Defecting from Communist Canada
Big news in South Korea this week, captivating the nation, concerns a North Korean soldier who risked almost certain death to escape from his communist hell under gunfire. Meanwhile, a minor news item in Canada, quickly swept under the rug of political correctness, concerns the free world’s cowardly escape from civilization into the nightmare of quasi-communist tribunalism.
To punctuate this absurd historical crossroads in language even a social justice warrior (aka communist revolutionary) might understand, people living under fully established Marxist totalitarian regimes are prepared to die in a desperate final grasp at human dignity, while the civilization that most precisely defined the concept of human dignity is rapidly disintegrating into the most irrational indignities of Soviet-style police state totalitarianism.
Lindsay Shepherd, a twenty-two year old graduate student at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, was leading a discussion in a freshman communications class. She innocently entered upon the topic of pronoun usage — related to questions such as whether it is proper to use “they” as a singular rather than “he/she” — by showing a short clip from a well-known Ontario public television political program, The Agenda, in which University of Toronto professor of psychology Jordan Peterson argued against Canada’s Bill C-16, which makes it a hate crime to refuse to use a “transgender” person’s preferred pronoun. Peterson’s strong stand on the pronoun question as a free speech issue elevated the good professor to extraordinary levels of fame, and helped to open what should have been a serious national debate about the recent precipitous insinuation of all manner of postmodern critique of Western hegemony (i.e., “cultural Marxism,” aka communist revolution) into Canadian law.
But the Laurier teaching assistant, due to her innocent enthusiasm to promote fruitful discussion by raising interesting topics in an open-minded environment of intellectual curiosity — that is, being naïve enough to imagine that an institution with the word “university” in its name might actually be a university (ah, the folly of youth) — quickly discovered the defining dynamic of social justice activism (aka communist revolution): progress waits for no one, and spares no one.
Ten years ago, Peterson’s views on gender pronouns would have been irksome to the more radical campus leftists, but they wouldn’t have been able to do much about it, as “transgenderism” was still a way-out-there pseudo-concept unrelated to the popular culture.
One year ago, Peterson found himself isolated in the academic world, abandoned by his own university administration, and forced to defend himself on YouTube and public television programs for daring to claim that biological gender differences actually exist.
Today, Peterson is condemned outright by the academy as a white supremacist owned by big oil, his views no longer even utterable in a class debate, and anyone who dares to present his thoughts without previously defining him as a Nazi and his words as hate speech is called up before a Marxist tribunal and accused of creating a “toxic atmosphere” at the university, not to mention being threatened with disciplinary action for having promoted illegal ideas. (Think about that: illegal ideas.)
Of course, a twenty-two year old grad student, cutting her teeth as a part-time teaching assistant, could not be expected to understand this dynamic — the progressive ratchet, as we sometimes call it. Her big mistake was imagining that a professor from Canada’s most prestigious university, expressing views that a government-owned TV network invited him to discuss on air just a year ago, would be unproblematic fodder for class debate today, as though nothing could have changed in the interim to alter the intellectual climate, and render the professor and his views suddenly “toxic” and forbidden. Finding toxicity in any and every non-Marxist belief, codifying that toxicity with peer-reviewed horse crap, and then quickly immersing it in fluid and ever-evolving laws whose implications no one has had the time or opportunity to consider, has been the mechanism of neo-Marxist activism (aka communist revolution) in the West for a century.
Thus it is that today, for merely airing a clip of the TVOntario appearance by Peterson — a professor, remember, at Canada’s most prestigious university — without first warning her students that the opinion they were about to hear was false, regressive, illegal, and constituted violence against “transgenders,” Miss Shepherd was hauled into a tribunal of her academic superiors to be suitably chastised for her violation of her moral duty as an educator, which, the tribunal explained in no uncertain terms, is to make sure no freshmen hear views that fall outside postmodern politically correct orthodoxy, unless those views are explicitly framed as fascistic, and their purveyors as Hitlerian alt-right charlatans.
By the way, if you think I’m exaggerating her professors’ attack on her, on Peterson, and on his opinion that using law to coerce “correct” speech for political purposes is a violation of freedom of speech — and what exactly would a violation of free speech look like, if not like that? — you are invited to listen to the audio of the actual interrogation via The National Post, along with the Peterson clip Shepherd played for her class. Yes, by the grace of Gaia, the naïve young lady had the foresight to secretly record her meeting with the commissars, and has released it publicly in her own self-defense — for which she will forever be branded, in academic circles, as an alt-right scumbag and traitor to the cause of social justice (aka communism).
The recording will take a little of your time, but it is riveting, vitally important if you care about liberty, and well worth every minute, especially if you are having a colonoscopy tomorrow and are looking for an alternative to that yucky enema drink. On the other hand, if you have seen the Twilight Zone episode “An Obsolete Man,” you may forego this audio, since you’ve already heard a more literate version of it, albeit a little less radically stated.
Key lessons to be drawn from the above audio:
It is illegitimate to expose university students to views that in any way challenge or contradict neo-Marxist orthodoxy regarding gender language, systemic oppression, or social justice (aka communism).
Ergo, neo-Marxist orthodoxy is Absolute Truth, to be accepted and promulgated as a matter of faith, and hence may never again be questioned or scrutinized in an academic environment.
Jordan Peterson’s critique of Bill C-16’s effect on freedom of speech was exactly right: making this week’s preferred neo-Marxist gender language legally enforceable means outlawing even the expression of a contrary opinion; such views may now be presented if and only if they are prefaced with warnings as to their complete falsity, their fascist underpinnings, and, worst of all, their failure to meet standards of peer-reviewed credibility. And yes, one of the interrogators actually borrows his argument directly from the standard “climate denier” rebuttal used by planet justice warriors (aka communists): the closed circle of peer review defines the limits of scientific legitimacy.
In fact, this direct analogy, used by one of the Laurier commissars, helps to shed light, for those who still haven’t quite seen it, on the real significance of that “peer review equals legitimacy” argument that the global warmists forever fall back on in lieu of any kind of climatic evidence for their hysteria, to wit:
A view that has been prejudged as non-compliant with neo-Marxist orthodoxy may not be expressed in progressive academic circles, except as an example of fascistic thought; hence, by definition, no view of this kind will be taken seriously on its own terms (i.e., given a fair hearing) within the progressive academic world; and then the fact that such views are not well-represented within the orthodox academic world is used as evidence that they are academically illegitimate. If you don’t see what’s wrong with that reasoning, I have a tenured professorship in Florida to sell you — though you probably already have one.
Shepherd’s inquisitors literally use the law itself as an argument for why objections to the law may not be discussed “uncritically” in a university classroom. In short, it’s illegal to disagree with our neo-Marxism, so we win by default, nyah, nyah. If you, like young Miss Shepherd, didn’t understand why postmodern social justice activists (aka communist revolutionaries) work so hard to pass such draconian laws, perhaps now you understand. This is not about “changing people’s attitudes”; it is about outlawing and incinerating alternative views, and the people who hold them.
If a psychologically confused and leftist-propagandized and exploited “transgender” person demands to be called “Shpler” Smith, for example, instead of Mr. Smith, but you persist in calling him “Mr.,” you are a rights-violating criminal worthy of fines, public shaming, and, should you reject your punishment, possible imprisonment.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the social justice coin, if a twenty-two year old woman sincerely tries to act like a responsible teacher for her freshman students by exposing them to serious and open debate about important contemporary issues in communications, then, if one of the views she introduces falls outside the accepted confines of communist orthodoxy, she will be attacked and browbeaten for it during a private meeting, in the deliberately intimidating climate of a social justice tribunal, by mostly male university professors threatening the woman’s academic career, accusing her of siding with fascism, refusing not only to identify her accusers but even to tell her how many there are, and demanding that she cough up her personal papers and submit to having her classes observed and critiqued for communist orthodoxy in the future if she wants to continue her academic career in good standing. And this bullying and intimidation are not only to be regarded as legal and moral, but as a proper and just defense of law and morality.
Where are the feminists on this one? I’ll tell you where they are. They are where they always are, right alongside their comrades in arms in defense of the real and overriding goal of all the postmodern neo-Marxist isms — feminism, transgenderism, environmentalism, historical revisionism, moral relativism, and so on.
There is not a woman on Earth the feminists wouldn’t sacrifice to their real goal, which has never been the well-being of women, but rather communism. There is not a sexually befuddled “transgender” that the promoters of the Bill C-16 hate crime legislation wouldn’t sacrifice to their real goal, which has never been gender identity rights (whatever the hell that would mean), but rather communism. There is not a human population, a forest, or a carbon emissions limit the environmentalists would not sacrifice to their real goal, which has never been “saving the planet,” but rather communism. There is not a historical revision the historicists would not sacrifice — why aren’t Marx and Hegel ever on the revisionist’s chopping block as purveyors of the Eurocentric patriarchy, I wonder? — to their real goal, which has never been correcting historical misunderstanding or “injustice,” but rather communism.
And, as Miss Shepherd’s tribunal, the left’s hateful smearing of Jordan Peterson, and a thousand other similar examples, establish beyond any wisp of doubt, there is not a “relative value” that the relativists would not sacrifice on the altar of their absolute faith, their sacred Truth — communism.
If it bothers you that I use the word “communism,” rather than “socialism” or “progressivism,” too bad. Progressivism is a word I often use, and defend using, when I am discussing the overarching philosophical position of the modern “left.” But when we are in the realm of law and concrete repressions of speech and action, we may as well come right out and call a spade a spade. These people are spiritual communists. If Canada didn’t still maintain some remnants of its civilized past and the rule of law, what would Miss Shepherd’s tribunal have looked like? How would it have ended? Be honest with yourself: How did her interrogators want it to end? Our collective failure to honestly identify these people, their agenda, and their hatred of other human beings is a large part of the reason the civilized West has disintegrated as quickly as it has, and is now, it seems, beyond the point of no return.
Canada is today, or is quickly becoming, an exemplar of the new, postmodern kind of progressive state — let’s call it democratic communism. Yes, there will be elections, for a while at least. But with laws on the books explicitly criminalizing certain moral and political views that would have been mainstream opinions a few years ago, and with the academic world, from top to bottom, reinforcing those laws and the spirit behind them in classrooms and tribunals from kindergarten to graduate school, what will future elections amount to, other than wrangling over who gets to enforce and advance the ubiquitous and ungainsayable neo-Marxist agenda for the next few years.
I reflect on that poor North Korean soldier, his body full of hideous parasites, shot in the back as he tried to escape to what must have seemed to him like “the free world.” And then I think of that world to which he escaped, and its breakneck sprint into the very abyss from whence that soldier fled.
And then I think of myself. I was born and raised in Ontario. I went to graduate school with people who later got academic jobs at Wilfred Laurier University. I was once that young TA, nervously but bravely hoping to inspire freshmen almost my own age by introducing them to ideas that would challenge their culturally-inherited, unreflective opinions. Like Miss Shepherd, I thought that was my job, the university teacher’s vocation. Today, having left Canada to teach in Korea, outside the mainstream of a university system I had found, and increasingly find, repulsive and morally compromising, I look at what has become of my home country on its path to democratic communism, and I wonder how I could ever return. I look at my writing, my teaching, my intellectual pursuits, and ask myself how much of what I think, do, and say would fall within the acceptable limits of Canada’s new moral and academic orthodoxy. I daresay very little of it.
I didn’t think of myself as a defector when I left Canada ten years ago. Progress happens so quickly.
