“At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the mediæval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow."

— G K Chesterton, A Short History of England

"Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Canadians, because they only knew that they were Canadians, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The Canuck poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of truck horns, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob."

— With apologies to G K Chesterton’s A Short History of England, Joseph Thompson

Who is the patron saint of the Freedom Convoy? St. Christopher is the guardian of truckers, but Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho with horns. Unlike the Philippine clergy during People Power, however, the Canadian Church hardly etched a profile in courage. One scanned the crowds in vain for a Roman collar or a burqa. Vaxpolitik meant never having to lose your tax-exempt status.

Perhaps the patron saint of the truckers is the donkey that carried Christ into Jerusalem. An acephalous, anonymous movement inspired Canadians to manpack jerrycans of diesel when Trudeau tried to cut off its fuel supplies. This was typical of his oblique approach in the face of the reluctance of both the military to Tiananmen Square and the police to Bull Connor. Occult sympathizers within the police and military deserve credit for signalling their unwillingness to move against the truckers. Bringing a Glock to a dance party seemed de trop. Without this Canadian Curragh Mutiny, things could have gotten ugly. Free men in a free land declined to impose democracy on their compatriots. Pierrot Trudeau’s mistake lay in not having a cohort of Easterlings loyal to him alone who would not recognize the crowd as fellow Canadians. He should have taken a page out of the media’s book and recruited heavily from among foreign mercenaries.

“Vax me harder, Trudaddy!” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the original “idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this, and every country but his own” gave full vent to his political autism in dealing with the truckers. Being a non-player character, Trudeau’s dialectical toolkit consisted of six darts: antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-science. Once he had thrown them all, to no effect, he had to resort to force. When all you have is sodomy, everything looks like an anus.

The truckers’ protest was like a phenomenon of nature: it released an energy of elemental power, within whose field of radiation Mandate Macht Frei did not run. Intractable problems and situations seemed to be resolved of their own accord. While Pierrot stood dangling his bonnet and plume the truckers provided a matrix within which thousands of mice emerged from the woodwork and nibbled away at their bonds, launching a Second Spring in frosty Ottawa. Ladies supplied hotel rooms, businesses donated saunas, and bakeries brought Polish sausage. When the feds froze the truckers’ funds, Florida governor Ron DeSantis showed himself to be the real Canadian prime minister by launching an investigation into GoFundMe. Like ground-penetrating radar images, the picture is much less clear than alleged, but with greater resolution the damage is chiefly confined to that most sensitive organ in the body, the wallet. Credit to Trudeau: he overcame the ancient French-English divide and had reticent Canadians hugging each other with his universally detested policies. Vax populi.

It was biblical. In the coming reckoning, special attention must be paid to the catastrophic failure of the Church, medicine, media, academia, legislatures, the judiciary, law enforcement, and watchdog agencies. “If these were silent, the stones themselves would shout.” Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

It was Shakespearian. How often in the plays does an anonymous minor underling take a stand and tip the scales?

Hold your hand, my lord:
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.

Pierrot’s response? “A peasant stand up thus!” Declining to muss his hair by climbing into the ring with the lads, he then drank the January 6 Kool-Aid and bolted. “He led his regiment from behind (He found it less exciting).” “The guilty flee where none pursueth.”

Which brings us to our thesis. When Trudeau’s Totschweigetaktik (dynamic silence) backfired, he dismissed the truckers as “white supremacists.” For once he was right, but not in the way he meant. Jordan Peterson makes the point that heavy industry and industrial injury are mostly male, as is lack of post-secondary education. Anyone in Ottawa during the protest could easily confirm the overwhelming composition of the drivers. In fact, the Freedom Convoy was Cathy Newman’s worst nightmare come true: the Fall of the Wuhall was conceived, formulated, designed, launched, executed, maintained, and accomplished not by Canada’s seething grievance culture but overwhelmingly by white males, which is to say, by people with a tradition of resistance to tyranny and oppression. The achievement belonged not to those coming from a tradition of tribalism, suttee, thugee, caste system, repression of women, illiteracy, binding, religious oppression, censorship, obscurantism, police statism, warlordism, and slavery, but to Christians and psychological Christians. Their support consisted overwhelmingly of men, women, and children of the same persuasion.

This is not to say that other elements were not present, but the Little Red Hen nature of their support was best put by Dr. Johnson:

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

Psychological bondsmen do not cry, “Hold the line!” and “Ils ne passeront pas!” Paper citizens whose Canadian identity is to be found in their wallet and whose loyalty lies abroad do not attack an open-borders government. The accusatory inversion of “white supremacy” only served to highlight the failure of the latter to step up.

No one was more surprised by their impact than the truckers. Labelled a fringe minority, they found themselves instead in the role of Galahad. Whereas Trudeau’s “wedge, divide, and stigmatize” alienated his own party, the lads united the country. They provided a world-wide rallying-point against the sanitary dictatorship and its “Vax or be fired” Procrustean bed. It was not the Jewish CEO of Pfizer or Pfizrael that came up with the Freedom Convoy. Pierrot took a knee for Black Lives Matter but gave truckers the cold shoulder. When all you have is martial law, everything looks like revolt. The PM, sunk in his own ideology, was the biggest recruiting tool they had. The hypocrisy could not be measured: BLM riots cost $2B in damages whereas the convoy shovelled the streets and fed the homeless. The Covidiots who sat silent while natives burned dozens of churches equated truck horns with terrorism. Media types who months before had led the charge to defund cops were now demanding that the Mounties enforce the law. Those who applauded the bronze Terry Fox wearing a Gay Pride flag were appalled when he was draped with the Maple Leaf. The hive mind that cheered the decapitation of John A.’s statue put a fence around the War Memorial. Enraged veterans dismantled it. Complaints were even made about the children’s slides. It’s hard to convince people you’re a terrorist with a bouncy castle present.

Given the kabuki theatre going on inside the House, a few of us decided to do Shakespeare (Justinius Caesar) on Wellington. “How many ages hence/ Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/ In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” The plays have always been intensely political: recall the production of Julius Caesar after Trump’s election in which an actor with orange hair was assassinated. We dressed in togas covered by Maple Leafs and, with rig roofs as our stage, gestured towards Parliament while belting out lines such as, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?”

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

While hardly the best actors in the world either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited, for the law of writ and liberty, we were the only men.

Pierrot was so unnerved by the Convoy that he decided to make the tool of last resort a tool of first resort and invoked the War Measures Act. His NDP lapdog, Jagmeet Singh, by propping up the minority government proved himself a traitor (if one can apply that label to someone who was never a Canadian in the first place). In the East despotism is ancient, it is liberty that is modern. Criminalizing a protest movement is characteristic of politically primitive populations. When the cops finally moved against the truckers, they did so just days after an attack by axe-wielding natives on the Coastal GasLink construction site in Northern British Columbia. Despite having done millions of dollars’ worth of damage, the attack was treated with the usual sympathy reserved for anyone who wasn’t a white male and barely reported.

Among the myriad good things about the Convoy is that it knocked the residential schools mess off the front pages. This, of course, had the woke mob seeing red and was the occasion for more demonstrations of Canuck self-flagellation and cultural alienation, proving once again that the only good Canadian is a self-loathing Canadian. The fragrant stain on our reputation empowered cultural quislings to fly the flag at half-mast on Canada Day and sternly forbid….

[…] This is just an excerpt from the April 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)