Troy Parfitt's Blog

Beyond Order: crypto-fascism masquerading as self-help

This review is primarily meant for Jordan Peterson’s critics, not his followers, whose maniacal reverence for and untutored defense of their omniscient leader chiefly serves to intimidate the skeptical and clog up the internet with paragraphs teaming with illiteracy accompanied by avatars of superheroes and unicorns.

Yes, Jordan Peterson is a leading figure of the alt-right; yes, he is nasty business who disparages women, journalists, lawmakers, educators, egalitarians, environmentalists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone who opposes him or his oddball brand of neo-fascism; correct, he is a grifter who peddles truisms and garish merchandise; to be sure, he has drug issues; and bingo, he is a weirdo of the first order. However, these oft-repeated assessments barely hint at the scope of the problem.

Jordan Peterson is a neo-Nazi. By extension, his movement, dubbed “the Jordan Peterson phenomenon” by the media, is a neo-Nazi cult. From reading the pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic comments under Peterson’s YouTube videos, it’s obvious that some cult followers are receiving the message. Nonetheless, many acolytes seem oblivious to their idol’s intentions, because 1.) he identifies as a self-help guru who claims to be helping them get their lives “in order,” and 2.) he usually communicates with them—seriously—through the medium of a crypto-fascist code. Given that Peterson’s fans tend to craft remarks like “JP is the bestest teecher I ain’t never had,” their failure to comprehend his real aims is understandable.

Think what I’m saying sounds crazy? In a sense, I would agree. When Peterson was in his early twenties, the wheels fell off his tricycle. In Maps of Meaning, he documents how he experienced a “split” from reality, a descent into schizophrenia, and a rebirth facilitated by a voice with eyes which began judging and regulating his speech. For nearly thirty years, he’s been ruminating on schizophrenia in ways that are clearly autobiographical, yet no one seems to notice.
Before I offer evidence to support my claims, please know that I’m not the first to make them. Historian Mikael Nilsson has accused Peterson of making a “barrage of revisionist falsehoods about Hitler and Nazism,” noting his “strangely generous framing of the Nazi leader” and his “reluctance to use the word ‘Holocaust.’ ” The CBC’s Wendy Mesley and British GQ’s Helen Lewis have questioned Peterson about why he posed with a Pepe the Frog flag, which has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol. Peterson filed a lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier University after a staffer compared him to Hitler; and Noam Chomsky has likened him to Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Peterson has denied such allegations, saying, “I’ve been lecturing about the dangers of Nazi totalitarianism… for almost three decades.”

It’s true that Peterson has been lecturing about Nazism for almost three decades, but not its dangers. Criticism of the Third Reich is fleeting, shallow, and offset by commendation. Jordan Peterson praises, defends, and empathizes with Adolf Hitler, downplays his malevolence, and routinely admits that he (Peterson) could have gleefully worked Jews to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He could have enjoyed it, he says, and routinely tells his devotees that they could have enjoyed it, too. It’s not a warning. It’s a suggestion. He’s as mad as a hatter.

Jordan Peterson defends other Nazis, including Martin Heidegger and Adolf Eichmann, as well as neo-Nazis, such as Ernst Zündel. He has come to the rescue of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and Tommy Robinson, and he networks with white supremacists like Faith Goldy (who was outed as a neo-Nazi), Lauren Southern (who was barred from the UK under a terrorist act), and Stefan Molyneux (to whom Peterson identified as “alt-right”). He does interviews with other racists and far-right cranks, like Douglas Murray, Jonathan Pageau, and Gad Saad, and has agreed with the views of white nationalist Ricardo Duchesne, author of Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. He has courted Charlie Kirk, who helped foment the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, and has characterized that attack as “events,” criticizing the government for imposing a curfew after such “events.” Peterson teaches that the alt-right project is “incomplete” and is fond of demonstrating the goose-step and Sieg Heil to his students at the University of Toronto. However, propositions which deviate from the neat liberal narrative that Peterson could be anything worse than a conservative fraudster are met with disinterest and disdain.

Peterson has repeatedly called Hitler “brilliant” and an “organizational genius.” He has said that the Führer burned things he found disgusting “beautifully,” adding, “The Nazis were unbelievably great at using fire of purification [sic] as a symbolic message.” He has referred to Hitler as “the jovial father of the race,” “[the] knight of the faith,” “the knight of the blood,” “a master of speech,” “tremendously artistic,” “charismatic,” “compelling,” and “captivating.” Moreover, he has asked: “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” He reminds his listeners that “Hitler… won a medal for heroism” and has falsely claimed that Hitler “served in the trenches” on “the front lines of the authoritarian struggle.” He has perpetrated the lie that Hitler was elected in a “landslide vote, the kind no modern democratic leader ever gets,” and has labeled the dictator a “quasi-deity,” “the Great Father,” “[the] wise Father,” and “God the Father,” who “climbed up the ranks of the hierarchy in a remarkable manner.”

Peterson urges his cult followers to climb the dominance hierarchy and be respectful of the figurehead at its pinnacle: God the Father. In 2017, he said, “The Father was right a hundred years ago… but he’s dead… and so, your moral duty… is to rescue your dead Father…” By heroically rescuing their dead Father, who was “right” in 1917, Peterson’s principally white, male, working-class base can “rejuvenate the state” and “re-establish order.”

You see, within the dominance hierarchy (a metaphor for the state), there are two opposing forces: order and chaos. As Peterson explains in 12 Rules for Life, order can be defined as “tribe... home and country,” “the greatness of tradition,” “trains that leave on time,” “the flag of the nation,” and “living room.” This is intriguing, because Hitler conceptualized order as “Tribes, Folks [and] States,” “the home country,” “the cultural traditions of a great people,” a “train [that] departed punctually,” the “national flag,” and “living space.”

Hitler used the word “order” interchangeably with Nazism. He used “chaos” to mean “negrification” or “Jewish Marxist Bolshevism,” what Peterson labels “Cultural Marxism” or “the radical left.” Hitler declared, “I overcame chaos in Germany. I restored order,” whereas Peterson cryptically informs his followers that order is white, chaos is black, and counsels them to “confront… chaos” and “transform chaos into order.” He writes, “The Great Father is order, placed against chaos… The Great Father is the tyrant…”

We can assume Peterson means the tyrant who burned things he found disgusting “beautifully,” because he has said to his students: “[Hitler’s] the Great Father! He’s the all-seeing Great Father in the background. He’s like the Wizard of Oz, fundamentally, ya know? So… he’s partly order, and that was a huge part of Hitler, and that’s partly [what] was attractive, because Germany was absolutely in chaos. So that made order more and more attractive, right?” While raving about a Nuremberg rally, Peterson has said, “The Germans are good at order.” He has also said, “Certainly, what happened to the Germans could be regarded as immensely chaotic. In a society that’s collapsed into chaos you’re going to get … [a] demand for the imposition of order, and one thing Hitler was good at was order.”

Peterson has recurrently specified that Hitler went beyond order, for instance when he said, “Now, the question is… why did [National Socialism] go so pathologically wrong? Well, that’s part of what we’re going to untangle… because… you might have benevolent motives in establishing order, but order shades into tyranny (i.e. order goes beyond order) and then your motivations for establishing tyranny might be completely self-serving and cruel… Certainly, it’s what happened with the Nazis.”

Beyond Order is a clandestine allusion to Hitler’s order. The book was originally called Beyond Mere Order and Peterson has discussed a collection of Hitler’s speeches called My New Order. When Peterson says he’s helping people get their lives “in order,” he means he’s priming them to become neo-Nazis.

Peterson: “you might have benevolent motives in establishing order”
Hitler: “a new order will be established”
Peterson: “Clear rules and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain and expand the order that is all that protects us from chaos” (he means racial chaos)
Hitler: “the main difficulty is not to establish a new order of things but to clear the ground for its establishment.”
Peterson: “new and benevolent order”
Hitler: “new and better world order”
Peterson: “Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.”
Hitler: “a new order has begun to crystallize from a state of chaotic conflict”
Peterson: “This individual… (re)establishes social order”
Hitler: “establishment of an entirely new spiritual order”

Plagiarizing Mein Kampf is a neo-Nazi tradition. Indeed, neo-Nazis occasionally communicate with each other by quoting and paraphrasing Adolf Hitler. This is what resulted in Jordan Peterson’s friend, Faith Goldy, being outed as a neo-Nazi. But Goldy was merely a Canadian journalist. Certainly, a Canadian educator wouldn’t plagiarize Hitler, would they?

At least two have done just that: Malcom Ross, who taught Nazi propaganda to high school students in New Brunswick, and Ricardo Deschene, who was outed by his peers at the University of New Brunswick. Another neo-Nazi educator from Canada, James Keegstra, did not plagiarize Hitler, although he was supported by Ernst Zündel, who Peterson defended while omitting that Zündel had served five years in Germany for violating hate-speech laws and two years in Canada for posing a threat to national security. During a talk in which Peterson stood up for the alt-right “comedian” Mark Meechan, who was fined for training his dog to give what resembled the Sieg Heil upon hearing “Gas the Jews,” Peterson implied that Zündel had been the victim of governmental malevolence and advised his listeners to “wake up and push back.” The phrase “wake up” is a neo-Nazi dog whistle. “Germany Awake!” was a National Socialist slogan and Hitler was forever banging on about awakening the German Volk to the danger of the Jews.

Beyond Order is riddled with plagiarism, crypto-fascism, and occultism. To cite an example, in describing a Rider-Waite Tarot card designed by Arthur Waite, Peterson writes, “The Fool is a young, handsome man, eyes lifted upward, on a journey in the mountains, on a sunny day—about to carelessly step over a cliff…” And Aleister Crowley wrote: “The Fool of the Tarot… In the common interpretation of the card, the Scholiasts say that the picture is of a gay, careless youth, with a sack full of follies and illusions, dancing along the edge of a precipice…” I ask you: why would a self-help book contain an image and explanation of an occultic Tarot card?

Arthur Waite was a demonologist and associate of Aleister Crowley, who wrote about Waite several times, even basing a character on him in a novel. Waite penned books on black magic, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and devil worship. Aleister Crowley hated Arthur Waite, but copied several of his tarot cards for his own deck which was published posthumously. One card that Crowley paid a designer to imitate was The Fool. And Peterson (or Penguin) paid a designer to imitate the Rider-Waite Tarot card, The Fool, because the original was still protected by copyright.

A fervent anti-Semite, Aleister Crowley was obsessed with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and tried to send the Führer his Book of the Law in the hopes that his Satanic religion could serve as the “philosophical basis for Nazi principles” and the “base for [a] Nazi New Order.” Maps of Meaning is overflowing with Crowley plagiarism (e.g. Peterson: “the many-breasted Greco-Roman Goddess Diana… mistress of the animals”; Crowley: “the Great Mother of Fertility, Diana of the Ephesians, Many-Breasted.”). Crowley wrote, “I have always considered [Hitler] a prophet in the Old Testament sense of the word, a more or less inspired madman who brings about the things that he… desires by exciting mass hysteria.” And Peterson has said to his students: “Then there’s Hitler… a person who was able to produce mass hysteria in his followers.” Much of Peterson’s Crowley-plagiarism comes from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. One of Crowley’s German followers sent a copy of the autobiography to the Gestapo. Many top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were influenced by the occult. Heinrich Himmler was an occultist and a Luciferian.

Beyond Order is published by Penguin, a company that put into circulation Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But hey, thoughtful critiques no longer pay the bills and fascism is gaining on democracy. The American president recently tried to topple democracy with the help of neo-Nazis and QAnon, but there’s no need for alarm. As conservatives kept telling concerned liberals while Trump demonized foreigners, put children in cages, ordered the Proud Boys to “stand by,” and called neo-Nazis “very fine people”: “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler.”

This is the stock rejoinder used when someone has the temerity to point out that a neo-Nazi is a neo-Nazi. It implies that no one is like Hitler and no one ever was. With few ideas of their own, Peterson’s cult members are wont to regurgitate this tired phrase. If you inform them that their leader has said, “No one likes to think they’re a Nazi, but everyone is one,” they’ll counter with: “He never said that.” If you show them the source, they’ll say, “He didn’t mean it that way,” or “You’re taking him out of context.”

Here’s some context: before JP identified as a life-coach, he identified as an expert on evil and said that Maps of Meaning was chiefly about why seemingly ordinary people would participate in an event like the Holocaust. Naturally, listeners would assume that Peterson’s Holocaust interest would stem from concern, but such an assumption would be incorrect. Peterson has admitted that 12 Rules for Life was essentially a rewrite of Maps of Meaning, raising the question: how could a self-help book—nay, two self-help books—be about the Holocaust? And how could books about the Holocaust barely mention the Holocaust? But then, why would they contain occultic poetry (e.g. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”; Yeats was also an associate of Crowley) and so many references to schizophrenia, demons, and Satanic possession? Why would they include praiseful remarks about Lucifer? And why would they include numerous references to Egyptian pyramids and the all-seeing eye of Horus (Aleister Crowley’s logo was a pyramid containing the all-seeing eye of Horus)?
Here’s what Peterson has said about “Rule 7—Do What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient”:

“You have to understand that you could not only do what the Nazi camp guards did in Auschwitz, but that you could actually enjoy it, and then you have to decide that you’re not going to do that anymore, and that’s not an easy thing to figure out. Well, and that’s what [Rule 7 is] about. So, that’s a rough chapter, man.”

Rule 7 hardly touches on Nazism or Auschwitz, but it really is about those subjects, because (to restate) it’s rendered in a crypto-fascist code.

Feel free to disbelieve me. Instead, believe the big lie. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, and as Peterson reproduces in 12 Rules for Life:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses… are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

When Peterson says, “One of the things I’ve always thought about Hitler is that, you know, people... you have to admire Hitler. That’s the thing, because he was an organizational genius,” perhaps it would be best to doubt and waver and continue to think that there may be some other explanation for what is obviously manic praise. I mean, apart from Peterson’s small lies about Hitler, he wouldn’t tell the big lie. After all, he has taught at Harvard and has spoken at Oxford, and in the (sorry) realm of public intellectuals, his is the dominant discourse. Besides, Rule 8 is “Tell the Truth or at Least Don’t Lie,” and Peterson learned to tell the truth from the voice with the eyes that appeared in his mind after he experienced his schizophrenic “split.” The truth is: for JP’s groupies to go “beyond order,” they first need to get their lives “in order.” And that’s what their leader is helping them to do.

Troy Parfitt is the author of The Devil and His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler.

"When I first heard Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speak in September 2017, I thought he had the personality of a dictator. When I first read Mein Kampf in September 2018, I realized he was a Nazi. Before I authenticate this claim, permit me to share how I arrived at such a discovery."

This is the opening paragraph of The Devil and His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Hitler, which will be released on Amazon on December 21, 2020. The e-book is now available for pre-order. The paperback will be available within in the next few days.

Discovering that Jordan Peterson is a plagiarist and a neo-Nazi has been fortuitous and a serious headache. Writing the book was hard, and I had to do heaps of research, which included reading more than 20 books and watching thousands of hours of Peterson's lectures and talks. Poor me. Anyhow, to have finished Volume One seems a bit unreal. I will now provide you with the back-cover copy and will try to write something a bit more absorbing later.

Back-cover copy:

It might sound implausible—even preposterous—but the world’s foremost public intellectual is a Nazi and an occultist.

The Devil and His Due chronicles how an obscure professor obsessed with the subject of evil rebranded himself as a pop-psych guru and shot to stardom by combatting “Marxist” compelled-speech laws that never existed. It illustrates how Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, father figure to a legion of male followers, is a cult leader who identifies as “the saviour,” feigns Christian beliefs, glorifies Satan, networks with white supremacists, praises serial killers, discusses “the Jewish question,” touts banned substances as “miracle cures,” encourages converts to slaughter goats in backyard sacrifices that ought to be “sufficiently bloody,” and teaches that the alt-right project is “incomplete.”

Peterson has spent 35 years pretending to warn against fascism while gushing about Hitler’s boundless talents and channelling his speech. Undeniably, the lecturer’s 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning have been systematically plagiarized from volumes like Mein Kampf and Hitler’s Second Book. Troy Parfitt has documented over 4,000 examples of Jordan Peterson copying from Adolf Hitler and others, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and the necromancer Aleister Crowley, who believed the Führer to be “a prophet” and lobbied to have his satanic religion made the official faith of the Third Reich.

Parfitt exposes Peterson’s hidden identity, academic theft, and latent belief system. He decodes his crypto-fascist messages and tells the mesmerizing, bizarre, and entirely true story of an elaborate prank—a ghastly joke born out of vengeance and psychosis, and perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting people.

The Devil and His Due is a public warning.


The Devil and His Due: How Jordan Peterson Plagiarizes Adolf Hitler

Having read all of Theroux’s travel books (besides The Tao of travel, a volume he mainly compiled), I am now making my way through his novels. I would classify this one, Saint Jack, as just fair. Though better than his debut, Waldo, it is nowhere near My Secret History. Saint Jack is an early Theroux effort and unfortunately it shows.

The creativity is still there. Theroux worked in Singapore as an English teacher, not a ship chandler’s assistant, like his protagonist, Jack Flowers, and the underworld the writer creates, though certainly informed by observation and based in reality, is fictional. Saint Jack does have its moments. Some of the paragraphs shine and occasionally the scenery and atmosphere of 1960s Singapore and the places Flowers frequents come to life. Theroux’s cleverness shines, but the story and the writing are choppy. Stylistically, Theroux is still working things out. The punctuation is a giveaway. There are lots of colons and semi-colons – too many for non-fiction, and absent in his later stuff. In short, Saint Jack offers glimpse of brilliance, but doesn’t quite come off. But it is an okay read. Jack is a memorable character, a tortured rogue – and the bit about him getting nabbed and tattooed by Chinese gangsters is classic. Theroux is a talented enough writer that even his earlier stuff, though perhaps not great, is still good. I look forward to reading his The Mosquito Coast and The Lower River.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

My Secret History was my first Paul Theroux novel. I tried reading Waldo, his debut effort, but could not finish it. (Waldo kicks off with promise, and humour, but stagnates in my opinion; Theroux was just 26 when it was published.) But My Secret History works. It is plainly written, even breezy, but it is extremely gripping. The novel is a fictionalized memoir. It plots epochs of the writer’s life, buffs them up a bit, and presents them as creative writing, which it most certainly is not, as readers familiar with Theroux ought to recognize. The narrator, Andre Parent, grows up in Boston, works as an altar boy, moves to Africa with the Peace Corps, meets his English wife, moves to London, works on his writing career, becomes friends with a famous Indian writer (VS Naipaul), publishes six or seven novels, has a breakthrough with a piece of travel literature, is devastated to learn his wife has had an affair, threatens to kill the man she had an affair with, has an affair himself, and recommits to his wife while on a trip to India.

Because I have read almost all of Theroux’s travel literature, I could see parallels – nay, identical situations –regarding his personal life. (For example, in the prologue to Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he talks about what a mess his life was when writing his breakthrough The Great Railway Bazaar, how his wife cheated on him, and how he threatened to kill her lover.) But readers unfamiliar with Theroux’s travel literature or his other fiction would still find this a satisfying read – it just adds another dimension if you know something about his biography.

My Secret History is a page-turner, hard to put down. The first chapter, “Altar Boy,” sparkles, as does the third chapter, “African Girls.” I have read satisfying novels set in Africa by JM Coetzee, VS Naipaul, and Joseph Conrad, but Theroux manages to really bring Africa to life. He seems to capture perfectly what living there in the early 1960s must have been like. His descriptions and assessments of London are intriguing and so are other “admissions” about his “secret life.” Indeed, one wonders how much of this novel really is fiction. I would conservatively wager less than 20 percent. I would not be surprised if it were only 5 percent. I had wondered why Paul Theroux never wrote a memoir; now I realize he did.

I only have two small complaints. At 444 pages, the novel is a bit long. It is also very conventional in style. Theroux, prone to analysing and discussing other writers, sometimes praises Hemingway and sometimes criticizes and mocks him. In The Pillars of Hercules, he accuses him of writing in Father Pilgrim English – but Theroux could be accused of writing in the same manner. But it doesn’t really matter. His writing is always good, always consistent, and his story-telling ability is brilliant, almost never dull. The novel is also packed with irony, humour, and incisive observations about human nature. Recommended, and I look forward to reading more of Paul Theroux’s fiction.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

Something approaching awe

While sending out review copies for my book about China, I warned readers they might find its content polemical, controversial, “politically incorrect,” or whatever. Two reviewers replied ‘not to worry,’ – they liked oppositionist perspectives and were admirers of Christopher Hitchens. I thought, ‘Christopher who?’ Incredibly, I didn’t know who Hitchens was (in 2011, no less), though I knew of his book God is Not Great, which didn’t appeal to me because, pompously perhaps, I reckoned I didn’t need to read an argument I already supported and a conclusion I had already arrived at. Like many, I familiarized myself with Mr. Hitchens through Youtube and found myself learning heaps about politics and history, and more than I expected to about religion (I had never thought of religion as the original tyranny, for example). And then I chanced upon a copy of his memoir.

Hitch-22 is the best memoir I’ve read and better than any biography I’ve read. From a startling account about his mother’s suicide to a Socratic declaration of how little he knows (the spur which kept him learning and reflecting on his positions and beliefs), Hitchens’s crisp and articulate prose courses through 400 pages, drawing you in, propelling you on, causing you to reflect, and impelling you to learn more about the many subjects, historical events, themes, and memes he scrutinizes and dissects. It also sends you to the dictionary, a healthy exercise, surely.
And it’s not a conventional memoir. Apart from the section pertaining to his youth, there is little straightforward or chronological autobiography, and there is limited mention of things there should be, his wife and children for instance. Rather, after describing his upbringing (vignettes of his loving but tormented mother Yvonne, awkward chats with his kindly but conservative father “the Commander,” and the bizarre rituals and norms of British public school), the volume morphs into a study of personalities, events, and subjects that shaped Hitchens’s life and career as a journalist, a writer, a political commentator, a radical, an iconoclast, and a public intellectual of the first order. So, in the beginning of the book, we get chapters like “Yvonne,” “the Commander,” and “Fragments from an Education,” and in the middle and latter portions we get ones like “Salman,” “Mesopotamia from Both Sides,” and “Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul).” The final chapter, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” does not, as I thought it would, speak to the writer’s battle with cancer (indeed, there is no mention of the disease that took his life just two years after this book was published), but instead to the volume’s overarching theme, encapsulated within its apposite title.

Hitchens, you see, far from being an absolutist (one of the charges from his reactionary and absolutist detractors), has always been acutely aware of his many contradictions. Ever since he began his rabble-rousing at Oxford (by day; by night he socialized with profs and dons) he has been cognizant of the fact he has kept two sets of books.

Like so many intellectuals, Hitchens was drawn to the Left through Marxism (he was a very active member of the International Socialists), but unlike other big thinkers, he quickly saw the contradictions of Marxist ideology, the shortcomings and failures of Communist states, and the fascist nature of anti-fascists. But Hitchens’s outright rejection of the Left was the culmination of a process that occurred over decades. For anyone who has ever wondered or felt confused about just which notch on the political spectrum they occupy, Hitch-22 offers consolation. “Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator,” our Anglo-American narrator writes. “Change only the name and this story is about you.”

Reading this book taught me too many things to comprehensively list, and whetted my appetite for more. Apart from Bill Clinton’s Mayor Quimbyesque “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” (and Clinton, remember, was impeached for lying under oath) I wasn’t fully aware of just what a lying sack of bovine fecal matter he was. I did not fully comprehend the challenge to freedom of expression (and freedom in general) that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie represented. I did not really understand the severity of the situation in Iraq (or precisely how evil and fanatical Saddam Hussein and his sons were). But most of all, and although I’ve had suspicions for a while and have been tiptoeing back to the centre of the political spectrum, I never fully realized just how utterly brainless, extreme, and absurd the Left really can be. See members of this bleeding-heart’s society demonstrating against armed intervention so fascist states and military juntas can continue threatening their neighbours and torturing and murdering their citizenry; see them advocate for freedom of expression while denouncing books and points-of-view their point of view deems “offensive”; watch as people who call themselves liberal criticise all US foreign policy as crass and corrupt imperialism believing nothing the United States government does is motivated – in whole or in part – by morality; note the expression of satisfaction on Leftist faces when the planes hit the towers and thousands die. “Well, hey, America had it coming.”

“If Hitchens didn’t exist,” Ian McEwan said, “we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” The cynic thinks this is overstatement: the endorsement of a friend in exchange for a mention or reciprocal endorsement. But the cynic who reads Chirstopher Hitchens should have their cynicism replaced by clarity if not perspicacity. They should come to the understanding that McEwan’s statement represents the truth.

At the risk of stating the obvious or sounding hagiographic, what a pity Christopher Hitchens is no longer with us. He did what the media so often fails to do. Not only did he use reason and logic to point the way toward what to think, but how to think. He got us to question what we knew or thought we knew. And now that he’s gone, who’s going to replace him? I reckon someone of Hitchen’s intellect and drive comes along once every twenty or thirty years. Or maybe longer. There was Socrates.... There was Orwell.... The feeling I got while reading Hitchens’s commentary was something approaching awe, and I felt foolish for not having known who he was. Without question, I will read his massive book, Arguably (reviewed opposite my own book in the San Francisco Book Review). I’m sure the pages will practically turn by themselves. Will I agree with everything Hitchens says? Of course not, and I doubt he would have wanted it any other way.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World.

Mordecai Richler's Cocksure is an amusing and fast-paced satirical novel that challenges – nay, skewers –political correctness; cheers for that. However, though it is a decent read, it doesn't quite come off and isn't as fulfilling as the writer’s previous work, The Incomparable Atuk, a lesser-known gem in Richler’s ground-breaking repertoire. (By the by, the reason Atuk is less known probably has to do with its wonderful political incorrectness. Or, as Richler once said, “Satirical novels are probably least seriously treated in Canada because... in Canada there’s an insecure attitude about culture.... People feel that culture is a very serious thing, and a duty, and connotes earnestness... and haven’t got enough confidence to realize that something funny may be of the highest seriousness... and people in England and the United States haven’t got that problem.”)

In any event, Cocksure revolves around Mortimer Griffin, a white-bread WASP from Caribou, Ontario who makes his mark in the London book trade. When an eccentric, self-obsessed Hollywood magnate named The Star Maker buys his publishing firm, Griffin is confronted by the fact he (Griffin) is not Jewish (many people think he is) and the impact this has on his career and personal life.

So, we've got a bit of a weak premise, especially for Richler, whose more serious efforts weave dozens of themes and characters together in a complex, erudite, and oh-so-satisfying mix. Regard, if you will, the literary pyrotechnics of Solomon Gursky Was Here, the profoundly good storytelling within the covers of Joshua Then And Now, or even the more conventional delivery and ba-dump tshewww! comedy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And we all know, or should, about the subtle intricacy and tragicomedy of Barney’s Version.

Humour helps Cocksure along – the bit about Griffin analyzing why he thinks about hockey legend Gordie Howe when making love to his wife is priceless – but some of the jokes don’t work. One does get the impression, however, the story must have been fun to write. The dialogue is good; Richler had that ear for vernacular. He never needed to describe the colour of the sofa or what was happening in the background; he just provided authentic and sustaining speech. And Cocksure’s characters are quite funny: the “ageless” Star Maker, for example, and Polly, who pretends she’s living in a movie, with scene cuts at all the dramatic spots.

It’s interesting to note that well into the twenty-first century, Mordecai Richler’s writing still pushes the envelope. He wrote Cocksure in 1968. Sure, it’s a bit ribald in places (the title being the clue), but that was the Zeitgeist, wun’nit? Still, the book was judged too risqué for some and was banned by WH Smith in the UK and by bookstores in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. We’ve come a long way, and we have writers like Richler to thank. In a CBC interview about Cocksure, Richler said, “I guess it’s a rather vile book. It’s really a novel of disgust. It’s meant to create discomfort especially among liberals who are so insufferably smug and self-satisfied about being moderately good.”
Cocksure is a decent read, but shouldn’t be anyone’s first Richler experience. I would wager you’ve got to “get to know him” elsewhere before you can appreciate this idiosyncratic, mocking little yarn. Cocksure might not achieve typical Richlerian heights, but it is fun; 4-stars fun.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

The Rachel Papers was my first Martin Amis novel and I liked it enough that I would read Amis again, most definitely. People say his subsequent efforts, such as Money and London Fields, are brilliant, and based on this book – published (if my math is right) when the author was 24 – I imagine they are. What a talent to write that well at that age. In terms of style and ability, it reads like a novel penned by someone twice as old.

The story (a narrative told on the day before the protagonist’s 20th birthday, recounting the previous pre-university year) revolves around Charles Highway and his “first love” Rachel, though it’s unclear if Charles really loves Rachel (or anything, or anyone, besides perhaps William Blake). Charles, you see, isn’t a very nice person. He is an exceptionally bright and an exceptionally egomaniacal and shallow 19 year old. He lies, he manipulates; he’s cold. But he knows he’s not a nice fellow (indeed, he tells you precisely why), so this articulate candour makes for humour, and the book is really funny in places. And it’s that can’t-see-it-coming humour, the best kind. I particularly liked the line (after some confessional about some inadequacy or personal issue) ‘My heart really went out to me there.’ It’s an interesting premise for a first-person narrative; Charles is effectively saying, “I’m a worm, and here’s why I’m a worm.”

The only problem I had with the book is that it is a sort of literary teen romance – very literary in places, but very teen romance in others. It made me think back to those zit-concerned, first girlfriend days: sneaking around behind parents’ backs, thinking “oldsters” were quite lame, and all that jazz – but at times it came across as too teen-edition-Harlequin-romance. I didn’t really need a description of fumbling for buttons or a step by step through opening a condom package (well maybe one, but not two or three). You get to an age where reading about that kind of thing loses appeal. But what else could a 24 year old have written about?

The character Kevin, Charles’s bother-in-law, is priceless – endless comedy, certainly based on a real person. Kevin is a kitchen-sitting, booze guzzling, card playing lout who likes to indulge Charles in banal conversation or locker-room talk about his sister (and Charles doesn’t seem to mind because he admits he thinks his sister is hot!). Kevin’s not a very nice person either, so he and Charles (or so Kevin thinks) seem to have a connection.

I wonder what Martin Amis thinks of this book. It was written in 1973, and Amis has since gone on to become a literary giant. Most writers wish their first couple of efforts would disappear.
I thought The Rachel Papers was a good read. I imagine twenty-somethings with good taste in literature (and a sense of humour) would find it a great one.

Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

Joshua Then And Now is a compelling novel penned by Canada’s most intriguing writer. Joshua now is in hospital with broken limbs and a battered visage. Journalists are snooping around his house looking for tips. Joshua is a local writer, a celebrity of sorts, and there is rumour he has done something illegal, has had a split with his wife, and has been involved in a homosexual affair. Scandal is in the air. His father, Reuben, a former prize fighter, keeps the reporters at bay; he doesn’t seem concerned.

The novel flashes back to Joshua then, from his childhood in Montreal to his days spent on Ibiza to the months and weeks prior to his apparent accident – and what a ride it is. Richler fans should delight in the bits about Ibiza, having fun wondering just how much of it is true. We know Richler lived on the Spanish isle, and we know he had trouble with a German named Mueller (Dr. Dr. Mueller in the novel; in Austria each doctorate deserves a title) and that he had to leave suddenly, like Joshua Shapiro did. We also see Richler’s imagination flowing and spinning from his summer home at Lake Memphremagog, featured in Barney’s Version. And we see variations on Richler’s classic characters: the blue-blooded Hornbys, “rotten to the core” and cognizant of it, Jack Trimble: a man who scraped and clawed his way to the top, ignored by Westmount’s and McGill’s elite until they needed him to make money for them; Reuben: Joshua’s ostensibly dopey but street-savvy father, Joshua’s sex-starved Jewish mother, uncle Oscar: forced to drive a cab at age 69, Joshua’s brother-in-law, a 40-year old rich brat (one of the Hornbys) who we think has been horribly framed.

This book really drew me in, but then I got lost a little in the middle. The flashback sequences are not dated, but like with Richler’s subsequent Solomon Gursky Was Here it’s not so much a matter of figuring out when the time-shift is but why. However, unlike the weightier and more literary Solomon Gursky, Joshua Then And Now novel didn’t make me wonder if Richler knew where he was going and if his descriptive wanderings weren’t inspired by too many glasses of scotch. In Joshua, storyline straightens out, right on cue, and you see the method in the madness. At page 150, I was thinking, ‘This might be one of his weaker ones,’ but by p. 250, I was marvelling.

What a shame Mordecai Richler is no longer with us. There is no one in Canada writing books like his nowadays, and there is one less social critic to lampoon the politically correct CBC, insincere Canadian politicians, or the politics of special pleading. What humour, what wit, what intellect; they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

David Adams Richards

The other night, I got an email from the local business development agency advising me that an announcement for my book launch was now listed in a municipal events-calendar. I clicked the link to see what it looked like and noticed that, in 38 minutes, there was a scheduled reading for Canadian author David Adams Richards at the public library. I jumped in the shower, jumped in my car, and broke the speed-limit.

David Adams Richards is easily the most famous writer to ever emerge from my native New Brunswick. He’s penned poetry, plays, non-fiction, and – most notably – fiction, including 14 novels, the latest Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. He’s won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the esteemed Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary honour. He was supposed to speak in front of a Canadian-literature class I took in high school, but had previous commitments. In university, I read Richards’s first book, The Coming of Winter, but didn’t quite get it. When I lived in Taipei, I found a copy of his Mercy Among the Children and was drawn in deeply, transported back to my quirky and rural home province. Mercy is a good novel (it’s the one that won him the Giller), and I’ve been meaning to explore others, but there are so many books and so little time.

Richards’s stories are often set in the Miramichi, one of New Brunswick’s four main cities. Richards employs stark realism tinged with dark themes. Characters are raw and real and converse in the vernacular. There’s crime, clannishness, ostracism, hypocrisy, prejudice, and poverty. The duplicity of human society features prominently, as does ambiguity; it may be obvious who the victim is, but Richards’s heroes are harder to spot.

At the library, 30 people were seated quietly. Richards was standing off to the side, looking apprehensive or bored. There he was: a Canadian literary giant. Why wasn’t anyone talking to him?
“Excuse me. Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“Ah, no,” he said, patting his pockets, “but there’s one on the table.”
The table was laid out with his books, including his Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. I grabbed the pen, signed my own book, and presented it to him. I thought he might wince, supply an insincere ‘Thanks,’ and toss it aside the instant I took my leave, but he seemed genuinely interested.

“You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re from Saint John?”

“Yes. I read your Mercy Among the Children when I was living in Taiwan, and really enjoyed it.”

“You read it in Chinese?”

“No, in English.”

“Because that one was translated into Chinese. On the mainland, though.”

“Did it sell?”

“I have no idea, but I remember the guy who did it. He was very nice. He wrote me a couple times to ask what things were, you know, to explain words so he could translate them. I remember him asking what a marshmallow was and I had to explain the word ‘Legion.’ I suppose they wouldn’t have Legions in China. Whether it was translated well or not, I don’t know. The English version is that thick (two inches), the German edition that thick (three inches), but the Chinese translation is only about that thick (one inch).” Richards shrugged. “His English wasn’t perfect, but he was really nice.”

It was nearing that time, so I sat down, and the female MC introduced Mr. Richards – at length. But while she was talking, an interesting thing occurred. The author wasn’t really listening. Rather, he was reading my book. At one point, I heard him say to himself, “This is really interesting.” When it was time to take the stand, he took my book and his book to the podium. He set my book down and patted it. He looked at me and said, earnestly, “Thank you for the book.” Then he began to read.

The reading was followed by a Q&A. My questions, the first, were generic: “In fiction, do you know where you’re going? Do you have it planned, or just a rough idea?” I imagine he’s been asked that a thousand times. I should have asked something interesting like, “Is the hypocrisy of human society something you obsess about?” or “How much of wanting to be a writer was motivated by revenge?” Many writers are idealists and feel the need to comment on corruption and perversion. And it’s my theory that, for male writers at least, revenge is a key motivator, especially when starting out.

Writers hope to show every critic, every pretentious academic, every teacher who said, ‘Sorry, you don’t have it,’ that they do have it. Writers catalogue slights and conjure them when they need motivation. Mordecai Richler admitted this. So has Paul Theroux. In The Forest for the Trees, by Betsey Lerner, a book about writing and the business of writing, written by a publishing-industry insider for aspiring writers, the author talks about what motivates authors, and revenge is right up there with need-to-be-heard.

The revenge question was the one I should have posed, but no, I asked the most limp-wristed question imaginable.

In addition to novels, and in true New Brunswick fashion, Richards has penned books on hockey, fishing, and hunting. He recently wrote God Is, about his Catholic faith. Reportedly, this raised the collective eyebrow of the Canadian literary community, with Richards claiming he’s now something of a pariah. I’m not a Christian, so God Is is not a book for me (but neither are books like God is Not Great, though I consider Christopher Hitchens an important essayist and polemicist), but I found Richards’s reasons for writing such a book, and the related advice he gave, interesting.

“Write what you know,” he said. “Write what you want to. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t curb your opinions to fit with someone else’s, which is what a lot of writers do. At some point, someone is going to tell you you’re wrong anyway, so you may as well write what you believe.”
It was the final idea I’d never thought of before: people are going to call you down anyway, so why even begin to compromise? That’s bloody good advice. Who cares about that cacophonous clang from the peanut gallery? Write for yourself.

Writers are often outsiders, but Richards seems an outsider to other writers, a role he acknowledges and appears to revel in (see revenge). He talked about how some time after he’d won the Giller, he was kicked out of a Toronto bookstore because of his appearance, and that he frightened the receptionist at his Toronto publisher because he was dressed like a lumberjack. Along with his art-imitating-life approach to writing, this is part of the reason I like Mr. Richards. He’s an anti-intellectual intellectual.

Richards also discussed the difficulty of getting published: you approach a publisher who tells you need an agent. An agent asks you who your publisher is. He then relayed a couple of anecdotes about his younger days. His debut novel, the one I read in high school, was edited by the publisher’s son, though Richards insisted all the bits the kid “gutted” be stuffed back in!

The Q&A was followed by a signing, and the book I bought was one in the Penguin Books Extraordinary Canadians series. I’d read the series’ Mordecai Richler biography by M.G. Vassanji and had liked it, so I thought I’d check out Richards’s book on Lord Beaverbrook, a.k.a. Max Aitkin (1879-1964), a New Brunswick newspaper baron and the first lord of Fleet Street.

When I was a kid, I played hockey at the Lord Beaverbrook Arena and when I returned to Canada I worked briefly in a building called the Beaverbrook House. I’d been meaning to read about Beaverbrook anyway and knew of Richards’s book, so why not buy a signed copy from the writer himself?

Beaverbrook was a real life Duddy Kravitz. He started his first newspaper at the age of 13, sold bonds door to door, and moved to Montreal to work on the stock exchange. He had a stab at law in Saint John, but then moved to England where he got into politics and built a chain of newspapers. He once owned Rolls Royce. He bought his way into the House of Lords, and was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill. Churchill made him a member of the wartime cabinet and put him charge of aircraft (Spitfire) production.

Beaverbrook cut an intriguing figure: a money man riddled with contradictions. He was both decent and deceitful, an uncouth colonial and a calculating aristocrat. Though he loved Britain and her empire, it was an unrequited adoration. But his efforts in Spitfire production made him a hero. Richards’s heroes are not always easy spot.

Despite all his success, Lord Beaverbrook, was – above all – an outsider. Who better than Richards, who grew up less than two blocks from the man, to write about him?

Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World is well written, nicely packaged, and fails utterly in explaining why China is going to rule the world. But then, maybe we should it expect it to. After all, it’s not called Why China Will Rule the World, but with a title like the one it has, one can be forgiven for expecting a concrete explanation.

In this book, you’ll find academic prose, a massive select bibliography, 70 pages of notes, lovely maps and graphs, omissions of key evidence, wild speculation, unforgiveable leaps in logic, stupefying factual errors (Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy was not influenced by Mencius; it was influenced by Abraham Lincoln), and a thesis that, if you will, repeatedly repeats itself repeatedly, but offers little in the way of support.

Before we look at the tome in toto, let’s have a glance at its Taiwan section. The chapter on Taiwan gives a fairly accurate overview of China’s and Taiwan’s political history since 1949 and notes that 2009 saw a thaw in cross-strait relations. The two sides signed agreements regarding direct flights, and so on, therefore there might be ‘a resolution of disputes in the relatively near future.’

But those agreements were signed by the Nationalist Party, the organization that turned Taiwan into the Republic of China upon losing the Chinese Civil War. Never mind that China and Taiwan were only ever nominally united, and for a very short time (something Jacques fails to mention), a chief aim of the Nationalist Party is so-called reunification. Because it can’t have “reunification,” the Nationalists settle for closer ties with China. “Reunification” is impossible because the Nationalist Party’s rival, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won’t allow for it. Moreover, supporters from both parties don’t want it. Polls regularly show that something like 90 percent of Taiwanese people want nothing to do with China politically. The Taiwanese are incredibly passionate and politically motivated, and they make frequent use of their democratic right to demonstrate. Futurology is a fool’s game, but I would stake my life on the people of Taiwan turning their country on its head before capitulating to Beijing or being sold out by the Nationalists in Taipei.

Jacques says that if the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) gets re-elected and declares independence, China will likely invade Taiwan, but it’s highly unlikely the DPP will declare independence because their supporters don’t want them to. Something like 70 percent of Taiwanese people wish to keep the status quo. The Nationalists and many of their supporters would never go in for independence, either; neither would the United States. Politically, Taiwan represents a political conundrum and cross-strait relations are a knotty, complex affair. But not to Martin Jacques, who says ‘things are getter better; one day they might be resolved’ (quotation marks are mine). Such a sentiment is the type of hare-brained sloganeering you’d find on a Communist Party propaganda banner. Jacques has to say a solution is possible because if China is really going to rule the world, a prerequisite would be to gain control over the tiny, nearby, Chinese island that has underscored China’s impotence for six decades.

I mention the Taiwan section because it is representative of the rest of the book. With print, you can make obstacles and complexities disappear by not mentioning them, and you can make any scenario seem plausible. Just use the words ‘possibly,’ ‘likely,’ and ‘perhaps,’ and for variety’s sake, or to sound authoritative, say that certain events will transpire. Using the word ‘will’ makes you sound like an expert. Don’t complicate things with the word ‘because’ because that only leads to claims that people can dispute.

The thesis statement for When China Rules the World can be found on p. 15: “It is banal, therefore, to believe that China’s influence on the world will be mainly and overwhelmingly economic: on the contrary, it’s political and cultural effects are likely to be as far-reaching. The underlying argument of the book is that China’s impact on the world will be as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater.”

But why will it be greater?

You read the book’s two parts (I: The End of the Western World, II: The Age of China) and sift through their many subsections (e.g. Beijing as The New Global Capital) only to find the flimsiest of evidence.

Naturally, the reader wonders, ‘When China rules the world, in what language will the world take its instructions?’ and Martin Jacques deals with this in the section ‘Can You Speak Mandarin?’ Here, we find the usual: Mandarin has become popular as a second language in countries like South Korea and Thailand. It still hasn’t taken off in the West, however, perhaps because of the US’s and UK’s “abiding linguistic insularity and their failure to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.” Jacques goes on to say that Mandarin “will probably in time join English as a global lingua franca and perhaps eventually surpass it.” And then: “The nascent competition between English and Mandarin for the status of global lingua franca... is fascinating... because... they could hardly be more different: one alphabetic, the other pictographic....” Only, there is virtually no competition between English and Mandarin, and the situation is not nascent. Furthermore, Chinese script is not pictographic. This gaffe, along with the fact Jacques cannot pronounce the Chinese words he attempts to slip into conversation in his promotional videos, are clear indicators he doesn’t speak Mandarin. Not that I’m calling Mr. Jacques a hypocrite. That would be a grave insult to hypocrites everywhere. Perhaps it’s just that Jacques prefers to cling to his linguistic insularity and fails to comprehend the wide-ranging implications of China’s rise.

I was especially curious to see what Mr. Jacques would say vis-a-vis the exportation or appeal of Chinese culture. The relevant section is a mere three pages long. As examples, Jacques holds up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese food, and what he calls the “global reach of traditional Chinese medicine.” But Chinese medicine doesn’t have a global reach. Western medicine does. Chinese doctors practise Western medicine. They read medical journals in English. They become doctors by studying textbooks printed in London, Boston, and New York. Ask a Chinese doctor about traditional Chinese medicine and they’re likely to tell you it’s quackery. Also exportable, Jacques says, is kungfu, interesting to me because during the decade I lived in Chinese society I never met a single person who studied kungfu. I never witnessed anyone wearing the uniform; never saw a single kungfu school. There are kungfu comic books and movies from Hong Kong, but they are, like Jacques’s arguments, puerile.

The author’s examples go from superficial and silly to downright absurd. While acknowledging China’s media outlets don’t compare with the BBC, the writer says the potential of the People’s Daily and CCTV (China Central Television) shouldn’t be disregarded. The People’s Daily and CCTV are propaganda outlets for the Chinese Communist Party. Martin Jacques was the editor of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Marxism Today for 14 years. Not surprisingly, that’s not mentioned in the book either.

In addition to being a Marxist, Martin Jacques is a dyed-in-the-wool Sinophile, and in the end, Sinophiles are all the same: they are knowledgeable, articulate, dedicated embellishers. About the closest the author comes to explaining his thesis is by saying China will come out on top because it is not a nation-state, but a civilization state – only there’s no such phrase as civilization state; it’s a term Jacques invented. Jacques, and other Sinophiles, would have you believe that China is exceptional, not subject to analysis applicable to the world’s other countries and cultural entities. China is different. In fact, it’s so different the English language lacks the terminology to deal with it, but luckily for us, Martin Jacques has a patent on the required lexical items, and he’ll share them for just $29.95. Sinophiles resurrect the old ethos that China is mystical, inscrutable. They would have you believe that China is nigh impossible to understand and oh-so-hard to explain – unless they are the ones explaining it.

Martin Jacque’s When China Rules the World represents a wish, an exercise in pro-China propaganda, or both. The Englishman’s argument is unsubstantiated, graph-and-chart infused, pseudo-academic tosh. The concept of China ruling the world has nothing to do with China studies and is the wrong lens through which to view that country. There are plenty of highly engaging, informative, and honest, China books out there. This isn’t one of them.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World