I. The Royal Canadian Cadets of Immigrants
I live in a nation dedicated to making “young new comers” symbols of Canada’s “history and values”. My city of residence is still over 90 White. Yesterday I attended the end-of-year ceremony of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets. Of the 50 boys and girls I counted, 20 were nonwhite, south Asians and Africans. In other words, 40% were recent immigrants. The prize for “best representative” of Canadian values of “good citizenship” went to an Indian cadet girl.
I did a search, and in no time came across an article published a few days ago (May 25) with the headline: “Cadets should be mandatory for young Canadian newcomers, says former honorary colonel” nationalpost.com/news/canada/ho The argument is that the Cadets should dedicate itself to recruiting immigrants as symbolic representatives of Canadian citizenship values. Canada is experiencing the highest number of immigrants in history, and the Cadets would be a great institution to act “as an integrator of newcomers”. The children of immigrants should be trained to stand for Canada’s national “multiethnic” identity.
This dramatic increase of nonwhite children in the Cadets is not incidental but a well planned effort to showcase immigrant children as the best symbols of citizenship and immigrant integration. Since the 1980s, Canada has been “ground zero” to showcase to the Western world that intense, accelerating immigration replacement, is possible without much reaction. Multicultural theorists traveled regularly to Europe arguing that Canada represented a model they should learn from about how to create a “harmonious multicultural nation”. Every institution, business, bank, university, and school in Canada has been transformed to make it a most welcomed place for immigrants, a success story.
I also attended the Cadet ceremony at Fredericton, a nearby city in New Brunswick. I could not believe my eyes: around 65% of the Cadets where nonwhite children. Most of the families in the audience were nonwhite. Yet, the immigrant population in Fredericton is less than 7%. I could sense the white parents were disconcerted, with the immigrants families in full control, and their children gaining most of the prizes as the “best models of Canadian citizenship”.
The Canadian Charter of Rights prohibits you from opposing this. In fact, the Charter requires you to do this. Elbows up.
II. The Embedded Mind of the Chinese
Among many of the arguments of my new book, Greatness and Ruin, is that the civilizations of the world can be ranked in terms of Jean Piaget’s developmental stages of progression of cognitive abilities in individuals over time: (1) sensorimotor (birth to 2 years), (2) preoperational (2-7 years), (3) concrete operational (7-11 years), (4) formal operational (12+ years). The reasoning abilities of adults in nonwestern cultures did not rise beyond stage 3, that is, the apprehension of individuals was restricted to the perceptual level and bound up with the sensory appearances of the world, barely transcending appearances and context-bound experiences through the development of hypothetical reasoning.
Europe was the first civilization to produce adolescents capable of reaching the final stage of Piagetian development. This was due to the discovery by European intellectuals, starting in ancient Greece, that humans have a mind separate from their bodily functions, a mind located in the physical cranium but invisible and immaterial, the seat of thinking and thus of knowledge. This rise of a mind capable of making itself “a possible object of thought to itself,” as Aristotle said in his book, On the Soul, was the precondition for Aristotle’s clear ability to engage in formal operational thinking.
The rise of stage 4 was not merely a result of a higher IQ. The Chinese had a high IQ but failed to engaged in logical-analytical reasoning. It was the result of a higher sense of self-awareness about one’s inner faculty of reasoning and how this faculty can self-impose upon itself proper rules for reasoning, which entailed a clear apprehension that there is a distinction between the thinking “I” and the external world, in contradistinction to the widespread belief among humans that the mental experiences in their heads constitute a oneness with nature or spirits or bodily functions.
One major historical question has confounded IQ race realists like J. Philippe Rushton: why did the “high IQ” Chinese, with their “higher cranial capacity” and “lower impulsivity” remain a backward people without anticipating modern science until the “lower IQ” Europeans awoke them from their slumber and gave them access to modern innovations? My book, Greatness and Ruin, dedicates keen attention to the Chinese, as the 2nd ranked people in world historical achievements (though a distant second). One key contrast is the Chinese had a lower concept of selfhood. Rushton recognizes the “lower self-concept” of Orientals, but the concept of self he has in mind is historically inadequate and reduced to a person’s willingness to do as they please, which leads him to argue that Africans had the highest “self-concept”.
I argue that Orientals had a lower concept of self because they did not manage to identify their mind as a distinctive faculty, but instead confounded it with the “heart” or with unreflected substances. The Chinese self thus remained embedded to its particular traditions and historical contexts without being self-aware of this. In contrast, Europeans developed a transcendental capacity to reflect, as distinctive persons with a differentiated self-concept, about their own cognition, feelings, impulses, and the conventions of the day. This transcendental perspective included eventually an awareness of the cultural and historical context within which reason operates in a state of self-reflection about the limitations of reason without being entrapped to this context.
III. The Invention of Prose Writing
Perhaps the most magnificent, unsurpassed achievement of Europeans was their invention of true prose writing or a type of writing that was analytical, argumentative, and tied to logos. True prose was inaugurated around the sixth century BC by the pre-Socratics as they began to think about logos, or the relationship between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure.
The invention of prose entailed a prior shift from orality to writing. Before the pre-Socratics, communication relied on oral poetry or hymns, which prioritized memorability and performance. Prose was designed for written dissemination. The invention of argumentative prose writing presupposed, indeed, the prior invention of the first full vocalization of the alphabet in the 8th century BC, in which vowels were accorded equal footing with consonants. The alphabet is the most abstract symbolic system of communication, allowing for flexible recording of complex ideas. It enabled the construction of sustained arguments, in contrast to earlier syllabic or logographic scripts, which could only convey authoritative announcements. The Linear B script (1450–1200 BC), for example, was syllabic and used for administrative records, rather than for philosophical reasoning.
What distinguished pre-Socratic prose was the use of grammatical structures and connectors (such as “and,” “but,” “however”), which made possible clear, sequential reasoning. Before prose writing, Greeks used oral poetry, hymns, recitals, which relied on meter, rhyme, or performative elements, for the communication of thoughts and feelings. Prose writing enabled the pre-Socratics to articulate abstract concepts, fostering sustained theoretical inquiries in medicine, science, philosophy, and history.
One can find the earliest example of grammatically structured prose writing in Anaximander (610-546 BC) when he discusses the Boundless as the origin of all things: “The Boundless has no origin, for it is ungenerated and indestructible, encompassing all things.” Short as this sentence is, it does not try to convey an idea in a rhymical manner as Homer’s Iliad. It relies on abstract concepts and natural principles rather than on announcements grounded without reflection on religious mandates.
Heraclitus (535-475 BC) is another pre-Socratic thinker. A famous fragment from his text On Nature (which only survives in fragments quoted by later authors) states: “This logos holds always, but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it.” Although this statement is also aphoristic, it marks the beginnings of argumentative writing in its reliance on grammatical connectors (“but,” “and”) and abstract concepts (“logos”) to make proto-rational declarations about the nature of the things. It is also a statement based on inquiry enabling rational disputation rather than demanding or affirming an unquestioned truth.
It may be argued, admittedly, that there were anticipations of non-poetical prose writing in Akkadian and Sumerian cuneiform texts like the Code of Hammurabi (1754 BC), which used non-metrical prose to record laws in a clear manner. Similarly, it may be said that Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic texts, such as the Instructions of Amenemhat (1900 BC), used non-poetic language for administrative purposes, in a straightforward style. It can be argued, moreover, that the annalistic historical prose one finds in the ancient Near East and in China was a form of writing that recorded events in a chronological, year-by-year format, in a dry and factual way.
However, these examples do not meet the definition of ancient Greek prose writing I am defending here, which entailed more than non-metrical, factual, and written prose. Greek pre-Socratic prose inaugurated a revolutionary form of writing characterized by the beginnings of sustained reasoning tied to the use of abstract concepts, particularly the concept of logos, which inaugurated philosophy, historical inquiry, and theoretical science. Near Eastern and Chinese writing was for practical, administrative, and annalistic purposes.
IV. Rethinking the Vichy Regime
In the liberal West, the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain from 1940 to 1944 has been portrayed as evil in its “collaboration” with the Nazis and “complicity” in the Holocaust. It is impossible to find a single positive image of daily life in Vichy France, or a single positive article. All the images refer you to “Jewish children and survival”.
Given the current malicious Africanization of France, it may be time to reevaluate the legacy of Vichy’s “National Revolution”.
1. The Vichy regime sought to unify France under a shared identity after the Third Republic’s decadence and division. It rejected liberal individualism in preference of a collective French identity rooted in “Work, Family, Fatherland”. It celebrated France’s pre 1789 revolutionary heritage –rural life, folklore, and regional traditions — through festivals, museums, and state-sponsored arts.
2. Instead of modern “decadent” subjects, the Vichy school system promoted traditional values, discipline, and patriotism, Catholic morality, classical literature, and French history, to instill pride and a sense of belonging.
3. Vichy’s police cracked down on crime, dissent, and “undesirables” (communists, black marketeers). It instituted beautiful strict curfews, identity checks, and surveillance aimed to maintain order.
4. Vichy offered subsidies for large families and medals for mothers of multiple children (e.g., the Médaille de la Famille Française). Divorce was restricted, and women were urged to focus on motherhood.
5. Youth associations instilled discipline, camaraderie, and patriotism in young men. Youth Work Camps trained young men in manual labor, discipline, and skills, providing work and purpose during economic hardship.
