|
In the olden days, in this country, people who were
hurtin' sang a country song. I remember my little sister,
when she was eight years of age, singing one in the
kitchen, while affecting to wash some dishes.
The
lyrics were, as I recall: "My daddy hates me. /
My mommy hates me. / My brubber hates me. / Everybody
hates me and I'm / not very happy." It needed at
least a banjo.
These
days in Canada, if you're feeling down and blue, and
you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to
a Human Rights Tribunal. And the people you think hate
you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature
of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed
over humanity in the 20th century's painful course.
Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely
some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee
of smug, leftwing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators.
After long delays that are costly only to the defendant
and the taxpayer (and justice delayed is justice denied),
you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy
squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of
the right to due process, in which there are no fixed
rules of evidence, in which the ridiculously biased
"judges" make up the law as they go along,
and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly
limited imaginations - such as ruinous fines, and lifetime
"cease and desist" orders, such that, if you
ever open your mouth again on a given topic, you stand
to go to prison.
Then
finally, on "some autumn night of delations and
noyades" (I am quoting Auden), the unrepentant
practitioners of free speech will be sequestered by
their litigator, and "those he hates shall hate
themselves instead."
Alan
Borovoy, one of the pioneers of these star chambers
in Canada, now expresses himself aghast at their powers,
and how they are being used to bring an end to Canada's
heritage of free speech and free press. As he wrote
in the Calgary Herald, recently: "During the years
when my colleagues and I were labouring to create [these]
commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately
be used against freedom of speech."
Against
him, it must be said that he and his colleagues simply
weren't listening when I and mine explained, decades
ago, why this would be their inevitable effect. I think
back, for instance, to the dismissals we received when
I published Ian Hunter's important article, "What's
Wrong with Human Rights," in the Idler magazine
of April 1985.
Everything
that has happened since has confirmed our darkest predictions.
Including
the darkest of those predictions: that intellectuals
and the Canadian media simply would not care about defending
even their own freedom. They would see it as a Left-Right
issue, and being overwhelmingly people of the Left themselves,
would actually approve the stifling of "racists"
and "misogynists" and "born again crazies."
But
to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niem?ller: "First
they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak
out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came
for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out
because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came
for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was
not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was
no one left to speak out for me."
It
should also be said that people of the Right, who should
have known better, also didn't care. I have several
quite plausibly rightwing friends who did not hesitate
to use the new "human rights" machinery to
lodge complaints about vicious attacks in the media
on themselves, on Christians and conservatives generally,
and especially on Catholics and the Catholic Church.
Their complaints were invariably dismissed by the tribunals
on sight, and yet by making them they contributed to
legitimizing the process by which free speech could
be "reviewed," as a matter of course, by their
most deadly enemies.
For
nota bene: this should not be a Left or Right issue.
Freedom for one is freedom for all, and tyranny against
one is tyranny against all. The remark attributed to
Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to say it,"
perfectly expresses the finest, traditional liberal
principle, upon which, ultimately, civil society relies.
I
mentioned last week the case Mohamed Elmasry and the
Canadian Islamic Congress have brought against Maclean's
magazine for publishing Mark Steyn - simultaneously
before multiple human rights commissions, a tactic that
is itself an egregious abuse of process. It is a case
that should clang alarm bells right across Canada. Yet
we've heard only a few modest tinkles.
|
