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Photo by Evan Vucci / AP

The weird dance of the post-moderns was neatly captured by our prime minister’s declaration to an American publication that “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”

You might think he was just being goofy, denying our core identity then describing it. But his words matter, because they wrongly imply that these values are not uniquely or typically Canadian but are shared by all mankind, or at least that representative portion he meets at Davos.

So please also go back and read Terry Glavin’s front-page cri de coeur about Aleppo in Thursday’s National Post quoting the desperate online words of Syrian English teacher and activist Abdulkafi Al-Hamdo, including “don’t believe anymore in the United Nations. Don’t believe anymore in the international community.” Nobody ever should have. The UN is manifestly a shop for dictators, anti-Semites and gasbags, and the “international community” is a granfalloon, an artificial collectivist construct even more absurd than the tripe trope “the homosexual community,” as though all gays had the same opinions and lifestyle and lived in the rainbow equivalent of the Smurf village.

The UN is full of dictators because most nations have not solved the “political problem” of a state strong enough to protect liberty but not to menace it, mostly because they have not solved the cultural problem of welcoming dissent without dissolving into chaos. How did anyone forget that? How did anyone forget that for all its failings, the West including Canada really has long had a much better way of doing things, from representative democracy to religious tolerance to peaceful settlement of disputes?

Sadly, they are not “universal values” in practice. But they are dominant here. And we neither commit nor suffer the atrocities you see in Aleppo precisely because it is un-Canadian to drop barrel bombs on civilians or throw rocks at places of worship.