The RINOs you complain about are RINOs now but they weren’t always. I don’t know how many of you remember the seventies. The right here was kind of like the right in Europe. It assumed that in the end communism would not only win, but DESERVED to win, and what the right disagreed with was the way to get there. It is useful to remember this was a time when William Buckley’s dictum that conservatism was “Standing astride History yelling stop” found deep resonance. Unpack that phrase. It assumes history comes with an arrow, that it’s not going our way, and that at best we can get it to pause.
Those RINOs who, by the way, took immense flack back then were as conservative as anyone dared to be. Because everyone knew in the end the reds won.
Then the wall fell down and we knew what true horrors lurked on the other side.
Individuals process these things fast enough. Well, my generation, at any rate, awakened by Reagan and shown that the win of the dark side was not inevitable, was more pro-freedom than people ten years older than us.
But when we saw the wall fall down, it pushed many of us further into the liberty side of the isle. Not only wasn’t a communist win inevitable, but their vaunted “strengths” like superior planning and better minority integration didn’t exist unless you really wanted to plan for three million size thirty boots for the left foot only, and integration meant grinding the minorities very fine and spreading them in the soil.
However cultures aren’t individuals. Cultures re-orient and process startling events very slowly.
Yeah, those older Republicans are still with us, and they were over 45 when the wall fell, which means they couldn’t reorient anymore. (Studies have been done.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Long March”, According to Hoyt, 2015-12-20.
January 8, 2019
QotD: RINOs and other soft conservatives
January 7, 2019
People tend to become more conservative as they age … let’s just lower the voting age to “fix” that “problem”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that as people age they tend to develop more conservative or even reactionary views. This can, in extreme cases, lead to deplorable results — as our American and British friends discovered in 2016 (fortunately, we Canadians were lucky enough to avoid such unpleasantness by having our election in 2015). Some advanced forward-thinking on how to best address this problem was reported in the Guardian on suggestions by Cambridge professor David Runciman, who advocated lowering the voting age to six, as younger voters are generally much more open to progressive ideas.
This extension of the franchise was not proposed by an inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane but by a professor, David Runciman, of the University of Cambridge, supposedly one of the best three or four such institutions in the world. But no mere criminal lunatic could have dreamt up such an idea. Is it any wonder that many people feel the world has gone mad?
Sure enough, Runciman’s idea was given serious consideration by a writer in The Guardian. Admittedly, the writer came down against the proposal, but only after giving it credence. Nevertheless, it gave an insight into the mindset of those whose political ideas are to themselves so self-evidently virtuous that the only possible explanation for the fact others do not share them is stupidity in the case of the poor and wickedness in the case of the rich.
At the head of the article were the words: “Allow six-year-olds to vote? No, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Children tend to be more progressive and idealistic than their parents.”
I think it’s safe to say that if the US election and the Brexit referendum had included all those woke six-year-olds, the results would have been much more amenable to our moral and intellectual superiors in the media. However, I suspect that Professor Runciman’s proposal is only half of the necessary solution. In addition to lowering the minimum voting age, we should give careful consideration to lowering the maximum voting age as well. I’m sure that a properly funded study would find that not only do older voters tend to become more conservative as they begin to fall apart physically, but it also tracks directly with mental incapacity. Our study — perhaps a pan-national group drawn from Harvard, Berkeley, Cambridge and the London School of Economics — would almost certainly conclude that a pattern of voting for more conservative options is a clear indication of enfeeblement of judgement and society would be doing a kindness to remove the franchise from those who can no longer responsibly exercise it.
Perhaps, rather than directly revoking oldsters’ voting rights, we could offer a more gentle option of designating a responsible young voter (ideally between the ages of six and eighteen) to exercise the franchise on their behalf. This way, they are still fully represented, but the vote will be directed by someone with a direct stake in the outcome, as the young will have to live for far longer with the result of any election (and the oldsters are all going to die soon, anyway).
It might also make sense to revise the voting system so that the votes of younger people carry more weight than those of older folks. Perhaps double the weight of their parents’ votes and quadruple the weight of their grandparents’? We can’t be short-changing the people who matter the most, after all … that would hardly be progressive, would it?
The use of the word progressive is telling. It implies not only that there is a clear path in humanity’s moral ascent to perfection but also that its route map has been vouchsafed to certain adults. For self-proclaimed progressives, there are no complexities or unintended consequences, let alone ironies: there is only progress and its opposite, reaction.
For the writer of the article, children are born with a knowledge of the route map of the ascent to perfection, as salmon, cuckoos and swallows are born with a knowledge of where to migrate to. Only the corruption of age causes them to forget: “Children do tend towards the progressive, having a natural sense of justice … and an underdeveloped sense of self-interest.” But what has caused the realisation that children may be suitable for enfranchisement? Our author cannot be clearer: “Most of the arguments against giving six-year-olds a vote have been capsized by the (Brexit) referendum.”
In other words, because the electorate got the answer wrong, it is necessary to change the electorate. If only it had answered the question correctly, it is a fair guess no one would have thought of lowering the voting age to six.
Why, then, does our author finally reject the vote for six year-olds? “If parents could be trusted to use their influence wisely and inculcate children with the politics it will take to assure a better future, then I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that, apart from, obviously, that culture is already wildly skewed towards parents … But that’s moot anyway, because parents can’t be trusted, otherwise we’d all already vote Green.”
It’s not what you report, it’s how you report it
Media reports over the last few weeks have highlighted the fact that three people have died in US national parks during the government “shutdown”, and most do their best to imply that these deaths are at least indirectly the fault of President Trump. What isn’t highlighted is that the three deaths — individually tragic as they undoubtedly are — are fewer than normally occur in US national parks:
Visitors to US National Parks in 2014.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
This does sound a little bizarre it’s true, but it seems that America’s National Parks are actually safer with the government shut down than they are when it’s all running. Not quite what we’d expect, all those rangers and the like we’d think would reduce risk to people.
It is actually possible that this is true too. Could be that rangers themselves are actively dangerous although that might not be the way to bet. But it’s possible that the presence of rangers leads to people thinking they are safer and thus they take more – and overcompensate – risks. As with people wearing seatbelts driving more aggressively and so on.
Actually, what is really true here is that varied journalists want to find something to shout at Trump about and deaths in national parks during the shutdown is a good enough excuse…
January 4, 2019
The US Turns Away from the World to Prohibition and Crime I Between 2 Wars I 1921 Part 1 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 3 Jan 2019After an unpopular war and facing unrest at home, the US returns to isolationism after half a century of gradually opening up to the world. On the home front, prohibition gives rise to more problems of the very kinds it meant to solve; crime and debauchery, and one the biggest crooks is in the White House.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Rune Væver Hartvig
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Edited by Wieke KapteijnsThumbnail depicts US President Warren G. Harding as in his official presidential portrait.
Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
From the comments:
Now… before all you modern liberals and modern conservatives get your panties in a bunch; listen carefully to what Indy says in this video this is not about right or left wing politics in the modern sense, and this video is not about 2018 any parallels you infer to today will by force be way, way off the mark, the world of the 1920s was a very different place. If you have the desire to draw parallels to today we can’t stop you (we disagree on principle, but hey), in any case we’re not telling this part of American history for that reason, this is just the way it happened and we have to cover these events and movements to understand yet another little piece of the puzzle that was laid as the foundation for World War Two.
January 3, 2019
QotD: Distorting history for political ends
Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 2, 2019
In non-breaking, non-news … politicians lie
Hector Dummond explains why what might seem like a shocking revelation from a former Thatcher MP isn’t even getting a raised eyebrow from the British media:
In a highly revealing article former MP Matthew Parris admits that the Conservative Party would often lie so that it could do what it wanted. And when it didn’t lie it fudged and avoided issues in order to prevent the ‘people’ having any say in the country’s governance:
our challenge was to find ways of ducking the issue. Once I became an MP, I did so by voting for the principle and against the practice. This subversion of democracy (in Theresa May’s phrase) caused me embarrassment, but not a second’s guilt. Sod democracy: hanging was wrong …
Among ourselves we talked cheerfully about subterfuge. The Britain of 1979 and 1983 most emphatically did not vote for a massive confrontation with the coal miners. We made sure the electorate was never asked.
These candid admissions have been completely ignored by the media. One reason they’ve been ignored is, of course, that most people have come to work this out for themselves, so Parris isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. But surely hearing it from the horse’s mouth has great value? Why hasn’t the media splashed on this? Why haven’t Parris’s old enemies in the Labour party made hay with it?
The main reason is that most of the media, and virtually all the Labour party, is on his side over this. Even newspapers like the Guardian. You might think the Guardian would be the natural enemy of a former Tory MP, especially one who worked with Thatcher, and certainly on some issues they will regard Parris as an enemy, but the fact is that the Guardian wants government to be free of restraint by the people, because its vision of the state involves a leftist government getting into power, imposing its own ideology onto society and removing the power for the people to have a democratic say from most areas of life. So it can hardly criticise Parris for having done what it longs to do. It doesn’t want to bring about anything that might lessen the freedom government currently has to ignore the voter.
In violation of Betteridge’s law of headlines, this question can clearly be answered “yes!”
A few days back, Ted Campbell posted under the title “Is it time to get rid of the CBC? Should we?” Betteridge’s law says the answer should be “no”, but in this case the answer is more like “Why haven’t we sold that thing off already?”:
OK, the source of this cringeworthy video clip, Rebel Media, may be suspect to many ~ I do not follow them ~ but it does bring up a question: is this what we expect for the $1 Billion plus we pay for the CBC?
The complete interview, which I watched. looks, as someone else said, more like an advertisement for one of those online dating sites than news. It certainly caused a small storm about the CBC’s bias … which, in this case, especially when compared to CBC journalists’ question and comments directed to e.g. Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, seems over the top, even by the CBC’s standards. And that begs the question: is the CBC living up to its mandate? The Broadcasting Act says (§3(1)(d)(i), inter alia, that “The Canadian broadcasting system should serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada.” I suspect that someone will want to make a case that the CBC, as a network, at least in it’s English language ‘news’ services, has crossed a line and looks too much like a 24 hour a day informercial for the Laurentian Consensus as represented by the Liberal Party of Canada.
[…]
What does the CBC do? Basically it provides, in both English and French, three services:
- Radio Canada International ~ this is Canada’s voice to the world, it is, today, entirely on the internet. In 2012 the Harper government imposed a 10% cut on CBC/Radio Canada ~ then CBC/Radio Canada decide that RCI, which is little known, would have its budget cut by 80% from $12+ Million to just over $2 Million. That ended the era of RCI‘s shortwave, world wide service. It was a criminally stupid decision that, in my considered, professional opinion, should have caused the government of the day to summarily dismiss the entire CBC/Radio Canada Board and all of the most senior managers for cause. Every country needs a “voice,” RCI was ours … the gold standard for international broadcasting is found in the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle, both still provides near global coverage using nearly jam-proof shortwave and satellite radio stations. Both, of course, make extensive and intensive use of the internet;
- CBC Radio ~ CBC Radio has a big, integrated network of stations covering most of Canada. You can see a list of transmitters on their web site. If you live in Arctic Bay, in Nunavut, population 850±, you are served by radio station CKAB-FM which is a community-owned CBC North rebroadcaster that gets its programming from CFFB in Iqaluit; if you live in Prince Rupert, BC, your are served by CBC Radio 1 (a national network which has a mix of local, regonal and national programmes) broadcasting on 860 KHz and if you live in Shilo, MB you are also served by CBC Radio 1 on FM from Brandon, the people in Twillingate, NL are served, again by Radio 1 from Grand Falls which is rebroadcast on 90.7 MHz from a transmitter in Botswood. In short, CBC Radio is doing a first rate job of serving most Canadians, even if you find some of the content banal and biased. I think it is, by and large, money well spent because in many, many, many communities the CBC provides the only news and weather; but
- CBC Television is, in my opinion, a near total waste of taxpayer’s money. As you can see from this list (you have to select the province you want) the CBC has only 14 English language TV broadcast stations which serve about 25 urban ‘markets’ and serves less than 10% of the Canadian market in prime time. (Rex Murphy, in a talk to the Manning Centre, quipped about the low audience levels of the CBC at about the 2’50” mark.) It used to have hundreds of transmitters providing near national coverage but in 2012, when Canada converted to digital TV, it closed all but 14 because only a tiny number (certainly less than 5%, likely less than 2%) of Canadians want to watch CBC and do not have cable or internet access. Electing to not serve Canadians with many, many local TV stations was a smart business decision because, as you can see from this listing, Canadians from Kamloops, through Kenora and on to Halifax and St. John’s are served by other networks.
I think that Radio Canada International should be upgraded; CBC Radio should remain about the same, government funded and commercial free, and CBC TV should be closed, completely and the money saved should be used to directly subsidize TV, film and radio production in Canada based on Canadian content rules: n% for the production company being Canadians and using Canadian studios, x% for using Canadian talent ~ on screen and in in the studio, y% for using Canadian locations and so on.
Some, at least half, I suspect, of the CBC’s 14 television licences will sell, at auction, for a tidy sum, making room for new, innovative, probably ethnic, services in larger cities ~ Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal and a couple of others. The CBC”s excellent production facilities will also sell for a good sum to private entrepreneurs who will then host dozens of independent radio and TV programme producers. There’s nothing wrong with Canadian production values and in a more open market I suspect that Canadian drama, public affairs, education and political commentary programmes can survive and even thrive, each on its own merits.
January 1, 2019
Whither European fine art?
It’s apparently not just problematic because the vast majority of it was produced by dead white males, but it’s also now considered to be a totem of white supremacist beliefs:
“The Raft of the Medusa” (French: Le Radeau de la Méduse) by Théodore Géricault 1818-19, an oil-on-canvas painting measuring 491 cm × 716 cm (16 ft 1 in × 23 ft 6 in)
Louvre, image via Wikimedia Commons.
A Philadelphia-based art historian and curator believes exhibitions of European art in American museums should be “reconsidered” in light of “a surge in white supremacist violence” across the country.
Alexander Kaufmann says that “[b]ecause the centering of Europe is baked into the architecture” of museums, and “usually inhabit the largest and most central galleries,” people might not notice a connection to white supremacy.
“But white supremacists do,” he adds ominously.
“Europe’s cultural prestige is their evidence for the racial superiority of white America,” Kaufmann writes in Hyperallergic. White supremacists and white nationalists gather at museums because that’s “where Europe’s cultural patrimony is most visibly singled out as exceptional.”
White supremacy notwithstanding, American museums’ original missions — “provid[ing] instruction for the industrial classes” and helping the country achieve the goal of becoming the “noblest development of humanity” — have long required a response, Kaufmann argues, and the activism of groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls can provide just that.
“After the violence in Charlottesville, Charleston, and Pittsburgh,” Kaufmann says, “our encyclopedic museums must take steps within their galleries of European Art to combat white supremacist ideology.” (But are women who run around in gorilla masks “to expose gender and ethnic bias [and] corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture” really part of a serious solution?)
December 31, 2018
QotD: Political convictions induce a distorted perception of reality
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
December 30, 2018
The US federal government “shutdown”
One of the things you quickly notice when there’s a public service cutback is that the cutbacks are always directed to the parts of that organization that interact with the public. The idea being that if the public are seriously inconvenienced by lack of service — I mean more than they ordinarily are, anyway — they’ll raise an outcry and the politicians will be forced to rollback the cuts. This is standard practice because, as a rule, it works fairly well. The current US federal government “shutdown” is a bit of an outlier here, because very few members of the public interact with federal employees between Christmas and New Year, and the ones that they do encounter are (mostly) still on the job. Even those who are not on the job due to the shutdown will eventually be paid for the time they didn’t work, so there are few monetary savings happening: probably the reverse, as the government will be racking up charges for services they’ve contracted for but won’t use during the disruption, and there may well be penalty clauses written into the contracts.
Colby Cosh discusses the oddity of American government shutdown kabuki theatre:
As occasionally happens, the U.S. government is now “shut down” as a consequence of a conflict over budget appropriations between the president and the Congress. Except, of course, it isn’t anything of the sort. Otherwise we Canadians would be meeting with other functioning states to decide what pieces of the United States to break off for ourselves, the way European powers used to do with Poland from time to time. (Newspaper ethics forbid me from publishing a web address for my $29.95 “Make Maine Canada Again” hats.)
The “essential” parts of the U.S. federal government, including the bits that guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, always keep on trucking through these “shutdowns.” (The National Guard is sometimes affected, but on this occasion the Guard has been taken care of by a spending bill that passed in October.) Social Security and Medicare roll on unimpeded. The functions of government that get held up are the ones whose delay or abandonment cause inconvenience — albeit serious, economically harmful inconvenience — rather than anarchy.
If you grow curious about these American “shutdowns,” perhaps because they did not happen before 1981 and do not really happen anywhere else, you discover that this kabuki-like feature is not really a coincidence. As much as Congress and the president may fight very earnestly over things like border walls, they have a common interest in the overall health of the state.
The U.S. Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a shared element of America’s legal DNA and the British Empire’s: U.S. government shutdowns are, in a weird way, a distant echo of early-modern money struggles betwixt King and Parliament. Westminster-style governments, however, have evolved so as to minimize the possibility of ugly standoffs between the executive and the legislature. The U.S., not so much.
December 28, 2018
QotD: Celtic nationalism
Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
December 16, 2018
Mackenzie King at war
Ted Campbell remembers Canada’s Second World War Prime Minister:
Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.
I was born in 1942, William Lyon Mackenzie King was the prime minister; my mother often said that, in the 1940s, it seemed that he would never cease to be prime minister, and she thoroughly detested him; it wasn’t all of his policies she hated, it was, mainly, how he approached the war, and a few other things ~ she was, later, fond of the Canadian poet F.R. Scott’s rather bitter epitaph:
He seemed to be in the centre because we had no centre,
No vision to pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.Truly he will be remembered wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.Let us raise up a temple to the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.Now, Canada fought a good war, we made four absolutely vital contributions:
- We were the true “breadbasket of the empire,” our farmers fed our large Army and much of Britain’s, too;
- We were a major part of the “arsenal of democracy,” our factories and shipyards turned out all of the things, from tanks and trucks and bombers and corvettes to Bren guns and grenades that were needed to help defeat the Axis powers;
- We managed the all important British Commonwealth Air Training Plan that was a key element in the allies’ eventual success; and
- We played a huge and a significant leadership role in the Battle of the Atlantic ~ the only battle Churchill said that he really feared losing.
But under King we did each with apparent reluctance, seemingly trying to never serve any vital interest if there was even a remote chance that any political constituency might be offended ~ something that reminds me of Justin Trudeau in 2018. Our large and entirely commendable war efforts were, in the main, directed, sometimes despite King, by the indefatigable C.D. Howe, and the national unity concerns were assuaged by recruiting the universally respected Louis St Laurent.
The King era was characterized by extraordinarily tepid leadership at the top but brilliant work by strong ministers in a small cabinet. It also began Phase 1 of a national political civil war. I think that in the First World War many Canadians had either understood or had been, largely, indifferent to Quebec’s objections to conscription. But in the 1940s we had better mass communications and many Canadians were less understanding of Quebec’s reluctance to participate in that war, especially as Canadian casualties mounted after Hong Kong and then in Italy and then in France, Belgium and Holland. Louis St Laurent did not try to explain French Quebec’s misgivings to English Canada, his job was to maintain, by force of his own stellar reputation and personality, just enough support in Quebec and, as he easily did, to “outclass” the vocal, crypto-fascist, French Canadian opponents to the war. But there was another division fomenting inside the Liberal Party of Canada: both Howe and St Laurent had a new vision for Canada in the post war world; both saw Canada as an important actor on the world stage; both were frustrated by King’s timid leadership; it is very probable that had St Laurent, the foreign minister, rather than King, [been] the prime minister, led Canada’s delegation to the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco in June of 1945 that Canada, not France, would have been the fifth member of the Security Council (or that it would have had only four members. as originally planned). St Laurent, especially, was known, liked and respected in both London and Washington; both he and Howe were highly regarded as leaders and as statesmen … King was not; Churchill distrusted him because he has actively supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and it seems to me that both Churchill and Roosevelt saw him as little more than an errand boy.
QotD: Transferring nationalist passions
The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, […] they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.
But for an intellectual, transference has an important function […]. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
December 15, 2018
December 13, 2018
QotD: The Cabinet
[T]here is a clear similarity between the Prime Minister’s cabinet and the wardrobe/closet from the Narnia Chronicles: neither has any back to it and people who spend an excessive amount of time in either find themselves in a fantasy land.
Eric Kirkland, 2005-03-24.
