Our Society is Under Attack — from Vilifying John A.Macdonald to Antifa

The mindless deferences to native blood libels against 95 per cent of Canadians should be replaced by the efficient placation of legitimate grievances; no less, and no more.

by Conrad Black

Both Canada and the United States are, in different ways, enduring an assault on their national legitimacy from within. The incessant agitation by the Canadian native community, now focused on, in Stalinist terms, the repression of John A. Macdonald, is essentially an attempt to delegitimize the entire settlement and political organization of this country by those who arrived here starting in the 16th century. As I have written many times before, the natives arrived here approximately 20,000 or more years before the Europeans did, but their civilization in the 16th century was at least 5,000 years behind that of Europe by any reasonable measurement of the maturity of a culture or economy of a society. And the natives were not sufficiently numerous or attached to durable places of residence to be said to occupy the territory of what is now Canada.

The arrival of the Europeans was more legitimate than the arrival of the Frankish and Teutonic and other tribes and peoples were in Central and Western Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. But the Europeans who came to the New World, whatever their behavioural shortcomings, were gentler and more tolerant of the natives than were the Huns, Vandals, Saracens and others who flooded into Western Europe and killed, enslaved, absorbed or assimilated most of the peoples that had preceded them there. There is not, even in the most eccentric circles, an agitation today for the restoration of the rights of Picts or Etruscans, nor any suggestion that they wish to live as they did 2,000 years ago.

The effort to demote Macdonald on the $10 bill, and the clamour to take his name off schools and highways and buildings, is the personification of the cheeky and outrageous effort to delegitimize the entire European presence in this country. It is dismally unsurprising that the initial effort to portray Macdonald as a genocidist by self-serving native myth-makers, seconded by addled judges, has now been taken up by our underworked, over-pensioned teachers’ unions, who bear the chief responsibility for reducing the collective IQ of this country in the last 40 years. Macdonald was the principal creator of the only trans-continental, bicultural parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, one of the chief authors of co-operation between French and English-speaking Canadians, the man who assured the right to vote for native people, and someone who had many allies in the native community, such as Crowfoot, the Blackfoot chief who supported Macdonald in the Metis disturbances.

The effort to discredit him officially is an effort to marginalize all of us morally; if the founder of the country was illegitimate, we all are. Every stage of this sequence of anti-historical upheavals of fact is nonsense. The manner in which Canadians, as a political society, have allowed our right to be and govern here to be impugned by people upon whom we have lavished scores of billions of dollars to no discernible purpose is an epic example of a people who so lack the moral self-confidence in their basic collective rights they can be blackmailed by people who have grievances certainly, but whose greatest modern grievances are not against us but against their own leaders. The non-native people in this country have not exploited and misgoverned the native people remotely as thoroughly as have some of their own leaders have done.

In the United States, for obvious reasons, the problem is more profound and on a greater scale. More than 150 years after the emancipation of the slaves, and more than 50 years after the end of segregation and of the practical disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the southern states, even after two terms of an African-American president and the passage of most African-Americans into the middle class, the United States is still riven by racist, violent anti-white movements, including the self-styled anti-fascists (Antifa), and Black Lives Matter (BLM), some of whose fellow travellers have targeted white police officers for murder.

Because the agitations of these extremist movements are cross-threaded with the half-completed takeover of the federal government by the populist Trump movement, still opposed by traditional Republican and all Democratic factions, the Never-Trumpers who dominate the national media have partially overlooked the odious and militantly racist nature of Antifa and BLM, and the Democrats have sailed close to this satanic wind in their eagerness to portray Trump as a Nazi sympathizer and to whitewash Antifa and BLM and others as righteous advocates of free speech and assembly. The FBI warned three days before the Charlottesville riots that it would be a battle between two extremist groups, and the Democratic governor and mayor facilitated the violence premeditatedly, presumably to blame President Trump for the deterioration of civility in the country. Of course the jackal media (and its witless Canadian echo chamber) fell in with this, but it is false and it won’t succeed.

A moment’s objective reflection should be enough to convince any reasonable observer that the idea that the constitutionally elected president of the U.S. is a Nazi sympathizer, especially one who, whatever his foibles, has an unbroken record as an equal-opportunity employer and has a family that is one-third Jewish, is an insane proposition. The founder of BLM has compared Trump to Hitler and claims that he seeks genocide on the African-Americans. The New York Times and Washington Post have dutifully run op-ed pieces lyricizing Antifa as fighters for freedom and social justice. The Democrats, after decades of constructing a coalition built on identity politics, are in bed with anti-white racists who extol violence and are bound to fail crashing into the rampart of American pan-ethnic, multi-racial national patriotism which Donald Trump bestrides unchallenged.

Since the British colonial ancestors of the original American whites brought the first African-Americans to the American colonies as slaves, because in the southern states Africans were productive harvesters of tropical crops, especially cotton and tobacco (which is why there was very little slavery in Canada, except among the natives), the present black militants can hardly emulate the Canadian native people and imply that the Americans of European ancestry have no right to be here. None of them have any interest in going back to Africa, but these militant groups have forgotten the lesson of Rev. Martin Luther King (adapted from Gandhi), that the persistent demand of recognition of “the self-evident (truth) that all men are created equal,” will move the conscience of the great white majority of Americans, while recourse to violence will lead to the suppression of the blacks. The power structure of America, including the majority of African-Americans, will support the application of whatever level of force is necessary to preserve a civil society. 

The Democrats would be very imprudent to make common cause with Antifa, which has routinely beaten up peaceful pro-Trump meetings and parades and prevented reputable conservatives from fulfilling invitations to speak at universities. Spurious investigations that were designed to impeach Trump go on producing an ever-larger nothingburger, and the Clintons cower in silence over their legal vulnerability on Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation’s gargantuan pay-to-play casino. It is all nonsense, the feeble echo of an attempt to replicate in America the two minutes of hate of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In Canada, all that is needed is for someone of some public stature to demand that the endless, mindless deferences to native blood libels against 95 per cent of Canadians be replaced by the efficient placation of legitimate grievances; no less, and no more. Neither country has a societal death wish such has afflicted much of Europe in the last century, and neither is in a European-style torpor. Both counties will work it out.   

First published in the National Post.