Defending the West

How you can help

Photo by Jennifer Lo on Unsplash

By

James Pew

As will be explained below, much of the things I write in these pages, and in my personal Substack, The Turn, will eventually be revised and updated into book form. A book I am in the process of writing that will cover a wide scope of material, issues and angles which revolve around the cultural malaise we are experiencing in the West due to the encroachment and colonization of Social Justice ideology. Indeed, the book is, in part, about mounting a counter-offense to this grave and illiberal injustice, and defending the West.

Also explained below is the basic structure of this book-in-progress. The Israel-Palestine conflict is just one of the issues that plays an important role in the analysis being put forward. In my view, events in the Middle East, especially those involving Israel, are of consequential importance to Canadians, although this is hardly apparent. Becuase of this, I have chosen to publish my Israel-Palestine writing on The Turn, so as not to chase away any Woke Watch Canada readers who prefer these pages to remain Canadian-centric. I encourage interested readers to subscribe to The Turn so you can receive all of my Israel and Middle East stuff directly to your email inbox.

My book will contain a long chapter, or potentially several chapters, on Israel. I have already started publishing large sections of it. On November 23rd I published The Case for Israel, and yesterday I published Israel, A Promised Land. Once the reader takes in these two essays, and today’s post below, it should become clear why the fate of Israel is a consequential Western concern.

Defending the West: How You Can Help

Canada, and every Western liberal democracy, needs courageous, energized, smart leaders to stand up and fight against the slanderous ahistoricism of the activist class who are aggressively pursuing the most hideously complex and coordinated international smear campaign targeting the institutions and principles of Western society and culture. Some of these great principles were invented in the West, others came extraterritorially, but were embraced, preserved and developed in the Western world. In all cases they form the basis of Western civilization and the various social configurations expressed uniquely throughout the sphere of Western liberal Nations.

It has been said that politics flows downstream from culture. In my view, it follows, Canadian leadership should not be limited to those holding office. Thought-leaders in the form of journalists, opinion-writers, academics, researchers, and all stripes of outspoken authentic truth-seekers are necessary to contribute to a much-needed cultural/political change. 

It is of vital importance that myself and other researcher/writers remain engaged in this work independently. However, it is also a major disadvantage that there are no research grants or formal ways for us to adequately fund the effort expended in order to do this work. I rely solely on the generous donations of Woke Watch Canada readers.

Further, the deeper I get into it, the more I feel compelled to both accelerate the generation and broaden the scope of my analysis. As the work gets done, a new workload increases. However, I feel like I am undoubtedly on to something: not just an understanding of what has gone wrong in the West in our modern moment, but also, an effective way to communicate and organize that knowledge, and to empower the reader with an analysis of the facts from which one gains the clarity of mind needed to contribute meaningfully to the pro-Western counter-offensive. 

I have a strong pro-Western view of the world, but my work is not polemic or hagiographic, it is based on sound consideration of facts and evidence. When historical facts that do not flatter my pro-Western sensibilities present themselves, I deal with them honestly. A painful example, British antisemitism in Mandatory Palestine, will be examined in my essay that will follow Israel, A Promised Land. In that work, I detail the rampant antisemitism present in British society and in the British High Command during the period of the League of Nations Mandate of Palestine, and the way that some British officers double-crossed the Jews, which resulted in an overall British failure to live up to the mandate of the Mandate. I would prefer to believe that every British diplomat and citizen was a liberal minded advocate of the Jewish people, and did everything they could to help the Jews during the Holocaust. However, even though there were many pro-Zionist British Christians and political leaders, the anti-Jew efforts to derail the creation of the Jewish state, including the prevention of immigration to Mandatory Palestine of Jews fleeing the Nazis, dwarfed those made by non-Jewish advocates.

I digress.

Turning back to the mission of defending the West, and how you can help. I request support from the admirable readership of Woke Watch Canada, in part because my work aims to influence the socio-political discourse of Canada’s reading public in several ways. One is to direct people to traditional forms of knowledge production built on evidence-gathering, fact-finding, and logically sound argumentation rooted in objectivity, empiricism, substantiation, and reason. Also, I should add, Objective Pluralism, but you will need to take in Israel, A Promised Land to know what I’m referring to.

A return to objective, traditional forms of scholarship in part facilitates a deliberate counter-offensive against the subversive movement that has so captured and destroyed knowledge production in the West - a culture-erasing movement I refer to as “The Postmodern Turn.”

I place the beginning of the postmodern turn at roughly the year 1960. Although, consequential events in the preceding centuries - the enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, the revolutionary period, the fin de siècle, etc. - had a great influence over the establishment of what political scientist Eric Kaufmann calls the “anti-majority adversary culture.” This anti-majority element later morphed smoothly into the 1960s era New Left counterculture at the dawn of the postmodern turn.

The turn of the 20th century, the fin de siècle, marks a point when anti-Westernism (the Lyrical Left), had established itself, at first, as a minor cultural phenomenon.  The cancer was limited to small groups of bohemian intellectuals who were critical of the societies they lived in (societies that enabled the life of bohemian intellectuals, no doubt). In America, this took the form of “The New York Intellectuals,” and the “the Greenwich Village Left”  (More on all of this to come - 2024, God willing, will be full of essays).

I am asking Woke Watch Canada readers to support my work in any way they can, but I want supporters to understand that they are supporting the type of leader, who uses the methods described in the first two paragraphs. Please support me as I contribute to the formulation of a defense of Western civilization and society. A defense against the attack on its history and cultural heritage. And against the anti-Western revisionism of the decolonization paradigm. 

Because I am Canadian, and proudly so, I am particularly defensive concerning Canada’s cultural heritage and history. In fact, because of the intense, rapid and overwhelmingly negative effects the postmodern turn has had on Canadian society, Canada is both a canary in the cool mine, and a perfect example of what a subverted nation looks like. Examining closely the evolution of the socio-political condition in Canada in the postmodern era, is instructive of the larger problem shared by all Western nations. Further, this examination should be of particular importance to Canadians who desperately need (and want) to be empowered and inspired by Canada’s story. Our history may have a few dark passages, but there are no dark chapters.

We cannot let a minority of haters erase or undermine the national and cultural achievements of Canada or of the Western world.

The following is a short summary of exactly what I am working on. I have been threatening readers since the beginning of Woke Watch Canada, and The Turn, that at some point a selection of the ramblings found in the aforementioned two Substacks, will be reworked and then combined with as yet unpublished ramblings, and from that a book (or books) will emerge. 

This is still the plan. And I still plan on reworking many of the ramblings mentioned and combining them with others. What is new, is the format and structure that I am thinking might be the most compelling way to package what has become an extremely ambitious vision.

First off, three modern events of extraordinary consequence, which hold among each other both similarities and dissimilarities, continuities and discontinuities, yet are bound together by the false assumptions of the postmodern paradigm, and held that way unfortunately, in the imaginations of far too many citizens of the Western world. In all three cases, it is of vital importance to lay out the contextual circumstances and the history that led to and empowered their controversy. And, to correct the record with the facts and arguments that prove this trio of extraordinarily false-narratives are nothing more than reduced and re-rendered distortions of events, for the purpose of bolstering the anti-Western Social Justice narrative.

The three events, in the order they occurred are: 1) The George Floyd Affair in the United States 2) The Unmarked Graves Hoax in Canada 3) The October 7th pogrom by Hamas against Israel.

The George Floyd moment changed everything. The power of the narrative created by the activist class and their partners in the media is seemingly unbreakable. The narrative succeeded in convincing a majority of the public that police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in cold blood. This narrative was accepted so rapidly and so broadly because previous overlapping and related Social Justice narratives had already been entrenched in Western society. There is an aspect of predictive programming at play where years of activist/media/academic narrative weaving around white supremacy and systemically racist police greased the gears for a complimentary narrative that demonized Derek Chauvin and the police force he was part of (which essentially threw him under the bus).

In order to fully understand the context of the George Floyd debacle, the relevant history of slavery and of the black radical tradition in America must be explained and connected to the modern narrative that tells us white people are oppressing black people. A huge undertaking in and of itself. Fascinatingly, the politics of black radicalism (the black radical tradition) in the United States, from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matters, is in large part responsible for the encroachment of identity politics into the West. (Lots more to come on this).

The unmarked graves hoax is often described as Canada’s George Floyd moment. In order to properly deal with this subject, a history of colonialism and of settlement in Canada is necessary. Along with this, a history of pre-contact Canada (and all of North America) needs to be detailed so the concept of contact and cooperation (roughly the first 100 years of indigenous-non-indigenous relations) and of uneven and combined development (based roughly on a theory by Trotsky) can be understood. Further, a history of indigenous politics in Canada is also required here. Specifically, the transition in policy direction concerning indigenous people from an assimilation paradigm to a post-assimilation/separate nations paradigm that occurred during the postmodern turn.

Lastly, the October 7th massacre in Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas is relevant to my analysis of the problems faced in the West in a postmodern world for many reasons. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. The Jewish people are responsible for many of the foundational Western principles defended in my work. Jewish law forms the basis of Western liberalism. Jews are said to be “hyper-white.” But also, the Israel-Palestine conflict is framed in the same way indigenous-non-indigenous politics in Canada are. According to the framework of settler colonialism, there are indigenous people, and there are invading settler colonists. Settlers are bad, and most give up land, pay compensation for historical injustices, and are subject to violence in the present. Indigenous people are good. They deserve to be given all of the land surrounding the areas they live, including lands others have developed and created thriving technological modern economies on. Indigenous people should not pay the same price for stealing from or committing crimes against non-indigenous settlers. When indigenous people kill or commit violence against non-indigenous settlers, it is excused and seen as resistance. 

These examples of faulty logic and moral indigence, sadly only the tip of the iceberg, must be thoroughly debunked. The truth of Israel’s legitimacy, and Hamas/Palestinian illegitimacy and terroristic pre-civilizational deprivation must be exposed and understood. The incommensurability of radical Islam with the Western world must be understood. And, the West must stand up for Western principles wherever they, and the lives of liberal democratic people are threatened.

The book will also have chapters on the history of the enlightened Western world (the reader will discover exactly why the West is worth fighting for), the history of knowledge production, the history of propaganda, the history of Social Justice activism and academics, the history of immigration and multiculturalism, of antisemitism, antiwhiteism, and Christian persecution around the globe and more. In a way, the book will be a collection of histories that will fill in the context around the most contentious modern issues weaponized by the anti-Western left in their effort to dismantle Western civilization. The information and arguments presented will help the reader break from faulty but well-established narratives, assumptions, and misconceptions and be empowered with factual “counter”-knowledge (truth) and a language (weapon) to use against the enemies of the West.

I am asking Woke Watch Canada readers to help me get this book written. I have already invested several hundred hours (over two years now!!), and it needs a few hundred more. I believe this book will perform an invaluable service by pushing back against tainted scholarship and false anti-Western narratives, AND by arming its readers with the unvarnished truth, and a sound, organized and effective approach to defending the West. If you are still not convinced here is a small excerpt from the book (still a work-in-progress) that deals with the similarities/dissimilarities and Social Justice conflation of the three big stories in this late stage of the postmodern turn:

George Floyd, the Unmarked Graves hoax, and October 7th pogrom. All three involve massive propaganda. All three have been distorted by the narrative creation/maintenance of Social Justice ideology. All three involve widespread historical understandings replete with inaccuracies concerning the oppressed who were uprooted from their lands, either enslaved or expelled. George Floyd fits into the narratives of the Black Radical Tradition (based on an ahistorical telling of American and world slavery), and the Unmarked Graves and October 7th pogrom events are set within a post colonial/settler colonialism framework by activists and media. 

The Social Justice conception of these three issues is deeply rooted in the postmodern paradigm, this means that much of the relevant knowledge produced is tainted by many fallacious and ahistorical assumptions (some about the nature of reality itself), that carry over to the media who draw from this tainted knowledge base, thereby amplifying misconception in the service of Social Justice narrative.

If you would like to help me finish this book, please become a paid subscriber or donate any amount you see fit to the donor box.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read Do white people have ethnic interests?

BREAKING NEWS: James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Gave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

There are now two ways to support Woke Watch Canada through donations:

1) By subscribing to the paid version of the Woke Watch Canada Newsletter for - $7 Cdn/month or $70 Cdn/year

2) By making a contribution to the Investigating Wokeism In Canada Initiative, which raises the funds necessary to maintain and expand Woke Watch Canada’s research and investigation into Dysfunctional Canadian School Boards, Education, Indigenous Issues, Free Speech, and other areas of Illiberal Subversion and the Canadian Culture Wars.