Race Riots: One More American Import We Don’t Need

I have, for as long as I can remember, been an opponent of the Americanization of Canada. This will probably not come as a surprise to long-time readers, although it might shock those who think of the Canadian way as being progressive, liberal, and left-wing and the American way as being reactionary, conservative and right-wing. When one takes the historical point of view, however, and remembers that all three of the latter set of terms originally referred to people who supported the institution of royal monarchy and the establishment of a Church governed by bishops in direct succession from the Apostles, it is quite apparent that they are misapplied in reference to the secular, republic of the United States of America. It is less difficult to argue against the claim that the Canada of the present day is progressive, liberal, and left-wing, but to the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Americanization of Canada. The Liberal Party was historically the party of Americanization. This was most obvious in 1891, 1911, and throughout the entire period when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister. (1)


I oppose the Americanization of Canada politically, on the grounds that the Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy is superior to any form of republicanism and that innovations introduced from the American republican system have never improved things here but only made them worse. I oppose the Americanization of Canada religiously - while I would prefer that the mainstream Christian Churches in Canada were far more orthodox and far less liberal than they are, I do not think the solution is more of the mixture of Puritanism, direct-personal-revelation-from-God-through-experience enthusiasm (2), and fanatical Millennialism that tends to characterize American folk Christianity. We have quite enough of our own domestic version of that sort of thing. I oppose the Americanization of Canada culturally. Probably nothing originating below the 49th Parallel has been more erosive and corrosive of Canada's traditions, institutions, culture, morality, and religion than what has been imported from the motion picture studios of Hollywood, California, and the recording studios of greater Los Angeles. To be fair, this is also what has been eroding and corroding the United States' own traditions, institutions, etc.



It is greatly to my disgust, therefore, to see signs that the American custom of the race riot is starting to move northward. We have enough trouble with our own, closest domestic equivalent, to worry about. Periodically Indians illegally blockade roads and railroads until the cowardly and craven politicians in Ottawa throw enough of the taxpayers' money at them and make enough absurd and meaningless gestures in response to whatever demands, reasonable or unreasonable, they are making. Nowadays, as the railroad blockade earlier this year demonstrates, professional agitators on the payroll of American petroleum interests can get away with this by claiming to be Indians, even if this claim has about the same level of validity as Elizabeth Warren's. We certainly do not need what is going on south of the border happening up here.


Once again the inner-cities of major American metropoles are burning. The race riot is an American tradition that is usually traced back to the Harlem riot of 1935. I am going to pass over this and the Harlem riot of 1943 due to their being isolated incidents, however celebrated, and date the tradition to the Harlem riot of 1964, since it was demonstrably the first in a chain. The riot, which started in response to a police officer’s having shot down a black teenager named James Powell, ran for almost a week. It began on July 16th. This was two weeks to the day after the Civil Rights Act came into effect.


The significance of that timing cannot be stressed enough. Ten years previously, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that de jure segregation was unconstitutional in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The American President at the time, liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower, declared that this decision would be backed up by force if necessary and three years later, when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas he demonstrated that he meant it. Progressive liberals, to distract public attention from the fact that the institutional white racism, which even then they were blaming for all the evils of the world, had been dealt a death blow in a top down move by an all-white Supreme Court (3) backed by a white President, had the new mass media of communications technology shine its spotlight on a bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama led by a local Baptist minister about a year and a half after Brown v. Board, to create the illusion of a grass-roots, protest movement, headed by a saintly preacher of non-violent resistance, that would slay the dragon of segregation. In reality the movement was fighting a mortally wounded segregation in its death throes. Its crowning achievement was the aforementioned Civil Rights Act which laid the foundation for the crazy busing schemes of de jure integration, Affirmative Action and its quotas, anti-discrimination litigation and the shakedown industry in general. Two weeks after it had come into effect, the first race riot began. Let that forever shut the mouths of those who try to justify riots of this sort on the grounds that “it’s the only way they can make themselves heard.” That is and always has been utter tripe.


Ten days after the Harlem riot broke out in July of 1964, another one started in Rochester in the same state. Then in August race riots broke out in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These were relatively small scale compared to the one that broke out in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles the following summer, after a black man was pulled over by a highway cop for reckless driving and found to be drunk as a skunk. Like the Harlem riot this one lasted almost a week. It saw 34 deaths, over a thousand injured, and some $40 million worth of property damage as almost a thousand businesses and government buildings were looted and burned. In July of 1966 there were race riots in the West Side of Chicago and the Hough section of Cleveland. The year after that saw the infamous “long, hot summer” in which over 150 race riots broke out between the months of June and August all over the United States, the worst of which was the one in Detroit, Michigan. Finally, in 1968, another string of riots broke out in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and over thirty other cities, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


These marked the end of the first wave of the race riots. There would be others periodically in the next two decades but it would not be until 1992 that anything comparable to those of the sixties took place. The previous year, Rodney King, who had been driving drunk in violation of his parole for robbery, sought to elude arrest. The result was a high speed chase which ended badly for him. A video of his capture which showed the police beating him was released – although the longer, unedited version paints rather a different picture of the events than the small clip that was repeatedly played on the media. When the police who arrested him and were charged with excessive force were acquitted in early 1992, race riots again erupted in Los Angeles. The deaths and injuries were about double those of Watts in 1966, and the property damage was at least twenty-five times greater.


What has grown into the current wave of race riots began almost a decade ago when the Black Lives Matter movement sprung up in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an incident which the media had grotesquely misrepresented in a deliberate and successful effort to stir up strife. Called activists by their sympathizers and terrorists by their detractors, Black Lives Matter appears to subscribe to a belief system in which all police brutality is directed towards blacks and black men are more likely to die at the hands of the police than in any other way, are always unarmed, never resist arrest, and are always salt of the earth pillars of their community. This belief system forms the interpretive lens through which they view any incident involving the police and a black man.


When you look at the actual data available on the subject you discover that pretty much everything progressive liberals, Hollywood celebrities, the news media, etc. take as given when it comes to race and the police in the United States is the opposite of the truth. Blacks are not killed by policemen in numbers disproportionate to their own involvement in violent crime unless by disproportionate we mean lower than we would expect, more whites are killed by American police each year than blacks and Hispanics, cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than unarmed blacks are likely to be killed by police, white cops are far more likely to kill other whites than they are to kill blacks, it is black cops who are the most likely to kill other blacks, and black people in general are far more likely to be killed by black criminals than by either whites or police of any colour and ethnicity. That these facts sound so strange to so many people is entirely due to the duplicity of the media. The newspapers and television news highlight cases of white cops killing black suspects, editorializing on them for weeks on end, while under-reporting cases that don’t fit the pattern.


It is that same media that refers to every Black Lives Matter event as a “protest” regardless of how violent it gets, similar to how the illegal blockade of the railroads earlier this year was called a “protest” even though it manifestly went beyond a peaceful demonstration.


Early last week, a black man named George Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis. A video that someone took from their phone showed him on the ground by a police car, with an officer named Derek Chauvin keeping him in this position by pressing his knee on the man’s neck for almost ten minutes. Floyd could be heard saying that he could not breathe and within an hour was dead. It is difficult to imagine any evidence coming to light that would show this not to be an excessive use of force and Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder. Yet, despite the fact that the officer responsible was quickly charged, a protest that was held in Minneapolis the day after Floyd was killed quickly degenerated into a riot, and riots rapidly spread to other cities of the United States. The number of cities where these riots have occurred or are occurring already exceeds that of the “long, hot, summer” of 1967. While David Warren is quite right when he says “there is no such thing as a spontaneous riot” these show evidence of a much higher level of organization than previous riots of the type. It is quite obvious who is doing the organizing. Despite the looting, arson, and other lawlessness typical of these sort of riots, many in the media persist in calling them “protests.”


How all of this will end is difficult to say at this point. The police are hardly in a strong position to contain these riots and the use of military force to keep the peace is being decried by the same sort of “human rights” watchdog groups who had no problem whatsoever with governments placing their entire populations under house arrest for two and a half months to stop the spread of bat flu.


There are those in this country who hold the opposite sentiments to those expressed in the first two paragraphs of this essay. There are those who think we need a “Canadianized” version of everything that happens south of the border, seemingly putting no thought into the question of whether it is good or bad in itself. There are others who would like to see Canada swallowed up by the United States entirely. One would like to think that nobody would be so foolish as to want the civilization-threatening violence south of the border to come up here, but apparently one would be mistaken in so thinking.


I was rather less than impressed, Saturday, to watch a televised report of a protest in Toronto. The protest pertained to the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet last Wednesday. Korchinski-Paquet was a 29 year old black woman, whose mother had called the police late in the afternoon. Some sort of conflict was going on and her mother asked the police to take Korchinski-Paquet to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She was subject to epileptic seizures and apparently had other mental health problems as well. She ended up falling to her death from the balcony of their apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. Her mother, in an interview that evening, accused the police of pushing her daughter off the balcony.


This was, I think, the least credible accusation of murder that I have ever heard levelled against the police. It is one thing to accuse a policeman of using too much force and beating someone to death or of being too quick to pull the trigger. These things, regrettably, happen. It is far less believable that they would push a mentally ill person they are trying to help off of a balcony.


Unfortunately, this incident took place two days after the death of George Floyd, just as the riots were heating up south of the border. Which brings us back to the protest in Toronto on Saturday, with approximately 4000 in attendance. Some wore coronavirus masks, others wore Antifa masks. There were signs demanding “justice for Regis”, signs that made reference to George Floyd, and signs with all sorts of left-wing slogans of varying degrees of inanity. There were plenty of Marxist flags and anarchist and revolutionary chants. It was just the sort of thing that could easily and quickly have degenerated into the sort of thing happening south of the border.


The next day that was exactly what did happen in Montreal. What began as a demonstration outside of police headquarters late in the afternoon turned into a violent riot in which windows were broken, shops were looted, and a barricade was set on fire.


This is precisely the sort of import from American culture that we would be better off without.


(1) The point could be argued that in the period when the Liberal Party veered to the hard left - the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - it abandoned its platform of Americanization for one of anti-Americanism. It could be counter-argued however, that this was merely a matter of appearance. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the two superpowers seemed to be each the polar opposite of the other. This was not how things looked in the period from 1933 to 1945 in which the American president was the biggest cheerleader of the Soviet Union and the latter was ruled by the most brutal despot of its entire history. It was in this period that Lester Pearson betrayed his king and country, and became a spy for the Soviet Union through the network headed and later exposed by Elizabeth Bentley. Pearson would later win a Nobel Prize for supporting the Soviet and American interest - once again united - against the French, Israeli, and, most important, British in the Suez Canal Crisis, betraying Canada's tradition of Commonwealth Loyalty and costing the government in which he was minister the next election. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1963, it was by bringing down the Diefenbaker government in a conflict over whether Washington DC should be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. Diefenbaker took the con position, Pearson the pro - see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). In Trudeau père's premiership, his most Communistic innovations were all brought in by following American precedent. His "just society" expansion of the welfare-nanny state followed the example of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", and his Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, establishing the Canadian equivalent of Soviet thought police and tribunals, was modeled on the United States' Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(2) I am using this term in its technical theological meaning, not its colloquial use.

(3) Thurgood Marshall Jr. was not appointed to the American Supreme Court until 1967, a good thirteen years later.

Wars and Rumours of Wars

One of the most aggravating consequences of last month’s false flag fiasco in Charlottesville was the removal of the only member of the Trump administration who possessed any degree of sanity with regards to international geopolitics. I said many times during America’s last presidential election that although I considered Trump to be the better choice by far of the final two candidates, as a patriotic Canadian rather than an American and a royalist who disliked republics and presidents on principle, I did not really have a stake in the campaign. There was an obvious exception to this in the realm of international geopolitics and it was here that Trump stood out above not only Clinton but all those he beat out to win the Republican nomination. The Clinton Democrats and neoconservative Republicans are not so much rivals as the left and right wings of the American war party, both firmly committed to the Pax Americana, the “new world order” that George H. W. Bush proclaimed at the end of the Cold War on the eve of Operation Desert Storm, and the ultimate outcome of the trajectory upon which Woodrow Wilson set American foreign policy in the first World War. The combination of overseas bombings, regime changes, and other military actions with open immigration even from the parts of the world where the former is likely to have created mortal enemies gave birth to the wave of terrorism that has hit not only the United States but her allies in the West and indeed throughout the world in the last two decades. Trump campaigned on the policy of doing the opposite of this and the member of his administration most committed to that policy was Steve Bannon, formerly and now again, of Breitbart News.

The liberal-left have been attacking Bannon as a “white supremacist” since he was first appointed. There is not the slightest truth to this accusation – there seldom is except in the rare occasions that they are talking about someone who self-identifies as such – but the demands for his head greatly increased in the aftermath of Charlottesville, and Donald Trump’s sensible condemnation not just of white racism but of the anti-white racism of the Marxist thugs who initiated the violence. Bannon would likely still be Trump’s chief strategist, however, were it not for a published conversation he had with Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the ultra-left American Prospect magazine, in which he said regarding North Korea:

There’s no military solution, forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.

While saying this was perhaps unwise – in effect calling his own President’s bluff – it was nevertheless true even at the time which was a couple of weeks before North Korea successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test.

The time for a military solution to the North Korean regime has long passed. In the 1986 film, Back to School, the following dialogue took place between Professor Terguson, portrayed by comedian Sam Kiniston and Rodney Dangerfield’s character of Thornton Melon, a successful businessman who has gone back to university to gain some respect. Terguson has just snapped and furiously berated a younger student for a naïve textbook response to a question about the Vietnam War:

Melon: Hey Professor, take it easy will you. I mean these kids they were in grade school at the time. And me, I’m not a fighter, I’m a lover.

Terguson: Well, well, I didn’t know you wanted to get involved in the discussion Mr. Helper. But since you want to help, maybe you can help me, okay? Do you remember that thing we had about thirty years ago called the Korean conflict? Yeah, where we failed to achieve victory. How come we did not cross the 38th Parallel and push those rice eaters back to the Great Wall of China and take it apart brick by brick and nuke them back into the f***ing stone age forever? Tell me why, how come, say it, say it!

Melon: Alright, I’ll say it. ‘Cuz Truman was too much of a pussy wimp to let MacArthur go in there and blow out those Commie bastards!

Terguson: Good answer, good answer. I like the way you think. I’m going to be watching you.

Although the movie is fictional, there is truth in this comedic dialogue in that had Harry Truman followed General Douglas MacArthur’s advice in 1951, and allowed him to drive the China and Soviet backed Communists out of North Korea, the spread of Communism throughout Asia would have been nipped in the bud and the later, longer, and far worse Vietnam War would never have taken place. More relevantly to the situation at hand, the regime of Kim Jong Un would not exist today.

Of course we cannot go back to 1951 and undo Truman’s big mistake, any more than we can go back to 1945, prevent Eisenhower from delaying the march of the Western allies so that the Soviets could reach Berlin first and authorize Patton, once Hitler’s regime was dead and buried, to keep going and take out Stalin’s. 1945, when Patton wished it, was the last time an attempt to take down the Soviet Union militarily would have been feasible. By 1949 the Soviets had the atomic bomb and six years later they had the hydrogen bomb as well – a war between them and the United States at this point would have been insane and the more each country developed and expanded their nuclear arsenals the more insane it became.

North Korea has been developing its own nuclear weapons program for decades. A quarter of a century ago it withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and eleven years ago it detonated its first nuclear weapon. The full extent of its capabilities is unknown but it has developed ICBM’s capable of reaching North America and has just conducted a successful test of a 120-140 kiloton hydrogen bomb. It is nowhere near having anything like a first strike capacity against the United States, of course, but what it has is sufficient for a deterrent especially when we consider that even without its nukes it could lay waste to Seoul, the capital of its southern neighbour, if attacked, and that it would almost certainly be backed by China which has been in the nuclear game much longer.

Bannon is quite right – there is no military solution here.

If the unthinkable happens and an all-out nuclear war breaks out between the United States and North Korea it will either be initiated by North Korea or by the United States. While Kim Jong Un has often been accused of madness, it is madness of the megalomaniacal variety and not of the suicidal, and he would have to be suicidal to attack the United States. The liberal-left thinks – or at least professes to think – that if the United States initiates nuclear war with North Korea – or anybody else, for that matter – it will be due to the temperament of Donald Trump. This has been a meme on the left ever since the election campaign when it was propagated by Hillary Clinton, herself not exactly known for her pacific temperament. It is a nonsensical meme.

No, if the American government does do something as stupid as initiate a nuclear war it will not be because of the temperament of their president but because the man with the most sense on the subject has been driven from his administration, to the cheers of the liberal-left, leaving Trump surrounded by hawkish advisers. Hey, but at least those hawkish advisers do not disagree with the left-liberal dogma that the more ethnic, cultural, religious, and racial diversity a country has the better off it will be, to which all right-thinking people give their whole-hearted and unquestioning assent. After all, what’s a little thing like the threat of nuclear Armageddon, compared to the evil of thinking thoughts that liberals maintain to be racist.

Give Up Freedom To Gain Perpetual War? No Thank You!

In times of conflict, when our country is at war, we are willing to tolerate such inconveniences, burdens, and abridgements of our rights and freedoms as are deemed to be necessary for the war effort. We recognize, in such times, that the good of our whole country must come first and that we must come together in support of those who are fighting on our behalf. Implicit in all of this, however, is the understanding that war is an exceptional circumstance and that the conditions of peace in which our rights and freedoms are not so curtailed are the norm.

This long-standing traditional consensus served us well down through the ages but in the last century it was torn apart by attacks coming from two different directions. While there have always been those who have defected from their society’s collective efforts in wartime in post-World War II conflicts these have occurred on a much larger scale as part of organized movements that have been driven by ideologies such as pacifism. From this direction the tradition that tells us to come together in unity when our country is at war has come under attack. The attack from the other direction is upon the tradition that tells us to make the conditions of peace the norm and it is this attack, and especially one particular form of this attack, that I wish to discuss here.

If the tradition under attack says that the conditions of peace in which the public are not overly burdened with rules and taxes and their customary rights and freedoms are not abridged are to be the norm then to attack this tradition is to say that the conditions appropriate for wartime are to be the norm instead. One way in which this occurred in the last century was that liberalism, the ideology that started in the so-called “Enlightenment” and came to dominate the Western world in the period known as the Modern Age, changed, at least in North America, in the period between the two World Wars. Until the First World War the ideas of John Locke, in which the need to protect the rights and liberties of the individual from the state was stressed, formed the most prominent strain in liberal thought. After the war the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, in which the role of the modern democratic state as the agent and instrument of utilitarian progress was emphasized, eclipsed those of Locke. The basis of this shift in liberal thought was the reasoning on the part of many liberals who served in administrative positions in the First World War that if the government can mobilize and organize society for the sake of the war effort in times of war then surely it can mobilize and organize society to achieve a better, more just, society in times of peace. This has certainly taken the liberty out of liberalism.

Another way in which governments, addicted to wartime powers, have resisted the tradition of reverting to the conditions of peace as the norm, has been to make conflict the norm rather than peace. About the time that liberalism underwent the shift described in the preceding paragraph liberals of the older type, including American historians such as Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to see a tendency in the foreign policy of the liberal American Presidents of the ‘30s and ‘40s towards holding up “freedom”, “democracy”, and “peace” as ideals while constantly mobilizing the country for war on behalf of those ideals. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” was how Beard described this policy to Barnes, who borrowed the title for a anthology of essays he edited in 1953 that took a hard, critical, look at the policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. (1) Another of these older type liberals, who now called themselves libertarians, Murray N. Rothbard, observed that a “welfare-warfare state” had developed that both practiced the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace and employed high levels of taxation, spending, and regulation for non-belligerent, progressive purposes in the Benthamite manner we have discussed. That a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace could be used as a cover for collusion between military leaders and arms manufacturers for the sake of war profiteering on a whole new level made possible by the advent of mass production was a danger against which American President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address.

In the last decade and a half events have transpired that our governments have exploited to take the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace to a whole new level.

Since the end of the Second World War the acknowledged leading country of the Western world has, for better or worse, been the United States of America. After the Cold War came to an end America and the West have become increasingly entangled in the conflicts of the Middle East. When, on September 11, 2001, the United States found herself the victim of a terrorist attack the American President at the time declared a “War on Terror”. As part of this “War on Terror” the American government created a powerful new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, charged with the task of preventing terrorist attacks on American soil, and the USA PATRIOT Act, which enhanced the investigatory powers of law enforcement and security agencies by removing such impediments as the need for a court order to search records, was rushed through Congress. Here in Canada Jean Chretien’s Liberals rushed similar legislation through Parliament in the form of the Anti-Terrorism Act of the fall of 2001.

The supporters of bills like these argued that they were necessary to remove obstructions that got in the way of security agencies and hindered them from doing their job of protecting us from the violence of terrorism. Critics and opponents of the same bills argued that these so-called obstructions were actually safeguards that protected Canadians and Americans against the misuse of government power and that to get rid of these safeguards is to abandon centuries of tradition, stretching back to before the founding of either the United States or Canada, in which these safeguards evolved to protect our rights and liberties, lives and persons. These critics were, of course, right. If we were to interpret every crisis that occurs as indicating a need for either enhanced government powers or a loosening of constitutional, prescriptive, and legal restraints on the use of government powers, very soon we would have an omnipotent state and no rights and freedoms worth speaking of.

Nobody made this case better than the late paleoconservative columnist Sam Francis, who in column after column took the administration of George W. Bush to task for such things as trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals rather than real courts, eavesdropping on confidential communications and issuing national id cards, creating the Department of Homeland Security, and putting police surveillance cameras throughout federal buildings in Washington D. C., as creating a slippery slope, whereby Americans would become accustomed to less rights, liberties, and constitutional protections and to being spied on by their government. Noting that the powers granted to the American government by the Patriot Act “are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn’t use could still be used by future ones”, he pointed out that this “is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all” and concluded that the Bush administration was writing the last chapters in the story of American liberty.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act was no better. This Act utterly abandoned our country’s traditions of liberty and justice and allowed for people to be arrested and detained without charges, denied basic legal protections, and tried in secret without being guaranteed the opportunity to hear and respond to all the evidence against them, if the government were to determine them to be a threat to national security. This Act expired several years ago – legislation of this nature can only be enacted for five year periods – but, contrary to Kelly McParland’s claim in the National Post on February 2nd of this year, it did not expire without having been used. Among its other provisions was an amendment to the national security certificate provision of the Immigration Act that made possible an incident that was a shameful disgrace to our country.

An elderly man, who immigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950s, who had never committed any violent crime here or elsewhere although he was the victim of terrorist attacks on the part of the followers of Rabbi Kahane, but who was repeatedly dragged through our courts for the “crime” of trying to spread the idea that accounts of atrocities committed by the other side in the Second World War still need to be revised to less resemble wartime propaganda, moved to the United States in order to escape this persecution. He married a woman there, applied for citizenship, and was arrested by United States Immigration who handed him over to our authorities, who issued a national security certificate against him. He was placed in solitary confinement and tried behind closed doors by a judge who refused to recuse himself, despite his obvious bias, and found guilty on the basis of evidence he was not allowed to hear in full, and was then sent to Germany, with our government knowing full well that the German government would arrest him upon landing, and sentence him to five years in prison for mere words that he said. This man, Ernst Zündel, was a noted admirer of a rather odious historical regime, but that did not make him a terrorist any more than Pierre Trudeau’s admiration for the even more odious Maoist regime in China, which, as was not the case with Zündel, was still around when Trudeau was doing the admiring, made the former Prime Minister a terrorist. It is certainly no excuse for treating the man with such blatant injustice.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act has, as we have noted, expired but our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, wishes to pass another one. Bill C-51, which has passed its second reading and been referred to the Standing Committee in the House, has several parts to it. The first, and the one most emphasized by the bill’s advocates and defenders, is the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act which tells other government agencies to share their information with those charged with protecting national security. This sounds reasonable at first, until you think about why government agencies were prevented from doing this in the first place. The fourth part is the one the bill’s detractors prefer to emphasize because it greatly enhances the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The bill’s supporters say this is to reduce threats to Canadian security, its detractors say that it is to enable CSIS to better spy on Canadians. Other parts of the bill include the Secure Air Travel Act, which authorizes the creation of a no-fly list and otherwise ensures that airport security will be even more of an obnoxious pain in the buttocks than it already is, and various amendments to the Criminal Code including one that makes mincemeat out of the traditional right to confront and challenge your accuser in court in the euphemistic name of the “protection of witnesses”.

This bill is an abomination and the vote on it should be a pretty good litmus test as to how much respect for Canadians and their traditional rights and freedoms our Members of Parliament and Senators possess. The present government was elected by supporters who were sick and tired of the way the Liberal Party was overtaxing and overregulating Canadians while showing complete disregard for our traditions, rights, and freedoms. Why then is it determined to establish a surveillance state? It is rather ironic that the most active opposition to this bill in the House seems to be coming from the party whose members can never speak about freedom without sounding like a Cold War era apparatchik spouting off about “the freedom loving people of the Soviet Union”.

The fact of the matter is that the “war on terrorism” is the ultimate form of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. The enemy in this war is not a foreign government, with its own territory, that can be decisively conquered, defeated, or destroyed. No matter how many Cato the Elders we may find to punctuate their speeches with “terrorismo delenda est”, we will never be able to produce a single Scipio Africanus to conclusively defeat terrorism, or an Aemilianus to raze its stronghold to the ground, and sow its fields with salt, that it may never rise again. It is not that kind of an enemy. Terrorism can pop up anywhere at any time. A war against terrorism is a war that can never end. A government that wishes to constantly retain its wartime powers and abandon the traditional understanding that peace is to be the norm, not war, could find no better means of accomplishing this end, than by declaring a war on terrorism, and passing bills like C-51.

(1) The title was reused by the late, left-libertarian novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, for a collection of essays similarly criticizing the policies of more recent administrations in 2002.