The Blood and Flesh of History
Knowing the West
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By James Pew
If history is a skeleton, then literature is blood and flesh. While history gives us the facts and the sequence and the objective truth, literature pumps through hearts to minds and round again. Literature provides observations of an introspective type, or of the type which contemplate the human condition, but subtly drapes them over the historian’s contextual scaffolding, injecting colour and texture into his carefully assembled outline.
The history and the literature of the West has been a great source of curiosity and inspiration, although lately, also of ominous concern. Civilizations, as history has shown, have a tendency to be fleeting, and whether ours is under imminent threat or not, the very awareness of such a devastating historical pattern should activate a citizenry towards a sense of protection and preservation. This newsletter began with the aim to defend Canada’s heritage culture against damaging incursions from illiberal “progressive” streams of influence, but it has since evolved to examine also Canada’s unique contribution and place in the Western sphere.
Canada, being a transplantation to the New World of a people and a way of life from the Old World, has since its inception, been a component of the Western World. We are part of the bigger picture of the West, so we must balance nationalism with Westernism, and make sure the former is not at odds with the latter.
The Woke Watch Canada newsletter is designed to assist defenders, primarily, of Canadian cultural heritage, but also of Western cultural heritage. In my view, the defense is made more significant when the defenders are reverent participants in what they are defending. This takes engagement and study. And there are few better ways to more deeply access the Western tradition than through its historical and literary canon. That is why, inter alia, I write the ongoing series Books, Education, and the Life of the Mind – it is not the life of any mind that I’m writing of, but the life of the Western mind to be sure.
It is also why I launched the Western Polemic – to further explore Western civilization, its moral and intellectual heritage, and its history which is so entwined with both. Through the writings published in these two newsletters my aim is to deepen readers’ connection to the Western civilization they are so inexorably linked.
A defender who studies deeply the Western civilization he fights for, will reflect the principles and the honour of that civilization as he defends it. If know thyself be a standard by which Western man buttresses his individualism, let the embrace extend to know thy civilization, and thy cultural heritage. Or to put it crudely, one cannot defend very well what one does not care to know much about.
The reasons I hold my chief earthly purpose to lie in the writing of essays on Canada and Western culture are several: a tendency toward garrulity, which I own with some shame, yet which is redeemed by an ever-growing and insatiable curiosity; and an adequate felicity of expression; and, above all, a deep and loving resolve to exalt moral principle, tempering liberty with restraint, that I may do genuine good in the world.
So there you have it; I hope you will support it, and I respectfully beg that you do. I do believe I have mentioned in the past that quite a bit of work goes into all this researching, and writing and publishing. The financial support from readers is as much essential as it is appreciated. Thank you to all the supporters who have helped out. And finally, here is how you can help:
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The following will preview some of the heavily researched, time-consuming-to-compose, Western-themed essays I have recently published. It should go without saying that writing these essays, which are not read at anywhere near the frequency as my ranty opinion pieces (which never cost more than an hour to write), takes blood, sweat and tears; to research and cross-reference; to follow the cues; to put together the pieces; and assemble the chronologies, etc. They are vast labours, but labours of love indeed.
Most recently, last Saturday to be precise, I published my essay Typhon and the East: Near Eastern Parallels in Greek Mythology and the End of Hellenic Isolationism, an examination of the Greek myth of Typhon — a chaotic, serpentine monster who battles Zeus — which was not a purely Hellenic creation but drew heavily from ancient Near Eastern traditions. It highlights close parallels with Hittite myths (Teshub vs. the serpent Illuyanka, and the stone giant Ullikummi), Canaanite tales of Baal defeating dragons, and shared motifs like divine generational strife, castration of sky gods, and the use of deception/restoration to overcome chaos. These influences reached Greece via Phoenician intermediaries and cultural exchanges, supported by archaeological evidence from Hittite, Hurrian, and Ugaritic sources. The piece explains how conceptions of Greek mythology as isolated and original became outdated, showing how foundational Western narratives incorporate significant “Eastern” elements while still crediting Greek innovation in reworking them.
Typhon and the East pairs well with another Western Polemic essay on much the same theme. I co-wrote with historian Scott Miller, A History of Western Education - Part One. The essay contends that Western education’s roots lie in knowledge transmitted from ancient Near Eastern civilizations (especially Mesopotamia and Egypt) to early Greece, rather than arising in Hellenic isolation. It traces cuneiform’s invention around 3200 B.C. for administration and literature (e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh), notes 19th-century discoveries that exposed Orientalizing influences in Greek art and culture, and critiques biases in Romantic Nationalism and Indo-European scholarship that minimized Eastern contributions. Key borrowings include calendars, astronomy, geometry, the Phoenician alphabet (adopted c. 800 B.C.), and possibly mythic motifs, facilitated by Bronze Age interactions and post-collapse recovery. While praising Greek innovations — like abstract natural philosophy, city-states, and democracy — the piece uses evidence from scholars like Walter Burkert and M.L. West to dismantle outdated isolationist narratives, portraying Greece as an innovative recipient in a broader Oriental-to-Occidental continuum of intellectual development.
Turning to another recent Western Polemic essay on a very different subject: the ethnogenesis of heritage Canadians. The essay is called Anti-Whiteism and the Ethnogenesis of Heritage Canadians. It argues that systemic “anti-whiteism” — embedded in Critical Social Justice, multiculturalism, and policies/media that portray whites as inherent oppressors — acts as a unifying force driving the ethnogenesis (emergence of shared ethnic identity) of heritage Canadians, the old-stock Anglo and Franco descendants of European settlers who represent Canada’s ethnic core. It highlights double standards (e.g., exclusionary programs, church attacks, historical erasure), critiques the inversion of truths about Western achievements in peace, prosperity, and innovation rooted in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage, and draws on the War of 1812 as a precedent for mythologized unity. Pew suggests this reactive consciousness could foster “ethno-traditional nationalism” with multivocalism — voluntary assimilation into Canadian traditions — while warning that unchecked anti-white rhetoric and demographic change risk societal fragmentation if heritage identity is not reclaimed.
And turning the attention to Woke Watch Canada. Recently I published an essay for the Books, Education, and the Life of the Mind series, called Ancients Vs Moderns. The essay frames the Western intellectual tradition as a persistent dialectical conflict between the Ancients — valuing classical tradition, beauty, and established wisdom — and the Moderns, who in the 17th–18th century championed empirical novelty, skepticism, utility, and radical innovation through tools like glosses, lemmas, and the “new science.” It traces this contest from medieval scholarly practices and Renaissance revivals, through the 17th–18th-century French “quarrel” and British “Battle of the Books” (e.g., Swift), to figures like Jacob Perizonius advocating a balanced “via media” against extremes while warning of civilizational decline similar to post-Augustan Rome. Drawing on historians like Paul Hazard and Joseph M. Levine, the essay portrays this tension as the root of modern culture wars and Enlightenment progress, emphasizing the need for moderation between tradition and curiosity to sustain civilization amid ongoing echoes of the debate.
And most recently, and also as part of the Books, Education, and the Life of the Mind collection of essays, I have embarked on a series exploring the seafaring literary tradition of the modern period in the West. The first essay in that series is simply called, Seafaring Tales: A Western Literary Tradition. It traces the English novel’s seafaring genre from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) — inspired by castaway Alexander Selkirk — as a landmark of realism, isolation, survival, and spiritual redemption, spawning the Robinsonade subgenre (e.g., The Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies). It contrasts this introspective solitude with Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), a gritty, experience-based depiction of naval life featuring impressment, corruption, disease, and brutal warfare (like the Cartagena siege). And it positions these works as foundational to Western literature, enriching psychological depth and realism while celebrating adventure and moral transformation at sea, with a nod to classics like Moby Dick and promises of more in the series.
And finally I will mention my book-in-progress called What Happened To Canada?. So far, the first two parts have been fully published in two essay series. The first part deals with the mainstreaming of feminism in Canada, the first essay is Dissident Critique of Mainstream Feminism – click through the link at the bottom of each essay to get to the next one. There are six essays in total for Part One.
Part Two is another six essays. This time dealing with the savagery of pre-colonial aboriginals in the Americas. The first essay begins the series with some satire, but things get bloody serious once you get to the second essay. The first one is, The Gravity of Truth and Reconciliation – click through the link at the bottom of each essay to get to the next one. There are six essays in total for Part Two.
The above merely scratches the surface. There are a ton more to read at both the Western Polemic and Woke Watch Canada. I have dozens of new essays in the works, and hundreds of ideas for more.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Book Review: Sleepwoking
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I recommend reading Bruce Pardy’s draft Alberta constitution. Real solutions to the problems this Substack identifies. https://c2cjournal.ca/2025/09/articles-of-freedom-what-the-constitution-of-an-independent-alberta-should-look-like/
Excellent work!