Canada Spiralling Out of Control, 1: Ethnic Liberalism versus Post-WWII Norms

Research Gate

Eurocanadians to this day are being harassed for lack of progress in dismantling institutional racism, half a century after the complete redefinition of Canada as a multicultural nation in 1971, after the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, which called for “equal opportunity” for “victims of discriminatory practices,” after the Employment Equity Act of 1986, which instituted, and still mandates, affirmative hiring for minorities, after the Multiculturalism Act of 1988, which provides billions in financial support to immigrant groups to enhance their cultural identity in Canada, while extolling Eurocanadians to dismantle their Anglocentric heritage.

What is more, and what is really threatening, is that this multicultural enforcement has come along with a dramatic demographic alteration in the ethnic character of Canada through the yearly arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in the same time frame, which has reduced Eurocanadians to a minority, or close to it, in all the major cities of Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, with projections announcing that within 15 short years, by “2031, 47% of second-generation Canadians could belong to a visible minority group.”

The demands keep getting more radical and suicidal. How did it come to be that conservative candidate Kellie Leitch was called “unCanadian” a few months ago simply because she considered asking supporters in a survey whether the Canadian government should screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values? This was deemed to be an extremist, intolerant question, even by some conservatives, and yet the values Leitch had in mind were equality of the sexes, tolerance, gay rights, diversity, and multiculturalism.

What is going on? A few months ago I attempted an answer to a similar set of questions in the essay “White Nations into Multiracial Places: A Spiral Radicalization Model.” I pulled out this essay from CEC due to a number of flaws. What follows below is the first part of a much longer, and totally revised, version of this essay.

The answer I now have, stated in the most abstract terms, is that a new set of norms came to take a firm hold over Western liberal democracies after WWII calling for the dissolution of ethno-nationalism in Western states and for the complete discrediting of racial identities among Europeans, on the supposition that ethnocentrism and racial identities were ultimately responsible for conflicts among humans, and that if future wars as deadly as WWII were to be avoided Western nations had to institute human rights, offer Western citizenship to peoples across the world, and create multiethnic and multicultural states.

I argue that once these norms were accepted, and actions were taken to implement them institutionally, they came to “entrap” Westerners within a spiral of radicalization, because these norms have an in-built tendency for never-satisfied “solutions,” because they inevitably entail ever more demands for equality in face of the stubborn reality of ethnocentric tendencies among humans and racial inequalities in talents and achievements. Moreover, since this drive for equality has been a planned experiment carried out, with ever more determination, by countries that were overwhelmingly White, it has entailed and involved the arrival of endless masses of immigrant minorities in need of continuous equalization programs coupled with ever more radical assertions in favour of the ethnic interests of minorities with a strong sense of the political, of collective identity, against every perceived form of “White privilege.”

The West is stuck pursuing an utopia of racial harmony and diversity through mass immigration that nowhere can be fulfilled because it is premised on unattainable goals. Hostile ethnic elites inside the West have exploited, and continue to exploit, these universal norms of racial equality, human rights, and multicultural citizenship, for their own particular ends, creating ever more tensions and calls for further radicalization by brainwashed Europeans with a weak sense of ethnic identity backed by an immense economic, political, and cultural establishment encrusted within the West, benefiting from this radicalization, unwilling to let go of its privileges, but insisting instead that ever more radical versions of these norms into ever wider areas of life need to be implemented.

This first part, and only this part, contains some paragraphs from the earlier version, although the wording has been made more precise and accurate. One difference with this revised version is that it presupposes a prior reading of an article posted recently at CEC, Carl Schmitt Is Right: Liberal Nations Have Open Borders Because They Have No Concept of the Political. I argued in this article that while liberal rights among Western states prior to WWII were understood in an ethnocentric manner, as testified by their pro-European immigration policies, these states were highly susceptible to the new norms of racial equality and human rights because liberal leaders lacked a strong concept of the political in presuming that their nations were associations formed by individuals for the purpose of ensuring their natural rights to economic freedom, security, and happiness, which all humans regardless of race supposedly aspire to have, rather than viewing their nations as creations by a people with a strong ethno-cultural identity, a collective identity, claiming sovereign right over a territory to the exclusion of other people with different, and always potentially threatening, ethno-political interests.

Spiral Radicalization Model

What do I mean by spiral of radicalization, or spiralling out of control? Some time ago, while researching the origins of the ideology of human rights, I came up with the term “spiral diffusion model,” which has struck me as quite useful in understanding the incredible manner in which anti-White diversity spread throughout the West in a few decades. This model is used differently by leftist human rights scholars; firstly, as far as I know, it has been used only to understand when human rights are likely to become “habitual” in the behaviour of governments around the world, and the argument basically is that the first step in bringing about “sustained improvements in human rights practices” is to make sure that the respective nations already have the political system to establish the rule of law, and the judicial and educational capacities required to give human rights traction and enforceability. Of course, this is all rather obvious, and almost tautological; and one wonders why academics think they have made a major discovery in finding “quantitative evidence for the proposition that countries with more highly developed legal institutions…tend to have better civil rights protections.”

But here is the interesting idea; they found that a “spiral” can be launched by creating certain normative conditions both at the domestic and the international level, such as having governments signed human rights treaties, for example, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, or showcasing major global socializing events that promote rights in Third World nations, such as international conferences and meetings, that can then “end up entrapping” state actors to make “tactical concessions” that can lead to further concessions and possibly “to unexpected consequences under conditions of turmoil and change.” They might get the government to release political prisoners on grounds that their rights are being violated, or sign international agreements as a condition for getting foreign aid or for ending international sanctions, or get them to allow alternative political parties and voices.

They found that the more states are “embedded” in international institutions, “the more likely they are to ratify international human rights agreements,” and the more agreements they ratify to improve domestic conditions, the more a spiral of further changes can develop pushing the nation to the “next” stage.

Without “entrapping” the nation to certain agreements and human rights discourses, they found that human rights agreements tend to “sputter and eventually fail.” While governments may adjust their behaviour to international pressures and treaties “without necessarily believing in the validity of the norms,” or purely for the sake of economic gain, it has been observed that minor concessions aimed at calming critics, can create certain normative conditions and precedents, as well as domestic pressures, that encourage further concessions later on, and thus create a dynamic for additional human rights treaties and institutional changes, until substantive changes are introduced aligning the state with the “moral standards of the international community” from which it is no longer possible for state actors to escape without experiencing the brunt of reprisals by domestic and international moral arbiters.

I believe this spiral diffusion model can be used to answer the question posed in the opening paragraph. Remember that the starting point of the spiral model, in respect to the diffusion of human rights in Third World nations, is that certain human right norms or treaties had to be put in place first in order to get the spiral going. The spiral needs a starting point, say, a tacit agreement that the human rights of non-violent political dissenters will not be violated. Only when such footholds are in place can we expect a spiral insofar as these first steps make possible, or create a normative-institutional climate, for the diffusion of further changes in favour of human rights.

Ethnic Liberalism

Racial Canadians in the 1950s

So, what were the normative and institutional starting points in the Western world that served as a launching platform for a spiral of diversity to be diffused leading to the current situation? I believe that the starting point for this spiral emerged in the West after WWII. Once this spiral took off it would gather ever more momentum pushing Western nations into ever more radical policies leading to the current situation where Europeans are expected to celebrate a new national identity created through mass immigration and race mixing.

The Western nations that defeated Nazism, it should be noted, were self-declared liberal-democratic nations in which individuals enjoyed rights of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the right to a fair trial. However, the way these liberal rights were understood among Western states generally, before WWII, before the spiral took off, was in a libertarian and ethno-nationalistic way.

The settler nations of Australia, Canada, United States, and New Zealand enjoyed admission and naturalization policies based on race and culture, intended to keep these nations “White.” Freedom of association, for example, was understood to include the right to refuse to associate with certain members of certain ethnic groups, even the right to discriminate in employment practices. Westerners were libertarians comfortable with a strong ethnic and cultural identity. This racial liberalism was widely accepted and institutionalized right up until the 1960s. Even denazified Germany endorsed, as a matter of common sense, and well into the 1970s, an ethnic conception of German nationality, accepting migrants only as temporary “guest workers” on the grounds that Germany was “not an immigrant country.”

It should be noted, moreover, that in the 1940s/50s the Allied leaders, the ones who condemned Nazi racial policies, believed that the peoples of the world were divided into different races and that it was legitimate for them to rule over “inferior peoples”: “subjects of empire were seen as unworthy of self-rule, as backward, as culturally inferior, and so forth.” Well into the 1940s, with strong challenges coming only from the 1960s onward, the Allied nations, in varying ways, had franchise laws that excluded certain minorities from voting, routine racial discrimination in employment opportunities, unequal access to public spaces, combined with all sorts of discriminatory practices in everyday private affairs.

In saying this I am not endorsing any ethnic ranking or endorsing European imperial rule. All ethno-national groups have a right to self-determination. The issue at hand is how did it come about that these racially liberal nations found themselves caught up within a spiral of radicalization the moment these norms were enunciated leading to the situation in which all Europeans are living today in which the most minimal form of White identity is totally suppressed as the worst form of evil and illiberalism at the same time as non-Whites are encouraged to affirm their ethnic collective rights, in the name of liberalism.

Post WWII Normative Situation in the West

Liberal Canada before the “War against Racism”

Below I will offer a list of the primary norms that I think set the spiral going. Let me make it clear that I am not trying to explain the origins of the norms that brought the West into the present state of affairs. The goal is to understand why there was such a fast acceleration against the ethno-nationalistic norms that were so readily accepted before WWII. I will offer arguments about how these new post-WWII norms came to entrap Westerners within a spiral of radicalization, how each norm reinforced the other, how each norm came to acquire meanings and goals not intended in their initial conceptualizations. I will also show briefly how new secondary norms were engendered by the initial primary norms, all of them reinforcing each other, leading Western peoples into a funnel with a seemingly irreversible logic of pro-diversity hysteria and pathological death wish.

Right after WWII four norms, attitudes and feelings, came to take a firm hold over Westerners against their preceding confidence and acceptance of their right to exist as ethno-national states. These norms were, from the beginning, interconnected, driven by similar principles, and therefore in a state of rapid reinforcement and radicalization.

1. Westerners came to believe that racism was the worst evil of modern times because of its association with Nazism and German supremacist beliefs. Western governments concluded that Nazis, including Fascist governments, had committed “crimes against humanity,” and that the Holocaust was a demonstration of the inhumanity of racist ideas that divided the peoples of the world into “superior” and “inferior” races, “inside” and “outside” members. A nationalism in which a race or even a particular ethnic group lay a privileged claim over the nation state was, accordingly, thoroughly discredited as inherently inconsistent with the ideals of liberal democracy. Over and over again, Westerns leaders began to announce that a true liberal state must be civic in orientation, based only on liberal values, standing above all ethnic groups, “neutral” both on matters of religion and race.
2. The immediate years after the defeat of Nazism saw the “outlawing of race” and the discrediting of “scientific racism” across the West. Western elites systematically spread out the idea, which up until WWII was only held by a minority of scholars, that there is no such thing as a “science” of race; the differences between different nationalities are primarily due to cultural and environmental factors; the differences of biology are superficially about skin colour, hair texture, or facial features, not about deep genetic differences in behaviour and intelligence. Since there is no scientific basis for the claim that humans can be categorized in terms of different races, there can be no scientific justification for racial discrimination; rather, discriminatory policies are creations of pathological individuals with an “irrational” fear of groups that are different in appearance. These fears can be eliminated through “proper” socialization and education.
3. The post-WWII era also saw the total discrediting of Western colonialism coupled with the intensification of the noble savage notion that Third World peoples embodied the innate goodness of humanity when freed from the corrupting influence of Western imperialism. Western imperialism was not a “civilizing” force but a violation of the liberal ideal that all peoples should have a right to national self-determination. Alongside these anti-colonialist sentiments, there developed a movement against the unequal status of people of colour inside Western nations. Western elites thus began to push for an end to discrimination in hiring, in voting, and, concomitantly, for an end to the privileging of one ethnic group over another by society generally. These demands also came along with the spread of the idea that all cultures are equal and that Whites rose to dominance by exploiting Third World peoples, blacks and indigenous peoples. White people are morally responsible for the unequal distribution of wealth in the world and inside their nations and for the subjugation of non-European cultures generally. They should feel guilty and do something to make up for past crimes.
4. It was in the aftermath of WWII that the idea of human rights really took off, the norm that the liberal principles of equality, dignity, and self-determination had to be applied universally to all humans across the globe regardless of national citizenship. Western liberal principles were limited in their encasement within national boundaries with ethnic attributes. In order to overcome the divisions of peoples into belligerent nations, races, and religions, these principles needed to be extended to humanity. As the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2, stated: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs…” The “right to live, liberty, and security of the person” (Article 3), are inherent to humans, and not derived from citizenship in a nation, and thus humans are entitled to them wherever they are, including those “who arrive at our doors without rights of their own”. Western nations must be committed to the extension of democratic rights to non-Europeans within Western countries and in non-Western countries.

It is my view, and this is why the spiral model may be useful, that the elites promoting these normative forces were not calling for the complete transformation of White nations into Multiracial Nations. These ideologies in-themselves, when they were first articulated in earnest and with persuasion from the late 1940s on, were not interpreted to mean that European nations needed to become diverse racially. These norms, to be sure, were already a radical challenge to the traditional ethnic-oriented libertarian ethos of the Western world. They were a spring board for radical agendas.

From the 1940s through to the 1960s, Western nations, in varying ways, would witness movements to end discriminatory employment practices and franchises, as well as race-based immigration regulations. These years would also witness the UN’s 1951 convention on asylum mandating that people seeking asylum in one country due to fear of persecution for their religious beliefs or racial make-up can’t be sent back to face arrest or torture.

Still, despite these substantial changes in the nature of Western liberalism, politicians were not celebrating in the 1940s, and even in the 1970s, the transformation of Western nations into race-mixed societies. Only since about the 1980s, or even later since the 1990s, have Westerners been made to believe that a truly liberal nation is one where diversity is the most cherished value and where the culture is no longer identified as “European” in history, literature, traditions, laws, and language.

These norms were more or less accepted across the West after WWII although their diffusion and implementation followed different lines and degrees of intensification in each Western nation. The focus of the article, however, will be on Canada. This will allow for a substantive, more detailed documentation of this spiral, step by step, in the history of Canada.

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