Remembering Who We Are

Towards a Neo-Traditional Western Civilization-State

Michal Kvac

I. The Loyal Sons of Empire

When Justin Trudeau smugly proclaimed that Canada is the first post-national state, I wanted to bridle. I really did. It isn’t normally hard for me to do so. Everything Castro’s by-blow says grates on me. The rainbow princeling’s mere aspect is like jalapeño juice on my eyes.

But I couldn’t, because in this one case, he was right. Or almost right.

Canada’s status as a post-national state isn’t a recent development, brought on by the firehose of immigration from the Middle East, China, and the Indian subcontinent. This state of affairs dates back to the very beginning, to long before Canada was confederated as a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire in 1867. In fact, describing Canada as post-national is incorrect only insofar as a ‘post’ implies that there was a previous era in which Canada was a nation-state. Which there wasn’t.

The words ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are so often said in compound that they have become synonymous to many. In fact, the nation-state is a very specific political arrangement, in which a given territory occupied by a super-majority of a certain nation is under the independent control of that nation, which in turn erects a state to serve the interests of that nation. A nation is essentially the same thing as a tribe or an ethnos: a group defined by common ancestry, together with a language or dialect, and its particular traditions, religion, etc. This is entirely distinct from a state, which is simply a governmental apparatus. It is quite possible for a nation to have no state whatsoever, for example in the case of neolithic tribes, or diaspora peoples such as the Jews before 1948. It is also quite possible for a state to be uncoupled from any particular nation, for example in the case of an imperial system.

So, Canada. From the beginning Canada was an awkward coupling between two founding nations that despised one another – the Anglo-Canadians, centred in Ontario, and the Quebecois in Quebec. There were also the various aboriginal nations with whom Canada shares territory, although unlike in the case of New Zealand’s Maori they were never formally incorporated into the system of government.

The Quebecois are a nation in the truest sense of the term. The seven million living Quebecois are all descended from a few thousand settlers who came over in the 17^th century. Initially it was just a handful of fur traders, all men of course because who in their right mind would send the fairer sex to the dreary, frozen hellscape of the fur trading outposts on the St. Lawrence river? After a few decades however, the French belatedly realized that their voyageurs were having a fair bit of sex with the local women, and breeding an entire tribe of half-breeds, known now as the Métis, and who are treated to this day as being indistinguishable from other First Nations for legal purposes (despite the fact that the French manifestly predated their existence). It was therefore decided to send over several hundred ladies, Les Filles du Roi or the King’s Daughters. They filed off their ships, stood in a line, and the men walked up to claim them and lead them one-by-one into the waiting chapel, where they were summarily wed. How’s that for government-issued girlfriends?

"Women coming to Quebec in 1667, in order to be married to the French Canadian farmers", watercolour by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale. I sincerely doubt it looked anything like this this depiction from the late 19^th century.

Les Filles du Roi were the last substantial influx of settlement from the Old World into Quebec. Since their arrival, all growth has been through natural increase. Until the sexual revolution the Quebecois were known to breed like incontinent Catholic rabbits, a source of considerable anxiety to their Anglican counterparts.

Ontario, or Upper Canada as it was known before confederation, had a rather different settlement history. The largest single group of settlers were refugees from the treacherous infamy of the thirteen breakaway colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America, a collection of squalid plantations and shipping harbours styling themselves as the upstart United States of America. Those who could not stomach this democratic treason, who preferred to remain faithful to God, King, and Empire, abandoned the rebellious colonies for a harsher but more honest and virtuous life north of the Great Lakes. These were the United Empire Loyalists. If you travel around Ontario, you see their memory everywhere – schools named ‘Loyalist’, every other street in every town named King or Queen or Princess or after one or another of the lordly colonels and majors who formed the early colonial administration. Their stiff dedication to tradition and high church moral virtue gave Ontario its character – polite, prim, and suspicious of anything too ambitious or fun which might upset the social order. The United Empire Loyalists were like Puritans, only boring and uptight. Where America’s greedy libertines dedicated themselves to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the stolid UELs founded a land based on Peace, Order, and Good Government.

In contrast to America’s screaming fist-fight with its father and subsequent departure from the household in fury and bitterness, Canada patiently waited until mom judged that it was good and ready to move out on its own. That’s the mythology at least ... a decidedly less inspiring myth than the Revolutionary War’s heroic struggle against brute tyranny and impossible odds. The truth may be not just uninspiring but downright cynical. I read once¹ that Canada’s independence – which came just two years after Lincoln’s years of slaughter re-united the Union – was pursued with such sudden urgency because Westminster wished to prevent the Russian Empire’s newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway from connecting via a bridge across the Bering Strait to America’s freshly laid Transcontinental Railroad. Talks were apparently in progress between the Czar’s government and the Senate to just this effect. A rail link connecting Eurasia with North America would have made Britannia’s rule of the waves irrelevant to world trade. The shotgun marriage between Ontario and Quebec was therefore hastily arranged; the Hudson’s Bay Company, a fur trading concern that was to British North America what the East India Company was to the Raj, and which had owned essentially all of Canada’s wild and inhospitable interior, was induced to sell its lands to Ottawa at a bargain price; and British Columbia brought into the fold in order to complete the geopolitical cockblock.

Regardless of the motivations underlying Canada’s establishment as a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire, in time the UELs became a nation unto themselves, albeit one that barely recognized itself as such. Where the Quebecois had the long history of traditions developed in relative isolation, common ancestry, and the solidarity induced by their subjugation by the despised British Crown, the UELs saw themselves as being intimately intertwined with the Canadian state, which itself was an extension of their beloved Albion. And oh, how they loved it. When the Great War broke out, their young men turned out in their thousands to volunteer for the trenches. The War that Didn’t End All Wars broke the old order in Europe, but in Canada’s national mythology – which is to say the national mythology of Anglo-Canadians – it was in the blood-soaked mud of Vimy Ridge that Canada came of age, when its hard, strong frontiersmen cracked open a German fortress that had stymied their soft cousins from the British Isles. The horrors of trench warfare did nothing to dampen Anglo-Canadian enthusiasm when the Empire declared war on Germany a second time less than a generation hence. No draft has ever been necessary in Canada. The ideals of duty to the sovereign and service to the Empire were so deeply embedded in their minds that it seemed nothing could break their loyalty.

Nothing, that is, except for the disappearance of the Empire.

Jinho Bae

II. An Orphan Nation

Which was exactly what happened when the second great European Civil War had finished smashing the continent to pieces. In exchange for logistical support, Roosevelt had extracted a promise from the City of London’s brandy-soaked bulldog to end the preferential trading agreement among British imperial possessions. The Empire on Which the Sun Never Set had been the world’s first globe-spanning free trade zone, one that the USA was locked out of. With the trading system removed, the Empire could no longer pay for itself; mere sentiment being less of an inducement than money, the Empire unravelled in a few years, evaporating almost as fast as the Soviet Union.

For the Quebecois, this meant nothing at all. Fuck the British. For the UELs, however, it was a catastrophe. Their entire identity as a people had been inseparable from the Empire. They defined themselves as the people who were loyal to the Empire, no matter what. Without an Empire to be loyal to, who even were they?

That debate had been raging for decades already before I was born. It raged for decades after, with no clear answer ever emerging. The best the UELs were able to do was to define themselves as not-Americans. Where America has McDonald’s, Canada has Timmie’s; where Americans play baseball, Canadians play hockey²; where Americans watch football, Canadians watch Canadian football³; where Americans go bankrupt individually for terrible medical care, Canadians go bankrupt collectively for atrocious healthcare. This apophatic definition of Canadians as ‘Americans who aren’t American’ had always been latent in UEL identity – it is difficult to distinguish oneself from a neighbouring people with a shared language and religion, whose very accent is so similar that it can be difficult for even locals to detect the difference⁴. But with the disappearance of the Empire, there was nothing left.

The UEL identity crisis manifested itself in a number of ways. One of the earliest was the adoption of a new flag. Out was the old Red Ensign, with its Union Jack in the upper left and coat of arms in the middle; in was the spray of crimson swords on a bed of ice, lying between two oceans of blood⁵. Then there’s the national preoccupation with identifying and propagating ‘Canadian’ culture in the form of state-supported broadcasts of state-funded period dramas, content regulations mandating the radios play a certain percentage of Canadian bands, and promotion of writers not just because they happen to have been born in Canada but because they write about ‘Canadian’ things, whatever those are supposed to be.

America, you’ll note, does none of those things. Americans know quite well who they are. To be a great American writer, it is not necessary to write about America. Or even to be born there. But when American writers do write about America, they write about the dusty violence of gunslingers trading shots with corrupt sheriffs and wild injuns in the Wild West, about hard-bitten detectives unravelling the dark plots of crime lords in the windswept midnight rain of Chicago. America’s long and violent history provides ample material for excitement and adventure. Canada’s writers, by contrast, write about explorers surviving the frozen wilderness. If you’re lucky. They’re just as likely to write about farmers doing gripping things like farming. Which is fine I guess, but personally I don’t find Man Versus Snow or Man Versus Soil to be nearly as compelling as Man Versus Man. Violence is always more interesting to read about.

Not that Canada hasn’t seen its share of violence. The French-Indian war and the conquest of Quebec, the Red River Rebellion, the Fenian incursions, to say nothing of the foreign adventures in the Boer War, the Great War, WWII, Korea, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan. We’ve got our share of great warriors, generals, air aces. But we don’t like to talk about them. We’re vaguely embarrassed by our martial past. We’d rather make movies about Anne of Green Gables.

At this point I can feel my Canadian readers starting to get angry at me. And you know how it is when Canadians get angry. I’m not your buddy, guy. I’m not your guy, friend. I’m not your friend, pal. I’m not your pal, buddy....

But I can’t help it. It’s in my nature as a Canadian to be self-deprecating.

The truth is, though, as much as it seems like I’ve been having a go at Canada here, that there’s something almost unfathomably based at the deep heart of the Anglo-Canadian cultural tradition. It’s barely visible under all the cruft of late-stage bureaucracy and terminal liberalism, because that foundation is entirely incompatible with the world of globohomo. But it’s there when you dig. Peace, order, and good government. Canada’s founding ideals are in hierarchy, tradition, respect for the sovereign, quiet competence and steady industriousness ... not the brash anarchy of the American gunslinger yelling “Them’s fightin’ words!”, but the firm steel in the Mountie’s voice as he makes “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t let you do that,” far more intimidating than it has any right to be. When we took Vimy, it wasn’t by blindly rushing the machine-guns. It was when we figured out that if our troops walked just a few steps behind the artillery barrage, the enemy would have to keep their heads down until we were right on top of them ... a tactic that required the sort of precision and cold-blooded disregard of the instant annihilation lying just a few steps away that one might associate more with battalions of T-800s than with men of flesh and blood.

However.

Deracinated by the loss of the Empire that birthed and defined them, the UELs have forgotten this tradition almost entirely. Anglo-Canadians are so far into the unresolved identity crisis precipitated by the collapse of the British Empire that they’ve forgotten they were even having an identity crisis. They don’t know who they are, and this national amnesia combines with the historical fact that Canada never really was a nation-state to make Canada the perfect laboratory for globalist social engineering schemes.

Did you know that multiculturalism was invented, and first adopted as official government policy, in Canada? That happened under Trudeau pere, the Marxist who slithered his way into the Prime Minister’s Office in the 70s, and whose nominal son is now completing the cultural demolition that his father began.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Those native land acknowledgements you’ve been seeing all over on university campuses? You’re welcome for those. Insanely restrictive tobacco regulations? We’ve been at the forefront. The legalization of Moron Jane? Yep, that’s us. COVID tyranny? No one went harder for longer. Freezing bank accounts to shut down a political protest? You saw it here first.

Not that these things aren’t happening all over the world. They are. But they meet essentially no resistance in Canada, so the Canadian government is able to engage in such social engineering experiments to its heart’s content, working out the kinks in a given tactic or policy before their colleagues in other countries roll out the fresh new horror elsewhere.

It is not only me who dislikes this. The policies of the Canadian government are broadly unpopular. Canadians dislike mass immigration, their cities being given over to an unrelenting stream of foreigners whose sheer volume makes them unassimilable. They intuit that multiculturalism, this idea that we can have any sort of unity in a centreless plurality, is a lie. Once when I was a boy, at army cadet camp, we were asked where we were from. One by one we replied – Sri Lanka, China, India, Portugal ... in this spirit I said England, for I thought we were being asked about our ancestry. Wrong! we were told, You are all Canadian! And yet recently I was having dinner with an old friend, a second-generation immigrant from India, who told me that from the very beginning her parents impressed upon her that she was brown first, and Canadian a distant second. The hyphenated have no interest in being Canadian ... whatever ‘Canadian’ even means. And why would they, when it has become an empty signifier?

The rising tide of resistance to globalization has for the last decade or so been largely found in nationalism. Nationalism – and I mean here ethnonationalism, which is the only really coherent version of this ideology – takes the genetic and cultural legacy bequeathed by a people’s ancestors, wrapped around the bond to the land that incubated that people, as the foundation of politics. The purpose of the state is to protect and cultivate the nation; to defend its borders, preserving the nation’s territory; and on that territory, to grow the nation, educate it, preserve it, enrich it. Nationalism has gotten a bad name for itself, thanks to certain overly aggressive versions of it which through the twentieth century attempted to expand one nation at the expense of others. But there is nothing intrinsic to the ideology that demands a warlike stance towards one’s neighbours. One may love one’s own family without hating the families of others; one may insist on the sanctity of one’s home and land, its exclusive use for the benefit of one’s own kin, without also demanding the land of others.

For all the reasons described above, nationalism has always been an awkward fit for Anglo-Canadian dissidents. Canada was never a nation-state, but rather an imperial project, a fake country like Belgium or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anglos were an ersatz imperial people, tasked with defending and administering this project. Are we to RETVRN to the crumbled ruins of a vanished empire? The touristy kitsch of the Mounties’ Musical Ride? Fealty to a feckless and hollow crown that could not care less about us, or any of its subjects?

You see the problem: the national identity of the Anglo-Canadian nation is wrapped up with something that no longer exists. We cannot simply go back. That would be as fake as men in wigs and as gay as pride.

A nation without an identity is no nation at all, and soon ceases to exist. But an identity cannot simply be manufactured out of whole cloth. The kludge of liberal platitudes, vague feel-good statements, and ‘we’re not Americans’ that the Canadian state has cobbled together has proved utterly inadequate to the task, and has in any case been repurposed to the aims of globalism, indeed weaponized against Canada’s core founding populations. Identity must be rooted in something real. It must be an organic thing, something that has grown naturally over time. This may be the unconscious motivation behind the recent foregrounding of the First Nations in the Canadian political consciousness – at least what they have is real, and the Canadian state can wear it like war paint to mask its underlying hollowness.

Jeff Bartzis

III. Liberal Internationalism Versus the Civilization-States

Alain de Benoist recently wrote a very interesting essay entitled The Dawn of Civilizational States. It’s already behind the paywall, but

Niccolo Soldo

featured it in his latest Saturday Review, and you can find enough excerpts and commentary there to get a sense of Benoist’s argument, which is that civilization-states are the best remedy to the tyranny of liberal internationalism. However, there’s quite a bit more in the essay itself, which is well worth reading in full.

By liberal internationalism Benoist means essentially the current globohomo ‘rules-based order’: the system that enshrines individual human rights, free market capitalism, procedural democracy, and so on, and demands everyone else do the same. This is not the same as liberalism: liberal internationalism is predicated on the universality of liberal values, which its proponents take as axiomatic, and therefore seek to impose via financial, diplomatic, cultural, and if necessary military pressure. This yields a paradox, in that liberal internationalism is intolerant of any culture that it deems insufficiently tolerant. Russia and the Islamic world must be made to conform to the dictates of feminism and gay rights; China must become more democratic; Hungary and Japan must be more willing to accept mass immigration.

While he goes unmentioned, Alexander Dugin’s critique of liberalism is implicit in Benoist’s essay. Dugin considers liberalism to be a sort of universal acid, emanating from the imperative to liberate humanity from all unchosen bonds. The liberal conception of the human is as a fully autonomous island, an atom whose identity is purely a creation of its own unique will. Ties of language, religion, nationality, family, history, all that which is inherited without choice, is seen as an imposition. Ultimately, Dugin argues, this must culminate in liberation from biology itself. Transgenderism already seeks to free humanity from the gender binary. In the near future, transhumanism will separate humanity from humanity itself – individuals will not even belong to the same species, for every individual will be a species of one. This is not merely a matter of cybernetic limbs and bionically enhanced senses. One’s memories, one’s very personality, are to a large degree imposed by biology; transhumanist technologies could enable one to surgically alter even these fundamental aspects of our being at the level of basic neurology, such that we can each become entirely different people from who we were before ... and can become different people again, as often as we like, as the whims of fashion and the dictates of market efficiency demand. We should not ignore that gender affirming surgery has not yet succeeded in transmogrifying a man into a woman, but has only yielded vivisected abominations and broken souls; we should keep this record in mind as we contemplate the promises of transhumanism.

Nothing is free in this world. As

Nick Cole

pointed out in his science fiction novel Strange Company, this is a sentiment that can be taken a few ways. Nothing is the only thing that is truly free; if one attains ultimate freedom, one ultimately becomes nothing. You get what you pay for.

Many regard this future with horror, and many more regard the more immediate impositions of the liberal internationalists with instinctive resentment. Liberation from all unchosen bonds means liberation from that which they most deeply value. It means rendering them into human atoms in a howling cultural void that drowns out the songs of their ancestors and blows them about powerlessly on the winds of the all-consuming market. And of course, for those not native born to Western liberalism, liberal internationalism means subjugation to the West – masked imperial hegemony, as Benoist accurately characterizes it.

Benoist posits that the nation-state has proven itself to be utterly defenseless against liberal internationalism. The first problem with the nation-state is that it is too small to be self-sufficient. The sheer scale of the global economy makes any local resistance difficult to sustain. The second problem is that it is too chauvinistic. How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? It is only too easy for the liberal internationalists to seduce the young of even the most reactionary of nations – see the youth of Poland or Hungary, for example. The siren song of liberation has a powerful appeal, for it offers the whole world, and asks in exchange only that you abandon that which is uniquely yours.

Another problem which Benoist implies, but does not develop, is that nationalism is itself essentially globalism on a smaller scale. Within its territorial boundaries it homogenizes the language and culture, gradually erasing the particularism of constituent regions. The population are citizens of the national state first, and scions of their specific tribes, villages, towns, cities, and provinces a distant second. It’s probably no accident that John Locke articulated the precepts of liberalism in the same period, and in the same part of the planet, that saw the Peace of Westphalia. Absolute self-determination for nations and individuals within nations follow from the same principle that absolute self-determination is absolutely good.

Civilization-states are a different story entirely, which Benoist argues have the potential to successfully roll back the tide of liberal hegemony. The first difference with a nation-state is simple scale. A civilization-state is a regional power large enough and strong enough to form what Carl Schmitt called a Großraum or ‘great space’ that can remain effectively autarkic with respect to the global economy. Thus, for example, the financial sanctions that America placed on Russia had essentially no effect: Russia’s real economy was more than large enough to absorb the temporary setback of being locked out of Western trade. A state with natural resources as vast as Russia’s cannot be starved out. A state with a population, and therefore a manufacturing capacity, as large China’s cannot be bullied.

The most important difference, however, is that a civilization-state places its long history and distinct culture at the centre of its political life, conceiving as the purpose of the state the maintenance and organic development of the traditional principles that define, for its civilization and its civilization alone, the good life. What is right for China is right because it is what is right for the Chinese, which is right for the Chinese because they are Chinese; likewise for Russia, or India, or Iran, or Turkey, or the incipient Caliphate. This seems tautological because it is irreducible. Rather than attempting to justify itself on the basis of universal principles, the civilization-state conceives of itself as an organic, natural entity, something evolved and grown through a historical process rather than designed according to and justified on the basis of disembodied cerebral abstractions. The tree’s purpose is merely to be a tree; what is right for the tree – the soil, climate, and light it requires – is right because that is what it requires. It needs no justification beyond itself.

The world order conceived of by the civilization-states is multipolar: a globe portioned out to the regional powers, each the guardian of the distinct civilizational tradition that they separately embody. This is in contrast to the unipolar model of liberal internationalism, in which the various nation-states all individually adopt similar market-oriented economic policies, parliamentary democracies, human rights legislation, environmental regulations, and so on, becoming increasingly indistinguishable from one another, all presided over by the financial oligarchs and their infrastructure of supranational trade organizations and non-governmental bureaucracies. The liberal system, based on the dissolution of unchosen bonds, results in atomization all the way down to the individual, leading to local powerlessness and therefore the centralization of power and wealth. The multipolar system, by contrast, is based precisely on those unchosen bonds of species, sex, race, language, and geography; it therefore leads to an intensification of local identity. If liberalism promises to ultimately annihilate our humanity entirely, multipolar civilizationalism promises not only to safeguard it, but to make us more vividly human over time.

Benoist’s essay draws a sharp contrast between the emerging multipolar world of the rising civilization-states, and the current order of nation-states enervated by liberal internationalism. Another way of putting that is ‘the West versus the rest’, because liberal internationalism has become synonymous with the West. The possibilities for the future of the West are, however, implicit within this framework. We can find a home there, too. Moreover, we should want to ... indeed it is the only way to save ourselves.

Klaus Pillon

IV. The Return of the Prodigal Son

As Dugin has pointed out, liberalism must ultimately destroy the West, simply because liberalism dissolves all identities in the long run. Look around you – it’s already happening. Indeed the disease is at an advanced stage. We Westmen are the first and most abused victims of liberalism. The rest of the world looks on in undisguised disgust at our genuflection to perversity and self-abasement before everyone not ourselves. They’re happy to take advantage of our madness, but they’ve no intention of taking part in it.

Beyond being necessary to save ourselves, abandoning liberal internationalism will be forced on us by historical necessity in short order. De-dollarization is advancing rapidly. As the American dollar is abandoned as a reserve currency and as a standard of global exchange, the power of the American empire that backs up the liberal order will decline rapidly. At the same time, Russia and China are rising fast. With them come India, Iran, Brazil, Turkey ... all of whom are quickly reorienting their trading, diplomatic, and military relationships away from the liberal order, and towards their new Russian and Chinese allies. The multipolar world order is already essentially a fait accompli.

The West has everything required to form a civilization-state of its own. Considering only the English-speaking peoples, we occupy or control 28.1 million square kilometres of land – almost 19% of the Earth’s total land mass, and more than Russia (17.1 million square km) and China (9.6) combined. We control almost all of North America, the entirety of Australia, the islands of New Zealand, and the islands of Britain. An Anglo civilization-state would have outposts in both northern and southern as well as eastern and western hemispheres, in contrast to every other power, which are all much more geographically constrained. The strategic advantages of this arrangement are obvious. The combined population of the English-speaking countries, around 470 million, is nothing like a majority of the world’s 7.9 billion ... but 6% is not nothing, either.

A civilization-state is more than just a generous swath of clay with some people on it, however. It must also be organized around its own, unique, and sacred tradition.

The logical nucleus of the Western civstate is the continental United States. America, however, is organized at its most fundamental level around the precepts of liberalism. It is the individualist nation par excellence. Liberal internationalism is essentially an American political project, a reductio at absurdum turned mad and vicious. American ‘conservatism’ is simply classical liberalism, as American conservatives are the first to tell any who will listen. This does not mean that there are no Americans incapable of understanding traditionalism – neoreactionary thought, as for example in the cases of

Curtis Yarvin

,

Theophilus Chilton

, Jim, or Charles Haywood, has been making the case against liberalism for some time now, and not without any impact on the culture. Still, it is an uphill battle. Liberalism is to Americans what water is to fish.

When the globalist order has collapsed, as is already happening, America will be left dazed and confused. Universal repudiation of liberalism’s universal values repudiates their universality. This is not something the American political establishment, including the satraps governing their vassal states, are equipped to understand. The ruthless desperation with which a Turbo-America untethered from all limits of ethics or sanity seeks to impose pride parades on a recalcitrant world is the manifestation of this incomprehension. Soon enough, historically speaking, America will no longer have the wherewithal to impress its universal values on humanity. That will be a dangerous moment; liberalism will be tempted to turn inwards on itself, to impose itself on its captive populations with redoubled ferocity. Where the French king gave his settlers wives, will Washington demand its men take the stunning and brave to bed?

In the midst of this psychosis, a lost people will search for a way out, a way to put things back together.

That’s where Canada comes in.

The Canadian political tradition has nothing to do with liberalism. Canada was born to protect traditionalism on the frontier, to carry the old world into the new, not to tear down what came before but rather to build on top of it, grow it, elaborate it. It is precisely this primacy of organic tradition that is the central organizing principle and raison d’etre of the civilization-state. Canada is much too small to be that state itself, but the high toryism which permeates its culture can serve as the ideological seed crystal around which to nucleate a renewal of the West ... not as the mere vehicle for an ideology, but as simply what it is, one unique civilization among many.

Some might read this and imagine I advocate for some form of authoritarian totalitarianism, a rigid tradition that allows no change. Chesterton’s fence, however, need not be a cage. It is merely the recognition that what came before evolved for a reason, and should not be torn down merely because we have forgotten what that reason was. While liberalism was born in the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxon political tradition has always included a respect for what was received from our ancestors. It is not revolutionary but evolutionary: England did not cut off the head of its king, but instead constrained him by custom, adding democratic elements to the monarchy rather than replacing the crown entirely. The English common law is not designed from above, but from below, by the gradual accumulation of precedent from the decisions of thousands of jurists spread across time and space.

Still, while the Anglo-Saxon political tradition is not only liberal, it is also liberal. It would be foolish to forget that, and indeed, Canada never has. The peace, order, and good government on which Canada was founded is not opposed to freedom, but its guarantor. Staying rooted in tradition makes us strong and hardy; liberalism keeps us supple. Without the former we would be as brittle as a dead branch; absent the latter, we would flop to the ground like an unsupported vine. This tradition of tradition intertwined with liberalism is much older than Canada itself. The freeholding thegn could use his land as he saw fit, but was expected to answer the call of his liege lord when war darkened the horizon. Anglo-Saxon political philosophy has always balanced local and individual autonomy with respect for authority and hierarchy. The best soldiers are those who understand the mission, and can figure out what to do themselves when obstacles inevitably arise. It is no accident that one of Canada’s oldest political parties are the seemingly oxymoronic Progressive Conservatives.

Canada certainly cannot impose traditionalism on the wider Anglosphere. It is too small. It must teach by example, and before it can do that it must first remember itself. As the American empire collapses into chaos and destitution, Canadians will need to get their own house in order. That begins with reminding ourselves about who we really are: not milquetoast market liberals mewling about the harm principle and the veil of ignorance, but the iron-willed settlers who carried the greatest of all civilizations into a frozen and unforgiving land, and planted their civilization in that new land, renewing it while simultaneously preserving it. This is not about Canada, but about the West as a whole, about legacy carried forward from the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Our task in reminding ourselves of our role as the guardians of tradition is a task for the whole of our wide-flung people. I would like to mention in particular here

Imperium Press

, whose founder I recently found out is Canadian. They have done very good work, providing and popularizing high quality editions of Beowulf, the Poetic Edda, Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City, and collecting the Folktales in the Indo-European Tradition, all of which you should read to know who you are. When I say that Canada was meant to preserve tradition, it is in this spirit that I mean it.

My suggestion here is that the nation of Canada – and by this I mean Anglo-Canadians, the descendants of the United Empire Loyalists and the various European groups that have assimilated into them – can save itself by gathering again around the banner of tradition. Not merely the symbols of the vanished British Empire, the crown and the red dress uniforms and the coats of arms and what-not; these were merely the contemporary manifestations of a much older tradition, a cultural transmission that goes back to the first Aryan conquerors, and which draws together so many of the disparate threads of their filial peoples. For what is Britain but the land in which the Celtic, Roman, Germanic, and Norse elements came to mix together? What is English but the island creole of these peoples? What is Canada, but the preservation of all these threads as they extended into a new world? And where are we going but headlong into a new world?

In the world I see, the West has rid itself entirely of its universalist pretensions. It no longer seeks to impose its values on the world, for it recognizes that what works for Westmen does not necessarily work for others; and while this does not bring peace, for there will always be friction with rivals, we are at least spared the guarantee of war and the infamy of tyrannical ideological bigotry. Likewise, the renewed West no longer assumes that its ways can be adopted by anyone who comes, and therefore does not pretend that it can continue itself with other peoples’ babies. Migration in this world is free and easy between compatible countries – North America, Australia, New Zealand, the British Isles, and Western and Northern Europe. It is exceedingly difficult and therefore rare from anywhere else: those who wish to resettle from incompatible civilizations must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the Westmen that they can internalize the West, not merely mouth a few slogans, memorize some historical facts, and master a language, but become Western to the depths of their souls ... a nearly impossible task, and deliberately so.

This renewed West has ceased trying to be all things to all peoples, and therefore becoming nothing – the off-beige AirBnB of civilizations. It is rather focused on the further and higher development of what it has always been, bringing forth its own inner genius as by definition only it can do. It is a West that has stopped apologizing for itself, because it is no longer sorry for what it is. It is a West that is happy to let the Chinese build their glittering cities, glad that the Russians are erecting glorious Orthodox cathedrals of glowing green glass and golden domes, thrilled with wonder as crystalline mosques spring in the oasis metropoli of Arabia, for this West has ceased trying to hector them into aping it, and focused instead on rebuilding itself according to its own best nature, banishing the solitary ennui of suburban housing developments for Shires of half-timber homesteads surrounded by gardens and laughing children, and tearing down its blank-faced office towers to build shimmering chromium Rivendells whose soaring Gothic beauty is the envy of humanity.

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J. Otto Szatmari

1. I believe it was from

Matthew Ehret

although I’m too lazy to dig up the essay as it was some time ago.

2. Of course Canadians also play baseball, and Americans also play hockey....

3. Which has subtly different rules, and no, don’t ask me what the differences are, I neither know nor care.

4. Until, that is, a Canadian says ‘about’, which sounds like ‘aboot’. Or so I’m told. Not a single Canadian, including myself, can actually here ‘aboot’ when we say ‘about’, but I’ve had enough Europeans, who’d never previously met me, mark me out as Canadian the moment I said ‘about’, which they universally claimed was pronounced as ‘aboot’, that I suppose South Park must have been onto something.

5. The red bands on Canada’s flag really are supposed to represent the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They’re red because making them blue would have made the flag red, white, and blue. Which was too much like the USA, Great Britain, and France. And yes that reasoning is embarrassingly silly in many ways, which is why I prefer to think of it as ‘two oceans of blood surrounding a spray of bloody swords’ than weirdly red oceans around a stupid leaf.