Explaining Canada’s Tilt Towards Tyranny

PELONI:  A must read article by Geoffrey Clarfield who provides a very insightful examination of the rising trend toward tyranny among very disparate regimes and political movements.

Geoffrey Clarfield

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All great tyrants and conquerors have been monotonously alike. – C.S. Lewis

In order to explain Canada’s recent and dramatic tilt towards tyranny under Canada’s first unelected parliamentary majority (they ‘persuaded’ already elected Conservative MPs to defect) one must first go back in time and ask why Fascist Japan and Nazi Germany were such close allies before and during WWII?

As a young man I asked that question and I could not figure it out, despite having read a fair amount of modern history by the time I went to university (college in American parlance). I did understand that Germany turned its back on democracy in the late 1920s, and that Japan, having looked at various European models of modernization, took the authoritarian route.

I could not understand why they became allies, for the Japanese had no animus towards Jews and Judaism until they saw this as an entrance ticket to their alliance with Hitler. I also could not understand the widespread sympathy for these regimes by the elected and selected elites of Canada’s government during the 1920s and 1930s, who sent Canadian health workers to Germany to see how its Euthanasia program was ‘implemented’ (German doctors murdered thousands of German patients before 1939 because they were deemed to be genetically inferior).

And so, one must ask what the underlying nature of this most recent gang up against Israel, one that includes a motley crew that includes, Iran, Pakistan, the Democratic Party of the USA, Canada and a host of Western European countries’ ruling elites. What sentiment brings them all together?

The answer is simple, either a commitment to tyranny or the slow intentional elite drift, away from their actual job of protecting citizens’ rights and democratic freedoms. This is called the slide towards tyranny. The top-down bureaucrats of the European Union are the latest examples as no one seems able to unseat them.

C.S. Lewis, the creator of the Narnia cycle called The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, once said,” All great tyrants and conquerors have been monotonously alike.” I would add and so are would be tyrants.

Lewis meant that despite the often vastly diverse personal and cultural backgrounds of tyrannies and would be tyrants, they are all driven by fear of personal liberty and the “democratic other” which is fused with the desire for control of society by a small network of unelected and sometimes elected elites, who unfairly concentrate political and economic power in their own hands and to the detriment of the majority.

As democratic leaders slide towards tyranny, they realize that as quasi tyrants, they have more in common with other full dictatorships or quasi dictatorships than they do robust democracies (like Israel). And so, they then band together against legitimate democratic movements and states, as these are perceived as negative examples and exemplify a lifestyle that their citizens may want or desire. That is why so many so called democracies abroad become ‘anti American.’

There are three primary forces driving this alliance.

The first is that these corrupt elites are an existential enemy of other robust democracies, (like Taiwan, the USA and Israel) and they fear that their own citizens may want that kind of freedom.

Most Islamic states, Russia, China, and a growing number of Western European states who are kowtowing to a growing Islamic lobby, from both legal and illegal immigration, exemplify this tendency. Canada and Britain today are good examples of this trend.

The persecution of Tommy Robinson in Britain, the banning and shunning of Le Pen in France and the hysteria against Alternatives for Germany in Germany are all good examples of this trend among so called liberal democracies, as well as a pre-democratic medieval prejudice against things Jewish and now Israeli, like soccer teams or singers. Let us not forgot that there was a deadly shooting at a Synagogue in Belleville Ontario just a few days ago.

The second factor is that dictators and would be tyrants often end up dead, or discredited, or jailed or debanked or separated from their cronies who get government contracts and so, from fear of death or from loss of ill-gotten gain, they often double down on their power and use the media and the universities to protect them.

The clearest example of this is to be seen in today’s Canada where the Liberal Party under Prime Minister Mark Carney has been buying off elective conservative MPs and incentivizing them to cross the aisle. They are also passing legislation dramatically restricting free public political expression. Canada now has its first fully unelected government since its founding in 1867! Expect many many more.

The third is government control of the media. Today digital authoritarianism reinforces tyranny. As the Canadian government is passing more and more laws against free expression, at the same time it is no surprise that Canada has been having military talks with the Chinese who also run unopposed Chinese overseas police stations in Canada. The Canadian government buys many of its drones from China.

The Carney administration also subsidizes the national media, the CBC, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year as a reward for their uncritical party and government line support. The CBC is unapologetically anti Israel and Pro Hamas. The fact that multinational companies associated with the Liberal Party like Brookfield, seem to thrive in this environment, is a correlation worthy of  a deep dive.

Mark Carney now wants Canada to join the economically declining but very authoritarian European Union. He gave a recent speech at their headquarters in Brussels just a few days ago, where he did not mention that it was Canadian and American soldiers who liberated Europe from the Nazis during WWII.

Instead, he praised the indigenous resistance forces who formed a tiny percentage of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands under the Nazis. Historians remind us of those hundreds of thousands of French, Dutch and Belgians and Norwegians were willing collaborators of the Nazis. This is a shameful historical omission.

Do not be surprised that Prime Minister Carney has declared economic war against the US. He has also officially and absurdly announced that he is making plans to defend Canada from an “American invasion.” This is the classic xenophobia of a would-be tyrant.

We should not be surprised that all these tyrannies and democracies on their way towards tyranny like Ireland, Britain, Holland and what some conservative journalists have called the ‘dirty dozen’ in Europe, are all calling for a boycott of Israel and especially its wine, which is produced in the Biblical Heartland of the Land of Israel-Judea and Samaria. A Freudian would say this is their literal protest of symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition that was once the basis of English speaking democracies.

This is not the first time in modern history that Europeans have boycotted Jews. One must remember the Nazi economic boycott of the Jews of Germany during 1930s. Boycotting Israel in the eyes of today’s tyrants is the “next best thing.” These same countries sell mountains of arms to Israel’s enemies and if it were not for American pressure, would be doing full-time business with the army of the dictators in Iran whose stated goal is to wipe Israel off the map.

One must conclude that even though tyrants and would be tyrants come from a myriad of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds they all band together because they are in love with tyranny.

Israel, a robust and free republic, is simply their time-honored whipping boy and a modern substitute for the custom of attacking the local Jewish ghetto to divert the commoners from the injustice meted out to them by their own rulers.

One thing that political scientists can certainly measure is the decline in citizens freedoms when their leader’s scapegoat the Jewish State. As Israel is soon to have free and fair elections supported by robust freedoms of expression across the board. Let us hope that Israel can be a light unto the nations and that Western opposition parties will rediscover the Judeo Christian moral tradition.

Everything else are just varieties of tyranny.

Geoffrey Clarfield is Canada’s only conservative anthropologist.