Reminiscere: Human and Divine

At this Sunday’s Eucharist the Church calls upon Almighty God to ‘Remember Thy great mercy and love, for they have been from of old.’ But while our Maker may be relied upon to reminiscere His chesed, His fallen creatures suffer from short-term memory with respect to the doings of this perishing age. Yet I marvel at the report that, while listening to a lecture that mentioned the Second World War, a student raised her hand and posed the question, ‘Does that mean there was a First?’ Given a media culture obsessed with instant entertainment and the hijacking of all branches and stages of education by unscrupulous social engineers, the historical amnesia of the current generation is perhaps only to be expected, with the result that little accountability is demanded of those who exercise civil authority over us. Of course, we need to beware of offering incense to the idol of so-called ‘democracy’, a phenomenon that nowhere actually exists and that can in any case claim no divine warrant. Government is much more providentially given than established by the governed. That said, though, there is cause to give thanks for the providential development in certain societies of constitutional, limited, representative government that can restrain the tyrant who lurks in every ruler tempted with addiction to power. But this kind of government, which has the potential to pull the teeth of the Beast who emerges from the sea, can only flourish where the citizenry has a sense of the fear of God, a grasp of the natural moral law, and the capacity to learn the lessons of history.

The accountability of governors to the governed is also contingent on the freedom of the press, a state of affairs more apparent in the countries of the Anglosphere south of Canada’s border and across the Atlantic than in the Dominion where I live. Generous governmental subsidies to the so-called legacy media have the effect of taming and toning down newspaper critique of the Government of the day. So, public comment is subdued on present evidence that the Chinese Communist Party has for some years been successfully working to ensure that the governance of this land remains in the hands of the Liberal Party. When, during the covid ‘pandemic’, a neighbour with whom I am on friendly terms would walk by remarking ‘Stay safe,’ I always wondered ‘From what?’ A form of influenza from which 99% of the infected recovered did not keep me awake at night, whereas the fact that going on a decade ago our current Prime Minister expressed his admiration for the ‘basic dictatorship’ of the Chinese Communist Party certainly made and makes me tremble for the wellbeing of my earthly patria.

Sadly, the federal and provincial parliaments and print and broadcast media of this land have so far opened little by way of inquest into the policies implemented by our rulers in response to the so-called covid 19 ‘pandemic’, the Black Death that turned out in hindsight to be somewhat of a hiccup. Things have turned out much differently in the UK, where at least the vestiges of a free press remain and where for the past year or so the much-pilloried ‘lockdown sceptics’ have engaged in a certain measure of speaking truth to power. This process has dramatically intensified over the last few days as a leading political journalist, one Isabel Oakeshott, has made public a mass of data naively shared with her by Matt Hancock, who held the office of Secretary of State for Health at the height of the ‘pandemic’. The section of the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper which has a reputation for ‘quality’ even though it often goes fearfully ‘woke’, accessible to the general public notes that ‘The Telegraph has obtained more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages between Matt Hancock and other ministers and officials at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.’ Happy to continue in blissful ignorance of what a ‘WhatsApp message’ might be, I have registered how the British Government flew by the seat of its pants as it imposed lockdown upon lockdown while instilling lunatic fear into the population, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in normal times an amiable clown with a gift for connecting with the people, oscillating between lockdown scepticism one moment and a desire for brutal enforcement of irrational rules that begat misery upon misery the next. More ominous than governmental incompetence was the craven submission to totalitarian madness of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the generation that so manfully resisted the Third Reich. Having cancelled my online subscription to the Daily Telegraph as a prudent retirement economy, I am unable to access the articles posted under the heading ‘THE LOCKDOWN FILES’ at the top of this newspaper’s websiteThe Telegraph - Telegraph Online, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph - Telegraph , and hence have gathered my information from other, free-of-charge sources. See The sinister cruelty of lockdown has been laid bare - spiked (spiked-online.com) and PETER HITCHENS: Now we know for sure that our leaders lost their heads over Covid | Daily Mail Online and Lockdown Sceptics Were Demonised – But the Lockdown Files Show We Were Right – The Daily Sceptic. It turns out, after all, that the covid 19 virus likely escaped, or was released, from a Chinese laboratory. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration stand vindicated after they and their supporters were decried as enemies of science and even lambasted as murderers or at any rate as accessories to murder. Economies were wrecked, children and youths were scarred for life, misery was inflicted on the aged, Governments exceeded their mandates, and yet the guilty walk free.

Cleansing of the body politic cannot begin without mass return to the fear of God, the natural moral law, and the proper lessons of history. It remains to be seen whether this process will take place in those countries that retain the form of constitutional, limited, representative government. But whether or not due accountability sets in in the institutions held in God’s Left Hand, an inquest into reactions to the season of covid madness needs to be conducted in the Church which is held in His Right Hand. For make no mistake about it, the recurrence of the patterns of twentieth-century totalitarianism that set in from 2020 till 2022 were no freak occurrence but will recur in a variety of forms in the new century and millennium that began two decades ago. ‘Remember, O Lord, Thy great mercy and love, for they are from of old,’ and grant us wisdom from knowledge and pondering of our past.