Speech given to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms George Jonas Award Ceremony 21 Oct 2021
by Dr. Francis Christian FRCSEd, FRCSC
Mr. John Carpay President and founder, Justice Centre. Members of the Justice Centre board. Allison Pejovic, Jay Cameron, Michael Alexander, Marty Moore, And all the brilliant lawyers of the JCCF who are as completely invested in the cause of freedom and liberty as I am, Distinguished guests, donors and well-wishers of the Justice Centre, Friends,
Thank you for the privilege and honour of allowing me to address you today.
We live in perilous times. A totalitarian darkness is closing in around us. Our friends and fellow citizens feel the boot of a dystopian tyranny heavy upon them – but as the Gospel according to St. John reminds us, the “Light shines on in the darkness – and the darkness has never mastered it.”
Today, I’d like to tell you about two equal and equally terrifying tyrannies.
Each is well known to those who pay attention to the history of mankind – and each has had its own crushing, cruel and evil day in living and recent memory.
The two tyrannies are tyranny by Communism and tyranny by Capitalism.
“East is East and West is West – and never the twain shall meet” wrote the colonial poet Rudyard Kipling.
And I am here to tell you that in fact Eastern tyranny and Western tyranny do meet – they are strange bedfellows, perhaps; but they are brought together not by love for each other, but by a common, fierce and consummating love of tyranny.
Amidst the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, just over a hundred years ago in November 1917, the one time journalist and now revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin promulgated through a speech, what he called the “Council of the Peoples’ Commissars Decree on the Press.”
According to Lenin’s Decree, “all publications could be censored or destroyed permanently or temporarily only by decision of the Council of People’s Commissars.”
Today, this “Council of the People’s Commissars” are those governing and controlling YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, CBC, CTV, GlobalNews, CNN, BBC … and virtually every news outlet in the Western world.
The next clause in Lenin’s Decree reads, “The present ordinance is of a temporary nature and will be repealed by a special decree as soon as normal conditions of social life set in.”
We all know that the Soviet tyranny in fact lasted more than 70 years.
Today, according to our leaders, the covid lockdowns, the flatten the curves, the dehumanizing masks and even the medical apartheid of the uninjected; all these, were also meant to be “of a temporary nature” and have now predictably morphed into the present monster of Stalinist control of the media, the press, our everyday lives and our freedoms.
Several months into this dystopian madness, there is no sign of the tyranny letting our people go. Even in Israel, there is no sign of the tyranny letting Moses’ people go.
Just as today’s authorities claim that their anti-science, ongoing suppression of individual rights is “for your protection,” the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia” claimed that Lenin’s Decree on the press was “aimed only at protecting the interests of the working class.”
Totalitarian regimes have long recognized that pervasive fear and peer pressure are effective tools with which to divide and control families and children.
In the Soviet Union, all children were indoctrinated and taught to have a higher loyalty to the state than to their families. The atheistic state policy also actively persecuted and bullied children if they were “reported” to have attended church.
Teachers were permitted to give lower marks to these children and their fellow-students were actively encouraged to mock and ridicule their church-attending peers.
In Canada and much of the Western world, these lessons of “divide and rule” have been learned and arguably, been implemented in a preparatory mode for several years.
But the naked, brazen implementation of medical apartheid of the uninjected in our societies and in our schools has been rolled out with such a profusion of speed and arrogance that it may even contribute to the present tyranny’s eventual downfall.
In Stalinist Russia, to be an informer against your neighbour was considered a patriotic duty – but to turn in your own family was considered the greatest good of all.
At least one in 10 Russians in Communist Russia were informers – and as Alexander Solzhenitsyn points out, “They had arrested a neighbour, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed.”
Is it worth reminding the authorities here in Canada that the Nordic country Sweden and the large US state of Florida among other nations and states, have successfully and humanely controlled their covid outbreaks without life-sapping hysterics and without mask mandates, without lockdowns, without distancing and without the medical apartheid of the uninjected? Do the authorities know that early, effective and cheap treatment for covid exists in the peer-reviewed literature and has been used successfully and on a massive scale by huge populations?
In other words, is anyone on the other side listening to the science?
Of course nobody one the other side is listening to the science. In fact, nobody has listened to the science in Canada since the start of this pandemic. You see, totalitarian regimes do not believe they need to listen to or even debate the science. They justify their mandate simply by the raw exercise of power over a subservient population.
Those who believe that Governments and state authorities always have their best interests at heart will be disturbed by the cold statistics of the last century. Governments have been responsible for mass murder and genocide on a scale that far exceeds the numbers killed by war. During the period 1926-1954 and not counting the millions of Soviet citizens killed in the second world war, more than 23 million Russians were killed in the gulags of Siberia, in the numerous state run detention centres and camps and by ad-hoc firing squads.
And now I shall turn to the second of the two tyrannies I introduced at the start of my speech, the capitalistic tyranny.
To those of us brought up in Western, supposedly liberal democracies, to those of us who believe that free speech and its progeny the free press and free scientific debate are inalienable rights and traditions which have historically set us apart from the genocidal Chinese or Soviet communist systems, I must say that these are undoubtedly comforting and consoling systems to believe in.
But they are not beliefs rooted in the stark realities of our recent or remote history. The capitalistic tyranny that is upon us today has a well rehearsed historical pattern that the tyrants of today are repeating.
Capitalism has a tremendous capacity to create wealth – and economists have proved that socialism and communism cannot do that. Indeed Margaret Thatcher’s brilliant parliamentary repartee that “socialists love money … other people’s money” encompasses in one sentence, the politics, economics, philosophy and history of socialism.
Capitalism’s ability to create wealth has also been responsible for grand infrastructure projects that have created our magnificent railroads and highways.
Germany’s Autobahn, now the envy of the world was built by the Nazi regime efficiently and in record time with the methods of a particular brand of capitalism. And Volkswagen cars were the result of Hitler’s personal desire to bring the fruits of capitalism to the people.
If the free flow of capital is one of the defining pillars of capitalism, then Nazi Germany certainly fulfilled this condition by obtaining massive foreign investment and by bringing in wealth and expertise from several other nations. Amongst the numerous American companies that invested in Nazi Germany for example are GM, Standard Oil, Ford motor company, GE, the Chase Manhattan bank and Cocoa-Cola.
Indeed there is detailed documentation of how IBM supplied and maintained the punch card machines of the Nazi concentration death camps in which millions of Jews, gays, Gypsies, Poles and Slavs met their death.
The Nazi regime gave tax breaks to GM subsidiary Opel, one of the main tank manufacturers for the German army. And Henry Ford received the “German Eagle” from the Nazi government – the highest award that could be given to a foreigner.
A few hundred miles away, in Southern Europe and under sunnier skies a charismatic Italian was energetically building his own brand of capitalism.
In his essay on the fascist economy, Jim Powell describes how “Mussolini appointed Alberto De’ Stefani, a man with free market economic views, as his Minister of Finance. De’ Stefani simplified the tax code, cut taxes, curbed spending, liberalized trade restrictions and abolished rent controls. These policies provided a powerful stimulus. Between 1921 and 1925, the Italian economy grew more than 20 percent. Unemployment fell 77 percent.”
Mussolini provided his own definition of fascism, “Fascism should rightly be called corporatism” he wrote, “as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”
Our covid era governments have perfected the fusion of corporate and government power and have reinvented the capitalistic tyrannies of the past to make for a seamless transfer of power from the people to the global capitalistic predators and their political and public health operatives.
Fascism however, is often a retrospective diagnosis. More often it is recognized only after it is well established and its excesses always obscure the means by which it achieved its tyranny – capitalism, corporate largesse, the free flow of capital, privatization and a supposedly free enterprise economy that strangles the life out of small business and the individual.
Capitalism vs socialism or communism is a false dichotomy.
The true choice for Canada and the nations of the world is between freedom and liberty or tyranny and enslavement.
Just as socialism favours a just view of society, capitalism and individualism do favour a free and libertarian view of the world – but in themselves none of these systems can guarantee our freedoms.
Those who put their faith in capitalistic free enterprise must beware, lest their idols of clay turn into the fist of iron.
Many years before the birth of Christ, the prophet Jeremiah exclaimed to his erring nation and with a certain desperation in his eloquent voice, “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
He realized as I suspect most of us do, that unless the heart of man is changed within, no external system of human organization or promised liberty can lead to the new Jerusalem, the city upon a hill.
Throughout recorded history, that city on a hill has been dangled as bait before gullible populations – by revolutionary leaders, by cataclysmic upheavals promising change, by charismatic charlatans who bring democratic credentials into the hallways of crime and by global predators who are able to convince the people that to be preyed upon is in their own best interests!
But if we believe that the Kingdom of God is within us, we must realize that change must start within and with the human heart.
The siren call to tyranny is never far from the human soul – no matter whether you are a capitalist, a communist, a socialist or even a libertarian.
For the heart is indeed “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Britain and America achieved freedom from slavery in different ways – one was peaceful, democratic; the other, democratic but heralded in by civil war.
In both nations, through hard-fought and often bitter battles in the courts, in houses of parliament and houses of Congress, in newspapers and public houses and even on the battlefields of the civil war, it was really a battle for the heart and soul of the nation.
In each case, there was an appeal to the higher calling, the yearning of every human being for liberty and to the conscience embedded in every human heart.
Wilberforce the evangelical Christian could recruit his brilliant orator friend and prime minister William Pitt the younger to his cause by appealing to his highest ideals, his noblest hopes for the British nation.
There is no record that William Pitt shared the evangelical faith of Wilberforce – but there is no doubt of the change of heart that drove his dogged campaign to free the slaves of the empire; or of the manner in which after much struggle and many apparent setbacks, the great majority of the British population also heard the anguished cry of the slave for freedom and answered with a heart that had changed from “the heart of stone to the heart of flesh.”
In America, the freedom that the constitution promised had to be purchased in blood. But the seeds for that battle had been sown and tended and harvested by the Abolitionists and by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
The heart of the nation had been drawn inexorably, kicking and struggling, but irrevocably and resolutely on the path toward that state of the Union in which, in the words of President Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …”
To change the direction and bring about an “about turn” in the life of this now oppressed and benighted nation, we also must appeal not primarily to political systems, politicians, or even to the science.
Nor must we believe that Canadians will readily revert again to their reputation for decency, accommodation and tolerance – these are evanescent virtues that evaporate with the onslaught of seductive, totalitarian solutions presented to a population cowering in fear. Most Germans or Russians or Italians who bought into their respective, genocidal tyrannies were “ordinary blokes.”
Instead, as the JCCF does so effectively, we must always use the law, the political systems and the science not as ends in themselves, but in service of a higher ideal, an appeal to those eternal and encompassing values of liberty, freedom, free speech, free movement and fundamental human rights and freedoms that will outlast political and scientific systems and will eventually win through to a better tomorrow.
We too, as citizens resisting the tyranny, must fight for the heart and soul of this nation – or any nation that is languishing under the shadow of the covid Orwellian boot.
We must use the science – but go far beyond the science to reclaim our freedoms.
As I write this, medical apartheid of the uninjected is being rolled out in a disciplined and coordinated fashion in every rich country of the world. Some nations are a little behind, some a little ahead in the exercise of this monstrous tyranny – but together with the cruel oppression of our children in the schools and the numerous rules on distancing, assembling, masks and travel, life as we once knew it has ceased to exist.
Against the advice of expert vaccine panels, basic science vaccinologists and statisticians, the covid criminal enterprise is preparing to inject our 5 to 11 year old children with an injection they certainly don’t need, but one which has known, severe adverse reactions and unknown long term effects.
Already, many of our teenage children have received this injection for a disease whose risk is vanishingly small for their age group – and statistically almost too small to measure. Numerous serious and life-threatening side effects from the injection have already been experienced. The tragedy is mind-numbing.
These are the great and present evils that we must resist with every fibre of our being – with mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation and with every legal measure still available to us.
Much more than science and its demise is at stake. The very heart and soul of the nation must be stoked back to life and liberty.
And we will never submit to the tyranny. We will resist at every turn – and we will prevail.
The undying quest for freedom and liberty can never be suppressed forever and every tyranny has a defined life span.
Our battle continues on several fronts, including the ability we have to counter in numerous ways great and small, the main stream propaganda media and Pravda press of Canada.
Even in the darkest days of the Soviet tyranny in Russia, small and makeshift, secret publications sprang up in multiple, major cities.
Under great peril to themselves and working feverishly to deadlines, in small, poorly lit and heated rooms and most often with no more than a few, manual typewriters for equipment, this alternate press was printing booklets and pamphlets, even small books. Excerpts from the Bible, the great works of Russian literature – including Boris Pasternak’s immortal and lyrical novel, “Dr. Zhivago” – and other banned material were typed/printed, then smuggled into the street and alleyways of Russian towns and cities. This alternate, underground press has since received the now celebrated name, “samizdat” (which is Russian for clandestine press).
I’d like to salute this alternate, Samizdat press in Canada and around the world that has been defying the covid criminal enterprise for several months. Demonized by the propaganda main stream media, demonetized by our complicit, capitalist financial systems and persecuted at every turn, they have continued to defy the tyranny – and they are getting stronger.
The alternative Canadian newspaper “Druthers” is being printed and distributed directly to more than 20,000 Canadians every month, bypassing the propaganda media. Rebel News and the Western Standard may not have started a rebellion yet … but they have relentlessly pursued the newsworthy story in the highest traditions of investigative journalism. And there are hundreds of dedicated channels, online live video shows and publications in English and in French which are slaying the dragons of regime lies and propaganda every day. They are too numerous to list – and our debt to them is incalculable.
When the nightmare of this tyranny is over and Canadians are “free at last,” the Samizdat press will be acknowledged to have been an indispensable pillar of our struggle. And they will undoubtedly qualify for a future George Jonas award.
Many of our fellow citizens have taken inspiration and a lead from the successful acts of defiance of the Chicago police force and the pilots of SouthWest Airlines – and our cousins to the South are in many ways leading this world wide, existential fight for freedom.
The multiple, small and peaceful acts of peaceful civil disobedience in Canada are at “take off” stage – and are poised to coalesce and escalate to a mass movement for the soul of our nation.
The JCCF has not let up in their relentless battle for truth and freedom and are repeatedly striking at the heart of the tyranny with their team of brilliant lawyers. The wheels of justice may not be spinning with speed yet, but the onslaught of righteous legal actions now before the courts cannot but be responsible for the creation of an unstoppable momentum toward freedom.
My friends, it is my privilege to be associated with you in this consequential and generational fight for liberty – a fight that will determine the destiny of millions of our fellow human beings.
A fight for our children and for future generations.
And we will win.
In the words again, of the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel: “The Light shines on in the darkness – and the darkness has never mastered it.”
