A cry for freedom
So many bitch & complain, but never do anything to try to remedy their complaints. Well, now we have a group who is doing something in spades—the truckers with their Freedom Convoy to Ottawa, inspiring like protests all over the world: France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, UK and more. They are a cheerful, peaceful, multigenerational, multicultural, working-class group, people who have been on the front line throughout the Covid pandemic.
They were celebrated as heroes by the elites—government employees, politicians & bureaucrats alike; the legacy media (I’m following Candace Malcolm, True North, in her renaming the mainstream media as the legacy media because they are no longer mainstream, having hemorrhaged readers/viewers by the millions with their left-leaning coverage of everything, even the weather!); academia, professors & students alike; and corporations, management & employees alike—as the truckers transported all the necessary, and not so necessary, things for civilized life to the ‘ruling class’.
Led by our increasingly tyrannical Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the vilification of the truckers by this privileged minority became increasingly shrill, culminating in Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act. Everything that Trudeau did was wrong, but not surprising. He’s a bully, thus a coward, so his first act of slinging insults at the truckers, then running away & hiding was predictable. True to his character, he learns nothing and gives his ego full reign to flagrantly abuse his power; he surrounds himself with toadies and struts around naked, believing himself fully dressed in the garments of authority. He calls the truckers a fringe minority—even accepting their support is 33% of Canadians (the lowest number of the many polls taken), this is the exact same number of Canadians who voted for Trudeau in the last election. Fringe, indeed!
May his kingdom crumble
Let us hope that we Canadian citizens make manifest that Trudeau has taken a step too far into tyranny, and his little kingdom comes tumbling down around him.
A cry with ancient roots
From Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2018, Plutarch, commenting on Solon’s laws in Parallel Lives:
Solon’s intention was evidently that men should not remain indifferent or apathetic to the public interest or safeguard their private affairs while congratulating themselves on having nothing to do with the disorders and misfortunes of their country. He wished instead to encourage them to attach themselves at once to the better cause, share its dangers, and give it their support, not to sit back in safety waiting to see which side would win.
From Thomas More, Utopia:
For things will never be perfect until human beings are perfect—which I don’t expect them to be for quite a number of years!
From Clive James, “Alan Moorehead”, Cultural Amnesia, 2007:
…to convince you that to be born and raised in a prosperous liberal democracy not only confers the energy to see the world as it is, but the obligation to make sense of it, on behalf of all those deprived of the opportunity.
Déjà vu all over again
There I was, listening to Lecture 4 in Hillsdale College’s “Western Civilization”, and I shook my head in disbelief: What Socrates described in Plato’s Republic is happening all around me in our modern Western world. The Woke Left’s overriding goal is equity, so they wage war on excellence. They tolerate all deviations, but not standards; free speech for their ideas, censorship for any opposing ideas; safe spaces and trigger warnings for any perceived threat to their view of what it is to be human, exclusion and Antifa thuggery for any contrary opinion. The result is a ruling elite and a mass of worker drones, masquerading as citizens.
But in our 21st century, we are rapidly trying to tear down this civilization and replace it with a premodern, tribal organization. The current reiteration of tyranny is a feudal structure, with the lords being the elites and the citizens, the serfs.
A perverse cry from intellectuals
Ever since I started reading and thinking about the way humans govern ourselves and structure our societies, I’ve been puzzled by the preponderance of intellectuals in the civilized Western world leaning left, many all the way to USSR & CCP communism. Following in Plato’s footsteps, many are fatally attracted to totalitarianism—centralized power in the hands of philosopher-kings in Plato’s utopia or of elites in today’s progressive dreams.
But ancient or modern, they share the distrust of the individual citizen and the worship of the ‘experts’. And I use the word ‘worship’ deliberately because the totalitarian template eschews religion and replaces God with the nanny state.
As Kevin D. Williamson writes in “Agent Kristeva”, National Review, May 2018, the political history of Julia Kristeva, a celebrated intellectual, “and that of the journal with which she is affiliated, Tel Quel, is a remarkable testament to the weakness of Western intellectuals for totalitarianism—provided it is dressed in sufficiently exotic trappings—careering from Marxist-Leninist to Stalinist to Maoist. Sadly, “Kristeva’s advocacy of what was in terms of gross numbers the most murderous regime in the 20th century is only one tessera in the great mosaic of Western intellectuals’ seduction by totalitarian systems, especially those that come wearing exotic costumes.”
I also particularly liked Williamson’s refutation of the idea that political fanaticism is not rooted in ideology as social-justice warriors claim. “It is a hollow clanging sound that social life makes when banging up against an empty soul,” he writes in “The world keeps not ending”, National Review, October 15, 2018—a wonderful description of the inevitable result of the rejection of family and friendship that all good comrades must make. The promised utopia becomes a hollow dystopia, and all the leftie slogans in the world can’t shut out the “clanging sound”.
The wind is rising
One of the most powerful voices standing astride history and yelling, “Stop!” is Jordan Peterson. In the National Post, January 19, 2022, Peterson indicts the radical trinity—Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity—of killing the universities, thus living up to its acronym, DIE.
All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise.
This pernicious prescription birthed in academia has leached into politics, with the Democratic Party in the US and the Liberal/NDP/Green parties in Canada completely contaminated. And the legacy media. And Hollywood. And even corporations, while the Chinese & Russian communists lick their chops at the West hanging itself.
“And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons, this is on you”—professors, teachers, CEOs, musicians, artists, writers—STOP! “He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising.”
The truckers & Peterson are real warriors, not like the poseur—in both official languages—of our prancing popinjay of a PM talks who talks tough but has no courage.
