Mark Steyn bewails the Dominion of our fundamental incoherence

UPDATE: Welcome! Mark Steyn readers.
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At the time of this writing, the podcast version of TVOntario's debate between Mark Steyn and Mohammed Elmasry's sock puppets has not yet appeared on the web (The Agenda - Video) and so this post is largely in ignorance of what unfolded. We know that a lot of political massaging went into setting up the debate; and while a lot of attention has been given to the sock puppets' reticence to debate the loquacious Steyn - various claims were made of sock puppet cowardice and hypocrisy and of a dhimmified TVO political correctness - it turns out that the three law students from the Canadian Islamic Congress (the Muslim Brotherhood) did in the end have something of a shouting match with Steyn.

However incoherent the shouting was, the mere fact of this event is really a victory for our side, the freedom side; the fact that a "debate" of this kind can still be staged in Canada, that after all the political positioning we can still give way to the arena of free speech to see what truth will come out in uncontrollable manner, is welcome. There are no doubt people in the sock puppet camp who would like to have all "debates" reduced to some sort of ritualistic formula where everyone says only what is proper to say, as if one were engaged, say, in a friendly discussion on proper relations between Muslims and Dhimmis in the offices of the Egyptian state police, as if reality could be reduced to, or captured by, the appropriate declarative statements.

The reports are that there were a lot of lies, or misrepresentations, and general incoherence from the puppets.

Some are calling it the "best 60 minutes of Canadian television ever".

Deborah Gyapong is less positive:

I'm too annoyed and angry to post anything right now. I'm glad Mark Steyn forced the sock puppets to debate him. But clearly, anyone who thinks Mark thinks this is fun, or that he wants to be a martyr, got disabused of this opinion tonight.

Because he has a sense of humor and is usually cheerful, it is easy to think that, oh well, he's fighting this battle on our behalf and it's not really costing him much in terms of stress and time and inconvenience, to say nothing of the money in legal bills.

Think again, folks.

And yet the sock puppets get funded at taxpayers' expense. I have to pay for them to undermine my freedoms and that of every other journalist in Canada.

This makes me furious.

Mark Steyn's post-mortem suggests that the most revealing comments were made after the show was aired:

Well, we did the TVO show and I doubt it was Must-See TV, even by the standards of Canadian public broadcasting. I succeeded in bouncing the Sock Puppets into agreeing to a face-to-face discussion, though it wasn't my finest hour or theirs. I believe the final words of the show were me saying, "Do you wanna go to dinner?", and Khurrum Awan yelling back, "No."

We didn't go for dinner, but we did have a relatively pleasant conversation after the broadcast that I thought was much more productive than the show. Khurrum was a bit chippy but the two ladies, Muneeza Sheikh and Naseem Mithoowani, are rather cute, even when they're damning me as a racist and hater. (Years ago, the BBC used to keep putting me up against humourless Marxist feminists only to find that on air I'd go all sweet on them and just make goo-goo eyes.) One confessed to finding me "mildly funny", which I took as a tremendous compliment until she remarked that she found "Little Mosque On The Prairie" funnier. Evidently by "mildly funny", she sets the bar down at world-champion limbo level. Heigh-ho. Still, even with dear old Khurrum, if I'd met him in an airport lounge on the other side of the world and we were stuck waiting for a flight, I think the conversation would go okayish. The post-show chit-chat was a useful reminder that everybody's media image is a reductio.

Nevertheless, we are stuck in our respective roles. I believe these Canadian Islamic Congress lawsuits - and, yes, I can hear the Socks yelling "That's a lie! They're not 'suits', they're 'complaints'," but that's a distinction without a difference if you're paying lawyers' bills and you regard, as I do, the Human Rights Commissions as a parallel legal system that tramples over all the traditional safeguards of Common Law, not least the presumption of innocence. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I believe these lawsuits are deeply damaging to freedom of expression. If they win (when they win) and the verdicts withstand Supreme Court scrutiny, Canada will no longer be a free country. It will be a country whose citizens are on a leash whose length is determined by the hack bureaucrats of state agencies.
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I was struck by something Naseem said to me on the sidewalk. I'd mentioned that I'd heard her on NPR saying that it was improper for me to attack "multiculturalism" because multiculturalism was officially embedded in Canada's constitution. And I said: So what? A free society shouldn't have an official ideology, but, if it has, I certainly reserve the right to object to it. If I'd lived in Italy 70 years ago, I would have objected to their official ideology (Fascism), and I object to Canada's, notwithstanding its touchy-feelier name. And she looked at me as if I was bonkers. I feel rather bewildered at meeting graduates of an elite institution in one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet who seem to think just because Pierre Trudeau cooked it up it's chiseled in granite. You can only marvel at what an amazing job he did of wiping a society's collective memory. What was the most depressing part of the post-game show for me was realizing that for my accusers the assumption is that every defect in society can be corrected by government intervention. They said one reason they went to the "human rights" thought police is because they're worried Rogers might buy, for example, The Toronto Star and install Ken Whyte, yours truly and the rest of the Islamophobes. Well, maybe. But look: right now, I'm "excluded" from The Toronto Star and so's every other conservative. We're "excluded" from the CBC, which is paid for by the tax dollars of Canadian conservatives. But so what? Society is not perfectable, and for a government tribunal to order the Star to run one Steyn column for every Siddiqui column in runs would only make things worse.

There's some talk on TVO's part of getting us together for a more civilized discussion, so we'll see how that works out. My only real objection was when Naseem said "Mark Steyn wants to be a martyr." Actually, that's more of a Muslim problem. (Whoops, Islamophobia alert!) But it's not true for me. I'd like nothing more than never to appear on a single TV or radio show in the deranged Dominion ever again. But the "remedy" they seek for Maclean's "Islamophobia" is incompatible with a free society. This is a point of principle. Here I stand. I can do no other. So on we go.

I kind of believe Steyn when he says he would happily leave the airwaves of this deeply confused Dominion behind.

We should count ourselves damn lucky that we still have Steyn cracking jokes at our expense. For only such people can remind us that many fundamental realities cannot be captured in dry legal or sociological prose. In other words, the law can only capture that part of reality that is suited to institutionalization, to monumentalizing the more important of our historical revelations, as if these revelations were not the particular product of a specific historical context, a specificity that always has some irreducibly mysterious element, but rather something we need to divorce from our consciousness of a particular and somewhat mysterious scene, in order to give it universal reign.

But while ordinary laws try to institutionalize creative discoveries, by allowing humourless lawyers to iron out what something meaningful and mysterious means, a nation's constitution should be limited to the problem of how to allow for the freedom necessary for creative people and mysterious discoveries to emerge, to be rejected or accepted and modified, and, if accepted, to be institutionalized. In other words a constitution should exist to allow for self-constituting processes necessary to meet unforeseeable national needs and exigencies, so that a nation may reconstitute itself through some kind of free and creative, but accountable, process. A "constitution" that tries to set in stone some great balancing of all existing rights and freedoms, individuals and groups, is only a vain attempt to fix reality, a fanciful metaphysical gymnastics, something our inherently dynamic and changing humanity cannot long fathom, however many lawyers we keep employed.

Yet any google on words like "multiculturalism" and "Charter of Rights" will dredge up a slough of horrific publications by agents of the Canadian state, great metaphysical gymnasts mind you, trying heroically to justify their existence and the overbearing necessity that they guard us from too much freedom, with which we might do each other too much harm, and threaten our fundamental "equality". Here's one such research document from the Library of Parliament:

In 1982, multiculturalism was referred to in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 27 of the Charter states:

This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

This clause is critical in locating multiculturalism within the wider framework of Canadian society. It empowers the courts to take Canada’s multicultural reality into account at the highest levels of decision-making. In the words of a former Human Rights Commissioner, it provides a useful “interpretative prism” to assist the courts when balancing individual and multicultural (and often collective) rights. A relevant example is the issue of freedom of individual expression, which must take account of the prohibition against racial slurs or circulation of racially based hate propaganda. Hence, the principle underlying the freedom of individual expression does not extend to absolute free speech.

Moreover, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms addresses the elimination of expressions of discrimination by guaranteeing both equality and fairness to all under the law, regardless of race or ethnicity. Section 15(1) states:

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.

In addition, subsection 15(2) establishes entitlement to non-discriminatory benefits without denying the need for additional measures to assist disadvantaged sectors.

We need more Steynian humour to point out the incoherence of writing like this, the hubris of the bureaucratic classes who act as if there is some way to balance all claims on and against the state. As I've already suggested, what makes a workable constitution in a democracy is not attempts at a thorough delimiting of rights in recognition of some putative social reality, "multicultural" or otherwise (as if there were some ideal formula for balancing individual and group rights, as if one could, say, bestow aboriginal rights on tribal entities and not thus cripple the free individuality of "aboriginal persons"), but rather a way of minimally expressing the means by which a society will (re)constitute itself through the exercise of responsible freedom. And that means there must always be room for the free individual willing to take the first mysterious step, a step that always must be done by one alone, even when in committee.

Anyway, since when are Human Rights Commissioners to be taken as authoritative on the meaning of the Canadian constitution, which is the product of a thousand years of charters and conventions and is yet still hardly explicit about outlawing racial slurs (whatever the Canadian high court's rulings legitimizing the Canadian Human Rights Act which does try to outlaw racial slurs)? One might ask, where exactly is the limit of an (im)permissible racial slur? Is saying that the French approach to constitutional law is insane, while the American is the seed of wisdom, a racial slur? Is saying that Canada has a "racist" past (compared to what other country or tribe's past, all of which are "racist"?) a racial slur? I recently witnessed a little PC brouhaha on a camera discussion list after someone spoke favourably of "the latest Jap model". Is that kind of naive usage to be grounds for legal claims in Canada? What about those who refer to "Sharia creeps"?

I am belabouring my point, no doubt, but attempts to formulate constitutional principles in the manner of the above quotation quickly get ludicrous. The emperor always loses his clothes, sooner or later.

Mark Steyn says the sock puppets cannot understand his defense of the Common Law as having superior constitutional sensibility than Trudeau's Charter of Rights. The latter, it seems to me, is less a model for how society can (re)constitute itself than a set of rules by which courts can limit Parliament's legislative authority, not so much as to advance our individual rights and freedoms vis a vis the state (though that is part of it), but rather to empower the authority of another branch of the state, i.e. the courts and the politically-correct expert class from whom the courts take their lead. But fortunately, Trudeau did not fully get his way with the provincial Premiers of his day and the Charter thus recognizes the democratic principle of Parliamentary Supremacy in its notwithstanding clause (as well as in the Charter's deferral to what is inalienable in a "free and democratic society"). In theory, if Parliament wants to pass a law outlawing or even requiring racial slurs, notwithstanding the Charter, it could.

In any case, the Gnostic "progressives" who dominate Canada's expert bureaucratic class like to think they are on the cutting edge of some daring social experiment in "diversity" and "multiculturalism". In fact, in many respects, there is little new under the sun of those who would reduce the ongoing generation of our national reality to baroque legal formulae. Across Lake Ontario from the studios of TVO lives, in Oswego, that former outpost of the British empire, one of America's great essayists, Tom Bertonneau. I think it's not too hard to locate Steyn and Canada in what Bertonneau writes about the ancient multicultural or "ecumenical" empires being in opposition to the self-ruling and self-constituting polis of the West's classical age:

The tension between the emergent "private person" and the state, by no means resolved in l’affaire Socrate, would become increasingly dire in the Ecumenic Age, to borrow [Eric] Voegelin’s term, that followed the dissolution of Athenian independence, taking the form of the succession of mundane empires beginning with that of Philip of Macedon and culminating with the Pax Romana, both in its first or Pagan and then again in its second or Christian phases. One puts it so notwithstanding the fact that a "Christian Empire" is another contradiction in the adjective.

What is the "ecumene"? A definition is needed because irony has a relation to the phenomenon. In the fourth volume (1974) of his Order and History (begun 1957), entitled The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin adduces a definition that one remembers for its poignancy but that eludes later relocation in his text. Voegelin says that whereas a polis is a subject that governs itself, an ecumene is a parcel of geopolitical existence--consisting possibly of hundreds or even thousands of poleis--over the possession and control of which contending concupiscent aggressors destructively battle. Says Voegelin in a passage that this author has providentially succeeded in locating: "The ecumene is not a subject of order but an object of conquest." It is also "a graveyard of civilizations." Thus the vast swath of earth subdued by Alexander the Great immediately becomes a desire-object for the contentious successors, who carve it up duodecimally; they run into Parthian and Hindu limits in the East, where the locals respond mimetically to the pattern. The Pax eventually reconciles competing Hellenic claims by swallowing Hellas whole. The individual becomes more, not less, "ambiguous" than previously he was.

At the historical noonday of the Pax comes Lucian of Samosata (125-200), an almost exact contemporary of the "Philosopher King" Marcus Aurelius (121-180) who, like Hegel many centuries later, conversed mainly with himself, as in his Meditations. Talking to oneself is "cud-chewing," says Kierkegaard in an aside on the Prussian illuminatus in The Concept. Talking to oneself is also inalterably derivative, in a defective sense, of the norm of talking with other people, in the same way that atheism is inalterably derivative of the norm of belief. Dialogue falls existentially prior to monologue just as belief falls existentially prior to denial. Lucian, a Syrian by birth and a Greek by education, scandalously but predictably did not receive a network television contract nor has his work appeared on DVD, although his repartee entails greater ironic subtlety by far than one-time matriculating SUNY Oswego undergraduate Jerry Seinfeld’s. Trained in Athens in rhetoric, the acknowledged royal road to power and riches of the time, Lucian experienced something like conversion, after which he scorned oratory and its pretenses; he wrote dialogues filling the Platonic form with the content of the New Comedy. He became, as far as historians can discern, the producer, writer, and stellar performer in a satirical road show that took him from Attica all the way to Gaul, during the course of which, as one says, he consistently packed the houses and brought down the rafters. Think of Saturday Night Live thirty years ago when the sketches were funny. Commentary takes Lucian’s Two Charges of Literary Assault, written around his fortieth year, for autobiographical. In Plato’s Apology, three orators bring the charges against Socrates; in Two Charges, Oratory herself, or rather Rhetoric, brings indictment against Lucian, but then so does Dialogue, in a case adjudicated by none other than Justice, ably assisted by Hermes, both examining the case at the behest of Zeus.

Before the gathered crowd (it more resembles a rabble), addressing herself to the jury and the two judges, Rhetoric complains: "It was I . . . who came upon this man, still wandering around Ionia not knowing what to do with himself. . . . He was pretty young, still spoke a barbarian language and was a hair’s breadth from going native and wearing an Assyrian-style kaftan"; after she made him both eloquent and rich, "he fell passionately in love with that bearded fellow, Dialogue . . . who clams to be the son of Philosophy." Where previously the Syrian spoke with the ennobled "free flow of my language," Rhetoric says, he now merely "weaves a few brief arguments together and speaks them in a conversational tone"; instead of adhering to the topics, he deploys "novelty." Rhetoric asks Hermes to force the Syrian to reply in dialogue, but Hermes points out that, as "there’s only one of him," he will need to defend himself in a speech. The Syrian says that while he was grateful for having been married to Rhetoric: "There came a time when I saw that she was not behaving sensibly any longer, nor retaining the seemly dress which she wore when the famous demesman of Paeania [Demosthenes] took her as his bride. Instead, she was wearing jewelry, had coiffured hair, had rubbed rouge all over her cheeks, and had a black line drawn under each of her eyes." (Take my wife--please!) The jury votes; the Syrian wins with only one vote against, after which Dialogue steps up to the dock to present his case. Dialogue lays it against the Syrian that: "He took off my sensible mask and put on another, comic, satyr-like and almost ridiculous. Then he shut me up in the same room with joking, iambus, cynicism, Eupolis and Aristophanes--men terribly clever at criticizing serious things and pouring scorn on what is right and proper."

As they say, read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: Tom Bertonneau, Mark Steyn, Elmasry's sock puppets

Are you next? After me?

In an article in today's National Post, Terry O'Neill brings our attention to

Section 7 of B.C.'s human rights act [which] makes it an offence for any person to publish "any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation" that so much as "indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate" against a protected group, or "is likely to expose a person or group or class of persons to hatred or contempt." No actual discrimination or hatred has to occur for an offence to occur. And, as pointed out on these pages over the past few weeks, truth is not a defence.

Did you know you were living in a totalitarian society where you can't speak the truth if there is any chance someone or some group who is privileged, by the state, to be considered more socially or culturally marginal than you, claims to be hurt by what you say or write? Were you aware that to think is to discriminate and, effectively, to hate evil? and that to be human is to be inescapably resentful in some degree, to feel alienated by someone who is closer to the sacred center of attention than are you? Did the British Columbia NDP government that passed the above-quoted section of the Human Rights Act - which should be considered unconstitutional and long ago thrown out (but it's still here) - ever win an election on the question of whether British Columbia should be a totalitarian state where you cannot express (and hopefully make productive) your inevitable human resentments of others?

No, because the people who pass such legsialation are not themselves aware that they are full of hate and contempt, especially for those they declare - with much passion - full of hate and contempt: e.g. the Archie Bunker stereotype, the "bigoted white male Christian", the "reactionaries" who act as what Rene Girard called "mimetic doubles" for our heroic "progressives". No, our left-liberal elites think they're secular, but they have a very powerful religion, of a Gnostic variety, that responds to the great and gut-wrenching uncertainties of our conflict-ridden human existence by looking for guarantees of self-righteousness. They're against hate and contempt, you see. They must be on the side of the holy. They're right, and you contemptible one are not, unless you "think" and chirp like them. It's oh so Utopian and feel-goody.

To understand how their religion works, we have to understand their utter dependence on the figure of the victim, around which their self-righteous consensus develops. They are, to put it bluntly, a variety of death cult, of human sacrificers, only less honest about it than were, say, the Aztecs, or less aware of how their need for victims - in order to appear politically self-righteous in supposedly defending victims - tends to lead to the production of the needed victims, if only (but it is not only) most obviously by the stigmatization of "right-wing religious bigots" (which in turn creates a desire for a class of people to go through life as the putative victims of "right-wing religious bigots". In extreme cases the cult of "human rights" leads "freedom fighters" to make victims of "their" own people to put on display before the world media, always in need of victims of modern Western States, in order to champion a cause.

What would be a simple example of this religion's mindset? Well consider this excerpt from another opinion piece in today's National Post, regarding the scandal of the Canadian "human rights" police. Barry Cooper tells the story of a Christian who apparently thought he had the right to a critique of homosexuality (not of the personhood of homosexuals, which as a Christian he must consider divine), long a part of a Judeo-Christian culture for reasons that we could debate (if we lived in a free society):

Last November, Lori Andreachuk, QC, a Lethbridge divorce lawyer and chair of an Alberta human rights panel, decided that, by writing a letter to the editor, Stephen Boissoin exposed homosexuals to hatred and contempt, which violated the Alberta human rights act.

[...the]entire ["Human Rights"] process is skewed. Most obviously in that complainants get a free ride and defendants pay full legal freight. The taxpayers of Alberta paid for Levant's interrogation. A lawyer from the Alberta Attorney General's office was present at the Boissoin-Lund panel.

This meant that, unlike the procedure in a genuine court, even if the defendant wins, he loses -- money, if nothing else -- and even if the complainant loses, he wins by ensuring that potential critics will think twice about speaking up.

Worse, the common-law rules of evidence do not apply so that the most bizarre and unconnected phenomena can be introduced as if they were relevant. These tend to involve the "feelings" of the defendant. In principle, human rights panels are inquisitorial bodies operating in what is usually an adversarial legal context, but they lack the balance that characterizes both systems taken on their own terms.

Incidentally, the government lawyer at the Boissoin-Lund panel asked me one of the strangest questions I have ever answered in many cross-examinations as a so-called expert witness. "How," he asked, would I "distinguish" Boissoin's letter to the Red Deer Advocate from Hitler's Mein Kampf? I resisted the temptation to give the reply that came immediately to mind and provided a more or less civil answer.

But Barry - and this is my example and point illustrating the Gnostic and victimary religion that motivates the "Human Rights" world view of today's liberals - this insane question is not at all incidental to the mindset of those who promote and prosecute thought crimes. It is a perfect example of how the central revelatory event of the religion of White Guilt - i.e. the Holocaust - allows one to lose all sense of differences and scale: everything is reduced, or inflated, to the central truth: that Western Society, as exemplified by the middle-class and professional-led Nazis, can, when taking its "norms" and "prejudices" seriously, result in the absolute and unquestionable victimization of the perfectly innocent "Jew" by the perfectly evil "Nazi", and with the more or less active co-operation of every "normal" person and profession in the country. That did happen in 1930s-40s Germany, so does that mean we in contemporary Canada can't be trusted to do any better with our freedoms? But if we can't, how can we be protected from our "protectors" and their ideas about who is a victim and who a victimizer?

Once the guarantee of the righteousness of the "victim" is determined by simply invoking memory of the Holocaust, all that remains for the neo-fascists of the "human rights" police is to insure that every worthy or potential victim of Western norms can now be clothed in the dress of the "Jew" and everyone who is in a position of normalcy, authority, power, or success in the Western world can be labelled a "Nazi". Many will have noted the leftist glee with which the Israelis and Americans have become the new Nazis. Those who have developed the power and means to lead and feed the world are now often the epitome of evil. Nazi antisemitism has given way to new left antisemitism. Mimetic doubles.

And so, the poor bugger who writes a "homophobic" letter to the editor can be fined and possibly jailed, be banned from speaking on given issues, because there is no essential difference - at least not in our human rights law - between his little Christian text and Mein Kampf. All sense of empirical discrimination - i.e. reference to facts and calm reasoning about the degree of one's reliance on the victim figure - is thrown out the door in a religious rush to the New Utopia. It is a passion that only creates a need for more victims in the guise of defending them.

I would like to be a bit more reflective about all this, but I'm damn angry (not that I ever get too angry) and I want to get this post up now, so I will conclude by quoting a better mind, Tom Bertonneau on the authors Howard Schwartz and Eric Gans:

The politically correct university is not only, as Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs of Paradox[1997]the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish) victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than this, because:

The descent of the absolute into the empirical world is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a] structural equivalent of the Jud Suss in Nazi cinema. In the already tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth; adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal and now transparent structure of victimary resentment. Group resentment has replaced individual resentment - the point of essential difference between the high and the popular - as the primary object of cultural deferral. (188-189)

Gans remarks how

a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates "the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos [ripping apart and distribution of the sacrifice or victim]. (189).

Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" and Gans's atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe, aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories - as though they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans' "non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of course, the proliferating new ubermenschen find their superiority to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group's special (mother-authorized) victim-status. The lese, as it were, proves the majesty. Where the lese does not exist, which means just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and "exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).

Bertonneau, Gans, and Schwartz are liberating thinkers, devoted to the true liberation of each and every individual, regardless of sex or race, from group passions and resentments. But I have my doubts if anyone in British Columbia would dare publish them, given the expensive frustrations the new Nazis of the Candian "human rights" commissions could throw at you for revealing an ugly religion - their religion - for what it is.

As Barry Cooper says, in the conclusion to his article, "Grow Up, People". Now is the time to demand our politicians pay attention to the growing outcry, so far limited largely to cyberspace, and insist they remove from all human rights legislation the ability of the state to police "hate speech". One may argue for retaining a criminalization of an incitement to violence, but in a free society we are best protected from hate by everyone having the freedom to speak out and show the hateful what they are, in full light of day. The state cannot really protect us, for it is the biggest threat. We must each, as individuals, sign a covenant to act as guarantors of each other's freedom. As the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant cases make clear, we as a civilization presently have no sane understanding of what human rights really are. And if the Mainstream Media are any indication, we have little will to stand up and defend them, in face of state evil. If you need a better understanding start by reading Cooper and O'Neill in full, two of only a few opinion pieces you will find in the Canadian papers; digest their arguments and then sit down and do your civic duty and write your provincial and federal politicians and tell them to fire the censors, now! They have no right to impose their religion and need for victims on the rest of us. They are not the good guys. You are, if you act now, in defense of freedom which is always the surest guarantee of our ability to minimize human violence. There is not some all-wise figure in the government, some Gnostic elect, who know how to do it better than millions of Canadians, liberated to speak their minds, to defend each other, in daily life.