Fuck you too, Syria

I haven’t commented much on Syria, despite the fact that its revolt is just as bloody and horrific as the one in Libya. President Assad, the ruler of Syria has been waging a constant campaign of terror and violence against his citizens for opposing his regime. One of the more heinous acts I’ve seen come out of this conflict is the savage beating of a political cartoonist:

One of the best-known cartoonists in the Arab world has been beaten up by Syrian security forces, activists say. Ali Ferzat, whose work is critical of the government, was forced from his car in Damascus and badly beaten. The attack comes after 11 civilians and eight soldiers were reportedly killed in different incidents across Syria. The UN says more than 2,200 people have been killed as security forces crack down on anti-government protests that began in mid-March.

The offending cartoon is as follows:

It depicts Moammar Gathafi (which is apparently how it’s spelled in English, according to his son’s passport) fleeing in a getaway car, with president Assad and some tiny guy with an ass for a face trying to hitch a ride. It was cartoons like this that apparently justified his being dragged out of his car and beaten nearly to death. Wikipedia tells me that Assad was educated in opthamology in Damascus and London. I guess he didn’t bother to study classical literature or political science or history or pretty much anything in the humanities. If he had, it would be clear to him that ideas cannot be beaten to death. They can only be countered by other ideas. Beating a person for having and/or expressing an idea does nothing to tamp those ideas down – in the best case scenario it simply prevents that one individual from expressing it.

Maybe Ali Ferzat’s cartoon, drawn as a response to his attackers, will express this idea in a way that even Assad can understand it:

Ali Ferzat – bad mother fucker.

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A study in contrasts

A few weeks ago I opined on the riots in London, and contrasted the police reaction there to the one here in Vancouver following our own riots. That story is continuing:

Prime Minister David Cameron has defended courts for handing out “tough” sentences for those involved in the riots across England. The barrister told the BBC “ringleaders should receive very long sentences” but warned “there was an issue of proportionality” over the way people already before the courts had been treated. The PM said it was good that the courts were sending a “tough message”. Speaking in Warrington, he said: “It’s up to the courts to make decisions about sentencing, but they’ve decided to send a tough message and it’s very good that the courts feel able to do that.”

Meanwhile, in Vancouver:

Vancouver police Chief Jim Chu is defending the pace of criminal investigations into Vancouver rioters, saying investigators are moving slowly because authorities want to make sure they can secure convictions. “Even though we acknowledge the frustration of those who wish these suspects were already in jail, and we hear and share your frustration, there are many reasons why we must proceed at this pace,” Chu told reporters Wednesday at a news conference. His comments came as critics point to swift sentencing seen in Britain in the wake of a sweeping series of riots in recent weeks.

First of all, it’s important to state unequivocally that the Vancouver riots are not comparable to the London riots. The issues that underlie the widespread reckless smash and grab in the UK are not represented in the 5-hour orgy of violence that happened here following the Stanley Cup final. Looking for a common thread between what sparked the two separate occasions is probably a waste of time. My intention here is to contrast the response by law enforcement in the two situations that, from a surface perspective, appear similar (people rioting).

I was critical of David Cameron’s response to the riots – right-wing chest thumping might be psychologically satisfying, but it is not the kind of evidence-based response we need to see that justice is done and further riots do not happen. While I am still critical of his approach, he is not really the focus of this story. It is now the judicial system that is engaging in a dick-measuring contest to show how “tough” they can be. As I’ve opined before, being “tough” on crime doesn’t do anything but appease the masses thirsty for blood. It’s a short-sighted response that finds its origin in our lizard brains – they hurt us so let’s hurt them back. While understandable, it leads us to react disproportionately and emotionally, when reason and logic are at their most crucial:

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said the sentences being handed out across the country for offences of dishonesty such as theft, burglary and receiving stolen goods, suggested there were disparities between courts. What the public was seeing may just be a “distorted version of the normal system”, our correspondent said. In another case, David Beswick, 31 from Salford was sentenced to 18 months in prison for handling stolen goods. Max Hill QC, vice-chairman of the Criminal Bar Association said it was not the job of judges “to deliver a political message on behalf of the government” when passing sentence but part of their role was to identify “serious aggravating features that elevate the crime beyond the ordinary”.

When the lawyers, intimately involved in the criminal justice system, are criticizing your policy, it might be a rebuke you want to take seriously. I said as much this morning.

In matters of criminal justice, it is far too easy to get swept up in the bloodlust of the crowd. Britain is certainly modeling such a reaction for the whole world to see. Vancouver’s response has been far more measured. They are concerned with making cases based on solid evidence, rather than appealing to cries for swift punishment. Why Jim Chu is choosing this route, and whether he will survive the next election cycle for his job, are open questions. I am happy and proud to live in a society where deliberate care is taken to avoid locking up the wrong people, or letting the right people get away on technicalities due to improper evidence.

Now if only we’d apply that same work ethic to charging the financiers that did far more damage to the economy than all the looters in the world could hope to accomplish. Then we’d really be getting something done.

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The company you keep

I think that a lot can be said for a person by the company that she or he keeps. Part of my attempt at consistent self-criticism involves me trying to size up how I am doing generally as a person. I take great comfort in the fact that I can count people I admire, respect, and wish to emulate among my close friends. It means, at least in my eyes, that there is something about me that they also admire and respect. Maybe they’re all just really nice and take pity on me 😛

In the same vein, when your friends and supporters are people with whom you fundamentally disagree, you’ve got to take a long hard look at yourself:

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, whose long-shot campaign has been gaining media attention in recent days, apparently has the support of an unusual constituency — the white supremacist movement. Stormfront.org, a white supremacy web site, as well as others, such as WhiteWorldNews.com, have actively supported Paul’s bid for the presidency, including directing donors to his campaign.  Stormfront has also endorsed Paul for president.

“Once in a great while a presidential candidate is presented to us. A candidate who not only speaks to us, but for us…I am supporting Ron Paul in his run for the presidency,” the Stormfront endorsement says. The endorsement praises Paul’s plans to reduce taxes, close the  borders and eliminate trade deals, such as NAFTA. “Whatever organization you belong to, remember first and foremost that you are a white nationalist,” the endorsement continues. “Put your differences with one and other aside and work together. Work together to strive to get someone in the Oval Office who agrees with much of what we want for our future. Look at the man. Look at the issues. Look at our future. Vote for Ron Paul 2008.”

Ron Paul’s supporters have a deserved reputation for being the most vehement scourers of the internet, and for being nearly indistinguishable in their defense of their champion. I therefore want to take great pains here to say that this is not evidence that Ron Paul is a white supremacist. I am not trying to imply a sort of guilt by association – the endorsement from Stormfront seems to be largely based on Ron Paul’s isolationist beliefs rather than any racist statements he’s made in the past. Which isn’t to say that Ron Paul’s positions on race aren’t suspect:

What bothers me the most about Ron Paul’s defense of liberty regarding the Civil Rights Act is that he glazes over the significance of the social and political culture at the time. However, I don’t think he’s a stupid man by any means. He is well educated and fully aware of the history of racial discrimination and the Civil Rights Movement. He is fully aware that allowing business owners to do whatever they wanted in their businesses during this period in history meant some business owners would deny service to individuals because of the color of their skin. He is fully aware that some business owners would take significant measures to remove black people from their businesses.

When pictures pass around the press of children having acid poured in their pool water, it is not just those black children who are being harmed. All black Americans were at the helm of potentially injurious acts of discrimination. This photo illustrates that real, violent threat.

This is my problem with Ron Paul specifically and libertarianism in general – while many of the ideas proposed have some merit, the absolute application of the principles they’re based on are wildly impractical. The Civil Rights Act absolutely infringed upon the liberty of some people. Anyone who denies this fact is either woefully ignorant or bizarrely entrenched in their own ideology. However, the Civil Rights Act, for all its infringement, was a step forward in recognizing the equality of all people. The free market approach to civil rights was not working – black people were on the receiving end of massive discrimination with no recourse or relief from a state that is ostensibly invested in defending the rights of its citizens. Libertarian policies of government non-intervention were failing, and a more direct approach was needed.

Which is not to say that Ron Paul is a Libertarian:

There are a lot of libertarians who still buy into the Ron Paul myth, I’m sad to say. Ron is no libertarian. He’s a paleoconservative and his voting record backs that up. In addition he has all the crazy shit he gets from the Birch Society and continues to spew out. But what I find surprising is how gullible some libertarians are regarding Ron’s excuses for all this. Take the newsletter that Ron edited and sold, during his stint out of office, between his LP presidential bid and his next Congressional race. Ron was listed as co-editor of the newsletter. There was a staff of four people, including his wife and daughter. So it was hardly a huge enterprise. It published some pretty bigoted remarks about blacks and gays and had the usual crazy Ron Paul shit about conspiracies.

I have talked about this kind of thing before, but when your support comes from people who hold positions you abhor, then you really need to take a hard look at why. I was quite taken with Ron Paul when I first learned of him. Ramping down foreign wars, eliminating the monstrously-wasteful war on drugs, support for individual rights – lots of great ideas. However, it’s mixed in with a lot of crazy stuff, including more than a little racism. It’s not at all a surprise to me that Stormfront sees him as their best hope of political legitimacy. That fact alone should give Paul supporters pause.

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The barbarians have switched gates

A few months back I wrote a post about Andres Serrano’s artistic installation “Piss Christ”. In it, I made an allusion, likening Philistine knee-jerk religious reactionaries to a horde of barbarians swarming around the gates of civilized society:

The fact is that rationality has surpassed our need for imagined explanations and intuitions  to govern our society. We can govern ourselves based on secular reason – furthermore, those regions that do this more are doing much better than their less-reasoned brethren. Those who would react to an idea by trying to destroy it, and those that think it, must not be the ones to rule us. They should be thought of, in our walled palace of reasoned thought, as barbarians banging at the gates.

Not a flattering image, to be sure, but it was not intended to be. I have nothing but the deepest contempt for those who believe the way to settle philosophical disagreements is through violence or the threat thereof.

I was disheartened, therefore, to see this story in the news:

A Manila art exhibit blasted as offensive to Catholic Filipinos has been shuttered, following complaints from President Benigno Aquino III and death threats to artists and cultural officials. The Kulo group exhibit at the state-funded Cultural Center of the Philippines opened in Manila in June. However, the show began receiving complaints after recent coverage by media outlets in the predominantly Catholic nation. Originally slated to close Aug. 21, Kulo was shut down Tuesday. Specifically, complaints focus on work by contemporary artist Mideo Cruz that mixes Catholic icons with pop culture and sexual imagery and paraphernalia.

We’ve heard about the presence of the Catholic church in the Philippines before, as they have been the chief force retarding that country making any progress toward comprehensive sex education. It’s nice to know that when they’re not dooming a generation to unwanted pregnancies and STIs, they’re still finding the time to act as art critics. Once again, though, I think they’ve completely missed the point of the exhibit:

The exhibition, entitled Poleteismo or Polytheism, includes a statue of Jesus with the ears of Mickey Mouse, and a wall collage featuring images from Christ and the Virgin Mary to the Statue of Liberty and US President Barack Obama. Mr Cruz says it is intended to be about the worship of icons. “This speaks about objects that we worship, how we create these gods and idols, and how we in turn are created by our gods and idols,” said the Filipino artist, referring to the 300 years of Spanish rule that brought Catholicism to the Philippines and the current influences from the US.

Or maybe they aren’t. I remember one of the first problems I had with the RCC as an organization was its insistence on idolatry (yes – I used to be a bit of a zealot). You can’t walk into a church or basilica anywhere in the world without being overwhelmed with religious iconography, which is in direct contravention of the second commandment. Of course accusing the Catholic church of being hypocritical is like accusing a windstorm of being destructive: you’re absolutely right but it’s not going to listen to you. This exhibition calling Roman Catholicism a foreign idolatrous ideology might have just rubbed the Church the wrong way, and so they fixed on (what else?) sex to get everyone up in arms.

You know what they should have been up in arms about?

A day earlier former first lady Imelda Marcos joined the growing protest over the exhibition. She said Mideo Cruz’s exhibition at Manila’s cultural centre had “desecrated” something sacred. Mrs Marcos is one of the country’s main patrons of the art and founded the cultural centre in the 1970s when her husband Ferdinand was president. She saw the exhibition for herself and said she was “shocked” by it. “There were so many symbols of the male organ there – something sacred to be desecrated. It is sad, and it should not happen here in the cultural centre,” said the 82-year-old.

The BBC uses the word “president” a bit too liberally. Ferdinand Marcos was a brutal dictator whose bloody reign was marked with corruption, violation of human rights, and assassination of political rivals. It was only 25 years ago that a huge populist uprising eventually forced him into exile, taking with him large sums of money that he and his wife embezzled from the country they had ruled mercilessly. It is thanks to his corrupt and cartoonishly-evil rule that the Philippines is in the kind of shitty shape it’s in now. And his wife has taken it upon herself to express her “shock” at how something beautiful has been desecrated. The irony of hearing this from the lips of someone who so thoroughly desecrated the principles of democratic government made my eyes swim a little.

I am not offended by this exhibit. I was slightly offended, for example, by some of the more lurid exhibits at the slavery museum in Amsterdam. I am very offended by the depiction of black men as sexual subhuman animals in pornography. Every fibre of my being – everything I have ever believed in, the very bedrock upon which I build my life, is offended by the bullshit that is the closing of an art exhibit because you don’t like the art. However, it doesn’t matter at all what offends me – I don’t have a right not to be offended. But then again, I am a rational human being, not a goddamn barbarian.

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Won’t get fooled again

One of the things that blows me away about history and human nature is that there’s really only a handful of stories that get told again and again. While we appear to be facing new challenges all the time, there is so much that even a basic grasp of history and psychology can teach us about just how not-new our problems are.

Pete Townsend certainly seemed to understand this:

This song could have been written yesterday, as far as Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, particularly the seemingly-prescient line “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Egyptian forces swinging electrified batons and shouting the battle cry “God is great” swiftly chased off dozens of activists Monday who had refused to end four weeks of renewed protests at Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Hundreds of riot police backed by armoured vehicles and soldiers moved in to tear down a camp of dozens of tents after a group of activists — some of them relatives of people killed in the national uprising that toppled ex-president Hosni Mubarak in February — refused commands over loudspeakers to go home. Some in the crowd, whose demonstration aimed to pressure the country’s military rulers, hurled stones at the police.

Just a side note: anyone who isn’t immediately terrified by the prospect of a police officer shouting praises to his god before charging into a crowd of people with the intention of hurting them… there’s something wrong with your head. Of course, many of you who have been reading this blog for a while will remember how much emphasis I put on what is being called the Jasmine Revolution. Anti-government protests started in Tunisia, and rapidly spread throughout the Arabian peninsula. I was admonishing you to pay attention to what was going on, because it will have profound implications on the future of the planet.

While I have stopped talking about the developments there (short attention span? more sexy news items?), my opinion of them hasn’t changed and I have been watching as closely as I can. I hope you have been too, because it hasn’t become less important. The story above, of police tamping down on protesters, should resonate with those of you who’ve been paying attention for two chief reasons. First, because it happened in Tahrir Square, which is the site of the original anti-Mubarak protest that captured the world’s attention back in February. While I don’t really believe in totemistic attachments to geographical locations (I don’t think that places have souls), but the symbolism of police beating protesters in that particular place is powerful.

The second reason has to do with who is behind the attacks. The police now work for the military council that forms the government. If you remember, during the original riots the military refused to take a side in the conflict and protected the protesters from pro-Mubarak gangs. The people of Egypt praised and thanked the military for upholding their sworn duty to the people of Egypt. Things appear to have changed now:

“They beat people with sticks and electrified batons. I don’t see why they had to use excessive force like this,” she said. State radio reported later that 270 people were arrested, describing them as thugs and criminals.

Also interesting is the fact that protesters are now being described on state radio as “thugs and criminals” – precisely the same language that Mubarak’s government-controlled state radio used to describe protesters in February. It attempted to delegitimize the protests by claiming that they were simply a handful of malcontents who were only there to cause trouble. Of course that wasn’t the case at all – they had real concerns about government conduct and human rights abuses. The same is the case now:

Many activists are skeptical that a military council headed by Mubarak’s longtime defence minister can deliver on promises of democratic reforms before returning the country to civilian rule. They also accuse it of dragging its feet with prosecutions of regime figures and say it has so far failed to weed out Mubarak loyalists from the judiciary, police and civil service.

What I find fascinating is the level of hypocrisy and myopia we see in human beings when they (we) gain power. Now that the military is running the show, they are adopting the exact same pattern of behaviour as those they helped to oust. They are using force to quell political protest – in direct violation of the stance they took less than a year ago. They are lying about the motivation of dissenters – which they must know doesn’t work because they were there on the streets the first time it failed. And perhaps most chilling of all, they are doing it with the name of their god on their lips – not a good sign in what is trying to become a secular democratic state.

There are two potential explanations I can conjure for this phenomenon. The first is cynical – the military had been looking for an opportunity to supplant Mubarak’s rule but for some reason couldn’t until there was public hatred for him. Now that he (Mubarak) is out, the army can take over permanently, and was just using its temporary political powers as a ruse for long-term despotism. The second is perhaps a bit more optimistic – that human beings in power will inevitably become corrupted by that same power. When someone sees themselves as representing the ideals of a nation, then any personal opposition to them is tantamount to treason. In such a scenario how could you see legitimate criticism as anything other than sedition?

While that doesn’t sound terribly optimistic, it does tell us what we have to do as a society to ensure that our political organizations are stable and sustainable – we cannot allow power to become consolidated in the hands of a few individuals. Power must rest with the people, and the governmental organizations must be responsive to the people’s needs. Without that kind of underlying philosophy, even those that we once thought of as heroes will quickly turn villain.

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Evidently ecstatic

There was once a time when I could have been accurately described as ‘pro-police’. I recognized that in order for a society to progress, we needed to have some way of enforcing law. A society without laws quickly degenerates into violence, and it was thanks to the tireless efforts of police officers and other members of the justice system that we were such a peaceful place to live. I would openly and unashamedly take the police’s side when debates came up in our high school (we had a pair of police officers on constant patrol on our campus). However, as I’ve become a bit more aware of the world and the nuances of the argument, my knee-jerk support for the police has diminished quite dramatically. While I have not yet gone quite to the extent of labeling police indiscriminately as a gang of threatening thugs, events like the travesty that was the G20 summit are moving me in that direction.

I still believe in the principle of rule of law, and I doubt that will ever change. However, I no longer see police as being reliable arbitrators of law. Again and again, we see examples not only of police abusing their power to circumvent justice for themselves, but of such abuse actually undermining justice for others:

The Richmond trial of five men accused of running a multi-million dollar ecstasy lab has been thrown out of court because of what a provincial court judge says were repeated Charter of Rights violations. In January 2007, Mounties uncovered nearly 100 kilograms of ecstasy and nine pill presses in two Richmond homes following a year-long investigation. Tin Lik Ho, Qing Hou, Shao Wei Huang, Yi Feng Kevin Li and Kai Lai Kyle Zhou were all charged with producing ecstasy and possessing ecstasy for the purpose of trafficking. But in a 30-page provincial court judgment, Judge Paul Meyers issued a scathing indictment of the RCMP’s handling of the case. “The police officers who were in charge of this investigation, from start to finish, violated so many Charter rights of the accused persons, that one might have thought that the investigation took place before the Charter of Rights had been enacted,” Meyers wrote.

Asking a conservative what this story represents will yield a very different response than if you ask someone who actually understands what she/he is talking about. A conservative commentator will point out that this is a prime example of the “hug a thug” mentality that liberals have – prioritizing the rights of criminals over the rights of decent, hard-working Canadians. This judge is clearly a liberal activist that doesn’t care about seeing criminals punished for their crimes, or of drugs spreading through communities where they destroy the lives of the young and innocent.

Someone with a slightly more realistic understanding of the legal process will recognize that this is the sign of a healthy legal system (the abuses of the police notwithstanding). Undoubtedly, these men are dead to rights – the drugs were found in their homes along with the method of manufacture. This was not the case of a handful of pills trying to make a quick score, or some guys who just really really like to get high – these guys were mid-level traffickers of a restricted substance. They absolutely belong in jail. However, in their handling of the case, the RCMP decided that their apparent guilt justified shredding the charter. While judges regularly look the other way for slight abrogations of legal rights in clear cases of guilt, Judge Meyers’s report details the extent to which these particular officers decided that they were above the law.

BC's RCMP reveal their new recruitment mascot

The reason why this ruling is good is because there are countries in the world in which those accused of crimes are treated as already-guilty. We don’t like those countries – they tend to use that justice system to lock up political dissidents. Neither the presumption of innocence nor the presumption of guilt will result in a perfect system; however, one will ensure that fewer innocent people are imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. We can always produce evidence of guilt – evidence of innocence is almost impossible by definition.

More interestingly, it seems as though the slipshod method of being “tough on crime” actually creates more crime than it prevents:

What’s more interesting than the finding that drug prohibition causes gang-on-gang violence is our inability – or is it unwillingness? – to learn from repeated demonstrations of this connection. For some reason, we seem to think that what’s happening in northern Mexico – where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Mexican army – is somehow different from what’s happening in Winnipeg, where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Winnipeg Police Service. There is a difference in scale, to be sure, but not in kind. Drug prohibition enriches organized crime, and police crackdowns on drug suppliers provoke gang-on-gang violence over market share.

We know from abundant evidence in other counties that the kind of drug enforcement strategy we use in Canada is not particularly effective at actually reducing crime. This analysis from The Mark suggests that, to the contrary, it actually increases the rate of violent crime as market forces inexorably drive up demand whenever supply is interrupted. If we were trying to reduce crime, we’d change our strategy – we’d do what it took to actually protect the populace against its dangerous elements. However, it is clear that we are not interested in reducing crime, which raises the question of what it is we are trying to do.

It is when we betray the liberal principles of crime prevention and harm reduction that we begin to see the corporatization of law enforcement. For-profit law enforcement strategies only serve those who make profit from crime. If our interest is in doing whatever it takes to ‘punish’ criminals by locking them up, we’ll see more examples like the Richmond case where the rights of the people become a secondary interest to serving and upholding law enforcement’s sworn duty to protect and serve the people.

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I get e-mail

Regular readers will remember a couple of weeks ago when I went to Amsterdam and stuck it to the reactionary jerk-offs that wanted to burn one of my favourite books. Well I dedicated that post to the author, Lawrence Hill. Mr. Hill’s books have been a major source of inspiration for me both as a writer and as someone interested in race. I sent him a copy of my post, thinking that he’d appreciate knowing that his fans aren’t down with the whole ‘book burning’ thing:

My name is Ian Cromwell, and I am a big fan of your work. You can certainly understand how dismayed and enraged I was when the group in the Netherlands threatened to burn your book over something as silly as misunderstanding the title. I share your outrage over book burning, as I am myself a staunch supporter of free speech as a fundamental right and key to our cultural survival.

I was recently in Amsterdam for a conference, and I took the opportunity to visit the same park where the book burning took place. I brought my own copy and took a couple of pictures, as basically a one-finger salute to the Philistines that think that fire is an appropriate response to disagreement in this century (without bothering to read first, clearly).

They’re up on my website (http://crommunist.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/this-post-is-for-lawrence-hill/). If you would like copies of them, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am looking forward to your next book, and cannot fully express my appreciation for the way your work has helped clarify some feelings I always had but couldn’t really put into words.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Cromwell

I was pleasantly surprised when I got this response:

Hello Mr. Cromwell,

Thanks so much for your words (and photos) of support, with regard to those who were burning the cover of my book in  The Netherlands.  It meant a lot to me to hear from you, and from others who were equally appalled to learn that Mr. Groenberg was planning to burn the book in Amsterdam. I join you in your feelings about freedom of speech as a fundamental right and key to our cultural service (although I would draw the line at hate speech). You probably know that I wrote an opinion piece for The Toronto Star about the book burning:

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/1012068–what-lawrence-hill-tells-dutch-group-planning-to-burn-his-book

If you are willing to send a photo or two to me, for my own personal archives, I would be very grateful.

Wishing you all the best with The Crommunist Manifesto! Great title for a blog!

Sincerely,

Lawrence Hill
[email protected]

In the common parlance of the internet, squeeee! While I think we’d have a lot to hash out with regards to our stances on hate speech, I’m really happy that he wrote me back. I’m going to see if I can parlay this into an interview someday.

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Perhaps a more attractive droid?

There is a particular paradox with my post this morning that I didn’t really go out of my way to point out. That paradox has to do with finding a case that we (as free speech advocates) can sell to the public as an argument for unrestricted free speech rights. Its self-contradictory nature comes from the fact that in a liberal society that respects the rule of law, there aren’t a lot of examples of unpopular speech that the public can really get behind. The most common form of unpopular speech is based in hatred and intolerance, and you can’t really rally too many people behind that message.

But perhaps, with a bit of work, we can convince people of the merit in this:

A Dutch court acquitted right-wing politician Geert Wilders of hate speech and discrimination Thursday, ruling that his anti-Islam statements, while offensive to many Muslims, fell within the bounds of legitimate political debate. Judge Marcel van Oosten said Wilders’s claims that Islam is violent by nature, and his calls to halt Muslim immigration and ban the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, must be seen in a wider context of debate over immigration policy. The Amsterdam court said his public statement could not be directly linked to increased discrimination against Dutch Muslims.

I will do myself the favour of stating unequivocally that I don’t like Geert Wilders, and will explain briefly why that is.

I do not buy the argument that the forces of Islamism are plotting a gradual takeover of Western society. It’s a fear-driven conspiracy theory carefully stoked in the xenophobic parts that inhabit all of us. It is convenient to our story-telling brains to dichotomize world events into “forces of good” and “forces of evil”. Hell, even I’m guilty of it (kind of… I trust my readers are aware of the sarcastic irony behind my categorization).

The reality is more like a variety of several ideologies, each competing for finite political real estate. The Islamist ideology is indeed fighting for supremacy, but not at the expense of Christianity. Islamism isn’t trying to “take over” any more than communism is trying to “take over” – all ideologies are fighting for dominance. This is where Wilders is wrong – he contrasts Islamic domination with Christian domination, when neither of these ideologies is truly dominant. While modern-day Europe owes a great deal to traditions laid down under true Christian ideological domination, most of the freedoms we enjoy today were despite Christian dominance (or rather, in the face of it) rather than because of it.

That being said, the world would be a much better place under the current situation of formerly-Christian secularism rather than an Islamic theocracy. Islam is, as written, much more hostile to the idea of religious pluralism than Christianity – I am happy to grant that. But the fight is not between an Islamic state and a Christian one – it’s between an absolutist state and a pluralistic one. Christian theocracy frightens me just as much as Islamic theocracy. Insofar as Wilders opposes an absolutist state, I am 100% with him. Where he and I differ has to do with his inability to divorce the ideas of Islam and absolutism. The two concepts are overlapping, but only mildly more so than are Christianity and absolutism.

Now, that covers basically where my position differs from Wilders’. The purpose of this post is to point out that what he said was a critique of an ideology, not the people who hold it. Mr. Wilders has gone out of his way several times to make this distinction – it is the religion of Islam he is criticizing as barbaric and dangerous. To the extent that individuals belonging to a religious group follow its strictures to varying degrees (and each insisting that theirs is the ‘true’ way), individual Muslims may or may not represent threats to secular society, just as individual liberals may or not represent threats to capitalism, for example. The courts have ruled precisely along these lines – criticism of ideas does not constitute hate speech, even if those ideas are religious or belong to a minority group.

It is precisely because this case lies on the balance of opposing concerns – distrust of religious extremism and distaste for intolerance – that it can be such a useful case to bring the free speech argument into the public sphere. You don’t have to like Geert Wilders to recognize that categorizing criticism of fanaticism as “hate speech” has very dangerous consequences that will do more to undermine secular society than all the forces of Islamism ever could.

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Free speech advocates: this is not the droid you’re looking for

I am in something of an unusual position, being an outspoken crusader both for human rights and for free speech. It crops up in my discussions of hate speech as a free speech issue again and again. The reason why I say my position is somewhat unique is that usually those who defend absolute speech rights ally themselves on the side of anti-gay, racist and/or sexist bigots. Their position tends to be “I shouldn’t be punished for saying hateful things.” My position is a bit more nuanced – I think that the definition of ‘hate’ is imprecise, and that while we should take note of it, it is far too tempting for the state to abuse the power to criminalize unpopular speech.

A recent court case has free speech advocates salivating like starving wolves in front of a fresh kill:

A comedian who was fined by the BC Human Rights Tribunal after a confrontation with a lesbian couple at a Vancouver restaurant is appealing the decision, arguing the province’s human rights legislation shouldn’t apply to stand-up comics. The tribunal ruled in favour of Lorna Pardy, a gay woman who testified that Guy Earle shouted gay slurs and other insults at her and her girlfriend from both on and off the stage during a comedy show in 2007. Earle and the restaurant were ordered to pay a total of $22,500 in compensation.

Human Rights Tribunals are the bane of the bigoted set. They are intended to find a way to balance respect for human rights with civil liberties, and are empowered to levy fines against people found guilty of discriminating, propagating hatred, or otherwise violating people’s charter rights in ways that aren’t expressly criminal. While they are an imperfect tool, they represent an attempt to uphold the rights of individuals to live free of persecution and hatred.

The reason why my fellow unrestricted speech advocates are so hot about this particular case is because on the surface, it reads like the story of a comedian who made some off-colour comments about lesbians in the context of a comedy performance, and who was subsequently brought up on charges by some overly-sensitive bleeding heart liberal lesbos in the audience who can’t take a joke. ‘Political correctness gone mad!’ has been the cry. ‘How can we allow these Tribunals to bulldoze over the rights of performers to make jokes? Can we only tell knock-knock jokes from now on?’

Hey guys, ‘Knock, knock”

Who’s there?

A maniac that went on a hatred-fueled tirade against two women in the audience that went well beyond the boundaries of his act. A maniac that went on to bodily assault those women when they tried to stand up for themselves. A maniac that completely lost his cool and continued to berate them after his stage show had finished.

Yeah, not so funny a joke now, is it?

If the case had merely been an echo of Michael Richards’ racist tirade against black people, or Tracey Morgan’s recent statement where he said he would stab his son to death if he (the son) came out as gay, then I’d be decrying this decision right along with the rest of my fellow speech defenders. This isn’t that, though. This is the case of a guy who wasn’t content to simply humiliate a pair of women who he claimed were heckling him (this is disputed by the women, who say he began harassing them for the arch-crime of kissing each other), but went on a rampage against them even after he was off stage.

My fellow speechies are holding Mr. Earle up as an example of the overreach of the Tribunal process, but if anything it shows that there are times where clearly some kind of intervention is needed. What occurred at the restaurant was far beyond what one would consider reasonable fare for a comedy show, where the abuse begins and ends on stage. Guy Earle is not the victim of an oversensitive system that bends to every errant whine from a minority group – he’s the perpetrator of a shocking and unacceptable verbal assault that crossed the line from joke to serious when he put down the microphone.

I am not sure what mental deficiency it is that makes my colleagues unable to understand nuance and irony, but it has them hitching their wagon to a horse that isn’t so much dead as it is running in the opposite direction they want to go. If the battle is indeed to bring the free speech argument into the public consciousness – to sell the idea of unrestricted free speech rights to the marketplace of ideas then they’ve picked a real stinker of a human being to make their/our case on.

That being said, if this were a simple free speech issue, I’d side with Mr. Earle in a heartbeat, no matter how despicable a human being I might think he is. What he said on stage may have been defensible speech, but the extent to which he allowed it to go is indefensible conduct. Speech, no matter how hateful, is crucial to the conduct of our society – parasites like Guy Earle undermine the very idea of free speech.

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Law and Disorder

Occasionally, events conspire to force me to subtly shift the focus of this blog. What started as a forum specifically for issues relating to race, free speech and religion has since expanded to include feminism, LGBT, law, politics, psychology, and secularism. To this litany of overlapping topics I am about to add a new one: crime.

As you may know if you pay attention to those sorts of things, Vancouver recently had a riot that followed a hockey game. Windows were smashed, people were stabbed, cars were lit on fire – it was a real shit show. It is inaccurate to label them as ‘hockey riots’ though, because they had nothing to do with the result of the hockey game. People came to the downtown area from surrounding municipalities with the sole purpose of causing damage – they brought rocks, gasoline, and masks to hide their identities from cameras.

Of course, such an event necessarily included response by law enforcement, who have been taking quite a bit of criticism for failing to react faster, or more thoroughly, or taking whatever steps were necessary to prevent widespread violence:

Vancouver police are defending the number of officers on the street during last week’s riot, saying it was about the same during the gold-medal hockey game in the 2010 Olympics. “It is true that about 5,000 officers were brought in from other jurisdictions for the Olympic Games, but those officers were for deployment by the Integrated Security Unit inside venues from Richmond to Whistler.

The Vancouver Police Department policed the streets of Vancouver, with some assistance from the ISU in the final days,” said a statement issued by police on Thursday. The force is continuing to refuse to release its tally of feet on the street, saying even if it did, it wouldn’t matter anyway because there will always be debate over how many officers would have been enough.

This more or less agrees with my take on the situation. When you have a crowd of 30,000 people involved in a massive orgy of destruction, there’s very little that having more police there can do. This particular paragraph resonated strongly with me:

“The fact still remains that the number of police on the street the night of June 15, correct or not, quelled a violent crowd of 30,000 people in three hours without major injuries or a single complaint of excessive force or unlawful arrest. Our goal once the riot began was to protect lives, end it as quickly as possible.”

This is the role that police are supposed to perform: protect lives and property (in that order of priority), and to respect the constitutional rights of even those that are committing crimes. The response from the VPD was measured and lawful, and as a result they are enjoying a great deal of public support (the criticisms and questions notwithstanding).

Either police chief Jim Chu is particularly forward-thinking and enlightened, or his policy just happens to coincide with those kinds of principles. At any rate, the VPD’s behaviour seems to reflect an understanding of the fact that the most powerful tool that the police wield is the respect and trust of the people  they are sworn to serve and protect. Respect for the law and those that uphold it is not something that can be legislated or purchased at the point of a gun.

When police behave well, they reap the benefit of not having to work as hard. The immediate response of the people of Vancouver following the riots was to submit photographs and videos to the police department, in the hopes that the police would be able to ferret out those that attacked the city. That is what respect and trust buys you. The other side of this is what happens when people don’t trust you:

Newly released G8/G20 summit documents reveal the RCMP and various Ontario police forces spent several months infiltrating anti-war, anti-globalization and anarchist groups with the use of undercover officers ahead of last June’s summits in Huntsville and Toronto.

<snip>

“A large number of the people charged with conspiracy were arrested prior to anything happening on that Saturday demonstration,” [Laurentian sociology and history professor Gary] Kinsman told CBC News, saying he himself was among the peaceful demonstrators at last year’s Toronto summit. “So the evidence collected from the people who infiltrated the activist groups was basically used to criminalize the organizers, prior to anything actually taking place.”

Using police power to criminalize dissent itself, rather than actual breaking of the law, increases scrutiny and suspicion of police officers. The RCMP and Ontario police’s borderline-illegal (of course, if the police do it, it’s not illegal) behaviour during the G20 summit in Toronto is a prime example of when police overreaching undermines their own credibility. People lose trust in the institution, and begin to demand answers. And, as sure as night follows day, incidents of police corruption are never isolated.

I disagree with anarchist groups, I disagree with anticapitalist groups, I disagree with antiglobalization groups. However, provided they are not breaking laws or conspiring to break laws (which is itself against the law, so maybe that phrase is redundant), I think they have the right to exist. After all, if the measuring stick against which we decide which groups are allowed to exist is whether or not I personally agree with them, then we can just go ahead and disband the Republican North Party right now.

When we allow police officers to infiltrate groups because they don’t like them and arrest people with no evidence of a committed crime, we open the door to criminalizing any political dissent. We have absolutist states in the world where political dissent is illegal – trust me, you don’t want to live in them.