Stanley, Chauvin, and the New Barbarism

 Three years ago, when Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter for having shot the twenty-two year old Colten Boushie when the latter with a posse of friends had invaded his farm, I spoke strongly against those who publicly denounced the verdict, including the Prime Minister and the  then Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, and, indeed, said that the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice ought to resign or be made to resign over their remarks.    That I disagreed with them about the case and the verdict – I thought and still think that the RCMP were wrong to charge Stanley in the first place, that the case ought never to have made it to trial, and that “not guilty” was the only sane verdict possible – was only part of my reason for taking that stance.   There was also the fact that for Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould to politicize the verdict in the way in which they did was an abuse of their office.   Ironically, less than a year after this, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould would find themselves on the opposite sides of a huge scandal about political interference in the affairs of the criminal justice system.   In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould accused Trudeau of inappropriately pressuring her to retroactively apply to an ongoing case certain changes that had just been snuck through Parliament by being tagged on to a spending bill so as to benefit a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party that was under prosecution for bribing a foreign government.    In this scandal, Wilson-Raybould was in the right in resisting Trudeau’s pressure but in the earlier incident, the two of them had both been guilty of political interference in the criminal justice system and in a much worse way.   As bad as politicians putting pressure on prosecutors to extend leniency may be it is far worse for them to denounce jury acquittals.   This is because doing the latter is a dangerous affront to the most basic principles of our criminal justice system, the very principles which distinguish civilized legal justice from tribal blood vengeance.   These principles prioritize the protection of the innocent over the punishment of the guilty by giving everyone the right to a fair trial when accused of a crime, placing the burden of proof upon the prosecution, and entitling the accused to a dismissal of the charges if the conditions of a fair trial cannot be met and an acquittal if the prosecution cannot meet the standard of proof.   Boushie’s family and several Native Indian organizations were taking the position that the acquittal was unjust because Native Indians were not represented on the jury due to the prospective jurors of this ethnicity having evinced prejudice against the defendant that disqualified them from performing that civic duty.   In their public display of support for this position, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould were basically saying that the system needed to be changed to make it harder for the accused to be acquitted by weakening his right to a trial by an unbiased jury.    

 

This week the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin.   In this case the verdict was guilty.   Chauvin was found guilty of three charges – unintentional second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter – despite there having been only one body.    As strange as that seems it might perhaps simply be the latest stage in the apotheosis of George Floyd.   When Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis last year he was at first proclaimed a victim of racism and police brutality but has since climbed the ladder to martyrdom and then sainthood.     If he has now been deified and made into a trinity that would explain his death being treated as a three-in-one.    

 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News responded to the verdict by saying “I’m glad that [Chauvin] was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges”.   The exact opposite of this is the just and sane position to take – that Chauvin should have been acquitted of all charges even if he was guilty of all charges.

 

The reason this is the only just and sane position is because of the same principles discussed with regards to the Stanley acquittal in the first paragraph.   There was not the slightest possibility of Chauvin having received a fair trial, therefore the principles of justice say that he ought not to have been tried at all and that he is entitled to be cleared of all charges.

 

As it so happens, the evidence does not support the conclusion that Chauvin was guilty of any of these charges.  Floyd had committed a crime and resisted arrest, which was why he found himself on the ground being restrained.   The knee-hold restraint Chauvin used was a nasty looking one but it was not lethal.   The police bodycam video shows that his knee was not on Floyd’s neck as it appeared from the angle of the bystander video that went viral but on his shoulder blade.   It was clearly not the reason Floyd couldn’t breathe and at any rate the video shows that Floyd’s breathing troubles had started before he was on the ground and under this restraint.   There were at least three other factors that were more likely to have contributed to his breathing difficulties than the police hold.   One of these was Floyd’s heart condition, another was the amount of fentanyl in his blood – three times higher than the dosage that nobody has ever survived.    The third factor was his infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  A difficulty in breathing is one of the main symptoms of the disease this virus produces when it bothers to produce a disease at all.   For over a year now every death that occurred to someone infected with this virus was counted a COVID-19 death even if other morbidity factors included automobile accident injuries, gunshot wounds, or being eaten by wild animals.   George Floyd, who was experiencing symptoms at the time of death that actually correlate with those known to be caused by the virus, is the sole exception of which I am aware.

 

Even if none of this was the case however and Chauvin’s knee actually had caused Floyd’s death he still should never have been charged and tried.   I don’t say this because he is a cop.   I say it because the media, professional and social, had already tried and convicted him in their own forum within a day of Floyd’s death.   If this were not sufficient in itself to preclude his ever having a fair trial before an unprejudiced jury, the long hot summer of rioting and violence in Minneapolis and other major American urban centres constituted mass intimidation of prospective jurors.   Then there was the blatant interference in the outcome of the trial by American political leaders including the present occupant of the White House and, most notoriously, Californian Congresswoman Maxine Waters.   Unlike Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould in the Stanley trial, these did not wait to make their inappropriate remarks as ex post facto commentary on the verdict, but instead made them prior to the jury’s deliberation.

 

The trials of Gerald Stanley and Derek Chauvin were heavily politicized due to the racial aspect of the trials.  Stanley and Chauvin are white men, Colten Boushie was a Native Indian and George Floyd was black.   To the progressive commentators, activists, and politicians who politicized these trials, this was all that was necessary to come to the conclusion that racially-motivated murder had been committed.   All this demonstrates, however, is just how toxic the racist ideology of progressives has become.   When you politicize a trial in this way, refusing to allow the courts to do their job and decide the outcome based on law and evidence, but instead demand a guilty verdict for reasons of racial politics, the consequence of your own actions is that the only just outcome of the trial is dismissal or an acquittal regardless of actual guilt or innocence on the part of the accused.   A guilty verdict, under these circumstances, would amount to a lynching.

 

The principles that I have defended in this essay are the principles that underlie justice in civilization.   While those who have been demanding Chauvin’s head have been framing their demands in terms of “racial justice” this is not really justice in the civilized sense of the term at all, but a tribal blood vengeance that elevates blood and skin colour over law, evidence, rights and due process.   This is a sign indicating a rapid slide into barbarism, one of several that we have seen recently.  The insane drive to erase history (1) which kicked into high gear at the same time and in conjunction with the George Floyd riots is another.   Ironically, the institution that the Left, seizing the opportunity afforded them by George Floyd’s death, sought to indict alongside the man Chauvin, the police, is also indicative of the decay of civilization into barbarism.   In this case it is the slower, more gradual, decay over the course of the Modern era that is indicated.   The police in the modern sense of the term is a semi-military force employed by government to spy on its own people in order to terrorize them into obedience.   Like the near ubiquitous false equation of democracy – mob rule – with constitutionally restrained government, the police are an indication of how we have gradually moved from civilization towards barbarism in its totalitarian form in the Modern era.  (2)   What we are seeing now in the racialized bloodlust against Chauvin is a much faster move into barbarism in its anarchistic form.   Both forms of barbarism are equally undesirable with the paradoxical combination of the two, which the late Sam Francis dubbed anarcho-tyranny, being the worst of all barbarisms.   This is the barbarism into which we are rapidly descending.

 

(1)   While the past itself cannot be erased, history, as John Lukacs defined it, “the remembered past” can.

(2)   Totalitarianism is the idea that we, our lives, and our persons are the property of the state which has the right to do with us whatever it wishes.  It is a Modern idea, the reverse side of the coin of Modern democracy, the idea that the people are collectively sovereign and the state is the voice of the people.  The Modern concept of democracy is not compatible with the civilized ideal of constitutional limits or restraints on government.  Totalitarianism is its inevitable logical conclusion.   The civilized ideal is compatible only with the ancient, prescriptive, institutions of monarchy and parliament.   In practice, totalitarianism requires the Modern police to impose the “general will” of the people.   This is why totalitarian states are often called police states.   The police, by contrast with the civilized institutions of monarchy and parliament, is a fundamentally barbaric institution, which is one reason why it tends to draw bullies, thugs, and other low-life scum into its ranks, offering them a quasi-legitimate venue for indulging their violent and criminal tendencies.    Ironically, Derek Chauvin may very well be one of the few police officers who does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in gaol.

Justin Trudeau Needs to Go

We Canadians are paying a heavy toll for having voted the Liberal Party into power so many times over the course of the last century. The Liberal Party has, from its inception, been the party of opposition to the Confederation project that established our country, the Dominion of Canada, in 1867. It has neither confidence in nor respect for the constitutional, political, legal and judicial traditions and institutions that, adapted by the Fathers of Confederation for our own country, we inherited from Great Britain. It has encouraged and fostered the widespread ignorance of and apathy towards those traditions and institutions that is so appalling in Canada today.

A consequence, sadly, of that apathy is that books like Eugene Forsey’s The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (1) and John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (2)have been out of print for many years. Forsey’s abridged doctoral dissertation and Farthing’s posthumously edited masterpiece are both brilliant defences of our constitution of parliamentary monarchy which spell out the continuing importance of the reserve powers of the Crown for maintaining our traditional rights and freedoms and protecting us from the tyranny of the governing party and Prime Minister. These truths are needed today like never before.

In their arguments for the reserve powers of the Crown it was the right to refuse a recommendation for the dissolution of Parliament that Forsey and Farthing focused upon. The reason for this was historical. In 1926, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal Prime Minister who had clung to power after the last Dominion election despite having failed to win even a plurality through the support of a third party, was facing a vote of censure in Parliament over his government’s involvement in a customs scandal, asked for a dissolution. The Governor General, Lord Byng, quite properly turned him down. In the next election, Mackenzie King deceived the electorate with his entirely false claim that Byng had acted inappropriately, that his refusal amounted to imperial interference in Canadian domestic politics, and that he, Mackenzie King, was championing Canada’s sovereignty over its own domestic affairs. All of this was hogwash, and the real issue was that if the Prime Minister can obtain a dissolution just by asking in order to avoid the just censure of Parliament then he is no longer responsible to that Parliament or to anybody else. The Liberal interpretation of these events, Forsey and Farthing rightly argued, laid the foundation for autocratic Prime Ministerial tyranny.

The Crown also has the right, in extraordinary circumstances in which the sitting government has become an active threat to the rights and freedoms of Canadians and the laws protecting them, to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister. Over the course of this past week, the Prime Minister and several of his Cabinet, including his Justice Minister, have behaved in such a way as to make the exercise of this Crown power appropriate.

I am referring to their response to the acquittal of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley who had been charged with second-degree murder over the death of Colten Boushie. Justin Trudeau and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould both responded to the acquittal by extending their sympathy to Boushie’s family and treating the verdict as an act of racial injustice – Boushie was an aboriginal youth. “We have to do better” they both said. Jane Philpott, Minister of Indigenous Affairs tweeted that her thoughts and prayers were with the Boushie family and that “we all have more to do to improve justice & fairness for Indigenous Canadians.”

If the Prime Minister or any other Cabinet Minister sincerely wished to offer their condolences to the grieving Boushie family the time and occasion to do so would have been a year and a half ago after the shooting. To extend sympathy at this time, however, not over the death of a family member but over a jury verdict of not-guilty, is out-of-line. To do so is to disagree with the verdict and to say that the jury either made a mistake or made a bad decision out of malice. We are all free to disagree with jury verdicts but to do so publicly in this way is not the place of a government Minister.

Even worse was the government’s announcement later in the week that it was going to act on the ill-chosen words of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Let us go over this again. A man was put on trial for murder and acquitted by a jury of his peers. The government says that it does not like the verdict. The government says that it is going to overhaul the legal system to correct what it does not like. There is no way that Trudeau and his Ministers can act on this that will not trample over some basic Canadian legal rights and undermine some of the most basic principles of our legal system.

One of those principles is that the burden of proof in a criminal case always rests upon the Crown prosecutor. This principle rests upon the foundation of the even more basic principle that it is better that many guilty people go unpunished than that a single innocent person be made to suffer unjustly. (3) Translated into the language of legal rights, this becomes the right of someone accused of a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Included within this are the rights to confront his accuser face to face, to cross-examine and discredit his accuser, and to have the case decided, not by politically motivated government ministers, but by a jury of his peers. That is to say, a jury of the defendant’s peers, not the peers of his alleged victim. If a member of race A is accused of murdering a member of race B, this ought not to ensure that race B is represented on the jury but may indeed, be grounds for excluding them because of the likelihood of prejudice against the defendant.

All of this is potentially endangered by the Trudeau government’s shameless exploitation of this case. It was not that long ago that the progressive left was accusing the neoconservative Stephen Harper of “fascism” because he wished to limit a judge’s ability to hand down slap-on-the-wrist sentences for serious crimes. Note, however, and note well, that sentencing by a judge only takes place after a guilty verdict has been reached. It is the Trudeau Liberals, not the Harper Conservatives, who want to interfere in the verdict-reaching process so as to get the verdicts they desire. This is where true fascism lies.

Through his complete disrespect for the principles of our justice system and his willingness to discard them in order to virtue signal to his mindless, politically correct, base of Generation Snowflake social justice warriors, Justin Trudeau has forfeited his right to lead Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa. It is time for him to go.

(1) Eugene A. Forsey, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943)
(2) John Farthing, Judith Robinson ed., Freedom Wears a Crown, (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957)
(3) This is an ancient principle, drawing upon both Scriptural (Abraham negotiating the fate of Sodom in the book of Genesis) and classical authority (Socrates, at least as represented by Plato in the Gorgias, said “it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one”). Of course the same Liberals who have encouraged apathy and ignorance of our country's political and legal traditions have encouraged the same towards Scriptural and classical learning. If more people were familiar with Aeschylus’s Oresteia they would appreciate better that trial by jury was designed to liberate man from the tribal vengeance mode of “justice” that those upset over the Stanley verdict are calling for. For an excellent critique of how Canada’s educational system has gone to pot through progressive liberalism, written just as the rot was first setting in, see Hilda Neatby’s So Little For the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education, (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company Ltd, 1953)