I am a Tory rather than a true libertarian. Actual libertarians would say that government is either a necessary evil or an unnecessary one, depending upon whether the libertarian is one who believes in the “nightwatchman state” model or one who believes that the state is a criminal plot against the rights of the individual. I hold to the classical view that laws are necessary and that government is a good thing in the sense that it is an institution that was established and exists to serve the good of the public. The degree to which any specific government in any specific time and place can be said to be either good or bad depends upon the degree to which it actually accomplishes this purpose. Having said all of that, I am the kind of Tory who, like the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon, has a great deal of sympathy for the minimal government type of libertarian. As the elder Waugh once put it “I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.” It is from this perspective that I make the following observations.
Whenever government declares “war” against something other
than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, poverty, whatever, it is for
the purpose of expanding its own powers. This expansion of
government is never necessary and it always involves the diminishing of the
civil rights and freedoms of the governed. It is very difficult to
contract the powers of government after they have been expanded and to restore
rights and freedoms after they have been diminished. Any time,
therefore, that the government starts talking about wars against abstract
enemies we should take this as an alarm bell telling us to stand up for our
rights and liberties before we lose them.
You are perhaps thinking at this point that I am about to
apply this to the militaristic language our governments have been using while
announcing totalitarian restrictions as their response to the spread of the bat
flu. While that is certainly a valid application, I will let you
make it for yourselves. Instead, I wish to consider another example
from twenty years ago, the ramifications of which are now becoming most
evident.
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida, an Islamic terrorist
organization that had evolved out of the CIA-trained mujahideen that the United
States had employed against the Soviet Union following the latter’s invasion of
Afghanistan decades earlier, attacked its former sponsor by hijacking planes
and flying them into the towers that symbolized American and international
commerce in Lower Manhattan. The American President at the time,
George W. Bush, shortly thereafter declared a “Global War on Terror” and gave
the rest of the world an ultimatum to either stand with the United States in
this battle or be counted on the side of the enemy.
By declaring war on the abstraction of terrorism in general
rather than merely the specific, concrete, terrorist organization al-Qaida that
had attacked America, Bush signaled that he had a far more ambitious project
than merely settling the score and punishing the perpetrators of
9/11. While terrorism is notoriously difficult to define due to a
lack of consensus with regards to certain of the particulars there is a general
understanding that it occupies the space where the kind of violence that law
enforcement deals with and the kind that requires a military response overlap
each other. This makes it a particularly bad choice for an enemy in
an abstract war. In addition to the problem common to all wars
against abstract enemies, that they can never be won and brought to a decisive
end because abstract enemies cannot surrender or be toppled or killed, a war
against terrorism is an invitation to merge the law enforcement and military
functions of government in a way that threatens the privacy, rights, and
freedoms of the governed.
This is precisely what happened with the Bush
administration’s War on Terror. In the first month of the War on
Terror the Office of Homeland Security was established which about a year later
would be expanded into the Department of Homeland Security, a creepy body, like
something out of a totalitarian dystopia, in which the line between law
enforcement and the military is all but eliminated. In less than two
months after 9/11 the Bush administration had drafted and pushed through
Congress the draconian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT)
Act, which stripped Americans of anything but nominal constitutional protection
of their privacy rights and turned the American republic into an Orwellian
surveillance state.
I knew full well at the time that this was a power grab aimed
at expanding the powers of the American government at the expense of the
privacy, rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans. I knew this
because this is precisely what the men who were rushing to do this in September
of 2001 had been saying about similar efforts on the part of the Clinton administration
in the 1990s.
In the spring of 1995 I was finishing my freshman year as a
theology student. At the very end of the semester a terrorist
attack in the United States was all over the news. A truck loaded
with a homemade bomb had been detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City. Bill Clinton immediately began pointing
to this event as demonstrating the need for the Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill
that his Attorney General Janet Reno's Department had drafted and that had been
introduced in the US Senate a couple of months earlier by none other than the
present occupant of the White House who at the time was Senator for Delaware
(Chuck Schumer was the sponsor of the Bill in the House of
Representatives). The bill met with strenuous opposition from civil
libertarians of the left and right and consequently it was only a very
emaciated version that was signed into law by Bill Clinton on Hitler's birthday
the following year. When, barely a week after 9/11, Bush's Attorney
General John Ashcroft had the draft of the PATRIOT Act available - a bill so
long that few who voted on it had been able to read the entire thing - this was
because he had basically recycled Clinton's Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill,
adding a few bells and whistles here and there. Ashcroft is said to
have called up Joe Biden to tell him that it was essentially the same bill that
he, that is Biden, had introduced seven years earlier. Now,
although Clinton had failed to get the surveillance state he sought in
1995-1996, he did not let up in his efforts to enhance government powers in the
name of fighting terrorism. Indeed, he brought the matter up with
increasing frequency as his many indiscretions began to surface and his
administration became enmired in scandal. Around 1997, for
example, he wanted the FBI to be given the power to intercept and read all
internet communications. An excellent article was penned in
opposition to this by the said John Ashcroft, who at the time was Senator for
Missouri. The article was entitled "Keep Big Brother's Hands
Off the Internet" and included such wise observations as the
following:
"The Clinton administration would like the Federal
government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer
communications...The proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans'
privacy...There is a concern that the internet could be used to commit crimes
and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do
not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited
wiretaps. Why then, should we grant government the Orwellian
capacity to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the
Web?...The administrations interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy
precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and
IRS snooping. Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to
exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this
is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open
our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international
communications".
Indeed. It appears that some time between 1997
and 2001 one of the pod people from Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers had
replaced Ashcroft with a look alike who instead of the above sound reasoning
espoused rhetoric about how those raising concerns about the PATRIOT Act's
impact on civil liberties were aiding and abetting the terrorists.
He was hardly the only one. The same could be said of a great many
of the most prominent figures in American conservatism who had talked like
Ashcroft about the Clinton administration's threat to American liberties in the
1990s, only to turn around and support the PATRIOT Act in 2001. It
was at this point that I lost all respect for American conservatives - other
than those like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Charley Reese who were manifestly
the same people, espousing the same principles, regardless of whether a Clinton
or a Bush was in power.
It was a couple of years later, when Bush and Ashcroft
were again talking about expanding their powers to fight terrorism – they had
drafted the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, nicknamed “PATRIOT II”, but it
was never presented to Congress – that the late Sam Francis wrote an article
explaining the case against all legislation of the type, in what was the single
best response to the annoying “it’s okay when our side does it" attitude
among the Bush “conservatives” that I ever read. He wrote:
But the larger point is not
what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.
The point is that the powers
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.
That, of course, 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.
Instilling in citizens the notion that the power to seize
library records is something the state needs is an excellent way to assist that
erosion.
Most libertarians, of the left or the right, will tell you
how we have been eroding those habits and that mentality for several decades
now. –
Samuel Francis, “Bush Writing Last Chapters in Story of American Liberty”, September 25, 2003, Creators Syndicate.
The truth of Sam Francis' words
is now glaringly obvious.
The White House is now occupied
by the decrepit swamp troll who had introduced the first draft of
what would eventually become the PATRIOT Act back in 1995 and he is calling for
even more anti-terrorism legislation. He has also openly turned the
War on Terror against those whom the Clinton administration had in mind when
they attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch their own War on Terror that year -
American citizens who stand up for their rights and freedoms, especially
Christians who are serious about their faith, white people who object to being
vilified for the colour of their skin and turned into scapegoats, and gun
owners.
The Department of Homeland
Security has issued a bulletin that implies that those who are unsatisfied that
the outcome of last year's election was legitimate, are opposed to the lockdown
measures that trample all over their rights and freedoms ("frustrated with
the exercise of government authority" is how the memo words this), or
both, are potential violent threats to the United States. A
government that regards around half of the people it governs as threats is no
longer a constitutional government that respects limits on its own power for the
protection of its citizens and their rights and freedoms. It is more like
a government that fears and has declared war on its own people. The
progressive media that during the last administration defended
its monolithically hyper-adversarial stance with slogans like
"democracy dies in darkness" has been calling for Republican senators
such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and in some cases the entire Republican
Party to be designated "domestic terrorists". The United States
is a two-party country. If you criminalize one of the two parties
you are left, of course, with a one-party state. Otherwise known as
a totalitarian dictatorship. The kind of state that the United
States, the capital city of which is now under military occupation by its own army,
is giving every impression of becoming.
From up north in the Dominion of
Canada it is appalling to watch our southern neighbour turn itself into the
world's largest banana republic, both because of what it means for our American
friends and because bad ideas and trends down there have a nasty habit of
migrating up here.
Think back to 2001 once
again. Our Prime Minister at the time was Jean Chretien, who was in
my opinion a creepy, sleazy, low-life scumbag, to list only his better
qualities. While Bush, Ashcroft, et al, were making a big noise about the
PATRIOT Act and all the other things they were going to do in fighting their
War on Terror, Chretien, relatively quietly had Anne McLellan introduce Bill
C-36, an anti-terrorism bill of his own into Parliament. It quickly
passed the House and Senate and received Royal Assent in December of that
year. It consisted of amendments to several different pieces of
existing legislation, such as the Criminal Code and the Official Secrets
Act. Some of its provisions, at the suggestion of Bill Blaikie who
at the time was the Member representing Winnipeg-Transcona in the House of
Commons, were given sunset clauses which caused them to automatically expire in
five years. Other provisions remain to this day.
I will provide an illustration of
how this led to the shameful abuse of government power twenty years ago before
returning to the present.
One the pieces of legislation
amended was the Canadian Security Intelligence Services Act, which created CSIS
in 1984. The amendment replaced "threats to the security of
Canada" with the much broader wording "activities within or related
to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious
violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political,
religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign
state". CSIS, when it took over the RCMP's intelligence
functions, also took over the issuing of security certificates, a provision of
the 1978 Immigration Act which allowed for those who were not Canadian citizens
to be declared a threat to national security and deported in a streamlined
manner.
In December of 2001, just as Bill
C-36 was going into effect, American immigration officials arrested Ernst
Zündel, who had left Canada in 2000 vowing never to return,
rather understandably as he had on three separate occasions been persecuted by
our government for his unpopular political-historical views. He had
married an American citizen, the Russian-German Mennonite novelist Ingrid
Rimland and, had he been anybody else, would have been on track for American
citizenship himself.
Interestingly enough, in February of that year the men’s magazine Esquire had published an essay by
journalist and war correspondent John Sack in which Zündel
featured The essay was entitled “Inside the Bunker” and recounted the writer’s experiences at the previous year’s
conference of the Institute for Historical Review where he met holocaust
revisionists such as Zündel. The essay,
which was later selected for inclusion in the anthology, The Best American Essays 2002, edited by Stephen Jay Gould, was
more-or-less the opposite of every other article which had ever appeared about holocaust
revisionists in the mainstream press.
Sack treated them respectfully, pointed out a few places where they were
demonstrably right, and gave reasons for rejecting their conclusions that were
based on evidence rather than abuse, for he presented them all in general, and Zündel
in particular, in a sympathetic light as basically ordinary people, who were
more hated than guilty of hatred and whose views arose defensively, in response
to post-World War II German bashing, rather than out of anti-Semitic
bigotry. Evidently, the essay had no
impact on the American and Canadian authorities. The Americans charged him with overstaying
his visa and sent him back to us. CSIS issued a security
certificate against Zündel, which it would not have
been able to do prior to Chretien’s anti-terrorism bill becoming law because he
was by no means a threat to the security of Canada having been a peaceful and
non-violent man for all of the decades he had lived here. Under
the Anti-terrorism Act, however, they were able to stretch the very flexible
new wording of their mandate to include him on the basis of people he had
associated with.
He was detained
and held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for over a year while he was
tried in his absence before a prejudiced judge on the grounds of evidence to
which neither he nor his lawyer, Doug Christie, were given full access, and
ultimately was deported to Germany where he was arrested over things he said or
written in North America, charged, and sentenced to five years in prison.
To summarize,
the greater flexibility that had been given to our “intelligence” agency on the
grounds that it was needed to protect our country from the threat of terrorist
violence was used pretty much immediately after it had passed into law, to once
again persecute a man whom our government had been persecuting for his
political-historical opinions since 1984, this time denying him the protection
of due process that had been available to him previously and which had
ultimately prevailed in those cases when the Supreme Court struck the laws
under which he had been convicted down.
This was a most
disgraceful episode and one that clearly demonstrates that governments that
seek to expand their own powers and flexibility in order to combat foes like “terrorism”
cannot be trusted to confine the use of those powers to that purpose.
Parliament did
take greater precautions than the US Congress in passing the Anti-terrorism
Act. I have already mentioned that
certain provisions came with sunset clauses that would cause them to expire in
five years unless the House and the Senate agreed to an extension. The Act also required that the House and
Senate appoint committees to conduct a comprehensive review of the Act within its
first three years, which would be a necessary preliminary step towards any
extension. While a short extension was
agreed upon after the first review, ultimately these provisions were allowed to
expire in 2007. By this time Stephen
Harper had become Prime Minister, but the expiration of the provisions should
not be attributed to any great concern for the privacy, rights, freedoms, and
due process of Canadians on his part.
In his final year as Prime Minister he introduced a new Anti-terrorism
Act, Bill C-51, which was more like the USA PATRIOT Act than Chretien’s
Anti-terrorism Act had been, and which greatly expanded the powers and mandate
of CSIS. Readers might recall that this
loathsome piece of legislation was the reason I
vowed never to vote for the Conservatives again as long as Stephen Harper led
the party. The Conservatives were
defeated in the election that fall, which I would like to think was in
retaliation to Bill C-51, except that they were replaced in government by the
only party in Parliament that had supported them in passing it.
Now let us
return to the present. One of the
provisions of Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act that remains in effect was the
creation of a list of groups officially designated as terrorists. It is odd, actually, that this was allowed
to stand, because it is one of the worst provisions in the Act. It essentially functions like a decree of
outlaw, depersoning everyone in the groups placed on the list, stripping them
of all constitutional protections.
One might think that the New Democrat Party, Canada’s
officially socialist party (as opposed to all the unofficial ones), with its
long history of human rights rhetoric, would have a problem with this. Back in 2015, when they were led by Thomas
Mulcair, they were on the right side, the opposing side, of the Bill C-51
debate. In 2021, however, they are led
by Jagmeet Singh. One might think that
Singh, considering his open support for the cause of separating Punjab from
India and Pakistan and turning it into the Sikh state of Khalistan, a cause that
has frequently been supported by acts of terrorism, including one of the most
notorious – if not the most notorious – to take place on, well, not on Canadian
soil, but in Canadian airspace, the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985,
would have even more cause than other NDPers to oppose the official terror
list. At the very least one would
expect him not to be throwing stones from within this particular glass house. One would be very, very, wrong in all of
this.
Not long after a number of unarmed and oddly dressed supporters
of Donald the Orange temporarily delayed the Congressional certification of the
Electoral College vote by entering the Capitol in Washington DC causing
everyone to break out into histrionics screaming “coup” “insurgency” and the
like, Singh tweeted that the event was an “act of domestic terrorism” and
stated that “the Proud Boys helped execute it”, “Their founder is Canadian”, “They
operate in Canada, right now” and that he was “calling for them to be
designated as a terrorist organization, immediately”.
What is this “Proud Boys” that Singh thinks deserve the
terrorist designation more than the mass murderers of Hindus?
It is not, as its title would seem to suggest, an
organization devoted to advancing the alphabet soup cause. It is a group that has attained notoriety
over the last five years mostly for its confrontations and clashes with
antifa. Antifa are those groups of
masked thugs that go to events organized by right-of-centre groups and lectures
featuring speakers with views that leftists believe ought not to be heard and
try to disrupt and shut down these events and lectures through intimidation and
bullying. I don’t know if this was the
original intent when the Proud Boys was founded but it quickly gained a reputation
as a group that was eager and willing to fight back.
The media, which has tacitly and sometimes explicitly,
supported antifa for years, has attached all sorts of labels to the Proud Boys that
seem to completely disregard the group’s account of itself. It is frequently called “white nationalist”,
for example, despite the fact that it has always been multiracial, that its
founder, the Canadian born “godfather of hipsterdom” and co-founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, is a civil
nationalist who explicitly rejected racial nationalism, and its current leader,
the one who has been charged with regards to the incident on Capitol Hill, is
an Afro-Cuban. McInnes described the
group as “Western Chauvinist” but he explained this quite clearly in terms of
the values of Western Civilization, which anyone from any race can adhere to
and which, in an irony totally lost on his progressive critics, are entirely
liberal – in the sense of classical liberal – values.
Since the facts obviously conflict with the claim that the
Proud Boys are white nationalists, why do the media and the self-appointed anti-hate
watchdog groups continue to so designate them?
Obviously it is because they are not using the term to
convey any meaningful information about who and what the group is but as a
weapon to demonize, discredit, and destroy it.
The exact same thing can be said about Jagmeet Singh
Dhaliwal’s call to designate the group a “terrorist organization”. There is little if anything in the facts
that would support this designation in any meaning-conveying sense. The violence perpetrated by antifa which
exists solely for the purpose of using violence or the threat of violence to
suppress opinions with which the left disagrees and silence those who hold such
opinions far more closely fits the meaning of the word terrorism than pushing
or punching back against said violence, whatever else one might think about
this sort of responding in kind. The
designation is not intended to be meaningful, it is intended to destroy a group
that Singh opposes for political reasons.
This is a terrible misuse of a law that seems like it was written to
be terribly misused.
Singh followed up on his tweet by raising the matter in
Parliament and bringing it to a vote.
The House unanimously voted for a motion recommending that the
government add the Proud Boys to the terrorist list. There was not a single dissenting vote. Anybody in the Conservative Party who might
have thought that antifa and BLM deserved to be on that list much more than the
Proud Boys kept that thought to himself.
Anybody in the NDP or Green parties who might have objected to the
terrorist list even existing on the grounds that it is a threat to human
rights, kept that thought to himself. This
unanimous vote to declare the group a terrorist organization for entirely
political reasons, depersoning its members and stripping them of their
constitutional protections, speaks extremely poorly about the politicians we
have sent to Parliament, and bodes very ill for our country’s future.
The motion in Parliament had no binding force on the
government. Bill Blair, the ex-cop who
is Public Safety Minister – a title from the French Reign of Terror which ought
not to exist in a free Commonwealth realm, back to Solicitor General, please – told the
CBC that the decision would be based on “intelligence and evidence
collected by our national security agencies” and that “Terrorist designations
are not political exercises”. On February 3rd he declared that the
Proud Boys, along with a bunch of obscure groups that few have ever heard of
before, had been added to the list.
Jagmeet Singh was elated, although it was reiterated on the
occasion that his motion was not a motivating factor in the decision (yeah
right), and he called upon the government to go even further in eliminating groups
that disagree with him. He
was quoted by the CBC as saying:
We need to build a country where
everyone feels like they belong. Those hateful groups have no place in our
country.
Clearly all
anti-terrorism legislation needs to be repealed immediately. Anything that gives such a man, who is so completely
stupid that he cannot see the glaring contradiction between these two
sentences, this kind of power to destroy those he doesn’t like is a far greater
threat to our country than terrorism itself.
