Captain Airhead and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

Last week, Captain Airhead, or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as those who are less acquainted with his true character call him, gave Canadian neoconservatives among others something new over which to be furious. The government he leads voted for a UN General Assembly resolution the description of which varies depending upon how the commentator views it. Those who agree with the resolution would call it a resolution in favour of Palestinian self-determination or a Palestinian state. Those who disagree would call it a resolution that condemns or bashes Israel.

This resolution, whether interpreted as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel, with or without Canada’s support, in no way affects either the security and stability of the state of Israel on the one hand or the future of the Palestinians on the other. In this it is no different than the numerous other resolutions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that are perennially raised in the UN General Assembly, all of which receive the support of a large majority of the member nations, all of which are voted against by the United States. It is because of the last mentioned fact that none of these resolutions has ever had any real effect on the conflict.

In this can be seen one of the few aspects of the United Nations that I would consider to be worthy of – moderate – praise. Don’t get me wrong. I despise the United Nations with all my heart and see it as being generally a force for evil rather than a force for good. I wish that Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, including the mother country, would withdraw from it. However, I must begrudgingly say that it was a stroke of genius on the part of those who set up the United Nations, that resolutions by the General Assembly go absolutely nowhere when opposed by the Security Council – or even just one of its veto-holding, permanent members, such as the United States. Therefore the General Assembly, in which all the military dictatorships, Third world kleptocracies, and other failed states on the planet form a majority, serves as a sounding board, allowing the representatives of these worthless governments to vent their inanities in toothless resolution after toothless resolution, while all meaningful international business is conducted by the grown ups in the Security Council.

Although it would be undoubtedly wiser to say nothing about this at all I feel compelled to comment on the fact that no other controversial geopolitical issue has the ability to generate as much irrational thinking, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy on both sides as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Both sides see the conflict as a zero-sum game, both sides think the media is hopelessly biased against them and in favour of the other side, both sides rely upon a highly selective and revisionist history of the conflict to support their claims. In the Western countries to which both sides appeal for support on the international stage, Israeli supporters and Palestinian supporters alike find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two sides in the Middle Eastern struggle for territory and power and the host of domestic issues that, however irrelevant, have become intertwined with these causes through the bonds of race and religion.

When two opposing sides have a “winner take all” approach to their conflict, their claims are mutually exclusive and it is not rational to say that both sides are right. It is perfectly reasonable, by contrast, to argue that both sides are wrong. Liberals prefer to take the “both sides are right” position, despite its irrationality, which is why they are usually wrong about everything, but in this case they have never been inclined to be on both sides at the same time. Seventy-one years ago, when Israel declared her independence, they were mostly on Israel’s side. Today, they are mostly on the side of the Palestinians.

Their arguments in favour of the Palestinians are the same arguments, derived from their abstract doctrine of human rights, that they used fifty to sixty years ago to support every nationalist movement in the Third world against European imperialism, and thirty to fifty years ago to support the Communist-backed terrorist movements against the Rhodesians and the South Africans. To this day they insist that they were right to support these causes, even though in each case the triumph of the cause they supported brought about the collapse of civilization in the country in question. Liberals maintain that the immense problems these countries have faced ever since are the legacy of “imperialism” and “colonialism” even though it is glaringly obvious that it was the removal of these things that caused the collapse of civilization. There is no good reason to believe that these arguments, which have produced such horrendous results in the past, will work out any better in application to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Conservative views have also changed. At the time of Israel’s independence, conservatives were either very skeptical of the project or mildly supportive of the new nation. They were rarely enthusiastic Zionists. Today, a much stronger Zionism has become the norm among conservatives. It would be one thing if this were because of all the things mentioned in the preceding paragraph, if they were taking the position “look, it is thanks to your moronic bleeding heart foolishness in the past that Rhodesia, South Africa, and every other country in the Third World has gone to pot, we are not going to let you destroy yet another civilized country in your idolatrous worship of human rights.” They are not. Their reasons for supporting the Israelis are almost as stupid as the reasons the liberals support the Palestinians.

There are basically two segments of the right today which are militantly Zionist – the neoconservatives and the Christian Zionists. The neoconservatives maintain that we ought to support Israel because she is a “liberal democracy”, the only one in the Middle East, and because she is a loyal ally. With regards to the first point, while it is not entirely false, there are many things about Israel that the neoconservatives would find intolerable in any other “liberal democracy.” The last point, however, is laughable in the extreme. No one has supported her as faithfully as the Americans have since the Lyndon Johnson administration, and no other country has she stabbed in the back and betrayed the way she has the United States. Her attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, her sale of American secrets to the Soviets in the 1980s and to the Red Chinese in the 1990s and much more recently are but three examples. Many more could be given.

The neoconservative arguments are, however lame, better than those of the Christian Zionists which rely upon abysmally bad theology. By Christian Zionist, I mean something more specific than just someone who is both a Christian and a supporter of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I mean someone who holds to a theology that says that God requires him as a Christian to be a supporter of Israel. The foundation of this theology is the idea that God irrevocably gave the land of Canaan to the nation that grew out of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Old Testament and that therefore it belongs to the Jews by divine right today. The following will demonstrate what is wrong with this kind of argument. While the term Jew originally designated a member of the tribe of Judah, and later, by the end of the intertestamental period, all of national Israel, by the end of the first century AD it had come to refer to an adherent of the religion Judaism and it has held this meaning ever since. Although the adherents of Judaism are for a large part drawn from the ethnic stock of ancient Israel, Judaism has always admitted converts even though it has never made seeking them the high priority that Christianity and Islam have. Post-Second Temple Rabbinic Judaism explicitly rejects Jesus of Nazareth’s claim to be the Christ or Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Somebody who converts to this religion is a Jew even if he has no Hebrew blood. For Christian Zionism to be true, it would have to be true that everyone without a drop of Abraham’s blood in him who converts to this religion that explicitly rejects Jesus’ claim to be the Christ, the Son of God, thereby gains a God-given right to an inheritance in the land of Canaan/Palestine/Israel. Do I really need to explain further why from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy this is rank and utter heresy?

Of course, the theology of those who argue that Christians need to support the Palestinian cause because “social justice, blah, blah, blah” is no better.

While I see no good reason for civilized Western countries to be drawn in to this Middle Eastern tribal blood vendetta and plenty of good reasons for us not to touch it with a ten-foot pole, if we absolutely must stick our noses in where they don’t belong it seems to me that the most rational position is to support – in a very moderate way - Israel. I would base this on everything that I said five paragraphs previously although the fact that Captain Airhead is now supporting the Palestinians is also a pretty good argument for the Israeli side.

Israel’s supporters, however, need not be worried that Canada’s reversal on this UN resolution is going to harm that country in any way. Captain Airhead knows as well as I do that UN General Assembly resolutions are toothless when opposed by a permanent member of the Security Council and the United States is not likely to change its position any time soon. Like everything else Captain Airhead does, this is all for show. In this case, Airhead wishes to dazzle all the Third world countries who hate Israel into supporting his bid for a temporary seat on the Security Council. With any luck, not only will he fail to obtain this goal which would serve only his own vanity and not any real need of Canada’s, but he will also alienate the large segment of the Canadian Jewish community which have historically been faithful supporters of the Liberal Party and do irreparable damage to that party’s interests.

Liberalism and the Inevitability of War

For as long as human societies have existed upon this planet they have fought wars against one another.

This is a statement that I believe most people would agree with. The same consensus, however, does not exist with regards to the following statement:

Wars will continue to be fought for as long as human societies continue to exist upon this planet.

This second statement is as true as the first. While specific wars have specific causes, the cause of war in general is to be found in human nature. The only way to eliminate war, therefore, is to eliminate human beings. As long as men live upon this planet they will from time to time go to war against one another.

Consider what the history of the 20th Century has to teach us. Conflicts in the Balkan region in the first decade of that century, broke out into a world-wide conflict between the great powers in the second decade. This conflict was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by those who continued to hold to the progressive optimism of the 19th Century. A little over two decades after it ended, however, it broke out again, this time to be conducted on an even larger, costlier, and more destructive scale. This time, it was brought to end by a technological innovation, the development of which would have, if anything ever could, permanently checked man’s propensity for war. That innovation was the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear weaponry raised the potential cost of war to what should have been a prohibitive level by making the extinction of the species a real possibility as an outcome of war. This did not, however, prevent the outbreak of future wars. Major, multi-national conflicts were fought in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s and if the large nuclear arsenals of the United States of America and the Soviet Union prevented the superpowers from directly confronting each other in war, it did not prevent them from using smaller allies, all over the globe, like pawns on a giant chessboard. The second half of the century saw conflict after conflict in the Middle East between the Arab nations and Israel and there is no end to those hostilities in sight. In the final decade of the 20th Century, the nations of the Balkans resumed the fighting that had led to the first World War earlier in the century.

That war will be around for as long as human beings inhabit the earth is not universally recognized, however, and liberals in particular are inclined to reject this truth. In fact, liberalism’s primary error concerning war, is the idea that it can be eliminated and a permanently peaceful world order established. This is not the same thing as pacifism. Far too many conservatives make the mistake of associating liberalism with pacifism. Pacifism is the refusal to participate in war on the grounds of a belief that war is always morally wrong. Pacifists are susceptible to the charges of cowardice and free-riding (1) and for this reason accusing one’s opponents of pacifism makes for effective rhetoric. Liberals, however, are not pacifists. Indeed, history would seem to demonstrate that they are more likely than conservatives to involve their country in a war.

Consider the major wars the United States of America was involved in during the 20th Century. It was liberal Democrat Presidents who led the United States into the four largest of these wars. It was a liberal Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who led the United States into World War I declaring that they needed to “make the world safe for democracy”. It was another liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought the United States into the second World War. (2) Liberal Democrat Harry Truman was the president who got the United States into the Korean War and Liberal Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson got the United States into the Vietnam War. In contrast, conservative Republican President ordered the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, countless covert-ops and the support of anti-communist contras in Latin America, but he did not get his country involved in anything on the scale of World Wars I and II, Korea or Vietnam and, in fact, negotiated an end to the arms race and the 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Similarly, here in Canada, after the Statute of Westminster declared that our own Parliament would decide from then on whether or not we were at war, it was Liberal Prime Ministers who led our country into World War II (William Lyon Mackenzie King), Korea (Louis St. Laurent), and Afghanistan (Jean Chretien).

Clearly liberals are not pacifists. Liberals and conservatives have different ideas about war but those differences are not the same differences which distinguish doves from hawks. Liberalism’s error is to believe that mankind can build a world that is free of war.

This idea lies behind several significant liberal projects of the last couple of centuries. Liberals began calling for free trade – the elimination of tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist measures so as to merge the economies of all countries into one big market – as far back as the eighteenth century, arguing that the economic interdependence that free trade would bring, would merge the nations of the world into one, bringing about universal brotherhood and peace. Richard Cobden, the 19th Century British “Apostle of Free Trade”, proclaimed that free trade:

[A]rms its votaries by its own pacific nature, in that eternal truth—the more any nation trafficks abroad upon free and honest principles, the less it will be in danger of wars.(3)

In a speech given on January 15, 1846 he declared:

I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.(4)

Similar utopian sentiments can be found in the speeches and writings of many other 18th and 19th century free traders.

When Woodrow Wilson asked the American Congress to declare the United States’ entry into World War I, he told Congress that “The world must be made safe for democracy”. This goal was connected in his mind with that of world peace. He immediately went on to say “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty”. (5)

Wilson’s idea of world peace is very similar to that of free traders such as Richard Cobden. The difference is that Wilson saw elected government as being the means to world peace rather than international commerce.

The idea that democratic governments are more likely to be peaceful government is not borne out by history. The roots of democracy go back to ancient Athens and Athenian democracy is widely regarded as having reached its peak during the years of Pericles, which are often spoken of as Athens’ Golden Age. This was not, however, an era in which Athens lived in peace and harmony with its neighbors, but the era of the Peloponnesian War fought by Athens and her allies against Sparta and her allies. This war, the history of which we know from an account written by Athenian general Thucydides, was not a conflict in which a democratic state, desiring peace, was forced to defend herself against the aggression of her non-democratic neighbors. Athens was as belligerent and ambitious as Sparta. From that day to this, democracies have been no less likely to go to war than any other kind of country. Nor is it true that democracies do not go to war with each other. Historians often refer to the War of Southern Independence (6) as the “first modern war.” Both sides in that conflict, however, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, were democratic republics. Furthermore, this was a particularly bloody war in which more Americans died than in any other war they have ever participated, including both World Wars and Vietnam combined.

At the end of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Emperor Karl von Hapsburg I of Austria were both forced off of their thrones and Germany and Austria became democratic republics. By Wilson’s logic, this should have made these countries less likely to want to resume the conflict at a later date. In fact it had the exact opposite effect. In the 1930’s Germany and Austria came under the control of Adolf Hitler who launched a second war that was far worse from the first. Now the point might be made that under Hitler, Germany and Austria ceased to be democratic. However true that might be it is very much the case that had the German Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor kept their thrones, Hitler would never have had the opportunity to rise to power. Hitler was a demagogue and democracy is the ladder a demagogue climbs to achieve power.

The spread of democracy was not the only part of Wilson’s plan for world peace. The last of his famous Fourteen Points was that:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike. (7)

This association took the form of the League of Nations. Although it was proposed by the American President, the United States never joined it. The countries that did join need not have bothered because it failed completely in its appointed task.

The failure of the League of Nations did not prevent a second liberal American President from repeating the experiment at the end of the second World War. FDR’s United Nations was conceived of as a forum in which the nations of the world could voice their grievances with each other and resolve those grievances without resorting to war. If the League of Nations was useless, the United Nations was worse than useless. The General Assembly simply became a platform upon which the representatives of every Soviet vassal state, Third World dictatorship, and Islamic theocracy in the world, were invited to stand and espouse their poisonous drivel to the world. The Security Council is powerless to oppose wrongdoing on the part of any of its permanent members, each of which has a veto. Since the Soviet Union was one of those permanent members the Security Council was powerless against Communist aggression in the Cold War, just as it is powerless to stop the sole remaining superpower, the United States of America, from doing whatever she wants. The only thing the United Nations has proven effective at doing has been wasting the money it receives from its member states as it tries, thankfully less effectively, to tell them how to manage their own affairs, usually in the name of some inane left-wing agenda. It has not made the world a more peaceful place.

These examples, I believe, are sufficient to establish the truth of my contention that there is a strong tendency in liberalism to believe that it is possible to construct a peaceful world order in which war is eliminated and that this belief lies behind several of liberalism’s most important projects. They also demonstrate that whatever the scheme the liberal comes up with his goal of world peace continues to elude him. (8) Today the economies of the world have been integrated into a global market, democracy is widespread, and the United Nations has been established for almost seven decades, yet perpetual universal peace is nowhere in sight.


(1) A free rider is someone who benefits from participation in a group without paying his fair share of the dues. A pacifist is susceptible to the charge of free-riding because he enjoys the benefits of living in his country, including the security provided by his country’s military, although he is not willing to serve his country militarily if called upon to do so.

(2) Granted, the Japanese empire attacked the United States first. However, FDR was in favour of the United States entering the second World War long before Pearl Harbor. He and his advisors in the year leading up to Pearl Harbor talked about war with Japan as a “backdoor” into the war with Germany. At the time, public opinion in the United States was strongly against American involvement in the war with Germany. See Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Robert Stinnett Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

(3) Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, (London: William Ridgway, 1878) p. 126.

(4) http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Cobden/cbdSPP20.html

(5) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/

(6) This is usually called the “American Civil War”. Ordinarily, the phrase “civil war” refers to an internal struggle for control of a state. In the English Civil War, the Roundheads fought to turn England into a Puritan republic against the Cavaliers who fought to keep it an Anglican monarchy. In the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans and the Nationalists fought each other for the control of Spain. In American history, however, the North and South did not struggle for control of the United States, but over whether the secession of the Southern states and their independence from Washington D. C. would be allowed.

(7) http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62

(8) If permanent world peace is an unattainable goal and it is inevitable that men will from time to time go to war with each other it does not follow from this that any particular conflict is inevitable and that attempts to prevent particular wars are always foolish and doomed to fail.

GTN Tory Classics No. 1: The Human Rights Scam

For the next two or three weeks I will be posting essays that I wrote in 2009 before starting Throne, Altar, Liberty. I distributed these essays to my friends through Facebook and e-mail. The dates on the essays are the dates these essays were originally posted to Facebook and/or e-mailed. I am posting them at this time because I am going to need at least two weeks to complete the essay I am working on.

The first essay in this series will be "The Human Rights Scam". I thought this essay would be particularly fitting at this time because of the hoopla in the news about the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms this past Tuesday. The progressive media is always telling us about the debt of gratitude we owe to Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party for this Charter which, according to progressive commentators, finally secured for us the rights and liberties Americans had enjoyed for two centuries under their Bill of Rights. This is all a lie. Our most basic rights and freedoms are derived from Common Law and were our possession, as subjects of the Crown, before the Charter. It is because the Americans had cut themselves off from the Crown and the prescriptive tradition that was the source of those rights, that they felt they needed to secure them for themselves with the Bill of Rights. Our Charter does not make those rights and freedoms any more secure than they were before 1982. In fact, it does the exact opposite. The limitations clause in section one and the notwithstanding clause in section thirty-three give Parliament and the provincial legislatures the authority to disregard our most basic prescriptive rights and freedoms. The so-called "human rights" legislation, at the federal and provincial levels, does in fact violate our basic freedoms. That is what this essay is about.

Note: Some of the themes in this essay I reworked into my May, 2010 essay "Human Rights Fraud", one of the first essays I posted here.


The Human Rights Scam


By Gerry T. Neal
May 12, 2009

You hear a lot about “human rights” these days. Countless organizations exist to promote “human rights” around the world or to complain about how this or that country abuses or neglects “human rights”. Every time a socialist wants to take your property and give it to someone else he will recite the mantra “human rights come before property rights”. But what are “human rights”?

To answer that question we must first answer the question: What are rights? Rights are closely related to liberties but they are not identical concepts. Our liberties are everything we are free to do, but our rights are everything we are entitled to. Rights can be categorized according to what it is we are entitled to, who is entitled to it, and where that entitlement comes from. The latter concern, the source of rights, has been a matter of discussion for centuries, and is directly related to the question of human rights.

Theories of rights basically find the source of entitlement in three places: government, tradition, and nature. Not surprisingly those favoring big government prefer to see the state as the source of our rights. When we are entitled to things because the government has written it into the law saying that we are entitled to them these are called our legal or civil rights. These are essential for protecting our rights but there is one basic flaw to legal rights – what government gives today, government can take away tomorrow.

For this reason we need our prescriptive rights. Prescriptive rights are rights which are ours by reason of our membership in a society in which those rights have been possessed from time immemorial. They are inherited rights, rights which our fathers fought for and died, and secured for us over the centuries. They come to us, in the customs, traditions, and ways of our people. Since this is the same way in which our government comes by its legitimate authority, government cannot take away our prescriptive rights, without attacking its own foundations.

Naturally, prescriptive rights will vary from society to society, depending on the traditions and customs of the society in particular. In Canada, a country under the sovereignty of the British crown and the Common Law, we (like the British and the Americans) are heirs to a particular set of prescriptive rights that were known in days of yore as “The Rights of Englishmen”. No greater set of rights has ever been or ever could be devised by the minds of men for the protection of our personal security and liberty than these rights that evolved with the Common Law over centuries of British history.

In the 18th Century, Sir William Blackstone, a jurist and professor of law, wrote a famous and influential treatise entitled Commentaries on the Laws of England that explained the English Common Law to the average reader. This work was divided into four volumes, the first two dealing with rights (personal and property rights), the last two dealing with wrongs (torts and crimes). The rights Blackstone discusses, are the Rights of Englishmen. These he divides into relative rights, such as those attached which come to particular persons by means of status (king, husband, parent, etc.), and absolute rights which are vested in individuals and are those “which every man is entitled to enjoy whether out of society or in it”. The latter, are the subject of the very first chapter of the first volume, and Blackstone, after a brief history of the Rights says they can be boiled down into 3 – the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right to private property. These are the same three rights which John Locke had argued were “natural rights” (which we will discuss shortly) and there is a great deal of overlap between the Blackstone’s concept of individual rights and Locke’s, but Blackstone is very careful to ground, even these rights, in the prescriptive tradition of English Common Law. He goes on to argue for 5 auxiliary rights “which serve principally as barriers to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights”. These are:

1. The constitution, powers, and privileges of parliament.
2. The limitation of the king’s prerogative.
3. Applying to the courts of justice for redress of injuries.
4. Petitioning the king or either house of parliament for redress of grievances should the courts fail.
5. Having arms for their defense.

Note carefully the last one. Although Blackstone’s right to bear arms is hardly as unqualified as the American 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms is an English tradition, not an American invention.

Other Rights of Englishmen that are our birthright from the historical tradition from the Charter of Liberties and the Magna Carta to the (English) Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement include the right of habeas corpus, the right to a trial by jury, the right to confront ones accusers, protections against retroactive law and self-incrimination, and the presumption of innocence (Blackstone, famously wrote in chapter 27 of the 4th volume of his Commentaries “the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer”).

These, our inherited rights are threatened, by a document ironically entitled “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms”. This document was tacked on to the Canadian Constitution in 1982 by Pierre Eliot Trudeau when he repatriated the British North America Act. Section 33 (1) of the Charter allows Parliament or legislatures to pass Acts which will operate “notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter”. What are those provisions? Section 2 identifies the “fundamental freedoms” of 1) conscience/religion, 2) thought/belief/opinion/expression, 3) peaceful assembly, and 4) association. Section 7 is the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Sections 8-15 include our right to security against unreasonable search and seizure, our right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned , our basic legal rights upon arrest and upon being charged with a crime, our right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatment, and our right against self-incrimination. All of these rights, we had under Common Law, as subjects of Her Majesty, by reason of tradition, prescription, and inheritance prior to Trudeau’s Charter. By allowing government to pass Acts which contradict these rights, Trudeau’s Charter is essentially designed not to guarantee them, but to take them away from us.

Mr. Trudeau was a big believer in “human rights” though. In 1977 he had Parliament pass a document entitled the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate. To discriminate means to “make a distinction” in the sense of preferring one over another. The CHRA makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of any of a number of identified reasons – race, sex, religion, etc. This discrimination is illegal under the CHRA in such things as hiring, promoting, and firing employees, serving customers, renting or selling property, and that sort of things. But to make discrimination illegal, means that you are limiting the rights and freedoms of individual persons in Canada. Specifically you are limiting the right of employers to hire, promote and fire whoever they want, the right of businessmen to do business with whoever they want, the right of property owners to rent or sell to whoever they want. In limiting any of these rights you are limiting the basic freedom of association. The Act further, in its Section 13, limits an even more basic freedom – that of thought and speech.

To make matters even worse, the government bodies established by the Act to investigate, prosecute and try cases of discrimination, are not subject to many of the ordinary limitations on police, prosecutors and judges. The burden of evidence in discrimination cases is essentially shifted onto the accused and the trials themselves are a means of punishment.

What kind of “rights” can these “human rights” possibly be that in their name, the most basic rights and freedoms of the English tradition are to be sacrificed?

The idea of “human rights” evolved historically out of John Locke’s doctrine of natural rights. Locke (1632-1704) was the founder of the Empiricist branch of the Enlightenment Project that rivaled the earlier Rationalist branch founded by Rene Descartes. In his Two Treatises of Government Locke identified three basic rights which he said belonged to every individual. These were life, liberty, and property, the same three that Blackstone would later write about. But whereas Blackstone, a Tory, would ground these rights in the context of an established tradition, Locke argued for them on the basis of abstract theory. In a primordial state of nature prior to society, Locke argued, men were free and possessed certain rights under natural law. The basic right was that of property. Men had a right to what was theirs. Since every man owned at least himself, he had the right to his life and to do with it what he wanted (liberty). But these rights in the state of nature were difficult to defend and so men formed a contract to establish society, whereby government and law would enforce and defend their rights.

Locke’s theory had many things to commend it, foremost among them his recognition of the primacy of property rights, indeed his identification of rights with property. The Communist Trudeau did not even consider property rights worthy of being mentioned at all in his Charter. The problem, however, is that divorcing rights from the context of a particular tradition and attaching them to all people universally by means of nature, blurs the distinction between what I am entitled to and what I desire (they are not the same thing). This causes the list of natural “rights” to ever expand and inspires anti-social and often destructive behavior. In 1789, for example, the French National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This document adopted Locke’s theory but identified considerably more rights than he did. This was understandable considering that its purpose was to stir up the French Revolution. British statesman Edmund Burke, seeing the madness that ensued from this document, wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he affirmed prescription as the basis of all legitimate rights.

Today, the principal document of the “human rights” doctrine is the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the General Assembly in 1948. This document is 30 articles long, and while much of it simply rewords the traditional English rights into universal rights it does not properly distinguish between a person’s wants and needs on the one hand and his rights on the other. Having your wants and needs met is a condition right, not a basic right. The only basic rights, the only rights which could conceivably exist in a state of nature apart from society and law are negative rights. Negative rights are entitlements to things you already have. They place no burden on anybody else – other than that they leave you alone to enjoy your rights. Positive rights – which entitle you to something you don’t have, and which place a burden on others to provide those things – may belong to someone by right of membership in a society which grants those rights to its members. They cannot be universal rights belonging to all humans.

Clearly the doctrine of “human rights” is a socialist doctrine. It is also an egalitarian doctrine – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights preaches equality and non-discrimination long before it gets around to enumerating the basic rights of life and liberty. But it is also a foundational doctrine for World Government.

The doctrine of “human rights” is a version of Locke’s doctrine of the universal, natural, rights of the individual, emphasizing the universal, where Locke emphasized the individual. Even if we properly limit our concept of natural rights to negative rights to one’s own life, liberty, and property, these rights don’t mean a whole lot unless they are recognized and respected by others. That is where the importance of society with its inherited rights and legal protections comes in.

By placing the importance on universality rather than on the individual the doctrine of “human rights” becomes an argument against particular societies and their particular traditions and in favor of a universal society that will universally protect “human rights”. It is no coincidence that the idea of “human rights” is so closely connected to the United Nations.

The doctrine of “human rights” inspired the tyranny and bloodshed of the French Revolution. Here in Canada it has been the basis for our being denied basic rights which are ours by inheritance from the English tradition. One shudders to think what this doctrine might inspire if a World Government arises to take over its enforcement.