A Reply to Matt McManus’s Review of “Canada In Decay”

“How do we explain, then, the fact that the liberal nations that fought Nazism, Australia, Canada, and the United States, had immigration policies aimed at preserving their ethnic heritage? Should we call European nations with liberal constitutions racist if their populations vote for immigration restriction…”

My books have been the beneficiary of excellent reviews. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011) was reviewed extensively in various languages, eight of which were full review essays published in both standard academic journals and conservative/dissident journals. Canada in Decay has received two review essays thus far. I expected this book to be attacked because it is the only book written by an academic who questions the misleading ideology that all Western nations must be diversified if they are to live up to their liberal-democratic principles. I am not surprised, therefore, by the extremely unfair, and carelessly constructed, review penned by Matt McManus. But this does not mean I will let this review go unanswered. McManus’s review is a reputational attack aimed at suppressing my academic freedom by identifying me, without any attention to the arguments and facts of Canada in Decay, as a “white supremacist.”

The views McManus expresses against me are standard fare in our universities, where no open debate is allowed on the most crucial question of our times: in what ways do Europeans stand to benefit economically and culturally from the continuous arrival of millions of immigrants? Everyone, and it starts in our primary schools, is mandated to believe that “diversity is our greatest strength” and that any form of European ethnic identity is inherently illiberal.

What surprises me about academics with PhDs, who should know better, is how conceptually inept they show themselves to be whenever they debate the relationship between the imposition of diversity and the nature and history of Western culture. They are always caught up in a bind created by their own contradictory claim that modern Western liberalism has been deeply marred by racist assumptions and practices, while in the same vein insisting that their efforts to diversify the West are conterminous with the ideals of Western liberalism. Academics take it as a given that opposition to diversity is inherently illiberal and racist. They can’t understand, accordingly, how someone can possibly attack immigrant multiculturalism, as I do, in the name of liberal values, in full agreement with the “critical thinking” universities are supposed to cherish, and in admiration of the ideals of Enlightenment thinkers.

McManus is a Cultural Marxist

A central contention of Canada in Decay, one that McManus mentions in passing with confused irritation, is that liberalism requires equal rights for everyone, including minorities, but it does not require mass immigration and mandated diversification. There is more to Western identity than civic values—equality under the law, freedom of the press, democracy, separation of church and state—conceived as “universal values for humanity.” Western identity includes, as well, historical and territorial ancestry, language, religion, kinship, and customs. These ethno-cultural markers were long intrinsic components of the very Western nations that developed liberal values. The forced separation of these ethno-cultural markers from the nation-state is an illiberal imposition conceived by globalist elites devoid of any deep attachments to their homelands and their people. 

Contrary to McManus’s claim that I make, “few efforts to explain why multiculturalism is apparently the product of so-called cultural Marxism,” Canada in Decay has multiple paragraphs explaining what this term means in the context of fully developed arguments against the ideas of a wide variety of thinkers, including Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor. McManus is a cultural Marxist when he writes that “liberalism is fundamentally about […] expressing a commitment to moving beyond the West’s racist past towards a more tolerant and multicultural future” by “accepting greater numbers of immigrants.” The creation of multicultural identities across the West through mass immigration with the intention of separating forever the nation of Germany from German ethnicity, the nation of Britain from British ethnicity, the nation of Sweden from Swedish ethnicity, is a cultural Marxist agenda.

It is bothersome to witness this reviewer endorsing Will Kymlicka as a major theorist of the idea that liberalism requires racial diversity, while completely ignoring my two chapters criticizing Kymlicka’s rather deceptive contamination of liberalism with cultural Marxist ideas. Among the many objections I detailed against Kymlicka is his self-portrayal as an advocate of rights for long-established minorities even though his entire career has been about bringing, in his words, a “profound transformation” in the ethnic character of all European nations through the importation of millions of new minorities. McManus should have explained in what sense Sweden, Germany, and Spain were racist and illiberal before the globalist rulers of these nations decided to open their borders to mass immigration, even though their long-standing minorities enjoyed the same liberal rights. 

McManus brings up the neoliberal argument that “it is ‘impossible’ to halt immigration due to the immense economic and demographic pressures which encourage people to migrate,” without mentioning the many sections and statistics provided in Canada in Decay against this economic argument, including the distinction I made between “globalization” and “globalism” in arguing that a country can be thoroughly connected to the world’s economies, as the advanced nations of Asia, without being “globalist” in celebrating the arrival of foreign peoples.

Canada in Decay is a Bestseller

McManus objects to the “very aggressive style” of my book, “which belies Duchesne’s aim of both reaching a wide audience—and his sense of himself as a lone academic dissident crying out in the wilderness.” First, whereas most academic books are never read except by students forced to read them, Canada in Decay has been consistently ranked number 1 on various subjects since its release last August. Second, McManus is only right in pointing out that I have tenure; but if he had done a bit of research he would have found out that I obtained tenure (in 2001), when I was still a leftist. This reviewer must know that it is very rare to find mainstream conservatives teaching at a university, and next to impossible to find a member of the dissident right. I am the only academic in Canada, and possibly the Western world, who questions the ideology of diversity while advocating white identity politics. 

Third, he is wrong to liken me to other “right-wing authors, including many of those on the so-called intellectual dark web, who present themselves as persecuted dissidents.” Jordan Peterson, David Rubin, Ben Shapiro and other members of the so-called dark web are not persecuted. McManus is right about that. They are being rewarded rather heftily for their “dissident” views. Marginalization and demonization by the mainstream only happens when one opposes immigration and defends white identity politics. I was the recipient of good grants before I started questioning diversity without having yet published a book. The situation is rather different now, despite having published three books. Particularly after the publication of Uniqueness, when I started questioning diversity, I have been vilified and excluded from all grant opportunities, conferences, and standard academic journals.  

McManus says I make “little or no effort to explain” why the conservative argument for assimilation is still cultural Marxist. This is an amazing act of neglect by this reviewer since Part Three, which consists of four chapters, including another chapter in Part IV, is dedicated to answering why the conservative critique of multiculturalism is not enough insomuch as conservatives have long been, since the days of Mulroney, avid supporters of mass immigration, while acquiescing to the leftist narrative about racism and about the enriching qualities of endless diversity. McManus wants to create the impression that just because I used strong polemical terms like “cuckservative,” it follows that I don’t make analytical and historically based arguments. It is plain laziness on his part to have ignored altogether my serious analytical engagement with the ideas of Neil Bissoondath, Salim Mansur, Janet Ajzenstat, J.L. Granatstein, including a chapter on conservative politicians, Mulroney and Harper.

Defamatory Labels Rather Than Scholarly Arguments

McManus says that my book is “very confusing from a structural standpoint” because it “frequently shifts between extended discussions on Canadian history and immigration policy, contemporary politics and policy analysis, political theorizing about identity, critiques of luminaries like the aforementioned Will Kymlicka and so on.” It is not the first time that academics, the vast majority of whom are specialized in very narrow fields, have objected to my “intrusions” into fields they think they own. I did my PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University, an interdisciplinary program in which I was able to study History, Political Economy, and Philosophy, subjects which I had been studying as an undergrad for 10 years. I then continued to study as a professor of Sociology. What I say should be judged for its merits rather than easy labels. Thus far in my exchanges with specialists, I have fared rather well, modestly speaking.

McManus does not even explain what is structurally confusing about the book but resorts to easy, undefined labels intended to besmirch my reputation. This is quite obvious in his “summary” of “the main arguments of the book,” which does not go beyond a very misleading summary of Part One. Rather than coming to terms with the masses of statistical evidence I provide showing that the nation of Canada was created by French and English settlers with high fertility rates, McManus misconstrues my argument to mean that Canada was created “with the intention of establishing a “White Man’s Country.” Wrong. The intention of my argument is that one can’t argue, as historians are commonly doing, that Canada was created by diverse immigrants from all over the world in the same vein as one condemns white leaders as racist for closing all doors against non-white immigrants.

My argument that Natives, before Europeans arrived, did not inhabit a nation is not intended to deny that Natives were the original inhabitants of lands that later came to be part of a nation named Canada. I explicitly state that Natives were the original inhabitants, while arguing what someone with a PhD in International Relations should know: the rise of nation-states with officially written languages, legal codes, network of communications, reasonably centralized armies, bureaucracies capable of enforcing state authority over an extended territory with some boundaries, is a modern European experience and concept. One cannot argue, without altering the historical meaning of words, that the Amerindians were the first founders of the nation of Canada when they were living in tribes and in lands that were gradually incorporated into Canada and that were actually contiguous with what came to be identified as the United States.

As if these were not enough errors, McManus misleadingly infers that my portrayal of the Natives as tribal and bellicose is intended to justify the right of Europeans to take their lands. He spends most his “summary” of my book attacking this claim, with all sorts of rhetorically juvenile questions such as whether Japan is “entitled to invade and appropriate the territory of European Moldova because it is 90 rankings higher on the 2016 Human Development Index?” International Relations now focuses, as a field, on promoting the idea that all the inhabitants of the globe have a “human right” to be citizens of Europe, rather than educating students about the actual way in which nation-states were created throughout history, by way of conquest and forced migrations. My claim is simply that Europeans did, in fact, create the nation of Canada. And I do say what should be obvious: this fact had “tragic” consequences for the Natives. I will not bother replying to his sophomoric attempt at pretending that definitions of what qualifies as less or more developed are arbitrary except to say that a real study of International Relations would have taught McManus that stronger countries, the ones able to impose themselves on others, tend to be more developed in their military, economic, technological, and state-political capacities.

From here on, McManus’s review spins out of control from one ridiculous statement to another forgetting altogether his promise to summarize the main points of the other three parts. He takes issue with my identification of the vast majority of Canadians in the 20th century as European in ethnicity by posing another rhetorical question intended to malign me as a racist and a white supremacist. Let’s quote this whole passage:

[H]ow does he deal with the observation that there were very substantial ethnic differences between French-speaking Roman Catholics and the primarily Protestant Germans who settled in Canada shortly before the First World War? Wouldn’t the French-speaking Quebecois have more in common with, say, francophone Roman Catholics from Haiti who happen to be black? To avoid this conclusion, Duchesne shows a truly ugly side by just biting the bullet and claiming that skin color and race matters.

For starters, this rhetorical question is a non-starter since there were no Protestant German immigrants moving into French-speaking Catholic Canada; moreover, there were many waves of German immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s before the First World War. It is extremely silly to say that my acknowledgment that ethnicity is an important factor among others in the identification of humans somehow means I have “a truly ugly side.” This is pure moral manipulation. I make it quite clear throughout the book that I endorse the principle of equal rights for minorities, including blacks that migrated to Canada. There is absolutely nothing racist in saying that Canada was created by Canadians with European ethnicity—be it noted that, according to official statistics and official use of language, as late as 1971, over 96 percent of the Canadian population was “European” in ethnicity.

McManus tries to tie me to “white supremacist” views by saying that I appeal “to a wide variety of questionable social Darwinian sources, which stress that race is responsible for substantial differences in intelligence and individualism.” Correction: The term “social Darwinism,” which academics love to use, is totally dated since this term was used in the late 1800s to refer to the application of the concept of survival of the fittest to human society—and then in the 1950s and 1960s by critics seeking to discredit any notion of racial differences. The term that is used now, and that I used in the book, is “evolutionary psychology,” which is heavily based on the most recent scientific studies in genetics. The notion that this school of thought is led by “Apartheid apologists” and “the white supremacist Jared Taylor” is preposterous. I refer to Taylor along with many other studies in established scientific journals. As McManus is forced to admit, I don’t get into discussions about IQ differences. What I do instead, but he fails to say, is discuss studies showing that humans have a strong disposition for ethnocentrism and that Europeans are unique in emphasizing individual rights. 

McManus, by the way, does not define “white supremacist” and “racist” but implies that any European who questions diversity is a “white supremacist.” Finns who wish Finland to remain majority Finnish are supremacists. So are Italians, Spaniards, Norwegians — but not Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Angolans, and every other non-white person.

McManus’s claim that I engage in scaremongering “by referencing an unspecified, but wide array of alleged acts of violence, rape, and so on committed by immigrants from non-white backgrounds” is a typical and very revealing demonstration of how a) ignorant academics are about the thousands of sexual assaults being committed by Muslims and immigrants across Europe, and b) how globalists have blatantly and shamelessly covered up the systematic raping of white girls just so to steamroll their anti-white agenda. There are numerous statistically oriented sources about this phenomenon, including by leftist media, which are finally starting to acknowledge this reality. Here are just a few: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

McManus says that “perhaps the weakest feature of Duchesne’s book is his discussion of liberalism and multi-cultural theory as it stands today, as mainly presented in Parts Two and Three of the book.” Yet he never discusses these parts, but instead says that “Duchesne’s argument largely pivots around his Schmittian claim that contemporary liberalism lacks a sufficient concept of the political,” a claim I make in a chapter on Carl Schmitt in Part Four. It appears that McManus has not read Schmitt and Part Four.

This is the longest and most ambitious part of the book. It aims to answer the question of why the “entire Western establishment came to the view that White nations had to be diversified and open to mass immigration?” This answer includes Schmitt’s ideas, followed by eight chapters discussing the evolution of immigration policies in Canada, the aims of Pierre Trudeau, the transformation of Canadian conservatism into a globalist ideology, the Charter of Rights, Multiculturalism Act of 1988, among other topics, all ignored by this reviewer. Calling Schmitt “an avid Nazi party member” does not constitute an argument worthy of someone with a PhD. Schmitt had a deep impact across the political spectrum with admirers including the radical leftist Chantal Mouffe.

The truncated convolutions concluding this review amount to the cultural Marxist claim that liberalism requires the acceptance of continuous mass immigration. How do we explain, then, the fact that the liberal nations that fought Nazism, Australia, Canada, and the United States, had immigration policies aimed at preserving their ethnic heritage? Should we call European nations with liberal constitutions racist if their populations vote for immigration restriction and for an end to multicultural citizenship?

My argument is not, as McManus writes, that “the restrictive and racist policies adopted by early liberal democracies were consistent with the fundamental principles of liberalism.” What I seek to explain in Part Four, rather, is why and how Western citizens were compelled to think that if they don’t welcome immigration-induced diversity they are not liberal even though minorities living inside their nations already enjoyed the same rights? Yes, liberalism is “predicated on the belief that individuals should be evaluated based on their specific merits and demerits.” But it is not predicated on the notion that all Western nations must undergo a radical alteration in their cultural and ethnic heritages against their German, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian identities in the name of a generic global identity without roots, controlled and manipulated by generic global companies. In short, Canada in Decay is a book written from a liberal perspective against the illiberal and manipulative policy of immigrant multiculturalism_.

Ricardo Duchesne is a professor of social science at the University of New Brunswick. His book Canada In Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians was published by Black House Publishing in 2017.