I feel betrayed by my people. My family has, like many European Canadian families, left our heritage in a dusty box in the attic, forgotten. I come from a cultural cul-de-sac of English, Irish, Scottish migrants who, near as our scant records can tell us, hopped the pond within the last 200 years. Our total lapse of cultural identity has meant that this fact has not bothered me, not even seemed worth thinking about, until my maturing into my mid-twenties.
Growing Up Deracinated
I cannot trace the beginning of this drift into cultural amnesia, for its hereditary nature blinkers my memory, too. Like the Olympic torch allowed to fall and be extinguished, if we ever “felt English” or “felt Irish,” that was long ago. We’ve traced some of our family to a band of horse-thieves, and this one clue to our history tells me this road was a long and straight one to where we are now. I can guess, based on my kin and their lives today, that we owe our current state to a combination of the lapsing of faith (Catholic and Protestant) and the community that comes with faith, the erosion of lacking education, and the ravages of caustic coping mechanisms in rot-gut drinking, drug use, and mindless absorption into post-cultural consumerism. These bad choices have all been enabled and exacerbated by the incentives provided by the Canadian government, cynically expunged of all but the appearance of its European character. None of my family think of themselves as European, and are only White insofar as this is a mark of shame.
I began life as many Canadians do, going to schools thoroughly ethnically mixed, subtly inculcated with White guilt and a sense that Canada belongs to everybody equally (I hear that this subtlety has all but vanished). This education had not been all bad; I keep and value a sense of human fraternity in areas where I maintain our differences make no difference. But the sense of morality and character with which our schools have tried to instill us really stuck with me, and sent me down a rabbit hole that comes out on the other side in a place (called Earth) where these differences, of culture mainly, but also of ethnicity, do matter. They taught me too well. My study of history, of the evolution of the scientific worldview, and of the politics of turning the possible into the real, tells me that we ignore our identity and its import at our peril. People learn from other people, and only what those people can teach. What we fail to teach, we lose. Thank goodness for history and philosophy books, and those people from families more intact than my own who have inherited European culture.
Whatever we do, we must agree to do. We must go forward together, or we do not get very far at all.
My thinking goes like this: I work backwards from the ideal future of a peaceful, cooperative world of irrational humans, soberly recognizing their irrationality, who avoid the foolish mistake of trying to correct this limit of ours, and who work with it and around it in humble acceptance of our lot. We get there by working with what is, at each step, rather than what we wish to be.
I’m a big-picture guy, sometimes to a fault. My motivations are compassion, productivity, efficacy, dare I say love. We have enormous potential to drastically improve our lives on this rock, and in my view, we are squandering it. To make such improvements, as history has shown, we need cooperation and understanding. Attempts by elites or power centres to force the evolution of humanity has only resulted in the corruption and collapse of the societies manipulated, and teeming graveyards. Whatever we do, we must agree to do. What we disallow by moral, intellectual, or physical force does not go away, it only goes underground, and seeps into every crack in our utopian schemes. We must go forward together, or we do not get very far at all. My background is in activism for the environment, for liberal economics, and for scientific literacy. And my wake-up moment to the importance of European culture was “Occupy Toronto.”
The Red Pilling Moment
Seeing just how hated I was, not for anything I had done to anyone, but for my guilt-by-association with my kind, got me thinking in terms I had never thought in before. Before, I was just a person, meeting to organize with other people, to try to make the democratic system work for more of us.
One day, I made a statement during the general assembly (the virtue-signalling messes that some of us tried to use as strategizing meetings) which was met with a mixed reaction. The statement was that, if we were to succeed, we would need to thicken our skin. We were in the weaker position, we had to go on the offensive against entrenched and callous interests, and our success required that we could not buckle at every slight, and lose hope in what was surely to be a long struggle. Forget that what we were struggling towards quickly revealed itself to be ten-thousand and one different ends, reaching any of them meant toughening up. This was as much a message to my own heart as to the emotionally-strained and energetically-frayed people I was meeting and struggling to come to common ground with. Some saw the wisdom of my proposal, and some booed.
Afterwards, many people approached me, with varying levels of tact, to inform me of my “White privilege,” and how this invalidated my message. I was shocked. I have never met such bald-faced racism in my life, towards me or others. This wasn’t the Canada that I knew. Little, apparently, did I know. Making it all the worse was their sincerity, even in some cases their sweetness. They obviously saw themselves as the kindest of the kind, the most moral and upright people. And they were telling me to shut my White mouth. Some said just that. Some tried socratically to inform me, this uninformed young man, which I resented more than the plain prejudice. Hate is one thing. But hate which convinces itself it is love is another evil altogether. When a Black woman stood up at the general assembly the next day, said the very same thing that I had, and was met with applause and “you-go-girl’s,” I knew that I was not in Kansas anymore.
At first, my racial identity awakening was not political, only emotional, social. I was the most progressive and moral person I could be, I thought. I had always stood with the little guy, often without even being asked, because doing so innately appealed to my sense of justice. I was a part of the “days of silence” at my school in support of gay children who felt they could not be themselves. I punched a kid in the eye for suggesting I was involved in degeneracy. In my young years, I had called a Black girl at my school a nigger, not realizing that racial slurs were considered a class of insult above and beyond cuss words or personal remarks, and, having later realized this, I had the opportunity to apologize to this girl in our high school years, which I was relieved that she accepted. I was one of the good guys, always challenging myself to be better. And I’m now to believe that I’m a “White privileged oppressor” by virtue of existing and claiming myself no LESS equal than these people stood in solidarity with? I realized that getting to my vision of a better world was not just a matter of reason and intellect. Good arguments were not the highest currency of the land. The war I was fighting was not the one the general had passionately sold me upon conscription (though I had volunteered without coercion). I had to factor in things I had never considered: my race, my gender, my culture.
Ethnic Awakening
Civilization, like all forms of excellence, is not an act, but a habit. It is not a destination to reach, whereupon we rest easy, it is the water-line above which we must continually tread, or sink. And I’ve come to believe that the peace, stability, and plenty of Canadian life has softened and made naive my countrymen — and those men of other countries who we have graciously welcomed to our lands, an act of charity unprecedented in the conflicted history of our planet.
Once I had been forced to be aware of my ethnic identity, I began to see things I had missed before.
Once I had been forced to be aware of my ethnic identity, I began to see things I had missed before. The intention of those I later learned to know as cultural Marxists was that I know my identity and feel shame. It would have been better for their cause to leave that stone unturned, because seeing the world in these terms caused me to ascribe credit and merit to each group according to their contributions and accomplishments and cultural character traits. That tally came out vastly in favour of Whites, and that included the darker sides of global history. We were all playing the same game, nobody had clean hands in the final analysis, but one cohort had come out, in most categories, far ahead in the latest round: that same cohort who had freed its own slaves where others had not (and some still haven’t); who had gone from the displacing colonization of other lands to their financial and social maintenance, through foreign aid, social programming, and even tax exemption and the donation of land and privileges solely to those displaced. What kind of “genocide” includes paying for the continued subsistence of the groups it seeks to destroy? And if so many people were working full-tilt against the existence of Canada as I knew and loved it, then who were those keeping it alive? White Canadians, and those who respect and appreciate their efforts to build this nation of unprecedented humanity, I concluded. It mirrored the idea of property rights, and the tragedy of the commons, to me. Those who had no role in the hard decisions it took to keep the field green and lush had no compunction about exploiting it down to the bare soil. If it was to remain fertile, then someone was going to have to protect it from those who could only see short-term gain, those who had no sense of debt or allegiance to the other grazers sharing the land.
A Two-state Solution?
I had frequently heard that, unless my ancestors wore feathers, I was an immigrant. Knowing we had all come from Africa originally, this struck me as an arbitrarily drawn line. But ironically, my own awakening to racial consciousness gave me an appreciation for this logic. In my pre-Occupy mind, Canada belonged to everyone equally, but I came to see that as untrue. The people on this land first, who had made best use of it for the greatest benefit to humanity, had more of a claim than those who were simply grazing off their sown efforts. The native Indians were here first, and, had they emerged more whole from the ravages of history, I may be deciding now that it was my moral duty to leave for my own lands in the British Isles. If I were Indian, I would want the Whites to leave.
Sadly, they are in no position to take up this mantle, as a people, and what we risk losing is too great to leave now. Mostly inextricable from the Whites here long-settled, and in various states of political and cultural malaise, their time has passed. Morally, I favour a two-state solution in Canada, where (ignorance on such technical matters admitted) it looks something like reservation lands embarking on the path to fully independent statehood. Realistically, I’m unsure how this would or even could work.
A White Canada
But the other state in that solution is, at heart, a White one. In my mind, not exclusively White in population (though immigration policies geared to maintaining a clear majority in that regard, irrespective of the birthrates and effects on the economy), but surely in character. Where differences of culture emerge, those of the English, Irish, Scottish and French of that emblem on the Red Ensign are the default. Multiculturalism has been put upon Canadians of varying assent by central political elites with allegiances outside our commons, seeking only their short-term gain. If Canada falls apart, all the better for them to encroach further and consolidate their empires. Canada is undergoing a second colonization, that of cynical corporate imperialists seeking a globalized serfdom to milk, for ends that breach the scope of this polemic.
Our institutions all flow directly from European values, and will be maintained only by strengthening these.
The institutions which uphold our law and order, which educate our children, the social decorum that maintains our polite and civil nation character all flow directly from European values, and will be maintained only by the continuation and strengthening of those values. Other cultures may have similar values, but they have their own lands. The architecture, the nomenclature, the population makeup of Canada clearly reflects this Europeanness.
Look at migration patterns on this planet: all flowing into White countries. This is the clearest evidence of the value of European culture, and the simplest argument for maintaining that culture, even as we renegotiate it amongst ourselves and our allies in the age of increasing humanism, disenchantment, and global peace. Identity has historically been maintained by defining ourselves against the enemy, and I hope that we can move away from seeing each other as enemies on this planet. But to achieve that level of peace and stability, every self-identified group must be given its space where they are the final arbiters of what goes on. Growth happens best when the body feels safe, and as our societies are made up of bodies, our feeling of security to self-determine on our own lands is critical.
James Crow
In my own life, I do what I feel I can, without excessively jeopardizing my standing, to hold space for these values and ideas. Realistically, I have had to open myself to all manner of attack as “racist” and “bigot” and the labels with which we are all familiar. This is the cost we pay. I have even had the bravery to argue that we are a White country, once or twice. I am in uneasy company, at times, as those with baser, more aggressive motivations are drawn to the same cause. This is where my education of tolerance and compassion comes in, for I believe that only hurting peoples want to hurt others. I will call out a racist on any side, but I see the worst ones as those hating Whites (and the worst of those themselves Whites!). Europeans have, largely, long-abandoned wanton prejudice, so I am not worried about a resurgence of White supremacists or Jim Crow.
My worry is, in clumsy yet catchy terms, what I call James Crow, or the viral prejudice towards Whites that has reached similar levels of casual acceptance as anti-Black racism once “enjoyed.” Rather than regressive conservatives, I see fauxgressive leftists (traitor to my own that I am!) as those hurting people who need restraint before they continue the cycle of violence upon others. I am, in many ways, typically left. If I were a Hollywood character, I might be Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski. I prefer to abide, to live and let live. But European culture is something I love dearly, for it really ties this room together.
And to quote the Dude in closing: “This aggression will not stand, man.”
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