GOVERNMENTS CAN'T
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Has the world suddenly gone bonkers? Well, no. The world seemingly has been afflicted with mass insanity since time immemorial. Hi-tech toys merely allow the madness to be refined. Eavesdropping on every telephone conversation, snooping into every e-mail message, cameras spying on citizens on every street corner; the lunacy has no end. Toll-free hot lines promote anonymous tips for every real or imagined slight. Unidentified squealers are protected while the unknowing victim of the allegation is subjected to search, seizure and deprivation of liberty, all the while never able to know the identify of his accuser, let alone confront them in a court of law. This civil-persecution system that views the accuser as always truthful and the accused as always guilty harkens back to "witch-hunting". The first mass witchcraft trials reached fever pitch sometime in the 15th century and crescendoed to mass hysteria between 1550-1650. Nobody should be horrified that the "witch-hunters" have everybody under suspicion and surveillance in Canada today. The United States created mass hysteria searching for A Red Under Every Bed in the 1940-50s. These tactics also were used during the Nazi Germany and Stalinist eras of the 1930-40s. Witchcraft trials were an on-again, off-again fad for nearly three centuries before witch burnings finally faded out of favour. Then, just as today, public health and public safety issues played an integral role in the witch-hunts. In the wake of the bubonic plague of 1347-49, rumours were rampant and fingers pointed accusingly at plague-spreading witches. In Nazi Germany, Hitler convinced his stable of legalized murderers that vermin-carrying Jews were a threat to public health and had to be exterminated. Today, terrorism is the latest fad setting off mass hysteria, and is used once again as an excuse for government to erode citizens' rights. They do so under the same tired mantra of "public safety" and "national security". Sadly, people must be scorched by these Draconian laws before they will open their eyes and stand against them. The very notion of "justice" is turned on its head. For only a government that fears its people would stoop to implementing programs that protect the identity of the accuser and leave the accused defenseless. Nobody outside the firearms community paid heed to the gun owners rattling their sabers over a criminal law that blatantly violates Constitutional rights and freedoms no less than 28 times. Under a law only a dictator could love, firearms owners can be sent to a federal penitentiary for merely failing to report their address change. Yet countless violent offenders, child molesters and rapists roam the country, free from such "violations" of their civil liberties. Hundreds of firearms owners have had their homes ransacked without due cause since the Liberals' Bill C-68 came into effect in 1995. Many others have been thrown into jail cells without provocation. The police use their powers to force the prisoners to give up their guns without having to go to the trouble to apply for a search warrant. It wasn't until the anti-terrorism legislation (Bill C-36) was rushed into law in late December, 2001--less than four months after the 9/11 attack on America--that well-known Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby felt the pinch over the exact things that firearms owners had decried and he ignored. In a by-lined Globe and Mail article of December 11, 2001, Ruby expressed fears that the threat of terrorism is impelling Canadians to give up or distort their fundamental rights and democratic freedoms. "It is the role of lawyers in a free society to defend the rights of the oppressed, and not to be conscripted by government to secretly inform on their clients," he wrote. "The chilling effect of these provisions may make it impossible for individuals or organizations targeted by the government to obtain any access to justice at all," he contended. It was on January 21 that Ottawa Citizen journalist Julie O'Neill felt the electric jolt from the same law. She came to the stark realization that the future of her profession--and freedom of the press--is under attack. On March 20, she told the University of King's College School of Journalism in Halifax, N.S., she no longer takes her freedoms for granted. She, of all people, never should have taken her freedoms for granted in the first place. On that fateful January day, O'Neill's private life was shattered. Her sense of her home as a private sanctuary evaporated. She no longer assumes--and never should have assumed--that her telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence are private nor that her computer files belong to her. Every nook and cranny of her "castle" was searched. Not even her lingerie drawer escaped the invasion. Her garbage was whisked away by one of the 20 armed RCMP officers who flooded her house, guarded her premises and simultaneously raided her newspaper office. What had O'Neill done to invite such oppressive tactics from the State? She wrote a newspaper article. O'Neill was incredulous when she discovered writing for a public journal can be punishable for up to 14 years in prison. The police raided her home and office in search of her source of information and a document cited by her in an Ottawa Citizen article of November 8, 2003. Her story focused on Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian computing engineer. She related he was deemed an al-Qaeda terrorist by U.S. authorities. Arar was detained in New York and taken to Syria. When returned to Canada in October, 2003, a year later, he told tales of imprisonment and torture. O'Neill's story told how he came to the attention of anti-terrorist investigators in Canada and of a series of security leaks that linked him to terrorism. I don't know where this woman of the mainstream press has been. But I hereby welcome her back to the real world, hopefully less naive. This is Kanuckistan after all, the True North Proud and Gagged by such freedom-sucking legislation as C-68 (the Firearms Act), C-36 (Anti-Terrorism), and the new Elections Act. I have long begged people of O'Neill's ilk to keep vigilance on Yukonslavia as the Petri-dish of what is happening to Canada, but they obviously can't be bothered until it is they who are affected. Interestingly, O'Neill was caught under the Security of Information Act portion of the anti-terrorism legislation which seemed redundant, anyway. O'Neill noted that s. 4 reads exactly the same as the dusty old Official Secrets Act of 1939, which she doesn't believe was intended to prevent journalists from doing their job. I wouldn't bet on that, although the accepted purpose was for Canadians to catch German spies and Communist infiltrators like their American counterparts were doing at the relevant time. In 1949-50, the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case was underway before the House un-American Activities Committee. Hiss, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was a high-ranking employee in the State Department who denied any espionage involvement with Communists. Chambers, a self-confessed Communist, accused Hiss of espionage. Believe it or not, a five-year statue of limitations existed on espionage, but no statute of limitations existed on perjury, for which Hiss was tried and sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary. The state is always able to find SOMETHING the sinner can be convicted of, no matter how self-serving. The conviction offered little-known Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin a golden opportunity to make political hay. He railed that the State Department was infested with Communists. And then came the mass hysteria. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been stalking those considered disloyal since 1947. The agency conducted a check of two million names on the federal payrolls and the 500,000 who annually applied for U.S. government jobs. Any dirt--regardless how minor--would bring on a full investigation into a person's past. No proof of subversive activities was necessary for dismissal. Often, civil servants were fired without knowing why and not knowing who had accused them of having ties with the Communist Party. Since the accused didn't know who they were fighting, they were defenseless. Once the wrongdoer was pinpointed and neighbours interrogated, the victim and his family were automatically and immediately ostracized from society. So-called friends and neighbours were afraid to associate with someone accused of Communist activities. Movie extras, film stars, entertainers--even kindergarten teachers--were being blacklisted from working in their respective occupations. Successful one minute, they were out in the streets penniless the next. Justice under the vigilantes was kangaroo-court style. The deck was forever stacked against the accused, despite investigators lacking any knowledge at all about the informer's background or motives. And they didn't care. It was akin to Salem 1692, and just as bad, if not worse, then what has happening in Soviet Russia under Communism, and what Canada has adopted today. Sometime in the late 15th century Christian church clergymen had been directed that when sorcery with the Devil was charged by someone, but went unproven, the consequences would be suffered by the accuser--NOT the accused. It did wonders for minimizing false accusations against the innocents and certainly cut down considerably on public-funded trials. I advocate returning to this policy posthaste. -- 30 -- Copyright 2004 diArmani.com |