As we near the end of the Lincoln Bicentennial year, I am delighted to report that the University of Missouri Press has just published my book Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love ahead of schedule. Since the publisher’s website already offers a description of the book, I won’t reproduce it here. I would only add that my study addresses many issues of interest to contributors and readers of Takimag, particularly those who wonder how American Protestantism morphed into a right-wing version of liberation theology by promoting the cause of global democracy-building. Long before the full onset of this Protestant “Deformation,”  there had always been two types of Protestants in America:  those who believed in a tough-minded version of charity and those who believed that it is the cause of the “chosen people” to liberate the world.  It may surprise most neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, but I contend that Lincoln was an avatar of charity (Christian love), not chosenness.  As a Protestant realist, Lincoln knew that America’s fragile union could not survive while the immoral double-standard of slavery existed and even threatened to spread to the western territories.  Slavery was a defiance of biblical charity (love thy neighbor as thyself) for the simple reason that no slave-owner would ever want to be a slave. 

Lincoln’s opposition to slavery, however, did not commit him to a program of universalizing America’s ideals, since he always assumed that a Christian people is best suited to understanding and practicing, however imperfectly, the golden rule. (For this reason, he appealed to the moral conscience of Southern Christians to end slavery peacefully, in the years leading up to the Civil War.)  Lincoln never believed that every culture, Christian or otherwise, shared the same commitment to moral universalism. Despite the claims of various presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, the last project Lincoln had in mind was to launch America on the path of global chosenness, or the mission to Americanize the world under the guidance of Providence.  The president, who did not always act charitably himself in wartime, well knew that both sides to the Civil War not only “prayed to the same God” but claimed with equal conviction that they were the chosen people.  When Lincoln made occasional use of chosenness, it was always with qualification: his famous reference to the “almost chosen people” suggested that no people, American or otherwise, were so divinely favored forevermore that they can simply impose an imperialist order without taking into account the humbling force of charity.  For this reason, the president was dead against a vindictive program of Reconstruction in the South that merely reversed the roles of master and slave in the postbellum era. Charity called for healing the wounds of the nation, not a new version of “might is right.” Despite the claims of neoconservatives and leftists who created a global universalistic version of Lincoln in the 20th century, Lincoln’s “charity for all” did not entail a radical program of egalitarian leveling at home and wars for human rights abroad. Ever since America made the fateful decision to enter the slaughterhouse of World War One, the triumph of a chosenness ideology has perhaps irrevocably transformed both Protestantism and America while rewriting the Lincoln legacy of political realism as a program for democratic imperialism. We are all living in the shadow of this legacy. 

The recent passing of Irving Kristol, the popularly dubbed “godfather of neoconservatism,” has occurred long after “neo” already lost its relevance or meaning as a prefix fitting a now long-established and triumphant movement on the Right.  As readers and writers on this site are all too well aware, neoconservatism could not have succeeded as well as it did in displacing the Alternative Right without the formidable influence and journalistic talents of Mr. Kristol, who urged his fellow neoconservatives—most of whom had been liberal Democrats disillusioned with their party’s leftist social and foreign policy—to embrace and take hold of the Republican Party from the 1970s onwards.  In the process, the GOP morphed into a slightly more conservative version of what the Democratic Party had been before Vietnam, the Great Society, and George McGovern.  This transformation is now so complete and long-lasting that it seems absurd to associate it with anything neo.

Amidst the plethora of accolades and diatribes currently being written on the legacy of Mr. Kristol, I’d like to add my two cents, or perhaps two (qualified) cheers.  First, this pioneer of neoconservatism eventually expressed a healthy respect for the old bourgeois order which, as he repeatedly contended in his Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), was going the way of the dinosaur thanks to the culture wars of the 1960s.  Unlike the nihilistic leftists whom he had once known as friends in his Trotskyite youth, the mature Kristol genuinely admired the bourgeois virtues of hard work, self-reliance, freedom of worship, and rugged individualism.  Second, Kristol sincerely respected the old Protestant heritage that had made these virtues possible and even excoriated many of his fellow Jews on the Left for irrationally fearing this Christian identity as intolerant and anti-semitic, when in fact American Protestants in the post-WW 2 era have been the best allies that Jews have ever enjoyed. 

That said, it is now time for one huge qualification.  Kristol’s praise for the dying bourgeois order did not sufficiently motivate him or his many comrades and followers to take up a decisive war against that order’s enemies on the Left.  His polemics against the “New Class”—that coalition of academics, bureaucrats, and statists who demanded the demolition of bourgeois society in the wake of the 1960s—were mainly directed against the architects and beneficiaries of LBJ’s Great Society, not the managerial state that had taken shape since the New Deal.  In famously quipping that neoconservatives were liberals “who were mugged by reality,” Kristol was denouncing the new and radical leftism of the 1960s in order to conserve the leftist liberalism that originated in the 1930s, not the liberalism of Thomas Jefferson or Calvin Coolidge.  It is well known that Kristol had zero sympathy with the Goldwater wing of the GOP that represented the last gasping effort to repeal the Old Left’s statism.  When Kristol famously told Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s that the Left had won the culture war, he was simply expressing his longheld conviction that American conservatives inexorably had to face the choice of two Lefts, one merely older and less radical than the other.  As much as Kristol admired the old Protestant bourgeoisie and its virtues, they were headed for the dustbin of history. 

As Sam Francis astutely observed in an essay on neoconservatism and the managerial state from the mid-1980s, Kristol and his new conservatism offered the Imperial Presidency, a more efficient welfare state, and an empire-building foreign policy to Americans on the Right, not a restoration of the old bourgeois order whose avatars would have despised all of the above.  The most bitter irony of this history is that the New Left could not have finished off the old conservatism without the complicity of an Old Left that had simply turned rightward.  And that is nothing to cheer about. 

This unique version of eros is the next frontier for Human Rights lawyers searching for oppressed, love-starved clients in need of social and legal affirmation. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, liberals and leftists demanded the end of segregated schools in the American South.  By the end of the 1960s, these crusaders claimed near total victory in their struggle to end segregation.  Canada’s largest city now wants to turn the clock back.  Toronto opened its first “Africentric” school yesterday, an institution which is designed to help improve the self-esteem and educational achievement of African-Canadian students by offering a curriculum that focuses on the history and culture of Africa.  Defenders of this school have dismissed worries that this experiment will foster parochialism and ghettoization; instead they expect that the students will do better in an environment which affirms and cherishes their identity.  This school has received wide support mostly among leftists who have given up on the ideals of racial integration and equality in order to address the problem of low test scores among African-Canadian youth.  Once the cradle of Tory conservatism in Canada, the multicultural city of Toronto is likely to face more demands to open up separate schools for other disadvantaged minorities. 

The Canadian Left is about to discover the brave new world of identity politics. 

Patrick Buchanan is not the first writer to argue that Hitler wanted no war with Britain, “whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.”  Other historians have also conceded that the Führer’s great admiration for this island nation, which he never set foot in, is proof positive that no war was inevitable between Nazi Germany and the British Empire.  This thesis, however, requires a caveat the size of Texas.  It is certainly correct, based on a highly selective gathering of evidence, that Hitler admired Britain.  The fact that he admired the English people and heritage, however, does not mean that he understood them.  Indeed, his fundamental ignorance of Britain fatefully contributed to war between her and Germany.

Hitler occasionally mused that the British Empire, with its Aryan origins, was the true model for a new German imperium in the conquered territories of the Soviet Union.  The Führer was impressed that a small number of British soldiers and administrators could govern hundreds of millions of Indians for over two hundred years.  What Hitler refused to take from the British experience, as any student of the Nazi-Soviet war knows all too well, was the twofold British legacy of encouraging the rule of law and responsible government in India; these practices would not be the blessings that the Nazis bestowed upon the peoples of Russia and her border states.  Instead, murder and slavery on a mass scale were the Nazi gifts to the victims of Stalin who were unfortunate enough to be “liberated” by Hitler’s legions on the eastern front.  British rule in India at least bequeathed to the Hindu majority the preconditions for parliamentary democracy; to say the least, no equivalent claim can be made about the Nazi oppression of the Slavic peoples. 

Hitler also failed to understand the power of British public opinion after the Munich betrayal.  By this time, a majority of English citizens had grown tired of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, and were urging their government to take a tougher stance against Hitler.  Had the Führer devoted more study to the nature of English democracy, he would have grasped that his plans to conquer Poland—and not simply take back Danzig, which was a pretext for conquest—would never be tolerated by British (or French) public opinion. 

By at least 1937, Hitler also should have known what his relation to Britain would be if he continued with his military build-up as well as his plans to bring the East to heel.  In that year, Churchill met with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain.  Ribbentrop was exploring, at Hitler’s request, the possibility for a full Anglo-German entente or even an alliance.  The conditions of this new agreement, however, were clearly unacceptable to Britain (as well as France).  While continually pointing at a map of Central and Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop explained to Churchill that Germany demanded a “free hand” in the East, or Lebensraum for her growing population.  Poland, not just Danzig, would be absorbed.  Russia, the Baltic states,  and the Ukraine would become vassal regimes.  If Britain did not interfere with this Nazi conquest of the East, then war would be avoided.  Churchill, who was a private member of Parliament at the time, firmly made clear to the ambassador that Britain could never “disinterest herself” in the fortunes of the Continent, nor would she tolerate the Nazi mastery of Eastern Europe and Russia as the price of avoiding war.  Yes, Hitler wanted peace, but entirely on his own terms.  If he had known anything about the history of Britain, he would have recognized that no English government in history had ever meekly allowed any nation on the Continent such an unprecedented and ominous hegemony.

In retrospect, it is obvious that Ribbentrop’s report to Hitler of this conversation with Churchill did not deter the Führer from pursuing his designs against the East.  Despite his admiration for the British Empire of old, Hitler and his henchmen showed contempt for the “decadent” and “bourgeois” Britain which, he believed,  had gone soft after a long period of global mastery.  (He showed even greater contempt for the resolve and fighting ability of the “plutocratic” Americans.)  The young and vital Third Reich would replace this old and decayed kingdom that pathetically lived off of long past glories. 

With respect to Britain (and so much else), Hitler was wrong on all counts.  Britain’s empire was a force for civilization, not the model of brutal tyranny that Hitler would inflict upon the Soviet peoples.  Moreover, Britain was more than a nation of shopkeepers, willing to tolerate Nazi domination of the East.  The Führer fatally misunderstood the resolve of the British to resist the designs of Nazi Germany after they were stirred to anger by the Munich betrayal. 

Churchill was right:  World War 2 was indeed the “unnecessary war,” but not because Britain failed to make peace with an untrustworthy and murderous regime.  “There never was a war more easy to stop,” as Churchill well knew, because every western regime with eyes that could see knew what Hitler intended for Europe, and did nothing to stop him until it was too late for millions of his victims. 

Canada used to be called the “peaceable kingdom,” once renowned for its dedication to the rule of law and political moderation.  The rise of what some pundits have dubbed Mohawkistan is changing all that.  Members of the Mohawk 1st Nation at the Akwesasne reservation are currently blocking the opening of the Cornwall Island border crossing with upper New York State.  This Ontario crossing has been closed since May because the Mohawks oppose the arming of Canada’s border guards with handguns to protect themselves while on the island.  After these guards abandoned their posts under duress back in May, several Mohawks—known as members of the notorious Warrior Society—encircled the guard post and lit bonfires around it.  This grotesque violation of the laws of the land happened because these Mohawks had previously threatened the lives of the guards while the federal government of Canada, which is supposed to keep the borders secure, did nothing to protect their lives or the integrity of the crossing.  Even America’s longstanding worries over Canada’s border security have not prompted the federal or provincial governments to take action against these criminal gangs. 

Although leftists have been stupidly tempted to portray these Mohawks as brave and noble defenders of their ancestral lands against an oppressive and rapaciously “capitalist” Canadian state, the real issue is control and flow of the contraband that comes across this border crossing every day.  The immensely profitable trade in guns, cigarettes, and other illegal goods would be disrupted if border guards had the firepower to protect themselves while they maintain the border crossing. 

The power of the smuggling trade on the Akwesasne reserve is so great that the Mohawks’ own reserve police are afraid to clamp down on the perpetrators.  Worst of all,  the Canadian government refuses to enforce the law against these criminals, and even prohibits police and military helicopters from flying over the reservation lest they be shot down by shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles!

All this is happening while Canada’s soldiers fight jihadists in Afghanistan.  The appalling irony of fighting a war against Moslem terrorists several thousand miles away while surrendering to gangster elements at home may be lost on the Canadian political class, but it is bitterly understood by the beleaguered citizens who suffer the misfortune of living in this Mohawkistani state of nature. 

Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009) is not exactly the first name that comes to mind as an individual that conservatives should readily praise.  As Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson (1961-1968), he presided over the most disastrous war in American history.  His statistical approach to fighting the Vietnam War—recall the gruesome “body count” that calculated the number of Vietcong killed each week as a measurable sign of victory—dramatically revealed the flaws of quantitative technique when applied to immeasurable realities like the tenacious will and historical memory of the North Vietnamese communist cadres.  It also didn’t win him many friends when, later in life, McNamara admitted that he, JFK, and LBJ were “terribly wrong” about the Vietnam War, particularly in their collective failure to understand that it was a civil war among the Vietnamese rather than a cosmic struggle between good and evil during the Cold War (with the North Vietnamese mistakenly seen as mere pawns of the Russians and Chinese).  This contrition, which comes through dramatically in Errol Morris’s fascinating documentary The Fog of War (2004), has struck most of McNamara’s critics on the Right and Left as a classic case of too little, too late. 

I must admit, however, to having a certain respect for one of McNamara’s retrospective lessons about peace and war.  In his book Wilson’s Ghost, which he co-authored with James Blight, McNamara explained how American policy-makers need to learn the fine art of empathy, or the willingness to put oneself in the skin of one’s enemies.  This feat JFK and his cabinet accomplished during those perilous 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), according to McNamara, when they managed to understand at that crucial time what motivated the Russians and Cubans to view the Americans the way they did.  Kennedy could hardly back down, given the threat the missiles posed to America.  Khrushchev also couldn’t just back down, since he had promised to protect Cuba from another Bay of Pigs invasion.  By promising Khrushchev that the US would not invade Cuba if the missiles were removed, Kennedy built what Confucians call a “golden bridge” for his enemy, or an opportunity to allow the Soviet premier to go back to the Russian people and claim that he had stopped an “imperialist” American invasion.  Empathy here was not the same as sympathy with the ideological aims of one’s enemy.  Rather, it was an honest and thoughtful attempt to understand the limitations and circumstances under which the enemy labored.  In theological terms, it was an astute application of Christian charity to politics (perhaps reflective of the influence which the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had on McNamara and Kennedy). 

In retrospect, this diplomacy averted a nuclear Armageddon that was even more probable than anyone knew at the time.  During the missile crisis, the CIA erroneously believed that no warheads had been delivered to Cuba.  Only in 1992 did McNamara find out that Cuba already had at least 90 fully armed nukes on the island, and that Khrushchev had approved their use in the event of an American attack! 

It is a safe bet that the former secretary did not believe that the Bush administration went through the same exercise of empathy with respect to the Iraq war, which McNamara to his credit vigorously opposed as absolutely wrong in political, moral, and economic terms.  We probably will not have to wait for the full declassification of the official documents of the Bush era to discover that this administration knew next to nothing about the complexities of Iraqi history and politics, especially its relentless tribal and sectarian strife which stretch as far back as its medieval period; the failure of reconstruction that sharply contrasts with the early optimistic neocon predictions of a brief and successful occupation is proof enough of that.  In retrospect, McNamara admitted that the empathy which JFK and his cabinet had felt for the Russians was never extended to the Vietnamese in the LBJ era.  We can only hope that the Obama administration, which has recently escalated the war in Afghanistan to new heights, has learned McNamara’s hard lesson of empathy. 

Now that Iran’s expulsion of foreign journalists has deprived the world of detailed news coverage of the present turmoil in that nation, we have been forced to rely on the gritty sights and sounds of violence and bloodshed communicated by brave Iranians with cell phone cameras, who courageously photograph and record the murderous tactics of riot police and revolutionary guardsmen on the ground.  Amidst this flood of heart-breaking images, there are a few moments that will haunt me forever.  Watching the news last night, I heard the desperate cries of a young, terrified Iranian woman who was pleading with the world to do something to stop this oppression.

I have often admired the honesty and conviction of Ron Paul, who has become the most famous spokesperson for the Alternative Right in recent years.  Yet I must take issue with his recent refusal to join the House of Representatives in condemning the crackdown in Iran.  To be sure, I applaud the moral reasoning behind his view that America has often been selective in condemning the repression in a hostile nation (Iran) while ignoring it altogether in a friendly one (Saudi Arabia).  It should also be recognized that Dr. Paul has always opposed the attempts of governments to crush the “democratic aspirations” of peoples everywhere.  Yet I cannot support his position that Congress lacks the “constitutional authority” to sit in judgment of actions taken by foreign governments “of which “we are not representatives.”  This position is so extreme that it is hard to imagine any crisis overseas which would justify the official condemnation of a tyranny by the government of the United States, at least in Dr. Paul’s view. 

Perhaps paleos who have recently gone on record opposing “interference” and “intervention” in Iran need to define exactly what they mean by these terms.  Do interference and intervention refer to the unlikely act of sending in the Marines, or do these words also include any moral support for embattled democratic forces in Iran?  While I support paleos who condemn military intervention in Iran in light of the sorry history of past interventions in the Middle East, I fail to see why democratic governments should hold their rhetorical fire against the mullahs.  Surely we are not condemned to the dualistic and extreme choice between outright military intervention and eerie silence, which offers no hope to human beings like the frightened Iranian woman I mentioned earlier.

Lest anyone accuse me of being a neoconservative mole, it is worth recalling that a great hero of conservatives everywhere understood the difference between recklessly intrusive acts and prudent interference.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was hardly a supporter of US-sponsored democratic revolution by gunpoint throughout the world.  Yet he famously pleaded with the West to interfere with the internal affairs of the Soviet state. 

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs. The Communist leaders say, “Don’t interfere in our internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet.” But I tell you: Interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.

It is of course false to suggest that this great conservative was seeking an all-out war between America and Russia as the price of such interference.  The choice was not between invasion and inaction.  Solzhenitsyn vigorously supported the efforts of the West to shine the spotlight on tyranny and impose further sanctions on the USSR.  A clear and vigorous condemnation of what is happening in Iran does not count as unwarranted interference, unless one is a member of the ruling theocracy there.  Obama and many others have used the argument that speaking out in favor of the protesters will play into the hands of the mullahs, who can then associate their enemies in the streets with Yankee intrusiveness.  No doubt the Soviets conveniently portrayed dissidents like Solzhenitsyn as dupes of America, just as the mullahs in Tehran misrepresent the demonstrators as lapdogs of Anglo-American imperialism.  Yet this self-serving propaganda should not deter governments from condemning this decaying, desperate theocracy.  Even if western regimes did not interfere in these affairs, they would still be accused of meddling.  To date, the mullahs and Ahmadinejad see little difference between the hawkish Bush and the dovish Obama anyway.  Obama’s hope that lack of tough talk will encourage the mullahs to dialogue with the administration over their production of nukes is an illusory hope if there ever was one.  Isn’t it more likely that the mullahs will sense weakness instead?

Solzhenitsyn cursed America and Britain whenever these nations appeased the Soviets, a sad process that began with Yalta.  Will the survivors of the protests in Iran also curse the West if there is a lack of clear and straightforward support for them, all at a time which could well be the defining moment for the history of modern Iran? 

I read Paul Gottfried’s recent reflections on the historical memory of the paleoconservative movement just after reading two recent studies of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin which devote particular attention to his critique of modern Christianity:  Jeffrey Herndon’s Eric Voegelin And The Problem Of Christian Political Order and John J. Ranieri’s Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss,  Eric Voegelin, and the Bible.  While Voegelin never called himself a conservative, paleo or otherwise,  it struck me that his understanding of western Christianity, particularly his unbridled detestation of the Protestant tradition (which Herndon and Ranieri admirably document), is a high-octane intellectualized version of a tendency which I find all too common in my limited experience with the paleoconservative movement.  Voegelin’s contention that most of modernity’s problems—libertinism, totalitarianism, etc.—can be laid at the door of the Reformation and the Enlightenment (which echoes Protestantism, in his view) is not substantively different from the anti-modern worldviews of paleos with traditional Catholic or Orthodox inclinations (many of whom Voegelin taught and influenced in postwar America).  Just recently a contributor to this site similarly blamed Anglo-Saxons for all the horrors of American modernity, ranging from the ugliness of shopping malls to the rhetorical excesses of Bush the Younger’s 2nd inaugural address.  Another contributor a few weeks back condemned the Enlightenment for liberating modern man from the authority of nature and tradition while unleashing the desire for consumption and mastery of the planet, all of which threaten civilization as we know it. 

As a Protestant Christian, I must grudgingly admit that my brothers and sisters in faith have not done their job in preserving conservative order (or what I awkwardly prefer to call “bourgeois Christian liberal democracy”).  In The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard rightly observed that as early as the 1950s there were hardly any prominent Protestant leaders to be seen on the American Right.  And, despite the cultural Marxist undertones in his studies of the American Protestant mind, Richard Hofstadter had a point when he long ago faulted Protestants for practicing an “anti-intellectualism” which left a void in conservatism that was later filled by noxious factions (although I profoundly disagree with Hofstadter’s paranoid dismissal of American Protestantism as fascism cloaked in red, white, and blue).  The failure of Protestants to defend their traditions on viable intellectual grounds has indeed led to a spiritual void or “deformation”, to invoke the terms of James Kurth, and thereby contributed to the decline of the very order that their forefathers worked to create. 

I fail to see, however, any wisdom in conservative efforts to scapegoat Protestantism as the main source of all that ails the present age.  While not all paleos have been as extreme as Voegelin in claiming that Lutheran and Calvinist “gnosticism” is a dress rehearsal for Hitler and Stalin, I have yet to encounter more than a handful of paleos who believe that the Reformation was a good thing.  It is far more common in my experience to find paleos who wish that the American founding had been a little more Catholic, or who support John Courtney Murray’s contention that America would be far better off if the Founders had read more Aquinas and less Locke.  (For the record,  I’ll take church-state separation over the ancien regime any day.)  It is one thing to bash Protestants for failing to defend their own traditions; it is quite another thing to bash those traditions as unworthy of defense in the first place. 

What Paul describes as a traditionalist prejudice of many paleos rings all too true in my experience:

Many of the paleos I’ve listened to show an otherworldly side, when they’re not bashing each other in geriatric rage. They glorify Catholic monastic ideals or invoke the memories of Christian crusades. They complain ceaselessly about modern life and insist that we return to scholastic precepts and medieval models of social organization. But such advice cannot possibly resonate in the current climate of debate, and it is foolish to castigate those young people who wish to have impact on the present age for not following someone else’s nostalgic reveries.

The constant decrying of Protestant modernity has been arguably very successful in driving Protestants out of the paleo camp and into the hands of neoconservatives, whose rhetoric about America’s chosenness resonates with many Protestants.  What Sam Francis once described as over-the-top Catholicism among paleos is simply a gift to movement conservatives.  It is also a very strange thing to call oneself a conservative if one is uncomfortable with the conservatism (that is, the older Protestantism) of one’s nation.  What exactly, then, is one trying to conserve in America? 

Psychoanalytic historians of the future will have to make sense of the schizophrenic behavior of democracies that want to export their ideals to distant lands while they tighten and squeeze civil liberties at home.  The latest dreary news to come out of Canada’s notorious human rights commissions is that the latter want to further increase their powers over freedom of speech.  While Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan to build a decent democratic regime (or at least one infinitely more humane than what the Taliban has to offer), the apparatchiks back home are moving to increase statist intrusions into what liberals used to call the private realm of life. 

At present, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) already gives its tribunals the power to punish anyone who “likely” exposes a person to “hatred or contempt,” as the judges define these practices.  In short, all they need prove is that your comments, blogs, or e-mails might cause a person to feel harshly towards another person.  To date, only individuals with politically incorrect views have been brought before these kangaroo courts.  Needless to say, the CHRC would shut down Takimag in an instant if it had a chance! 

Despite considerable public criticism of this nonsense, the guardians of the CHRC want to strip Canada’s Criminal Code of any free speech defenses, and thereby add to its surveillance powers.  Under the present Code, those who are accused of a “hate crime” can defend themselves on the grounds that they were either telling the truth or sincerely believed that they were doing so.  If the CHRC has its way, the truth will no longer be enough to defend a citizen against its authority, as long as that truth is deemed “hateful.”  Some of Canada’s top schools are already garnering the dubious distinction of being havens for the suppression of academic freedom, and this proposed measure will only add fuel to the fire.  (Anybody who writes or teaches on Islam from a critical perspective in Canadian universities should take special note of this ominous development.)

It would be comforting to believe that evil triumphs when good (that is, conservative) men and women do nothing.  To date, however, conservative governments in Canada have not only tolerated but even expanded the powers of these commissions, in the vain hope of winning votes from leftists.  If politicos on the Right refuse to strip these commissions of their powers, who will do so?  To be sure, the Canadian Left—which generally supports the CHRC—would predictably accuse, in good Stalinist fashion, the Right of protecting the freedoms of alleged xenophobes and fascists if these tribunals were demolished.  It may come as a surprise to the so-called conservatives who want to protect the CHRC, but the voters who support these star chambers are unlikely to vote Tory anyway. 

In short, what has the Right got to lose?  Restore liberty to Canada, and tear down this tyranny now!