http://www.davidwarrenonline.com ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES - A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Events by David Warren (c)2005 davidwarrenonline.com, David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen. All rights reserved. The best, the most pointed and comprehensive opinion on the award of the Order of Canada pin to Henry Morgentaler, in the course of this long grim week, was by Ian Hunter in the National Post: “In old Canada, Morgentaler was prosecuted and sent to jail for performing illegal abortions. But that was in another era and, as far as I'm concerned, another country -- a country as dead as any of the recipients of Morgentaler’s attentions.” I shall say something about that award tomorrow. For today I want to focus on the New Canada -- the one that is like the old one turned upside down -- and what, if anything, we can do to start putting it right way up again. In everything I write, I am aware that Canada is not an unusual case -- that what has happened here in the course of the last couple of generations has been happening, at different speeds, in every Western country: a form of moral disintegration. Mr Hunter is a professor emeritus of law: one of the last from that “Old Canada,” at sea in the New. I’ve known him for some time now. It was from him I commissioned an article entitled “What’s Wrong with Human Rights” -- a quarter-century ago in my now long-defunct magazine, The Idler. The article explained to readers how the Left had taken hold of the expression, “human rights,” and twisted it, so that it had come to mean the opposite of what it had meant when it acquired its prestige. And in particular, how Trudeau’s 1982 “Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” and the frenzy of other “human rights” acts from that era, with their absolute commitments to various undefined terms, were daggers aimed at the heart of our free society. Prof. Hunter quoted the great American jurisprude, Learned Hand. The spirit of liberty “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it; and while it is alive it needs no constitution, no law, no court.” Hunter himself, born after or before his time -- the possessor of a very fine legal mind -- would have made a great Justice on Canada's own Supreme Court. But that was in the Old Canada; not the New, where our highest bench is warmed, for the most part, by petty-minded mediocrities, who are chosen largely for their fashionable adherence to the ideological bubbles of the day. Yet with the abandonment of the legislative role of our Parliament (on the abortion issue, and most others of a controversial nature), it is upon the superior and supreme courts we now rely for the only remedies we can hope from the bureaucratic proliferation of kangaroo courts -- “human rights” tribunals and the like -- staffed by truly frightful people, whose ideological frothings are neither subtle nor fully sane. We have seen lately what happens when “human rights” commissions turn themselves loose on rightwing journalists and the periodicals that publish them, from Maclean’s magazine, down. We seldom see reported the myriad small decisions, in which defenceless little people are hauled before the tribunals, stripped of all due process, ground down and destroyed both financially and spiritually. In the course of this last grim week, the Ontario government of Dalton McGuinty quietly announced a huge expansion of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, giving its apparatchiks enhanced powers of intrusion, removing the cap on fines, providing a new class of lawyers to assist in prosecutions, and opening 22 new “hearing and mediation rooms” around the province where these star chambers will conduct their quasi-legal proceedings. As a writer who does not subscribe to the “politically correct” ideology, it is reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, they will come for me. Of course I also realize that, in making this statement, I will be mocked by the usual leftwing jackals. But in light of what has already happened in this province and country, my assertion is reasonable. Moreover, I write with the sincerity of a man who has already tasted the New Canadian tyranny, and the threat of imprisonment without due process, under the feminist rewrite of Ontario family law. I was born a free citizen of the Old Canada, and before her God I declare, that I will go to jail rather than acknowledge the legitimacy of any “human rights” commission. I invite other journalists and indeed, every other Canadian, to declare likewise. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=888 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=888 Thinking back on the columns I’ve written for Dominion Day, over the years, I am struck by a tone almost of lamentation. “My” Canada -- she of whose history I remain proud, from Cabot and Champlain through to childhood memory -- the Canada for which my father and his father marched off to Europe -- is not in question here. Little symbols of that Canada still wash up in the flea markets, and I have a relic of it on the table as I write, forming a still life with the laptop, ashtray, and big mug of tea. This relic is a schoolbook, published by the Macmillan Company of Canada, in whose warehouse at Bond Street in Toronto I once shunted boxes as a kid. The thing is properly stitch-bound into a soft cloth cover, so that it has held up nicely through nine decades. It once belonged, according to the fountain-pen inscription on the front endpaper, to a certain Ida Hope, of Leamington, Ont. The book is entitled, Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas -- and is by William Wood, then Lieutenant-Colonel in the Canadian Militia. I am familiar with this author, a capable historian, whose enthralling account of Francis Drake and the old Elizabethan sea dogs once fell into my hands. His little volume, All Afloat -- a survey of historical Canadian boats and waterways, from the Chronicles of Canada series (1921) -- is still on my shelves. Wood’s works are both learned and lively. They are both impassioned, and fair. After mentioning, for instance, cruelties of Spanish conquistadors to aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas, he reminds his reader of what British conquerors did to the Beothuks of Newfoundland. Nor, conversely, does he stint in praise of the great seamen and vessels of other lands and empires, when there is occasion. Perhaps it is only my own weak hold on maritime history, but I seldom find him making a statement of fact that requires serious revision in light of later knowledge. Wood’s books are dated only by the fine spirit that infuses them, of loyalty to God, King, and Country. Wood’s was a loyalty founded on love of one’s own, on a genuine and reasonable pride in the accomplishments of his people, and not on belittling what is foreign. Indeed, his loyalty to the British Empire -- of which Canada was then a conscious, self-governing part -- makes him cosmopolitan in a way now lost on his “nationalist” successors, whose outlook is crabbed by narrow, “politically correct” abstractions, and the fears they engender even in writers who are not themselves socialist, feminist, morally relativist, and so forth. This loyalty is the reverse of the spirit enunciated by e.g. Stephen Harper, recently, in his appalling Parliamentary apology for the entire past existence of Canada’s residential schools for Indians. In a craven and cowardly act of political correctness, our prime minister smeared generations of sincere teachers and missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant -- who devoted their lives to serving the Indian children according to their best lights, and to saving whom they could from what was often terrible squalor. We may certainly dispute the methods and even purposes of the best of them: historical revisionism is academic fair play. But to officially tar all these teachers and missionaries together with the few malefactors who abused their trust; and to condemn the whole enterprise in the loaded terms of an explicitly anti-Christian ideology -- this was shameful. Mr Harper played directly to the gallery, implicitly accepting the radical thesis that everything Indian is necessarily in conflict with everything Christian. As a friend who is Cree, and Anglican, said to me: “Truly, a white man who speaks with forked tongue.” The same argued in extenuation that Mr Harper was only acknowledging the standards of today -- that his ignorant historical anachronism is merely a fair representation of what is now taught in every public school. It is, after all, doubtful that he would know enough actual Canadian history to realize that the condemnation he was uttering -- in the name of “tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” “closure,” and various other postmodern idols -- could equally condemn all of our ancestors. In my lifetime I have seen the “re-branding” of my country, and with it, inevitably, the rewriting of our history to accommodate many lies. The project began officially with Lester Pearson’s new flag, in 1964 -- that ad-agency “red maple,” doubling as the emblem of the Liberal Party. Under Trudeau we saw this red maple used as a kind of rubber to erase the old heraldry; and almost every other symbol of Crown-in-Parliament followed into disuse. The proud word, “Dominion,” was among the noble artefacts put out with the trash in annus horribilis, 1982. By such acts -- including, more substantially, the rewriting of our laws -- our governments and our "gliberal" governing class have made it impossible for the patriot of the old order to be a patriot of the new. And the very freedoms we inherited as Canadians now fall, successively, before the State’s new “human rights” inquisitors, as we face an ignominious future. Lamentation, as George Grant once explained, is not an exercise in negativity. On the contrary, it is a celebration of the good that was, and is now lost, and that we would recall to life for posterity, "That posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream." It was Grant who wrote, so prophetically in 1965, his book, Lament for a Nation. With considerable passion, he observed the triumph of Pearson's deracinated technicians and straw men, and the smug new class of media publicists, coolly demonizing the upholders of every noble tradition in Canadian life. Grant was wrong about many topical details, but boldly right in the main. So on this, as on every Dominion Day, let those who can still know how fine a country our ancestors made -- how free and how honourable a Dominion -- remember what was. “Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=887 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=887 As was perfunctorily reported on Thursday, the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, one of three HRCs to which Islamists took Maclean’s magazine for having published Mark Steyn, has self-protectively dismissed the case before it could come to tribunal. The Ontario HRC had previously dismissed it: but with an outrageous statement from its chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to the effect that Maclean’s was guilty of publishing “hate,” nonetheless. She regretted that her commission had no mandate to try the case, but looked forward to a time when this mandate would be extended. A British Columbian “human rights” tribunal did, however, decide that it had jurisdiction over what a Toronto-based magazine could publish, and the show trial against Maclean’s continues there, with judgement awaited. The Alberta HRC continues to try Ezra Levant and his Western Standard magazine (now defunct in print) -- in proceedings that have gone on for more than two years. The Canadian HRC has taken 16 months in preliminary consideration of the case a gay activist brought against the small Toronto-based Catholic Insight magazine. Indeed: prolonged and arbitrary delays appear to be part of the method by which the HRCs bleed their respondents dry with legal and other expenses. I have mentioned only the current cases in which periodical publications have been prosecuted, in the strange new world of “Kafkanada” -- where you can be tried for the same imaginary “hate crimes” in any or all federal and provincial jurisdictions, simultaneously or sequentially. A single complaint by any reader anywhere is enough to launch a secret inquiry. The target has no right to confront his accuser, and will not at first even be told who he or she is. Truth is no defence, the absence of harm is no defence, there are no rules of evidence -- due process is entirely subverted. The inquisitors of these kangaroo courts may ultimately reach any “judgement” they please, after months or years of playing cat-and-mouse with their selected victim. A Protestant minister in Alberta was, for instance, recently ordered to publicly renounce his Christian beliefs, as well as pay a big lump sum to the anti-Christian activist who had prosecuted him, in a case I mentioned in a previous column, and which I am pleased to see is getting wide publicity in the United States even if not up here. “Re-education” programmes are frequently assigned, for which the victim must also pay. All of the complainant’s expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting “human rights” bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists. The people are still sleeping, but some “blowback” has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own “independent” investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.) It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author, Mark Steyn, and the mainstream newsweekly, Maclean’s, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity -- biding their time until circumstances are propitious to “extend their mandate” again. Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada’s HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile “human rights” investigators have been doing, and in due course, their past victims should be exonerated. Given what has already occurred, it is not enough to simply fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that “your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended” must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the foetid swamp of “politically correct thought.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=886 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=886 We finally have a result in the Zimbabwe election. Over the weekend, the man who won it, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from the run-off, thus clinching the presidential poll for the incumbent and loser, Robert Mugabe, after nearly three months of murder and mayhem. An official letter from the challenger’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (which also won the Parliamentary elections), confirmed yesterday that the run-off would not be contested, to save the lives of as many party supporters as possible. Mr Tsvangirai himself immediately sought refuge in the Dutch embassy at Harare, trusting not in his opponent’s magnanimity. He had already been arrested and beaten five times during the election campaign -- in one instance “to a pulp” according to persons who saw him just after his release. Tendai Biti, the MDC’s secretary-general, is in police custody, charged with treason and facing death for the crime of having uttered “premature” election results -- i.e. the aggregate results from polling stations, before the ballot boxes had been locked down, and Mugabe’s Zanu-PF had had a chance to tamper with them. So bad have things now become in Zimbabwe, that the ruling African National Congress in neighbouring South Africa has announced it is officially “dismayed”; and President Thabo Mbeki, who for years has been running cover and interference for the Mugabe regime, is understood to be a little embarrassed. Nelson Mandela -- former South African president, hero and saint of the anti-apartheid struggle, who has so much to say when a democratic polity such as Israel slips into defending itself against armed terrorists -- remains silent about atrocities committed against the black people of Zimbabwe on a scale far beyond any the apartheid regime dreamed of committing against its own black people. Mandela, the picture of discretion in retirement, is able to withhold comment even though he has been verbally snubbed by Mugabe, and even though he alone carries the prestige to mobilize opposition to Mugabe through Africa. The West, and in particular, former Rhodesia’s departed imperial master, Britain, can take no satisfaction in the turn of events. In the Lancaster House Agreement, of almost thirty years ago, Lord Carrington and the panjandrums of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office delivered the future Zimbabwe into the hands of its most revolutionary faction, in the fairly complete knowledge of what they were doing, in order to wash their hands of the place. They knew then that Mugabe was violent and depraved. This is a long and cumbersome diplomatic history to which the moral, in retrospect, needs to be affixed. We must eventually abandon the cynical diplomatists’ belief that by cutting the legs out under the most moderate, reasonable, and even popular faction, and delivering a country into the hands of murderous revolutionaries, “progress” will be most efficiently served. In Zimbabwe today, upwards of three million starve, in payment for post-colonial “realpolitik.” It is worth mentioning that the situation in Zimbabwe might not be much improved, might even, God forbid, be worsened, should Mugabe suddenly be removed from the scene. For the man has created a government in his own image: armed, ignorant, paranoid thugs. All stand to come to a bad end (at least in their own imaginations) should they release for a moment their grip on power. There were credible reports coming out of Zimbabwe, just after the mock-election took place, to the effect that Mugabe’s control had already been seriously relaxed, and a junto was emerging for which he was mere figurehead. Out of a junto, a new strongman generally emerges, as one scorpion out of several in a bottle. While the possibility exists, that Mugabe’s vicious regime may perpetuate itself, and is in fact using the present chaos to adapt itself to conditions after Mugabe’s final departure, I doubt things would in fact get worse. Nature tends to reassert herself, and in a country so well-endowed with magnificent farmland, a people do not stay hungry forever. Moreover, the self-confidence of the regime has depended, since its inception, on its “figurehead.” One thinks e.g. of Cambodia after Pol Pot: for even among us sordid humans, there are few monsters with the sheer stamina of a Pol Pot, an Idi Amin, a Saddam Hussein, a Fidel Castro, or a Robert Mugabe. Two in a row in the same small country would be, after all, a statistical fluke. President-for-life Mugabe has declared on several occasions that, “Only God can remove me from power.” Well, Lord: the ball is in Your court. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=885 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=885 Last Sunday I wrote, and was chastised by several correspondents for writing: “The keystone of the feminist order is ‘domestic violence.’ Men are so universally presented as having ‘anger management issues,’ that even in the extreme case, where a woman has murdered her husband, the court will invite feminist ‘experts’ to argue that the man must have deserved it. And the man in this scene is unable to defend his own posthumous reputation, for dead men tell no tales.” As if in response to this cue, an Ottawa court -- veritably, an Ontario Superior Court -- reached that very evening a "Father's Day Verdict" in the trial of one Teresa Pohchoo Craig. By way of precisely illustrating my remark, the jury responded to “expert” feminist testimony by quashing both first- and second-degree murder charges, convicting her instead only of “manslaughter" for stabbing her husband while he slept. Widow Craig's “support group” was also out in force to hear this latest legal vindication of what we might call “the woman's prerogative” in the post-modern age. Feminist “experts” argued that, even though there was no evidence the late Mr Craig had physically abused his wife, ever, in any way, he was nevertheless guilty of "verbal abuse," for telling her it was “my way or the highway.” This amounted to “battered wife syndrome,” according to Dr Evan Stark, author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, and the star defence “expert.” Widow Craig was also victim of “battered mother’s dilemma,” since the dead man had allegedly told her he’d get custody of their child if she left. The notion that a man would get custody of the child in such circumstances is risible. Mrs Craig had only to make one phone call to the police, or one visit to the nearest women’s shelter, and a living Mr Craig would have been family court toast. The notion that the man in such circumstances will get custody even of his own paycheque, after any kind of “abuse” has been alleged, is similarly risible. One must assume that not only Mrs Craig, but the entire jury, was born yesterday. I am not entirely without sympathy for the widow. I’m sure it was an unhappy marriage. Moreover, I can make an argument for her lawyers: for once courts have begun to accept such meta-physical arguments, as abuse without abuse, a defence lawyer is bound to use them in the interest of his client. I can think of no way to excuse the courts. To grasp the injustice of this case, and of many preceding cases across Canada and around the Western world, one has only to reverse the “genders.” Let my gentle reader imagine, if she will, that Mr Craig had put the pillow over Mrs Craig’s face, while stabbing her in her sleep. He admits to that, but his lawyers argue that he was suffering from “battered father’s dilemma” since he would never see his son again if Mrs Craig left him. Let us also bring in some neighbours to tell the court that the hypothetically deceased Mrs Craig was a shrew, a scold, an alewife, constantly ordering her poor husband about. True, she never hit him, but the hapless fellow was suffering from “battered husband syndrome” all the same, to say nothing of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Further comment is unnecessary. Yes, the law has become “a ass.” But I don’t want to leave this unpleasant subject on a negative note. Let me suggest one practical reform, to make our present legal arrangements less painful, and by way of introducing “feminism with a human face.” I propose some sort of constitutional challenge be brought to the Supreme Court, or even presented to Parliament (though I would prefer it go to the more powerful legislature), arguing for the restoration of a form of capital punishment in Canada on humanitarian grounds. We wouldn't be asking for it in cases of murder, terrorism, etc., but only in those where a woman has decided to terminate a husband or boyfriend. The argument would be that in such cases, the woman herself should be spared the disagreeable necessity of performing the deed, and the man of having to endure an amateur execution that might prove cruel, unusual, and prolonged. Under the system I propose, where a man is to be terminated, his wife or girlfriend would simply provide his name and address to the police, who would then deliver him to a kind of "Morgentaler clinic" for unwanted men. There’d be a slight, but unavoidable paperwork delay, while the police assured themselves that all the man's property would be transferred to his widow or girlfriend by a proper will. (We might also need a court ruling to prevent life insurance companies from refusing to pay out after a man has been “euthanized.”) As a legal formality, there might at first be a standing committee of qualified feminist experts at every "men's clinic,” to pronounce judgment before each execution is performed. Later, our Supreme Court could strike down this formality, as an unwarranted interference in women's "equality rights." http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=884 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=884 It will be recalled, by readers who follow world news, that the President of Iran has on many occasions unambiguously declared both the desire to annihilate Israel, and the expectation that Israel will soon be annihilated. It will also be recalled, that on the balance of evidence, the Iranian state has been working assiduously to acquire the means for this act of genocide. It is in direct defiance of U.N. resolutions to stop enriching uranium, and playing Saddam-like games with U.N. inspectors. If a man were threatening to kill you, and declaring that you will soon be dead, while reaching for a gun, I think most readers would allow you were within your rights to kick that gun out of his reach. The word “genocide” -- which has been seriously cheapened and abused by rhetorical posturing in the “culture wars” of the West -- does have a meaning. It is an awkward word, with the Latin for “kill” tacked onto the Greek for “tribe,” but it acquired a reasonably precise definition in international law when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was promulgated through the United Nations in 1951 (after a little watering down to appease the Soviet Union). And while that Convention was obviously inspired by the Holocaust in which at least six million European Jews were annihilated by Nazi Germany, work towards it had begun much earlier. Curiously enough it had not borne fruit in the days of the League of Nations, owing to the need felt in the 1930s to appease the demands of Nazi Germany. The examples then were the huge massacres of Armenian Christians, across what is now Turkey, of Assyrian Christians, in what is now Iraq, and of Greek Christians along the Black Sea coast, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, during World War I. To this day all these events are disputed in Turkey, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, but the weight of evidence is overwhelming. At least two million died in the death marches, obviously designed not to relocate, but to eradicate these ethnic groups, whose loyalty to the Ottoman cause was profoundly doubted. The relativist phrase, “One man’s terrorism is another man’s freedom struggle” has been popularized by the Left, and could as well be paraphrased, “One man’s genocide is another man’s self-defence.” This playing on words, while avoiding the things the words signify, has become a commonplace of “political correctness” at the present day. A wanton confusion between “genocide,” which is clear and factual and very bloody, and “hate speech,” which is entirely interpretive, has by now been written even into various Western criminal codes, including Canada’s. In international law “genocide” means specific acts intended to physically destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These range from outright massacre, down to imposing conditions in which the group cannot reproduce itself, or its members are forcibly indoctrinated, its children kidnapped, its women systematically raped. “Hatred” is an emotion. It should not even come into the discussion of what genocide means, and is only brought into the discussion to confuse the issue -- to use all the emotions associated with the Holocaust for the purpose of advancing some other dark agenda. The Iranian state is officially represented not only by President Ahmadinejad, but also in similar statements made by other leading ayatollahs, promising the utter annihilation of Israel. Iran openly arms and funds Hezbollah and Hamas, which likewise publicly promise to annihilate Israel. Actual command of a state, or at least a large paramilitary force, is moreover entirely necessary to make the threat of genocide meaningful. For an attempt at genocide requires the means. Some adolescent neo-Nazi, raving on an Internet thread, is not in a position to attempt genocide. President Ahmadinejad is in such a position. Israel recently rehearsed a military operation over the eastern Mediterranean, on a scale and of a kind to foreshadow a raid on Iran’s nuclear installations. Little attempt was made to conceal it, and we can only conclude it was meant to send a breeze up the ayatollahs’ skirts. But rather than condemn the Israelis, reflexively and neurotically, for “war-mongering,” we should confront the cold, hard reality. Under the Genocide Convention, as currently received, Israel would be entirely within her rights to launch such a raid on Iran -- to, by analogy, “kick away that gun.” Alternatively, Iran must demonstrably withdraw those genocidal threats, and unambiguously recognize Israel’s permanent right to existence. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=883 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=883 People abroad, who do not like the United States, and do not wish her well, overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for President. This is clear enough from the polls in Europe, and the desultory remarks of unfriendly statesmen around the world. Alas, anti-Americanism is so rife that Mr Obama enjoys overwhelming support in almost every country. His opponent, John McCain, would only stand a chance in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Iraq. And maybe Poland. The issue is important, for practical reasons, quite beyond the pleasure it would give Bush-haters to watch an Obama inauguration. From the disordered way he has run his campaign, from the list of key supporters he has had to abandon, from his remarkably ignorant statements on foreign policy, and much else besides when away from his teleprompter, it does not follow that Obama would make a bad President. Miracles have happened in history, weak characters turned out to be strong when it counted, and many frightening challenges (one thinks of the 13th-century Mongol threat to Europe) suddenly evaporated. It is unwise to bank on miracles, however. What does follow, is that, should he become President, Barack Obama, and by extension the United States, will be severely tested. The tyrants of this world are not governed by gooey, feelgood notions about “change we can believe in.” A President who strikes them as naïve, indecisive, and poorly briefed, will soon be given the opportunity to prove otherwise. Leaders of Iran and North Korea -- of China, for that matter, even Russia -- will be eager to learn just how far they can get with the new boy, and his unimpressive advisers. They will try things on that they would not think of trying on John McCain. Things like the 1979 hostage-taking in Tehran -- or the myriad Soviet undertakings in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, Grenada -- were worth trying on a President like Jimmy Carter, who would respond with nothing beyond the odd self-righteously futile gesture. They were not worth trying on Ronald Reagan -- as, for instance, the ayatollahs realized, releasing their hostages on the day he took office. This is simply how the world works. The U.S. -- and by extension, the West -- would already be seriously exposed, by the lame-duck Bush administration, backpedalling on every plank of the Bush Doctrine. But there is a measure of protection in the election campaign itself. Tyrants who would relish an Obama presidency hardly have an interest in doing now what would only contribute to the election of McCain. Obama basks in this lull before the storm. McCain, too, would be tested -- all new Presidents are -- but not to the same degree. Moreover, he is unlikely to fail any test that hinges on a U.S. show of strength. The worry, there, would be in the relation of the new Republican President with an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress. The latter might seek to sabotage the former. Has Bush delivered the presidency into Obama’s hands? On his “victory lap” across Europe -- I use the term facetiously -- the receding President met all major heads of government. The people at the top of the leading allied Western governments -- Sarkozy of France, Berlusconi of Italy, Merkel of Germany, Brown of Britain, Fukuda of Japan, Harper of Canada -- have a fairly clear idea of the threats and dangers that confront the West, and of course would not indulge in cheap Bush-bashing even if they wanted to, from the diplomatic imperatives of their offices. But I was struck by how openly other senior figures have told the media, during the farewell tour, that they would “be glad to see the back of the little fellow.” Bush himself, who has been to my view among the most candid and honest of Presidents, confessed to British observers that he was among the authors of his own misfortunes, from the unnecessarily macho rhetoric he used in the run-up to Iraq. Certainly he was insensitive to the aesthetic requirements of European politics -- a Texas bull in a shop full of exceedingly delicate china. A worse failing was the administration’s response to the universal “Bush lied, everybody died” demonization by the Left. Bush and his allies failed to be sufficiently aggressive in response to this (and similar) nonsense -- in which the White House alone was held accountable for intelligence misjudgements that afflicted spy agencies right across the West. Domestically, Democrats who received the same garbage briefings as the President himself, through Congressional intelligence, foreign relations, and armed services committees, came to the same conclusions as Bush, and yet their own words are seldom read back to them. Five short years later, the media allow them to rewrite history. But people believe what they want to believe, and no argument avails against an opponent who is dreaming. (“Change we can believe in.”) It will take another catastrophe to wake the sleepers from their rest. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=882 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=882 For some tens of thousands of fathers, in this Canadian province alone, “Father’s Day” is an especially bitter occasion. These are the men separated from their children by court order, many never to see them again. Each knows that his children have been subjected to a vicious propaganda against him, that in many cases a child’s own mother -- a woman the father once trusted enough to marry -- has turned the child’s heart against him. (I know of many cases.) It could be worse: for the father may have been replaced in his own household by a new man, or even a new woman. Someone who will never care for his children as he did, however badly he may have expressed it; who will at least be lacking the biological compulsion to look out for one’s own flesh and blood. In a further twist, whether or not mom has found a new squeeze, the ostracized dad may be making court-ordered spousal support payments sufficiently onerous to put him on a cot in some closet -- hounded by process servers, and under the threat of jail if his payments fall behind. (I know this experience at first hand.) There is no cure for it. The legal papers make clear -- go to lengths to make clear -- that he will be hounded until the day he dies. Male suicide rates, not only in this province but across North America, are at their highest level since the depth of the Depression in the 1930s. They are four times higher than the female suicide rate, and while no government has the guts to gather statistics on this, it is an easy guess that family court disasters lie behind a large proportion of them. The legacy of feminism has been to make us acutely aware of women’s sensibilities, no matter how frivolous; and obtusely indifferent to men’s, no matter how grave. Men are consistently demonized in the feminist propaganda, women consistently presented as victims, in defiance of the facts of human nature, which show the capacity for evil to be well-distributed. Under the pressure of feminist lobbying, our entire family law system has been skewed so that the man almost invariably pays, the woman almost invariably collects, regardless of the circumstances. Only in the most extraordinary cases is the man granted custody of the children, or even equal access. The keystone of the feminist order is “domestic violence.” Men are so universally presented as having “anger management issues,” that even in the extreme case, where a woman has murdered her husband, the court will invite feminist “experts” to argue that the man must have deserved it. And the man in this scene is unable to defend his own posthumous reputation, for dead men tell no tales. The statistics show domestic violence to be well-distributed between the sexes, although there are knots and wrinkles before we get to that result. For instance, men are actually more likely to physically bully and abuse women than vice versa (on the average, women are physically smaller). On the other hand, women are more likely to physically bully and abuse children and the elderly (who are smaller and weaker than they). And there can be no justice, no approximation to justice, unless each charge is considered on its merits, free of malicious, “politically correct” ideology. I hold no brief for men, or women. They are absolutely necessary to each other, and on their mutual sympathy the future of every society depends. Very few men or women are saints. By no means is any father, who has fallen afoul of, say, Ontario’s Kafkaesque “Family Responsibility Office,” entirely innocent. At the very least he exercised poor judgement in his selection of a mate. But men are not exceptionally evil, nor women neither. Some of each are monsters, in their several ways. All are subject to temptations, and our skewed family law has the effect of putting so many temptations in the way of women, that many fail to resist. Not because they are women, but because of skewed law, many women employ the dirty tactic of laying false charges that, under our present order, will immediately get them custody and whatever else they may want -- with little risk of punishment, even if they are caught lying. This simply stands to reason. Indeed, the removal of common sense from family law -- and its replacement, over the last two generations, with various feminist mantras -- has made this problem almost impossible to fix. For the debate is now inevitably over, “How much feminism is the right amount?” Whereas, there is no "right amount" of feminism, just as there is no right amount of Nazism, Communism, Islamism. For at its core feminism is an ideology, declaring that the interests of one class (women) take existential priority over another (men). To those fathers who had the wisdom to marry good women, and who wake this morning to the joy reflected in the face of each beloved child: You have your reward, and it is very beautiful. Join us now in praying for all the others. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=881 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=881 We (royal) consult Drudge every morning -- at least every morning when we are supposed to be at work -- as we cruise the Internet in our quest for “news.” The BBC website may be better if one wants significant world news of the breaking variety. (What they report may not have happened, but will point to something that may have happened.) Drudge, however, provides a service unduplicated elsewhere. It gives a flash overview of what is impinging, or will presently impinge, upon the mind of Middle America. (Which incidentally includes much of Canada, unbeknown to our MSM.) Yesterday we were directed via Drudge to ABC News, which has gone to the trouble of assembling scientists of the David Suzuki species from all over the world, to ask the following interesting questions: “Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?” Meanwhile their viewers are invited to contribute videos and the like, to affirm the New Age Apocalypse. Anything weird or unpleasant will do. “Scientists” (i.e. of the species mentioned above), who cannot predict the weather the day after tomorrow with any certainty, are nevertheless certain that they understand what it will be like over the next hundred years, and remain untroubled that all their previous long-term predictions failed, including those which might have been got right by flipping a coin. (For instance, the world has been getting cooler, not warmer, for the last few years.) But their message to ABC News is unambiguous: “The world will end unless you do as we say!” This is not an actual quote from any of them, but rather, a fair summation of them all. It is also, by coincidence, the standard message to earth from space aliens in all the classic science fiction movies. I would myself be inclined to take the space aliens more seriously. We turn now to Europe, where the little electorate of Ireland found itself voting in a referendum this week on the future of the Lisbon Treaty. The Treaty in question was agreed by the interacting bureaucracies of all 27 member states of the European Union -- cobbled desperately together to replace a grand “European Constitution” that was shot down by the electorates of Netherlands and France. The deal among them this time was: nobody, but nobody, gets to vote on this, it is far too important to the interests of our bureaucracies. Alas for them, Ireland, and Ireland alone, had a little constitutional provision -- one that would have been effectively expunged by the same Lisbon Treaty. It compelled the Irish government to put the measure to a vote, and the Irish Parliament to abide by the result of the referendum. With all their ambitions for a “streamlined” juggernaut on the line, the bureaucratic masters of Europe set to work on the little Irish electorate. All the mainstream political parties in Ireland itself joined forces to promote the Yes side of the referendum. (In Canada, we remember Meech Lake, then Charlottetown.) Threats were quickly offered, of what could happen to dear little Ireland’s EU-dependant economy if she failed to deliver a Yes. (“Lovely little subsidies you have there. A shame to lose them.”) The message to the Irish voter was unambiguous: “The world will end unless you do as we say!” God bless the Irish. They would seem to have voted No. As an old-school fan of the Westminster model of Parliament, I used to be opposed to referenda. I thought they belonged only on municipal ballots. I was actually in favour of the Meech Lake Agreement, two decades ago, believing at the time it was the least available evil. When Meech Lake went down, I opposed Charlottetown, on the reasoning: “Let’s stop trying to make this machine turn over. Let’s start taking it apart, instead.” The bureaucratic masters of Europe (and their Irish running dogs) complain that innumerable Paddies voted No only because they did not understand the Treaty. I’m sure this is true. And I’m equally sure it was a darn good reason to vote against the Treaty. The notion that citizens should accept, on the word of “experts,” things they cannot possibly understand, is itself inimical to democracy. And while I’m by no means democracy’s biggest fan, it is the only weapon we have against our bureaucratic masters. Always vote No. But watch out for trick questions. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=880 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=880 The pen is reputed to be mightier than the sword -- and probably is, over the longer stretches of history. Over the shorter stretches, the sword is definitive; or, as that great Leftist sage, Mao Tse-Tung, expressed it: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” With its monopoly on power, the State is equipped to suppress the truth. And yet the truth will not die, no matter how many people are punished for expressing it. They may die -- or be imprisoned, fined, compelled to publicly recant, or otherwise silenced and humiliated -- but the truth will survive. Yes, this is a statement of my Catholic faith. But it is also a candid reflection on all of the history I have read: that political power passes away, that truths about God and man resurface, that human freedom is never fully extinguished. Much of the history we know may itself be false, owing to the disappearance of evidence over time; and justice in this world may not be availing. Yet in broad outline, a time always comes when we may review the past, freed from the shackles of the past. The chains of history always rust away. This is a point worth recalling, as we head into a period in Canada when, owing to malice from an ideological camp, to cowardice on the part of our elected representatives, and to indifference on the part of the people, free speech and freedom of the press will disappear in Canada. Those who deviate from the officially-sanctioned lies of “political correctness” will emigrate, perhaps mostly to USA, or experience that peculiar form of internal exile -- of enforced silence -- that good men have shared in many times and places. My own political education was provided in part by several impressive Czech exiles from Communism, with whom I fell in as a young man. What I learned from them is that under an ideological regime, the best men live in jail, or are assigned to work in tanneries and collieries, where other good men may be found. The worst men live in luxury and power. As free speech disappears in Canada, one looks for instance not at the more celebrated cases of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, but at the much less publicized fate of e.g. Rev. Stephen Boisson, convicted by an Alberta kangaroo court (“human rights tribunal”) last November for publicly expressing the Christian and Biblical view of homosexuality, on the say-so of an anti-Christian activist from his home town. Rev. Boisson has now been ordered to desist from communicating his views on this subject “in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet” so long as he should live. He has been ordered to pay compensation to Darren Lund, the anti-Christian activist in question, and further to make a public recantation of beliefs he still holds. Meanwhile, Fr Alphonse de Valk, editor of the magazine Catholic Insight, is being prosecuted by a gay rights activist in Edmonton, for having upheld both sides of the Catholic teaching on homosexuality in the pages of his magazine over more than a decade: that homosexual behaviour is sinful, but that we are nevertheless to love the sinner. That case, in which, as ever, all of the expenses of the complainant are met by the taxpayer, will drag on for some time before the inevitable guilty verdict is delivered, and the punishments to Fr de Valk and his colleagues are meted out. While the case drags on, the small magazine, which exists without state subsidies or significant advertising, on the dime of its several thousand loyal Catholic readers, is being driven towards bankruptcy by the cost of maintaining its own legal defence. These are costs they would not be eligible to recover, even if they won at tribunal. Fr de Valk has written a lead editorial in the June number of Catholic Insight that should be read not only from the pulpit to every practising Catholic in Canada, but by every concerned Canadian regardless of his religious or political affiliations. It is entitled, “Fascism has come to Canada,” and mentions several other major cases in which Christians have been hauled before the country’s “human rights” tribunals, and ordered to abandon their beliefs, pay out to complainants, stage public recantations, submit to indoctrination, etc. -- with little to no media coverage. Alas, there are more cases (they are multiplying quickly), and the “human rights” commissars are not the only source of state persecution. Among the spookiest aspects of these cases is the silence over, and indifference to them, on the part of journalists whose predecessors imagined themselves vigilant in the cause of freedom. As I’ve learned first-hand through email, many Canadian journalists today take the view that, “I don’t like these people, therefore I don’t care what happens to them.” It is a view that, at best, is extremely short-sighted. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=879 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=879 I’m not sure I said enough about domestic violence last week, while attacking a vicious “public service” advertisement from the Canadian Women’s Foundation, designed to focus hatred on “white males” -- though perhaps I did say enough to satisfy some of my feminist readers (or as I call them, affectionately of course, the “shriekie sisters.”) I mentioned the ad as a token for what has in fact been a long-rolling social and political campaign, nay melodrama, dating back before the “take back the night” spectacles of the ’nineties, before the “recovered memory syndrome” hysteria of the ’eighties, before the “pantsuit revolution” of the ’seventies, to the pioneers of “second-wave” feminism in the ’sixties of the last century. The history is itself interesting, and let us quickly surf those waves to understand at least the received jargon of this ideological movement, which has tended to fill all the spaces between Communism, Environmentalism, and Islamism. “First wave” feminism is taken as having consisted of the various women’s rights, suffragette, and temperance crusaders of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. The women, and allied men of this wave, sought to remove actual legal impediments to a woman’s full participation in public life. These were all removed shortly after the Great War. The “second wave,” dating roughly from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique -- a polemic of 1963 that wove strands of earlier feminism together with neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism into a stinging lash -- began with the observation that women remained “subjugated” by false consciousness even after being legally freed, and demanded that the de jure accomplishments of previous generations be consolidated de facto. The target became “patriarchy,” and with this, men qua men. Beneath the radar, the target became women who persisted in behaving like women. This is the feminism I was raised in, and I remember how slowly its tenets seemed to spread -- though in retrospect it was an historical blink of an eye. The cutting-edge “hippie chicks,” who were my precise contemporaries, sought liberation, but continued to dress and behave in stereotypically feminine ways. Indeed, for many men of my generation, those were the last real girls we ever got to see, and we remember them fondly. In what came to be known as the “third wave,” which has now been with us for two decades, the partially comprehensible motives and intentions of the second wave diverged, then converged, and resurged, in a great heaving flood of moral acids, and in the blather of post-modern irrationalism (or “subjectivity” as its exponents call it) -- e.g. “womanism,” “ecofeminism,” “sex-positivity,” “post-colonial theory,” “anti-racism,” “queer theory,” “transgender politics,” and so forth. In this wave, the hatred has become focused on the one remaining excluded group -- the heterosexual white male. And the one remaining rational link between the various acidic “theories” is the need to demonize, then destroy, or at least geld, this sorry masculine creature, wherever he can be found. Needless to say, among those who can count higher than three, various “fourth waves” have been announced more recently. As a “heterosexual white male” myself, the eagerness of many other HWMs to buy into all this was long a mystery. Why try, when you are disqualified by race, “gender,” and sexual orientation? But I’ve come to understand these men. My affectionate term for them is “the castrati” -- nominally heterosexual males who seek the protection of a dominant female, on the analogy of the yappy little poodle on a leash. We all know the type, although for obvious reasons it is seldom in everyone’s interest to admit what we know. Nature continues to assert herself, however, and as I continue to observe at first hand, women prefer men to poodles, at least sexually. (Well, not all women.) Alas for them, the diminishing supply means that more and more must settle for a nasty core of actual psychopaths, who give flavour to the proposition that men are inherently violent. This is in turn another by-product of a “feminized” social and educational order, that denies the value of any kind of manliness -- for it often appears that only the psychopaths survive the indoctrination. So: if the reader has followed my analysis this far, he will grasp that the focus of demonization has further narrowed: to heterosexual white males other than yappy little poodles. These are the men responsible by definition for all the violence in the universe, who must be caged for the sake of everyone else: women, children, the various transgendered, whales, dolphins, monkeys, snails, and all the endangered species of the rainforest. The idea that men, and men alone, are inherently violent -- and that therefore women need special State protection from them in any intimate relations they may enter into -- is among the received premises of the “meta-logic” of post-modern feminism. It is why in a country like Canada today, where statistics still show a remarkably even distribution of actual domestic violence, we have approximately 500 shelters for abused women, and approximately zero for abused men. Oh dear, I have run out of space. Will continue these reflections next Sunday. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=878 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=878 The term “reality check” is often used by the media in assessing the claims of politicians. It could also be applied to electorates, and a nice Gallup poll this week invites us to do just that. It was a test of popular belief in “global warming,” with the usual leading question to suggest the “correct” (i.e. politically correct) answer. So, after a nudge and a wink, 61 percent of Americans are now true believers in this scientistic cult phenomenon, up from 48 percent in 1997. The numbers get interesting when broken down by party allegiance. Among Republican voters, the number of true believers has actually fallen from 47 to 41 percent over the last decade; but among Democrats, it has risen dramatically, from 46 to 76 percent. What makes this such a priceless reality check, is that we can now compare the results to global average temperatures. There was indeed a “global warming” trend for several decades. It ended in 1998. Temperatures then began falling, very slightly, and recently have begun to plunge -- just as in the past. That is to say, warming cycles are followed by cooling cycles. (And vice versa!) To put this plainly: as the evidence for continuous “man-made” global warming disappears, belief subsides among Republicans. But among Democrats it increases, radically. Democrats respond better to words, and the repetition of them. For the one thing that has increased hugely, in the last decade, is the propaganda for “global warming.” I have myself observed this distinction between the Right and Left sides of mainstream electorates in most other Western countries: the Right tends to believe in facts, the Left to believe in “theories”; and as we advance through post-modern irrationalism, those theories become battier and battier. The trend towards “global crazing” was not always there, however. If we go back half a century, differences between Liberals and Conservatives up here, as between Democrats and Republicans down there, did not hinge on “ability to discern reality.” On the facts of life; on moral, legal, and religious principles; on the need to keep government out of our lives and resist tyranny in any other form, there was broad agreement. A “very liberal” voter from the 1950s would pass for a “rightwing dinosaur” today. This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland. I have attributed this to many things, but chiefly to the effects of mass urbanization. People living in vast conurbations become disconnected from nature, and thus increasingly suggestible. The press of crowds enforces conformity, so that we get “school of fish” movements in public opinion. The individual fish believes that the direction of the school has been determined by “experts,” and anyway fears being eaten if he deviates from the consensus in any way. And then you realize that the “experts” are people like Al Gore, and it is too late to panic. So, returning Stateside: we now have, on the Democrat side, the ideal presidential candidate in Barack Obama. Untested and inexperienced, coming from a Chicago wardheel background that does not bear a moment’s examination, he is a master of theatrical words and suggestion. Though eloquent and convincing only when speaking from a teleprompter, he has the wit to avoid spontaneous interactions, and the ability to recover, once back in front of his teleprompter, from extraordinary gaffes. “Change we can believe in!” is one of several blank-content slogans that put an almost sexual thrill into his starry-eyed supporters. Consider this modest remark by Mr Obama, while receiving the nomination on Tuesday: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” It is when such lines are put in cold print, instead of into the mouth of a very fine actor, that the true chill begins to run up one’s spine. Mr Obama had only 143 days of sessional experience in the U.S. Senate, before his Presidential campaign began, so that his positions on most issues cannot be known. But when he was there, his voting record was farthest Left of all 100 senators. Imagine him as President. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=877 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=877 The writings of Canada’s most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada’s obscene “human rights” commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act. I wrote “obscene” advisedly. Before Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, a respondent has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists. I wrote “show trial” advisedly, for there has been a 100 percent conviction rate in cases brought to “human rights” tribunals under Section 13. Take this in: A group of Islamist fanatics, claiming to speak for every Muslim in Canada, charged Maclean’s magazine with “spreading hatred against Muslims” for having printed a lucid and reasonable (if controversial) excerpt from Steyn’s bestselling book, America Alone. This is a news story that should be on the front page of every newspaper in Canada, every day until it is resolved. Everything about this case stinks to high heaven. It was brought before three different “human rights” tribunals simultaneously. The British Columbian venue was openly “jurisdiction shopped” because the province’s human rights tribunals have an especially egregious record for ignoring respondents’ most basic charter rights. The charges were brought more than a year after the article appeared. There was an open attempt at extortion, when representatives of the complainant called a press conference in which an offer was made to retract the charges for unspecified considerations. And so on: a layering of affronts to the most elementary standards of justice and decency. The case is the more ludicrous because the allegations brought are semi-literate (for instance, Steyn’s quotations of lunatic Islamist imams are confused with Steyn’s own assertions). The remedies sought keep changing; the arguments keep changing; the explanation of why the complainant has brought the case and what he hopes to gain from it has kept changing. And now the show trial has begun, the prosecution is presenting a parade of entirely irrelevant testimony. (Has Steyn properly understood the Koran? Etc.) A farce, but a farce that has huge consequences for Canada: for by such methods free speech and free press are being snuffed out. The Left may think they have found the ideal method to silence anyone who challenges their insane, “politically correct” ideas, but have instead created a monster that can as easily eat them next. This is a disaster also for Canada’s Muslims, for the views of fanatical Islamists are being presented as representative of them all. No single person has done so much to advance contempt for Islam in this country as Mohamed Elmasry, president of the “Canadian Islamic Congress,” the complainant in this case -- whose public assertions have included e.g. the view that every Israeli citizen is a valid target for Palestinian hitmen. The bland acceptance of this jackass, by mainstream Canadian media, as the definitive spokesman for Muslim interests in Canada, cannot be blamed on the Muslim community. Innumerable Muslims have disavowed him, and yet are entirely ignored. Indeed: Mark Steyn has been among the few journalists distinguishing between camps. He would be: for he has plenty of Muslim supporters. There is some good news. It appears the Harper government has finally been goaded into calling a public inquiry into proceedings of at least the federal “human rights” commission. Some good may come from public confirmation of the outrageous, often sick behaviour of its members and hangers-on -- which Canada’s leading bloggers have been documenting. But the problem is at once more urgent and much broader than any carefully-focused inquiry can present. For what radical activists have achieved through “human rights” commissions is now endemic, in all kinds of “star chamber” and “kangaroo court” operations, in everything from the tax system to provisions of family law. Another crucial point: While media attention to Mark Steyn’s show trial is inadequate (it is getting more attention in the United States than up here), it is nevertheless the best publicized case ever to come before our “human rights” bureaucracies. Most of the victims of these neo-Maoist tribunals have been “little people,” with nothing like the resources Maclean’s magazine has put in play to defend itself and Steyn, and no media reporting whatever. They have been persecuted, stripped of their livelihoods and savings, demonized among their neighbours, made to endure humiliating “re-education” programmes -- without lawyers, without assistance of any kind -- all for exercising rights that any Canadian would have taken for granted a mere generation ago. I want justice for Mark Steyn. But I also want justice for all these little people, who have been crushed under the jackboot of “political correction.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=876 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=876