On June 4 of 2019, the Vice President of the University of New Brunswick announced that Professor of Sociology Ricardo Duchesne, an outspoken critic of multiculturalism and mass immigration, would be taking early retirement.
The announcement followed a weeks-long attack on Duchesne in the Canadian media and amongst Duchesne’s colleagues at UNB. Over one hundred of these colleagues signed an open letter condemning Duchesne’s views as “racist” and “without academic merit.” A smear article in the Huffington Post portrayed Duchesne as a Ku Klux Klansman, while Evan Balgord of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network claimed he was “part of the alt-right neo-Nazi movement.”
In three major books and hundreds of articles, Duchesne has advanced two basic arguments: that European culture developed in a manner unique in world history, and that Europeans, like all peoples, should not be forced to undergo diversification.
In his 2011 book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Duchesne highlighted the west’s difference from every other world civilization in its restless spirit, its continuous creativity, its unique self-consciousness, and its affirmation of the heroic individual.
In his next book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017), Duchesne posited that human beings could not be abstracted from the particular cultures, folkways, and traditions that they had developed as a people, and asked “How could a city or nation be called Western if most of its inhabitants were pursuing ethnic interests that stood in competition with the ethnic interests of Europeans?”
In his third book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), Duchesne considered multiculturalism and mass immigration not as inevitable developments, but “an experiment of major proportions” to create a new Canada with no natural connection to its past. He noted that “There is no example in history of a people or a nation promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other races, religions, and cultures.”
His ousting from the University of New Brunswick shows how narrowly the parameters of acceptable discourse have been defined in Canadian academia and in the broader society.
Janice Fiamengo
Professor of English
University of Ottawa
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For many more details, see this excellent video :
