Discrimination and Justice

Imagine the following scenario. You are at a bar or a nightclub and someone comes up to you, expressing romantic interest, and asks you for your name and contact information. This person is of the same sex as you and you, not being into that, politely explain this and turn this person down. The next day, you are notified that you have been charged with discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. You think the charge is absurd but find yourself dragged into a long, expensive, legal battle, at the end of which, a judgement is made against you, and you are slapped with a fine that exceeds your annual gross income and which you cannot possibly pay.

“Preposterous,” you say. “That could never happen!”

Why not?

“It is not discrimination for a heterosexual to turn down an advance from someone of the same sex.”

Actually, yes it is. To discriminate is to observe a difference or make a distinction and to act as if that difference or distinction mattered. A man, who turns down a sexual advance from another man, because he himself is heterosexual, is discriminating against potential sexual partners on the grounds of both their sex and their sexual orientation.

“That cannot be right. There is nothing wrong with a person rejecting an advance from someone he is not attracted to.”

That is my point precisely. There is nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, since there is nothing wrong with it, there is nothing wrong with discrimination qua discrimination.

It is a matter of basic logic folks. A heterosexual man, being attracted only to women, will turn down advances from other men. In doing so, he is making and acting upon a distinction between men and women, and therefore discriminating. If discrimination is wrong in and of itself, then it is wrong for him to do so. Since, however, everyone who is not crazy knows that there is nothing wrong with a man who is attracted only to women turning down another man, it must therefore follow that discrimination in itself is not wrong.

As impeccable as this logic is, the conclusion will still be resisted by those who, lacking all capacity for thinking outside of the “discrimination is wrong” box, will sputter in helpless rage at this demonstration of how everything that they have been brainwashed into thinking by the news media, popular entertainment and the Stalinist indoctrination camps that are our public educational system all their lives is wrong. To pour salt on their wounds, I will point out that logic brings us to the same conclusion if the scenario is altered so that it is a lesbian rather than a heterosexual man rejecting the advances of a male suitor.

“Not so fast”, someone might object, “to arrive at the conclusion that discrimination is not intrinsically wrong from that starting point would requires that the lesbian be right or at least not wrong in rejecting her male suitor, and does not traditional Christian morality teach that lesbianism is wrong?”

Traditional Christian morality does indeed teach that lesbianism is wrong but not in a way that would affect the outcome of our argument. It is not the lesbian’s rejection of men that traditional Christian morality condemns as sinful but her having sexual relations with other women. It is modern liberalism that runs into a problem here, because liberal ethics seeks to simultaneously affirm the goodness of homosexuality and the injustice of discrimination. The lesbian’s choice of sexual partners, however, is no less discriminatory based on sex than that of the heterosexual male – or for that matter those of the homosexual male and the heterosexual woman.

It is not wrong to discriminate. That does not mean that it is always right to discriminate, of course, but it does mean that the rightness or wrongness of an act of discrimination lies elsewhere than in the mere fact of its being discriminatory. This is one of the reasons why laws against discrimination are themselves unjust.

It is a little over fifty year since the first anti-discrimination bill, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The United Kingdom followed suit with the Race Relations Act of 1965 and Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977. Other Western countries brought in similar legislation and the US, UK and Canada have all subsequently amended and expanded their initial anti-discriminatory bills.

Advocates of this sort of law point to injustices of the era in order to justify the introduction of these laws but the interesting thing to note about that is that the injustices in question consisted of laws and government policies whereas the anti-discrimination bills forbade private acts of discrimination. Segregation in the southern United States, for example, the justification given for the US Civil Rights Act, was the separation of the races by laws enacted by the state governments in the late 1800s, laws which were struck down by the American Supreme Court ten years before the US Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on the part of businesses, employers, and those looking to sell or rent a house, was passed.

It is one thing to tell a magistrate, responsible for hearing and settling disputes between two parties, that he is required to base his ruling on the facts of the case and not on the wealth and social status of the parties in question. This has been recognized as a basic principle of justice from time immemorial and the violation of it is the classic example of a kind of discrimination that is also an injustice.

It is a different matter altogether to tell an employer that he cannot discriminate in his hiring practices. Imagine if the government were to pass a law that says to employers “if a member of group X comes to you looking for a job, you are required to hire him, and you must never fire him.” That such a law would be a grotesque injustice to employers is easily recognizable by all sane people but laws which forbid discrimination on the part of employers inevitably translate into such laws in practice. If the law says you are not allowed as an employer to discriminate against members of group X, and a member of group X applies to be hired and is turned down, he can then charge you with discrimination and you will be faced with the burden of proving that your decision was not based on discrimination. That is not something that can be proven to a human judge, however, because discrimination takes place in the heart and mind which the judge cannot see for himself and can hardly be required to take your word for it. Therefore, the only way to protect yourself as an employer from a false charge under a law that says “you cannot discriminate against members of group X” is to treat the law as if it said “you are required to hire members of group X.”

Laws that forbid discrimination by placing the onus of proof upon the accused rather than the accuser and by presuming to dictate what we can and cannot think or feel in our thoughts and hearts violate our civilization’s traditional principles of justice and are experiments in totalitarian thought control that would be right at home in kind of Communist hellhole that Stalin and Mao ran and George Orwell satirized. Which is why, unless these laws are revoked, we can expect that someday in the not so distant future we will see the absurd hypothetical scenario with which I began this essay, become an absurd reality. It is the fundamental nature of these laws to produce such an outcome.

GTN Tory Classics No. 3: Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory

The term Pyrrhic victory comes from Pyrrhus of Epirus, a 3rd Century BC Greek king who fought against Rome. At the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, he led a coalition army against a Roman army of about equal strength. The battle lasted for two days and in the end Rome was routed, but Pyrrhus lost a huge portion of his own army in the process. After the battle, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked "One more such victory, and we shall be undone". A Pyrrhic victory is a victory won at a cost so high it means the ruin of the victor as well.

I wrote the essay that followed for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this essay I argue that the West won the Cold War against Communism at the price of becoming Communist ourselves. This essay also argues against the widely held but foolish idea that "Communism in theory" is noble and good and unrelated to the actual experience of 20th Century Communism.


Twenty Years Later: A Pyrrhic Victory?


By Gerry T. Neal
October 20, 2009

This November 9th will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The significance of that historical event cannot be exaggerated. It marked the beginning of the end of the global conflict that had been raging since the end of World War II between the two superpowers that had emerged from that War to take the place of the great European powers that had been decimated by the World Wars. Two years after the East German guards abandoned the check stops and allowed free access through the gates of the wall the Soviet Union was no more.

Did the end of the Cold War mean that we had won and Communism had lost? Or was the “victory” of the West a Pyrrhic victory? In his 2007 book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Post-Modern Age, Dr. Tomislav Sunic pointed out that in Europe some authors had made the observation that “communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”. Is this in fact the case?

What was or is Communism? It was an ideology and a movement dedicated to bringing about a global revolution on the part of the working class that would establish an egalitarian society. It’s roots lay in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century philosopher whose ideas inspired the French Revolution which became the template for revolutionary movements that popped up all over continental Europe in the early 19th Century. One of those revolutionary organizations, the Communist League, commissioned German economist Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels to write a manifesto outlining the aims of their movement. The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in London in 1848. Less than a century later a party known as the Bolsheviks, dedicated to the ideology of Communism, seized control of the state in Russia, and turned the old Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Under the leadership of tyrants like Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Communist Russia established a brutal system of totalitarian rule. Freedom to worship was severely curtailed by the officially atheist state. Artificial famines were created to inflict mass starvation and suffering upon the Ukrainians. A class of peasant known as the “kulaks” were made the official scapegoat of the Soviet state and targeted for persecution. Forced labor camps were set up all across the USSR. Long before Hitler came to power in Germany the Bolsheviks had set a record for state cruelty and oppression that the Nazis, brutal as they were, would never be able to top. It would, however, arguably be topped by the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong who in 1949 had driven out the Chinese Nationalists and conquered mainland China.

Show trials, Potemkin villages, concentration camps, artificial famines, mass executions of entire classes of people deemed to be enemies of “the people” because of their education, wealth, or religion, these were what Communism looked like in practice wherever it reared its ugly head, whether in Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Cuba under Castro. The whole time this was going on, smug, ivory-tower, leftist intellectuals in America, Canada, the UK and Europe stuck their noses in the air at anyone who considered Communism to be a serious threat to human freedom and happiness.

These sort of things, we were told by leftist academics and Hollywood actors, are not what Communism is really about. Communism is really about equality and sharing and being fair to people. Only those with unearned wealth and power which they jealously guard for themselves while unfeelingly leaving other people to suffer could possibly be opposed to Communism.

Alright then. Lets look at Communism in theory.

The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels set forth the ideas and aims of the Communist Party, was a short document. It outlined Marx’s distinct view of history as progressing through a series of conflicts between oppressor classes and oppressed classes and his prediction that the next revolution, on the part of the proletariat (industrial working class), would lead to the abolition of private property (the root of all evil in Marx’s theory) and the establishment of a society where everything is owned in common and people contribute to the best of their ability and in accordance with their needs. In their second chapter, entitled “Proletarians and Communists”, Marx and Engels put forth a 10-point agenda for the Communist movement to achieve its goals.

What is interesting about this agenda is that 3 of the points have been completely accomplished in Western societies. The second point is “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth point is “Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly” and the tenth point is “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc”.

Note that each of these points is a step towards statism. An income tax is a direct tax on the incomes of people that requires people to give detailed information about their employment and income to the government and which cannot be established apart from an intrusive government tax agency that keeps records on people and has the power to audit people like Revenue Canada or the IRS. When that tax is “progressive or graduated” that means that the government is telling certain people they are making too much money and so the government will take a larger share from them than from others. This tax was established in the United States in 1913 and in Canada in 1917.

A central bank is a tool for the government and bankers working in collusion with the government to confiscate everybody’s wealth without them actually coming up to you and saying “you have saved such-and-such an amount of money over the years, we are now going to take it away from you”. The Federal Reserve System was established in the United States the same year as the income tax and the Bank of Canada was established in the 1934.

Universal public education takes the responsibility for and control of the education of the young away from their parents and places it in the hands of the central state. When schools are paid for and controlled by the central government they become instruments whereby that government can undermine the authority of parents, churches, and other social institutions through state indoctrination. As of late, the public schools seem to be doing far more of that, than teaching kids to read, write, and do math, and imparting to them a basic knowledge of the literature and history of their society and of the world at large.

The other seven points of the Marx/Engels agenda have not been fulfilled so conspicuously and completely but with our estate taxes and government bureaucracies like the CRTC and FCC, and the ministries and departments of transport, it can be said of many of them that they are fulfilled in spirit if not in the letter.

The leftist academics might pipe in at this point and say “See, that proves our point, you can have Marx and Engels without the Gulag, and the killing fields, and the terror famine, and the Great Leap Forward”.

Lets take another look around us then. We don’t have apparatchiks but we do have self-important sycophantic bureaucrats galore. We don’t have yes/no elections on candidates from a single party. We get to chose between various brands of the same party so as to get the policies of Jack Layton under the label of Stephen Harper. We don’t have secret police knocking on our doors in the middle of the night and dragging us away because we have written scurrilous verse about our Leader. We do, however, have Human Rights Commissions, which investigate our actions and words to make sure they measure up to official human rights ideology and which summon us to trials where we are not entitled to legal counsel but where we can face penalties of up to $50 000 and life-time gag orders if we are convicted for just posting words on the internet. There are people in jails across Western Europe whose only crime was to question aspects of the historical account of the Holocaust. Instead of re-education we have “sensitivity training”.

What we don’t seem to have any more are the prescriptive Rights of Englishmen under English Common Law, whereby we are free to do whatever we want if it is not a crime clearly proscribed by law. The Common Law Rights of Englishmen further protected us by insisting that we, if detained by the state, have a right to be immediately presented with the charges against us, to have a judge rule on our detainment, to a trial before a jury of our peers, and if convicted to appeal our case up to Her Majesty herself. Apparently “human rights” trump those rights.

These all seem to have fallen by the wayside as our government has pursued the goals of progress, equality and “human rights”. It looks like Communism, whether in its stark, ugly, naked form in the USSR or Red China, or dressed up to look pretty in Canada and the United States, is simply incompatible with the long-standing British tradition of liberty.

If we value that tradition of liberty, maybe it is time we started asking our politicians to give it back to us, and to get rid of all the Communist innovations they have smuggled in over the last century. Otherwise, the West’s victory over Communism of 20 years ago, is a Pyrrhic victory indeed.