Their Silence Is A Warning
Their Silence Is A Warning
Governments across the west are curiously silent about what is happening in Canada.
A shorter version of the following piece appeared in the American Thinker.
Fires In Liberal Democracies
The fallacious position put forth by hate speech police who feel it their duty to call out “hate speech” wherever they’re offended by any speech and frame it as such, is to advocate the limits of free speech using the famously debunked “you cannot yell fire in a crowded theatre” argument.
There are several worthy challenges to this argument which show it to be a fallacy in challenging first amendment rights and a poor if not shameful ruling by Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes. Perhaps no better refutation exists than Christopher Hitchens’ 2006 speech at a conference in Toronto of all places. The entire speech should be mandatory viewing, and homework assigned by civics teachers across the west. He opens his address from an old neo-gothic oak paneled Harry Potter looking University debate hall:
“Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Now you’ve heard it. Not screamed in a crowded theatre admittingly, as I now realize I might have shouted it in the Hogwarts’ dining room.”
Let’s take this argument, and assume a much more serious hypothetical situation than the crowded theatre analogy. What if there was a fire in a liberal democracy scorching human rights and civil liberties? What if that fire was in several liberal democracies and spreading fast? The people are loudly screaming “Fire!” but leaders and human rights organizations across the west are curiously silent.
The implementation of emergency war powers in Canada to suspend rights, is either a temporary overreach of power or a blatant authoritarian shape shift to crush political dissent, seize assets, and implement martial law on completely fabricated charges. The majority of people in the U.S. and Canada are seeing the totalitarian shape shift, and loudly screaming “Fire!” but there are no western leaders rushing with an extinguisher, nor even any acknowledgement of what is happening.
One would think it the duty of every pragmatic and thoughtful western leader to call out the suspension of basic human rights and civil liberties where they see them, and yet with the exception of Nayib Bukele, President and self proclaimed CEO of El Salvador, all of them are terrifyingly silent on the matter. Perhaps if democracy is dead, as Tucker Carlson and others have recently observed then majorities no longer matter and there aren’t just little fires across the west but raging infernos.
For two years these leaders have tasted the kind of power that corrupts and may be envious of the Trudeau regime’s beta testing of this new shift toward absolute power and permanent destruction of any pretense of being considered a liberal democracy ever again. Let their silence serve as a warning that what’s happening in Canada, may not stay in Canada.
Globalism’s Chains
In a recent piece entitled “The Revolution Will Not Be Swiped”, I opened with a simple observation of how we are inextricably linked by what we value as individuals in society:
… Your privacy is their privacy. Your autonomy is their autonomy. Your liberty is their liberty. Your salvation is their salvation. We are inextricably linked by the human values we develop, nurture and blossom. Our future and the futures of those we love are dependent upon us caring deeply for these inextricably linked values.
The very simple explanation of our links can be summed up accordingly in relation to what we are witnessing with our good friends up north in Canada: “If my rights can be violated for something you don't support, and you cheer on the state toward this end, yours will soon be violated for something you do support, though I would be a damn fool to cheer on the state for the same reasons you failed to recognize.”
If the best case scenario is that liberal democracies are presently in a state of “suspension” across much of the west, even in the absence of any real threat, then the values that the individuals support and are linked by are no longer in play, and we have no choice then to acknowledge some other forces have been substituted to prepare the shift to a new governing paradigm. We can call this new paradigm global technocracy because we have seen it with our own eyes for years ushered in through the ruse of invisible harm necessitating the state impose measures that collectivize risk and risk choices of the individual which undermines both their autonomy and liberty. Convincing the masses to go along with this ruse only required controlling all narratives, and injecting sufficient and constant streams of fear into the body politic.
As with interlinked individual rights, the rush to globalism over the past thirty years has linked many nations of the west beyond just commerce, trade and economics. The unity of alliances for defense and diplomatic affairs in global groups like the G7 and G20 have merged the governing and ruling habits of western leaders who have formed a curious “lock step” on domestic policies. We’ve watched these policies be war gamed through “pandemic preparedness” of simulations for events that are being ushered in under the pretense of threats, which are fabricated to justify the desired “lock step” maneuvers. It’s as if these nations are now networked computers running the same domestic policy software programs.
The question then becomes: Are the nations of the west now inextricably linked by values that are determined by the forces of global technocracy? If the answer is yes, then democracy is dead and if you’ll miss it (apparently a third of Canadians will not) long live democracy!
Demon In Democracy
Ryszard Legutko’s recent book The Demon In Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations In Free Societies, was largely ignored by the liberal academic community, and to their own peril. It is prescient in timeliness and message and offers us a cogent window to view the present situation across the west, especially Australia, Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Canada. As Legutko observes, the post-Soviet "end of history" failed to sufficiently demonize socialism and communism, instead under the guise of a common solidarity and the paradox of tolerance allowed these forces direct seats inside parliaments and ivory towers across the west. Liberal democracies have been eaten from the inside by these forces who have been weaponized by higher forces—global oligarchs—to usher us toward their new paradigm. He argues that both communists and liberal democrats share a utopian idealistic view of their ideologies.
The proponents of liberal democracy perceive their system—from an inside perspective—as having no superior alternatives. According to Legutko, “The liberal democrats would say: if liberal democracy is not accepted, then society will fall prey to authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy.”
Even by Legutko’s observations the liberal democrat either doesn’t believe that, or those who consider themselves liberal democrats and fling the word ‘democracy’ as a rhetorical weapon, a call to action to behave as its self anointed protectors, do not believe their own words which can only reveal seriousness if backed up by actions. The actions of Justin Trudeau have shown he has already fallen prey to authoritarianism and fascism.
If—as did the liberals—we interpret history as a complex set of conflicts that slowly but irresistibly maximized the freedom of the individual and—as did the democrats—as a comparably complex set of conflicts that slowly, but irresistibly liberated the people from tyranny and empowered them with political instruments of self government, then liberal democracy will indeed seem to be a happy ending of the eternal human dreams.
According to Legutko, here we have arrived at the paradox. If liberal democracy is not accepted, then the downfall toward tyranny is inevitable, but if that downfall to tyranny happens in a self proclaimed liberal democracy like Canada than it’s impossible for the solution to be a return to the thing that caused the downfall to tyranny.
What if, these systems of government (parliamentary democracies) that we have called liberal democracies for decades across the west were never very liberal nor democratic?
Without systems of legal protections of liberties like those enshrined in the First Amendment to the constitution, the slope of tyranny becomes tempting and evermore slippery. There exist no protections anywhere in the west for freedom of speech or assembly in the way they do with rigorous legal foundations in the United States. The shift in attitudes of liberals across the west from devout civil libertarians one generation ago to other shades of ideological leftist orthodoxies (communism, socialism, race marxism, green socialism) has only embolden the temptation toward the totalitarian demons in western liberal democracies. In which case we find ourselves back at the same conclusion: there exist no more liberal democracies in the west in practice.
Where we might still see pockets of it in Eastern Europe or red state America should not offer much solace if we live in a globally interconnected world of “lock step” domestic policies. The dictates of central power will come for those pockets sooner or later if this tyranny is allowed to fester. The federal powers of a bloated state bureaucracy, when fully mobilized against its own people will be no match for the noble performative tweets of resistance from any red state governors.
Silence Is Envy
Could it be true, as many are speculating that leaders of the west wish they could do what Trudeau is doing, that they envy his authoritarian power grab? Having tasted two years of power that corrupts and advertised their fealty toward global power interests rather than the people who elected them it’s hard to disagree. Their resistance to dispense with emergency medical police state powers should be a warning that given the opportunity to create an emergency to justify more state powers and the suspension of liberties, they will rush to take this action. The conclusion is clear if this is true, these are not liberals, these are not leaders, these are servants of the global technocratic machine.
Trudeau assumed the seat of prime minister with less than a third of the popular vote, a convenient loophole and glaring deficit of many parliamentary democracies. This results in a simple tyranny of the minority coalition government. That a third of Canadians are still cheering on the state in their race to crush the basic rights of their fellow peaceably assembled working class citizens through all manner of authoritarian actions is perhaps both a reflection of the failure to educate on our inextricably linked social values, and a rise of the totalitarian tendencies of those who still proclaim themselves “liberals” and defenders of “democracy”. In a nation where peaceful protest is criminalized by political opponents in power under banana republican fabricated charges, there is nothing liberal or democratic to see there. Worse still it may engender the kind of violent rebellion the Trudeau regime has fabricated as justification for its tyranny. They are using JFK’s famous words to their advantage: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Once again the forces of global management are trying to engineer a crisis that doesn’t exist into reality, so they can point to any resistance as violence, and offer their prepared solutions - more tyranny.
In the absence of condemnation of what we’re witnessing in Canada, the cancer will only grow and likely spread across the west. This disturbing silence of western leaders should be viewed as tacit support of the authoritarianism and fascism in Canada, and that should worry all of us who care deeply about our basic liberties because in a globally interconnected lock step world, what happens in Canada may not stay in Canada.
Comments
Post a Comment