Ricardo Duchesne

Ricardo Duchesne is a Puerto Rican-born Canadian historical sociologist and former professor at the University of New Brunswick. His main research interests are Western civilization, the rise of the West, and multiculturalism. Duchesne's views on immigration and multiculturalism have been described as racist and white nationalist.^[1][2][3][4] He has denied being a racist to the mainstream press,^[2] but has described himself as being "the only academic in Canada, and possibly the Western world, who questions the ideology of diversity while advocating white identity politics."^[5]

Duchesne was born in Puerto Rico; his mother Coralie Tattersall Duchesne was a British citizen born in Calcutta, his father Juan Duchesne Landron a medical doctor of Afro-Puerto Rican and French heritage.^[6][7][8] His parents met when his mother was studying at the Sorbonne; they were wed in Tangier, had three children while living in Madrid, and three more, including Ricardo, after they moved to Puerto Rico in 1956.^[9] His parents divorced in 1970 and Ricardo Duchesne's mother moved to Montreal,^[10] where she became active in the local cultural scene as an actress^[11] and playwright;^[12] he joined her there in the mid-1970s when he was 15 years old.^[13][14] In Montreal he studied History at McGill University, and later at Concordia University under the supervision of George Rudé. In 1996, he received a doctorate in Social & Political Thought at York University^[15] for his 1994 Dissertation, "All Contraries Confounded: Historical Materialism and the Transition-to-Capitalism Debate".^[16] In 1995, Duchesne was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick.^[17] He took early retirement from his position in 2019.^[18]

Of his siblings, his older brother, Juan Duchesne-Winter, has become a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh with a special interest in indigenous cultures.^{[19] [20]} Their sister Giselle Duchesne is a Spanish-language poet.^[21] Another sister, Rosanna Duchesne, has helped document the history of Duchesne family members who were notable jazz musicians, including Puerto Rican relatives who played in New York during the Harlem Renaissance.^[22] Their grandfather Rafael Duchesne Mondriguez^[23] was a significant jazz clarinetist and composer who played as a soloist with the Harlem Hellfighters, an American regimental band that introduced jazz music to Europe, as part of his military service during the First World War. After the war he returning to live in Puerto Rico where he taught music and continued to perform and compose.^[22][24] Ricardo Duchesne's uncle, José Luis Duchesne Landrón, was a saxophonist and a member of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1980.^[22]

Ricardo Duchesne is married to the dance choreographer Georgia Rondos.^[25] They have two children.^[26]

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Themes

Duchesne's first book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, published in 2011, criticizes the work of world historians, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, who he argues portray history in terms that support the egalitarian idea that all cultures are similar, devaluing Western civilization and its contributions in the process.^{[27][28][29][30][31][32]} Duchesne challenges historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, whose work posits Chinese economic and intellectual pre-eminence prior to 1800, and maintains that the culture of the West has always been "in a state of variance from the world" at least since classical antiquity, characterized by multiple divergences, successive revolutions, and continuous creativity in all the fields of human endeavor.^{[33] [31][32][34]} He traces the West's restlessness and creative spirit to what he characterizes as the unique aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans, with its ethos of heroic individualism, weaker kinship ties, war bands bound together by voluntary oaths of loyalty and fraternity, and its original pastoral package of wheeled vehicles, horse-riding, and chariots.^[35][31]

The Book's Reception

Martin Hewson, politics and international studies professor at the University of Regina, points to Duchesne's The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as the leading book in what he describes as a trend toward "post-multicultural history". Hewson states that "The main achievement of post-multicultural world history is to have established that there were numerous critical non-economic divergences between Europe and other regions. The West was both peculiar and inventive across many domains."^[36] Historian Peter Turchin gave the book a somewhat more negative review, calling the book "thought-provoking", while criticizing Duchesne for "allowing ideology to drive the agenda", rather than adopting a more empirical approach.^[37] David Northrup noted that the book "presents the most wide-ranging critique of the field of world history that has yet appeared," adding that "although The Uniqueness of Western Civilization may well upset or infuriate world historians, they have much to gain from reading it, since it presents summaries and critiques of a great many works in comparative world, European, and Asian history." However, he found the book "deliberately and openly tendentious" and, assessing how the various elements of the argument presented in the book fit together, concluded that the book's effort at “[s]tringing all of these pieces together coherently is more imaginative than persuasive".^[38] Steve Balch, Director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, said "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization is old-school scholarship at its best: consequential, closely reasoned, richly evidenced, and professionally courteous."^[39] Eric Jones wrote that the book was a "staggeringly well-informed work...displaying prodigious learning in historical anthropology" and that Duchesne "shows himself...a master of the archeologically based sagas of the Indo-Europeans." He considered the book to excel in its analysis and critique of other scholars, while also pointing out that Duchesne's "method, like that of the revisionists [whom Duchesne criticizes], owes too much to Marxist-style rhetoric". He expressed doubt concerning Duchesne’s thesis attributing the progress of the West to aristocratic competitiveness inherited from “invading, prestige-hungry Indo-European steppe nomads”, saying that “these hoary, contentious themes are really several orders of magnitude more speculative than the tracts of early modern history where Duchesne fences with the most fashionable of the revisionists.”^[40] Thomas D. Hall, although critical of the book in many respects and finding that it "gives a sense of pontificating from on high", concluded that The Uniqueness of Western Civilization "despite my stylistic critiques shows a very wide range of scholarship and many deft syntheses. It is an impressive book."^[41] In a review in the journal The European Legacy, Grant Havers wrote that Duchesne "brings to his study an erudition that is matched only by Marx, Spengler, and Voegelin. Ricardo Duchesne demonstrates his mastery of anthropology, philosophy, religion, economics, and especially world history". Havers criticises Duchesne's work for attributing the prominence of the West to an aristocratic "Nietzschian ideal of pagan greatness" and deemphasising the importance of Christianity, which Havers sees as the "founding faith" of the West, "whose egalitarianism in undermining aristocratic pride made the modern democratic West possible."^[42]

Scholars of Asian history had concerns about the work. Mark Elvin, a professor of Chinese history, describes Uniqueness in the Canadian Journal of Sociology as an "alpha-delta book - with some very good and some unnervingly bad components." He expresses doubt about Duchesne's theses and notes that Duchesne lacks the familiarity with non-Western history and cultures that would be needed to do the kind of comparative work that the book professes to contain.^[43] Duchesne wrote a detailed rebuttal of Ervin's criticism's in the same issue of the journal.^[44] A review by Geetanjali Srikantan, a historian of India, is more critical than Elvin's, mentions the lack of "non-Western theorists" in the text, and observes that the book contains "discrepancies that one does not expect in an academic text". He concludes that "It is clearly alarming that such scholarship has had positive reviews."^[45]

Kevin McDonald, an evolutionary psychiatrist and white supremacist, wrote a 22 page review in which he praised the book as "a brilliant work written by an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar and thinker."^[46] McDonald would go on to publish much of Duchesne's subsequent work in The Occidental Quarterly, which McDonald edits.^[47] Gerald Russello praised "Duchesne's marshalling of enormous amounts of data and his obviously wide reading...", saying that "His thesis about the Indo-Europeans and the differences he perceives between the West and other cultures is based on solid historical and archeological research".^[48]

Subsequent work

Duchesne has voiced vehement criticisms of political correctness, multiculturalism, and immigration. He has bemoaned what he describes as a "relentless occupation of the West by hordes of Muslims and Africans", and states that "only out of the coming chaos and violence will strong White men rise to resurrect the West." The source of these quotations was located by David Solway in an article Duchesne wrote in March 2017 in his "Council of European Canadians" blog with the title "There Is Nothing the Alt-Right Can Do About the Effeminacy of White Men". According to Solway, "Duchesne's sweep of reference in [this] essay is impressively wide-angle, covering the centuries and featuring an informed discussion of Cato the Elder, Plutarch, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Hume, Hobbes, Marx, Spengler, Adam Smith, Franz Boas and others."^{[49][50][51][52]}

Duchesne also criticizes some conservatives for advancing the idea that Western political identity is based only on universal liberal democratic values that are true for all human beings. He argues that liberalism is uniquely Western and that Western identity is also deeply connected to the ethnic character of Europeans.^[53][54][55] More recently, Duchesne has argued that civic nationalism is consistent with a strong collective sense of ethnic national identity. ^[56]

In mid-2014, he created the blog "Council of European Canadians", with the stated purpose that "Canada should remain majority, not exclusively, European in its ethnic composition and cultural character [because] Canada is a nation created by individuals with an Anglo/French/European heritage, not by individuals from diverse races and cultures."^[57][58] He has denied being a racist to the mainstream press,^[2] but has nonetheless become more comfortable with white identity politics in the articles he writes for his blog.

He has maintained in the blog that "the language of collective rights" inscribed "in Section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedom (1982), as well as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, otherwise known as Bill C-93," can be used by Eurocanadians as a legitimate means to engage in "white identity politics."^[59] "Euro-Canadians" is a term primarily used by opponents of Canada's immigration policies, and its use has been criticised as conflating distinctions between very different European groups and nationalities.^[60] Duchesne uses it interchangeably with "European Canadians" and at times interchangeably with the term "White Canadians". He recognises that most Canadians of European descent do not see that as their collective identity and instead identify with a specific ethnicity or country of ancestral origin, characterising themselves as for example "Anglo" or "Québecois" rather than as part of a larger "Euro-Canadian" group.^[61]

Duchesne claims in his book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017),^[62] to be for identity politics for whites, within the constitutional framework of Canadian multiculturalism, in the same way, he claims, that multiculturalists favor identity politics for "non-Caucasians in race". A critic of the overall philosophy of multiculturalism and of immigration to Canada from the Third World, Duchesne shares with white nationalism the belief that "Euro-Canadians" should maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of Canada’s culture and public life.^[63] He has shown sympathy for white nationalism, for example by providing a positive endorsement and cover blurb for a book entitled The White Nationalist Manifesto.^[64] He has appeared as a feature guest on the Red Ice podcast, a site known for its advocacy of white supremacist ideas and white genocide conspiracy theory;^[65] he has appeared as a guest on broadcasts of Free Bird Media,^[66][67] a site known for giving a platform to white nationalists;^[68] and he spoke at a forum of the National Citizens Alliance, a fringe political party known for its advocacy of white nationalism and far-right conspiracy theories.^[69] Professor Frances Widdowson, herself under attack amidst claims that she articulates racism,^[70] said in an interview that while she was herself opposed to white identity politics, she did not think Duchesne should be "shut down" and prevented from speaking. She expressed concern that "as soon as you say you want to have a discussion about what Duchesne is talking about, you’re accused of being a white supremacist."^[71]

Duchesne’s 2017 book, Faustian Man In A Multi-Cultural Age^[72] (portions of which had been first published in the white nationalist magazine The Occidental Quarterly), marked the new direction in Duchesne’s writing, connecting his assertions about the uniqueness of the Western spirit to theories about the genetic characteristics of European man. Whereas his first book had been published by an academic press, this one was published by Arktos Media, the world’s largest distributor of far-right extremist writing. In the preface and first chapters of the book Duchesne describes himself as following an intellectual journey from liberal preconceptions of racial equality to explicit avowal of Western race-based identity. The first chapter credits this transformation in part to “visiting… forbidden places”, listing the names of a series of journals and websites associated with white nationalism, neo-nazism and the alt-right.

In his other 2017 book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians, he argues that Canada is not a "nation of immigrants" but a nation created by Anglo and French pioneers and settlers. The book questions what Duchesne argues are double standards of multiculturalism in granting both collective ethnic rights and individual rights to minorities and immigrant groups while, in his view, suppressing the ethno-cultural rights of Canadians of European descent.^[73] Crawford Killian, writing about the book under the descriptive headline "A Fascist Take on Canadian History", characterizes Canada in Decay as "a deeply disappointing book by a scholar who should have been able to do much better.... it implicitly assures us that white racism in Canada is alive, and almost immune to debate."^[74] In contrast, Mark Wegierski wrote in The Social Contract Journal, an anti-immigration white nationalist publication,^[75][76] that "Canada in Decay offers a well-written and tightly argued account of the ongoing drastic course that is changing the face of Canada...Prof. Duchesne’s book is certainly a strong challenge to the currently regnant notions of multiculturalism and mass immigration in Canada."^[77]

Historian R. Charles Weller has described Duchesne's anti-immigration stance as bearing "an uncanny resemblance to white nationalist and racist anti-immigration laws of the interwar period aimed at maintaining a white majority".^[58]

Vancouver controversy

In one of his blog posts in 2014, Duchesne criticized a motion of the Vancouver council to investigate discriminatory policies imposed on Chinese immigrants in the city before 1947 as an exercise in manipulating "white guilt",^[78] claiming they have "the goal of taking Canada away from the Europeans and transforming the nation into a multicultural and multiracial society."^[79] He attacked one city councillor, Kerry Jang, personally, saying that Jang "is exploiting White ideas to advance the ethnic interests of the Chinese, utilizing the same white guilt our educational institutions inflict on White children.”^[80] The comments sparked controversy with Jang saying he was shocked that the city council’s move would be taken this way,^[78] that he considered Duchesne' comments to be hate speech, and that "I don't think he should be teaching".^[81] In a follow-up post, Duchesne responded by saying about Chinese Canadians that " “We are thus talking about a very powerful demographic group that also happens to be very wealthy with deep ingrained connections to Communist China. This group has been allowed to alter radically the formerly elegant, serene, community-oriented, British city of Vancouver, turning it into a loud, congested Asian city (still attractive only because of the architectural and institutional legacy of past white generations).”^[82] His remarks prompted an op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail which stated that Professor Duchesne "glorifies scholarship and writing that fuels xenophobia and provides fodder for white supremacy. Mr. Duchesne is a unicultural ideologue... [whose] rants are an apostasy to sociological thinking."^[83][84]

The University of New Brunswick rejected a complaint concerning Duchesne's remarks on the grounds of academic freedom.^[58][81]

Public lectures and criticism

In September 2015, a group of ten University of New Brunswick professors penned an open letter to the Toronto Star newspaper criticizing Duchesne for claiming that immigration undermines the European character of Western civilization. The letter described Duchesne's views as "devoid of academic merit".^[85]

In the Spring of 2018, Duchesne was invited to lecture at the University of Waterloo together with Faith Goldy, a journalist associated with the alt-right and ideas of white supremacy. The invitation to them came from a student group co-founded by Lindsay Shepherd. Goldy's participation in the event drew strong protest and it was cancelled after Waterloo police advised the university that ever-increasing security costs for the event would reach $28,500.00.^[86]

Shannon Dea, who was Vice-President of the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo at the time, has expressed concern that the event was one of a series of "repeated efforts by fringe groups to lay traps for universities by organizing on-campus events featuring speakers calculated to provoke a response," through which the organizers benefit from the prestige of the university if it is held, but can claim they are victimized by excessive "political correctness" if it is not. The Faculty Association chose not to object to the holding of the event, responding instead by using it as an occasion to fundraise for university groups devoted to Indigenous, racialized, and international students.^[87]

Upon the invitation of UBC Students For Academic Freedom, Ricardo Duchesne gave a lecture at the University of British Columbia in the Fall of 2018, introduced by Lindsay Shepherd, entitled "Critical Reflections on Canadian Multiculturalism", in which he asserted the right of "Euro-Canadians" to "white identity politics" within the framework of Canada's official multiculturalism.^[88][89] While visiting Vancouver to present the lecture, Duchesne courted controversy and publicity, walking around the university campus together with a camerawoman and challenging random passers-by to debate him on immigration, gay rights and the merits of a white ethnostate.^[90]

Investigation and retirement

In May 2019, The University of New Brunswick announced that it would review further complaints related to Duchesne's public comments and views on race after it was reported that he had written blog posts alleging that immigration was part of a conspiracy to advance white genocide. A group of over 100 of Duchesne's colleagues at the University of New Brunswick signed an open letter of complaint stating that Duchesne’s blog posts, and even at times his classroom teachings, had no merit, and qualified more as hate speech than academic freedom.^[91] The Canadian Historical Association also wrote a letter denouncing Duchesne's work in similar terms.^[92] In response, Duchesne stated that the signatories did not have "any scholarly background" in immigration or multiculturalism, and that the charge of racism "has been overused beyond reason...and is used against anyone who questions this diversity".^[2][3] His response was disputed, as at least two of the signatories did specialize in aspects of multiculturalism and immigration to Canada.^[93] Mark Mercer, president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship questioned the school's decision to review Duchesne, and argued that Duchesne's work should be protected by academic freedom.^[91][94]

The following month, on June 4, 2019, the University announced that Duchesne was taking early retirement.^[95][96] The terms of his settlement with them prohibit him from speaking publicly about the circumstances leading to his retirement.^[97]

Kenneth Westhues, professor Emeritus at University of Waterloo, author and editor of five books on "academic mobbing", while acknowledging that he had "not studied this case in enough detail to identify all the factors that precipitated it",.^[98] considered what Duchesne experienced at UNB to have been a "collegial mobbing" by academics who objected to his admiration for Western civilization and his criticisms of multiculturalism. "Had it been up to the board of governors and senior administration at UNB, Duchesne might well have kept his job. The hostility toward him arose from his peers, his colleagues especially in sociology and history but also in other fields." Westhues hypothesized that the "envy of excellence" was another factor in the mobbing of Duchesne. In addition to advocating politically incorrect views, Westhues was of the opinion that Duchesne excelled over most of his colleagues in academic output and, based on the comments about Duchesne on ratemyprofessors.com, also excelled "in the classroom".^[98] Westhues added that, as he had observed in other cases, "“Foreign birth and upbringing, especially as signaled by a foreign accent” heightens the risk of being "mobbed" by ones academic peers. He pointed out that Duchesne's "English, while altogether fluent and understandable, is delivered in a marked Spanish accent, reflecting his origin in Puerto Rico. One of the reasons he was mobbed may be that he came across as too much of a foreigner to the colleagues at New Brunswick who ganged up on him, notwithstanding their professed allegiance to multiculturalism."^[98]

More recently, speaking as part of a panel organized by the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (Mar 22, 2021), Westhues stated that "Duchesne's sin was that he generally admired Western civilization and wants to explain empirically its power and inventiveness. His further sin is to be so smart and work so hard as to produce a larger, more coherent body of scholarship than, wild guess, 95% of UNB professors. As if these offenses were not enough he is kind of a foreigner, having been born in Puerto Rico and bearing an Hispanic first name. One of my books on mobbing is entitled The Envy of Excellence. Duchesne's case is archetypal"."^[97]

Westhues did not discuss Duchesne's blogposts and podcast appearances.

Duchesne had stopped publishing in mainstream academic journals even before his retirement.^[5] Since then, he has continued his research and writing as an independent scholar, publishing articles on his Council of Euro-Canadians blog and in Kevin McDonald's white nationalist journal, The Occidental Quarterly.^[47]

On October 9, 2019, Ricardo Duchesne and Mark Hecht spoke at the UBC-Vancouver campus at an event hosted by the UBC Students for Freedom of Expression. The event, titled "Academic Freedom to Discuss the Impact of Immigrant Diversity", was met by dozens of protesters claiming that the university should not give a platform to "far right" hate speech.^[99]

• The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. Studies in Critical Social Sciences. Vol. 28. Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2011. ISBN 978-90-04-19461-8.
• Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age. Arktos. 2017. ISBN 978-1-910524-84-8.
• Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. Black House Publishing. 2017. ISBN 978-1-910881-93-4.
• "Defending the Rise of Western Culture Against its Multicultural Critics," The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms (2005) 10#5, pp. 455–484. online

• Groves, J. Randall (2012). "Rationalization, Dialectic and the West: An Appraisal of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization". In: The Coming Clash of Civilization: China versus the West? Proceedings of the 42nd Conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. (Washington, D.C.): 165-177.

• Personal website
• The Council of Euro-Canadians — Duchesne's political blog
• Research Gate—Duchesne's research profile