Canada’s Complicity In Western Decline
by Dimpee Brar
To despise America is to despise Western Civilization.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Basem Boshra, Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News, Canada’s largest publicly funded state media apparatus, instructed his staff to refrain from referring to 9/11 as a “terrorist attack.” Instead, he insists: “the hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania and Manhattan.”
This is an obvious attempt at historical revisionism. Its true intent is pedagogical. A regime’s deeds are always guided by its opinions. And opinions about the United States in Canada have acquired a character that turns what ought to be an attack on Western civilization into something, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, justifiable. The CBC walked back the 9/11 memo over the weekend, but it’s important to understand the standard that produced it.
Boshra appears to be another beneficiary of unfettered Islamic immigration in Canada. Many commentators will therefore argue, with reason, that open borders and naïve multiculturalism have security repercussions. While true, it is insufficient. The deeper question is: into what climate of opinion was this man received?
For decades, Canada has formed its political self-knowledge in direct opposition to the United States. This is especially true of the Left, for whom “anti-American” is synonymous with “progressive” or “enlightened.” It is no exaggeration to say that anti-Americanism is a cornerstone of Canadian public orthodoxy and a potent instrument of successful electoral demagoguery. The career of the current Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is inseparable from this posture.
To be “not American” is, for many Canadians, a moral predicate.
This may seem trivial; a sort of provincial snobbery. But the United States is not merely one nation among many. It is the profoundest political expression of the principles of the West: equality, natural rights, and liberty. To despise America then is to despise Western Civilization. While not obvious, anti-Americanism is how hatred of Western Civilization expresses itself within the West.