Fifth Part. "The New Fascism"

“Come, come”, you say. “The feature stories were searching and told all.” Yes, all, except…. Except somehow both of those major publications forgot to tell their readers that Ignatieff became a Liberal candidate in the first place by a manipulated, rigged procedure which shut out candidates who wanted to run against him. It seems he is in the House of Commons by violations of just electoral process, perhaps fraud. “Darn it”, you say. “Both Maclean’s Magazine and the Globe and Mail forgot to tell their readers about that. Oh well….” And so it goes. CBC is gutted and then gutted again to make room for Social Darwinist (Survival of the Richest) broadcasting. Canadian film-making (for fifty years, plus) has been ground under the heel of “continental Capitalism” (meaning U.S. corporations). Canadian governments protect and have protected U.S. film wealth in Canada, suppressing excellent Canadian film-makers and the possibility of a strong, internationally successful Canadian film industry. Repeatedly. Constantly. Afraid (?) of the U.S. and equally afraid of liberated communication in Canada through a dynamic, successful Canadian film industry, the Canadian governments have walked (and continue to walk) on the faces of Canadian film-makers. The Canadian book trade virtually no longer exists except as a phantom. Most Canadian books that sell decently are published by U.S. publishers. Textbooks used by Canadians throughout post-secondary education come mostly from the U.S. – freighted with U.S. propaganda and indoctrination. “You mean,” you say, “there is no major Canadian textbook industry to serve Canada and profit from the millions of books Canadian students need and use? You mean, too, most of the Canadian books I buy off the bookstore shelf to read are first okayed for publication by U.S. publishers? “ Right It’s called preparing the ground for “The New Fascism”. “What is it,” you ask, “in the philosophy of Canadians that permits those things?” Briefly, Canadian political parties in power (serving private corporate interests) have accepted the huge lies – first – that free trade and corporate takeovers benefit all. And, secondly, they accept that economics is made most efficient through the operation of “comparative advantage”. All of those activities have always benefitted imperial powers and impoverished other countries. Always. “Comparative advantage”, just for instance, is a bogus idea that if each country produces what it does best, all will balance and everyone will benefit. Except imperialist countries are always most technically proficient, best organized, and always prevent or control the development and profit-making of others, and always work and war to dominate trade and production. When free trade backfires and benefits another than the imperial country, it violates free trade. (As the U.S. has just done – with the help of a subservient Canadian government – in the softwood lumber dispute.) Canadians are continuously brainwashed on those subjects by Canadian governments and the private corporate class. Most Canadians haven’t the faintest idea how deep and total the brainwash is – in their own heads. Take philosophy itself, the activity that deals with explaining what we are, how we know, where we get ideas and “values”, and how human beings should live. The philosophy we get from philosophers often seems a long way from real life and, basically, unimportant. But very often a philosophy comes out of a community, characterizes it, and tries to solve or at least explain its biggest questions. The major philosophy of the U.S., for instance, home-grown, is Pragmatism. It argues for the “cash value” of ideas, supports the U.S. capitalist way of life, and asserts that “Truth” is what works. (Analytic philosophy is also big in the U.S. Adopted from Britain (mostly) and re-shaped, we don’t have to bother about it because it can be called a close cousin of Pragmatism.) The U.S. has pushed its philosophies at Canada until Deweyism (a form of Pragmatism) has become a curse here, especially in education. The U.S. has wanted Canada to adopt as its own U.S. philosophies in order to consolidate the U.S. Empire. It just happens the traditional Canadian philosophies in anglophone Canada and francophone Quebec stand in the way of U.S. philosophy. Anglophone philosophy, for instance, asserts that all parts of creation are connected and inter-responsible, that truth exists to test action against, and that reason governs the universe. In the 1950s when the first small conference on Canadian philosophy was held, a U.S. contributor assured Canadians they did not have and could not have a philosophy. There is no Canadian philosophy, he said. But in the 1960s when foreign (especially U.S.) academics believed Canada’s universities and colleges were theirs, that Canadian curriculum should be nonexistent, and that Canadian professors were inferior and unnecessary, a major fight was conducted to keep Canadian higher education Canadian. Rising from it, two Canadian philosophers wrote a book as a basis upon which to found the study of philosophy in Canada. [Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces Of Reason, Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier Press, 1981]. The history of the book and its results tells all. The authors should have been set up in a Canadian philosophical centre, surrounded by young, inquiring francophone and anglophone scholars at work on Canadian philosophy and its connections to religion, statecraft, sociological structures, First Nations thought, and Canadian philosophy in the world. What happened? Having completed the book – after Leslie Armour felt driven from the University of Waterloo where there were 21 philosophers, 19 of them from the U.S. and actively unsympathetic to his work – it was considered (as is usual) for a publishing grant. The three reader/assessors said publish it right away. Two of them were leading public intellectuals of the time, George Grant and Northrop Frye. The granting agency stalled. It sought another round of expert assessors. They said publish the book. The granting agency stalled and sought more assessors until it found some who quibbled about the book. Finally, the agency agreed to publication after demanding the last chapter of the book be removed. The last chapter reported that after a hundred years (more in francophone Canada) of established philosophizing in Canada, Canadian philosophy was being drowned by U.S. philosophy and U.S. philosophers now in Canada. The authors sought a publisher. University of Toronto Press refused it. UBC press refused it. Round and round went the search. Finally, years after its completion, it was accepted – without its last chapter – by University of Waterloo press. As I view the situation, both Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott have been subjected to quiet, unforgiving, on-going discrimination for daring to do serious scholarship in Canadian philosophy. In 1976 the British immigrant president of the Canadian Philosophical Association gave a presidential address in which he said the situation might lead him “to mouth ignorant and disconnected platitudes”. E. F. Sparshott then did everything he could in the speech to prevent Canadian philosophy from being taught. Was Canadian philosophy alone in that fight? Not at all. But others fought in a different situation. No one could deny Canada has “history”, though foreign (especially U.S. ) scholars were trying to cut down the amount of Canadian history courses being offered. In Art History, Literature, Sociology and other subjects foreigners (especially U.S. immigrants) tried to prevent Canadian materials from being taught. But living Canadian writers and living Canadian artists joined the fight, as did Canadian students. Laurier Lapierre wrote to me from McGill at the time saying that of several hundred Sociology term papers he had surveyed there NONE dealt with Canada, three dealt with Quebec, and the overwhelming bulk dealt with specifically U.S. subjects. Students demanded change. Outside the universities there were no practising philosophers. Inside, the majority were foreign (especially U.S.) immigrants. And so they won the fight to keep Canadian philosophy from being taught. There is almost nowhere in Canada where even an introductory course is offered to Canadian students. Time has passed. In the year 2000 Ottawa University published a book called Is There A Canadian Philosophy? Its lead author is a man who grew up in the U.S., did his first two degrees there, did his Ph.D in France, and then joined the McMaster Philosophy Department. G. B. Madison still writes like a yankee, and, to me, reads like a full-blown U.S. cultural imperialist. He condescends to Canada; he says it was inferior until recent immigration gave it a little shine; he denies it has a significant philosophical past. He lays the groundwork for the book, contributing nearly the first half. Two Canadians (apparently) – clones of Madison – finish the book along his line of argument. Is There A Canadian Philosophy? is not a study of Canadian philosophy, nor is it a widely thrown net to catch Canadian philosophical thought. It is brazenly, disturbingly, and brutishly an attempt to erase the history of Canadian philosophy and present U.S. private corporate propaganda as the embedded philosophy of Canadians. To clear aside at least 150 years of serious Canadian thought, the authors make a wholesale attack on communitarian ideas. Those are ideas which suggest there are many times when community needs must be addressed in the face of individual demands and some things individuals believe are their highest needs. The authors wipe out formal Canadian philosophy almost completely except for a few recent philosophers with whom they wish to take exception. Repeatedly, they quote as experts U.S. people on the Right. They take for granted the U.S. is exactly what its most adoring propaganda says it is. Any positive claim for Canada, however, is always judged as myth or unproveable theorizing. Canada’s ideas of positive and community-oriented responses and tolerance in our history, we are told, verge “on pure mythology” (p. 20) Bedrock contempt for Canada is persistent. Canada could not be sophisticated now if it hadn’t had recent massive immigration. Its founding white European population is described as inferior. Those less sophisticated Canadians, however, we are told, are being liberated now from “the quasi-socialist mentality” they were cursed with. At no point in their shallow list of threats to Canada do the authors even hint that U.S. expansionism and private corporate culture could be a threat. After exploding with delight at Free Trade Agreements, globalization, and what they hold to be unsophisticated Canada before recent, massive immigration, they state that “liberal society must remain ‘neutral’ as to what constitutes the ‘good life’”. (p. 25) But their “liberal society”- they have no doubt - should prevail, with the population manipulated by private corporations and governments supporting them to set up “international” institutions which serve private corporate power. So much for neutrality. Many of their statements when not wholly or mostly false are offered as fact without any hint they are seriously in question. In addition, many of them are made in a fog of generality so that the fact they are of the same stuff as the nineteenth century arguments for Slavery will not be seen. The authors occasionally differ a little, but they quote each other and accept the main arguments laid down by G.B.Madison. He says that the publicly owned and run Canadian Social Insurance securities must see a “withering away” in order to create a “vibrant civil society in which individuals participate in a host of voluntary organizations that contribute in one way or another to the common good.” (p. 47) (Always outcomes are described foggily, imprecisely, and without any real relation to social forces.) That is a situation, for the authors, in which “economic (commercial) affairs must be allowed to follow their own logic.” (p. 53) A telling comment. “Economic (commercial) affairs” were allowed “to follow their own logic” in the England of the nineteenth century. In Manchester in 1851, for instance, the life expectancy rate was “38 years for ‘professional persons and gentry and their families’, 20 years for ‘tradesmen and their families’, and 17 years for ‘mechanics, labourers, and their families’….” (F.D. Klingender, Art And The Industrial Revolution, Frogmore, Paladin, 1972, p. 144) The authors go on to argue that it is impossible (p. 127) to “rectify socioeconomic inequalities” because to help some (the chronically disadvantaged) is to offend and distress others (the financially comfortable). For the authors all legislated attempts to lessen discrimination are discriminatory and harmful. They quote reactionary F.A. Hayek that we must not employ human reason to attempt some control of the future. We must let “spontaneous” action (that is Social Darwinism, economic and commercial forces following “their own logic”) rule. The book is not only a tract for “The New Fascism”. It is an indication of the degree to which that force is taking over Canadian culture, social identity, and communication. The book publishes patent falsehoods and wildly controversial statements as plain fact. I close with a few: The Free Trade Agreements have “opened Canada in a grand and completely irreversible way” (p. 19) The Queen of England is, somehow, the “honorific” Queen of Canada. (p. 18) French language rights are “supposed” rights. (p. 21) “There is no more a “third way” between liberalism and illiberalism than, in the economic sphere, there is between a market economy and a command economy.” (p. 39) The opposite of “liberal” for the authors is (falsely) “illiberal”. G. B. Madison writes: “Tyranny – illiberalism – is indeed the issue….” (p.41) In a staggering falsehood they write “globalization signifies the end of the age of empire….” (p. 50) “In a postnational world we are all immigrants”. (p. 59) The Soviet Union suffered demise because it made the error of attempting to conceive the “market” as something that could be organized. (p. 143) The actions of both apartheid and genocide can only be carried out by individuals against other individuals. (p. 176) “The more ‘entitlements’[?] the welfare state hands out, the more the demand for them increases…, and the more citizen is pitted against citizen in a relentless battle for larger pieces of what tends to become a shrinking pie.” (p. 177) G.B. Madison, Paul Fairfield, and Ingrid Harris present a rape of reason and a falsification of reality as the only philosophy of Canada. It is the philosophy of the worst contemporary U.S. reactionaries in the U.S. The book, moreover, thanks, for support, the Canada Council, the University of Ottawa, the Government of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Brood on that. [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 1, 2006]