Ricardo Duchesne’s Canada in Decay

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Ricardo Duchesne
Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians
London: Black House Publishing, 2017

With a clever Black House cover design featuring an autumn maple leaf about which Spenglerians might appreciate a subtle symbolism, Dr. Duchesne combines a scholarly method with an approachable style that makes Canada in Decay a significant manual for those resisting the deconstruction of Western societies through multiculturalism as a dogma and as a demographic assault. The book focuses on the author’s nation of residence, but the principles he is describing are applicable to all nominally Western societies.

Duchesne has an interesting background that makes him an ideal partisan for Canada’s and the West’s resistance to deconstruction. He is a professor at the University of New Brunswick with decades of experience in the unhallowed halls of academia, confronting in his everyday life the dogma-ridden, cerebrally-poisoned and spiritually pathogenic diktatur of the intelligentsia, and the destructive ideologies and agendas of Leftards entrenched in the organs of opinion-forming. He is a sociologist, well-versed in Marxist dialectics, and is a migrant from Puerto Rico. With such a background he is able to draw on experiences providing added insights into the tactics and thinking of the enemies of European culture, which he does as director of the Council of European Canadians ^[2].

“All immigrants”?

Duchesne uses the textbooks of multiculturalism in Canada, the material that is being used to indoctrinate students with a distorted view of Canadian history, as his starting point in critiquing the premises of Canada as a “country of migrants.” It is a cliché familiar to readers in Britain, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, used to justify continuing mass immigration from widely divergence sources by stating that “we are all immigrants” or the heirs of immigrants. As Duchesne points out, the words migrant and immigrant are so widely used as to render them meaningless. It is part of an Orwellian process of changing history and language. Hence, Canada is according to textbook writers a nation that was founded by diverse ethnicities, just as much as Britain has “always” always been “diverse” because of Welsh, Scots, Irish and English, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Picts, Jutes, Vikings, Romans, Normans.

To the so-called “First Nations” of Canada (which of course were not “nations” in any sense, but wandering tribes of no real fixed abode, as with the New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines) were added French and British, and with the latter a few Blacks who came up from New England with the “Loyalists” to make Canada so very historically “diverse.” According to this rationale, if it can be called that, the migration of Chinese, East Indians, and Africans, ad infinitum, are continuing a trend that has been taking place for centuries.

However, Duchesne states that from the earliest days of European colonization by French and British, population increase, especially among the prolific Quebecois and Acadian French who were encouraged by the state to have large families, was overwhelmingly due to births in Canada, rather than to further immigration. Duchesne also draws the distinction between “immigrants” and “settlers.” The British and French came as settlers, to tame the wilderness, on land that had been sparsely and transiently populated at most. The roots to the land and the raising of their families made them Canadians and formed a Canadian nation prior to which there was no such concept, any more, it can be added, than there was prior to European settlement an Australian or New Zealand.

The words “immigrant,” “settler” and “pioneer” have been redefined to support the notion that Canada (and USA, New Zealand, Australia, and even Britain) have always been “nations of immigrants;” that “we are all immigrants,” suggesting that anyone who moves anywhere is an ‘immigrant,” which presumably makes the also much-lauded term “indigenous” (other than when it is applied to indigenous Britons or Afrikaners) problematic. Duchesne points out that an “immigrant” comes to an existing society; a “settler” comes to something new, and a “pioneer” builds something new. Prior to modern immigration waves, Euro-Canadians were primarily descended from settlers and pioneers; those who had reached a vast wilderness devoid of people. They were not coming to a pre-existing society. The same is true of those Europeans who settled New Zealand, Australia, and the British and French Colonies to the south. What pre-existing society or nation did the Dutch settlers who became the Afrikaners encroach on? There were some wandering, scattered Bushmen, as in Australia, while in New Zealand, land ownership was based on conquest, and the befuddled and honest settler was often conned into paying for land to multiple bogus “owners.”

From the 1960s there was supposedly a shift in Canadian attitudes towards immigration. The academic apologists state that Canadians, especially thanks to television and other modern communications, were opened up to the world and become cosmopolitan in outlook, discarding their “parochialism,” as part of a process of urbanization and modernization. Previously they had lived in ignorance. No matter that the statesmen of Canada such as Mackenzie King and the Canadian intelligentsia and literati regarded Canada as developing a new type of “European” ethnicity from the amalgamation of white ethnicities. Mackenzie King warned against Asian immigration in the same manner and at the same time as New Zealand and Australian statesman, and when the proponents of “white Australia” right up until the 1960s were “socialists.”

“Liberal communitarianism,”

For the rest of the book Duchesne addresses the multicultural – and conversely the assimilationist – dogmas and tactics that are used to destroy the nation as a community. In particular he addresses the theories of the two most influential academic exponents of multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka, and Charles Taylor, both of whom are well-sponsored. Kymlicka’s primary text, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (1995), has been translated into 32 languages.

Kymlicka advocates “liberal communitarianism,” stating that ethnic group identity is intrinsic to individual well-being. Such “group rights” are a predicate for the integration of the individual into society, and hence require special rights of protection and recognition. Such recognition does not extend to the Anglo-Canadian, as his culture is to be neutral and neutralized, and is nothing other than a legacy of “racism,” “colonialism,” and “xenophobia,” and any expression of European identity premised on race theories that were defeated with Hitler.

Duchesne identifies Kymlicka as part of the New Left “march through the institutions,” a term that Kymlicka actually uses often. He sees multiculturalism as an agent for “transformation,” that is, the deconstruction of European culture until “neutered and neutralized,” while a multiplicity of symbols replace the traditional flag, anthems, and language, and holidays and oaths are secularized, while sundry sects and religions foreign to the West are accommodated. Resistance is motivated by “racism” and “xenophobic fear.” All these liberal and crypto-Marxist clichés and strategies in Canada should sound familiar to any New Zealander, Australian, American, Briton, Swede, German, et al.

Charles Taylor is heralded as Canada’s most eminent academic. He goes beyond Kymlicka in some important ways. He affirms deep ethnic attachments as inherent to the individual personality and necessary for self-development. Ethnic group attachment must be accepted by Euro-Canadians, but they must eschew any such identities of their own. Duchesne points out an important factor in Taylor’s thinking; that if ethnic bonds are intrinsic to the human personality and its health, then the principle is applicable to every race and ethnoi. “Non-recognition” and “misrecognition” of ethnoi cause harm, and “the right to be different” must therefore be maintained. While Kymlicka argues for ethnicity as a bridge to integration, Taylor argues for the permanence of differences. Again, however, this does not apply to the Western culture, because it is a neutral utility relevant only insofar as it identifies with a universal liberal doctrine that provides the means by which other ethnicities can survive and prosper at the European’s expense.

This is a crucial but befuddled issue that Duchesne clarifies from the viewpoint of European identity, and I think this makes the book particularly valuable. There are far Left academics who critique multiculturalism as they see it as also being an intrinsically Western doctrine, and therefore also Eurocentric as a worldview. They are of course right. It is Enlightenment liberalism, and a white man’s construct. Professor Sunera Thobani sees its purpose as being to “stabilize white supremacy,” accurate up to a point, insofar as it is the rationalization for creating a rootless labor market. However, a rootless labor market has long been sought by mercantile interests including the era under imperialism, when multicultural immigration was even then being promoted with the support of the British colonial office, and resisted by Empire statesmen such as Mackenzie King, New Zealand’s Richard Seddon, and the Australian labor movement. The fight against foreign immigration was the fight of labor in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa (revolt on the Rand), and the USA (Denis Kearney and the Workingman’s Party). The Left sold out on this, as did the supposed “Right,” albeit the Left did so well prior to the Right, and now makes “identity politics” the basis of their tactics since appeals to the “international proletariat” didn’t get anywhere. Rather it was more a matter of the merchant that has no country, who was the earliest to succumb to the ideal of a rootless global freebooter (as idealized in G. Paschal Zachary’s book, The Global Me, as literally the next stage in human evolution driven by economics: Marx’s dream).

The multicultural ideal among such sections of the Left as represented by Thobani, whom Duchesne describes as “cultural Marxists,” has propelled itself to the level of reductio ad absurdum without the prompting of any contrary forces. Now the Leftard intelligentsia as per Thobani propose to replace nations with what Duchesne describes as “an interdependent network of global relations.” Again the principal of ethnic rights applies to all other than the European. Apparently the European proletariat is also to be left without any sense of social kinship, as a rootless automaton, while perhaps lauded over by the Chinese or Hindu billionaire, who retains his identity within his own ethnicity within any land-mass in the world in which his wealth enables him to settle. If it all seems dystopian, albeit presented as idyllic, it is perhaps because the liberal and Leftard doctrines lack any sense of reality, to the extent of being psychotic in the literal, clinical sense, while ironically presented as the most advanced mode of thinking behind a façade of academic terminology, and mediocrities hyped as “scholars.”

Assimilation

Particularly interesting is Duchesne’s discussion of “assimilation” contra “multiculturalism.” It might come as a shock that having read Duchesne’s incisive critique of “multiculturalism” he proceeds to explain certain merits. He does so against the background of recently revived “assimilationist” doctrines and policies. Some major states such as Germany and Britain (Angela Merkel and David Cameron) recently conceded the failure of multicultural policies because of the inherent fracturing of societies, and the ghettoization of unassimilable second and third generation youths. Second and third generation young Muslim has failed to become Muslim-Germans, Muslim-Frenchmen, Muslim-Britons, and the consequences are becoming increasingly violent. This is because governments have encouraged the retention of separate identities as of “right,” in the holy name of “diversity.” Now there is a scramble to push for “assimilation;” the old doctrine of the American “melting pot” of Emma Lazarus and Israel Zangwill, albeit at a time when immigrants were Irishmen, Slavs, Italians and Greeks, and even then an ideal not for any future Israel.

Duchesne records the tendency of conservativism to have adopted an assimilationist position in reaction to the failure of multiculturalism. The “Right” however does not do so on the basis of any traditional world-view, but again on the premises of Western classical liberalism. Hence, immigrants are to be welcomed into Western societies so long as they can fit in as individuals in a consumer society, that their religion is not so noticeable as to include the burqa for example, that they are “hard workers,” fill labor shortages (while Europeans have eliminated tens of thousands of babies through abortion as of “right), that most of all they are taxpayers. These are all the inanities that are the mainstay of supposedly “Right-wing” immigration policies, from supposedly “conservative” parties such as the New Zealand First Party, and the One Nation Party in Australia, and the Trumpite faction of the Republican Party. The new immigrant is expected to, as Duchesne puts it, “disaggregate” and become “abstract individual units.” Even parties that liberals smear as “neo-Nazi” or at least “racist”, such as Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom, and prior to him Pim Fortuyn, oppose foreign immigration on the basis that the values and religions of certain immigrants do not accord with the West’s liberal enlightenment legacy.

Concomitant with this assimilationism is the notion that in each state all citizens must adopt a common set of civic values, or “civic nationalism.” Hence, this liberalized “Right” is affronted by what it calls the “racism” of “social privileges” accorded to ethnic minorities under the multicultural agenda. These “race-based” and “racist” policies are condemned as “separatism” and as “apartheid.” I am here referencing the common refrain of the small but politically significant “populist” New Zealand First Party in its opposition to what it sees as Maori privileges. Such ideas were for many years promoted by the One New Zealand Foundation, and have now entered the political mainstream. The premise is that the so-called “founding document of the New Zealand nation, the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), made Maoris and settlers “One People,” in the words of Governor Hobson, under one law and one sovereign. Ironically, the interpretation of the Treaty has been the cause of perpetual fracturing and dispute between the races, because “One People,” eighteenth-century ideas about social contracts notwithstanding, is not formed on the basis of a handshake and a legal document. Conversely, there are a faction of “Maori radicals” who are of course anathema to the liberalized “Right,’ who are condemned for their “separatist” attitudes. Prior to the 1980s the “Right” was comparatively ideologically coherent. It openly defended apartheid in South Africa, the British settler legacy, and white immigration. There was tremendous goodwill towards South Africa. Now the “One Nation” types quote as their inspiration Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. They are so bereft of history as to assume ideas of race to be “Marxist.” Now what is called “Right” is equated with libertarianism, and believes we must all be “New Zealanders,” although there is no definition of “New Zealander,” other than as a law-abiding, hardworking tax-payer, and any such concept of a New Zealand culture had its Golden Age ended circa 1950s, with the generation around poets such as Rex Fairburn, including Marxists such as Curnow, and R A K Mason, et al. These are the experiences of New Zealand, which are as applicable to Canada, Australia, Britain, USA and others; in particular those whose heritage include colonialism.

Duchesne clears away the ideological debris. Although multiculturalism is destructive, it is presently a fait accompli. What is worse is the alternative that is being offered by “conservatives,” assimilation. Duchesne reasserts the premise that kinship is inherent and the kinship bond of ethnicity is an extension of family kinship. “To demand assimilation is suicidal” (p. 169). But that is precisely what the pseudo-Right is demanding with its commitment to liberal universalism in reacting to the multicultural quagmire.

Rather, Duchesne contends that while nothing can be gained from assimilationism, multiculturalism does afford the opportunity to maintain identities rather than to sink everyone into a rootless, nebulous mass. He cites the Multicultural Act (1988) as granting every ethnicity the maintenance of identity as of right, and founded the Council of European Canadians to assert these rights on behalf of traditional Canadians.

Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt

Duchesne writes: “On the question of the individuals’ relations to society, I have more in common with multicultural communitarians than with assimilationists who view humans as atomized creatures.” (p. 177). It seems the most realistic and consistent option. The “Right” was originally communitarian. It viewed the nation as a social organism, not as a collection of individuals welded around social contracts.

Taking up his critique of the pseudo-Right, Duchesne addresses the supposedly “conservative philosophy” of Leo Strauss who viewed the West as uniquely universal and race-neutral, as representing values that are applicable to every hominid, in forming a “civic identity,” against any form of collective identity which is “fascistic.”

The liberal “Right” has adopted the notion of their being universal values that apply to all humans, reflecting the aspirations of all humanity: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That now defines what is “Western,” and is hence neutered of all connection with a race. Anyone can become part of it. Duchesne sees it all as a reflection of “cultural Marxism” whether defined as “left” or “right.” German historicism that saw a culture reflecting an ethnos, has been rejected for universalistic notions. The Anglo-American sphere has become the primary purveyor, and it is this idea that is now called “Right-wing.” Duchesne considers the philosophical influence of Leo Strauss on “neoconservatives.” While I am sure that few supposed “conservatives”  in New Zealand or Australia would have even heard of Strauss, they parrot the line of a universal Western liberal culture where the individual is primary, while there are no collective identities, and their opposition to multiculturalism and advocacy of assimilation are as fallacious as the Left. Strauss however did not extend this universalism to Jews, and saw universalism as a means by which Jews would feel safer while retaining their identity. (Emma Lazarus and Israel Zangwill were also able to combine advocacy of the “melting-pot” with Zionist ethnocentricism).

However, science continues to confront cultural Marxism. Among the recent finds that Duchesne cites is the once much heralded oxytocin hormone, which showed that empathy is inborn. Hormonal manipulation could have created a brave new world where all individuals are empathetic towards the other. Yet again the utopia was dashed on the rocks of reality, when it was also found that oxytocin is equally the hormone for antagonism towards the foreign. Hence there is a characteristic long argued by scientists such as Arthur Keith of an innate dichotomy of in-group bonds and out-group rejection. Empathy cannot be imposed and enforced by laws; the result is the opposite – hostility towards the “other” and a breakdown of social trust.

Contra the “right-wing” Strauss, and the sundry leftard and middling liberal academics that Duchesne considers, he looks at Carl Schmitt whose premise is that ethnoi are formed vis-à-vis an enemy. Schmitt critiques liberalism for not having a strong concept of the political in defining states; as lacking a strong sense of sovereignty over a territory and the ability to distinguish enemies. This is the result of the primacy of the individual and the rejection of the collective. A “nation” is regarded as an association of individuals bound together in contractual agreement for pursuing the supposedly universal aspirations of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Spiral of Diversity”

Duchesne spends the final part of Canada in Decay considering “the spiral of diversity,” identifying a process that once started accelerates. This process has four predicates: (1) “Racism” as the worst evil and contrary to democracy, (2) repudiation of “scientific racism”, and identifying racial attitudes as motivated by “fear,” (3) the demonization of Western colonialism and the revival of the eighteenth-century notion of the “noble savage,” promoting a guilt complex among whites, (4) universality of “human rights.”

The “spiral” is morally fortified by the fiction that it is ethno-based “nationalism” that is the cause bloody strife, with the Hitler spectre as a crucial ingredient. Duchesne plots the course of the “spiral” from the aftermath of the war against fascism, producing key documents such as UNESCO’s Race Question, albeit a statement that received much criticism from scientists, U.N. declarations on universal human rights, and the targeting of Canada’s restrictive immigration policy by the newly-created Third World states, morally buttressed by decolonization.

Pierre Trudeau, as a child of this milieu, had written during the early 1960s of Canada as the world’s first multicultural state, that would eliminate the concept of the nation, and be a light to the world as an experiment for “tomorrow’s civilization.” He called this the “new treason of the intellectuals.” Trudeau wrote that every ethnicity has a right to cultural perseveration, and even autonomy and territorial expression. Never mind that his ideas were full of contradictions. Perhaps that is what is called dialectics? What is a territory where an ethno-culture is sustained if not a “nation,” and one moreover in the traditional sense? In South Africa a similar idea was called “apartheid,” but that is something that Trudeau and his type were most vociferous in condemning. In 1971 as Canada’s Prime Minister he declared Canada to officially be a “multicultural nation.”

The “spiral” accelerated and amidst an onrush of academic papers and symposia discussing the new state dogma, immigration offices were opened throughout the Third World, a Ministry of Multiculturalism was established, the Immigration Act was passed in 1978, Human Rights Act in 1977, and Charter of Rights in 1982. Australia and New Zealand followed. Immigration was based on a “points system,” based on economic needs, devoid of cultural or ethnic criteria, as “”branch-plant Amercian capitalism,” and the displacement of traditional British investment by American, ideologically converged with left-liberalism. Under the push of corporate global capitalism and its concomitant Americanization, Duchesne cites the perception of a traditional Canadian Tory, George Grant (Lament for a Nation, 1965)  who wrote that “it is impossible to conserve anything for long,” including Canada. Toryism soon sold out, and there was a convergence of Left and Right across the world unified by a universal liberal dogma, where a “homogenized world market is sought,” such uniformity of global citizenship being in accord with Leftist doctrines on universal humanity. At this time many fervent, veteran “socialists” had a spontaneous epiphany and converted to libertarianism. In New Zealand the libertarian “Act Party” (“Act” being an acronym for “Association of Consumers and Taxpayers,” which cogently summarizes the banality of the ideology) was formed by Labour Party socialists, and is regarded as a “Right-wing party,” committed to universal liberal values in defining citizenship, while demanding the abolition of “race based privileges” for Maoris, and erecting election hoardings in Mandarin Chinese.

Duchesne cites attempts to classify “in-group attachment” as a “personality disorder, and public health pathogen,” as an entry in The Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorder puts it (p. 328). Such a move has been mooted in recent years with studies purporting to show “racism” to be the result of biochemical imbalance etc., that can be eliminated through medication. Perhaps the next phase of the “spiral,” but it is confronted by ongoing research into the negative social impact of multiculturalism on social trust. It also means that, given decades of research insisting that individual self-worth, identity and development requires this “in-group attachment,” it must be presented as a Euro-specific pathology. If the contention is that “in-group attachment” only becomes a pathogen within “majorities,” and within “minorities” is not only healthy but necessary, the Leftard academic is confronted with such questions as whether the ethnocentricism of Israeli Jews is pathogenic? Conversely, why is ethnocentricity therefore not lauded among the dispossessed minority Afrikaner? There is the common theme of a double-standard. Are white liberals who regard “in-group attachment” as “evil” and pathogenic lacking the oxytocin levels that drive such “prejudice”? If so, that also implies lack of oxytocin levels driving empathy. This would help to explain why liberals and the Left have an aggregate of the mentally dysfunctional who rationalize their mental aberrations as humanitarianism, while projecting their own inadequacies onto others.

From out of this quagmire that erodes every Western nation, what is called “progressive conservativism” in Canada emerged, while traditional Toryism was pushed into oblivion. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took the “spiral” to a next level, by eliminating even the economic requirements for immigration in the pursuit of multiculturalism. Then Justin Trudeau reiterated his father’s vision of Canada as a “postnational” state, being described by The New York Times as “the avatar of his father’s vision.”

Given that Canada is the incubator of experiments on human behaviour, as Duchesne shows, this “postnational” agenda will be introduced throughout the West as the next phase in human development. It is being driven by global capital, seeing the free movement of people (immigration) as concomitant with the free movement of technology, capital, and raw materials and the formation of a homogenized consumer market unhindered by cultural and national particulars (as described by Richard Barnett and R E Muller in Global Reach, 1974).

While multiculturalism is promoted behind a façade of “diversity” and “cultural enrichment” it is being imposed and enforced in the name of contrived “universal values,” derived from eighteenth-century liberalism. It is the same liberal notion of universalism that a befuddle and ever-retreating “Right” adopted as its own, and has adjusted with an assimilationist position that again seeks to re-define the nation-state out of laws and constitutions, negating any concept of “race;” in favor of “common values of citizenship,” where the potential of a “new citizen” is measured by his work ethic and tax-paying ability. While there exists multiculturalism there is at least a recognition that identities are essential, albeit only for non-whites. But it is still – at least for the moment – a milieu that Identitarians can work within. The Zangwillian melting-pot, which “conservatives” are now returning to, given the failure of ethnic communities in Europe to “integrate,” is an alternative, in my view, that is worse.