Chapter Twelve: Ricardo Duchesne and the Decay of Western Civilization
By Alex Van Hamme
One of the intellectuals whose work helped me gain a better perspective on Western civilization and what it means to be “Western” was Dr. Ricardo Duchesne. In April 2018 I had the opportunity to sit down and record a video interview with Dr. Duchesne, who at the time was a tenured professor of historical sociology at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of the best-selling Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians, as well as Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age and The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
Since conducting this interview (the first of two that are available on the FBM YouTube channel) Dr. Duchesne was essentially forced out of academia for his views.
He had been voicing very controversial opinions for a long time and finally over 300 of his academic peers signed a petition condemning him. This caused a media controversy that ultimately ended in Dr. Duchesne taking an early leave to focus on his own scholarly pursuits as an individual.
Global ran the headline “Controversial UNB professor set to retire after white nationalist comments surface”. The CBC ran the headline “UNB prof accused of being a white supremacist takes early retirement”.
The article ends by stating “The Current requested a full interview with the professor. He outlined certain conditions for an interview, which the show was not prepared to meet.”
I find this to be another manipulation technique on behalf of the CBC, as I know that Duchesne is a very reasonable person and I’ve never had a reason to question his honesty. He never had any requests when he did interviews with me and I can’t imagine that whatever the conditions he asked for were in any way unreasonable. He had no concerns with me because he had no reason to question my journalistic integrity, but I do believe would have had good reason to be skeptical of the CBC, as they never fairly represent right-wing figures. In 2015, UNB defended Duchesne’s academic freedom after a racism complaint.
It is important to note that Dr. Duchesne was a tenured professor, and it was not the things that he said on campus that generated so much controversy, but rather his work outside of academia, as part of the blog eurocanadian.ca and his books, mainly Canada in Decay. Still, because of his opinions expressed outside of academia, especially to journalist like myself, over 100 of his colleagues at the University of New Brunswick signed a letter denouncing him for arguments about multiculturalism and immigration that they labeled “racist and without merit.”.
When this happened the mainstream media responded predictably, by running headlines essentially implying he was a racist white supremacist.
Duchesne responded with essentially the same message I did when the CBC smeared me, but in an even blunter way, saying “I haven’t done anything wrong, really. I’m not racist or supremacist.”
So what exactly are these controversial ideas that Duchesne promotes? Is he actually a “white supremacist”?
One of the most controversial concepts that Duchesne talks about is the concept of the ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. People often confuse this with talk of white genocide as people apply it to places like South Africa, where white people, especially farmers, are facing literal violence in the streets and ethnic cleansing from the Black majority.
Duchesne clarifies what he means by ethnocide when he states in Canada in Decay:
“While sometimes I use “Euro-Canadian” interchangeable with the term “White Canadians,” I much prefer “Euro-Canadian” because this term captures both the racial and cultural aspects of a group that is uniquely ancestral to the land of Canada. In this sense “Euro-Canadian” is an ethnic term rather than a purely biological or racial category. It is a term that includes cultural, historical, racial, religious, and territorial identifiers. Therefore, by “ethnocide of Euro-Canadians,” I mean what the United Nations also means by “cultural genocide” and “ethnocide,” that is, the deliberate destruction of the ethnic heritage of a people. I do not mean the deliberate killing or extermination of Euro-Canadians, which is also part of the definition of “ethnocide.” I mean the deprivation of Euro-Canadians of their integrity as a people with a distinctive culture and ethnic identity in possession of their own nation-state.”
Canada is the world’s first “Post-National State” as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proclaimed, and has taken on a strategy of actively becoming as ethnically diverse as possible as we head into the future.
Historically speaking, a “nation” is a group of people united by ethnicity, common culture and language. A nation can technically be without a state, if they are nomadic for example. A “state” is an area de facto controlled by force by a group of people who compose the government. So a “nation-state” refers to a territory controlled by a nation of people, who are relatively homogeneous. Japan, China, Isreal and the Philippines are good examples of this. When Trudeau says Canada is “Post-National” he means that we are beyond a nation, or a homogenous group of people. We are a state, a territory controlled by a government but not loyal to or defined by any specific race or culture. The government understands it really doesn’t matter what race or religion a person is for them to be a good, obedient consumer. Canada is essentially a tax farm now, and all the government cares about is that the masses stay working at some kind of drudgery.
This is the gradual end result of the extreme individualism that is unique to the West. When Trudeau Sr. declared that Canada was to be multicultural, he did so to avoid problems of both Anglo and French nationalism in regards to Canadian identity. Because of this, whites are seeing themselves slowly becoming ethnic minorities in their own countries, which is historically novel, as no other group of people willingly replace themselves in favor of other ethnic groups. The data by Professor Dutton in Chapter Five that I referenced earlier regarding Whites’ being very low in ethnocentrism compared to other races contributes to this interesting phenomenon. Through my interviews with Duchesne and by reading his books I have come to appreciate the concerns he raises of the threats that mass immigration pose to our liberal society. This doesn’t make me a bigot, or a racist, or a xenophobe, or even ethnocentric actually. For me, the issue of mass immigration has always primarily been about the pragmatics of preserving liberalism and keeping society functioning.
It was the work of Duchesne that also helped me understand the fundamental problem with the “we’re all immigrants” progressive narrative constantly peddled by the media in Canada. There is a fundamental difference, by definition, of settler/pioneers and immigrants. Settles are people who leave a developed place and move to an undeveloped place and build something from scratch, while people who move from a developed place to a better and more developed place to take advantage of the infrastructure are by definition “immigrants”. Ricardo shows by looking at the immigration records of Canada that the Euro-Canadians who built the modern nation-state of Canada were not immigrants, technically speaking. The “refugees” crossing into Canada from Roxham Road to take advantage of our health care and education system are not the same type of people who came here and hacked a living out of the wilderness for themselves. Furthermore, since early European settlers like the Quebecois and Acadians grew their populations through high birth rates, and not immigration, they are technically indigenous to Canadian soil. These realities are no longer part of the Canadian historical narrative.
Duchesne does an excellent job of presenting the objective timeline of Canadian immigration in his book, as well as a great job of contrasting his position with that of the dominant narratives taught in school, as pioneered by leading proponents of multiculturalism like Professor Will Kymlicka from Queens University. By comparing the way textbooks have slowly reworked the story of Canadian history of being a nation essentially formed through EuroCanadian and Native Americans into a story about many diverse groups of people working equally to create Canada, I have developed a sense that we are living in scenario not unlike that experienced by Winston Smith in 1984. Whereas it is now taught that Canadian history was always very diverse, the reality that prior to the Immigration Act of 1965, the only real period of mass immigration to Canada was from 1867 – 1914, and it was mostly European immigrants, the majority of whom quickly immigrated to the United States. Canada’s population growth was mainly due to high fertility rates.
Regarding the progressive narratives that have come to promote a dishonest version of Canada’s history, Dr. Duchesne writes:
“Basically, what has happened and is happening, is that historians have been expected to view the older Anglo-Saxon narrative of Canada, or the “two founding races” narrative, as “monolithic mythologies,” as “models” that were “violently imposed” on history against “the Other,” against the actual “complexity” of Canada as a nation created by multiple groups, to cite the words of John Ralston Saul, the putative philosopher of Canada. “Monolithic,” in the establishment world Saul inhabits, means a view that “denies complexity” and holds the “illusion of racial unification or cultural unity”. “Mythology” means that it is not truly reflective of the actual historical realities. Saul expresses these thoughts in his superficially contrived ‘reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the Beginning of the 20th Century’ published in 1998. Academics love to use these words when they describe their ways of thinking. Portraying Canada as “richly diverse”, a “complex cultural mosaic” from its origins, means that one can grasp complexities, one is “subtle” and “nuanced”. By contrast, writing that Canada was fundamentally a British nation bespeaks of crudeness and simple mindedness.”
When I first interviewed Dr. Duchesne, he expressed to me the importance of a proper understanding of one’s own history, especially in the West, by saying:
“If you want to be really educated, you have to understand the history of the West. You must read books on the intellectual history, the history of mathematics, of science, because then you get the sense that really, there is no mathematics without the West. There is barely any science. I mean you have the Bronze Age civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, producing the rudiments of mathematics and science, but after that, it’s pretty much an all-out Western endeavor. This is an amazing fact of history. How could it be that the West produced, and I have an article on this, at a minimum 95% of all the greatest philosophers. I just did a list, and being modest, I did a list of the 75 greatest philosophers, and I spent a lot of time on this. I have read many books on the history of philosophy. I relied on authorities, what made them decide this or that philosopher. And I said if you are modest and want to you can include a few Chinese, a few Muslims in that 75 list, but you don’t have to. So we’re talking about a very different history, a history of high achievement. So if it maters to you, then you have to appreciate it. It’s not about bragging, it’s not about saying “oh, because those philosophers were great I’m great”. No, actually, it puts a burden on you. So if there is this incredible philosophical tradition preceding you, you’re not going to go out and brag as if you’re a philosopher because you learned a few things, you’re going to say to yourself “I better pay homage to this.” You know, you are really humble, because there are so many great people behind you. So I think this is very important, a sense of history, and an appreciate of Western Civilization, to be properly educated.”
This was another growth step in my intellectual development; gaining a realization that individualism is the exception and not the rule in the world, and that real individualism is only realizable within a collection of people who mutually share that value. I also realized that, despite what my social conditioning had trained me to believe, it was perfectly reasonable for Euro-Canadians to have a sense of themselves and a sense of pride in their heritage. Having a sense of pride in one’s ancestors, heritage and culture should not be a sin for white people, rather, it should be encouraged and is it psychologically healthy.
Over the coming months I would promote this viewpoint through Free Bird Media, and would be publicly denounced as morally reprehensible by many liberals and mainstream conservatives. Any sort of pride in ones heritage, if one was white, seemed to be out of the question. If whites begin to have a sense of themselves as a people, it was explained to me over and over again, this would eventually lead to Nazism and genocide, as World War Two had proven.
When I asked Duchesne about his thoughts on Peterson and his stance on identity politics, Duchesne told me:
“I like Peterson, and I think he is great on general issues, and the psychology of religion and certain conservative beliefs. I think he’s sincere and very passionate and he’s a great speaker. There’s no question about that. Nobody would rise to an incredible state of stardom - I have never seen an academic reach that kind of popularity, so he has to be given credit. I think he is a sincere human being and I welcome what he has done, and the discussion that he has generated, but he is wrong about identity politics and the way he equates the leftist identity politics with the dissenting right or the alt-right identity politics, he is wrong about that. Also, the point you made, that there’s no reason for anyone to be proud about their heritage or their past, because they haven’t themselves accomplished that, that makes no sense to me. You have to teach people a sense of history, of their ancestry, and yes, to be proud of it and to respect it, otherwise they will not respect it. I mean, Canadians don’t know anything about the settlers that built this nation. It’s all negative, primarily negative…you SHOULD be aware of what your ancestors achieved and how much they struggled and how hard it was for them, and that there’s a sense of pride and a sense of recognition, because you want to recognize them. It’s not about you, it’s not like Peterson says, that you’re trying to grab something that’s not yours. I don’t think that’s what it means. It just means respecting them. Realizing that they gave you what you have. That’s just normal. This is a problem – I mentioned liberalism has flaws, and one of the flaws it has is it separates an individual from that background, from that heritage, and it shouldn’t do that, precisely because liberalism and individualism are so unique to the West. And you want to know what that ancestry, so what IS this civilization that produced this type of individualism? Then I ought to really understand it, and know that it came before me. I’m not just some individual that came out of nowhere, bragging and running around thinking that “I’m the maker of the world” because you’re not. So I would say that he’s wrong on that particular point. It makes no sense to me, somebody that has no sense of history, which maybe, it’s excusable, because he’s a psychologist after all, and not a historian, whereas my background is historical.”
I respect Dr. Duchesene because he recognizes some hard truths that progressives will never accept, and although these truths are not socially acceptable in a politically correct world, he still has the courage to voice them. Ultimately he could not stay in academia, but I suspect this will be a benefit to him in the long run, as he can continue to work on his books free from of the limitations and toxic culture of modern academia.
I also respect him tremendously for being vocal on the fact that whites certainly are not the most ethnocentric people and that racial identity politics is a very real reality for everyone, especially non-whites.
“One point I want to clarify is that, it depends where you are. There are some European nations that in my view can accommodate more diversity than other nations. Take Norway – I don’t see any reason why they need to diversify. If the Norwegians say “We’re going to stay Norwegian, we’re not accepting a single immigrant, that’s it, closed. Even the immigrants we have now, if they haven’t assimilated, and they’re into suspicious activities we’re going to repatriate them” – I don’t see any problem with that. In the case of Canada it’s a bit more difficult. Because Canada did have some real diversity from the beginning. We had the aboriginals and then other ethnic groups came. So I wouldn’t advocate White Nationalism in Canada. I don’t think that that is viable, at least not in the foreseeable future, and that is not the right politics to go about. So I do advocate identity politics but that’s not the same as White Nationalism. Some people think it is but it’s not. Because as I make clear in my writings, I understand that other ethnic groups will naturally go about their own identity politics. That to me is understandable. Let’s just break through that double standard. The double standard in which whites are not allowed to engage in it, because despite what conservatives say, other ethnic groups naturally are engaging in identity politics.”
My opinion on this was strengthened when in January 2019 it was reported that Liberal candidate Karen Wang was stepping aside after pointing to Jagmeet Sing’s Indian origin and her own Chinese origin as the reason why voters should vote for her. Her message, which was posted on the social messaging app WeChat read “If we can increase the voting rate, as the only Chinese candidate in this riding, if I can garner 16,000 votes I will easily win the byelection, control the election race and make history! My opponent in this byelection is the NDP candidate Singh of Indian descent!”.
Although Wang ultimately apologized and stepped down as a candidate in the wake of the controversy this created, it is clear proof of what people like myself take for granted at this point – that race is an obvious reality that people care about and the most people, especially non-whites, vote for their own race over the issues when it comes to elections. To think that the majority of Canadians are not cognizant of racial and ethnic identity is absurd and untrue. This is why people like Dr. Ricardo Duchesne who care about the rate of non-European immigration to Canada are not racist or white supremacists for being concerned about such things. It is because they understand that liberal Western societies are a unique product of Europeans and that mass importation of non-Europeans may possibly threaten the stability of the very society itself, as most people will vote along racial lines, especially non-whites, and do not actually value true liberalism.
Expanding on this idea, Duchense told an interviewer:
“In the last part of the book, spiraling out of control, I try to explain why it is that Canadians and Westerners generally have come to accept this kind of idea, and I’m not going to get into an explanation of it here because it’s a long complicated explanation, but there is something peculiar about Western peoples, and it is in part because of their individualism that has not allowed them to fully comprehend that when you create a nation, you don’t create a nation in the sense that individuals, as abstract units, came together and agreed to create that nation. It’s not like Locke says, that contractual arrangement, of isolated individuals agreeing to create a nation based on certain values. That’s not how it happens. The way it happens, and the way it happened in Canada, there is a process of colonization, a process of imposing yourself, making a living, struggling, surviving, having conflict with other people that are different, and then defining yourself as a people with certain customs, a certain religion, and if you look at early Canadian history, they are always saying very early on “Canada is a British Nation.” That’s Canada’s heritage. And what they want to do is set cultural boundaries. That’s what they are. The Quebecois are doing the same thing. So this idea that they thought of themselves from the beginning as singular individuals that could come from anywhere else is not true. They thought of themselves as people coming from a particular background in the world, that tended to be heavily British, Christian, in the case of Quebec Catholic, very French but Quebecois because they grew in the soul of Quebec - that’s a collective. That’s a sense of “we’re a group, we’re a nation, we’re a people”. But liberalism has this idea that “oh well, no, we are just many individuals, each pursuing our own way of life, each with our rights, and we cannot define ourselves as a culture.” And so this liberalism was radicalized and was pushed by leftist who penetrated into the liberal worldview and sort of pushed it in a direction in which you strip Canadians of any collective cultural and ethic identity, I mean, Pierre Trudeau did that. And this happened across the Western world, slowly and gradually. Any sense of ethnic cultural identity was seen as something that is potentially or already fascistic, nasty, racist, “you can’t do that”, “if you really want to be a liberal, your country has to be open to the rest of the world”. And so one of the things that I argue in my book is that no, you can consistently be a liberal, you can believe in equality of rights, you can believe in the separation of church and state, you can say that human beings should be free to pursue whatever career they want to, and that the educational system should be open to everyone, you believe in freedom of the press, all of those basic liberal values, you can believe in them and yet at the same time say “but we are a people, we are a culture”. It doesn’t mean that it is very homogeneous or that it is pure, but give and take, you know some diversity here and there because the aboriginals were here too, and some immigrants from other parts of the world had arrived, give and take the kind of diversity that is there, you can still say it is a people, and the minorities are assimilating, and this is a collective way of life. So that is something I write a lot about in the book, and I think it’s important to understand that “don’t let the left, the other side, make you feel that you are not liberal, you are not open minded, you’re intolerant. That’s not true. All these values were created by Europeans. The values of tolerance, freedom of the press, were created by nations like Britain, very cohesive. I mean they have the Welsh, they have the Scots, and hey have slight ethnic variations, but these are historic minorities that have been there for generations, they are not newly arrived peoples coming out of nowhere from far away, they are very close genetically speaking, all these smaller groups within Britain, or Scotland, which is a bigger group. So it’s important to be aware that liberalism in many ways was corrupted and stolen away from Europeans and turned into something that it need not be. But it does have that weakness. It has a weakness to misunderstand the importance of a national collective background for the proper functioning of liberalism itself.”
Duchesne has further elaborated:
“After the second world war, Western people became obsessed that any identification of oneself as a member of a race is inherently potentially nasty and you’re about to round up people who look different from you and that’s not true. I mean the people who fought Nazi Germany, Canada included, were liberal nations. They did have immigration restrictions, because they felt, McKenzie was very clear, he said “If we open our borders to Asian immigration, well the character of the nation will be radically transformed”. And you only have to go to Richmond BC and various other areas of Canada to realize that it has been changed. The language in terms of Richmond BC is Chinese. The sounds, the language that people are speaking around you when you go to restaurants, you go to public spaces, when you get into the bus it’s not English. And in many other ways, I mean people have different mannerisms, expressions and looks that do matter. The whole idea that it doesn’t matter, that you can change people and have Canada populated entirely by Asians and you know, that doesn’t make a difference, that’s just not true. It makes a difference. There are many things that make up a race and a culture, including simple, or not simple, things you take for granted, like facial expressions, the jokes people make, the kind of things they like in life, whether it is that they like national parks, that they like animals and they are for animal rights, that they really love their pets, the kind of songs they like, all of these things make up a people and they matter. And just merging everyone together, creating a kind of mixture, like a mongrelized pie of cultures and races, they’re all going to look alike, so wherever you go you’re going to see a replica of Toronto or a variation thereof, and meanwhile you also have this generic multinational company selling out their products, and they don’t care, the more generic you are the more they like it. This is another element I explain, that Corporations do like that kind of world. They don’t want people that are very rooted and that have peculiar tastes, and they like their smaller more ethnic kind of restaurants. They want fast food chains, clothing chains, that meet a mass consumer audience, and with music the same, a kind of co-mingling of many musical styles. And I’m not saying that that in itself is wrong, or that in some ways it was inescapable, because modernity does – Japan is very homogeneous and has it own peculiar ways and habits and accents, and the things they teach in schools and universities, the books they read, the way they joke and they laugh, is peculiar onto themselves, and they are refusing, just because their fertility rate is very low, they are saying “well there are other ways, you can either retire later, or you can introduce automation, and other ways”. So the whole idea that modernization or globalization brings, or should bring immigration, is simply inaccurate. This is only happening in the Western World.”
I thought a lot about how places like Montreal, Toronto and New York are essentially the same now in a super generic way. If homogeneity is the end goal, progressives seem well on their way to achieving it.
“I wouldn’t advocate White Nationalism in Canada. I don’t’ think that that is viable, at least not in the foreseeable future, and that is not the right politics to go about. So I do advocate identity politics, but that’s not the same as White Nationalism. Some people think it is, but it’s not, because as I made clear in my writings, I understand that other ethnic groups in Canada will naturally advocate their own identity politics. That to me is understandable.” - Dr. Ricardo Duchesne
(Above: The second interview I did with Dr. Ricardo Duchesne)
Identity politics consume everyone in a multicultural progressive world, and white people are obviously not immune. For a variety of predictable reasons, an increase of young men are being driven towards white identity politics, some going so far as to become overt White Nationalists. A student group calling themselves Students for Western Civilization formed at Laurier University. I had the opportunity to have lunch with young man who was working with this group at the time and who was planning to launch his own podcast focused on white nationalism in Canada. He did not want to be interviewed for my channel but was willing to give me some quotes to use in my eventual book. It was a candid conversation and I appreciated his willingness to open up to me about his political perspectives and opinions. He told me:
“Europeans are a very empathetic race, nostalgic, sentimental. This is a virtue that’s been weaponized against us, in my view.”
He paused, then continued.
“Regarding white genocide, we’re 72% of the population, but look how we’re being treated by our own government already. It’s a dark age for white males. We’re hooked on SSRI’s, pot, cartoons, video games, superhero movies, toys. No end of unnecessary distractions for us as a group, hence why the far right is emerging so exponentially fast. A man needs a purpose, but more importantly, he needs a home. We’ll have neither if this keeps up.”
“And I think the reason the far left or neocons do this, is because they are projecting the way they act onto us. The far leftist pretends they are acting in the good naïve indigo child spirit of ’67. Peace and love, man. But then you see them tweeting how they want to kill white people, or eradicate 4/5ths of the male population. A neocon pretends they’re acting in the interests of the people, when in reality they’re fucking War Criminals. So when George Bush goes up there and denounces WN’s, I get a kick out of it. These people project their ill intentions onto us, when really we don’t have anything to hide…The inability to have an honest conversation is almost entirely due to the liberal’s projection of their psyche onto people like me.
To explain:
I do not want to harm anybody. I don’t even think I have the ability to, lol. Not physically. I don’t want executions, gassings, lynchings, anything. I want to be left alone with a land for my people. 97% of people who identify as WN will tell you this. I’d say the other percentage are your sub-90 IQ idiots who consume American History X, Romper Stomper, The Believer, and other Jew-made caricatures of WN’s and begin to adopt that style for themselves, just to be contrarian.
That’s neither here nor there; the point is: Most of us want to be left alone. That is our honest intention, we wear it on our sleeve, and what is the response from journalists like Elle Reeve, or the guy who the piece on Mike Pienovich or theright.biz? To “try and understand us”. Because there has to be an ulterior motive, right? There has to be something that went wrong in our childhoods to make us this way. They have to pathologize us, and look for an ulterior motive. There was a guy who went “undercover” in the alt-right and “exposed” Greg Johnson. Besides doxxing him, all he exposed were the same ideas you could find on his website, that he’s been discussing for years.”
I am not a white nationalist, and do not advocate for such politics, but I felt sympathetic towards the way this young man had essentially been driven to White Nationalism. Anti-white rhetoric seemed to be everywhere in the media that point (as I covered in Chapter Five). Never was someone with his point of view going to be fairly represent in the mainstream media, nor the talking points he brought up ever allowed to enter into true public discourse. My opinion is none of this is even really about race from the point of view of the establishment, it's about not interrupting immigration because that would interfere with Canada's GDP. It's all about workers and taxes and nothing more.
What saddened me even more upon reflection was realizing that the liberalism that people on the right are worried about losing is mostly already gone.
#ricardoduchesne #westerncivilization #liberalism
Racial vote pandering sinks Liberal Candidate in Burnaby by-election https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/racial-vote-pandering-sinks-liberal-candidate-in-burnaby-byelection/
UNB prof accused of being a white supremacist takes early retirement - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/unb-ricardo-duchesne-retiring-1.5161931