"Now there are some in your country and some in Canada who feel Canada's Oil Sands is ‘Dirty Oil’ because of the extraction process. What do you think? Is it Dirty Oil?" A direct quote, ladies and gentlemen, from the host of CBC's The National, Peter Mansbridge, in an interview with the President of the United States, Barack Obama. To the president's credit he refused to take the bait.
He refused to call what gets processed from the Alberta Oil Sands, as ‘Dirty Oil.’ Do you think the CBC loves the phrase ‘Dirty Oil’ a little too much? I asked my friend Lorne Gunter in Edmonton. He said, "Yes, they do and as does Geoffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail.” Do you think some day, someone on behalf of Oil, is going to take someone to the Human Rights Commission, pressing the case that the use of the phrase ‘Dirty Oil’ is Hate Speech? It’s just a rhetorical question, just to punctuate a truth that on our Animal Farm known as Canada, some Canadians are treated less equally than others, and are less inoculated against hate messaging.
Ezra Levant once made a fateful decision to publish some Danish cartoons. He became the target of a Human Rights Commission inquisition. He pointed out the other day on Adler on Line that Human Rights Commissions in Canada never go after people who say controversial things about White people. When is the last time you heard that piece of plain unvarnished truth on THE NATIONAL? You are sitting there thinking, is Adler saying that Levant is saying that you can pretty much say whatever you want about Whites and not worry about having some Human Rights Commission shredding your reputation and your bank account? Hey, Levant and I are not saying it. The facts are saying it. The facts are screaming it coast to coast. The facts are screaming that ‘Dirty Oil’ is a White business primarily, white-owned, and white-operated. Alberta has greater ethnic and cultural diversity, much more than it once did. But some continue to think that the Canadian Outback is still a Throwback to pre-multicultural Canada. A part of the world run by Good Ole' White Boys with too many Cow Chips on their Cowboy Boots and too much Crude Cash in their wallets and too many Expensive Homes in their All-White Neighborhoods with too many White Trophy Wives and it's all just too much for the Downtown Toronto Front Street CBC Palace.
These are the front lines for the toxic ideology that says those Westerners who don't need Canadian taxpayers to send them Equalization Pogey will pay dearly for their crude and dirty independence. The Front Street Gang prefers to see Canada as a cultural plantation. The cultural slave masters congregate at the Front Street cathedral spewing a catechism that the good guys in Canada are those who are down and out and dependent on the average taxpayer to send them money to keep them breathing, just enough to keep them alive but economically enslaved. The favorite players in this drama are the low-growth rural communities of Atlantic Canada, Quebec, and of course, those Native Reserves. That's where the Harvest of Ideological Shame is always bountiful, a beautiful sight for the sore eyes of the Front Street Gang who want to throw it in Canada's face every day, that if people in this country are struggling and suffering it's: a) YOUR fault, and, b) YOUR duty to pay higher taxes. Naturally if you have been captured and conquered by that loathsome political agenda, you naturally see Albertans as evil-doers. They have the most. They own the most and they seem to be the least interested in this CBCist outlook, this CBCist perspective, and this CBCist propaganda. They will pay dearly for their Dirty Deeds done Dirt Cheaply.
Hope you don't mind a little Australian AC/DC language once in a while, when I offer you a piece of my dirty crude mind. But three of the music men I admire most are Angus Young, Malcolm Young and Bon Scott. And sometimes their riffs and lyrics course through the capillaries of my cranium and make my melon moan like a sweet, sweet Stratocaster.
The moan and groan du jour of the Front Street Gang is about ‘Dirty Oil.’ But the question you need to ask the next time Peter Mansbridge (or anybody else from his gang who tries to bleed that old pig) is this: "Would they use the phrase ‘Dirty Oil’ if the Tar beneath their heels was located in the rock of Danny Williams' Newfoundland? Or, what if instead of Northern Alberta, the location of ‘Dirty Oil’ were to stretch to Northern Quebec? If billions of barrens of ‘Dirty Oil’ were discovered in Northern Quebec would it still be dirty? If ‘Dirty Oil’ was found on one of the poorest Native Reserves in Canada, Shammatawa or Pukatawagon, do you think the Front Street Gang would be calling that oil the sweet, sweet fruit of the Canadian geological loin, or do you think it would be called Dirty?
Ladies and gentlemen, I have taken you across our great land and even given a very honourable mention to the Land Down Under. Now I want you to allow me to take you to one of the CBC's favorite countries, Denmark. It is a Social Democratic paradise, partly paid for by all that offshore oil, but that's relatively recent history. I want to take you back to the nineteen-forties, to a time when Nazi forces were sweeping through Europe and part of their mission was to ethnically cleanse the continent. Their chief targets were the Jews, and the Nazis referred to them, as the ‘Dirty Jews.’ Of course, we now know the Nazis succeeded all too well, in most parts of the territory that the Nazis temporarily conquered. But there was one place where they had a great deal of difficulty in wresting the Jewish population from the general population. It was in Denmark, where the King whose name was Christian had a much more generous attitude towards his Jews than other European leaders. There was a tale that was told for years about how when the Nazis ordered the Jews of Denmark to wear arm bands with the yellow Star of David, that King Christian became the first to put one on his arm and called on all of his countrymen to do the same as a symbol of resistance. Well that arm band story is an urban myth, probably propagated by another one of those scamp like Scandinavian cartoonists who wanted to make the point that King Christian and his people were willing to take some serious risks on behalf of the seven-thousand Jews who lived in Denmark. They were willing to say to the Nazis, if you want to think of our Jews as ‘Dirty Jews’ than you might as well think of all of us as ‘Dirty Jews.’ By Holocaust metrics, only a tiny fraction of Danish Jews ended up in the human rubble created by Hitler's Jewish Death Wish. Of the six-million Jews killed, fewer than fifty were from Denmark. King Christian was seen by his people as the protector of the Jews and during the years of Nazi occupation, Danish police officers and Danes in every other walk of life, were instrumental in preventing the Nazi machine from rolling over their Jews.
Although every country conquered by Hitler had to answer to their Nazi Slave Master on the so-called Jewish question, the Danish Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, in the fall of 1941 when the Nazis were at the peak of their strength, had the temerity to talk back to Hermann Goring himself. Goring was one of history's most feared warriors. He was the head of the infamous Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force. Scavenius, when asked by Goring what Denmark was going to do about the “Jewish question,” spoke the truth. He said, “Herr Goring, in Denmark, there is no Jewish question.” Ladies and gentlemen, when I was a very young, curious boy, curious about the evil done to members of my family, my grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins, whose young and vital bodies were turned into ash, I searched and I scoured the stacks of books that were for a long time the only friends I trusted, to find some good among the evil. I found no better a human being than King Christian, who would ride through the streets of Copenhagen every day unarmed, even during the Nazi occupation of his country to inspire his people to show resistance to evil and part of that resistance was not to do anything to quench the Nazi thirst for Jewish blood, and not to accede to the Nazi attempt to brand the Jews as ‘dirty.’
I first learned of that story when I was twelve-years-old. Thank goodness I was an obstreperous kid who got tossed out of class a lot and that allowed me to spend more time in the library reading the books I found to be far more interesting than some of the mailed-in, passionless lectures of my teachers. It was in one of those precious books where I found that story and over the years whenever I heard someone say ‘Dirty Jew,’ I would think back to King Christian of Denmark and say to the ignorant soul, “Why don't you call me a ‘Dirty Jew,’” and when I heard someone say ‘Dirty Black’ I would say the same, “Why don't you call me the Dirty N-word.” Call me a Dirty Irishman or Italian or Pakistani or Philipino or Aboriginal and all the pejorative derivatives of those bigoted words. Call me that name. I will wear the armband of your derision as a badge of honour. Was I super faithful to the spirit of King Christian? Did I always speak up? No, I am not a perfect man, and I am not nearly as good as a man as he was. We are never quite as good as our role models. But I want to ask you to speak up the next time someone tries to dirty up a fellow Canadian. And so the next time you hear someone say ‘Dirty Oil,’ code for those Dirty Dogs of Wealth and Independence in Alberta, you tell them your name is ‘Dirty Oil,’ and if they want to say it about them, let them tag you with the same name to your face. It's amazing how fast people back off when you personalize your point-of-view, when you personalize your common sense.
I don't apologize for telling you I take it personally when I hear ordinary Canadians attacked, regardless of what part of the country they are working in. The people of Alberta aren't lying in hammocks clipping dividend stock coupons sipping on Margaritas. They are working their butts off, as are Canadians in every part of this country, and yes, I take it personally when they are disrespected and dumped on with impunity. I take it personally when ordinary Canadians are trashed because this is my Denmark, my safe place, my piece of Heaven on Earth. Canada is a country with the same King Christian generosity because it opened its doors to my family in the fall of 1956. I owe the good people of this country a debt that I can never repay. But the least I can do is talk back to those who wish to play divide and conquer games with our own people, divide group against group and then conquer as many as possible, making them sip from the witch’s brew. The Adler family did not come to a free country to help make it a slave country. I am a free man. I am not a slave. And if you want to call Alberta oil, ‘Dirty Oil,’ call me ‘Dirty Oil,’ call me Dirty Chuck. Call me your fellow Canadian who on your behalf is only too happy to tell the Gang on Front Street to blow it out their smoke stack.
I'm Charles Adler on the Corus Radio Network.
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Here's some extra reading:
Comparing Carbon output of
Alberta Oil Sands to U.S. and Chinese Coal plants,
AND
The story of
King Christian standing up to the Nazis occupying Denmark.
