at the time instead of an air-force tail-gunner and had he made the same allegations he would make during the 1950s and on the same scale, he would have been guilty of grossly underestimating Soviet influence in the American government.  FDR’s government advanced Eisenhower through the military ranks far more rapidly than his skill or experience supported.  The rate accelerated after the United States entered the war and half a year later he became commanding general of the American army’s European Theater (sic) of Operations.  A year and a half later he was named Supreme Allied Commander. 

By the time the United States entered the war, Hitler had already broken his pact with Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, and so the Soviet Union was now one of the Allies as well.  Stalin requested that another front be opened up as soon as possible to relieve the pressure on the Russian army and this was not an unreasonable request under these circumstances.  Prior to D-Day, however, there was much argument over where that front should be.  Sir Winston Churchill wanted a Mediterranean invasion that would approach Germany through Italy and the Balkans.  Eisenhower and his superior, General Marshall, however, backed Stalin’s demand that the second front be opened up in France.  The Americans and the Soviets won out in the end, but the success of the Norman invasion does not prove them to have been right.  One of the reasons Churchill wanted a Mediterranean front was to prevent, or at least lessen, one of the less pleasant consequences of the Allied victory, namely the fall of Eastern Europe into the hands of the Soviets. 

While Eisenhower’s insistence on France in itself does not prove that he wanted Eastern Europe to fall behind what Churchill would soon dub the “Iron Curtain” his subsequent actions did nothing to clear him of the charge.  After D-Day, Eisenhower’s “broad front” strategy prevented commanders who wished to move faster and end the war quicker, most notably General Patton, from doing so.  In Patton’s case, he cut his fuel supplies in August 1944 and then ordered him to assume a defensive position. If Eisenhower had other motives at the time than slowing the Western Allies so the Soviets could advance from the East this cannot be said of what happened when the fall of Germany was imminent in April 1945.  At this point Eisenhower halted the Western Allies at the Elbe River and called up Stalin and told him to take Berlin.  While Eisenhower claimed that this is what had been agreed upon prior to the invasion, Churchill disputed this claim.  Eisenhower had received requests from German cities that lay in the path of the Red Army asking that they be allowed to surrender to the Americans instead.  Eisenhower denied these requests, much like the civilian government of the United States denied the surrender requests that Japan had been sending General Douglas MacArthur for over a year before the United States committed the single greatest atrocity of the war when she dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Meanwhile, discussions were underway as to the next steps to be taken after the war was won.  In 1944, a proposal for imposing a Carthaginian peace on Germany was made.  It was called the Morgenthau Plan after Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury under whose name the initial proposal was distributed, although Morgenthau’s assistant, Harry Dexter White was the brain behind it.  White, who would later dominate the Bretton Woods Conference that gave birth to the IMF and the World Bank, was identified by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as an informant of the Soviet spy rings they had been associated with.  These allegations were verified quite early and the post-Cold War publication of the Venona Project findings and the opening of the Soviet archives have established the matter beyond a reasonable doubt.  The Morgenthau Plan, if it had been enacted, would have left Western Europe much more vulnerable to Soviet invasion.  While Eisenhower would downplay his connection to the Morgenthau Plan later, Welch cited Morgenthau’s former assistant Fred Smith, as identifying Eisenhower, who hosted Morgenthau and White on 7 August, 1944, as having “launched the project.” 

Welch also quoted Eisenhower himself, from his memoir Crusade in Europe (which was ghost written for him by Joseph Fels Barnes, an American journalist who had been the American director of the Institute of Pacific Relations, a think-tank that served as a Communist front, and who had been named as a Communist by Whittaker Chambers), as having said at that same meeting “Prominent Nazis, along with certain industrialists, must be tried and punished.  Membership in the Gestapo and in the SS should be taken as prima facie evidence of guilt.  The General Staff must be broken up, all its archives confiscated, and members suspected of complicity in starting the war or in any war crimes should be tried.”  This, was eventually acted out at Nuremberg.  At the Tehran Conference, when Stalin and Roosevelt made ghoulish remarks about a post-war “victor’s justice” involving the summary execution of random German officers, Churchill walked out in disgust (it was Stalin, not the American president who went after him and appeased him with the excuse that Solomon put in the mouth of the “mad man who casteth firebrand, arrows, and death”) and after the Nuremberg Trials his son Randolph, speaking in Australia called the executions of the German officers murder and said “They were not hanged for starting the war but for losing it. If we tried the starters, why not put Stalin in the dock?”  This was not a popular opinion then and it is less popular now in this day and age in which questioning the received account of the other side’s atrocities in that war is absurdly treated as a crime itself but the Churchills recognized what we have allowed to sink into Orwell’s memory hole, that putting those you have just defeated in war on trial before a newly created court that could not possibly have any legitimate jurisdiction was not in accordance with the principles that, however often they may have been ignored, have informed our civilization’s ideas of law and justice since classical antiquity although it fits quite neatly into the Soviets’ barbarous idea of justice.  The American who was most outspoken in expressing this forgotten truth at the time was Senator Robert. A. Taft of Ohio, the son of former American president William Howard Taft.  The story of his bravery on this occasion can be found in the final chapter of Profiles in Courage, ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Ted Sorenson.  Senator Taft, incidentally, was Eisenhower’s chief rival for the Republican Party’s nomination in the election that put Eisenhower into the White House.

The most inexcusable of Eisenhower’s war-era pro-Communist activities, however, was his involvement in the forced repatriation of refugees from Communism.  This is often called “Operation Keelhaul”, which is the title of the fourth chapter of Welch’s book as well as of the book-length treatment of the matter by Julius Epstein, although as an official designation this name was more limited in scope, applying to a specific set of operations that were carried out for about a year after the war, while the entire program of repatriation to the Soviets began before the war ended and extended, in some cases to as late as 1949.  Count Nikolai Tolstoi entitled his excellent book about this matter Victims of Yalta.  The whole sordid affair, however, went far beyond what was agreed upon at Yalta and, indeed, began in 1944 before the conference had even taken place.  By the time it was over, up to five million ex-patriots of Soviet-occupied territory, including territory that had only just become Soviet-occupied in the war, were turned over to the Red army to face torture, the prison and labour camps administered by GULAG, and death.  Nor, as Eisenhower apologists have been known to claim, were these all or even primarily, Russians who had defected to Hitler’s army (in the case of those who did meet this description, American Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, one of the more responsible negotiators, in the talks leading up to the Yalta agreement pointed out that to meet Stalin’s demands would violate the Geneva Convention which required that these, captured in German uniform, be treated as Germans).  They included people from lands that Hitler had captured who had ended up in his camps, from which they were “liberated” only to be surrendered to Stalin.  They included soldiers who, individually or as bands, had fought in the war alongside American and other Allied forces, but for all that were turned over to Stalin’s army at his request, by Eisenhower’s orders.  They included patriots from the countries that the Red Army overran on Stalin’s march to Berlin who had put up a fight against the Soviet takeover but, before their countries fell, surrendered to the Americans instead only to be turned over the Soviets by order of Eisenhower.

From all of this, which pertains only to Eisenhower’s actions as a military commander and of which I have given merely a small sampling of what Robert Welch provided in the first five chapters of his eighteen chapter book, it should be evident that Buckley’s own standard concerning the Joseph McCarthy allegations as articulated in Buckley’s own book, had been met by Welch with regards to Eisenhower.  Indeed, suppose one was trying to prove the opposite of what Welch claimed, trying to demonstrate that Eisenhower was a solid anti-Communist.  The evidence is far less abundant, to put it mildly.  Eisenhower claimed to be anti-Communist in his run for the American presidency but that took place long after the time when openly hug-a-Red types like FDR could be elected president four times in a row.   The Cold War was underway and anyone hoping to win had to present himself as an anti-Communist.  Eisenhower basically claimed to be an anti-Communist by association by making Richard Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials as the investigator in the Alger Hiss case were impeccable, his running-mate.  Apart from his association with Nixon, the strongest evidence for Eisenhower’s anti-Communism was his deposing of Árbenz who, as we have seen, was not a real Communist and who was removed for reasons that had nothing to do with real anti-Communism. Outweighing this phony example of Communist-toppling is another example of regime change from the same era.  From 1957 to 1959, the Eisenhower administration, including the same Dulles brothers who pushed for the removal of Árbenz pursued a policy of weakening the government of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and supporting the revolutionaries.  Dulles’ CIA even provided training and arms to the revolutionaries.  Ezra Taft Benson, leader of the heretical Mormon sect and Eisenhower’s Agricultural Secretary, tried to persuade the Eisenhower administration to abandon its support for the revolutionaries and the deaf ears he kept encountering eventually persuaded him of the truth of Welch’s thesis.   In 1959 the revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro, came to power and declared their allegiance to the Soviet Union.  For a book length account of the American government’s responsibility for this outcome see The Fourth Floor: An Account of the Castro Communist Revolution, the memoir of Earl E. T. Smith, who was the American ambassador to Cuba during the period of the revolution.

On 3 January, the American air force bombed Venezuela while a team of American agents infiltrated the country, captured its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and removed them from Caracas to New York where they were charged with various crimes having to do with narcoterrorism.  When I heard the news, Guatemala in 1954 came immediately to mind. 

In both incidents, the American government removed the president of a Latin American country.  Both times they justified their actions by accusing the removed president of the greatest evils of the day – Communism in the case of Árbenz, narcoterrorism in the case of Maduro, although defenders of the American government’s actions also frequently call Maduro a Communist.  In the case of Guatemala the American government’s real motivation was the economic interests of United Fruit.  In the case of Venezuela, it was, as the American president openly admits, all about the country’s oil which had been nationalized by Maduro’s predecessor.  In both cases, the American president was himself likely a Communist.

In 1987, Donald Trump visited the Soviet Union, ostensibly to make a deal to build a hotel in Moscow.  Alnar Mussayev, a Kazakhstan politician who served in the KGB during the 1980s, claimed last year that Trump had been recruited as an asset by the KGB during this visit and given the codename “Krasnov”.  While Trump’s political opponents, the Democrat Left, have been accusing him of being a Russian puppet for years, Mussayev’s claim is somewhat different.  When Hilary Clinton, et al., accused Trump of being controlled by Russia, they were thinking of Russia as a nation, a post-Communist country which, in their eyes, had gone down a dark path since the break-up of the Soviet Union.  The KGB, however, was not merely a Russian national agency, but a Communist agency.

It is 2026 now and the Soviet Union has supposedly been gone for thirty-five years.  I stress the word “supposedly.”   In his 1995 book The Perestroika Deception, Anatoliy Golitsyn warned that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a façade intended to lull the West to sleep as a late stage in a long-term Communist strategy of deception thought up decades earlier.  The Communist Party and its KGB enforcers remained firmly in charge, Golitsyn argued.  As crazy as this may have sounded, the credibility of the book was greatly enhanced by Golitsyn’s earlier, 1984, New Lies for Old, which also warned of a long-term strategy of deception thought up by the Communists in the late 1950s.  This book contained many predictions, most of which were fulfilled by the early 1990s.

The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, had been a career KGB agent before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and his entry into politics.  That he has been in charge of Russia, alternating as prime minister and president, for the past quarter century, adds further credibility to Golitsyn’s claim that the KGB, and the Communist Party behind it, remained in power after the supposed Soviet breakup.  If Mussayev is right about Trump, then Communism once again has an agent in the White House, as it did at the time Golitsyn says the Communists agreed upon this strategy.  The difference is that at that time, Communism was regarded as a serious threat, today it is regarded as a thing of the past, a defeated foe, making a Communist agent in the White House that much more of a threat.

Of course, even if Mussayev was talking out of his rear end and Trump is not a KGB chess piece in a game the Communists have been playing since the 1950s, he is still the world’s biggest jerk.  This is another thing common to him and Eisenhower.  Suppose Welch’s interpretation of Eisenhower’s actions was as off-base as Buckley and Kirk claimed it was.  He still ordered the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union.  He still supported the revolution that put Castro into power.  Communist or not, he was a real bastard.

Maduro may very well be as bad as Trump’s zombie cheerleaders claim him to be.  Indeed, I’d be surprised to hear that he wasn’t.  That does not make the Trump administration’s actions right.  The United States does not have some kind of universal jurisdiction to act as policeman, prosecutor, judge and executioner for the entire world.  Nor should her acting like she does be tolerated by the rest of the world.

One of Krasnov’s predecessors, John Quincy Adams, while serving as James Monroe’s Secretary of State, famously declared “America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”  While Adams’ idea of a United States that minded her own business rather than everyone else’s was not absolute – it was not until a couple of decades later that he repudiated his belief in the repugnant doctrine of Manifest Destiny, i.e., America’s supposed destiny to subjugate everyone else in this hemisphere to the rule of the United States, and then, for reasons other than that he perceived the inconsistency between this and his nobler idea of a United States that minded her own business – it remained influential into the first half of the twentieth century.  World War II was believed to have killed it, nailed its coffin shut, and buried it. Adams’ words, however, were revived after the end of the Cold War by those who thought that the United States should roll back her military presence throughout the world and who rejected George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “New World Order”, announced in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in which the United States would lead a coalition of nations in policing the world against actions such as Hussein’s. 

These were generally those on what passes as the Right in the United States – the United States having been founded on the ideology of liberalism by deists who rejected everything the real Right stood for, i.e., royal monarchy, an established Church, and the rest of the institutions and order of pre-liberal Christendom – who dissented from the neoconservatism that had come to dominate the American Right by the end of the Cold War.  A note to readers from my own country, while we use “neoconservative” to refer to Canadian “conservatives” who define their “conservatism” in American terms rather than those of the more authentic Toryism of our own country and the larger British Commonwealth, in the United States “neoconservative” refers to a group of pundits, who had been part of the New York Intellectuals in the period leading from the war into the second half of the twentieth century and as such had been on the Left with views ranging from those of FDR type New Dealers to Trotskyism, who in response to the development of the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, realigned themselves with the American Right.  This American neoconservatism blended what was basically a Manichean view of the world as a battleground between the forces of Good and a reified Evil with a Nietzschean view of “might makes right.”  Practically, however, its ideas were that the rest of the world was entitled to American liberal democracy, that the United States had the duty to provide the rest of the world with American liberal democracy, whether they wanted it or not, even if it took all of America’s bombs and bullets and boots on the ground to do so, and especially if it meant regime change in a country whose government Israel wanted removed.  This belligerent and ignorant hawkishness became even more pronounced as American neoconservatism entered its second and third generations.  Those who quoted John Quincy Adams in response to the neoconservative takeover of the American Right were called paleoconservatives (Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Thomas Fleming, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Gottfried, et al.,) and paleolibertarians (Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, et. al.,) and when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States the first time this was widely regarded as a victory for them and a defeat for the neoconservatives who generally opposed Trump.


In Donald Trump’s third bid for the American presidency in 2024, however, he had the support of these same neoconservatives.  This, as became evident before Trump was even inaugurated the second time, signalled that The Apprentice, White House Edition, 2.0 would be very different from the original and not in any way that could be described as an improvement.  In the new iteration Trump has been acting as if he were elected president of the world rather than merely of one country and that the rest of the world has to bow to his wishes or be forced to do so either by his preferred means of economic force, such as tariffs, or if necessary by more conventional military means.  The only county he does not seem to think he has the right to boss around is Israel, the very country the American neoconservatives place at the top of their pecking order above their own.

Let us now return to the thesis I have been suggesting in this essay.  It was never very likely that the Communist Party would achieve its goal of world-wide Communism by means of the Soviet military.  The establishment of a world-wide Pax Americana under the United States as the sole superpower, however, was a likely outcome of the Cold War and it might serve Communism’s end better than the Red Army ever could if the break-up of the Soviet Union was the elaborate ruse Golitsyn painted it to be and if a KGB agent recruited in the perestroika and glasnost phase of the Communist strategy were to become the American president as it entered its end game.  Should someone raise the objection that it makes no sense for an extremely wealthy businessman like Donald Trump to be a Communist agent, I would answer that such an objection displays ignorance of the history of Communism.  From 1848 when wealthy cotton merchant Friedrich Engels co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx to 1917 when the Bolshevik Revolution was financed by German and American bankers (see Anthony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution) to the very end of the Cold War it was always capitalist money that kept Communism afloat.  Has not the open policy of the People’s Republic of China for decades been to finance Communism with capitalism?

We have become too used to thinking of Communism and capitalism in terms of the Cold War paradigm which portrayed them as enemies that are each the polar opposite of the other.  In such a paradigm it would be difficult to explain the thinking of the American president just prior to the Cold War.  What made FDR so naïve when it came to Stalin?  It was his conviction that despite the differences in state structure and economy, the United States and the Soviet Union were ultimately on the same side and not just in the sense that they were both at war with the Third Reich but in the sense that they were both Modern countries to whom the future belonged as opposed to older powers whose day had passed into which category he placed the other Allied powers.

From the perspective of those of us who are still Tories, who still cherish what the original Right stood for, who still believe in kings, orthodox Christianity, the Church, roots, tradition, honour, loyalty, chivalry and all the old pre-mercantile virtues, FDR’s point of view was in a sense more correct than that of the Cold War paradigm.  This correctness did not lie in its more positive assessment of Stalin and Communism, but in its identifying the Modern spirit of progress that united the USA and USSR as outweighing the differences between their economic models.  We, however, would say that what FDR celebrated, we decry because this Modern spirit has been the enemy of all we hold dear for centuries.   Communism is more open and upfront about this hostility, being officially atheist rather than merely officially secular, but this arguably makes capitalism the more dangerous of the two.  Capitalism is better as an economic model because it is not based on calling what is protected as a good by God’s Law, property, an evil, like Communism is, but both systems openly worship and serve Mammon. 

Trump’s critics on the Left typically liken him to Hitler.  Of course they have been doing this all along and they do this to everybody.  The comparison, therefore, had more weight to it when it was made this week by podcaster Joe Rogan.  The thing about Hitler is, while most contemporary thought likes to imagine that it was Nazi distinctives, things which set Nazism apart from other systems like Communism, that made it so bad, the reality is that it is the much larger group of areas in which Nazism was indistinguishable from Communism – a totalitarian state that governed by fear enforced by secret police and prison camps, etc. – that made it so bad, which is something Sir Winston Churchill certainly understood.  Rogan compared ICE, the immigration enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security, to the Gestapo.  He could have added the Cheka, the NKVD, or any other of the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police.  The comparison is quite valid.  An organization empowered to hide behind masks, stop individuals in their daily lives and demand to see their papers is behaving exactly like these Communist agencies.   Granting an agency powers of this sort seems to be more designed to harass and intimidate American citizens than to deal with the very real immigration problem the United States, like other Western countries, faces.  It was George W. Bush rather than Trump who created ICE, but the sort of disregard for the rule of law and reasonable limitations on powers that Rogan was commenting on is increasingly characterising the second administration of the man who only a few days ago told an interviewer that his own morality was the only limit on his power.

From a sound Tory perspective, it is not that this sort of thing has finally come about in the United States that is surprising so much as that it took so long for it to happen.  The American Revolution was based on the same toxic notions that Edmund Burke rightly referred to as “armed doctrines” when they were shortly thereafter re-used to produce the French Revolution which very quickly brought about the Reign of Terror.  T. S. Eliot wrote in 1939 “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”  Today they will have to make do with Krasnov the Orange. — Gerry T. Neal

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New Year, Old Tory

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Throne, Altar, Liberty

Thursday, January 1, 2026

New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole – of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

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Catholic and Protestant

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, June 20, 2025

Catholic and Protestant

The Anglican Church is both Catholic and Protestant, although the liberalism that has become far too prevalent in the Church in both England and North America is neither Catholic nor Protestant nor, for that matter, Christian, but is rather a revisionist theology that borrows Christian terms and redefines them to fit the ideas of the post-Christian secularism that “Western Civilization” adapted after ceasing to be Christendom.  While orthodox Anglicans of both high and low varieties are usually okay with the expression “Reformed Catholic” some Anglo-Catholics are as allergic to the term Protestant as some evangelical Anglicans, those who share some traits of what I call Hyper-Protestantism, are of the term Catholic.

I maintain that we ought to embrace both words, albeit with the caveat that they are properly defined.

“Protestant” requires the most definition. It has become a rather vague term, designating any ecclesiastical group not in fellowship with the Roman See except those who parted ways with Rome prior to the sixteenth century like the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox or whose breech with Rome was based on new innovations Rome introduced after the Council of Trent like the Old Catholics.  Used this way, it conveys little to nothing in the way of positive information about what these groups believe.  For the term to be meaningful rather than useless it needs to be defined in a way that identifies beliefs that all Protestant groups hold in common.  This requires that it be less inclusive than is the current norm.

The words that we would most naturally use as substitutes for “Protestant” come with their own sets of difficulties, however.  “Reformed,” while it sounds better to the ear than “Protestant” and taken literally is a precise statement of what we mean when we say the Anglican Church is Protestant, that is, that is has undergone a “Reformation”, comes with a problem that is the opposite of that attached to “Protestant.”  It is too precise.  Especially when it is spelled with a capital R, it identifies a specific ecclesiastical tradition, that which emerged from the Reformation in Switzerland and as a theological term it indicates the system associated with the Reformed Church, and in particular the interpretation of predestination adapted at the Synod of Dort.  While a sort of Calvinism was probably the predominant theology among Anglican clergy of the last half of the sixteenth century and there was an attempt to enshrine this in the official theology of the Church by appending the Lambeth Articles to the Articles of Religion this attempt ultimately failed because it went against the overall spirit of the first Elizabethan era which was to avoid committing the Church to either side in the disputes between the mainstream traditions of the continental Reformation.  This meant that the slight slant towards the Swiss Reformed tradition that had been introduced late in the reforms under Edward VI was removed by the reforms under Elizabeth I. Examples of this can be seen in the revision of the Articles of Religion into the current Thirty-Nine from the Edwardian Forty-Two and the dropping of the black rubric from the Elizabethan editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

In the sixteenth century “Protestant” was largely a term of abuse used by the Roman See and its adherents for the Reformers and their followers.  Their own preferred self-designation was “evangelical” but as with the term “Reformed” little would be gained by substituting this for “Protestant.”  By the twentieth century, especially in North America, this term had come to have a rather different set of connotations than in the sixteenth century.  It has connotations of pietism, puritanism, revivalism and an approach to religion centred on personal experience of the type that the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers would most likely have denounced as the enthusiasm and extremism associated with those they dubbed Schwärmerei.  Alternately it can suggest a revised version of fundamentalism that is less separatist (good) but also far more willing to compromise on the infallible authority of Scripture (bad). 

There is also the problem that the self-application of this term by the sixteenth century Reformers and their followers was based on the mistaken idea that they had recovered a Gospel that the Church had lost.  The Gospel is clearly identified in the New Testament as the message that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses.  It is at the heart of the faith confessed in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds as well as the Athanasian Symbol, along with the basic truths that identify the Christ proclaimed in the Gospel (that there is one God, Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son, while remaining fully God, became truly Man, by taking unto Himself a whole human nature through His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and birth of the Virgin Mary).  It was never lost by the Church.  If the Reformers recovered anything it was the Pauline doctrine of justification, but this is not the Gospel.  The Pauline doctrine of justification – that it is by faith and not by works, or as the Reformers put it, by faith alone – is a doctrine about the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel itself.  The Gospel is Christocentric – it is about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is anthropocentric – it is about us, and how we receive the benefit of what the Gospel proclaims.  To claim that justification by faith alone is itself the Gospel is to place us rather than Jesus Christ at the centre of the Gospel.

Rather than abandon it for these alternatives, it makes more sense to retain “Protestant” with a proper definition.  The definition need include no more than two positive affirmations of belief.  The first is that the Bible as God’s written Word is the authoritative standard of truth to which the Church’s doctrine and tradition must conform.  The second is that the salvation which Jesus Christ accomplished for us in the events proclaimed in the Gospel is in all of its aspects given to us freely as a gift which we receive by faith rather than by our works.  

“Catholic”, as stated, requires less definition.  This is the ancient term – the first recorded use of it is in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred early in the second century – that designated the whole Church as distinguished from the Church in a specific location (the Church in Rome, the Church in Galatia, and so forth).  It is the Greek word for whole – which is also the root from which the English word whole is derived – with the prefix kata attached as an intensifier.  In addition to designating the whole Church, the early Christians used it to distinguish the true faith from heresy.  This is how the term is used in the Athanasian Symbol, in, for example, its first statement “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”  Used this way, it is basically synonymous with orthodox, but note that the usage of Catholic as orthodox is derived from the meaning of Catholic as whole.  The Catholic faith, the orthodox faith, does not include doctrines that are particular to one place or one time, but is the faith confessed by the whole Church of Christ.  As. St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it is the faith confessed “everywhere, in all times, and by all.”

“Protestant” and “Catholic”, so defined, should not be thought to be at odds with each other.  A Catholicism that is defined by what is believed and practiced by the whole Church, in all times and places, rather than what may be particular in one place and time, will not include such things as mandatory celibacy for clergy, restricting Communion to one kind for the laity, an intermediate state for the faithful prior to the Final Judgement that resembles hell except in that it is temporary, supererogatory works and a treasury of merit, indulgences and dispensations, that are innovations of the Roman Church from after when she and the Churches of the four ancient Patriarchs of the East broke fellowship with each other at the end of the first Christian millennium.  These things have never been part of the faith and practice of the Eastern Churches.  The Protestantism that rejects these on the grounds of their being unscriptural is not rejecting anything that can truly be said to be Catholic.  That having been said, there are ideas commonly thought to be “Protestant” that are at odds with Catholicism properly defined.  Examples of these include a) the idea that the true “Church” is not an organized community/society but an aggregate term for speaking of all people who considered as individuals are Christian believers, b) the idea that ecclesiastical government (episcopal, Presbyterian, congregational) is adiopha rather than of Apostolic provenance, c) the idea that when Holy Communion is said to be an anamnesis or memorial of the Lord’s death this means a depiction in the present of an event in the past rather than the means given to us by grace whereby we partake in time of the Lord’s sacrifice which has been taken out of time and into eternity by His offering of Himself in the Tabernacle built not with hands in Heaven, d) the idea that baptism, the sacrament of entry under the New Covenant corresponding with circumcision under the Old, unlike the New Covenant itself is less inclusive rather than more and should therefore be withheld from the infants of Christian parents, and e) that when the Son of God “was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father)” so that He could say to St. Philip “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” this did not effect a fundamental change from when God said to Israel through Moses under the Old Covenant “ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”  Just as none of the beliefs and practices that Rome introduced after the Schism and which Protestantism rejected is truly Catholic, so none of these ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic should be considered essential to what is truly Protestant.  That all of them are wrong is demonstrable from the Scriptures.[1]

Rather than picking “Protestant” or “Catholic” to describe our Church, orthodox Anglicans should embrace both terms, defining “Protestant” so as to include the supreme authority of Scripture and the freeness of the gift of Christ’s salvation received by faith[2] but to exclude ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic in that it belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church since the earliest times and defining “Catholic” so as to include what belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church from the earliest times but to exclude those distinctly Roman errors rightly excised from our English Church in the Reformation.

[1] That a) is wrong is evident from both the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, which denotes a group that has met or assembled, and from how the New Testament uses the word – it is always a visible community of Christian believers, never just a convenient way of speaking of X, Y, and Z Christians, regardless of whether they have ever met.   With regards to b), the episcopal polity is clearly of Apostolic provenance in the New Testament – the Apostles themselves, along with those invited to share in their governance such as SS Timothy and Titus, are the bishops in the sense of the governors of the Church, presiding as the top tier of a ministry which like that of the Old Testament Church has three tiers, the middle being that of the presbyters and the lower tier the deacons.  That the Apostles were the governors and the New Testament was written while they were still alive is the reason the word bishop had not yet become the official designation of the governors and is sometimes used of presbyters.  This is a seer/prophet matter and does not negate the New Testament’s clear testimony to the Apostolic provenance of the ecclesiastical government found in all ancient Churches prior to the sixteenth century.  With regards to c), look up every occurrence of anamnesis in the Bible, LXX Old Testament and New Testament.   In none of these does it mean something intended to call something from the past to our mental recollection.  That Christ died in time, but took His sacrifice out of time and into eternity by offering it in the Heavenly Tabernacle is a key theme of the epistle to the Hebrews.  With regards to d), that baptism takes the place of circumcision can be demonstrated from Colossians 2:11-13 and that the New Covenant is more inclusive than the Old is rather the point of Christ’s commission to take His Gospel and baptize all nations, as well as of St. Paul’s frequent comments about the Old Testament Law, which distinguished Israel from other nations, being removed as a “wall of partition” between them.  That infants, circumcised on the eight day under the Old Covenant, would not be excluded from baptism under the New, is the only reasonable inference from this and is basically explicitly stated by the Lord when He rebuked His disciples from not allowing the infants to be brought to Him.  The words quoted from St. John’s Gospel in e) ought to be sufficient to rebut it.  Obviously the Incarnation changed everything.  The arguments that St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite advanced against the iconoclasts and which won out in the seventh ecumenical council were built firmly upon the foundation of the Incarnation.  While Christians who adopt iconoclasm like to think they are walking in the footsteps of King Josiah and that Christians who reject their iconoclasm are tainted with pagan idolatry, in reality the iconoclasts have adopted a position typical of monotheistic religions that reject the Incarnation.

[2] When Dr. Luther said that justification is by “faith alone”, by “alone” he excluded only what St. Paul had already excluded in Romans and Galatians, our own works, and for the very reason St. Paul gives for excluding these in Romans 4, that if it were by works it would be a wage paid to us rather than a gift freely given.  Faith is the hand by which we receives the freely given grace of God and in this function it is indeed alone in that nothing else we do can either do this instead of faith or alongside faith.  This does not exclude the sacraments as means of grace, as ought to be evident from what Dr. Luther, Calvin, and our own Anglican formularies have to say about them.  In the giving of a gift, two hands are always involved, the hand of the recipient and the hand of the giver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver working through the means of His Church.  Nor does it say anything about any other function of faith, such as its being one of the three elements of basic Christian character alongside hope and Christian love.  Nor is it some sort of ontological statement.  This adequately answers any reasonable objection someone might try to make to it on the grounds of theology that is actually Catholic.  When Rome anathematized it in the Council of Trent, and the Eastern Church rejected it as found in the Confession of Cyril I Lucaris, what they rejected was the idea that someone can gain acceptance before God by getting all of his intellectual ducks lined up properly while living however he pleases. This, however, is not what Dr. Luther meant but is rather a form of salvation by works in which visible outward works have been replaced by invisible inner works.  The Protestant doctrine can only be properly understood as speaking of faith as the hand that receives the gift of salvation.  That salvation is a gift we receive rather than something we earn or achieve for ourselves is a Catholic truth that both the Roman and Eastern Churches traditionally affirm, a fact one needs only look at the early history of the struggles against the rigorist schismatics the Donatists and Novatians and against the heresy of Pelagius to discover, but it had become badly obscured, especially at the popular level, in the Roman Church by the end of the fifteenth century.– Gerry T. Neal

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              Democracy and Equality

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, November 7, 2024

                                         Democracy and Equality

In conversation with some colleagues the other day, the topic of the American election came up.  One person said that the Americans should amend their system so that whoever wins the popular vote wins the election.  I responded that this was a bad suggestion.  Democracy, I argued, is the worst concept of government there is.  America’s Founding Fathers, I argued, while wrong to give themselves a republican (no king) form of government, at least had the sense to invent the electoral college to filter the popular vote so that their democracy was less direct.

Someone else said that I was advocating dictatorship, as if this was the only alternative to democracy.  Apparently he had forgotten that I have explained my views quite clearly in the past. Legitimate government is a representative model on earth of the government of the universe in Heaven.  That means the reign of kings.  Or, should the succession fall to a woman as in the case of our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, a queen.  Since human beings are fallen and sinful and lack the perfect justice of the King of Kings in Heaven, the institution that provides the governed with representation in the earthly king’s government is also acceptable.  This is the ancient institution of Parliament.  That it is ancient and has proven itself through the tests of time, and not the fact that it is democratic, is why it is acceptable. 

Dictatorship is not the opposite of democracy but its ultimate expression.  I don’t mean the original dictators, who were officials of the Roman Republic, appointed by the consuls (co-presidents) to handle an emergency, usually military in nature. I mean dictators in today’s usage, which is synonymous with what the ancients called tyrants.  Whatever you call it, however, a dictator or tyrant, this kind of person is the ultimate democrat.  For he seizes power by rallying the mob behind him.  He is the opposite of a king, whose position in his realm is an extension of that of the father in the home or the patriarch in the older, more extended, family.  A dictator is always “Big Brother”, the first among equals.  Eric Blair knew of that which he wrote.

This colleague defended equality on the grounds that the Lord made us equal.  “Chapter and verse” I responded.  There is no chapter and verse, because this is not the teaching of the Scriptures.

Like democracy, equality is one of those abstract ideals that Modern man has made into an idol.  The ancient Greeks knew better as can be seen in the myth of Procrustes, whom Theseus encountered and who made his guests fit his one-size-for-all bed by either lopping parts of them off or stretching them.  Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Harrison Bergeron” is an updated version of this story.  Equality is a very deceptive idol because of its surface resemblance to the ancient good of justice.  Justice, however, demands that each person be treated right.  Equality demands that each person be treated the same as every other person.  These are not the same thing. 

The difference between treating people right and treating people the same can be illustrated by further ripping the mask off of equality.  Equality passes itself off as the virtuous ethic of “You should treat a perfect stranger as if he were your own brother.”  In practice, however, what it really means is “you should treat your own brother as if he were a perfect stranger.”  In the field of economics equality is socialism, the system that presents itself under the mask of Charity or Christian Love, the highest of the spiritual or theological virtues, when behind that mask is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins.

The ancients knew that equality and democracy, far from being the goods and virtues they purport to be, basically boiled down to two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for supper.  Modern experience adds that the false idol of equality leads inevitably to the dehumanization of mass society in which each person is reduced to just one number in the multitude.

My colleague argued that each person is equal in worth or value and that this can be seen by the fact that Jesus died for everybody.  We should not be making a big deal about people’s worth or value, however, because to do so is to commoditize human beings.  The value or worth of something is what you can exchange it for in the market.  Jesus applied the concept of value to human beings once.  This was in Matt. 10:21 and Luke 12:7 which record the same saying.  Jesus’ point here is not egalitarian.  God cares for the sparrows, you are worth more than them (this is a hierarchical, not an egalitarian observation), therefore you should trust God to take care of you.  The only other time the word value appears in the New Testament – worth doesn’t appear there at all – is in Matt. 27:9 which speaks about the silver Judas was paid to betray Jesus. 

Yes, Jesus died for all.  To say that this made people equal is a major non sequitur.  It introduced a new distinction between people.  Those who trust in Him are saved by His death.  Those who don’t, are condemned all the more for their rejection of the Saviour.  Where they are equal, that is, the same, is in their need for Christ’s saving work.

I recommend reading Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn for clarity on this matter.  Start with his Liberty Or Equality? The Challenge of Our Times. — Gerry T. Neal

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The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

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The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Monday, July 1, 2024

The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

Today is the 157th anniversary of the day when the British North America Act came into effect establishing a new realm in North America that under the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and governed by her own Parliament in Ottawa would bear the title of Dominion and the name of Canada.  Originally a confederation of four provinces she would grow to include six others along with the territories which were originally a single territory, which was divided twice, just before the twentieth century and at that century’s end bringing the current number to three.  Although I was only six when the Liberals, lacking the necessary quorum in Parliament, sneakily and illegally passed a bill changing the name of our country’s holiday I still refer to it as Dominion Day which the great Robertson Davies, writing to the Globe and Mail, once described as a “splendid title” while referring to the new one as “wet” due to its being one letter off Canada Dry, and the folly of the Liberal parliamentarians as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed.”

Normally for Dominion Day I write an essay, sometimes about a notable Canada, sometimes a more political piece blasting the Liberals, big and small l, and all the changes for the worse that they have wrought.  Last year’s essay was a call for religious revival in Canada.  This year I decided to do something a bit different and have put together a Dominion Day recommended reading list.  This list is not intended to be exhaustive either in whole or in any of the sections into which it is divided so non-inclusion in this list should not be taken as a recommendation against a book on my part.  

Canada: Political Philosophy

The two books that top my list of recommendations for Canadian political reading are ones to which long-time readers will have seen me make multiple mentions.  These are John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).  The first of these, which was published posthumously having been edited by journalist Judith Robinson who herself passed away not that long after, makes the case for our constitutional parliamentary monarchy against the alternatives of American capitalist republicanism or Soviet socialist totalitarianism which at the time were striving to remake the entire world, each in her own image, in the conflict we remember as the Cold War.  Farthing also discusses the first stage of the Liberal Party’s subversion of our constitution in the King-Byng affair.  A more thorough examination and defense of the constitutional principles represented by the right side of that almost century old controversy, that of Lord Byng (the King in the name of the affair was not King George V, whom Byng represented as Governor-General, but the Liberal Prime Minister whose last name was King) can be found in Eugene Forsey’s doctoral dissertation which was published as The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943).  I mention this third book, which in its dissertation form can be found online if you have any difficulty locating a hard copy, before commenting on Diefenbaker’s because of its topical connection with Farthing’s. Diefenbaker’s book collects speeches that he gave during and in response to the second wave of Liberal subversion.  It is mostly changes wrought early in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau that are decried although the second wave of Liberal subversion can be dated to the moment that Lester Pearson, with the aid of both the Social Credit and the New Democrats, ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  For the classic account of this act of Liberal subversion see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965) which is the most political of Grant’s books, although it incorporates the philosophical and moral insights more typical of his other writings.

The fifth book that deserves mention under this heading is The Social Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973) which was edited by Alan Bowker and which incorporates the whole of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, originally published in 1920 and which is a critique rather than an endorsement of socialism, as well as “Greater Canada: An Appeal” and several of the essays from Leacock’s Essays and Literary Studies (1916), including his “The Woman Question” which is the best single piece ever written by a Canadian on the subject of feminism. Leacock was the chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill where he was a mentor to both Farthing and Forsey.  Noting this connection brings me to the sixth book, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982).  The author of this book was Charles Taylor, not the philosopher but the journalist and race horse breeder. Eugene Forsey and George Grant both get a chapter in this book, the chapters being based on  Taylor’s personal interviews with these men, which is the same format used for the chapters on the historians Donald Creighton and William Morton and a few others.  Leacock and Farthing obviously could not be similarly interviewed although Taylor discussed Leacock and mentioned Farthing earlier in the book.

Canada: Topical Politics

The distinction between the books under the previous heading and the books under this one is that the previous books addressed Canadian politics in terms of general political philosophy whereas these address specific issues.  The Stephen Leacock book could have gone in either section.

On the subject of immigration, which is a very hot button topic today, Doug Collins’ Immigration: the Destruction of English Canada (Richmond Hill: BMG, 1979) is arguably still the best Canadian book ever written.  It was the eighth and last book published by BMG, a small publishing house set up by Winnett Boyd, Kenneth McDonald and Orville Gaines to warn against the path down which Pierre Trudeau was leading Canada. This was very early in the era of liberal immigration and Collins accurately predicted that the end result would be the importation of a lot of unnecessary and unwanted racial strife.  For warning against importing racial strife Collins was branded a racist.  Since that warning went unheeded, he was a Cassandra and his enemies did their worst to make him a pariah by the time he passed away in 2001.  More of his commentary on immigration and a host of other issues can be found in The Best and Worst of Doug Collins (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1987).  When this book was first published you could walk into an ordinary bookstore and buy it off the shelf.  When he died in 2001, the only obituaries I remember seeing were by Kevin Michael Grace in the Report and by Allan Fotheringham in MacLeans (I was never a fan of Foth but he showed a lot of class on this occasion).  The next book on my list on this topic is Ricardo Duchesne’s Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (London: Black House Publishing, 2017).  Of all recent books on Canadian immigration this is the closest to Collins’ in terms of what it is for and what it is against although it tackles the subject from an academic rather than a journalistic angle – Duchesne is a historical sociologist who until he was driven out by leftist colleagues a few years back was a professor in the social science department of the University of New Brunswick – and has the advantage of almost four more decades of history on which to comment.  Other books deserving mention are Charles M. Campbell’s Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000) and Mike Taylor’s The Truth About Immigration: Exposing the Economic and Humanitarian Myths (Coquitlam: KARMA Publishing, 1998).  These could be described as having been written from an insider’s perspective.  Campbell, an engineer in the mining industry by profession, served ten years on the old Immigration Appeal Board that existed before it was reorganized into the Immigration and Refugee Appeal Board in 1989 following the Supreme Court’s bad ruling in the Singh case in 1985.  Taylor had worked as an immigration investigator for the federal government before writing his book.

The current Liberal government that has taken rather the opposite view of immigration to that expressed in the books just mentioned has promoted a lot of hatred against Canada or at least the historical Canada.  They have also promoted a lot of ethno-masochism among Canadians of European ancestry.  I am not saying that these problems began with the present government, far from it, but they have been more aggressively promoted by this government than any prior and the means employed has been a narrative in which the history of the church-administered boarding schools that Canada used to fulfil her education obligations under the Indian treaties has been heavily distorted.   In response I will recommend two books both of which are edited collections by multiple authors.   The first is Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf ed. From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Report (Winnipeg: The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021) and the second is C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan ed. Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) (Dorchester Books and True North Media, 2023).

Since my recommendations in the previous two paragraphs will have already driven any overly sensitive progressive into a fuming frenzy I will stoke the fire of their rage further by adding Down The Drain? A Critical Re-Examination of Canadian Foreign Aid, written by Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform co-founders Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published in Toronto by Griffin House in 1981.  This is the best Canadian book that I have read on the subject of tax money being taken from working and middle class Canadians and either dumped into the bank accounts of Third World dictators or thrown away on wasteful projects in the Third World.  While the book is obviously in need of either an update or a sequel the issue, which had largely been dormant for a decade or more, has been brought back to life with a vengeance by the present Trudeau Liberals.

When it comes to the topic of the ongoing moral and social decay of our country and Western Civilization in general in the post-World War II era the best and certainly most exhaustive book by a Canadian that comes to my mind is The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out On the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That Threaten Us All.  The author was the late William D. Gairdner who competed for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympics before going to university and earning his Ph.D. and becoming a well-known small-c conservative speaker and writer.  This, his second book, was originally published in hardback in1992 by Stoddart of Toronto who released a paperback edition the following year.  After Stoddart folded, BPS Books of Toronto re-released the paperback edition in 2007 with a new cover which as far as I can tell is the only revision made.  In connection with this book I would also recommend by the same author The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008).  Where the first book looks at such matters as “Compulsory Miseducation”, “Moral Values and Sex Ed”, “The Feminist Mistake: Women Against the Family”, “Women at War: On the Military, Day Care and Home Fronts”, “Radical Homosexuals vs. The Family”, “The Invisible Holocaust: Abortion vs. the Family” to give a few chapter titles in whole or in part from the perspective of the official policies behind the various changes involved the second book digs deeper and addresses the basic ideas of which the official policies are practical applications.

The War Against the Family included a chapter on euthanasia as well as a chapter on abortion and this has become a far more timely topic due to the present government’s having introduced the world’s most aggressive and extreme euthanasia policy in M.A.I.D.  Another book that addressed both abortion and euthanasia from the perspective of showing how the Modern technological way of thinking and doing has conditioned people to reject the older way of thinking about justice that rejected and condemned these things and to embrace a newer way of thinking that accepts them was George Grant’s final book Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Ananasi Press, 1986).  The chapters on abortion and euthanasia are the last two in the book and these Grant co-wrote with his wife Sheila.

Bill Whatcott’s Born In a Graveyard: One man’s transformation from a violent, drug-addicted criminal into Canada’s most outspoken family values activist (Langley: Good Character Books, 2014) is the autobiography, or perhaps testimony would be a better word, of a man who has paid the price for translating his Christian views on these matters, especially abortion and homosexuality, into practice in the form of activism.  Whatcott was charged by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission for distributing pamphlets that colourfully expressed his opinion about the alphabet soup gang’s public schools agenda.  The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruled against Whatcott who appealed to what was then the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench (now King’s Bench) which upheld the Tribunal’s ruling, then to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal which ruled in favour of Whatcott causing the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada which held hearings in 2011 and unanimously ruled in 2013 that while Whatcott’s rights under section 2 of the Charter had indeed been violated those who so violated them were allowed to get away with it because of the loop-hole in section 1. Needless to say this asinine ruling in which the expression of “detestation” and “vilification” was declared to be outside the protection of free expression (I suspect that the “detestation” and “vilification” of white people, men, and Christians is treated as an exception) was not exactly a step in the direction of freeing Canadians from the unjust shackles of censorship and self-censorship that the first Trudeau introduced early in his premiership.  Today it is part of the legal precedent that the second Trudeau and his cronies look to in order to justify and explain their attempts to pass draconian laws telling us what we can and cannot say on the internet.   Since Whatcott is up before the Supreme Court again this time on charges pertaining to his creative evangelistic efforts at a Hubris parade in Toronto a sequel may be on the horizon.

Canada: History

The first book on Canadian history that I recommend is W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada: A General History from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963).  The author, who was born in Gladstone, was the head of the Department of History at the University of Manitoba from 1950 to 1964.  Among his other books, all of which are worth reading, are histories of the university and of the province.   Taking its name from the original full designation of the country proposed by the Fathers of Confederation this one-volume history of Canada ends on the eve of the second wave of seditious, Liberal, revolution-within-the-form under Pearson-Trudeau.


The second on my list would be the complete works of Donald G. Creighton.  Alright, you can omit Take-Over (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1978) because that is a novel, but The Young Politician (Toronto: Macmillan, 1952) and The Old Chieftain (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), the two volumes of his biography of Sir John A. Macdonald must remain on the list for the story of the life of the foremost Father of Confederation is an absolutely essential part of Canadian history and no one tells it better than Creighton.  Read both volumes in the original editions if you can, but if you must read the current one-volume edition from the University of Toronto Press consider skipping over the introduction by Creighton’s own biographer, Donald Wright of the University of New Brunswick.  His apologizing for Creighton’s not holding to the stomach-churning, woke, entirely-wrong, perspectives of the present day are bad enough in his biography of Creighton without marring Creighton’s masterful account of Sir John’s life.  My recommendation again is for the entire corpus of Creighton’s writings.  I will not list them all but a few deserve special mention.  The book that earned him his reputation is one of these, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1937), in which Creighton tells the history of the use of the St. Lawrence River as a means of trade and transportation in the century leading up to Confederation.  Goldwyn Smith had written a book that was published in the year of Sir John A. Macdonald’s death in which he argued that Confederation was a mistake because it was a project undertaken against the natural north-south flow of trade in North America.  That year, the Canadian public gave their answer to Smith’s thesis by awarding Macdonald, who was running against Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals who were campaigning on a platform of free trade, a landslide victory.  Creighton’s book was the scholarly answer.  Editions of it published from 1956 on have omitted the “Commercial” from the title.  His The Forked Road: Canada 1939-1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976) was published as Volume XVIII, the penultimate of the Canadian Centenary Series that he and W. L. Morton had started and edited.  It can also be regarded as the last in a series of books that he authored bringing the history of Canada down from the pre-Confederation period that he covered in The Commercial Empire and The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863-1867 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) down to the end of the St. Laurent premiership.  While I don’t think anybody would claim that this was the best book he ever wrote it is too often criticized for taking the opinion that the Liberals under King and St. Laurent were leading the country down into the sewer if not lower.  Creighton died three years after it was published.  Imagine what he would have said if he had lived to write the history of the two Trudeau eras.

The penultimate entry in this section is David Orchard’s The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1993, revised and expanded edition Montreal: Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing: 1998).  This book is a history of Canadian resistance to continentalism and particularly to American economic conquest via free trade.  The first edition came out during the talks on expanding the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement that Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, both men betraying the protectionist traditions of their own parties, had signed in 1988 into the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which came into effect on the first day of 1994.  The expanded edition came out during Orchard’s campaign for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1998.  This was also the occasion for the writing/compilation of Ron Dart’s The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (Dewdney BC: Synaxis Press, 1999) which is why I am adding it here rather than in the general political philosophy section.

Canada: Christianity

The first book in this section will be the Right Rev. Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church of Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963).  This book was first published the same year as W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada in which year the second wave of the Liberal subversion of the country began under the premiership of Lester Pearson.  A small-l, theological liberal subversion of the Church was already underway.  A small indication of that can be seen in the 1962 Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer, in which the Psalter is bowdlerized to omit the imprecatory portions of the Psalms, including the 58th in its entirety.   This was unfortunate in that it marred what is otherwise an excellent adaptation of the Restoration BCP of 1662.  It was a mild display of liberalism, however, compared to that which would soon sweep the Church leading to the present day in which I dare say most of the prelates wish that this history, written by the seventh Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec who went on to become the eleventh Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, would be swept under the rug and forgotten.

With regards to the liberal sweep of the Church I recommend two books both written in the late 1990s.  Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? (Cambridge Publishing House, 1999) was written by Dr. Marney Patterson who was sometimes described as the “Anglican Billy Graham.” He wrote six other books with more uplifting topics and by the time he passed away two years ago had transferred to the Anglican Network in Canada.  A year prior to this Rev. George R. Eves had released Two Religions One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada (Saint John: V.O.I.C.E., 1998) which he has recently updated and made available as an e-book.  While the increasing willingness of the Church to depart from both Scripture and Tradition on the matter of moral theology as it pertains to those attracted to their own sex was the occasion for the writing of both of these books, Dr. Patterson and Rev. Eves both address the larger problem of liberalism.  Dr. Patterson dealt well with the matter of how the unwillingness to stand for unpopular Scriptural truth compromises the Church’s ability to evangelize.  Rev. Eves discussed how the introduction of the Book of Alternative Services, which in many parishes is not so much an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer but its replacement, was a victory for liberalism since on the lex orandi, lex credenda principle if you change the liturgy you change the belief.  These books both came out within five years of the conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society, Anglican Renewal Ministries, and Barnabas Ministries for the purpose of addressing these concerns that produced the Montreal Declaration of Anglican Essentials.  The papers at the conference were edited by George Egerton and published as Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith Within the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1995).

One of the speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference was the Rev. Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a priest and academic from Nova Scotia, where his home town was Crousetown, in which the house where he grew up was on Crouse Road (his family had lived there for centuries).  His address to the conference was entitled “Hope Which Does Not Disappoint” in which he warned against “that most dangerous of all sins” despair, to which souls, left weary and lethargic from the “widespread destruction of theological and liturgical tradition” resulting from the false persuasion that the ancient, ecumenical, and Anglican heritage is “somehow outmoded and inappropriate in the present time” are tempted and gave the timely reminder that our “spiritual health depends crucially on a revival of hope”, the virtue that is the opposite of the vice of despair, and which rests upon faith in the promises of God.  I cannot recommend a book that Dr. Crouse wrote because while he contributed to books and wrote plenty of reviews and articles, he never wrote a book qua book.  His doctoral dissertation was a translation.  Last year, however, Darton, Longman & Todd in London released three books compiled from his sermons.  These are Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Witness in Christian Spirituality, The Souls Pilgrimage – Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse and The Soul’s Pilgrimage – Volume 2: The Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse.  He had talked to Essentials about the need for renewing the Christian spiritual life, these books describe what that very thing looks like.

Two other speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference were Ron Dart and J. I. Packer.  In response to a book by Michael Ingham, who occupied the See of New Westminster at the time and basically stood for the opposite of what Essentials stood for, they wrote In a Pluralist World (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1998) which returned to print in 2019 under the new title Christianity and Pluralism and published by Lexham Press in Bellingham.  While the origins of this book place it in the context of the same ecclesiastical turmoil that produced the books mentioned in the previous paragraphs Dart and Packer concentrate here on the question of the competing ways that have been proposed for Christians to deal with the competing truth claims of multiculturalism. Since I mentioned another book by Dart in the previous section I would add another book by Packer except that my favourites of his books were all written before he moved to Canada.   So read the revised editions.

One thing that Anglican bishops and fundamentalist Baptists have in common is that they tend to be great subjects for biographies and to write excellent autobiographies.  The Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, father of the John Farthing mentioned in the first section (whose middle name was Colborne so this is not a case of Sr. and Jr. which requires all the names to match) and the Bishop of Montreal in the early twentieth century wrote an excellent memoir entitled Recollections of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal (1909-1939).  It was printed without any publication information but was likely published either by Farthing himself or by what would then have been called the Church of England in Canada at some point in the early 1940s. The Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto and an important figure in pre-Confederation Canada did not write his own biography but his successor the Right Reverend A. N. Bethune wrote a very readable Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D.D., D. C. L., First Bishop of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870).  If the title confuses you note that while “memoirs” and “autobiography” are often used interchangeably they are not the same thing.  An autobiography is when someone tells the story of his own life.  A memoir is recorded memory of something, an event, a person, whatever.  There is a lot of overlap but basically in an autobiography one’s self is always the subject whereas one’s memoir can be focused on the people and places and events one knew rather than on one’s self. An account of someone else’s life can be called a memoir if the writer knew the person well which is the case here.  Either type can be called a memoir.  If there is an s on the end it is referring either to more than one book or, less properly but more commonly, to the kind that overlaps with autobiography.  The Most Reverend Robert Machray, the second Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land to which my own parish belongs, became the first primate of what would become the Anglican Church of Canada.  His biography, written by a nephew of the same name, came out the year he died.  That is Robert Machray, Life of Robert Machray, Archbishop of Rupert’s Land (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909).

As for the fundamentalist Baptists, since we are listing Canadian books here the obvious biography to mention is Leslie K. Tarr’s Shields of Canada (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1967).  Like his subject, Leslie K. Tarr was a Baptist minister, as well as the first editor of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s publication Faith Today.  His subject, T. T. Shields was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and of the Baptist preachers who fought for orthodoxy against encroaching liberalism in their denomination was by far the most prominent Canadian.  He joined the short-lived Baptist Bible Union and in consequence is usually remembered alongside that group’s co-founders, W. B. Riley of Minneapolis and J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth as a sort of triumvirate of the Baptist fundamentalism of the era.  Honourable mention goes to Lois Neely’s Fire In His Bones: The Official Biography of Oswald J. Smith (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 1982).  Oswald J. Smith was not a Baptist.  He was first ordained a Presbyterian minister, then switched to Christian and Missionary Alliance (the founder of which, A. B. Simpson, was originally a Presbyterian from Prince Edward Island), before founding the non-denominational megachurch the People’s Church of Toronto.  As pastor of People’s Church before handing the reins over to his son Paul B. Smith he was probably the best known evangelical preacher in Canada in the twentieth century.  I’ll also throw in Perry F. Rockwood’s Triumph in God: The Life Story of Radio Pastor Perry F. Rockwood (Halifax: The People’s Gospel Hour, 1974).  At fifty-seven pages and staple bound it is a booklet rather than a book and the only one to make it into this list.  Rockwood was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1943 which at that point consisted of the parishes that had opted to remain Presbyterian after most, about seventy percent, had joined with the Methodists to become the United Church in 1925.   While one might think that those who opted out of the merger would be very conservative and orthodox it was only a few years after his ordination that Rockwood was hauled before an ecclesiastical court over four sermons he gave on the subject of “The Church Sick unto Death” and while a case could made that he was indeed guilty of the charge of “divisiveness” a stronger case can be made that those who put him on trial were guilty of exactly what he charged them with in the sermons i.e., the greater crime of defecting, not only from the Presbyterian Westminster Confession but from the basic Christian faith as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The four sermons are reproduced in full in his autobiography.

This section would not be complete without The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years, a twelve-volume history of Christianity that was produced from 2001 to 2013.  The idea for it came from the late Ted Byfield, most remembered as the founding editor and publisher of the Alberta Report newsmagazine the final version of which folded in 2003 the year the first volume was published.  Byfield served as general editor of the series.  The series was published out of Edmonton under the imprint of The Christian History Project which after 2006 came under the aegis of SEARCH, the Society to Explore And Record Christian History.  I exclude volume 10 from the recommendation because it presents the Enlightenment, the separation of church and state, and basically the Modern way of doing things or liberalism as the product, albeit unintended, of Christianity rather than what it actually is, the embodiment of the Modern Age’s apostasy from and rebellion against Christianity.  Byfield began his Christian walk as an orthodox Anglican and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the events mentioned previously in this section and so has no excuse for not knowing better.

Canada – Humour

All of Stephen Leacock’s fiction can be included here, as can, for that matter, his non-fiction for even when writing on serious subjects he was funny.

Peter V. Macdonald, Q. C., a lawyer from Hanover had a column that appeared in the Toronto Star entitled “Court Jesters” in which he recounted hilarious true anecdotes from courtrooms across Canada.  A compilation of these was published as Court Jesters: Canada’s Lawyers and Judges Take the Stand to Relate Their Funniest Stories (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985).  This was followed up by a sequel More Court Jesters: Back to the Bar for More of the Funniest Stories from Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987) and then Return of the Court Jesters: By Popular Demand More of the Funniest Stories From Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990).  I received the first one of these for Christmas one year and annoyed my family for days with loud laughter.  There are also versions of at least the first two books in which the anecdotes are illustrated with cartoons.  It appears he also wrote a book with funny police stories.  I have not seen a copy although I have read a similar book by Bruce Day, a retired police officer here in Winnipeg, that was self-published in 1995 and is entitled Stop! Police Humour.

Another collection of hilarious true stories is Ben Wicks’ Book of Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979).  The author whose name is indeed part of the title was best known as a cartoonist.  He followed it up with Ben Wicks’ More Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).  It should be obvious what these stories are like but if not here is the definition of a loser provided at the beginning of the first book “A German tourist, en route to the west coast, who steps off his plane in Bangor, Maine, and spends four days there thinking he is in California.”  Actually that is quite mild compared to what happens to most of the people in the book.  Wicks’ wrote and illustrated several other books of humour.  The only two that I have read are his Ben Wicks’ Canada and Ben Wicks’ Women which were also published by McClelland and Stewart in 1976 and 1978 respectively.

Canada – Fiction

I will not be listing all the titles and bibliographic details in this section because it would be very tedious due to the number of lengthy series included.  What I recommend under this heading are all the works of fiction of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robertson Davies, and Mazo de la Roche.  Remember that this recommended reading list, neither in whole nor in any section, is intended to be exhaustive, and that non-mention of an author does not constitute a recommendation against.  There are Canadian writers that I would recommend against but I am not going to name them here because that is not the purpose of this list.

L. M. Montgomery is, of course, internationally famous as the author of Anne of Green Gables, the first in a series of eight novels chronicling the life of the title character.  Two collections of short stories, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea are also part of the Anne of Green Gables continuity.  If you remember Kevin Sullivan’s television series Road to Avonlea it was based in part on these short stories although the main characters of that series were taken from The Story Girl and The Golden Road neither of which were connected to the Anne storyline in Montgomery’s original novels.  She wrote several other novels, some in series such as the Emily of New Moon trilogy, others stand alone.

Robertson Davies tended to write his fiction in trilogies, including those that he wrote as “Samuel Marchbanks” the pen-name he used when writing for the Peterborough Examiner in his time as editor.   A selection of his Marchbanks pieces were collected and published as three volumes, although it is best, in my opinion, to read them in the later omnibus edition The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks for while some abridgement takes place you also get a great introduction in which Davies interviews his alter-ego Marchbanks. There are three completed trilogies of novels that are usually called the Salterton, Deptford and Cornish trilogies, the first two after the fictional locations in which they are set, the third after the character whose death sets off the plot of the first novel and whose life is told in the second.  Davies started a fourth trilogy, set in Toronto, but only completed two of the novels.  The earliest of these trilogies, the Salterton, is my favourite.  Davies also wrote several plays but only one book of short stories, High Spirits, a collection of the ghost stories that he composed to tell at Massey College at the school’s Gaudy Night each year while he was Master (president, headmaster, principal) there.

Mazo de la Roche was for much of the twentieth century the single most read Canadian novelist.  An interesting piece of trivia is that she is buried in St. George’s Anglican cemetery at Sibbald Point in Sutton West the other most famous resident of which is Stephen Leacock whose grave is very close to hers.  She wrote short stories and plays as well, but is most remembered for her twenty some novels of which the most read are the Jalna series, a family saga, somewhat like a novelized soap opera, spanning one century over sixteen books.  Jalna was the first published in 1927.  Its title is the name of the family estate or more properly the manor on the estate where the novels are set.  The family that live there bear the last name Whiteoak and so the series is also known albeit less commonly as the Whiteoak saga.  The hero of the saga is Renny Whiteoak, who inherits the estate and the role if not the authority of family patriarch from his father and grandfather, fights in both World Wars, and breeds and rides show horses while trying to raise his own younger brothers and keep the struggling estate afloat.   We had a number of hard cover editions of these books in the family library when I was a child.  The ones I remember usually featured Renny on a horse on the cover.  The real ruler of the family was Renny’s grandmother Adeline whom the family called Gran, a sharp-tongued old woman who kept them all in line by not disclosing the sole beneficiary of her will and who had a parrot that she taught to make extremely rude remarks in Hindi.  The books were not published in order of internal chronology, although as with C. S. Lewis’ children’s novels subsequent re-print editions have numbered them in that order. The last of the series to be published, Morning at Jalna, which came out in 1960 the year before de la Roche died, is second in internal chronology, being set just prior to Confederation in the period in which the American North and South were fighting.  This book’s not-so-subtle sympathy with the South was a not-so-subtle expression of de la Roche’s contemptuous opinion of the “second Reconstruction” then underway in the United States.  That such sentiment prevented neither the publication of the novel nor the adaptation of the entire series into the television mini-series The Whiteoaks of Jalna and by CBC nonetheless about ten years after her death demonstrates how much healthier and saner our country was in terms of not having to toe a party line on liberal social values before two generations of Trudeaus messed everything up.  The last of the novels in terms of internal chronology was Centenary at Jalna and it was set in the year in which it is was published, 1954.  That it is set exactly one hundred years after the story begins, as the title indicates, would suggest that this was where de la Roche intended the saga to end, although the ending of the novel itself very much suggests otherwise

That brings this list to a close.  If you are looking for something to read this Dominion Day because some Canada-hating woke jackasses have cancelled the celebrations in your area try one or more of these.

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

Posted by Gerry T. Neal at 12:30 AM

Labels: Dominion Day, Donald Creighton, Eugene Forsey, George Grant, John Farthing, John G. Diefenbaker, L. M. Montgomery, Mazo De La Roche, Peter V. Macdonald, Robertson Davies, Ron Dart, Stephen Leacock, W. L. Morton

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Nancy Pelosi, The Chinese Dilemma and its Solution

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                                          Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Friday, August 5, 2022

Nancy Pelosi, The Chinese Dilemma and its Solution

 If you have been following the news at all for the last couple of weeks – a practice I would advise against, as “the news” consists almost entirely of brain-rotting disinformation peddled by the corrupt corporations and even more corrupt government bureaucracies that control all but a fraction of a percentage of the main media organs – you are likely aware that the travel itinerary of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker in the lower house of the congress of the American republic has generated a bit of a brouhaha.   Included in that itinerary was a trip to the Republic of China on the island of Formosa.   When the People’s Republic of China on the Asian mainland learned about this they raised a stink about it and began issuing all sorts of warnings, threats and ultimatums, telling the American republic that they would be “playing with fire” if the trip were not cancelled, and even talking about shooting her plane down.   By doing so they accomplished something that few others have been able to do, especially in the last decade or so.  They brought the Democrats and the Republicans in the American republic together and united them on an issue.   Both took the position that the Chinese government must not be allowed to bully American officials and tell them where they can and cannot go.     I had rather expected her to pull a Captain Airhead or a Joe Whatshisname and come down with a sudden case of the bat flu but on the evening of Tuesday 2 September she arrived in Taipei.

While I have nothing but loathing for Communism and Communists, I admit that I can see the point of the brutal Chinese despots on this matter.  I don’t care for the fact that for most of the year Nancy Pelosi is across the 49th Parallel from the Dominion of Canada and would prefer her to be much further away on the other side of the world.    There is little I can do about that, alas, but it makes it easier to understand what must have been going through Xi Jingping’s head when he learned that soon there would be nothing but a 110 mile strait separating him from this creature.    I assume that apart from the whole “nobody tells us what to do” attitude of the Americans, the reason for the bipartisan consensus of indignation towards the People’s Republic’s threats was that Democrats and Republicans alike did not want her trip and thus their time free of her to be cut short.

Since China and not Pelosi is my subject here, the only thing I will say about the person who looks and acts like she is auditioning for the role of a female or transgender Skeletor in a cheesy woke remake of the Masters of the Universe in which the protagonist He-Man would likely be dressed in his twin-sister She-Ra’s outfit and calling himself She-Man and who managed through trading that many see as just a tad suspicious to amass a fortune of about $120 million dollars in her career of almost forty years as a politician is to note that back in May she was excommunicated by the Church of Rome’s Archbishop in San Francisco over her using her elected position to support a special privilege for her own sex, the gruesome and unconscionable special privilege of having the legal right to murder unborn children.   I mention this only because the Archbishop in question, Salvatore Cordileone, deserves commendation for his courage, rare in this day and age, by contrast with the clownishness of the current Pretender to St. Peter’s throne in Rome who ignored the excommunication and administered the Sacrament to her anyway, if it can still be called a Sacrament coming from the hand of a man better suited to be a contortionist than a prelate judging from the performance he recently put on here in Canada, in which he bent over backwards to stick his head, pointy mitre and all, up his own rear end, by issuing a groveling “apology” for his Church’s past humanitarian and missionary educational outreach endeavours. 

This whole controversy has undoubtedly been confusing to those who are only slightly familiar – or not at all – with the situation in East Asia.   This is not like some bizarre scenario where Mexico objects to the point of threatening military action to an official from France visiting the United States.  It is not even like Russia objecting to Western politicians visiting the Ukraine at some point prior to the current war, although this is a little closer.   The island of Formosa, although it has been claimed politically, in whole or in part, by various empires over the last millennium, has ethnically and culturally long been part of China.   Ceded to the Japanese Empire late in the nineteenth century, after Japan’s defeat in World War II it returned to Chinese governance, specifically that of the Republic of China then based on the mainland.   At the same time, however, the Chinese Civil War, which had been officially on hold for World War II, restarted and in 1949 the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-Tung had driven the Nationalist government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek out of the mainland.   The Nationalists, and the Republic of China which they governed, retreated to Formosa which has been governed by the Republic ever since.   The Communists have remained in control of mainland China, governing their People’s Republic from Beijing.   Now, obviously there has been a de facto political separation of Formosa from mainland China ever since 1949.  However, unlike the situation with the Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed and she declared her independence from Russia in 1991, the independence has not been formally recognized by both sides.  Indeed, it has not been recognized by either.   The People’s Republic of China claims Formosa to belong to China and itself to be the sole legitimate government of all of China.   The Republic of China agrees with the People’s Republic of China that the island and the mainland are one country.   She, however, although this rhetoric has been toned down in recent decades, has insisted since 1949 that she, rather than the Communists in Beijing, is the legitimate government of all of China.    

Therefore, when the People’s Republic of China says that she does not want Nancy Pelosi going to Formosa, her objection is to the American politician going to what she regards neither as another country nor a territory in conventional secession whose independence she refuses to recognize, but to part of the country over which she claims to be the sole legitimate government.   Leaving aside for the moment the question of the truth or falsity of her claim to legitimacy, her objection to Pelosi’s visit would be simply hot air if she was the only party that regarded Formosa as part of China.   The matter is complicated greatly by the fact that the government of the Republic of China on Formosa agrees with her and so does the third party to this dispute.

That third party is the United States.   The United States has, ever since she decided in the Nixon administration to take advantage of the split in the Communist world between Moscow and Beijing by opening up diplomatic and trade relations to Red China, taken a “One China” policy in which she agrees with Beijing and Taipei where they agree – that there is only one China and Formosa is part of it – while remaining ambiguous on the rather stickier point on which they disagree.   Due to her taking this position and opening up relations with Red China, the United States dishonourably withdrew her previous recognition of the Republic of China, but she tried to make it up to the latter by promising to supply them with enough arms to deter the Communists from attacking.   Thus, her “One China” policy contradicts both that of the People’s Republic and that of the Republic of China in that her commitment is, above all else, to preserving the status quo.

This is understandable, perhaps, in that the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for creating that status quo in the first place.

The Communist takeover of mainland China began with the overthrow of the Chinese monarchy and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911.   This led to several years of turmoil as attempts were made to fill the power vacuum left by the abolition of the legitimate government.   The second president of the Republic attempted unsuccessfully to seize the monarchical power for himself, then the country was torn apart as military factions headed by warlords took control of the various regions of the large empire.   Then Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of the 1911 Revolution who had been briefly the first president of the Republic, formed the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which fought against the warlords to re-unite the country.   These efforts ultimately succeeded in 1926, by which time the Kuomintang was headed by Sun Yat-Sen’s successor, Chiang Kai-Shek.   The success war short-lived however.   Sun Yat-Sen had made a foolish and naïve decision to co-operate with the Chinese Communist Party, backed by the Bolsheviks in Russia.   As was the case with Kerensky in Russia in 1917, this provided the Communists with an opening they were able to exploit to seize power for themselves.  As a consequence his successor was soon embroiled in a Civil War against Mao’s Communists.

The Chinese Civil War began about a little over a decade before the Second World War started and had that latter conflict not broken out it might have ended differently.   World War II forced the Nationalists and the Communists in China to put their conflict on hold, for the most part, to fight against their common enemy in the Japanese Empire.   This, however, placed China in alliance with the other countries fighting against Japan and the Axis.   More specifically it placed her in alliance with the Soviet Union and the United States.   Due to this alliance, when the hostilities in the Chinese Civil War resumed after World War II, the balance had already shifted to the Communists.

That an alliance with the Soviet Union, the sponsors of Mao’s Communists, would tip the scales in the Chinese internal conflict to the latter, hardly needs explanation.   That an alliance with the United States would have the same effect will sound strange to those used to looking at the United States and the Soviet Union through the interpretive lens of the Cold War in which they are portrayed not just as hostile powers in an ordinary conflict but as polar opposites representing capitalism and communism.   It is nevertheless the case.   World War II began in the second of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms as American president.   FDR was so horrible that only a few years after his death the Americans passed the twenty-second amendment to their constitution limiting a president to two terms.    Had they not revolted against their legitimate Sovereign in the eighteenth century, they would have had no need to create the office of president and would never have had to impose a term limit on it to prevent another rotten politician from clinging to elected power as long as FDR did.   One of the things that made FDR so bad was his attitude towards Communism in general, and Stalin in particular.   Later, in the Cold War era, liberals talked and acted pro-Soviet for a number of reasons.  Sometimes they were actually Soviet agents.  Most often it was simply a case of their liberalism being that of the squishy sentimentality that Robert Frost so appropriately captured when he defined a liberal as “a man too open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel”, the quarrel at the time being with the Soviets.   FDR, however, was the kind of liberal who saw the Communists as fellow progressives, sharing the same ideals and working towards the same ends as American liberals, who were just a little misguided about the means.   The first year of his first term as president, he sent the first American ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union, right at the time the Holodomor – the artificially induced famine that killed millions in the Ukraine – was going on.   He recalled that ambassador when he sent back truthful reports of just how awful the USSR was, and in his place sent Joseph E. Davies, who arrived just in time for the Great Purge, i.e., the show trials through which Stalin eliminated his rivals, and sent back to FDR just what he wanted to hear, glowing reports about how wonderful Stalin and Communism and the USSR were, complete with an account of the Great Purge that depicted the victims as guilty and justice as having been served.   FDR would later personally request that the Warner Brothers turn Davies’ pro-Stalin memoir Mission to Moscow into a pro-Stalin propaganda film, with which request, much to the discredit of the company that gave us Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety, they complied.    Had this been all, FDR would merely have gone down as the biggest moron in history.   Unfortunately, however, his attitude towards Communism and Stalin also manifested itself in his World War II policies, and in his meetings with Churchill and Stalin from the first at Tehran (1943) to the last at Yalta (1945), convinced that he had some kind of power of persuasion over Stalin – see Robert Nisbet’s Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (1988) – he made concession after concession to the Soviet dictator that ensured that after the war about a third of the world would end up under Communist tyranny.   Unfortunately Churchill, who understood Communism much better than FDR, had been scraping to the American president since even before Pearl Harbour – see Robert Shogan’s Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency (1995), an account of how FDR swindled Churchill with the destroyers in 1940 – and so was in no position to do anything about it.

While Eastern Europe – including Poland, to protect which from the Nazis who had agreed with the Soviets to divide her between themselves, was the original reason for the war in the first place – is the most discussed of Soviet territorial gains due to World War II, the USSR also took over several regions in Asia that had been controlled by Japan.    This included a number of regions to the north of China that had, for much of the past millennium, been part of the Chinese Empire and which were of strategic importance to the Soviets in their designs to help Mao’s Communists take over China.  Mongolia, which had declared its independence from China when the last dynasty was overthrown, had been taken over by Soviet-allied Communists in the early 1920s, and while the Soviets had refrained from recognizing Mongolian independence in this early period, at the end of World War II during which they had repelled the Japanese invasion of Mongolia and used Mongolia as a base from which to launch their own attack on Japan, which FDR had “persuaded” Stalin to do at Yalta, they convinced China to recognize the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic.  This was part of a treaty the Soviets signed with China in August 1945, the terms of which Nationalist China abided with – recognizing Mongolian independence following a plebiscite in October that had obviously been rigged by the Communists – but which the Soviets were covertly violating before the ink was even dry on it.  Bordering Mongolia was Manchuria, the region that had been home to the last ruling dynasty of China.   This had been taken over by the Japanese Empire in 1932 and on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the Soviets, armed with weapons provided by the United States, invaded and took it from Japan.   When the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria the following year, nominally turning it over to the Republic of China, it was actually Mao’s army that took control of the region and turned it into a base to attack the Nationalists.

By this time FDR was dead and the remainder of his fourth term as president was being filled by Harry S. Truman.   That Truman was little better than FDR when it came to Communism, he would later demonstrate in his refusal to let General MacArthur win the Korean War.   At the time in question, however, the last half of the 1940s, the problem was not so much the American president but the Communists and Communist sympathizers who had become entrenched in the American Department of State with the previous president’s blessing.   Also problematic was another American World War II general with a decidedly different attitude towards Communism than that of the Pacific commander.   General George C. Marshall, whom FDR had made Chief of Staff of the US Army, was sent to China as a special envoy late in 1945 tasked with trying to resolve the Chinese Civil War.  The only solution that he was capable of thinking of was that the Nationalists needed to accept the Communists who were actively waging revolutionary war against them into a coalition government.   This was an obvious recipe for total Communist takeover.  Marshall threatened to withhold American financial assistance to China if the Nationalists refused to cooperate.   As it happened, the Communists were not interested in such a coalition either but, when Marshall’s mission ended in failure, he returned to the United States blaming the failure on Chiang Kai-Shek.  When, soon after, he was appointed Secretary of State by Truman, he used the position to fight against American assistance to the Chinese Nationalists.   Indeed, through the entire period that he served as special envoy to China and American Secretary of State and even earlier during World War II, Marshall worked to prepare public opinion to accept a Communist takeover of China by whitewashing Mao and his forces, claiming that they were merely “agrarian reformers” rather than Soviet style Bolsheviks.   Marshall died in 1959, one year into the “Great Leap Forward”, the Maoist version of a Stalinist five-year plan that generated a famine that killed more people in China than the Holodomor had done in the Ukraine.   It would have been interesting, had he lived to the end of the “Great Leap Forward”, to see whether he would have finally admitted just how much of a fool he had been about Mao in the 1940s.   He was hardly the only one, however.   His deputy and successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson was just as bad or worse, writing a thousand page White Paper at the time Mao was driving the Nationalists off the mainland, justifying the Truman administration’s policies towards the Republic of China and arguing that had they done anything differently it would not have prevented the Communist takeover, a laughable obscenity considering that what they had done was insist that the Republic of China clasp the viper of revolutionary Communism to its breast.  Aiding and abetting Marshall and Acheson in this, were the dolts working for the Institute of Pacific Relations, an international think tank funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, that published the academically acclaimed journals Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey that had become heavily infested with Communists and Communist sympathizers, a great many of whom also served in the State Department and other bureaucratic and diplomatic offices in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.   This was the basis of the charges of Communist infiltration made against the State Department by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.   Although the newsmedia and academic institutions made his name synonymous with witch-hunting over this, William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr made a convincing case as early as 1954 in McCarthy and his Enemies that there were witches indeed to be found in the State Department, cackling around their cauldron as if they were acting out the first scene of the fourth Act of Macbeth.   The mid-1990s public release of the files of the Venona Project, along with the opening of the Soviet archives after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, established the point beyond a reasonable doubt, although the progressive nitwits in the media and academe, including or especially all those who accepted without question the unsubstantiated claims of Hilary Clinton that her failure to win a third term in the White House in 2016 was due to interference by the current Russian government, are unlikely to acknowledge this any time soon.  For the whole sordid tale of the IPR, which shared board members, staff, and a building with Amerasia the journal caught with almost 2000 classified documents stolen from the OSS and other American and British military intelligence agencies after it had rather stupidly published one in 1945, and the FDR-Truman policies that helped the Communists take over so much of Asia, see John T. Flynn While You Slept: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who Made It (1951).

It is easier to understand how the American leadership of the 1930s and 1940s could have been so naive at best and collaborative at worst towards Communism if we grasp that in a sense FDR was right about the relationship between American liberalism and Communism.   The two are cousins of a sort.   Both are the children of the Modern Age, and the philosophical spirit of that Age which spirit can be summed up in the idea that human beings need to abandon tradition, time-proven established institutions, religion and the like and pursue maximum freedom and equality through reason and science, movement towards which goal is what is meant by the word “progress” in its political-philosophical sense.   American liberalism is the direct descendent of the earliest manifestation of this spirit in the sixteenth-seventeenth century English movement that began as Calvinist Puritanism and secularized into Whiggery.   Communism is descended, through Karl Marx as interpreted by V. I. Lenin, from the Jacobin movement responsible for the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (the revolutionary movement with which Marx aligned himself and for which he wrote began as a faction of the Jacobins).   Jacobinism, like American liberalism, was descended from Puritanism-Whiggery, but through the intermediary of continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau.    So FDR was right that American liberalism and Communism have the same goal – a society in which freedom and equality are both maximized – but with different ideas about the means to achieve it.   Where he was wrong was in thinking that this was a worthy goal.   It is not.     Progress is not desirable but evil.  The end of the Modern Age is based upon a contradiction.   Freedom and equality, in their purest forms, are utterly incompatible with each other.   Freedom is compatible with justice but not with equality.   Freedom and justice were considered to be goods in the pre-Modern tradition, that is to say, desirable ends that were what they were as part of the transcendent order.   Freedom and equality are considered to be values in the Modern Age.  Equality is a perversion of justice.   It is to justice what a $3 bill is to real currency.   When idealists make equality their goal rather than justice – and when modifiers such as “social”, “racial”, “sexual” are added to the word “justice” it is actually equality that is meant – they think they are working towards a better society, but are actually making it worse.   Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. Similarly, equality, the counterfeit of justice, drives out justice – and freedom along with it.  The ancients understood this – it is the point, or one of the points at least, of the myth of Procrustes, the giant with the “one size fits all” policy regarding beds, whom Theseus encountered on his way to Athens.   Just as Modern thought errs in thinking that freedom and equality are compatible, so it errs in thinking of pre-Modern thought and tradition as something to be dismissed and discarded except in that it can be interpreted, ala the Whig Interpretation of History, as leading to the Modern Age and its goals.   See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s writings, especially Liberty or Equality (1952) and The Menace of the Herd (1943) for a fuller explanation of the incompatibility of equality and freedom.  For an illustration look to the French Revolution and all the Communist Revolutions that took their inspiration from the French.   While the Jacobins who founded the first French Republic, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, etc. all saw themselves as “liberators” and claimed “liberty” or “freedom” as an ideal as much as the Americans do – the motto of the French Revolution, remember, was “liberty, equality, fraternity” – the French Republic and all the People’s Republics were terror states, life within which could hardly be described as freedom.   That the American Revolution did not immediately produce a similar state is due to a number of reasons, the foremost being that while the leaders of the Revolution were liberals with the same contradictory program of freedom and equality as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, the Revolution they led was a secession movement rather than the seizing of a central state and furthermore, a secession movement on the part of a coalition of political entities which, once secession was achieved, initially established a much weaker central government than what it eventually grew into because they wished to preserve their own powers in the new federation, and thus the liberals were not able at first to impose their agenda like a Procrustean bed on all Americans from the top down, which meant that much of the freedom of the pre-Revolution tradition was able to survive.

While nobody in their right mind wants to see the inhabitants of Formosa fall under the totalitarian rule of Beijing – the recent example of what happened to the inhabitants of Hong Kong when it was transferred to the People’s Republic should suffice to convince anyone not yet persuaded that life under Red Chinese rule is not desirable – it is a mistake to look to the United States to preserve their freedom.   It is not just that American liberalism is cousin to Communism and that the United States failed to prevent the Communist takeover of mainland China and arguably abetted it.   It is America’s self-contradictory policy with regards to China.   By agreeing with both Beijing and Taipei that there is only “One China” including both the mainland and Formosa, they take a position that keeps them from supporting Formosan independence qua independence and requires them to support one of the governments as the sole legitimate government of all of China.   They cannot support the government in Taipei as the legitimate government of all of China and retain their relations and trade with the Peoples’ Republic.   Therefore, they logically have to support the People’s Republic as the legitimate government.   So far their commitment to keep Formosa from falling into Communist hands has prevented them from doing so in an unambiguous manner.   This does not seem to be a sustainable position in the long run however.   The current incident that is the occasion of this essay demonstrates that among other things.

I will conclude by saying that in my view neither the Republic of China in Formosa nor the People’s Republic of China on the mainland is legitimate.   My views lean towards Jacobitism rather than Jacobinism, albeit Dr. Johnson’s brand of Jacobitism in which loyalty is to the current reigning house, and accordingly I regard no republic as legitimate.   I therefore take a legitimist position with regards to China.   The legitimate heir of one of the ancient dynasties – I will leave it to the Chinese to determine which one – should be found, and restored to his throne over all of China, and both the Republic and the People’s Republic ought to be dissolved into the restored Chinese monarchy.   That is the proper resolution to the situation.   Since the Americans are not likely to get on board with it any time this side of the Second Coming, when they will have to repent of their republicanism and democracy and bow the knee to the King of Kings if they don’t want to share the fate of the first Whig, the devil, the Chinese will just have to do it themselves. — Gerry T. Neal

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