What word would you use to describe a government that loudly
proclaims its belief in and commitment to “democracy” but governs with contempt
for the institution of Parliament and the idea that it, that is the government
in the sense of the Cabinet of executive ministers, is accountable to
Parliament for all of its actions and displays this same contempt regardless of
whether it commands a majority or a small plurality in the House of
Commons?
What if that same government, while constantly evoking the “common
good” when demanding total submission and obedience to every rule, regulation,
and restriction it imposes even if these blatantly violate, and not in any way
that could objectively be called reasonable or minimal, the most basic of the
rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by constitutional law,
conspicuously governs in a way that rewards those who tend to vote for it and
punishes those who tend to vote against it?
Let us say, for example, that a Liberal government on the one hand got
itself embroiled in a huge corruption scandal for putting pressure on its
Justice Minister to interfere in an ongoing prosecution on behalf of a large
corporate donor to the Liberal Party located in the home province of the Prime
Minister, and on the other hand did
everything in its power to sabotage the energy industry of the province(s)
least likely to elect Liberals to Parliament. Let us add that this same Liberal
government in the name of combatting the gun violence that is primarily a
problem in urban areas that vote Liberal or NDP, introduced
a new gun ban that was completely useless for that purpose in that urban gun
violence is almost entirely committed with already illegal handguns, but,
like most previous Liberal gun legislation, primarily affected rural gun owners
who tend not to vote Liberal or NDP.
Let us also add that this Liberal government keeps targeting parts of
the population – like pickup
truck owners and prairie
grain farmers – who traditionally vote against the Liberals with its tax policies.
In other words it displays utter disregard for that grand
traditional principle of Parliament that it is the duty of those who hold
executive office in government to serve all Canadians – this is what the common
good is supposed to mean and what it was traditionally understood to mean –
rather than favouring their own supporters, and especially not punishing those
who voted against them. Note that
hindering the government from giving in to the temptation to do the latter is a
major part of the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the reason why Her
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is an official standing in Parliament and not just a
label for the runner-up in the last Dominion election.
Suppose that the same government was led by a Prime Minister
who refuses to take action when protests conducted in the name of causes that
he and his followers support such as the various causes associated with the
Green movement or those of the so-called anti-racist – in reality anti-white
would be a more accurate description – movement disrupt commerce, movement, and
the everyday lives of numerous Canadians or even break out into violence and
other destructive criminal behaviour.
Suppose that this same Prime Minister likes
to lecture the governments of other countries on the need to allow peaceful
protest and to listen to people who disagree with them. Then suppose that this same Prime Minister, when
faced with a protest against his government’s
policies and actions and how they have infringed upon Canadians’ basic rights
and freedoms and adversely affected the lives and livelihoods of the protesters
and countless others, even though the protest is far more deserving of the
adjective “peaceful” than any of those that the Prime Minister supports,
instead of listening to them hides himself away and like a tantrum-throwing
three year old hurls every nasty name he can think of against them, before bringing
out the biggest tool available to the government, one designed for use against
terrorism and never before used in its current form, essentially putting
the country under martial law, in
order to crack down hard on the protesters. While all of this is still expanding upon
our initial and primary question it is worth adding a second question here of
whether, when this Prime Minister sets up an inquiry into his own just
mentioned actions, we can expect this to be impartial and its results credible.
Now suppose that immediately after the events described in
the previous paragraph the same Prime Minister goes on a foreign tour in which
he lectures other leaders about the dangers of a rise in
“authoritarianism”. In his usage,
“authoritarian” appears to describe leaders and movements he doesn’t like,
whereas “democratic” appears to mean little more than leaders and movements he
does like, and the purpose of the lectures would seem to be to encourage the
governments of the world to join him in an attempt to recklessly escalate a
volatile situation in a volatile part of the world that the Americans had
foolishly been fomenting for years into something much worse. Meanwhile, while condemning
“authoritarianism” – again, meaning little more than those whose politics he
disagrees with – his own governance displays many of the characteristics of
totalitarianism.
The distinction between “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism”
was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would soon thereafter serve as American
ambassador to the UN during the Reagan administration, in an article entitled “Dictatorships
and Double Standards” that appeared in the flagship journal of American neo-conservatism,
Commentary, in November of 1979 and
was later expanded into a book that came out in 1982. While the Kirkpatrick Doctrine is vulnerable
to many of the same objections that could be made against American
neo-conservatism in general, the distinction is not without merit. The basic distinction is that an
“authoritarian” government claims a monopoly on political power in the country
it governs, but a “totalitarian” government claims a monopoly on every aspect
of the country – political, economic, social, cultural – and the lives of those
it governs. Consequently, an
authoritarian government, while bossier and far less tolerant of dissent than
Western liberal democracies are – or like to think they are at any rate – does
not attempt to dictate the every thought of those they govern, like a totalitarian
regime. People living under an
authoritarian government were thought to be far less free than people living in
a liberal democracy but far more free than people living in a totalitarian
police state. Programming the public to
think a certain way about everything, spying on everyone’s every move,
basically everything out of George Orwell’s 1984,
these are the hallmarks of totalitarianism.
The term first caught on as a convenient way of describing the characteristics
shared by both the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and the Fascist and
National Socialist regimes in Italy and Germany.
Totalitarian governments like to rely upon fear to keep
their populations under control.
Related to this, one of their favourite tactics to use against
dissenters is scapegoating. Scapegoating
is when they point to an identifiable group of dissenters – it works best if
the group is small and unpopular – and blames this group for whatever ills are
afflicting the population, with these ills often being in reality the fault of
the government, and tell the public that “they” are to blame, that these
“spoilers” are the reason the regime’s grand and glorious programs aren’t
working out as planned. By doing this
the totalitarian regime is able to identify its own enemies in the public mind
as “enemies of the people” and turn the public’s fear against them.
Let us now return to the Liberal Prime Minister we had been
discussing. Let us imagine that this
individual won the first term of his premiership
in a Dominion election in which he accused his Conservative predecessor of
employing the “politics of fear and division”. The implication was that it was fear of ethnic
and racial diversity and immigration that he was accusing the previous
government of in which case the accusation was entirely groundless as that
government was similar to his own on such matters. The public did have good reason to think of
the previous Conservative Prime Minister as engaging in the politics of fear in
that he had exploited the fear of terrorism to pass a bill making it easier for
law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Canadians. The Liberal leader, however, had been the only
other party leader in Parliament to support this bill. Perhaps his talk about the “politics of fear
and division” was just an empty smokescreen.
When it came to his own premiership, however, “the politics
of fear and division” could be said to be its feature characteristic. As one of the new “woke” breed of
progressives, he has stoked the fear of such things as racism – racism on the
part of whites, he doesn’t care about explicit and even violent racial hatred
directed against whites by other people – sexism, homophobia, and more recently
transphobia – in order to turn Canadians who have the “correct” opinions on
such matters, i.e., those approved by the media and academic left, against
Canadians who do not. When the media
generated an unnecessary panic over the spread of a new coronavirus he
exploited the situation to get out from under the constraints of Parliamentary
accountability which ordinarily would be enhanced by his having been reduced to
minority status in the last Dominion election only a few months prior. He made use of this new situation to spend
like a drunken sailor, paying Canadians to stay home for months, so the
provincial governments and their public health officers could follow the advice
of the Dominion public health officer, which was to implement the experimental
procedure of trying to control the spread of the virus by keeping everybody
apart. When this didn’t work, he
scapegoated those who objected to the unprecedented curtailing of all our basic
rights and freedoms. Then, when the
new mRNA injections were available, he, flip-flopping completely on his
original stated position that they would be available to those who wanted them
but nobody would be compelled to take them, jumped on board the idea of
returning to most Canadians most of their rights and freedoms, converted by the
whole process into permissions and privileges, while locking those who had
refused the injection – or the required number of injections – out of the new
re-opened society in a way that resembles nothing so much as the whole “show me
your papers” trope from depictions of Cold War era totalitarian regimes. His
scapegoating of those who refused the injection – those, remember, who are
distinguished from other Canadians only by the fact that they were not willing
to give the government their unthinking, blind, trust and allow themselves to
be injected with a never-before-used-on-humans substance that had not completed
its clinical trials merely because the government said it was safe and was
heavily pressuring them into taking it – was in
language that we would normally associate with how the Bolsheviks talked about
the kulaks, or the Nazis about the Jews.
Accusing them of all sorts of “isms” that had nothing to do with the
issue, he suggested that we should be asking ourselves as a society whether
we should be tolerating them in our midst.
Bizarre as may be to compare something said about the
ultra-individualist Ayn Rand to this collectivist creep, his comment
nevertheless brings to mind something Whittaker Chambers said in his famous
review of Atlas Shrugged
in the December, 1957 issue of National
Review: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from
painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber-go!’”
Now suppose this Prime Minister also conspicuously displays
another totalitarian characteristic – the urge to control what everyone else
thinks. Indeed, let us further
stipulate that this trait was evident in his leadership of his own party before
he even became Prime Minister.
Declaring by fiat that the debate about abortion was settled and over –
a rather strange way of describing a status quo that exists merely because
Parliament narrowly failed in the Mulroney premiership to follow the Supreme
Court’s recommendation that it pass new abortion laws to replace those it was
striking down and no subsequent government has had the gumption to do anything
about despite the fact that there is overwhelming public support for neither
the status quo nor the status quo ante – he
forbade pro-life members of his own party from voting their conscience on the
issue, and refused to sign the nomination papers of any future candidates that
did not agree with him on the matter.
It is less surprising, therefore, that a leader who places strict limits
on what members of his own party are allowed to think on a controversial issue
like this, as Prime Minister would treat the country in the same way.
When it comes to Canadians, this not-so-hypothetical Prime
Minister is single-mindedly obsessed with controlling both the information that
they are allowed to access and the ideas they are allowed to share with
others. When his then-Finance Minister, who shortly thereafter
would be forced to resign in disgrace to save the Prime Minister’s skin in a
scandal in which both of their families were involved, announced
a government bailout of privately owned newspapers, television stations, and
other pre-internet media of communication, he declared that this was “to
protect the vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in
our communities”. Predictably, however,
it had almost the opposite effect of this.
The newspapers, television stations, etc. that took this money – the
vast majority of them – began echoing the same point of view expressed on the
CBC overnight and thus could hardly be said to be “independent news media” at
all anymore. The Crown broadcaster
itself, which had long been shamefully slanted towards the progressive left and
the Liberal party, abandoned even the pretense of the impartiality that
Canadians ought to be able to expect from a public, tax-funded, news company
and began presenting a narrower range of perspectives on a broader number of
issues, one that was coterminous with the spectrum of views the Prime Minister
considered “acceptable”. Yes, this Prime
Minister has actually distinguished certain Canadians from others on the
grounds that their views were “unacceptable”. Unsatisfied, however, with over 90% of the
Canadian media, public and nominally private, echoing his own point of view, the
Prime Minister has taken a hostile, combative attitude towards the few media
outlets that present an alternative perspective, thus displaying his true
attitude towards “independent news media”.
The independent news media that resist conforming to the
Prime Minister’s party line are primarily those that operate on the
internet. Before the last Parliament was dissolved
the government had introduced a bill that would give the CRTC the same kind of
regulatory control over the internet that it already has over radio and
television. Although they pitched
this as a means of making streaming services and social media abide by the same
Canadian content rules as traditional broadcasting media, it was clearly worded
in such a way as to give the CRTC the power to censor online opinions which the
government has deemed to be “unacceptable”.
The main target of this, and the government’s more overt attempts at
licensing independent media, seems obviously to be the handful of online news
companies that have a perspective independent of and often hostile to the Prime
Minister’s own. The
government also failed to assuage the concerns of those who feared that the
government was trying to tell individual Canadians what they could and could
not say when using social media.
Although they insisted that they were not trying to regulate user
generated content, they kept removing safeguards against this very thing. They had also tabled a bill that would
re-introduce something similar to Section 13.
Section 13 was the provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that
allowed those who belonged to groups protected against discrimination –
although the Act is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects
everybody against discrimination on the basis of their race, sex, etc., it has
been generally interpreted by the courts as protecting certain groups that are
“vulnerable” rather than others, i.e., blacks but not whites, women but not
men, etc. – to charge others with discrimination on the basis of words they had
communicated over the telephone or over the internet. It was so loosely worded that virtually
anything negative said about someone from a protected group would fall under
the umbrella and so a conviction was pretty much guaranteed. Parliament
repealed it after the public became aware of how bad it was. The proposed replacement would be even worse
in that it would allow for a court order to be taken out against someone before
he had even said anything. Both of
these bills were re-introduced after the government won re-election. The new versions are worse than the ones
that failed to become law in the last session of Parliament.
As if all that were not thought control enough, among many
other non-budget related items included in this year’s federal budget – the turning
of budget bills into omnibus bills ought to have been banned decades ago, it is
far too easy a way for government to smuggle things into law that would not
withstand Parliamentary scrutiny and debate if introduced separately on their
own merits – was a provision that would criminalize publicly expressing an
opinion that disagrees with that of the Prime Minister about historical events
of eighty years ago. To be more precise
it will criminalize the denial, condoning, and
diminishing of the Holocaust. Germany,
France, and a number of other European countries had introduced similar laws
decades ago but this was a very bad example to follow. (1) It
is not government’s place to tell people what they can and cannot think or say
about historical events. When they
attempt to do so they merely set up their understanding and interpretation of
the historical event as a dogma in a new state religion. The very expression “Holocaust denial” illustrates
the point. (2) When someone denies that a historical event
took place this may, depending upon the evidence for the event, call into
question his intelligence, but “Charge of the Light Brigade Denial” is an
expression that would not carry the moral undertones that “Holocaust denial”
does. This tells us that to those who are
obsessed with condemning the latter it involves the denial of an essential
tenet of faith. Yet it is an
essential tenet of neither any orthodox form of Christianity nor Islam. Nor is it an essential tenet of Judaism in
any traditional understanding of that religion. This was a point that the late academic
rabbi Dr. Jacob Neusner frequently made when bemoaning the fact that for many
American Jews remembering the Holocaust had replaced remembering Moses, the
Exodus and the Sinaitic Covenant at the core of their identity. (3) If
it is not an essential tenet of any of these religions, it is not an essential
tenet of any traditional religion.
Surely members of all traditional religions, the tenets of faith of none
of which are similarly protected against denial by law, ought to object to such
protection being extended to a new state faith and by the party, none the less,
which in Canada has been most historically identified with the American
doctrine of “separation of church and state”.
(4) I hope that you note the irony – those who think that the
appropriate way of responding to “Holocaust denial” is to pass laws of this
sort which essentially boils down to telling people with a view they find
loathsome “shut up, shut up, or I’ll make you shut up” by doing so make
themselves far more closely resemble the Nazi dictator, at least as he is
depicted in Hollywood films, than do those they are attempting to silence. (5)
This Prime Minister has a habit of condemning opinions that
differ from his as “denial”, thus making his own opinion out to be an essential
tenet of faith. With regards to both
the climate and the pandemic, for example, he speaks of those he disagrees with
as “science deniers”. Ironically, of
course, since it is the very nature of science not to speak dogmatically – to
be scientific at all, a theory must be open to being questioned and tested –
“science denier” is an epithet that is only meaningful as it rebounds upon the
one who uses it. More to the point,
however, when the same Prime Minister justifies his attempts to squash the few
remaining independent Canadian media sources that do not dance to his tune and
bring the online platforms where Canadians express their thoughts and speak
their minds under government regulatory control on the grounds that the spread
of “misinformation” and “disinformation” – information, that is, with which he
disagrees and of which he disapproves – online causes “harm”, can there be any
doubt that having outright banned one form of “denial”, he is moving in the
direction of similarly suppressing all of these “denials” he hates. He does all of this in the name of liberal
democracy, although it looks more and more like totalitarianism every day.
As an old-fashioned Tory, of course, who believes in
time-proven institutions like the monarchy and Parliament and distrusts
abstract ideals like liberalism and democracy, this does not seem as
contradictory to me as it would to a neo-conservative, since I see the seeds of
totalitarianism in both liberalism and democracy. In the Prime Minister in question and his
sycophantic Cabinet these seeds are rapidly coming to a full bloom.
So again, I ask, what word best describes such a Prime
Minister and such a Cabinet in which such an appalling combination of
self-righteousness, arrogance, hypocrisy, disrespect for the constraints of Parliamentary
tradition and constitutional law, and totalitarian impulse can be found?
A new one might be needed to really do the matter justice.
(1) It might surprise some to learn that such a law
was not already on the books in Canada.
The trials of Ernst Zündel
and James Keegstra in the 1980s are among the most famous legal cases involving
“Holocaust denial” in history and both took place here in Canada. In both cases, however, the complaints were
based on laws that did not speak about “Holocaust denial” specifically. In Zündel’s case,
for example, the law was Section 181 of the Criminal Code which prohibited the
deliberate spread of false news. He was
charged twice under this law, and convicted twice. The first conviction was thrown out on a
technicality, but after the second conviction the Supreme Court struck the law
down on appeal as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
(2) Both words in the expression contribute to this. Holocaust is ultimately derived from ὁλόκαυστος, the Greek word for “burnt offering”.
(3) Dr. Neusner argued that the Holocaust was
filling a vacuum created by the abandonment of Jewish traditions, beliefs, and
practices on the part of many American Jews.
Indeed, he was talking about this decades before the fact became obvious
in polls like the 2013 Pew Research Poll in which “remembering the Holocaust”
was identified as the main essential to being Jewish by most of the Jewish
American respondents. He spoke of the
theology developing around the historical event as the “Holocaust myth”, which,
had he not passed away six years ago, could have rendered him susceptible to
prosecution as a Holocaust denier on visits to Canada under the proposed law,
although he was using “myth” in an academic sense that has nothing to do with
the truth or falseness of the story in question.
(4) I do not believe in the doctrine of “separation
of church and state” in either its Anabaptist or its American form. On one of the last occasions I spoke with my
late friend the Reverend Canon Kenneth Gunn-Walberg, he spoke critically of “conservative”
support for “religious liberty”, noting that support for clerical reserves for
the orthodox, established, Church was the more authentic Tory position. I agreed, of course, although I might have
pointed out that one of
the earliest tracts advocating broad religious liberty, not in the form of
Church-State separation but that of tolerance of a wide spectrum of opinion (within
the limits of the Apostles’ Creed) within the Church and peaceful co-existence
with heterodox sects, was penned by none other than the great Carolinian Divine,
the Right Reverend Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who based his arguments upon the demands
of the highest of the Christian theological virtues. That having been said, the American doctrine
that has historically been associated mostly with the Liberal Party in Canada
(the NDP’s predecessor was a “Social Gospel” party, founded and led by a former
Methodist minister J. S. Woodsworth, and while the NDP has moved about as far
away from Christianity as possible, its first and most famous leader was a
Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas, with other prominent NDP MPs including United
Church ministers such as Stanley Knowles and Bill Blaikie), which Liberals in
the past have frequently mistaken as part of Canada’s tradition, while
theoretically unsound, is much to be preferred to the establishment of left-wing
dogma as a new state creed to which no public dissent is tolerated. This is but one of several examples of older
liberal – classical liberal – ideas which, while objectionable from the
standpoint of a sounder perspective, are nevertheless preferable to what the newer
kind of “liberal” is offering.
(5) The government is pointing to claims that anti-Semitism
is on the rise as its justification for doing this. Almost 70 Christian church buildings were
burned or otherwise vandalized last summer, but I see no action being taken to
curb the Christophobia behind this largest single spree of hate crimes in
Canada’s history, nor would I expect it from a government that seemed to be
doing everything it could to throw fuel on the fire of that hatred. Nevertheless, suppose we cede for the sake
of argument the claim that anti-Semitism is the largest growing hate problem in
Canada. Even if we also ceded that outlawing the expression of opinions was
capable of justification, a concession I am by no means willing to make, this
would be an extremely poor justification for this kind of law. Similar laws have not prevented a resurgence of
anti-Semitism in the European countries that passed them. I suspect that you will find that the
countries which passed such absurd laws are also the countries which have
experienced the largest growth in anti-Semitism in the years since the laws
were passed. This is because the sort
of progressive mindset that thinks banning “Holocaust denial” is a good thing
to do rather than an insane, draconian, attack on freedom of speech that
involves persecuting a tiny minority for holding an unpopular opinion, is also
the same mindset that thinks bringing in immigrants from all over the world
without any sort of screening for cultural compatibility – that would be “racist”
to these dolts – is sound policy, and consequently, with floods of immigrants
coming in from countries with either a deep-seated cultural animus against the
Jews or perhaps just a more recent animosity based upon Middle Eastern
conflicts of recent decades, finds its cases of anti-Semitic incidents
exploding. Rather than placing the
blame squarely where it belongs, on the latter idiotic policy, they pass the
former draconian law in order to scapegoat a tiny minority for the consequences
of their own stupidity. The government
expects to get away with this because most people will think something to the
effect of “This law will only affect neo-Nazis and who cares, they have it
coming.” That is stupidity at its
worst. Laws that the public accepts on
the grounds that they only affect such-and-such a despised group never end up
only affecting the group in question.
In this instance, I have already demonstrated (vide supra, footnote 3) how the most respected academic rabbi of
the Twentieth Century could have run afoul of this law. He was hardly a neo-Nazi. Nor is Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the American academic
and pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of “Holocaust denial”
although his book The Holocaust Industry
makes no revisionist claims about the historical event but rather talks about
people whom he sees as exploiting the event (both of his parents had been
interred in the Nazi camps, incidentally, his mother in Majdanek, his father in
Auschwitz). It is unlikely that Noam
Chomsky’s famous protégé would be prosecuted under the new law should he visit
Canada but not out of the realm of possibility. Almost
a decade ago, at a Canadian conservative blog I witnessed a well-known
progressive activist and blogger pedantically lecture the others present on the
difference between “concentration camps” and “death camps” and how the latter
were only on Polish soil. That is a
distinction that is made in every serious and mainstream history class and
textbook that deals with the subject but he was accused of “Holocaust denial”
for this. The people making the
accusation were not generally ill-informed people and perhaps made the
accusation tongue-in-cheek because this man was a noted supporter of banning “hate
speech”, but the point is that if something that is part of the mainstream
narrative can be confused with “Holocaust denial”, a law against the latter,
even if were justifiable to make such a law against those it is intended to be
used against which it is not, makes
possible the prosecution of a lot of people who have not committed “Holocaust
denial” in the conventional meaning of the phrase. Ironically,
had the United States passed such a law in the 1950s or even 1960s, and had it
not been struck down immediately for violating their First Amendment, even if
only actual “Holocaust deniers” in the conventional sense of the word were
rounded up, if all of them were arrested there would have been more Jews than
white supremacists arrested. At that time,
“Holocaust denial”, and World War II revisionism in general of which it is a
subset, was most widespread among libertarians for the simple reason that these
arch anti-statists recognized that the military expansion the United States
underwent in World War II, and which continued after the war because of the
Cold War, was a massive expansion of the American central state and therefore a
threat to the liberty of American citizens.
Therefore the claims of the American government during that conflict
were suspect to them. There were far
more libertarians than Nazi sympathizers, then as now, and a large percentage
of libertarians were and are Jewish.
