Our values, truthfully, are indeed better

In the ghastly light of the carnage in Aleppo can we revisit the condescending dismissal of “Canadian values” that has inexplicably become popular? There is a reason such things do not happen here and it is not geography.

Consider Wednesday’s National Post story about an attack on an Ahmadiyya mosque in Chakwal, Pakistan, following a petition claiming “infidels” had taken it over so, unless the authorities stomped on these loathsome heretics, “we will be forced to take extreme measures to liberate this mosque.” Ho hum, we are tempted inconsistently to say, such things happen all the time over there in the “international community.” But one signatory of that petition seems to have been Canadian, prompting a spokesman for Ahmadiyya Muslims in Canada to say “We don’t want stuff like that here” and call violence against religions minorities “un-Canadian.”

Does anyone care to dissent? Would anyone like to raise a hand, or a fist, and say that we do want it here, and should beat the stuffing out of any wretches who don’t accept our lovely theology without being battered with rocks?

I didn’t think so. But why not? Why don’t we have laws like theocratic Pakistan’s forbidding religious minorities from declaring their faith, building places of worship or making public calls to prayer, and violent mobs using “direct action” on anyone who wants, say, to hold their own opinion as to whether Mirza Ghuylam Ahmad was the Mahdi?

I can of course produce theoretical arguments from Locke or Mill about the sanctity of individual conscience and the practical benefits of free speech. But the reason we don’t have these laws and mobs here is not that such ideas exist out there in the ether. It’s that they are woven into the culture, as the birthright of everyone born here and the acquired right of all who choose Canada, so that we recoil from those who dissent from them … or used to.

Lately the notion that our way of life is better, or that we even have one, has been under radical attack. It is a bit rich for the left to whine that Donald Trump incarnates a confused orthodoxy, imposing values they deny exist.

The weird dance of the postmoderns was neatly captured by our prime minister’s declaration to an American publication that “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”

You might think he was just being goofy, denying our core identity, then describing it. But his words matter, because they wrongly imply that these values are not uniquely or typically Canadian but are shared by all mankind, or at least that representative portion he meets at Davos.

So please also go back and read Terry Glavin’s front-page cri de coeur about Aleppo in Thursday’s National Post quoting the desperate online words of Syrian English teacher and activist Abdulkafi AlHamdo, including “don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community.” Nobody ever should have. The UN is manifestly a shop for dictators, anti-Semites and gasbags, and the “international community” is a granfalloon, an artificial collectivist construct even more absurd than the tripe trope “the homosexual community,” as though all gays had the same opinions and lifestyle and lived in the rainbow equivalent of the Smurf village.

The UN is full of dictators because most nations have not solved the “political problem” of a state strong enough to protect liberty but not to menace it, mostly because they have not solved the cultural problem of welcoming dissent without dissolving into chaos. How did anyone forget that? How did anyone forget that for all its failings, the West including Canada really has long had a much better way of doing things, from representative democracy to religious tolerance to peaceful settlement of disputes?

Sadly, they are not “universal values” in practice. But they are dominant here. And we neither commit nor suffer the atrocities you see in Aleppo precisely because it is un-Canadian to drop barrel bombs on civilians or throw rocks at places of worship.