Catholic comments on the passing parade.
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Two reflections on the current troubles.
1. The OPP deserve credit for ending the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge as peacefully as they did. It forms an honourable contrast to images of the French police using tear gas in Paris, and the Dutch police on horseback with truncheons. Or the New Zealand police playing Barry Manilow records.
Credit where credit is due.
2. I should have been a trucker instead of an academic.
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| 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.
_(cropped).jpg/330px-Nathaniel_Erskine-Smith_at_the_East_York_Canada_Day_Parade_-_2018_(42256213615)_(cropped).jpg) |
| Natty Nate. |
My MP, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, has now reversed his earlier, qualified support of Joel Lightbound. He claims his comments were “torqued” by the media—although what I read were his own tweets. He now blames the Conservatives for any verbal escalation of the current trucker protests:
“he's right that we all need to stand down on divisive rhetoric. This is particularly true for my Conservative colleagues.”
He thereby ignores as comparatively trivial such examples from his leader, Justin Trudeau, as are quoted by Bill Maher in the clip. Conrad Black writes “The defamation and the attempt to incite public hostility against [the protesters] was contemptible demagogy.”
So what were the Conservative insults that were so much worse? Erskine-Smith says, obliquely, “we should not platform or engage the language of treason, medical experiments, Nuremberg Code, etc.”
Worse indeed. So much worse that one must not just never say this; one must deplatform and silence anyone who does.
Oddly, however, he cites no one saying these things, and so far as I have seen online—and I have been following events, especially in Parliament, pretty closely—no Conservative members have accused the government using such terms.
Since nobody prominent has even made the claims, it would appear that they are terrible only in the sense that it would be terrible if anyone did say them. And so terrible that Erskine-Smith will not himself actually say them, but seems to refer to them obliquely. And even if they have not said them, the Conservatives COULD say them. Which actually implies that they are true.
It seems important, then, to find out just what he means.
Treason is plain enough. One can only be concerned that the Liberals are, in their own minds, open to that charge. Are they, for example, colluding with the US government to suppress the protests? Who else might he mean? China?
What is the Nuremberg Code?
The Nuremberg Code, I find, is a set of standards for medical experimentation. It was created in 1947 as a reaction to Nazi experiments on humans. As summarized by the British Medical Journal,
“Amongst other requirements, this document enunciates the requirement of voluntary informed consent of the human subject. The principle of voluntary informed consent protects the right of the individual to control his own body.”
Obviously, whether or not they are experimental, vaccine mandates violate this requirement for voluntary informed consent, and the principle of the right of the individual to control his own body.
And it is arguable that the vaccines, approved only for emergency use, are still experimental.
The Nuremberg Code is not a Canadian law. But the optics look pretty bad for the government. I suspect it might also be used persuasively in a lawsuit: the government may abridge basic human rights, like security of the person, only in situations demonstrably necessary for a free and democratic society. Violation of the Nuremberg Code is persuasive evidence that this standard has not been met.
It all might be hell to p[ay for the government, not just in present political terms, but in the courts for years to come.
Thanks to Nathaniel Erskine-Smith for this tip.
Reports now there is a demonstration at the Osoyoos, BC, border crossing.
It looks as though the police are not using any strong-arm tactics on the crowd at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. And the bridge remains blocked. No tear gas, for example. No slow, steady advance on horseback with batons. No--wait, let's not give anyone ideas. The deputy chief was actually on local TV claiming the police are trying to negotiate with the protesters. They may be taking the sensible approach.
https://twitter.com/thomasdaigle/status/1492629409190268933
It looks as though they were hoping they would scare the protesters off, but they do not want to escalate the situation and become the bad guys.
Not my place to say it, I'm not there, and I don't actually support blocking the bridge, after making the point that they could, but it looks to me as though the protesters in Windsor may have nothing to fear but fear itself. It looks like a feint, similar to the one in Ottawa last Sunday night.
Stand firm, and either the government doesn't have the stomach to push it, or, at least as likely, cannot count on the police to do so.
If the police were to break in any visible numbers and join the protesters, it would all be over quickly.
One thing the Windsor blockade has probably done is taken the pressure off the Ottawa demonstrators. OPP resources have been sucked south. Whack-a-mole.
Almost everything in this piece from the legacy media is a lie.
If it is insurrectionist to deputize some members of the convoy as “peace officers.” so is setting up a neighbourhood watch program. Canada is full of such revolutionaries, it seems. Obviously, the truckers want to maintain order; if there is any criminal activity, they are liable to be the victims, and there are children among them. And then the government and the media will blame them for it. The Ottawa police themselves keep complaining they are understaffed and cannot maintain order.
The voiceover then claims that Candace Bergen and the Conservatives have changed their tune, from encouraging the convoy to telling them to go home. Whether you agree with her or not, Bergen has been telling the convoy to go home from the beginning.
The disturbing thing is that CTV now believes it is safe to go back to spouting the government line. A few days ago, it looked as though they were trying to pivot.
My local MP, too, has turned tail and withdrawn his partial support for MP Joel Lightbound. He now actually has the cheek to blame the Conservatives for any inflammatory rhetoric.
The worry is why they all suddenly feel renewed confidence. The obvious change is that the US government has spoken, prompted by the closing of the Ambassador Bridge. It is now as though they feel assured that, if worst comes to worst, the Yanks will come in to restore order, just like those tanks on the streets of Budapest in 1956, or of Prague in 1968.
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| Beauty and the Beast |
Xerxes opines that he never liked history back in high school or university, because it was “primarily a record of an endless succession of wars.”
“History books say next to nothing about what life was like for the peasants who served as cannon fodder -- collateral damage -- in those wars, or how they survived when they weren’t at war.”
My take on history is the opposite. I always loved history in the traditional sense, the accounts of wars and how they were lost or won, of how government policies succeeded or failed. The recent fad of documenting the lives of ordinary people instead―including “black history” and “women’s history”—misses the point. I find it useless except as a sort of gossip, with the same appeal to some of our worst instincts.
Why do we study history? To learn the lessons of the past: Don’t pay Danegeld. Don’t debase the coinage. Don’t leave defence in the hands of foreign mercenaries. Don’t appoint two leaders with identical authority. We learn these things from the experience of leaders with important responsibilities, a high public profile, dealing with major matters of public consequence in most cases, for the obvious reason that this is where we have clear documentation of what was done and what resulted. We have more detailed records.
We might have even better records for very recent events, but there we do not have the long view, and personal interests—politics—can cause distortions of the record. Cause and effect are not yet clearly visible.
A focus on the ordinary life of the common man or woman is similarly useless. Our documentation of their experiences, their decisions, and their results is always far scantier. This leaves a barn door open to anyone to imagine or falsify. Even if this were not so, it is almost impossible to connect cause and effect.
Not that the experiences of the common man or woman are not of interest. Not that there is no documentation. But this falls in a different realm of discourse: not history, which is concerned ultimately with politics, but literature. For the average man or woman rarely made public policy. From them we learn of fundamental life decisions: whom to marry, how to raise a child. And our sources are folk songs and ballads, folk tales, popular legends.
Nice music. The good guys always have better music, and that is meaningful.
Leonard Cohen: "We are ugly, but we have the music."
As politically unwise as was and is Justin Trudeau’s refusal to recognize or parley with the Ottawa protesters, Doug Ford’s reaction is even worse. He seems to have turned on a major part of his base. He has probably killed any hope of reelection. As Erin O’Toole just demonstrated, this is not a time in which Tories can ignore their base. Their base is upset.
Trudeau’s actions can be explained by the urgent desire by the “deep state” to set up a system to permanently track and gather data on the citizenry. This is not just a conspiracy theory, either; some of it has come to light in recent parliamentary and congressional investigations. Some of it is visible in the “deplatforming” and “cancel culture” movement. This really has to be what the vaccine mandates were about; since they are now politically risky, and have no definite medical or scientific value.
Doug Ford may be part of this to; he has his own deep state whispering in his ear. But this hypothesis may not be necessary in his case. It is enough that Ford is indecisive. This is something we already knew. He flip flops often.
For a long time, he did not know what to do about the current protest. Queen’s Park was silent, and conspicuously absent from the Ottawa discussions among levels of government.
But when the Ambassador Bridge was closed, Ontario businessmen would have rung him up, directly and personally—as a fellow businessman and, as it were, Rotarian. Ford is always going to want to please the person he has most recently spoken to. Rumour is that he first spent some time with the deep state hoping they would agree to dropping mandates. But evidently they would not. So he acted as he did. The path of least resistance was to get tough.
This being so, the smart strategy for those who oppose the mandates, or simply oppose this getting violent, is to make sure this does not remain the path of least resistance. Resist, and he is likely to back down.
I urge all who have a Conservative MPP—I do not—to contact them and warn that you will not support any violence to end the protest. It must be done by compromise and negotiation.
The present danger is that, by clearing the Ambassador Bridge by what looks like force or intimidation, if he can, Ford will have solved his immediate problem, but will have increased the odds that the main protest in Ottawa, and the protests elsewhere, will also end in arrests, and possibly bloodshed. It will encourage this approach.
RoseAnne Archibald, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, has publicly objected to the Ottawa protesters declaring today Orange Shirt Day, in honour of allegedly murdered and abused aboriginal children. They have no business, she insists, appropriating this to their cause. This is “a real insult.”
Keep in mind that aboriginal people, and aboriginal children, are among the protesters. There have been many Mohawk, Metis, and other aboriginal flags seen in the crowds.
This is as if “Black Lives Matter” were objecting to someone saying that black lives matter; or abolitionists objecting to anyone saying “free the slaves; or Christians objecting to anyone saying “Jesus is Lord.”
It illustrates that the Orange Shirt movement is not about aboriginal children, or aboriginals, or children. It is about power. It is a weapon made and honed to be used by aboriginal leaders to advance their agenda and their control.
The Assembly of First Nations itself is not an organic growth, but a creature of the federal government, which funds it. Leadership is selected Soviet-style, not by ordinary Indians.
At the start of the pandemic, I had hopes that this would end our differences and make us all pull together against a common enemy. There would be a new era of peace and brotherhood.
I was wrong, and very soon saw and admitted that I was wrong. Instead, it has been a lightning bolt suddenly revealing where the zombies are.
More accurately, where the sheep and the goats are.
The Bible says plainly that there are two kinds of people: those who are out for what is right, the good people, and those who are only out for themselves. When a common crisis strikes, these two will quickly coalesce. The good will come together in peace and brotherhood. The goats will look for a chance at personal advantage, at climbing.
We see this now: peace and brotherhood rules on Wellington Street before the Parliament buildings. But in their high towers, many, indeed most of the authorities seem to be looking for how they can use this emergency to advance their own power. They are eager to divide us to do so.
The good people turn out to be exactly whom the Bible said: the common people, the fishermen, the carpenters, the shepherds. The kinds of men Jesus chose as apostles.
And the majority of those in civil command, the scribes, the teachers, the officials, turn out to be only out for profit, or for power, or for prestige. For self.
We out, for future reference, to keep accounts. Although my guess is that this is the sort of crisis that will topple all the obvious Pharisees by the end. New ones will soon rise up in their place.
Lyrics (slightly modified):
Oh we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And we'll rally from the hillside, we'll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
(Chorus)
Freedom forever, our foremothers' belief
Down with the mandates, up the maple leaf
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
Oh we're springing to the call for three hundred thousand more
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And we'll fill the vacant ranks with a million freemen more
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
(Chorus)
We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
(Chorus)
So we're springing to the call from the East and from the West,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom;
And we'll hurl the tyrant crew from the land we love the best,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
