John Robson: Attempts to Trivialize Chinese Election Meddling Will Have Serious Consequences

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a town hall meeting with university students in Halifax on Feb. 23, 2023. The Canadian Press/Riley Smith

Commentary

Diversity, we are told monotonously, is what unites us in Canada. And it is good up to a point, indeed vital. But a society that is not united around certain principles, for instance that foreign tyrants subverting our elections is intolerable, will neither survive nor deserve to. So are we?

I see an ominous divide here. On one side are those, generally not fans of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who think his efforts to shrug off very specific intelligence agency warnings are failing before our very eyes. And on the other are those, including many Liberal partisans, who dismiss, mock, and even smear these warnings as racist.

Of course an open society needs to debate things. Including what election meddling happened, if any. But we need to hold certain shared premises or debate is impossible. It’s one of those Aristotelian deals with a golden mean between suffocating uniformity and ruinous disorder. A man who is “all muscle” is as dead as one who is dismembered.

Which brings us to our prime minister’s infamous claim to an American newspaper, days after assuming office, that “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” If taken literally, it means there is no Canada. There might be a place with that name, but there cannot be identifiable “Canadians” when the test of a Canadian is to have nothing in common with other Canadians.

Whether the PM meant us to take his words seriously is unclear. He is not a serious person and immediately contradicted himself with, “There are shared values.” So he contains multitudes, or at least platitudes. But this shallow worldview serves as a barometer of contemporary trends including a postmodern attitude that there is no truth, about anything.

The theoretical difficulties with this view are well known, at least to those who have not succumbed, and I won’t rehash them here or dwell on the tendency of those who most loudly espouse Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to impose conformity, injustice, and cancel culture and fly into a rage if contradicted. (Including requiring counterespionage to be “inclusive, diverse, culturally sensitive,” but not effective.) But I will cite a remark by C.S. Lewis about all philosophical doctrines that deny first principles.

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

It’s like sawing away at the branch on which you sit, politically and socially as well as philosophically. What if we’ve finally gotten through it and only remained suspended in midair because, like some cartoon character now banned as insensitive, we hadn’t looked down… until now?

Remember, there was vigorous debate in the United States in the 1950s about whether there really was widespread Stalinist infiltration of key institutions. Despite stereotypes of a long “McCarthyite” reign of conformist terror, the allegations were first ridiculed, then briefly became orthodoxy before being laughed back to scorn somewhat unjustly. But there was minimal dispute over whether it mattered. The Communist Party and a few nogoodniks said it wasn’t happening but would be cool, and got the raspberry from everyone else.

The 1960s were more dangerous, with a “revolt of the elites” many of whom claimed they lived in Amerika, a fascist Potemkin democracy, where “Burn, baby, burn” was the only decent option. (Which Canadian leftists apparently envied and tried to import.) But when the Weathermen or some nutbar politician went too far, even then, there was a “silent majority” that recoiled in politically effective horror.

What about here and now? When a Canadian artist sings of “Our home on native land” at a major American sports event, do we agree that it’s going too far to call Canada fundamentally illegitimate? And when that same Prime Minister Trudeau said nearly two years ago a genocide was happening now, with him in charge, where was the deafening outcry that he must be deposed at once either for conducting genocide or for spewing poisonous nonsense?

Thus on Chinese Communist election meddling, I grant the right, even duty, of free citizens to question its extent or effectiveness. But if they laugh off subversion as of no importance, or laugh off importance itself for TikTok lulz, then the centre cannot hold. And in those situations, famously, the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity, anarchy is loosed upon the world, innocence is drowned, and something nasty slouches from the void.

Are we there yet?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.