The Looming Tribulation
Have we already run out of time? A round-up of the unreported, misrepresented, and conveniently overlooked.
Kristallnacht, Remembrance Day & the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
On the confluence of this long weekend’s anniversaries, observances and remembrances, I remember that “the past is a foreign country,” as the English novelist L.P. Hartley put it, and yet it’s also an increasingly familiar place.
About Kristallnacht, with the 86th anniversary upon us, don’t avert your gaze from Amsterdam. Here’s a roundup: 'This is what globalize the intifada looks like'. I’m not shocked: Amsterdam bans protests after 'antisemitic squads' attack Israeli soccer fans. I should be, but I’m Canadian.
Across Canada, since the October 7 2023 Simchat Torah massacres, we’ve seen a 670 percent increase in reported antisemitic incidents in Canada: Arson attacks and shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools. At less than two percent of Canada’s population, Jews have been the targets of 70 percent of religion-based hate crimes over the past year.
October 7 changed everything, as I insist on pointing out, burt it’s not just about the Jews. Across the Anglosphere, it’s in large measure about something that occupies almost all the spaces where the democratic “left” used to be. It didn’t begin on October 7, and although there was a clear harbinger in the countrywide riots and the desecration and burning of churches during and after the Year of the Graves, the counterculture left’s intellectual and moral death spiral began about 20 years earlier.
There’s no turning back from this. Whatever you want to call it, it’s not evil because it’s antisemitic. It’s antisemitic because it’s evil, and reluctant as I am to peer through the future’s glass too darkly I dare say that contending with its recrudescence may prove the defining struggle for liberal-democratic civilization for at least a generation to come.
Just as October 7 was an epochal an event, so was the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 35 years ago yesterday. Except that’s not really what happened, writes Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and The Road to Unfreedom.
“It never fell,” Snyder writes here. “The ‘fall of the Berlin Wall’ is a literary device, not a historical event.” And not just because the Solidarnosc movement had taken hold in Poland a decade earlier.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not accomplished by Ronald Reagan or by Pope John Paul II or by the genius of western capitalism. It was pulled down by the people. In the same way, Vietnam did not win the war with the United States because your auntie went to Woodstock. Hippies didn’t end the war. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese guerilla fighters backed by China and Russia won it.
In the case of the former Soviet Union, the senior apparatchiks who ran the Communist Party’s vast industrial enterprises just restructured those institutions as multinational corporations and transformed themselves into chief executive officers who immediately turned to buying up yachts in the Mediterranean and real estate in London, Rome, Paris and Manhattan.
The KGB changed its acronym to the FSB and saw to it that one of its most cunning lieutenant-colonels assumed Stalin’s old mantle, and Vladimir Putin has been in power since 2000.
Snyder: “When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, as we will be summoned to do today, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens. The wall was up. Bad. And then it fell. Good. We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us. And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.”
When you’re done here, do read what Snyder has to say. Freedom doesn’t just happen.
At least the Nazis’ “white poppies” have gone out of fashion
Here in Canada, it will be very surprising if we don’t have to put up with what “pro-Palestine” nuisance-makers are planning in the United Kingdom for tomorrow’s Remembrance Day ceremonies, which are supposed to be about honoring the soldiers who fought and died for our freedom.
You may have noticed versions of this headline popping up over the past couple of days: NDP-Liberal Government Bans Military Chaplains From Reciting Prayers On Remembrance Day or Canadian military again bans prayers at Remembrance Day ceremonies. In the real world: The government has not banned Remembrance Day prayers. There is no prayer ban.
Instead, what we’re saddled with is a squishy directive from the Chaplain General that is understood to have been made necessary by a decision about religious neutrality by the Supreme Court of Canada last October.
The decision caused Chaplain General J.L.G. Bélisle to issue a directive, which he temporarily rescinded owing to protests, that required chaplains to be “inclusive” while leading “public reflections” that must be mindful of the federal “Gender Based Analysis (GBA+) principles” and include elements in both official languages, and local languages “when appropriate.”
But the directive was reinstituted because a committee established to review the new rules never got around to making any recommendations. However silly it is, it isn’t a prayer ban.
Lesson: A “narrative” might be handy, but facts are messy and necessary for true stories.
No prophecy, please. Bets accepted though.
As I mentioned above about my reluctance to peer into the future too closely, it’s my custom to abstain from exercises in clairvoyance. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, let alone what will be happening by the time of Donald Trump’s January 24 inauguration or what fresh hell awaits us in the first innings of Trump’s second term in the White House.
You never know, but some things strike me as not bloody likely, now that the Democrats (they/them) have gotten what they deserved, which is what I was on about this week in the National Post: It’s no sure thing that the United States will ever regain its global standing.
Donald Trump is a vulgar, swaggering braggart and a shameless liar. His re-election to the American presidency Tuesday may well trigger an unprecedented crisis in the functioning of American constitutional democracy. You never know. What appears by all evidence to be inevitable and unstoppable now, though, is the final abdication of American leadership in what used to be called “the free world.”