John Ralston Saul, husband of former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, was the official public intellectual of Canada during the 1990s and early 2000s. He is still out there, but nowhere near Jordan Peterson. His ideas were leftist, the same as everyone else, though he has always imagined himself an outsider fighting for “social change” against a “terrifying” elite determined to squelch dissent. He still imagines himself a risk-taking fighter, but nowadays his revolutionary opprobrium is directed against “globalist” opposition to diversity.
Check his Twitter — it is heavily dedicated to mass immigration and 100 percent against patriots who want European nations to remain European.
Saul imagines himself a profound thinker. I heard a few times (from academics who never read a book by Voltaire or about the Enlightenment) that his book, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1993), was “a must-read book for anyone who considers themselves educated”. I have never cared to read anything from this guy, other than some relevant pages from his supercilious and superficial book, Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1998).
But this summer, while in Halifax, I came across an article in a local paper with the title, “Saul espouses virtues of immigration,” which piqued my curiosity as to what else this must-read thinker may have to say about immigration besides his statement in this article that Nova Scotia needs to be flooded with immigrants just like the other major cities of Canada.
I wanted something from him that would capture some of the things he wrote in the past combined with his current obsession with turning the whole of Canada into a gigantic Toronto. I found an article, “Immigration and Identity,” published in the German magazine Der Spiegel (February 28, 2017). In this article he tries to combine what he has said about Canada’s history with his current fundamentalist fixation on immigration.
His argument is that Canada’s unique contribution to the world is “the intellectual idea” that citizenship must be predicated on the permanent inclusion of immigrants from different cultures and races. “This is not a mere idea,” he says. “The Canadian experience…has always involved both government and citizen support for the newcomers.” Particularly since the days of Wilfrid Laurier, belonging to the Canadian nation has been about “how to blend immigration with citizenship”.
There were dark periods in Canada’s past, to be sure, when Whites acted as if Canada was their own “monolithic nation state” and refused to acknowledge the equally critical nation-making contributions of people from multiple racial and religious backgrounds. But all in all, Saul wants us to believe, Canada was a uniquely conceived nation founded on civic values for the integration of continuous immigrants, rather than, in the words of John A. MacDonald, “a British Nation, under the British flag and under British institutions.”
Forget for the moment that this is the same idea Neoconservatives have made about the United States, and the same idea everyone is now making about all White created nations. The point I want to highlight is how our current diversity-obsessed Saul has decided to imagine a Canada that was founded by diverse races for the purpose of integrating immigrants from all over the world into a nation detached from any “monolithic” cultural identity.
In “Immigration and Identity” he does not always use a forthright language, as he wants to trick Canadians, but the implication of his argument is that Euro-Canadians must accept their ethnocide because Canadian identity is inescapably bound up with the continuous acceptance of diverse newcomers. Brexit and the rise of Trump are clear signs of a resurgence in White racism, he observes, and if Canada’s is to live up to its ideals, and showcase its superior form of citizenship to other White nations, a more intense and widespread effort must be made to compel Whites to understand that their citizenship hinges on the “sponsoring” of immigrants.
“It cannot be said loud enough,” he writes, the “sponsorship of immigrants and refugees” should no longer be seen as a charitable act, but as an intrinsic component of what it means to be a citizen in Canada. “Even if you come from a family established for centuries,” Saul mandates, your citizenship should be premised on your “personal commitment” to the continuous inclusion of millions of immigrants into Canada.
In order to make Whites understand this, Saul believes he has come up with a very original plan: Citizenship ceremonies for diverse newcomers should become “very public celebrations”. Not only “the families, friends and colleagues of the new citizens” should be asked to participate in these ceremonies but everyone with “Canadian citizenship…needs somehow to be included.”
These ceremonies should be extended to the whole of Europe. Whites across the West should be made to realize that their citizenship demands that they be “engaged” in celebrating newcomers. They should imitate Canada’s uniqueness as an immigrant nation.
These ceremonies will be a great opportunity to teach Whites how “courageous” immigrant/refugees are, as compared to “those of us born in our countries [who] rarely have to demonstrate [courage]”. They will be a great opportunity to teach Whites to “see immigrants as individuals, not as racial or cultural types or members of interest groups.” To teach them, for example, that “the assertion that Muslims cannot fit into a Western society” is a racist “abstraction”.
These ceremonies should be seen as only “the first step in a very personal, long term relationship” between Whites and immigrants. They should indeed be seen as a “grand celebration of marriage” between Whites and immigrants. If politicians, teachers, and corporate owners are to “break up” the “old habit” White Canadians have of thinking of themselves as having an identity that is based on Christian and Western values, and create instead new “humans who have multiple identities,” this marriage needs to be nurtured from childhood on.
Graduation from high school should not be allowed “without serious hours of volunteer work” helping immigrant integration. “Through their direct involvement with immigrant students,” easy going White students, will “find themselves rethinking their often comfortable points of view.”
“Sponsoring immigrants and refugees,” Saul demands, needs to become widespread, a requirement for all Canadians. Everyone, friends, families, Christian groups, should “put together enough money to fund a refugee family’s first year, covering rent, furniture and so on.” Canadian citizens generally must “become like godparents or an extended family” to foreign immigrants. They must facilitate immigrant integration into “the local education system, healthcare network, job market, sports systems, whatever is helpful to ease the way.”
Muslim, Haitian, and African Immigrants should become “our best friends”. “This is not charity. This is engaged citizenship.” After all, immigrants are better students, and “they are more likely to become entrepreneurs than those born in a country.”
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| In recognition of his great sacrifices as a dissenter on the issue of diversity, a portrait of John Ralston Saul was unveiled Monday, Dec. 17, 2012 at Rideau Hall |
Saul imagines himself the very embodiment of “empathy,” a man “personally involved” (through a program called the “Cultural Access Pass”) in granting immigrant families “a one year free membership in some 1400 cultural institutions…almost every major art gallery and museum” in Canada. In austere and proud language, Saul instructs us that the aim is not merely for foreign immigrants to learn about Canadian culture, but “to be part of shaping the country’s cultural evolution.” Foreigners can force our institutions to reflect their own cultural values and achievements, and bring about the complete elimination of the racist heritage of Euro-Canadians. And, yes, immigrant should get a free pass — “after all, the taxes of working immigrants help finance those institutions”.
Just Another Falsifier of Canada’s History
Saul imagines himself a man who represents ordinary Canadians and Indigenous peoples in their fight against “globalists elites“. He also imagines himself the first historian to realize that Canada was uniquely committed from the beginning — notwithstanding some mistaken notions about being a “monolithic” British nation — to a form of citizenship intrinsically tied to immigration and racial diversity. From its early history, Canada envisioned itself, or Saul would have us believe, as a nation of multiple immigrant cultures coexisting alongside each other in a state of harmony, “building a non-racial, non-religious idea of citizenship, which denies neither ethnic nor faith differences.”
In truth, Saul is merely regurgitating the currently mandated multicultural interpretation of Canada’s history. Not just in Canada, but across the West, the nations created by Whites are being portrayed as if they were founded by immigrants of multiple races. They want Whites to think that the current enforcement of immigrant diversity is a natural continuation of past historical trends. The intention of this falsification is to compel White Canadians to imagine their past in a way that fits with the ideological goals of present globalist rulers.
They want us to believe that the older Anglo narrative of Canada, or the “two founding races” narrative, was a “monolithic mythology” “violently imposed” against the actual “complexity” of Canada as a nation created by multiple ethnic groups. I am taking these words from Saul’s Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1998). Similar portrayals can be found in many recent history books of Canada as a “richly diverse,” a “complex cultural mosaic” from its origins (to quote the popular book, The Illustrated History of Canada).
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| “My thoughts are an intellectual burden smaller men would buckle under.” |
No facts are offered; just politically correct euphemisms. In Canada in Decay I show that this nation was close to 100 percent Quebecois in Quebec and overwhelmingly British elsewhere, with “other European” groups arriving late in the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century. As late as 1971 the nation was 96 percent White.
All the institutions, legal system, educational curriculum, transformation of the wilderness into productive farms, all the cities, the parliamentary traditions, the churches, the entire infrastructure of railways, ports, shipping industries, and highways were created and managed by hardworking Euro-Canadians.
In support of the view that Canada was always meant to be open to the Third World, Saul cites the following words by Laurier:
We must also have the cooperation of the new citizens who came from all parts of the world, to give Canada the benefits of their individuality, their energy and their enterprise. Canada is in one respect like the Kingdom of Heaven, those who come at the eleventh hour will receive the same treatment as those who have been in the field for a long time. We want to share with them our lands, our laws, our civilization.
It is obvious that Laurier’s use of the words “from all parts of the world” was loosely rhetorical. The years Laurier was Prime Minister, 1896 to 1911, were years when Canada was viewed by the entire establishment as an exclusive Anglo-Quebecois nation, when the Chinese head tax was increased (in 1900 and in 1903), when Laurier took a number of measures to prohibit the entrance of blacks into Canada, and when liberal Laurier insisted that Indians were “unsuited to live in the climatic conditions of British Columbia and were a serious disturbance to industrial and economic conditions.”
Laurier was not a racist in doing these things. Ethnocentrism has been a normal state of being among humans throughout history, and remains so in the source nations/cultures of the immigrants Saul celebrates as incredibly rich and intelligent. China officially pursues racial supremacist policies, attitudes which immigrants from this nation retain in Canada, while participating in the condemnation of a small head tax over a hundred years ago.
All European Nations Should Sponsor their own Ethnocide
Saul imagines himself to be the first intellectual to have seen that Canada was the first nation in history to come up with the “intellectual idea” that citizenship does not have to be rooted among a people with a particular heritage and a particular territorial ancestry but can be open to the world.
This is “the biggest difference between Canada and other Western countries,” he writes. Canada long began and still continues “living in a permanent experiment and building a non-racial, non-religious idea of citizenship.” He wants this very unique model of Canadian citizenship to be exported to all Western nations. This is the only way to combat the inherent racism of Whites, of Germans, British, Swedish, Italian, French, all European peoples.
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| “I am indeed, very, very profound.” |
Exporting Canada’s model is the only way to fight “populism, racism and exclusion” in Europe; the only way “to fight back” President Trump, the “extremism” of his presidency, “his racist, certainly illegal and probably unconstitutional orders” limiting illegal immigration.
It does not matter that immigrants are systematically raping thousands of White girls across Europe. It does not matter that immigrants are a massive net cost to the host nations, in welfare, in terrorism, in security costs, in pollution, in vandalism, in exorbitant housing prices, in lower wages for native workers, in the constant harassment of Whites as racists, in the outright rewriting and falsification of history — none of these things matter compared to the “intellectual idea” John Ralston Saul has discovered about Canada’s concept of citizenship.
Saul concludes his profound thoughts by calling for a” transparent” debate on immigration to combat rising xenophobia fomented by “tired and confused elites”.
At the core of that conversation there needs to be as great an emphasis as possible on citizenship and on the inclusion of newcomers.
Only those who agree with mass immigration can participate in this open discussion. The “core” of the discussion is that Whites must be made to see that their citizenship in Canada is conditional on their “inclusion of newcomers”.
I was going to conclude that it does not get any more Orwellian than this: a supposed public intellectual claiming he is a dissenter while expressing the same views as TD Bank and Costco. But this would be inaccurate. Saul seriously thinks he is an outsider combating globalist elites. He is not consciously engaging in propaganda or misinformation. The public intellectuals and academics of our times, having spent their lives reading cultural Marxist literature, are the most brainwashed individuals in human history. They truly imagine themselves to be “critical thinkers” while expressing the same ideas one hears every day in the media and from primary school on.
If I may borrow the language of Julian Jaynes, these are “bicameral men” lacking an internal space in which to be individuals with an analog “I” that bespeaks of self-reflection and an inner self that can separate itself from the prevailing assumptions of the time, a self that is able to question with full transparency the widespread notion that “diversity is our greatest strength.” They are worse than the bicameral men of pre-ancient Greek times, actually, since they believe themselves to be individuals with a critical mind while going along with the core assumptions of the time.
We need to realize that only those in the dissident right have an “I” by which to narratize out alternative ways of thinking about what are the ethnic interests of Whites. The least reflective, most damaging thing, Euro-Canadians can do to their heritage, children, and future prospects is tying their citizenship to the sponsoring of immigrants.
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