Xerxes Weighs In

 

Brian Peckford

Friend Xerxes has at last done his inevitable column on the Freedom Convoy—from the left-wing perspective.

He begins by writing “making demands to restore things the way they were before the pandemic is ridiculous. The coronavirus is not going to go away.”

Boy Howdy? He makes the truckers’ point for them, forcefully: the restrictions, imposed in an emergency, are going to be permanent. This is what they are afraid of.

To condemn the truckers, he makes three analogies: it is like holding somebody hostage and demanding a ransom. It is like occupying a food bank and closing it down to demand new management. Honking horns is bullying, shouting down opposing voices.

All three fail. 

For the first, he would have to identify something or someone the truckers are holding hostage. He actually cites the city of Ottawa. Yet they are simply parked on Wellington Street; anyone is free to come and go. The worst you can say is that they are obstructing traffic; but they claim they are keeping emergency lanes open.

Xerxes might make a better case with the Ambassador Bridge. There, commerce is being obstructed. 

But--an odd thing--when I see the photographs, videos, and aerial views, there are no trucks; just cars, maybe vans, and pedestrians. Some online say there never were any big rigs. 

Perhaps there never were any trucks; perhaps the trucks drove off when the provincial government ordered them to, or after a relatively brief protest. But since there are no trucks, it seems dubious to blame “the truckers.” This may be a separate protest inspired by theirs, as others have been in Europe, New Zealand, and South America.

The analogy of barricading the local food bank looks like a straw man argument. It requires the claim that the intent of the protest is to overthrow the government, which the truckers have denied. It is to lift mandates. So the more exact analogy would be people protesting outside a closed food bank demanding it be reopened.

The third analogy, that truckers are shouting someone or something down by honking their horns, would require us to find some voice or point of view that is not being heard because of the truckers. The government’s? The media’s? That claim would be laughable.

Bullies do not pick on people bigger and stronger than they are. By that standard, David was a bully when he challenged Goliath. 

And by that standard, speaking out is silencing someone else. But then only silence is free speech, and speaking out isn’t. So there’s also no problem if anyone else is silenced, is there?

Most disturbingly, our leftist interlocutor writes “’Freedom’ is, in reality, an American catch-phrase, not a Canadian one.” 

The Canadian Constitution begins with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, universal and endorsed by all member states, begins “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

“Freedom” is also a Christian catchphrase. It is to exercise free will, freedom of choice, that we were created and put in the Garden. It is freedom, being moral agents, that makes us more than animals, and participants in the divine. It gives us our chance of heaven.

You ask “Freedom for whom? For what? From what?” 

In a current lawsuit, and in speeches, Brian Peckford, one of the actual framers of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has outlined how its freedoms are currently being violated. Notably, mobility rights, the right to work, freedom of speech, the right to security of the person, freedom of association. I would add freedom of conscience; not sure he does. And the moment any right is lost, all are endangered.

Insisting none of the truckers’ rights have been violated, Xerxes writes, “no one has forced them to get vaccinated at gunpoint.” 

To make that true, he had to add “at gunpoint.” The left is obsessed with guns. Only guns are evil. The truckers and many others across Canada have been forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs and livelihoods.

He writes of “Trump posters and Confederate flags on display”; as a reason to dismiss the protests. At best, that is an ad hominem argument. 

There are Trump posters. So far as I have been able to find online, only one Confederate flag has ever shown up at the protest. The man flying it was masked—an indication he was not a part of the protest against masking. He was challenged and chased off by the people around him.

What does a Confederate flag mean in Canada? Obviously not Southern pride. Slavery, then? Then it obviously has no part in a protest demanding freedom.

I think it is a fair guess that the guy was a plant.

To finish off, Xerxes claims that the truckers are suspiciously well-organized. Their funding and organization must have come from the US. 

But if the US far right wants to launch a freedom convoy, why would they do it in Canada instead of the US? Why haven’t they even managed a parallel demonstration there? Bad planning, for such brilliant planners.

Odd too to assume that Canadians cannot do things for themselves, but would need American help.

Or is it that they are truckers?

The notion that the truckers could not have organized themselves reminds me of the claim that Shakespeare could not have written his plays, because he had only been to grammar school. And, of course, a carpenter and a few fishermen could not have founded a church that could take over the Roman Empire.

It is classism. It assumes that the working class is stupid.

They obviously are not. That is bourgeois prejudice. Or rather, clerical prejudice.