We Canadians have had it too good for too long, and in Justin Trudeau we have a prime minister set to take advantage of our complacency. He is now “primed” to “minister” to those who would profit from our passivity and deference to authority by foreclosing on the social and political mortgage to our national home and reclaiming it for a consortium of oligarchs, technocrats and political activists known collectively as the Great Reset—the brainchild of the Davos elite at the World Economic Forum (WEF). The New World Order it envisions is, in effect, the Old World Order in contemporary guise, the ancien régime redivivus.
We could say that the First and Second Estates of the present day, comprising the privileged classes of bankers, judges, CEOs, plutocrats, political nomenklatura and assorted ideologues under the authority and direction of a virtual monarch, are transforming a democratic, free-market nation into the political fiefdom of a repressive aristocracy—otherwise known as a China-style Social Credit State. The tools and weapons at their disposal are merely the current version of the earlier and antiquated system of popular control. Vaccine mandates, travel apps, quarantine protocols, digital currencies and Digital Identity Programs replace edicts from the throne circulating on paper or vellum and do not rely on undercover agents or spies on horseback, but the end result is the same.
The radical transformation going on in Canada today is ironically reminiscent in some ways of the events surrounding the French Revolution, in both its conduct and the precedent situation—minus the bloodshed, the parade of executions, and the enraged and violent multitudes, of course. Once allowance for context is accepted, the structural similarities with some of the excesses of the French revolt are quite remarkable. For example:
A Committee of Public Safety, which controlled the Revolutionary Tribunal, passed the Law of Suspects, according to which anyone suspected of resisting or criticizing the Revolution could be summarily arrested without proof of criminal behavior. Canada also has a Public Safety Agency responsible for national security, and it is not hesitant to act. The recent arrest and detention of Trucker Freedom Convoy organizers, such as Tamara Lich, to take one notorious instance, on the flimsiest grounds of public mischief, is straight out of the Law of Suspects.
The executions in the bloodiest days of the Revolution had become a daily diversion, with crowds of onlookers enjoying the spectacle. In the current circumstances, the media—press and platform—have whipped up mesmerizing and largely fraudulent accounts of misdemeanours and potential crimes that were said to occur during the Trucker protest. Events were sensationalized for a rapt and fascinated public, many if not most of whom cheered on the brutal and illegal putdown of the Truckers, their families and their supporters. The mob is the mob whether in the Place de Grève or on Twitter.
During the six years of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1795, Christians were particularly targeted for prosecution, nonjuring clergy arrested and stripped of their livings, and Christian churches regularly defiled. Over the last few years in this country, Justin Trudeau (and his provincial counterparts) had no problem presiding over the burning of churches and the jailing of pastors.
Respectable citizens in Paris and in lesser cities, known as the Septembrists, joined in the orgy of bloodshed in support of the Revolutionary councils. In the context of the Covid pandemic, respectable citizens became snitches and collaborators and reveled in shunning, denouncing and punishing the unvaccinated, joining in the government campaign to vilify and exclude from public life those who opposed its mandates. Perform a historical thought-experiment and we might find the majority of our citizens morally equivalent to the sans-culottes and their ilk, which is to say, equally indecent.
But the differences between the French Revolution and the Canadian exemplar are no less, if not more, dramatic.
Paradoxically, the “Canadian Revolution” proceeds in a reverse direction from its predecessor, reproducing the conditions that the Revolution struggled to correct and recruiting the public into the process of their own dispossession. Prior to 1789, the Third Estate (middle class, peasants, laborers) were overburdened with taxes in every department of life: taxes on income, land, property, transport, goods and comestibles, crops, salt, tobacco, wine, cider, you name it. Commoners were subject to autocratic rule. The parlements met only at checkered intervals. The nobles consumed most of the country’s wealth. The same is the case in contemporary Canada, as ordinary citizens are loaded down with crushing taxes on products and services, face food and fuel shortages, can expect no respite from an oft-prorogued parliament, and grapple to meet the inflationary costs for the necessities of life, while wealth accrues in the hands of large corporations and financial magnates.
The irony is unmistakable. As the country undergoes a gradual but decisive transition—in effect, a tacit revolution—from a condition of democratic freedom and economic prosperity to demagogic rule and dwindling resources, nothing in the way of a popular revolt seems to be brewing, despite the hopeful assumptions of patriot thought-leaders.
The prospect is forbidding: reduction of liberty to a pale simulacrum of what the country once enjoyed, enthronement of a soi-disant Bourbon wannabe who, like Louis XVI, was interested not in improving the lot of his people but in his own personal projects and empty-headed notions, and the creation of an autocratic regime paradoxically enabled by the public itself—a public in part indifferent and in part enthusiastic. One thinks of Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark. Leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” We had a constitutional democracy, but we couldn’t keep it.
The depressing fact is that none of the ills befalling our nation, including the multiple electoral victories of the indisputably worst prime minister ever to desecrate the storied precinct of Parliament Hill, could not have occurred without the complicity of an approving or stupefied public—harsh words but true. Justin Trudeau and his associates in finance, public policy, media, the academy and the corporate world are the de facto spawn of an electorate that has allowed and materially advanced the descent of a favored and democratic country into the realm of looming economic collapse and mounting political tyranny. The general population is an accessory before, during and after the fact, having been made to see, in Jonathan Swift’s memorable words from his 1710 Examiner essay The Art of Political Lying, “their ruin in their interest and their interest in their ruin.” This may explain why more and more Canadians, those who are aware of the imminent crisis and cannot tolerate the specter of encroaching despotism, are leaving the country for, shall we say, freer pastures.
The government and the majority of the people are at one, which is the major difference between the two revolutions. When the people adopt an oppressive government’s beliefs and actions as their own, there is little chance of preserving our heritage. The French Revolution gave us the ringing motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and to some extent, following the Napoleonic interregnum, managed to achieve it. The slogan of the Canadian Revolution might well be "Servitude, Polarization, and Enmity," and it is in process of achieving it as we speak. Mutatis mutandis, the ancien régime is once again on the rise as Canada, in a historical parody of the French Revolution, slips back, perhaps irrevocably, into the pre-democratic past.
Article tags: Canada, Davos, French Revolution, Justin Trudeau, Klaus Schwab, revolution, Tamara Lich, The Great Reset, World Economic Forum
We are living in a feminist tyranny. A healthy society is a blend of masculine and feminine traits, such as competition and cooperation. Too much masculine influence and competition leads to fighting, even war. But too much feminine turns cooperation into tyranny, where anyone who dissents must be ostracized or destroyed. Trudeau embodies the excess of feminine traits, as does California's Governor Newsom. Trudeau cannot stand for his ideas to be challenged because he fears competition.
Canada is collapsing like most of the west because during the good times we failed to understand the essential need for masculine traits, cultivating healthy competition, and raising boys to become men. There is no quick fix.
If we get a chance to elect a sane government sometime in the future, they should demand that every media outlet return every cent of Federal money received during the Covid hoax, the idea being to put every one of them out of business, they have to be made a example out of , or we will never stop the nonsense.
The truckers should refused to go within 100 kms of Ottawa and other major cities that denounced them, no deliveries and no pickups. Going into that cesspool was a huge mistake, seige them into weakness first. Every phone and its owner that was in the region during the protest is marked and tracked. If we get a chance to elect a sane government sometime in the future, they should demand that every media outlet return every cent of Federal money received during the Covid hoax, the idea being to put every one of them out of business, they have to be made a example out of , or we will never stop the nonsense.
I usually agree with Solway, but I am disheartened to see him comparing these animals to the Ancien Regime. The French Revolution was carried out by the same people who are tearing down our world today. Pick a side here, David. You can’t have BOTH sides as villains in your analogy. But unquestionably, in my mind, the forces of evil were the ones destroying, murdering, and burning churches and Christians.
Of course, the problem as it were, is that the population agrees and submits with smile on their faces.
Another fine essay.
Here’s an idea. Have the Canadian Truckers who deliver fuel and food to Ottawa call in sick for a week or two. Just a little muscle flex could work wonders.